Books and Beyond 4 volumes : The Greenwood Encyclopedia of New American Reading

Books and Beyond

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Books and Beyond The Greenwood Encyclopedia of New American Reading

VOLUME 1:

A–D

Edited by

KENNETH WOMACK

GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Books and beyond : the Greenwood encyclopedia of new American reading / edited by Kenneth Womack. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978-0-313-33738-3 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0-313-33737-6 (v. 1 : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0-313-33740-6 (v. 2 : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0-313-33741-3 (v. 3 : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0313-33742-0 (v. 4 : alk. paper) 1. Books and reading—United States—Encyclopedias. 2. Reading interests—United States—Encyclopedias. 3. Popular literature—United States—Encyclopedias. 4. Fiction genres—Encyclopedias. 5. American literature—History and criticism. 6. English literature—History and criticism. I. Womack, Kenneth. Z1003.2B64 2008 028’.9097303—dc22 2008018703 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2008 by Kenneth Womack All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008018703 ISBN: 978–0–313–33738–3 (set) 978–0–313–33737–6 (vol. 1) 978–0–313–33740–6 (vol. 2) 978–0–313–33741–3 (vol. 3) 978–0–313–33742–0 (vol. 4) First published in 2008 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents Preface

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Introduction: Reading in America Today

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Entries Academic Fiction Adventure Fiction African American Literature Arab American Literature Arthurian Literature Asian American Literature Autobiography and Memoir Beat Poetry Biography Chick Lit Children’s Literature Christian Fiction Comedic Theatre Comic Books Coming of Age Fiction (Bildungsroman) Contemporary Mainstream American Fiction Cyberpunk Dramatic Theatre Dystopian Fiction Ecopoetry Erotic Literature

1 13 26 40 53 66 87 97 112 137 162 185 195 209 222 249 274 289 312 325 338

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CONTENTS

Fantasy Literature Film Adaptations of Books Flash Fiction GLBTQ Literature Graphic Novels Historical Fantasy Historical Fiction Historical Mysteries Historical Writing (Nonfiction) Holocaust Literature Humor Inspirational Literature (Nonfiction) Jewish American Literature Language Poetry Latino American Literature Legal Thrillers Literary Journalism Magical Realism Manga and Anime Military Literature Musical Theatre Mystery Fiction Native American Literature New Age Literature Occult/Supernatural Literature Parapsychology Philological Thrillers Poetry Regional Fiction Road Fiction Romance Novels Science Fiction Science Writing (Nonfiction) Sea Literature Self-Help Literature Series Fiction Space Opera Speculative Fiction Sports Literature Spy Fiction Suspense Fiction Sword and Sorcery Fiction

351 366 385 401 416 427 440 455 468 483 498 511 521 537 552 561 571 587 600 612 625 638 663 682 699 717 732 740 767 782 796 805 833 848 862 880 894 917 930 954 962 971

CONTENTS

Terrorism Fiction Time Travel Fiction Transrealist Fiction Travel Writing True Crime Literature Urban Fiction Utopian Literature Vampire Fiction Verse Novels Western Literature Young Adult Literature Zines

995 1012 1025 1034 1047 1065 1078 1091 1119 1131 1147 1163

Contemporary Authors by Genre

1177

Suggestions for Further Reading

1191

About the Editor and Contributors

1195

Index

1205

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Preface Books and Beyond: The Greenwood Encyclopedia of New American Reading offers a multivolume reference work expressly designed to address the shape and nature of contemporary American literature in all of its postwar, print, and post-print cultural manifestations. Books and Beyond is written to serve the educated general reader, as well as a broad array of high school, college, and university students. The encyclopedia is arranged alphabetically, with more than 70 chapters, or entries, devoted to a wide range of literary areas. Individual chapters in the encyclopedia provide readers with broad overviews of the topic area, with specific attention and detail afforded to works associated with contemporary popular American literature and culture. Although the chapters often give a historical overview of the genre’s development, these entries devote special attention to works published from 1980 to the present. In addition to establishing a definition of the literary area with attention to its relation to other literary forms, each chapter also offers discussion of major trends and themes, as well as the principal contexts and issues associated with the area. Additional attention is usually given to the genre’s reception, including, when possible, criticism, film adaptations, and the relation of the area of literary interest to popular culture in a broader sense. Each entry provides readers with a discussion of the major authors active in each area, as well as brief analyses of many authors’ major works. Helpful crossreferences are provided through bolded words in the text, and chapters conclude with bibliographies comprising print and electronic sources related to each rubric; in many cases, a secondary bibliography with suggested works for further reading is provided. At the end of the book, a number of useful features will help users find more about authors and reading in America, with a list of authors active (or recently active) in the field today, arranged by genres, and a list of “Suggestions for Further Reading,” which provides material, including Web sites, for more general

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information about genres and reading. The encyclopedia is fully indexed to afford readers greater ease of use and flexibility. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The editor would like to thank Anne Thompson and George Butler of Greenwood Press for their advice, patience, and steadfast encouragement and professionalism. Special debts of thanks are owed to Amy Mallory-Kani and Susan Yates for their superlative editorial efforts on behalf of the encyclopedia, as well as to Jacki Mowery, Judy Paul, and Aaron Heresco for their good-natured assistance and unflagging generosity of spirit. I am especially grateful to Jeanine Womack for her unerring love and support throughout this project.

Introduction: Reading in America Today On any given day, the vast majority of American consumers share in the common language of a popular culture. Whether it be via the latest fast-food craze, video games, hip-hop music, reality-based television, Barbie, and action films, we possess a ready, easily discernible, and shared form of cultural discourse that allows us to converse with one another in an instant. Although the social power of our popular culture clearly has generational boundaries, it often succeeds in transcending the margins of space and time through a perhaps even more powerful and affecting sense of shared nostalgia. Anyone who thinks wistfully of the days of malt shops, big-finned cars, and Marilyn Monroe understands this notion implicitly. In academic circles, cultural critics have only recently begun to comprehend the significant role of popular culture in our lives and in our systems of social organization, as well as in the evolution of our reading practices. During the early 1950s, for example, we were content simply to understand popular culture as a “low” form of art in contrast with its more austere and presumably more important counterpart, the “high” culture of classical music, ballet, literature, and fine French cuisine. But, of course, that was before the explosion of television, and perhaps even more notably, the advent of cable television and the Internet. Now we commune with one another in a remarkably different fashion. Where once we gathered together on front porches and at summer picnics and spring festivals, we now assemble, many of us, in front of the glowing screens that transport us to Deal or No Deal, eBay, and the latest Sony PlayStation. Add to that our vast consumption of communication technologies such as text-messaging, instant-messaging, and e-mail, and the convoluted nature of our language usages and reading experiences becomes even more murky and complex. The tone of my commentary thus far might suggest the beginnings of a critique of technology and its impact upon our culture—social, economic, reading, or otherwise. This, I shall reassure you, is not that kind of introduction. Technology is

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merely the means of contemporary popular culture’s massive, and nearly instantaneous, dissemination. Perhaps a more interesting and revealing question involves what happens when one nation’s popular culture—the popular culture of the United States, for example—is transmitted around the world, erasing and homogenizing the particularities of other cultures across the globe. Although there is little doubt that we import various aspects of other popular cultures into our own—sushi, the River dancing phenomenon, and Harry Potter immediately come to mind—the exportation of Americana exists on profound levels that few of us ever genuinely consider. By any measure, we live in an age of rampant textual instability, and our consumption of popular culture has become inextricably bound with our reading appetites and experiences. There is widespread belief—and ample statistical and anecdotal evidence in support of this notion—that the act of reading itself is on the wane. Yet in an era that demands highly competent reading skills in order to negotiate nearly every avenue of our highly technology oriented contemporary lives, excellence in reading could not be any more significant. As Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, notes in his prefatory remarks for To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence (2007): “Regular reading not only boosts the likelihood of an individual’s academic and economic success—facts that are not especially surprising—but it also seems to awaken a person’s social and civic sense. Reading correlates with almost every measurement of positive personal and social behavior surveyed. It is reassuring, though hardly amazing,” Gioia adds, “that readers attend more concerts and theatre than non-readers, but it is surprising that they exercise more and play more sports—no matter what their educational level. The cold statistics confirm something that most readers know but have mostly been reluctant to declare as fact—books change lives for the better” (6). WHAT IS A “BOOK”? But what constitutes a book in our age of rapid textual convolution? And what accounts for “high” and “low” culture in an era in which everyone has access— by virtue of technology and the Internet—to nearly every possible text, as well as the means of producing text on an unheard of scale? The very notion of what makes up a text is under reconsideration, and, as the chapters in this encyclopedia demonstrate—with their wide disparity of focuses and disparate textual natures—this is a worthy issue indeed. In truth, we are only just beginning to formulate a critical vocabulary for describing—much less comprehending—the increasingly fluid nature of textuality. How, indeed, do we even begin to understand our cultural artifacts, their popularization, and their reception into the cultural and critical main—especially in a rapidly shifting marketplace in which text, more often than not, does not find its materiality in the pages of a book? As cultural studies continues to challenge our conceptions of the borders of literary and textual studies, issues regarding the nature of what constitutes a text have become increasingly significant in our post-print culture. In addition to involving such controversial subjects as the interrelationships between high and low culture and the component differences between material and nonmaterial texts, the chapters in this encyclopedia explore the manner in which we receive and interpret a wide variety of texts—from works of popular serial fiction and the transhistorical literary imagination to film adaptation and popular music.

INTRODUCTION

As an encyclopedia of contemporary literatures and reading practices in all of their attendant forms, Books and Beyond merges conventional forms of text with unconventional ones in a myriad of innovative ways. Attention is devoted to a number of well-honed literary areas, including Adventure Fiction; Children’s Literature; Contemporary Fiction; Fantasy Literature; Historical Fiction; Humor; Mystery Novels; Poetry; Romance Fiction; Science Fiction; Spy Fiction; Suspense Novels; Travel Writing; and Western Literature. At the same time, a wide variety of ethnicities and cultures is represented, including Arab American Literature and Native American Literature, to name but a few. Contemporary reading trends are also explored, as evinced by wide-ranging chapters devoted to such areas as Autobiography and Memoir; Biography; Chick Lit; Christian Fiction; Coming of Age Fiction; Erotic Literature; Historical Nonfiction; Inspirational Literature; Legal Thrillers; Literary Journalism; Magical Realism; Military Literature; New Age Literature; Occult/Supernatural Literature; Regional Fiction; Road Fiction; Science Nonfiction; Sea Literature; Self-Help Literature; Series Fiction; Sports Literature; True Crime; Urban Fiction; Utopian Fiction; Vampire Fiction; and Young Adult Literature. Yet in order to demonstrate the breadth and scope of contemporary American literature, attention to a vast range of transcultural and transhistorical forms is also necessary, including chapters devoted to Arthurian Literature; Beat Poetry; Comic Books; Cyberpunk; Dystopian Fiction; Ecopoetry; Film Adaptation; Flash Fiction; GLBTQ Literature; Graphic Novels; Historical Mysteries; Language Poetry; Manga and Anime; Speculative Fiction; Sword and Sorcery Fiction; Terrorism Fiction; Time Travel Fiction; Transrealist Fiction; Verse Novels; and Zines. But how do we account for the textuality of such a wide array of authorial (and, in some cases, nonauthorial) forms, particularly in terms of the Byzantine nature of their construction, production, and dissemination? Perhaps even more significant, how do educators approach the act of teaching this important aspect of textual theory to new generations of students for whom textuality has become an increasingly diffuse and convoluted concept—a generation for whom textual stability is becoming progressively more irrelevant? For many contemporary “readers,” the concept of narrative-driven works of art, whether they be artifacts of high or low culture, concerns the nature and rapidity of its systems of distribution, its value determined almost entirely by the end-user’s capacity for negotiating its acquisition, its storage, and the ease of its consumption. A century ago, the textuality of narrative, whether fiction, nonfiction, or news, was delivered to users almost universally via the physical properties of the traditional book, magazine, and newspaper forms. Within a scant few decades, books were joined by the radio airwaves as principal means of textual distribution, to be followed, in short order, by movies and television. The advent of computer technology transformed, in rapid and radical fashion, existing forms of distribution while acting as the catalyst for new eras of textuality as witnessed by the evolution of digital storage media that have irrevocably altered the ways in which we consume not only books, but all manner of music and video in the process. WHAT IS TEXT? This incredible shift in the production, distribution, and consumption of our cultural artifacts—our popular textualities, if you will—necessitates an ongoing interrogation of text and its multiplicities of variation. The ideology of text, in and of

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itself, is deceptively simple. Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s working definition of text includes “any coherent complex of signs” (1986, 103). For Roland Barthes, the text exists as a locus of meaning, as a form of discourse rather than as a concrete object. “The text is experienced only as an activity, a production,” he writes (1977, 157). Texts ask readers to participate in the act of meaning-making, while books take up physical space on a shelf. In this way, readers actively participate in the processes associated with textual production. Yet our post-print theories of textuality must be increasingly enabled to account for the nonphysicality and nonmateriality of digitally-inscribed texts. In Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice, Peter L. Shillingsburg defines text as “the actual order of words and punctuation as contained in any one physical form, such as a manuscript, proof or book.” Shillingsburg astutely recognizes that “text (the order of words and punctuation) has no substantial or material existence, as it is not restricted by time and space.” Indeed, even in terms of the traditional book format—with its spine, its pages, and its inky print—“the text is contained and stabilized by the physical form but is not the physical form itself” (1996, 46). Hence, textuality enjoys an intrinsically fluid quality, the nature of which can be manipulated by authors, editors, publishers, distributors, and the like with veritable ease, given the relative pliability of electronic storage devices and digital redistribution. These new ways of thinking about textuality—about the representation of text in our post-print age—mandates a revisioning of our understanding of materiality. Once defined almost exclusively by the brute physicality of the book, text has emerged as an increasingly imaginative and unstable construct. As N. Katherine Hayles shrewdly asks, “What are the consequences of admitting an idea of textuality as instantiated rather than dematerialized, dispersed rather than unitary, processual rather than object-like, flickering rather than durably instantiated?” The answer, Hayles points out, involves a revaluation of text, particularly in terms of what we consider to be its material aspects. “The specter haunting textual criticism,” Hayles writes, “is the nightmare that one cannot then define a ‘text’ at all, for every manifestation will qualify as a different text. Pervasive with electronic texts, the problem troubles notions of print texts as well, for as physical objects they would also differ from one another. But this need not be a catastrophe if we refine and revise our notion of materiality” (2003, 276). The result of so much variation, as evinced throughout our postwar, post-print culture, is an ongoing and increasingly complex sense of textual instability, particularly as new forms of electronic storage and digital distribution replace earlier storage and delivery methods with a vexing and dislocating rapidity. Philip Cohen describes this concatenation of circumstances as a form of “textual instability” in which “the essence of texts may be their ability to be re-ontologized and re-interpreted endlessly as different textual versions and contexts are employed.” Textual instability entails the manner in which “texts are not immune from the flow of history,” Cohen writes, as well as the ways in which “they are composed, revised, expurgated, improved, defaced, restored, emended, and circulated as a matter of course” (1997, xxii). As the chapters in this encyclopedia so clearly demonstrate, the analysis of material and nonmaterial texts under these strictures offers prescient reminders about the ways in which we need to approach popular works of literature in our rapidly shifting and expanding digital age. It is nearly impossible to imagine a world in which the formerly conventional strictures of authorship and textual hegemony, or domination, will be restored. As J. Hillis Miller points out, it

INTRODUCTION

is always “beneficial to the health of our society to have an abundance of good readers” (1998, 100). Robert Coles takes this notion a step further, writing that “students need the chance to directly connect books to experience.” Literary texts, Coles adds, allow educators to “address our humanity with subtlety—conveying the willingness to do justice to our variousness and to the complexities, ironies, and ambiguities that shape our lives” (1994, A64). Indeed, what teachers in society can do is provide students with the analytical tools to become experts at getting to the heart of the textual matter, at learning how to sift among the competing texts that they encounter, and to begin establishing a sense of cultural unity and interpersonal growth for themselves. With its wide-ranging emphasis upon the proliferation of material and nonmaterial texts in our increasingly uncertain textual era, Books and Beyond: The Greenwood Encyclopedia of New American Reading is one of the first steps in this important direction. Bibliography Bakhtin, Mikhail M. “The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis.” In Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986, 103–131. Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Cohen, Philip. “Textual Instability, Literary Studies, and Recent Developments in Textual Scholarship.” In Texts and Textuality: Textual Instability, Theory, and Interpretation. Philip Cohen, ed. New York: Garland, 1997, xi–xxxiv. Coles, Robert. “Putting Head and Heart on the Line.” The Chronicle of Higher Education 41 (26 Oct. 1994): A64. Goodrich, Diana Sorensen. The Reader and the Text: Interpretive Strategies for Latin American Literatures. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1986. Hayles, N. Katherine. “Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality.” Yale Journal of Criticism 16.2 (2003): 263–290. Miller, J. Hillis. “Is There an Ethics of Reading?” In Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology. James Phelan, ed. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1988, 79–101. National Endowment for the Arts. To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence. Research Report #47. Washington, DC, 2007. Shillingsburg, Peter L. Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice. 3rd ed. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Worthen, W. B. “Disciplines of the Text: Sites of Performance.” In The Performance Studies Reader. Henry Bial, ed. London: Routledge, 2004, 10–24.

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A ACADEMIC FICTION Definition. The campus novel enjoys a long and distinguished history in the annals of literary studies. A review of academic fiction’s emergence as a literary form, particularly during the nineteenth century, accounts for its archly satirical manifestations during the latter half of the twentieth century, the era in which academic satire enjoyed its most fruitful period, with forays into a variety of creative spheres, including fiction, poetry, drama, and film. The analysis of exemplary works by Kingsley Amis, Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, A.S. Byatt, and Jane Smiley demonstrates the nature of campus fiction’s abiding influence. History. “As a literary genre,” Mortimer R. Proctor writes in The English University Novel, the academic novel “has always reflected conditions within Oxford and Cambridge far more closely than it has followed any literary trends or movements” (1957, 185). The universal conception of Oxford and Cambridge as unique intellectual societies—in short, the fictive terrain of “Oxbridge”—inspired centuries of fictions devoted to university life, from Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxford through the romanticized academic novels of the early nineteenth century. While these narratives poked occasional fun at the ineffectuality of university faculty or the unreality of college life, their plots generally involved sentimental, often melodramatic, portrayals of Oxford and Cambridge. The genre of English university fiction finds its more satiric origins, however, in the various educational reform movements of the midnineteenth century, as well as in the admission of women to the sacred groves of Oxford and Cambridge in the latter half of the nineteenth century. During this era, Oxford and Cambridge witnessed a decline in the hegemony of their influence upon English society and culture. Their fictional portrayals, once predicated upon more lofty elements of esteem and erudition, now languished in narratives about “university lecturers who did not lecture, and undergraduates who freely enjoyed all the pleasures of depravity” (Proctor, 11). The acts of reform experienced by Oxford and Cambridge found their roots in the 1850s, when a series of reports commissioned by the English government

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revealed a set of institutions that operated on an outmoded classical curriculum and blatantly catered to the needs of the socially privileged. In “From Narragonia to Elysium: Some Preliminary Reflections on the Fictional Image of the Academic,” Richard Sheppard notes that for universities this era in English history also marks the shift from their function as clerical institutions devoted to producing educated priests to their emergence as the precursors of our modern research institutions (Bevan 1990, 11). While a set of statutes during the 1870s virtually redesigned the governance of both institutions, reform acts in 1854 and 1856 abolished religious tests at Oxford and Cambridge, respectively, thus providing access to the universities for students outside of the Church of England (Proctor 1957, 56–57). This movement against exclusion ultimately resulted in the momentous events of 1879, when Somerville College first opened its doors to female students at Oxford. As Janice Rossen observes in The University in Modern Fiction: When Power Is Academic (1993), the exclusion of women from the university community continues to resonate within the pages of academic fiction. “There has been nothing else like the wholesale resistance to the admission of a particular, coherent group to the University in Britain, and this is part and parcel of the subject,” Rossen writes. “The two facts are inextricable—women got into the University, and women were bitterly opposed in their efforts to do so. The powerful initial resistance to their inclusion in the University would certainly have affected how they saw themselves and their place in that community for some time to come” (34). In addition to increasing the public’s interest in the business of higher education, the nineteenth-century reform acts at Oxford and Cambridge succeeded in establishing a social landscape ripe for narrative consideration. “Reform,” Proctor observes, “brought new causes to urge, and a new cast of characters to add to the traditional rakes. With reform, it became more plausible to take an interest in the success of scholars; examination halls became the scenes of triumphs and disasters in which good very nearly always triumphed over evil” (1957, 59). As with their English antecedents, American novels about academic life find their modern origins in the nineteenth century, an intense era of social change and industrial growth that destabilized the prodigious cultural influences of privileged institutions of higher learning such as Oxford and Cambridge and, in America, Harvard. The emergence of the American academic novel can be traced to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Fanshawe, published in 1828. Set in Harley College in the wilderness of New England during the eighteenth century, Hawthorne’s novel—which he later attempted to suppress— explores a number of themes endemic to modern academic fictions, including Hawthorne’s depiction of the eccentric Dr. Melmoth, an absent-minded and ineffectual scholar who later becomes the institution’s president. In his examination of the American evolution of the academic novel, John Lyons (1962, 4) remarks: The advance of industrial capitalism during the nineteenth century is another cause for the popular suspicion of the academy. The mechanical sciences which fathered and made this advance possible were eminently practical ones. It was engineering which laid the rails and built the bridges and designed the mills, not philosophy. And the money which engineering made possible was used to buy and sell engineers, so it was unlikely that the capitalist businessman should even respect the engineer when his knowledge brought him so little power.

The “popular suspicion of the academy” that Lyons ascribes to the industrialized societies of the latter nineteenth century underscores the emergence of the brand of

ACADEMIC FICTION

satire endemic to the Anglo-American novels about university life. Satire, by its traditional definition, functions as a critique of the follies of humankind. Yet Lyons astutely differentiates the modern incarnations of satire in university fiction from the texts of the great satirists of the Augustan Age, who invariably situated themselves on the side of “Reason, . . . tempered by humanity and common sense.” The satirists of the Augustan era, Lyons notes, often hinted at solutions to the dilemmas depicted in their narratives. Satiric novels of academic life, however, provide no such answers (162–63). Further, in his essay, “Inside Jokes: Familiarity and Contempt in Academic Satire,” Brian A. Connery observes that academic satire—in contrast to neoclassical satire, which only attacks the vices and follies of an absent or unknowing target—also aims its satiric barbs at the reader. In this way, he argues, academic novelists deny their readers the ironic, self-congratulatory pleasures of neo-classical satire because the readers themselves, often academics, function as the texts’ ultimate targets (Bevan 1990, 124–26). Trends and Themes. A thematic analysis of various works of postwar academic fiction sheds considerable light on the remarkable rise of the campus novel during the latter half of the twentieth century. Rossen identifies a “dynamics of power” that undergirds postwar manifestations of English and American academic novels during this era. “We should begin to read these novels less in terms of their actual brilliance or success,” she argues, “and more in terms of what they reveal about the dynamics of power between the contemporary novelist and his audience” (1993, 188). Rossen’s paradigm for interpreting academic fiction’s vast output reveals the various structures of power that simultaneously manipulate both the life of the individual scholar and that of the university community. These power structures, she argues, ultimately problematize campus life through their creation of a philosophical paradox that scholars ultimately cannot escape. As Rossen observes, “The scholarly life inevitably consists of life in community, though it is fundamentally predicated on a principle of individualism” (9). Modern universities, by virtue of their tenure and research requirements, maintain, at least in regard to their nontenured members, the explicit threat of expulsion. The ominous power of this vestige of professional affiliation creates “an imposing façade” in favor of the university, Rossen writes, “which suggests a powerful presence through its ability to exclude potential members” (30). The politics of exclusion—the threat of ultimate severance from the community— functions as a menacing obstacle in the path to institutional success for the individual scholar. For this reason, the nature of academic scholarship receives particular attention in university fictions. As Rossen observes, “All novels about academic life and work exploit the tension between these two poles of idealism and competition, or scholarship as a means to an end and as an end in itself” (140). This tension presents scholars with an emotional dilemma of staggering proportions: in one sense, campus life purports to offer them an arena to engage their colleagues in free intellectual discourse, while in another sense it necessitates that they confront their colleagues in a high-stakes competition based upon the quality and proliferation of their intellectual exertions in order to ensure their professional security. “The emotional dimension of such work can lead to heightened battles between scholars,” Rossen remarks, “and in a way which brings their powerful intellectual abilities and skills to bear on what is fundamentally an emotional issue” (145). Rossen’s contentions regarding the highly competitive nature of contemporary academic life can be ascribed to the experiences of students as well. Through entrance requirements

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and performance standards, students endure similar threats of expulsion from the university community. Undergraduates must also conform to a form of communal disruption each term as their lives redefine themselves around new course schedules and holiday breaks. “What undergraduates in all of these novels seem to experience primarily is an intensely intimate, private world with their peers—and one in which they suffer from either ambitions to be included . . . or yearning to find love and acceptance,” Rossen observes. “The unique feature of community life for undergraduates is that the small world which they create for themselves vanishes when the students disperse at the end of their University terms” (118). Thus, a number of novels explore the undergraduate experiences of students in the academy, including Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers (1973), Clare Chambers’s Uncertain Terms (1992), and Bret Easton Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction (1987), among others. Marion Rosen’s Death by Education (1993) explores student life in a secondary educational institution. Contexts and Issues. Academic fictions’ nostalgia for the ivory towers of their prenineteenth-century cultural and social supremacy prevents them from positing solutions in a pragmatic world where the idealism of the academy lacks viability and significance. In the first half of the twentieth century, then, when the world demanded answers to even more complicated social and political predicaments— from the calamities of the First and Second World Wars to the Great Depression and beyond—the academy once again lacked practical answers to the human community’s vexing problems. Hence, the interconnections between the satiric ambitions of the Menippean writers and the motivations of twentieth-century academic novelists merit particular attention. As W. Scott Blanchard notes in Scholar’s Bedlam: Menippean Satire in the Renaissance (1995), “Menippean satire is a genre both for and about scholars; it is an immensely learned form that is at the same time paradoxically anti-intellectual,” he writes. “If its master of ceremonies is the humanist as wise fool, its audience is a learned community whose members need to be reminded . . . of the depravity of their overreaching intellects, of the limits of human understanding” (14). In short, modern academic satire began to share in a richly developed and lengthy satiric tradition. And academic novels flourished as never before. The genre’s evolving presence in contemporary British fiction finds its origins in the proliferation of provincial “redbrick” universities, which, like the reform acts of the nineteenth century, undermined the formerly exalted influence of Oxford and Cambridge and expanded appreciably the public’s access to institutions of higher education in England. For the first time, academic novels—through their explicit use of satire—seemed to offer solutions for the problems that confront modern readers far beyond the hallowed walls of the university. As Ian Carter remarks in Ancient Cultures of Conceit: British University Fiction in the Post-War Years, the answers

THE PROFESSORROMANE Campus novels have seen an enormous output in England and the United States since the 1950s. Richard G. Caram usefully describes these works as Professorromane, “a term of my own coining, in the tradition of slightly-pompous Germanic scholarship,” he writes.“The Professorroman has distinctive features that qualify it as a subgenre of literature similar to the Künstlerroman or the Bildungsroman” (42).

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lie in “taking culture seriously, and taking universities to be important bastions of culture. But the notion of what constitutes culture,” he cautions, “must be transformed from that typical of British university fiction” (1990, 277). In this way, the academic novel proffers—through its satiric depiction of the institutional states of malaise inherent in its fictive representations of contemporary universities—a means for both implicitly and explicitly advocating positive value systems. In short, contemporary academic novels, by postulating a kind of anti-ethos in their narratives, ultimately seek to enhance the culture and sustain the community through a more ethically driven system of higher education. This anti-ethos, which Kenneth Womack describes as a “pejorative poetics” in Postwar Academic Fiction: Satire, Ethics, Community (2001), underscores the satirical motivations of the authors of academic fiction and the manner in which their narrative ambitions function as self-conscious ethical correctives. Reception. There is little question that the campus novel will continue to resound as one of literature’s most satirical genres. While their forebears in the academic fictions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries languished under the specter of “Oxbridge,” contemporary academic characters must contend with the whimsy of global economic slumps and university budget cuts, the fashionable nature of structuralist and poststructuralist literary criticism, growing social and racial divisions on college campuses, and an increasingly hostile academic job market, among a range of other issues. Indeed, there seems to be no end to the ways in which the practitioners of Anglo-American university fiction can utilize academic characters and institutional themes as a means for exploring, through the deliberately broad strokes of their satirical prose, the ethical and philosophical questions endemic to their genre that impinge upon such enduringly significant issues as culture, morality, romance, knowledge, and commitment. Selected Authors. Many scholars attribute the origins of postwar academic fiction to the landmark publication of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim in 1954. In addition to its widely acknowledged place as the quintessential campus novel of the twentieth century, Lucky Jim illustrates the peculiar dilemmas experienced by young scholars in their efforts to achieve selfhood and find acceptance within the larger academic community. Often characterized as an unabashedly comic novel, Lucky Jim offers a moral landscape that confronts the novel’s protagonist, Jim Dixon, with a variety of ethical predicaments. Amis utilizes the métier of comedy in the novel for delivering his judgments regarding the problematic moral state of academic life during the remarkably fractious era in which his novel first appeared. His satiric attacks on the university community find their targets in those privileged individuals who endeavor to maintain the academic status quo in their favor through the exploitation of junior colleagues, and, ultimately, through the threat of expulsion from the seemingly sacred groves of campus life. As Amis’s novel so stridently reveals, the very threat of severance from the scholarly community poses as a powerful obstacle in the young academic’s path to self-knowledge. Lucky Jim finds its textual roots in Amis’s 1946 visit to the Senior Common Room at Leicester University, although it also owes its genesis to the confluence of three historic moments in twentieth-century British social and literary history: the passage of the Education Act of 1944, the advent of the redbrick university in England during that same era, and the subsequent apotheosis of Lucky Jim as the master text of the Angry Young Man movement in the 1950s. In 1946, Amis visited Philip Larkin at Leicester University, where Larkin, Amis’s friend from their

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scholarship days at Oxford, worked as an assistant librarian. “He took me into the Common Room there,” Amis later remarked, “and after about a quarter of an hour I said, ‘Christ, someone ought to do something about this lot’” (McDermott 1989, 17). Amis’s experiences during the late 1940s as a junior lecturer at University College, Swansea, only served to confirm his initial impressions about the ethical inequalities of academic life. In addition to his personal observations of the university community, Amis found the inspiration for his novel in the social and political turmoil that followed the passage of the Education Act of 1944, an article of legislation that, for the first time since the landmark educational acts of the mid-nineteenth century, attempted to undermine the place of university education as an exclusive privilege of the upper classes. The Education Act required students to pursue their primary education to at least the age of 15, while also creating a two-tiered system of free secondary education that consisted of “Grammar Schools” and “Secondary Modern Schools.” During the decades that followed, the Education Act accomplished its intended goal of producing a greater quantity of college-bound working-class students. Accommodating this influx of postsecondary students likewise necessitated the wholesale expansion of the English university system and resulted in the construction of an assortment of provincial redbrick institutions and “new” universities across Great Britain. Despite the Act’s intention of assimilating a larger workingclass student population into English university life, Philip Gardner observes that the Education Act of 1944 “gave rise to a significant number of deracinated and disoriented young men, no longer at home in their working- or lower-middle-class attitudes and environments, but at the same time not feeling accepted by the social system into which their education appeared to be pushing them” (1981, 24). This culture of alienation in the 1950s ultimately produced the “angry young man,” that peculiar social manifestation of cultural angst and intellectual derision depicted in such works as John Wain’s Hurry on Down (1953), Lucky Jim, and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956), among others. The figure of the angry young man as a fictive persona reveals himself as a literary character simultaneously oppressed by the hypocritical value system of the same society whose standards and traditions he so desperately strives to oblige. In Lucky Jim, Amis traces the life and times of Jim Dixon, a fledgling academic who must negotiate his way through a maze of ethical choices. In addition to his satiric characterizations of Dixon’s senior colleagues, particularly the unforgettable Professor Welch, Amis addresses the perils of scholarly research and publication, as well as the peculiar, unforgiving nature of university politics. Focalizing the narrative through Dixon’s working-class eyes allows Amis to dramatize the uneasy relationships that develop between the privileged upper-class denizens of the university community and their disoriented and insecure junior counterparts. A graduate of Leicester University, Dixon secures a temporary adjunct position at an unnamed provincial redbrick university after besting an Oxford candidate at his job interview. Like the other angry young working-class men who struggle to find acceptance and self-sufficiency in the groves of academe, Dixon hungers for job security amidst a world that both bores and bewilders him. A probationary junior lecturer in medieval history—a subject that he detests, yet that seems to offer him the promise of secure employment that he so covets—Dixon confesses in the novel that his policy “was to read as little as possible of any given book” (16–17). He harbors little regard for academic research and scholarly publication, although he realizes their esteemed places in the competitive campus arena.

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As one of the most notorious figures in the genre of campus fiction, Professor Welch serves as Dixon’s primary nemesis in Lucky Jim, as well as the target of many of the novel’s satiric barbs. In Welch, Amis proffers a blistering portrayal of academic pretension and indifference, what Gardner calls “a devastating portrait, incidentally, of a certain type of British academic” (1981, 27). For Dixon, Welch represents everything that he finds troubling about academic life—from snobbery and cultural affectation to vocational ineffectuality and self-indulgence. “No other professor in Great Britain,” Dixon muses, “set such store by being called Professor” (Amis 1954, 7). Dixon finds himself equally perplexed by the disparity between Welch’s academic standing and his vague qualifications: “How had he become Professor of History, even at a place like this?” Dixon wonders. “By published work? No. By extra good teaching? No in italics” (8). Yet, because Welch possesses the power to decide Dixon’s ultimate fate at the university, he remains unable to express his dismay at the inequities of his precarious position as a probationary lecturer. For this reason, he accedes to all of the professor’s demands for his service, while secretly imagining the violent acts to which he would subject Welch. When Dixon prods Welch for reassurance regarding the state of his uncertain position in the department, moreover, the professor refuses to show any compassion for his adopted “protégé” and nervously avoids Dixon’s glance while stammering unintelligibly. Despite all of his efforts to curry favor with Welch, Dixon essentially lacks any palpable identity in the professor’s eyes, for Welch frequently refers to him as Faulkner, the name of a previous temporary assistant lecturer. Counseled by Welch that an effective public lecture on behalf of the department might save his job at the university, Dixon’s discourse on “Merrie England” functions as the novel’s hilarious climax, as well as Dixon’s supreme, inebriated moment of ethical judgment. Well fortified with alcohol, Dixon delivers a protracted and forceful parody of the academy, scholarship, and his senior colleagues. During his “Merrie England” speech, Dixon effects a series of cartoonish faces along with drunken imitations of the voices of Welch, the university principal, and, finally, a Nazi stormtrooper. In this way, he posits his final, blistering attack upon the untenable foundations of the academic world of his experience. When Dixon effects his own expulsion from university life at the novel’s conclusion, his sense of humanity soars when he finds solace and acceptance in a bona fide community of genuine friends and truly conscientious mentors. “It is no accident,” Rossen argues, “that many of the best University novels are about someone leaving academe at the end of the book” (1993, 188). Malcolm Bradbury’s Eating People Is Wrong (1959) provides a tragicomic look at the interpersonal conundrums inherent in academic life. The novel traces the experiences of the inexorably earnest Professor Stuart Treece, the head of an English department at a provincial, redbrick university located—ironically enough—in the city’s former lunatic asylum. Through Treece, Bradbury’s novel asks complex questions about the nature of liberalism as a philosophy connoting tolerance, decency, and moral liberty. Bradbury complicates this issue via Treece’s relationships with two students, including an older, mentally disturbed man, Louis Bates, and Mr. Eborabelosa, an African student who violates academic—indeed, social— decorum at nearly every turn. The manner in which Treece responds to their difficulties leads to disastrous results, especially when he considers his liberal impulses in comparison with the choices that he must inevitably make when confronted with Bates and Eborabelosa’s convoluted interpersonal issues. Treece’s love affair with

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Emma Fielding, a postgraduate student at the university, also suffers from the dichotomy between his liberal ideals and the vexing ethical realities of contemporary life. As the novel comes to its disheartening close, Treece feels utterly betrayed by his value systems—especially his ethical devotion to the precepts of responsibility and goodness—and ends up in a mental hospital with little hope for the future. In this way, Bradbury postulates a damning critique of the academy’s capacity for engendering genuine educational and social change when its most cherished principles evince little practical application. Scholars of academic fiction often identify novelist and critic David Lodge as the genre’s most significant practitioner. Lodge’s trilogy of academic novels—Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small World: An Academic Romance (1984), and Nice Work (1988)—satirizes academe’s convoluted nuances with playful abandon. In Changing Places, Lodge traces the intellectual and sexual lives of Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp, the academic characters whose professional and social intersections grace each of the narratives in Lodge’s academic trilogy. An introverted and ambitionless lecturer at an English redbrick university, Swallow distinguishes himself among his peers at the University of Rummidge because of his superior skills as an examiner, not because of his reputation as a literary scholar. “He is a mimetic man,” Lodge writes, “unconfident, eager to please, infinitely suggestible” (1975, 10). In sharp contrast with Swallow’s ineffectual scholarly career, Zapp enjoys considerable scholarly renown for his numerous well-received studies of Jane Austen. A full professor of English at the State University of Euphoria in the United States, Zapp plans to embark upon an ambitious critical project that would treat each of Austen’s novels from every conceivable hermeneutic perspective: “historical, biographical, rhetorical, mythical, Freudian, Jungian, existentialist, Marxist, structuralist, Christian-allegorical, ethical, exponential, linguistic, phenomenological, archetypal, you name it” (44). In this way, Zapp plans to exhaust Austen’s canon of novels for future critical study. “There would be simply nothing further to say,” Lodge remarks, “periodicals would fall silent, famous English Departments [would] be left deserted like ghost towns” (44–45). Swallow and Zapp’s lives collide in 1969 when they agree to participate in an annual professorial exchange scheme that exists between their respective institutions. During their transatlantic experiences, the two scholars not only exchange their students and colleagues, but their wives and families as well. How they literally swap their entire worlds with one another underscores Lodge’s satiric critique of his academic characters and the ease and alacrity with which they exchange the emotional and sexual discourses of their respective lives. As the narrative of Small World (1984) unfolds, we find Zapp and Swallow once again ensconced in the comfortable scholarly and interpersonal inroads of their respective worlds. While their private lives seem to follow a rather predictable course—Swallow returns to married life with Hilary and Désirée delivers on her promise to divorce Zapp—the worldwide reinvigoration of their profession in the late 1970s irrevocably alters their academic experiences through the auspices of international conferences and global scholarly trends. “The day of the single, static campus is over,” Zapp triumphantly announces in Small World, and with its demise arrives a new generation of globe-trotting scholars equally beset by the professional and interpersonal contradictions inherent in academic life (72). In Small World, Lodge traces the international scholarly and romantic exploits of Zapp, Swallow, and a wide range of other intellectuals bent on exerting their professional and erotic wills upon one another. A rousing keynote address delivered by Zapp at

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a conference hosted by Swallow at the University of Rummidge inaugurates the novel’s thematic exploration of erotic love and its narrative possibilities for interpersonal fulfillment. Entitled “Textuality as Striptease,” Zapp’s lecture discusses the inadequacy of language and scholarship as mechanisms for communication. Because it fundamentally encourages the act of interpretation, language necessarily denies itself the capacity to articulate any singular meaning with precision and exactitude. Scholarship suffers from a similar interpretive malady. As Zapp astutely remarks, “Every decoding is another encoding” (29). As with the text, which contains so many convoluted layers of unattainable meaning, the striptease, Zapp argues, entices the viewer with elements of curiosity and desire while ultimately defying possession. This struggle for erotic authority motivates the quests for love embarked upon by Lodge’s academics in Small World, and its consummate elusiveness challenges their capacity for finding self-satisfaction in the competitive community of scholars. In addition to detailing once again the sexual and professional exploits of Swallow and Zapp, Lodge traces in Small World the erotic quests of such fictive critical luminaries as Arthur Kingfisher and Fulvia Morgana, as well as the romantic experiences of the naïve lover and scholar, Persse McGarrigle, a fledgling young academic from University College, Limerick. In the novel, Persse’s search for the elusive independent scholar, Angelica Pabst, functions as a framing device for the erotic quests of Lodge’s other intellectual characters. He crisscrosses the globe, exhausting his savings in a wild international pursuit of the evasive Angelica while sporadically encountering Lodge’s other protagonists in such disparate locales as Rummidge, Amsterdam, Geneva, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Honolulu, Jerusalem, and finally, New York, where Lodge’s entire coterie of academics reconvenes for the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. Perhaps even more important, Kingfisher acts as Lodge’s most corrosive example of academic dysfunctionality. Secluded in his penthouse suite high above Chicago, Kingfisher lies naked in bed with a scattered selection of critical quarterlies and his delectable Korean research assistant, SongMi Lee, by his side. An emeritus professor of Columbia and Zürich Universities, Kingfisher spends his days writing reviews of the latest monographs of hermeneutics while watching pornographic movies on television. “A man who has received more honorary degrees than he can remember, and who has at home, at his house on Long Island, a whole room full of the (largely unread) books and offprints sent to him by disciples and admirers in the world of scholarship,” Kingfisher, Lodge writes, can unfortunately no longer “achieve an erection or an original thought” (105). Lodge’s unsavory depiction of Kingfisher consuming pornography while simultaneously engaging in the act of literary criticism underscores Lodge’s exacting critique of the academy via one of its most cherished mechanisms for professional advancement. As the final installment in Lodge’s academic trilogy, Nice Work (1988) examines the uneasy relationship that often exists between the academy and the “real world,” between the competitive forces of the intellect and the free-market forces of industry. In addition to questioning the relevance of literary theory to the problems that plague the world beyond the halls of the academy, the novel attempts to provide readers with a sense of reconciliation regarding the tenuous relationship between industry and academe through the medium of an erotic affair between the novel’s protagonists, Victor Wilcox, the managing director of an engineering firm, and Robyn Penrose, a temporary lecturer at the University of Rummidge. The dramatic

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consummation of their relationship seems to offer the possibility of mutual understanding between these remarkably disparate characters, yet the instability of love and language depicted in the novel’s closing pages ultimately undermines their genuine attempts at ideological compromise. In the novel, Robyn agrees to participate in the “Shadow Scheme” that eventually draws her into Vic’s orbit on the advice of Swallow, still chair of the department at Rummidge, although he is beginning to succumb to incipient deafness. The brainchild of the university’s vice-chancellor, the shadow scheme endeavors to enhance the university’s understanding of the commercial world by requiring a faculty member to “shadow” a senior managerial figure in the local manufacturing industry. Swallow believes that Robyn’s participation in the exercise might allow her to keep her Rummidge lectureship beyond her current three-year allotment. A gifted and well-published scholar, Robyn remains unable to secure a position in England’s depressed academic job market, despite her extraordinary professional credentials. Vic, Robyn’s industrial counterpart and the marketing director of J. Pringle and Sons Casting and General Engineering, harbors disdain for the value of higher education and views the university as a “small city-state” characterized by its “air of privileged detachment from the vulgar, bustling city in which it is embedded” (Lodge 1988, 14–15). Robyn possesses a similar distrust for members of the private sector and their commercial activities. Her ideological and social differences with Vic likewise manifest themselves on a number of occasions throughout their association during the shadow scheme. Robyn reacts in horror, for example, when she visits the factory’s dark, inner recesses: “It was the most terrible place she had ever been in her life,” Lodge writes. “To say that to herself restored the original meaning of the word ‘terrible’: it provoked terror, even a kind of awe” (90). Her revulsion at the squalid conditions in the factory later results in a spontaneous strike after she warns one of the laborers of his imminent dismissal. The Shadow Scheme reaches its dramatic climax when Robyn agrees to accompany Vic on a business trip to Frankfurt, where her knowledge of German allows Vic to negotiate the purchase of a machine for the factory at an exceptional price. Absorbed with the success of their cooperative effort as business negotiators, Robyn and Vic retire to her suite for a sexual encounter: “The captain of industry at the feet of the feminist literary critic—a pleasing tableau,” Robyn muses (207). Back in England, their relationship deteriorates rapidly. “When Wilcox screwed you, it was like the factory ravished the university,” Robyn’s friend Penny observes (212). Robyn and Vic achieve reconciliation only after he visits the university as her “shadow” and after the factory discharges him from his position as managing director. Using the proceeds of her inheritance from the estate of a recently deceased relative in Australia, Robyn salvages their relationship when she good-naturedly offers to invest in Vic’s plans to design a revolutionary spectrometer. In this manner, Vic and Robyn opt for a working relationship over the semiotic and interpersonal struggles of romance. Robyn’s own professional fortunes eventually soar after Zapp fortuitously arrives in Rummidge—about to embark upon his annual European conference tour, of course—and negotiates the American rights of her second monograph for Euphoric State’s university press. The novel’s deus ex machina conclusion reaches its fruition when Swallow finally, almost predictably, locates the funding to extend Robyn’s contract for another year at the University of Rummidge. In this manner, Nice Work’s hopeful dénouement allows Lodge to establish a state of reconciliation between industry and academe.

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A.S. Byatt’s acclaimed Possession: A Romance (1990) adopts the detective form in a labyrinthine campus novel about the complicated nature of love and possession, as well as about the primacy of the text in academic circles. In the novel, Byatt narrates the interconnected stories of two, historically disparate couples—Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey, a pair of contemporary literary scholars on a quest to authenticate a love affair between two Victorian poets; and the poets themselves, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. As a postmodern pastiche, Possession features a panoply of textual voices, ranging from scholarly articles and autobiographical texts to Ash and LaMotte’s correspondence and verse. While Christine Brook-Rose draws upon the textual nuances of postmodern pastiche in her novel Textermination (1991), the result hardly compares to the quality and nuance of Byatt’s achievement. With Possession, Byatt succeeds in both satirizing academic life and yet managing to venerate its capacity for generating viable textual research— and engendering romance, no less—at the same time. Byatt’s most exacting critique of the scholarly world emerges via her treatment of Professor James Blackadder, Roland’s avaricious employer and the curator of a vast museum of holdings related to Ash’s life and work. Byatt similarly derides the unchecked ambitions of two caustic American characters, rival collectors Mortimer Cropper, the representative of a wealthy New Mexico foundation, and Leonora Stern, an influential feminist scholar who longs for Maud’s affections, as well as for the fruits of her latest research about LaMotte’s clandestine relationship with Ash. In many ways, the most effective aspect of Byatt’s satire involves the manner in which Roland and Maud become so obsessed with their subject that they can hardly begin to consummate the romantic feelings that blossom during their time together. Although Possession ends by suggesting that they might eventually enjoy a fulfilling romantic connection, Roland and Maud conclude their quest by only solving the mystery of Ash and LaMotte’s affair. The novel’s sad irony is that they fail to unravel the equally complex and intriguing mystery about the bond that has come to exist between them. The rigors and demands of scholarship, it seems, have established barriers rather than fomenting the interpersonal bridges that the university champions in workaday life. While Amis’s and Lodge’s narratives illustrate the vexing world of British higher education, Jane Smiley’s Moo (1995) focuses a sharp, satiric eye upon the political machinations and ambitions of the administration and faculty of Moo U., a large midwestern university well known for its agricultural department. Rife with social and scholarly intrigue, Smiley’s novel admonishes the bankrupt value systems of a powerful American institution of higher learning obsessed with its agenda for technological and financial superiority. Smiley allots conspicuous attention to all of the competing voices comprised in Moo U.’s political maelstrom—from the contentious professoriate in the horticulture and English departments to the institution’s dubious administration, an often bemused and vacant student population, and a giant hog named Earl Butz who resides in an abandoned building in the middle of Moo U.’s campus. In addition to her penetrating critique of university life’s economic circle—an endlessly negating system of consuming and being consumed—Smiley addresses the interpersonal motivations exhibited by an array of administrative, professorial, and undergraduate characters. Smiley’s self-conscious retelling of consumerism’s cautionary tale—of what happens when a beast like Moo U. is permitted to gorge itself at the trough of other, ethically dubious creatures—affords us with one of academic fiction’s most compelling narratives.

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In addition to the aforementioned paradigmatic campus novels by Amis, Bradbury, Lodge, Byatt, and Smiley, the tragicomic world of academic literature increasingly includes works of detective fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, film, and textual experimentation. Academic novels frequently employ the conventions of the murder mystery, as evidenced by such texts as Amanda Cross’s Death in a Tenured Position (1981), P.D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), D.J.H. Jones’s Murder at the MLA (1993), and Estelle Monbrun’s Meurtre chez Tante Léonie (1995). In the nonfictional Masterpiece Theatre: An Academic Melodrama (1995), Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar consider the ethical implications of the “culture wars” of the early 1990s by fashioning a loosely veiled account of the political machinations by a host of international academic and political figures. With Recalcitrance, Faulkner, and the Professors: A Critical Fiction (1990), Austin M. Wright offers one of the genre’s more innovative works. In his quasi-nonfictional study, Wright satirizes contemporary literary criticism through his reproduction of two imaginary essays on Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930) by a pair of feuding instructors whose students subsequently meet at “Phil’s Pub” in order to critique the quality of their professors’ divergent arguments. In addition to poet Galway Kinnell’s satirical look at literary studies in “The Deconstruction of Emily Dickinson” (1994), the academy receives attention in such plays as Susan Miller’s experimental Cross Country (1977) and David Mamet’s controversial Oleanna (1992). Produced as a film in 1994, Oleanna concerns a professor and his student’s inability to communicate with each other on any genuinely meaningful level. Their utter incapability of comprehending the nature of their obligations and responsibilities, both to each other and to higher education, predicates Mamet’s brutal musings on sexual harassment and political correctness. The academic novel reaches its experimental apex in Alexander Theroux’s Darconville’s Cat (1981), a work that features stylistic forays into such genres as blank-verse drama, the sermon, the diary, the fable, poetry, the essay, and formal oration, among a host of others. Bibliography Aisenberg, Nadya, and Mona Harrington. Women of Academe: Outsiders in the Sacred Grove. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. Amis, Kingsley. Lucky Jim. New York: Penguin, 1954. Begley, Adam. “The Decline of the Campus Novel.” Lingua Franca 7 (1997): 39–46. Bevan, David, ed. University Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990. Blanchard, W. Scott. Scholar’s Bedlam: Menippean Satire in the Renaissance. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1995. Bradbury, Malcolm. Eating People Is Wrong. Chicago, IL: Academy Publishers, 1959. Byatt, A. S. Possession: A Romance. New York: Vintage International, 1990. Caram, Richard G. “The Secular Priests: A Study of the College Professor as Hero in Selected American Fiction (1955–1977).” Diss. Saint Louis University, 1980. Carter, Ian. Ancient Cultures of Conceit: British University Fiction in the Post-War Years. London: Routledge, 1990. Gardner, Philip. Kingsley Amis. Boston, MA: Twayne, 1981. Inness, Sherrie A. Intimate Communities: Representation and Social Transformation in Women’s College Fiction, 1895–1910. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1995. Johnson, Lisa. “The Life of the Mind: American Academia Reflected through Contemporary Fiction.” Reference Services Review 23 (1995): 23–44.

ADVENTURE FICTION Kramer, John E., Jr. The American College Novel: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1982. Leonardi, Susan J. Dangerous by Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville College Novelists. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Lodge, David. Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses. New York: Penguin, 1975. ———. Nice Work. New York: Penguin, 1988. ———. Small World: An Academic Romance. New York: Penguin, 1984. Lyons, John. The College Novel in America. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962. ———. “The College Novel in America, 1962–1974.” Critique 16 (1974): 121–128. Marchalonis, Shirley. College Girls: A Century in Fiction. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995. McDermott, John. Kingsley Amis: An English Moralist. London: Macmillan, 1989. Proctor, Mortimer R. The English University Novel. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1957. Rossen, Janice. The University in Modern Fiction: When Power Is Academic. London: Macmillan, 1993. Siegel, Ben, ed. The American Writer and the University. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989. Womack, Kenneth. Postwar Academic Fiction: Satire, Ethics, Community. London: Palgrave, 2001.

Further Reading Bevan, David, ed. University Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990; Carter, Ian. Ancient Cultures of Conceit: British University Fiction in the Post-War Years. London: Routledge, 1990; Johnson, Lisa. “The Life of the Mind: American Academia Reflected through Contemporary Fiction.” Reference Services Review 23 (1995): 23–44; Rossen, Janice. The University in Modern Fiction: When Power Is Academic. London: Macmillan, 1993; Showalter, Elaine. Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005; Womack, Kenneth. Postwar Academic Fiction: Satire, Ethics, Community. London: Palgrave, 2001.

KENNETH WOMACK

ADVENTURE FICTION Definition. What makes an adventure? An adventure is an experience of a situation in which one cannot predict the outcome. It can sometimes be dangerous and chancy, but it can also be thrilling, exciting and fun. The adventures one seeks can also be life-changing events, learning experiences, and good stories to tell. A good adventure story leaves the reader wondering what will happen next. Adventure subgenres include adventurous science fiction stories, and children’s adventures like the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, although these novels, originally meant as children’s stories, became favorites with adults as well. The Western genre is full of Wild

Many contemporary novels and stories of action adventure often leave any depth of character or plot structure out of the main text.The focus is on action and adventure that involves physical, often violent activity, which is emphasized more than character development, motivation, and overall theme. Fiona Waters says this of Willard Price’s adventure series that is also true of many adventure novels and stories:“Nothing gets in the way of the narration, of the boy’s exploits and the constant stream of information—no time is wasted on philosophizing or theorizing, all is action and very successful” (Rubinstein 2007).

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West adventures, but very seldom do they involve true accounts by the authors who write about them. Spy, thriller, and mystery adventure fall under the same heading, but all belong to different genres because adventure is only a part of the whole story. History. Traveling the world meant exploration for expanding empires, conquering civilizations, and acquiring new trade routes for new resources. Herodotus in mid-400 B.C.E traveled to Greece, Italy, and northern Africa to learn about its inhabitants and their religions, the native flora and fauna, and the geography. Herodotus is considered one of the first travel writers, and he often gave lectures about his travels. The Vikings may have been adventure seekers and discovered new lands, but their travels also resulted in destruction, as did the different European empires. Colonies of different countries were established around the world, as adventurers claimed new unexplored land in order to acquire their untapped resources such as gold, spices, rubber, and slaves. Christopher Columbus is one of the world’s most famous explorers. He traveled with Marco Polo’s journals, convinced that he could find a route to Asia by going west instead of taking the only known route to the East that sailed south of Africa and around India via the Indian Ocean. He failed to find the route he was looking for, but he did succeed in finding what is today known as Cuba, setting European sights on new land and resources. He also succeeded in inspiring other explorers to seek their own adventures. Although the accounts of his travels are not always accurate or factual, his stories contain the key elements of traveling: excitement, intrigue, wonder and amazement, and most important, adventure. Taking the grand tour began in the 1600s and gained in popularity through the 1800s and 1900s. Termed as the le grand tour by the French, the grand tour was especially popular with young men, and eventually young women, of wealthy families. The voyage was for many a rite of passage, signaling their transformation from school-aged children to young adults. At first, the mode of transportation was the steamships that sailed across the oceans, until the arrival of the steam train in the mid-1800s that enabled passengers to travel over land. The young traveler was accompanied by a tutor or other adult guardian and was taught the history of the countries visited, as well as their cultural aspects, such as fencing, language, dancing, horseback riding, manners, and fashion. These lessons helped shape the travelers in their everyday life, preparing them for the social life that was expected of persons of their class and wealth; often, these experiences gave young men the foundation for leadership positions in the military. Writings of these voyages came by letter to family and friends at home. The destination of these journeys was often the colonies of the empires of which they were citizens. Subjects of the colonizing empires were guaranteed entry without special passports or visas. The presence of English travelers was extremely common in India from the early 1600s until the World War II in 1945. One example of the grand tour novel is A Passage to India, published in 1924, by author E.M. Forster. The novel captures the sense of adventure of a British woman traveling to India to meet her fiancé who works for the British raj, a form of British government in India. In 1908, Forster also published A Room with a View about a young woman traveling through Italy, and in 1905, his other Italian novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, was published. Forster, a traveler in his own right and a British subject, used his experiences of traveling to both India and Italy to provide the background scenes and ideas for many of his novels. Another example is Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s novel Journey to the End of the Night, published in 1934.

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It is the story of a young French man who travels to the different French colonies of Africa and, ultimately, to America. The characters reflect their society; they were able persons with financial means traveling and experiencing the adventure of other countries and cultures. Both novels, Journey to the End of Night and A Passage to India, explore the racial tensions between colonizer and colonized, bringing depth to the characters and providing political commentary while creating excitement for the reader. Other adventure novels that emerged in the beginning of the century told a story of travel, but they dealt with the characters’ development as a reflection of mankind. Mark Twain is another novelist who used his personal travels as the basis for his narratives. His classic novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and his nonfiction book Old Times on the Mississippi (1876), are taken from Twain’s experience on the steamboats of the Mississippi River. Trends and Themes. Outdoors adventures are real stories about real people creating their adventures by traveling the world and beyond. Some examples of outdoor adventures are Heinrich Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet (1953), Norman MacLean’s Young Men and Fire (1992), Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory (1981), travel writer Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods (1998), Alexandra David-Neel’s My Journey to Lhasa (1927), Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989), Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki (1950), Joe Kane’s Running the Amazon (1989), Bernard Moitessier’s The Long Way (1971), Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958), journalist Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air (1997) and Into the Wild (1996), journalist Tim Cahill’s Jaguars Ripped My Flesh (1987), Piers Paul Read’s Alive (1974), Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm (1997), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand, and Stars (1939), Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard (1978), novelist Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps (1936), James Tobin’s To Conquer the Air (2003), Nathaniel Philbrink’s Sea of Glory (2003), Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins’s autobiography Carrying the Fire (1974), naturalist John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), F.A. Worsley’s Endurance (1931), Ernest Shackleton’s autobiography South (1919), and mountaineer Reinhold Messner’s The Crystal Horizon (1982). Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna (1952) inspired many mountain climbers such as Reinhold Messner and Ed Veisters who chronicled his own adventures of climbing all 14 of the world’s highest peaks in his 2006 autobiography No Shortcuts to the Top. Apsley Cherry-Gerrard’s The Worst Journey in the World (1922) is considered to be the National Geographic’s number one adventure book, followed by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s Journals (1814). Women also played the role of adventurers, detailed in such accounts as Osa Johnson’s I Married Adventure (1940); Arlene Blum’s Annapurna: A Woman’s Place (1980), an autobiography of the ascent of Annapurna, by a team of women, two of whom died; Isabella L. Bird’s A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879); and Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa (1897). Alive and The Perfect Storm were both made into blockbuster movies in 1993 and 2000, respectively, as was Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet in 1997 starring Brad Pitt. Isak Dinesen’s novel Out of Africa (1937) was also made into a movie starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep in 1985. The movie won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture in 1986. Endurance, based on Ernest Shackleton’s journey to Antarctica, was developed in 2002 as an A&E Channel miniseries entitled Shackleton starring British actor Kenneth Branagh. Mountaineer Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void (1988) was made into a documentary film in 2003.

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Context and Issues. In nonfiction adventure, the author as the main character usually comments on ideas and experiences that contribute to their personal identity, as well as developing skills of travel and survival through the adventure. Often authors, or their critics, describe their writings as outlets for their personal and spiritual development, as can be seen Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard (1978). Many nonfictional accounts of adventure begin as a quest, as the author develops a route of travel that has a purpose, either of exploration, self-discovery, sport, or a combination of all three. Jon Krakauer utilized all three of these aspects when he was first propositioned for a journey to Mt. Everest in 1996. A mountaineer and a journalist, Krakauer has written several articles and books about his experiences at a high altitude. His experience on Everest in the spring of 1996 also became a soul-searching endeavor, as he witnessed one of the worst death tolls on the mountain. Eventually adventure becomes a commodity—adventure for a price. Armchair travelers have, at their advantage, movies and television that takes them to places they have never been, doing things they may never do. Average people do not need to go anywhere to experience the beauty of a different country, but they do miss out on the true culture, the true nature of people. Essentially, they miss out on the experience, the thrill and the excitement. “Without the possibility of death,” said mountaineer and author Reinhold Messner, “adventure is not possible” (Alexander 2006, 44). Messner is first a mountaineer, and second a writer. He penned the story of his adventures in The Crystal Horizon (1982), which is filled with danger, excitement, life, death, and rebirth. He embodies the real-life hero of adventure, knowing the risks involved with climbing mountains, sometimes alone and without bottled oxygen. But when Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world, has been conquered, explorers look to what is beyond the planet and explore the stars as Apollo 11 Command Module Pilot Michael Collins details in his autobiography Carrying the Fire (1974). In a 1923 interview with The New York Times, mountaineer George Mallory made famous, , the phrase “because it’s there” (Knowles 2001), meaning that the mountain was there to climb, the moon was there to explore, and adventure is all around for us to experience. Reception. Action novels are becoming increasingly popular, and many movies have been made because of the theatrical success of the original action adventure films, such as Star Wars (1977–2005), the Indiana Jones trilogy (1981–1989), the Mummy trilogy (1999–2005), The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003), The Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy (2003–2007), and The Harry Potter films (which began in 2002). Other adventure movies include The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The Crimson Pirate (1952), The African Queen (1951), Romancing the Stone (1984), The Goonies (1985), National Treasure (2004), multiple remakes of King Solomon’s Mines (1937, 1950, and 1985), The Lord of the Flies (1963 and 1990) based on the novel by William Golding, and Sahara (2005) based on the novel by Clive Cussler. Many successful action and adventure films are based on best-selling thriller novels. Both The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter movies were originally based on best sellers. The second book in C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia series, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), was developed into a highly successful film in 2005. The popularity of the film version of adventure books has been overwhelming. The films are easily accessible, and the visual effects are often elaborately planned and well executed. Examples of movies based on such novels include John Grisham’s The Pelican Brief (1992), The Client (1994), The Firm

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(1991), and The Rainmaker (1995); Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity (1980), The Bourne Supremacy (1986) and The Bourne Ultimatum (1990); and Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990) and The Andromeda Strain (1969). Each movie contains a popular actor or actress to enhance the film’s marketability, along with special effects and continuous action throughout the film. Other novels that were turned into popular films include Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes (1921), which spawned numerous movies and television shows; Forster’s novels A Room with a View (1908) and A Passage to India (1924); and Ian Fleming’s famous character James Bond, also known as 007, originally created in 1952 and turned into such movies as Dr. No (1962), Goldfinger (1964), and Live and Let Die (1973). After Fleming’s death, other authors have kept the Bond name alive with new adventures in novels and such blockbuster movies as The World Is Not Enough (1999) and Die Another Day (2002). Casino Royale, based on Fleming’s 1953 novel, was released in 2006. Authors and Their Adventures. Adventure travel writers differ from adventure fiction writers in that the travel writers write about their own adventures, whereas fiction adventure writers write about an adventure that happened to fictional characters that has been embellished to create a sense of heightened excitement and intense anticipation. Adventure travel writers, however, have written harrowing adventures that are based in reality; and, for the reader, knowing that the story is true creates a different kind of excitement. The reader usually experiences anxiety and concern for the characters, who are often the authors themselves, and because they know that the story is true, they often experience empathy for the author, the people involved in the story, and the land and the culture as well. Not every adventure turns out fine, as it does in adventure fiction. Examples are Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity (1980) and Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990). Selected Authors Mark Twain (1835–1910). Mark Twain was one of the first American authors to be considered a travel writer, basing most of his work throughout his life on the journeys he had taken in the United States and Europe. Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Mark Twain began his writing career writing articles for local newspapers and magazines about his traveling experiences. As a young man in 1851, he worked as a typesetter at the Hannibal Journal, owned by his brother Orion Clemens, in his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. There he was given the opportunity to contribute articles to the paper. Twain also worked as a printer in various cities including Cincinnati, St. Louis, New York, and Philadelphia, but it was the steamboats of the Mississippi River that he loved. Twain studied the maps of the Mississippi River’s 2,000-plus miles over the course of several years, earning his steamboat piloting license in 1959, and he continued to work on the ships until 1861 when the Civil War began, which immediately halted the travel and the trade of the steamboats along the river. In 1863, he and his brother Orion traveled for two weeks across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, finally settling in Virginia City, Nevada. These travels would become the basis for his nonfiction book Roughing It (1872) and his short story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, published in the New York Saturday Press on November 18, 1865, and finally as a novel in 1867. Twain was also given the opportunity to travel to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) to write

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about his experience for the Sacramento Union newspaper based in California. In the summer of 1867, Twain took a trip on the cruise ship Quaker City. His compilation of travel letters, published as Innocents Abroad in 1869, was written during this time as he traveled though Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. A Tramp Abroad, published in 1880, is based on a second trip to Europe. In 1875, Twain published a series of essays titled Old Times on the Mississippi in the Atlantic Monthly, which he eventually turned into a nonfiction book titled Life on the Mississippi in 1883. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, published in 1876, was one of Twain’s first works of fiction. It was closely based on Twain’s own life as a boy in Hannibal, Missouri. Another novel to follow took Tom Sawyer’s friend, Huckleberry Finn, on his own adventures with a runaway slave named Jim. The story was set during the 1850s when slavery was still legal. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884, became more successful than Tom Sawyer. The book was well received with the public, cheering Huck’s sense of rightness and his refusal to conform to the prejudices of society just because they were the popular belief. Although the book was banned in many schools in the latter half of the 1900s because of language considered by today’s standards as vulgar, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn proved that adventure novels can have depth; instead of just exploring the landscape. The character, too, can grow to reflect society. Willard Price: The Adventure Series (1887–1983). Willard DeMille Price wrote many stories based on his travels around the world, including his work editing for the journals Survey and World Outlook. From 1920 to 1967, Price traveled for the National Geographic Society and for the American Museum of Natural History. In 1949, he wrote a series of children’s adventure novels. My aim in writing the ‘Adventure’ series for young people was to lead them to read by making reading exciting and full of adventure. At the same time I want to inspire an interest in wild animals and their behavior. Judging from the letters I have received from boys and girls around the world, I believe I have helped open to them the worlds of books and natural history. (Rubinstein 2005)

Price wrote 14 Adventure Series books from 1949 until 1980: Amazon Adventure (1949), South Sea Adventure (1952), Underwater Adventure (1954), Volcano Adventure (1956), Whale Adventure (1960), African Adventure (1963), Elephant Adventure (1964), Safari Adventure (1966), Lion Adventure (1967), Gorilla Adventure (1969), Diving Adventure (1970), Cannibal Adventure (1972), Tiger Adventure (1979), and Arctic Adventure (1980). Fellow children’s author Fiona Waters said of Price’s novels: “The exploits may be fiction, but the facts and settings could only have come from real life; Price’s tales are based on his own tumultuous and action-packed life” (Rubinstein 2005). His passion was for traveling and learning about different cultures and geography. His travel books Rivers I Have Known (1965), Key to Japan (1946), Adventures in Paradise, Tahiti and Beyond (1955), and The Amazing Amazon (1952), all contain photos, maps, and sketches made by Price during his travels. Price also wrote nonfiction stories based on his own life adventures, such as Ancient Peoples at New Tasks (1918, for the Missionary Education Movement), Japan Rides the Tiger (1952), Japan’s Island of Mystery (1944), The Japanese Miracle and Peril (1971), and My Own Life of Adventure: Travels in 148 Lands

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(1982). Price also wrote articles for Harper’s Magazine from 1935 to 1942, exploring territorial expansion of the islands of the Pacific as well as military policy and the political situations of Japan, Korea, and China. Enid Blyton 1897–1968. In contrast to Price, Enid Blyton wrote several children’s books for the British Publications Adventure Series. Blyton also wrote many tales of adventure for television and movie production. Her adventure series consists of the novels The Island of Adventure (1944), The Castle of Adventure (1946), The Valley of Adventure (1947), The Sea of Adventure (1948), The Mountain Adventure (1945), The Ship of Adventure (1950), The Circus of Adventure (1952), and The River of Adventure (1955). Two of these novels were made into movies for British television: The Island of Adventure in 1982 and The Castle of Adventure in 1990 (IMDb.com 2007). Blyton also wrote many other novels for children, about 300 titles in all, but later in life, she was accused of having a limited vocabulary, even for younger readers and it was said that her stories were rife with sexism, racism, and English snobbishness (Stoney 2006). Unlike Price who had really had adventures, Blyton had stayed for most of her life in England, writing stories from her imagination rather than from real travel experience. National Geographic Society (1888–). Started in 1888 by 33 explorers and scientists, the National Geographic Society began as a way to learn more about the geography of the world. The first president of the society was Gardiner Greene Hubbard. Upon his death in 1897, Hubbard’s son-in-law, Alexander Graham Bell, became his successor. In turn, Bell’s son-in-law, Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor, became the first editor of the National Geographic magazine in 1889. Grosvenor incorporated photographs and stories of travel and adventure to add to the intrigue of geography, and published studies of the people and cultures of different countries. The magazine also features maps, is published quarterly, and has been translated into 31 different languages. From 1919 until 1975, the National Geographic Society distributed a monthly newsletter for schools. The school newsletter’s title was changed to National Geographic World in 1975 and again in 2001 to National Geographic Kids. Other publications include National Geographic Traveler, created in 1984, and National Geographic Adventure in 1999. The society also publishes many atlases, maps, travel guidebooks, and other larger photography books about specific travel destinations. In 1964, the society began a television program in conjunction with CBS. The program moved to ABC in 1973, and in 1975 made its final move to PBS. In 1997, National Geographic launched its own cable channel, appropriately titled the National Geographic Channel. The channel gives viewers 24-hour access to the programs that originated in the 1970s and continues to make groundbreaking discoveries on Earth and in space exploration. The society also produces feature-length films and documentaries such as the adventure film K-19: The Widowmaker (2002) and March of the Penguins (2005), which won an Academy Award in 2006. The National Geographic Society also awards grants for research. Among the more famous recipients of these grants are Lewis Leakey and his wife Mary, who in the latter half of the twentieth century spearheaded primate research in Africa and Indonesia. His researchers included Jane Goodall who studied chimpanzees in northern Africa, Dian Fossey who studied mountain gorillas in Rwanda and Uganda, and Biruté Galdikas who studied the orangutan in Indonesia. Leakey,

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along with his wife Mary and son Richard, made a name for his family and for the society as a physical anthropologist, uncovering many of the historical archeological digs in British East Africa, Nairobi, and Kenya and at the now-famous Olduvai gorge, where Mary Leakey made her most important discovery of an early hominid skull that she named Zinganthropus, which was dated at from 1 to 1.75 million years old. Leakey helped create the growing interest in the National Geographic Society, filming many television specials that ran in the 1970s in prime time. In addition to the famous Leakey projects, the National Geographic Society also funded expeditions Ian Baker’s exploration of the legendary “hidden waterfalls” of the Tsangpo Gorge in Tibet in 1998 and 1999, Robert Bartlett’s arctic exploration from 1925 to 1945, Hiram Bingham’s 1911 excavation of Machu Picchu in Peru, and JacquesYves Cousteau’s many underwater explorations and television specials. Tim Cahill (1943–), Road Fever (1991) and Lost in My Own Back Yard (2004). Tim Cahill is considered one of the foremost adventure writers by Outside magazine, the National Geographic Society, and fellow travel writer Bill Bryson, who said, “Partly the reason Tim Cahill is adventurous is because he’s an adventurous kind of guy. He’s more inclined than the rest of us to do adventurous and brave things, partly because he knows he can write it very skillfully, but also because he’s drawn to those types of things. He’s in his element in those situations” (Shapiro 2004, 135). Cahill became a journalist for the San Francisco Examiner and Rolling Stone magazine in the early 1970s. In 1976, he started Outside magazine with friends Michael Rogers and Harriet Fier. Today it is one of the leading outdoors adventure magazines. Cahill has been around the world collecting sources for his stories, often including more than one continent in a book. For example, in Road Fever: A High Speed Travelogue (1991), Cahill and friend Garry Sowerby drive 15,000 miles, starting at the southernmost tip of Tierra del Fuego, the main island south of Chile in South America, and ending at Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, a trip made in only 231⁄2 days. “Adventure is physical or emotional discomfort recollected in tranquility. An adventure is never an adventure when it’s happening. An adventure is only an adventure when you’ve had time to sit back and think about it” (Shapiro 2004, 10). This adventure includes humor juxtaposed alongside their everyday troubles, which include the weather conditions, revolution, and stale food. Cahill’s other books include Jaguars Ripped My Flesh: Adventure Is a Risky Business (1987), A Wolverine is Eating My Leg (1989), and Pass the Butterworms: Remote Journeys Oddly Rendered (1997). In 2004, Cahill was given the opportunity to explore one of his favorite spots, Yellowstone National Park. Lost in My Own Back Yard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park, published in 2004, was written with permission from his editors, even though an abundance of travel books about that area had been written in previous years. Cahill claims that he must have had “the capacity to see it with fresh eyes” (Shapiro 2004, 12). Peter Matthiessen (1927–), The Snow Leopard (1978) and In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983). Peter Matthiessen is a naturalist and author of historical nonfiction as well as fiction. He was one of the founding fathers of a literary journal called The Paris Review in 1953; some claim the journal was just a cover for his involvement in the CIA. Besides writing for The Paris Review, Matthiessen also wrote for The New Yorker magazine and for the Atlantic Monthly. His novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965) was nominated for a National Book Award and in 1991 was made into a film of the same name.

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His first two novels Race Rock (1954) and Partisans (1955) were published to little acclaim, and it wasn’t until his nonfiction environmental piece Wildlife in America (1959) that Matthiessen discovered what his real passion. My earliest nonfiction book, Wildlife in America, was about wildlife and the environment, and I’ve always been concerned with it. A parallel concern was traditional people who are also threatened, their languages and their culture, and they too show up in Wildlife in America. One cannot really separate those concerns, the environment and biodiversity and social justice. They’re all tied in very closely together. (Shapiro 2004, 347)

Matthiessen’s 1983 nonfiction story, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, shows his passion for the environment, native culture, and social justice. The main story is about Leonard Peltier, a member of the 1970s American Indian Movement (AIM), who was allegedly involved in the deaths of two FBI agents during a standoff between several members of AIM and the FBI near Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1975. Of the four members of AIM that were indicted, Peltier was the only one to be convicted and is currently serving several consecutive life sentences. Matthiessen delves into the controversy surrounding the case as well as the overall treatment of Native Americans on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, the poorest reservation in the United States. Adventure novels were once written without much character development, but as the authors of such novels started to do more exploring and research for their works, the criteria for the characters of the books also changed. One such example lies within the text of Matthiessen’s nonfiction book The Snow Leopard (1978), which won the contemporary thought category of the National Book Award in 1979. In 1995, freelance writer Amanda Jones was stranded in Calcutta, India, when she was given a copy of Matthiessen’s book as a gift from her Sherpa. She was drawn to the book because it mirrored much of her own travel at the time, but she was also drawn to the personal journey Matthiessen experienced that helped form the thesis of his book. A year prior to the trip, the writer’s wife had died of cancer. The Snow Leopard is an excruciatingly beautiful and honest account of what turned into a tough spiritual and physical journey. With the energy that great travel writers have coursing through their veins, Matthiessen walked me, pace by pace, over those mountain passes, through the precepts of Buddhism and the valleys of his soul. (Jones 2007)

Inspired by his travels, Matthiessen devoted his life to the study of Zen Buddhism. For him, travel is a spiritual journey, and the evidence is found throughout The Snow Leopard. Matthiessen began this journey at the invitation of naturalist and zoologist George Schaller to join him in his study of the Himalayan blue sheep in the Dolpo region of the Nepalese Himalayas. This expedition would give Matthiessen, who was studying Buddhism at the time, a prime opportunity to visit with ancient Tibetan Buddhist monks living in a remote and isolated area of Nepal, and to “possibly glimpse the most elusive of all great cats, the ice-eyed snow leopard” (Jones 2007). Matthiessen did not see a snow leopard, but he did meet with his Buddhist mentors and continued his practice, becoming a Buddhist teacher in the late 1990s. Jon Krakauer (1954–), Into the Wild (1996), Into Thin Air (1997). Jon Krakauer received a degree in environmental studies at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. He began his writing career with articles in magazines such as the American Alpine

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Journal and later Outside and Playboy. He began mountain climbing in 1974, which helped give him an edge in outdoor adventure journalism. His familiarity with the Brooks Range in Alaska, and later the Stikine Icecap region of Alaska, would help him develop articles leading to the publication of Eiger Dreams (1990), a compilation of articles detailing his success and failures with mountain climbing. He was also able to identify with the subject of his book Into the Wild (1996), a story about Christopher McCandless, who, after graduating from Emory University, gave away all of his money and possessions, changed his name, and set out to live alone in the Alaskan wilderness. Krakauer could understand McCandless’s need for isolation because he has searched for isolation in the mountains. Several months after McCandless’s disappearance, his body was discovered near an abandoned bus. His only possessions were a .22 caliber rifle, a camera, and literature by authors Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, and Jack London. Krakauer’s best-known work is the 1997 book Into Thin Air, a nonfiction work about his experience climbing Mount Everest in May 1996 and the tragedy that occurred. He found that, with travel to high places more reachable, the top of the world became more quickly accessible. The summit of Mount Everest was once an exclusive club for only the most experienced and adventurous climbers, but now it could be bought for the right price: The slopes of Everest did not lack for dreamers in the spring of 1996; the credentials of many who’d come to climb the mountain were as thin as mine, or thinner. When it came time for each of us to assess our own abilities and weigh them against the formidable challenges of the world’s highest mountain, it sometimes seemed as though half the population at Base Camp was clinically delusional. But perhaps this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Everest has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics, and others with a shaky hold on reality. (88)

Krakauer describes the ascent and descent of two of the climbing parties that ventured to the summit on May 10, 1996, led by Rob Hall and Scott Fischer. Krakauer was sent to the mountain on assignment for Outside magazine in March of the same year, slated to be on New Zealander Rob Hall’s team. Around 1 P.M. on May 10, a storm approached the mountain, but as Krakauer noted, teams were still heading up the mountain to the summit rather than heading back down to shelter. “Why did veteran Himalayan guides keep moving upward, ushering a gaggle of relatively inexperienced amateurs—each of whom had paid as much as $65,000 to be taken safely up Everest—into an apparent death trap?” (6). Six people would lose their lives that day because of the storm. On record as one of the worst climbing tragedies in Everest history, the season itself went on record with 15 deaths, making it the deadliest year ever for climbers. Bill Bryson (1951–), A Walk in the Woods (1998). Prior to becoming a travel writer, Bryson wrote columns for a British newspaper, often resubmitting the same travel story to several papers in both England and the United States, but his adventures were what people were to read about. Michael Shapiro claims that “Reading one of (Bryson’s) books feels like visiting with an old friend who spins the most amazing tales; you laugh, you learn, you long for more” (Shapiro 2004, 130). Bryson didn’t originally set out to be a travel writer, but when he started to write with a humorous twist about the places he had been, he found that he had a talent for writing about these experiences and adventures. In an interview with Michael

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Shapiro, Bryson said: “I had no desire to become a travel writer, in fact it never occurred to me to think of myself as that” (Shapiro 2004, 134). His first book, The Palace Under the Alps and Over 200 Other Unusual, Unspoiled, and Infrequently Visited Spots in 16 European Countries (1985), was written about one of his many trips to Europe. Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe (1991) also documented his early travels in Europe. After returning to the United States, with his wife whom he met in England on one of his first journeys through Europe, Bryson wrote The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (1989). In 1989, Bryson returned to the United States after living in England for many years, settling in New Hampshire. Of this experience Bryson wrote I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away (1998) and A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail (1998). In I’m a Stranger Here Myself, he describes how, even though he was born in the United States, he still felt out of place returning to this country after being away for so long. “It’s weird in the United States because it’s all changed—three years later it’s not recognizable . . . It’s so hard in the States to find anything the way it used to be. In Europe it’s exactly the opposite—you can go back and nothing has changed. It’s the same café and still the same old waiter” (Shapiro 2004, 139–140). His most popular travel book is A Walk in the Woods, which spent many weeks on The New York Times best-seller list in 1998 and again in 1999 when the paperback edition was released. When he told his family and friends that he had decided to walk the greater part of the Appalachian Trail from New Hampshire to Georgia, not everyone was enthusiastic about his new adventure: Nearly everyone I talked to had some gruesome story involving a guileless acquaintance who had gone off hiking the trail with high hopes and new boots and come stumbling back two days later with a bobcat attached to his head or dripping blood from an armless sleeve and whispering in a hoarse voice, ‘Bear!’ before sinking into a troubled unconsciousness. (5)

The story relates the adventures of Bryson and his friend Stephen Katz, who had made an appearance in Bryson’s earlier book Neither Here nor There. Katz, as he is called, provides much of the entertainment for the trip as Bryson describes hiking across miles of trails, though rain, sleeping out in tents, and finding salvation in a gas station convenience store. Bryson also describes the scenery in detail, expressing his concern about the trees that are disappearing due to climate change and the garbage people leave along the trail. He also explores how Americans can become more environmentally conscious about their national parks and nature in general. Paul Theroux (1941–), The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). Adventure novelist Paul Theroux traveled the world for inspiration and stories for his many novels and travel essays. As a contributor to The Smithsonian magazine, The New Yorker, and Time Asia, Theroux gained experience writing about his travels for scholarly journals, giving him the freedom to be honest about his discoveries, even if he found things to be unpleasant. In an interview with Theroux, author Michael Shapiro asked him what his worst experience traveling was, to which Theroux replied: “There are no ‘worst’ in the negative sense. There are only experiences which are the very stuff of my

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books” (Shapiro 2004, 158). His travel experience fed his passion for writing, and as a result he authored many fictional and nonfictional books about traveling and adventure. “Even if I were not a writer I would be a traveler” (Shapiro 2004, 154). In reference to the travel narrative of The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), Shapiro claimed, “(Theroux) eschewed florid prose in favor of unvarnished observations, peppered with abundant dialog” (Shapiro 2004, 150). Theroux loved overland travel as can be seen in his two other railroad-themed novels, The Old Patagonian Express (1979) and Riding the Iron Rooster (1988), but The Great Railway Bazaar would become his best known work, detailing Theroux’s trip by train through Great Britain, western and eastern Europe, the Middle East, south and southeast Asia and Japan, and Russia. “The only worthwhile trip is what you call a challenging trip” (Shapiro 2004, 154). Theroux’s other nonfiction books include Sunrise with Seamonsters (1985), The Happy Isles of Oceania (1992), and The Pillars of Hercules (1995). His fiction novels include Waldo (1967), Sinning with Annie (1972), The London Embassy (1982), My Other Life (1996), and Blinding Light (2006). Theroux was also a part of the Peace Corps in Malawi, Africa, from 1963 to 1965, and he later moved to Uganda to teach at Makerere University, basing his novel Dark Star Safari (2002) on his experiences there. Theroux comments: “Travel is a form of autobiography. This book is not about Africa—this is a book about my trip through Africa—this book is, I suppose, about me” (Shapiro 2004, 151). Theroux gives rich descriptions of the people and places that he experiences, giving them almost larger-than-life characteristics in his books, which also made them perfect for film adaptation. Theroux’s 1973 novel Saint Jack was made into a movie by director Peter Bogdanovich in 1979; the novel Doctor Slaughter (1984) was adapted to become the film Half Moon Street, released in 1986; and The Mosquito Coast (1981) was made into a film in 1986, starring Harrison Ford, Helen Mirren, and River Phoenix. Bibliography Adams, P.G. Travelers and Travel Liars 1600–1800. New York: Dover, 1962. Adler, J. “Origins of Sightseeing.” Annals of Tourism Research 16 (1989): 7–29. Alexander, Caroline. “Murdering the Impossible.” National Geographic Magazine 5 (November 2006): 42–67 Ashworth, G.J., and Tunbridge, J.E. The Tourist—Historic City. London: Belhaven Press, 1990. Bassett, Jan, ed. Great Southern Landings: An Anthology of Antipodean Travel. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1995. Broc, Numa. La géographie des philosophes: Géographes et voyageurs français au XVIIIe siècle. Thèse: Université de Montpellier, 1972. Bryson, Bill. A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail. New York: Broadway Books, 1998. Burgess, Anthony, and Haskell, Francis, Le Grand Siècle du Voyage (1967). Paris: Albin Michel, 1968. Céline, Louis-Ferdinand. Journey to the End of the Night. New York: New Directions, 1934. Colins, Michael. Carrying the Fire. New York: Ballantine, 1974. Coupland, Douglas. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone, 1995. Devitt, Amy J. Writing Genres. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004.

ADVENTURE FICTION Forster, E.M. A Passage to India. London: Arnold, 1924. Fussell, Paul, ed. The Norton Book of Travel. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1987. Hanbury-Tenison, Robin. The Oxford Book of Exploration. Oxford University Press, 1993. Ghose, Indira. Memsahibs Abroad: Writings by Women Travelers in Nineteenth Century India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. Helterman, Jeffrey, and Lyman, Richard. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit, MI: Gale, 1978. Hibbert, Christopher. The Grand Tour. London: Thames Methuen, 1987. IMDb. “Enid Blyton.” March 16, 2007. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0090067/. Jones, Amanda. “Wander Lust, Peter Matthiessen.” Salon.com. 8 July 1997. http://www.salon.com/july97/wanderlust/matthiessen970708.html. Knowles, Elizabeth. “World of Words: A Quote from George Leigh Mallory.” Ask Oxford.com. 2007. http://www.askoxford.com/worldofwords/quotations/quotefrom/mallory/ ?view=uk. Krakauer, Jon. Into Thin Air. New York: Random House, 1997. Leed, Eric J. The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism. New York: Basic Books, 1991. MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Matthiessen, Peter. In The Spirit of Crazy Horse. New York: Penguin, 1983. ———. The Snow Leopard. New York: Penguin Nature Classics, 1987. Messner, Reinhold. The Crystal Horizon. Seattle, WA: Mountaineers, 1982. Pettinger, Alasdair. Always Elsewhere: Travels of the Black Atlantic. London: Cassell, 1999. Poole, Robert M. Explorers House: National Geographic and the World It Made. New York: Penguin, 2004. Price, Willard. Adventures in Paradise, Tahiti and Beyond. New York: John Day Co., 1955. ———. The Amazing Amazon. New York: John Day Co., 1952. ———. Key to Japan. New York: John Day Co., 1946. ———. Odd Way Around the World. New York: John Day Co., 1969. ———. Rivers I Have Known. New York: John Day Co., 1965. Robinson, Keith. “Enid Blyton.” Enid Blyton.net. 2004. http://www.enidblyton.net/index.html. Rojek, Chris, ed. Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory. New York: Routledge, 1997. Rubinstein, Matt. “Adventure Adventure.” June 11 2005. http://mattrubinstein.com.au/?p=78. Shapiro, Michael. A Sense of Place. Berkeley: Publishers Group West, 2004. Smith, Valene L. Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989. Stoney, Barbara. Enid Blyton: The Biography. London: NPI Media Group, 2006. Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Webster, 1884. ———. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. New York: American, 1876. ———. Innocents Abroad. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1869. ———. Life on the Mississippi. Boston, MA: Osgood, 1883. ———. Old Times on the Mississippi. Toronto: Belford, 1876. ———. Roughing It. New York: Harper, 1872. ———. A Tramp Abroad. London: Chatto & Windus, 1880.

Further Reading Adams, P.G. Travelers and Travel Liars 1600–1800. New York: Dover, 1962; Fussell, Paul, ed. The Norton Book of Travel. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1987; Hanbury-Tenison, Robin. The Oxford Book of Exploration. Oxford University Press, 1993; Ghose, Indira. Memsahibs Abroad: Writings by Women Travelers in Nineteenth Century India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998; Hibbert, Christopher, The Grand Tour, London: Thames Methuen, 1987;

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AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE Leed, Eric J. The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism. New York: Basic Books, 1991; MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. University of California Press, 1999; Pettinger, Alasdair. Always Elsewhere: Travels of the Black Atlantic. London: Cassell, 1999; Smith, Valene L. Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.

ANNE BAHRINGER

AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE Definition. African American literature is the verbal organization of experiences into oral forms, such as spirituals, work songs, blues, and sermons; and into written forms, such as autobiography, poetry, fiction, drama, essay, and letter (Henderson 1973, 4). Produced by writers of African descent, the oral and written genres are closely tied to African Americans’ ways of life, their needs, their aspirations, and their history—in short, their culture (Henderson 1973, 4). Since the mid-twentieth century, African American literature has gained an ever-increasing celebratory and scholarly status in the United States. As editors and critics contend, it is rare to find a library that does not collect or a bookstore that does not market literary works by African Americans. Even in the academy, African American writers, particularly those who have earned the prestigious honors of the National and American Book Awards, the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the Pulitzer Prize are increasingly included in newly reconstituted curricula in American literature, American studies, women studies, and ethnic studies. What must not be lost in this literary paean for African American arts and letters is that African American writing as literature has been a long time coming in the United States (Andrews, Foster, Harris 1997), and today’s writers stand on the shoulders of writers from ages beyond, whose roles have been complexly accommodating, apologetic, and experimental. History Accommodation and Protest. During the Slave and Reconstruction eras in the United States, African American writers produced accommodating works that said what seemed acceptable to their largely white audiences (Davis and Redding 1971, 5). The most notable accommodating writers of the eighteenth century include Lucy Terry, Jupiter Hammon, Phyllis Wheatley, and George Moses Horton. In 1746, with the ballad “Bar’s Fight,” Lucy Terry published the first literary work in African American arts and letters. As an exemplary genre, “Bar’s Fight” (1997), however, does not emulate a structural form from African American culture. Instead of relying on multiple meters, improvisation, or call and response that are found in African American spirituals or work songs, Terry’s work preserves the standard rhymed tetrameter couplet: The Indians did in ambush lay, Some very valiant men to slay, (Stanza 1, lines 3–4)

The content of Terry’s ballad also reflects the accommodating trend in African American arts and letters in the eighteenth century. Set in 1745, in the regional meadows of Deerfield, Massachusetts, the African American writer’s work focuses on an Indian ambush of two notable white, New England families. Some 20 years after Terry’s “Bar’s Fight,” writer Jupiter Hammon emerges as yet another accommodating artist of the eighteenth century. Throughout his lifetime, with support largely from Quaker abolitionists, Hammon publishes a number of

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essays, including “A Winter Piece: Being a Serious Exhortation, With a Call to the Unconverted”; “A Short Contemplation on the Death of Jesus”; “An Evening’s Improvement, Showing the Necessity of Beholding the Lamb of God”; and “An Address to the Negroes of the State of New York.” Appearing first in anti-slavery periodicals also are Hammon’s essays that understandably promote an anti-slavery sentiment: “An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ, with Penetential (sic) Cries” and “Salvation Comes by Christ Alone.” Critics cannot agree on what makes the works of Jupiter Hammon African American. Enthusiasts such as Sandra O’Neale argue that when using choice words such as “my brethren,” “Africans by nation,” and/or “Ethiopians,” Hammon is coding his writings with protest of African American life in the 1800s (Hammon, 72–73). Earlier critics such as Arthur P. Davis and Sterling Brown, however, are adamant in their critiques of Hammon’s protest writings. Both contend Hammon’s protest comes in the form of subtle irony that is overshadowed by his use of “common-metre hymn doggerel” (Davis and Redding, 5): Lord turn our dark benighted Souls; Give us a true Motion, And let the Hearts of all the World, Make Christ their Salvation. (Stanza 1, lines 45–48)

The sermonic language of Hammon’s “An Evening Thought” and “Salvation Comes by Christ Alone” suggests the role of the writer in his works is that of folk preacher. Expectantly, he is to help move African American life toward a sense of spiritual wholeness (Hubbard 1994, 383). But, after close scrutiny, Hammon’s performance seems reminiscent of evangelical preachers of the Great Awakening in early history in the United States. Undeniably, Hammon counsels fellow slaves to expect “salvation,” “freedom,” and “equality” after death. Phyllis Wheatley publishes her first poem “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin” in 1767. Six years later, she publishes Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, the first collection of writings by an African American. Unlike her African American literary peers of the eighteenth century, Wheatley’s style is sophisticated in meter and elegant in control. Like her literary peers, however, as a writer, Wheatley is accommodating to her audience. She models her work after neoclassical writer Alexander Pope who insisted on displaying respect for structure and rules by way of his structural use of the heroic couplet; his admiration for reason and judgment via his classical allusions; and his striving for desirable human qualities that are intimated in his achievement of neatness and precision (Cuddon 1991, 578). Like the neoclassical writer in general, in her poetry, Wheatley models being intensely moralistic and religious, and she maintains lyrical restraint that is regarded as one of the highest of virtues (Davis 1971, 4). A number of critics who have looked beyond Wheatley’s accommodating poetics recognize in her poems a subversive tone of protest via her duality of meaning. For instance, the masking of protest in “To Maecenas” is reminiscent of multiplicity of meaning often demonstrated in the spirituals and work songs. In African American oral genres such as the spirituals and work songs, creators drew attention to their circumstances via repeated personal situations. Wheatley saturates her poem with personable situations while simultaneously she draws attention to her questioning of her situations as “partial grace.” She asks why she is unable to succeed as a serious poet, or why the African American race is unable to succeed as a group? In “On Imagination,” Wheatley offers her work to literary scrutiny. The

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poet allows her imagination to wonder in order to question the inhumanity of slavery in the eighteenth century. Ironically, attention is drawn to Wheatley’s protest when her lines invoke Samuel Johnson’s warning to classical writers to avoid “letting the imagination run away with one” (Cuddon 1991, 578). George Moses Horton is perhaps the most versatile of the accommodating writers of the eighteenth century. Like his literary peers, Horton’s poetry is predetermined: It is formulaic (Davis 1971, 4). But, unlike his peers, Horton’s poetry is influenced by varied personal experiences other than slavery. For instance, for a time at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Horton was a servant to several college students. The students often commissioned him to write lyrical verses of love. For a time, Horton also traveled in North Carolina with the Union Army. For his patron, William H. S. Banks, Horton commemorated in writing a number of northern and southern leaders. Because of Horton’s associations with abolitionists, it was easier for him to get into print many of his anti-slavery poems such as “Liberty and Slavery,” “The Slave’s Complaint,” and “On Hearing of the Intention of a Gentlemen to Purchase the Poet’s Freedom.” Like his literary peer Hammon, Horton’s freedom comes in his unbridled opportunity to write and to publish poetry. Horton’s style, however, is far superior as demonstrated in “The Slave’s Complaint” (1998): Must I dwell in Slavery’s night, And all pleasure take its flight, Far beyond my feeble sight, Forever? (Stanza 2, lines 5–8) Or, in “On Liberty and Slavery”: Say unto foul oppression, Cease: Ye tyrants rage no more, And let the joyful trump of peace, Now bid the vassal soar. (Stanza 5, lines 17–20)

Writing in the introduction to The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997), editors Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay summarize best the legacy left by the eighteenth century writers: Their “mastery of language, the essential sign of a civilized mind to the European, implicitly qualified [the] black writer, and by analogy those whom he or she represented, for self-mastery . . . ” (128). Critic Sterling Brown, writing in The American Negro (1969) has called poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and fiction writer Charles Waddell Chesnutt pioneering writers of the nineteenth century (78–79). In their respective genres, Dunbar and Chesnutt lead the way in adapting aspects of African American life to purposes of an African American literary tradition (Brown 1969, 78–79). Both writers consciously introduce a range of “matter and mood” of African American culture, particularly at a time in American history when African American life had become largely disenfranchised and stereotyped. Following the Civil War, known also as Reconstruction, African Americans made significant political, economic, and social gains, particularly in the South. These gains, however, were short-lived and forcefully reversed. In what would be called the Plantation Tradition of the nineteenth century, largely white southern writers such as Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, Thomas Dixon, and Irwin Russell, sought to recover forms of power and racial order that had been dismantled by the war. Created by these writers were idealized African Americans who wished to return to the southern days when whites

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provided, among other things, housing, work, clothing, and food in exchange for servitude. Created by the writers of the plantation school are stereotypical sketches of African Americans who were content with their status or happy-go-lucky slaves. Writers of the plantation school also created sketches of African Americans who objected to returning to an idealized world of servitude: the wretched freedman, the brute, or the tragic mulatto. The dialect of all of these characters in plantation literature solidified a perception of the African American as incapable of reasoning and of self-governance (Brown 1969, 78–79). Adapted by mainstream America during Reconstruction are these ideological constructs of plantation literature. The challenge for the nineteenth century writers Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Chestnutt was how to portray the humanity of African Americans and to express an African American literary tradition of perseverance and survival, especially when the largely white patrons preferred the characterization of African American as contented slave, tragic mulatto, and brute, to name a few. In Dunbar’s poem “Worn Out,” he insists on conveying to his largely white patrons that the African American had become weary of his disempowered status in the United States. Unlike several of Dunbar’s African American literary predecessors from the eighteenth century whose protest was very subtle, Dunbar is direct and detailed. He uses sophisticated meters in his lyrical expressions to convey his protest on behalf of disenfranchised African Americans in the 1900s: You bid me hold my peace And dry my fruitless tears, Forgetting that I bear A pain beyond my years. (Stanza 1, lines 1–4)

Dunbar also exceeds his predecessors Hammon and Horton in style and language when in poems such as “Ere Sleep Comes Down to Soothe the Weary Eyes,” “Sympathy,” and “Negro Love Song,” he skillfully emulates the unnamed creators of the spirituals and uses repetition “to personalize” the African American experience. Intimated in several of Dunbar’s poems, particularly “Ode to Ethiopia,” are also vertical movements of the African American folk sermon. Performing like an African American folk preacher, Dunbar regenerates the spirits of a downtrodden and conveys their sense of endurance and survival through his lyrics (Hubbard 1994, 383). In general, the folk sermon moves from complication, rising action, denouement, and cathartic release. Dunbar begins the “Ode” with complication: “I know the pangs which thou didst feel,/When slavery crushed thee with its heel/With they dear blood all gory” (Stanza 1; lines 4, 5, 6). His poem then rises in action: “The forests flee before their stroke,/Their hammers ring, their forges smoke . . . ” (Stanza 3, lines 16–17). As the poem moves toward its end, Dunbar tells his subjects, the slaves of Africa, that, “Thou has the right to noble pride./Those spotless robes were purified/By blood’s severe baptism.” (Stanza 6, lines 33–35). Unlike Hammon in “An Evening Thought” or “On Salvation,” who tells his audience that happiness or freedom for the slave comes after death, in “Ode to Ethiopia,” Dunbar allows his audience to release pent-up emotions and to achieve a spiritual connection to an ontological life force here on earth: Go on and up! Our souls and eyes Shall follow the continuous rise; Our ears shall list thy story

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Dunbar’s experimentations with African American oral structures such as spirituals and sermon, of free verse, and of conventional dialect convey a versatile style. But, in the nineteenth century, the art of capturing African American life via, for instance, dialect and music, proved to be liabilities for the writer and for African American literature. Regrettably, Dunbar’s realism of African American life is overshadowed by his audiences’ desire to be entertained by the familiar sketches of the plantation tradition. In his own reflections of this turn of events in his career in “The Poet,” Dunbar laments that while “he sang of life/ serenely sweet,/ With, now and then, a deeper note,” (Stanza 1, lines1–2) his audience preferred “A jingle in a broken tongue” (Stanza 2, lines 8). Conventional dialect poetry of the nineteenth century is popularized by the writers of the plantation school and by Dunbar in poems such as “Negro Love Song,” “When Malindy Sings, or “Little Brown Baby.” Criticism of dialect in African American literature in the 1900s is found in James Weldon Johnson’s Preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1921), the first anthology of African American literature complied by an African American. In this work, Johnson (1969) calls for poets who follow Dunbar to refrain from the use of conventionalized dialect. His regrets are as follows: [It] is based upon the minstrel traditions [or fictionalized plantation traditions] of Negro life that had but slight relation—often no relation at all—to actual Negro life, or is permeated with artificial sentiment. It is now realized both by the poets and by their public that as an instrument for poetry the dialect has only two main stops: humor and pathos. (4)

Southern writers of the plantation school reinforced their sketches of the contented slave, the primitive, or the wretched freeman via tales narrated by African Americans who speak in conventionalized dialect. Unlike African or African American lore that draw from African American experiences and is intended to instruct, to protect, to entertain, or, as Zora Neale Hurston writes, “to laugh to keep from crying” (Hemenway 1977, 157), stories by Thomas Page, Joel Chandler Harris, or Irwin Russell help to retain “the good Negro” and to reserve other vital markers of a nurturing slave culture. In his 1899 collection The Conjure Woman, Charles Chesnutt sets out to revise the African American stereotypes of plantation lore. The writer introduces a trickster figure from African lore whose role is to outmaneuver foes of the African American community with guile, wit, and charm (Smith 1997, 736–737). There is a duality in the language of the trickster figure. Within his story there is always an inner plot that provides subversive opportunities to redress a power imbalance or neglect to basic human needs (Smith 1997, 736–737). In the Conjure stories, Chesnutt’s trickster figure is Uncle Julius McAdoo. The McAdoo character is intended to counterbalance the likes of the stereotypical Uncle Remus from Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings or the likes of Sam from Thomas Nelson Page’s “Mar’s Chan.” The fact that Uncle Julius is a descendent of Africa’s Yoruba’s trickster, who would demonstrate an art of multiplicity in language and performance, gets lost in Chesnutt’s familiar expressions of dialect, superstitions, and free-wheeling lifestyle of

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his freedmen. The above are core elements of plantation literature. Also, because Chesnutt’s Uncle Julius shares the inner plot of his stories with his white patron John, critics claim Uncle Julius and Chesnutt too often limit the abilities of author and character to affirm African American life. Widely anthologized is Chesnutt’s short story “The Goophered Grapevine” that first appeared in The Conjure Woman. The structural presence of Uncle Julius in the short story is to intimate his power and control over his white patrons John and Annie, and over his own fate, but in this story and others, audiences of the nineteenth century fail to recognize Uncle Julius’ cultural distinction. The strength of the trickster figure is overshadowed by the degrading weaknesses of familiar sketches of African Americans from plantation literature and by audiences’ expectations of the sketches. Like Dunbar, Chestnutt attempts to adapt African American life to an African American cultural tradition and purpose in his literature, but his efforts are compromised. The largely white audiences of the nineteenth century expect a continuation of sentimental African American life and characters, institutionalized by the school of plantation literature (Johnson, 1969, 9). The legacy left by Dunbar and Chesnutt is the actual attempt by writers to return to the folk culture for poetic symbols. Trends and Themes Modernism and Postmodernism. Writing in Modernism and The Harlem Renaissance (1987), Critic Houston Baker calls attention to the seminal moments of “Afro-American modernism” presented in the works of Harlem Renaissance writers Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, and Sterling Brown. He reminds critics and readers that because the southern African American life had been distorted in nineteenth century plantation literature by Thomas Dixon and his school, writers such as Toomer, Hughes, and Brown transformed sentimental characters in order to reveal the realistic, modern conditions of “black sufferers of marginalization and dispossession” (Baker 1987, 95)—that is, alienation, fragmentation, a lack of social identity, and a lack of historical continuity. In particular, Toomer’s Cane, which “embodies the tensions of modern science and folk tradition, of psychoanalytic technique and Afro-American music, [and] of mysticism and Afro-American spirituality” (Bell 1987, 96), focuses on the psychology of the characters Ralph Kabnis, Bona, and even Karintha who attempt throughout their journeys “to reconcile [themselves] . . . to the blood and soil that symbolize [their] ethnic and national identities” (Bell 1987, 99). In Langston Hughes’ autobiography Big Sea, particularly in the early pages, the writer focuses on dealing with his search for literary and racial identities against the backdrops of three continents. In Southern Road, Sterling Brown gives voice to the displaced traveling blues man and blues woman of rural America who redefine their fragmented identities by overcoming limiting circumstances. In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s major writers, such as Richard Wright in Native Son, Ann Petry in The Street, Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man, and Melvin Tolson in Harlem Gallery, communicate in their works concerns “[about] the plight of the individual in the modern world” (Hogue 2003, 30). As W. Lawrence Hogue, writing in Race, Modernity, and Postmodernity points out, pervading the fiction and non-fiction of these writers, in particular, are existentialism, secularism, rationalism, and individualism (Hogue, 30). Although these writers experiment with cultural forms in their works—circularity, improvisation, call and response—they consciously move beyond

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the values of wholeness, transcendence, and historical continuity (Hogue 31) that were evident in a number of the general works of Hughes and Hurston. Instead, Bigger Thomas in Native Son and Lutie Johnson in Ann Petry’s The Street succumb to their environments or, as in Ellison’s Invisible Man, the individual succumbs to invisibility. The shift from modernity to postmodernity in African American literature is marked by works such as James Baldwin’s Another Country, Toni Morrison’s Sula and Song of Solomon, David Bradley’s The Chaneyville, Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Clarence Major’s All-Night Visitors, John Edgar Wideman’s A Glance Away, Doris Jean Austin’s After the Fall, and Andrea Lee’s Sarah Phillips. Not only is there the “blurring of the boundary between history and fiction and the cross of the line from modern to postmodern aesthetics, but these writers, Morrison in particular, are concerned also with the atypical aspects of postmodern aesthetics. They are concerned with the ‘collective’ that existed before African Americans were integrated into the American modernization process” (Hogue). These writers, Morrison in particular, are concerned with reintroducing African Americans, and readers in general, to an African American collective and historical past—a past where rejuvenation of the spirit toward wholeness and other racial traditions become solutions to alienation and fragmentation. Central to the individual or to the community is a sense of spiritual survival. In the twenty-first century, there are a number of contemporaries who stand on the shoulders of postmodern writers like Morrison, Lee, Wideman, Reed and others. Like their predecessors, these writers revisit the cultural values and norms of the racial past that existed before African Americans were integrated into the American modernization process. Among others, included in this group are Edward P. Jones and his Pulitzer Prize winning fiction The Known World and his collection of short stories Lost in the City and All Aunt Hager’s Children; James McBride and his Song Yet Sung; and Albert French and his Billy. Context and Issues Apology and Propaganda. In 1921, in the Preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1969), the first anthology of African American literature compiled by an African American editor, James Weldon Johnson instructs African American writers on what to retain from the legacies of nineteenth century writers Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt: “form[s] that [would] express the racial spirit [of African Americans] . . . from within” (41–42). Johnson also instructs writers on what to abandon from the period writers: conventionalized dialect and any symbols “from without” that had become reminiscent of the degrading stereotypes found in the Plantation literature of the century (41–42). African American writers of the early twentieth century comply, but they also initiate a challenge to the national mental attitude regarding the African American by creating what Sterling Brown called apologetic or propagandistic literature that suggest genteel African Americans are not so vastly different from any other American, just distinctive (Brown 1969, 105). Examples of apologetic literature include W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece, Jesse Fauset’s There Is Confusion and Plum Bun, and even James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. In general, these writers revise earlier stereotypes, focusing on the psychology of individual characters, their choices in life, and the ideology of gender and class. For instance, in The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1969), an allegorical novel, Du Bois portrays characters that are consumed by their economic survival—that is, cotton or the fleece.

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Eventually, Du Bois’s characters such as Elspeth and Zora learn that “without intelligence and training and some capital it is the wildest nonsense to think you can lead your people out of slavery” (137). In There is Confusion (Fauset, 1989) rewrites the tragic mulatto character. Her characters Joanna Marshall and Peter Bye in Confusion overcome color prejudice and achieve success by committing themselves to education, hard work, respectability, and each other (Bell 1987, 107). Thematically, Confusion explores middle-class attitudes, and it stresses the significance of family and origin. In The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1960), Johnson also rewrites the tragic mulatto. He confronts his narrator’s double consciousness or sense of two-ness (American and African American) as he attends college, travels abroad, and even passes for white. In the end, the narrator permanently adopts a white American identity. His explanation is that he deservedly should have “every possible opportunity to make a white man’s success” (147). While the nineteenth century southern white writers of the plantation school use literature to effect change in national politics, African American writers of the early twentieth century use literature to challenge the national mental attitude regarding African American life and characters. Aesthetically, the role of the writer as apologist and the function of literature as propagandistic equate to what Sterling Brown, writing in The American Negro, calls “race-glorification”(1969, 103). As Brown concludes in the same work, “it was natural that [African American] novelists [of the early twentieth century] . . . should write as apologists. His objection is, however, that writers such as Du Bois, Johnson, Fauset, and others kept the charge instead of a story to be told (105). Reception Contemporary African American Literature and Pop Culture. In 1990, Terry McMillan published the best-selling Breaking Ice: An Anthology of [African American] Contemporary Fiction. According to McMillan, the writers of her collection are a “new breed,” standing on the shoulders of past African American writers: “We are a new breed, free to write as we please, in part because of our predecessors . . . ” (1990, xxi). As Trey Ellis reminds us in “The New Black Aesthetics,” important also to remember is that unlike their predecessors, the present generation of “new black artists [are no longer] shocked by racism as were those of the Harlem Renaissance, nor are [they] preoccupied with it as were those of the Black Arts Movement. For [this group of contemporary writers] racism is a hard and little-changing constant that neither surprises nor enrages” (1989, 234). With all said, the publications of the “new breed” of African American writers are “personal response[s]. What [writers] want to specify. What [writers] see. What [writers] feel” (McMillan 1990, xxi). In essence, contemporary writers are individuals “trying to make sense of ourselves to ourselves” (McMillan, xxi). With such criteria for the writer, the role of the writer and the function of African American literature become exhaustive. In the preface to Breaking Ice, John Wideman reminds the contemporary writer of James Weldon Johnson’s charge of 1921. He reminds the writer of the following within African American arts and letters: A long-tested view of history is incorporated in the art of African-American people, and our history can be derived from careful study of forms and influences that enter our cultural performances and rituals. In spite of and because of marginal status, a powerful, indigenous vernacular tradition has survived, not unbroken, but unbowed, a

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AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE magnet, a focused energy, something with its own logic, rules, and integrity connecting current developments to the past. An articulate, syncretizing force our best artists have drawn upon, a force sustaining both individual talent and tradition. If what a writer wants is freedom of expression, then somehow that larger goal must be addressed implicitly/explicitly in our fictions. A story should somehow contain clues that align it with tradition and critique tradition, establish the new space it requires, demands, appropriates, hint at how it may bring forth other things like itself, where these others have, will, and are coming from. This does not mean defining criteria for admitting stories into some ideologically sound, privileged category, but seeking conditions, mining territory that maximizes the possibility of free, original expression. (1990, vi–vii)

For the contemporary writer, free and original expressions have translated into an exhaustive list of memoirs, short and long fiction, and independent films that are, to pull from Susanne B. Dietzel’s “The African American Novel and Popular Culture,” relatively unexplored terrain[s] in African American literary history and criticism (2003, 100). Reasons for this exclusion or oversight range from academic practices and aesthetic standards that qualify a text for inclusion in the African American literary canon—practices and standards that are traceable over the centuries to ancestral African American writers who strived to keep in place a division between literary and commercial forms of literature that rendered expressions of African American life and culture. Selected Authors Experimentations with Form. Regarded as an architect of the Harlem Renaissance, James Weldon Johnson reprints in his collection The Book of American Negro Poetry (1969) a number of writers who published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the preface to this collection, Johnson instructs writers to experiment with form in their works and to express a “racial flavor” of African American life “from within” (41–42). After all, Johnson firmly believes the following: “The status of the [African American] in the United States is more a question of national mental attitude toward the race than of actual condition. And nothing will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the [African American] through the production of literature and art (41–42). With such directives, Johnson refocuses discussions of African American arts and letters, particularly the role of the African American writer and the function of African American literature. In the 1920s, Alain Locke, writing in the introduction to The New Negro, and Langston Hughes, writing in his 1926 essay, “Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” embrace the idea of experimenting with form, but they go a step further. Unlike the apologists who preferred to portray the most genteel of African Americans, Locke and Hughes want writers to return to the masses and to create “an art of the people.” They urge writers to use inherent expressions of African American life for “themes and treatment of [structure]” (qtd. in Ervin 1999, 50). These themes include identity, dreams, journey, freedom, endurance, and survival. The inherent structures were to be found in the culture’s spirituals, blues, jazz, and so forth. (qtd. Ervin 1999, 131). Major writers of the 1920s, who returned to the African American masses for their themes and to African American musical traditions, such as the spirituals and blues for their structural forms, include, among others, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Sterling Brown. In a number of

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their poems, there also is evidence of experimentation with traditional verse lines such as heroic couplet and with stanzaic forms such as free verse, the sonnet, and the ballad. As instructed by Johnson, these writers also are successful in deepening their understandings of the intricate rhythms and repetitions of the spirituals and blues as forms that give a racial voice to the urban and rural working class in their works. By way of his instructions and others, the writer gives rise to “an art of the people.” Although it is clear that these writers did not fully understand the inherent structural techniques that are traceable to West African provinces—for example, multiplicity of meaning (Yoruba); syncopation (Mande); call and response (Ejagham); improvisation (Yoruba); circularity (Dohomean); and mysticism (Kongo)—(Thompson), their work offers ample evidence in terms of experimentation with form. In his poem “Song of the Son,” from Cane (published in 1923), Toomer reveals his attempt to add “racial flavor” to his writing “from within.” In the last two sentences of each of the first three stanzas of the poem, Toomer employs repetition and syncopation, as found in the spirituals, to personalize the connection of the African American soul to the southern landscape. For example, in the first stanza of “Song of the Son,” he writes: Pour O pour that parting soul in song, O pour it in the saw dust glow of night, Into the velvet pine-smoke air to-night And let the valley carry it along And let the valley carry it along (Stanza 1, lines 1–5)

The intended structure of the first three verses is the standard iambic pentameter— that is, five iambs of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable. The last two lines of the poem, which have fewer words, resemble lines in a spiritual where the author must employ the West African form of syncopation. The last two lines require the writer/reader to lengthen out a few syllables in order to fill one metrical foot. Toomer also explores the West African form of improvisation. Cane consists of the “integration of song and movement” via poems and fiction, always returning to recurring themes. In “The Weary Blues” (1997) Hughes returns to the classic blues aab structure to add “racial flavor” from within to the poem. Providing the name of his collection The Weary Blues, the poem begins as follows: Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, (a) Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, (a) I heard a Negro play.(b) (Stanza 1, lines 1–3)

Like the genre that allows spiritual escape for some readers and, for others, a dramatization of cultural vitality and rebelliousness, Hughes’ blues musician endures and escapes the routine: “He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.” Sterling Brown experiments with African American oral forms such as the blues and the work song. From the rural community, he adapted local African American heroes to the proportion of national heroes—for example, John Henry, Stackolee, and Casey Jones. Like Langston Hughes, he also attempts to use language and humor as vehicles for determining the diversity as well as the complexity of African American life. In

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the poem “Long Gone,” the reader meets “a railroad man,/ With a itch fo’ travelin’” (Stanza 2, lines 2–3) and in the poem “Slim Greer,” the reader meets the “Talkinges’ guy/An’ biggest liar” (Stanza 2, lines 1–2) who moved around and left “only echoes/ Of his tune.” These men, like others, exert control in an often hostile world through their music and mobility. More so than other writers of the early twentieth century, Claude McKay experiments with the standard stanzaic sonnet, particularly the Shakespearean sonnet. A verse form that consists of 14 lines and is usually written in iambic pentameter, the Shakespearean sonnet has three quatrains, each of which explores a theme, and a concluding couplet that offers resolution. By literary standards and focus, the sonnet represents high or elegant art. McKay uses such a form to obtain the attention of his readers and, then, he renders his criticism of the plight of the African American race (e.g., “The White House,” “Enslaved,” and “If We Must Die”). In the 1940s and 1950s, writers/critics such as Richard Wright, writing in “Blueprint for Negro Writing”; James Baldwin, writing in his essay “Many Thousand Gone”; and Ralph Ellison, in his interview “The Art of Fiction,” return to James Weldon Johnson’s charge to express a “racial spirit” by way of symbols of the larger things” (Wright 1994, 1) and a “sensibility [of an African American tradition]” (Baldwin, 36). Speaking in 1955 in “The Art of Fiction,” which is collected in Ralph Ellison’s Shadow and Act (1964), Ellison looks back to the complex roles of earlier writers and ahead to the role of the modern writer when he elucidates Johnson’s charge: Too many books by Negro writers are addressed to a white audience. By doing this the authors run the risk of limiting themselves to the audience’s presumptions of what a Negro is or should be; the tendency is to become involved in polemics; to plead the Negro’s humanity. You know, many white people [and by now some middle class black people] question that humanity but I don’t think that Negroes can afford to indulge in such a false issue. For us the question should be, what are the specific forms of that humanity, and what in our background is worth preserving or abandoning. (171–172)

Like James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, and others, Ellison is calling for what bell hooks later called “an aesthetic of blackness” (hooks 1990, 113) in African American literature. For Ellison, the genre manifests itself already in the oral structures of black music and in black speech. In his major work Invisible Man, there is evidence of experimentation with structures adapted from the oral forms: multiplicity of meaning, circularity (the end is the beginning and the beginning is the end), and improvisation. The language and actions of the narrator in Invisible Man are used to help him achieve self definition as he moves from being gullible to “recognizing my invisibility.” James Weldon Johnson’s instructions to writers to capture the “racial flavor” of African American life in African American literature is realized as late as the 1960s via the writers of the Black Arts Movement and later in the 1970s and 1980s via women writers such as Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. In the 1960s, co-editors LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Larry Neal of Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (1988) detail how the poet of the Black Arts Movement is to capture the “racial flavor” of African American life: “[T]he poet must become a performer the way James Brown is a performer—loud, gaudy, and racy. . . . He must learn to embellish the context in which the work is executed; and

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where possible, link the work to all usable aspects of the music—that is, largely jazz” (655). For Baraka and Neal, the context of the work is as important as the work itself. According to Neal, poets must learn to sing, dance, and chant their work, tearing into the substance of their individual and collective experiences (655). To demonstrate the expectations of African American writers of the 1960s (i.e., as performer, a presenter of “various selves” in unconventional ways, and capturer of usable improvisation of the African American musical tradition, namely jazz), there was, among others, Baraka’s poem “Dope.” In it, ignoring all conventions for writing poetry, Baraka teaches writers how to chant and sing the lines. Following the Blacks Arts Movement, writers moved beyond debating a politically narrow and limiting role of the writer and functions of the literature. In the late 1970s, there is a shift in discussions of African American literary aesthetics. As Houston Baker points out in his essay “Generational Shifts and the Recent Criticism of Afro-American Literature” (1981), [A] new and resplendent nation of Afro-Americans invested with Black Power . . . gave way in the late seventies to a new . . . group of intellectuals . . . [willing] . . . to separate the language of criticism from the vocabulary of political ideology. . . . Their proclaimed mission was to “reconstruct” the pedagogy and study of Afro-American literature so that it would reflect the most advanced thinking of a contemporary universe of literarytheoretical discourse. (80)

One of the voices that “reconstruct[s]” discussions of an African American literary aesthetics, first called for by James Weldon Johnson in 1921, is Toni Morrison in her 1984 essay “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation.” While echoing earlier writers who pull from West African structural patterns such as multiplicity of meaning, circularity, call and response, and improvisation, Morrison adds ancestor to the discussion. According to Morrison, in our literature, ancestors are grandparents as in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man or healers like Minnie Ransom in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters. The important point is that ancestors are “timeless people whose relationship to the characters (and perhaps readers) are benevolent, instructive, and protective (1980, 339–345). Ancestors also provide a certain kind of wisdom and, often in conjunction with the language and the overall structure of the work, they help to regenerate spiritual aspects of African American life toward some sense of spiritual wholeness (Hubbard 1994, 383) and ancestral truths. In Morrison’s own works, there are often females who guide members of the younger generation in some way: M’Dean and Aunt Jimmy in The Bluest Eye; Ondine and Sydney in Tar Baby; Baby Suggs in Beloved; and even the shadowy female images that haunt Jadine Childs in Tar Baby. The most known ancestor in Morrison’s work is Pilate Dead in Song of Solomon. In Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, the ancestor is Mama Day. In Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, often the ancestor is a community of women who remember and proscribe their existence by bonding with one another. In the late 1980s, experimentations with form shift yet again. As Trey Ellis points out in his 1989 essay “The New Black Aesthetic,” a new generation of novelists, poets, screenwriters, critics, and curators called for a “new black aesthetics” (NBA) that was more individualistic (but not in the mold of art for art’s sake and not without social and political responsibility). In essence, the NBA artists sought to communicate what Greg Tate in “Cult-Nats Meet Freaky Deke” called

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“the complexities of our culture” (5). Echoing this young generation, Ellis writes as follows: [The New Black Aesthetic icons included] Ishmael Reed, Clarence Major, Toni Morrison, and John Edgar Wideman; George Clinton with his spaced-out funk band Parliament/Funkadelic; conceptual artist David Hammons who has hung empty Thunderbird bottles and spades from trees; Richard Pryor with his molten parodies of black life on his early albums and short-lived television show. (234)

At another point in his essay, Ellis describes the NBA artists as culturally eclectic: Young blacks [are] getting back into jazz and the blues; [or] the only one you [saw] at punk concerts . . . [or] who admit liking both Jim and Toni Morrison . . . Eddie Murphy, Prince, and the Marsalis brothers. (234)

In the twenty-first century, a few twentieth-century icons have been replaced with more contemporary hip hop ones, but the role of the NBA artists remains the same: culturally eclectic and individualistic but not without social and political responsibility. Bibliography Andrews, William L., Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris, eds. The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Baker, Houston, Jr. “Generational Shifts and the Recent Criticism of Afro-American Literature.” Black American Literature Forum 15, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 3–21. ———. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Baldwin, James. “Many Thousand Gone.” Notes of a Native Son. Boston, MA: Bantam, 1972, 13–36. Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst, MA: Massachusetts University Press, 1987. Brown, Sterling. The American Negro: His History and Literature. New York: Arno Press, 1969. Cuddon, J.A. Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1991. Davis, Arthur P., and Saunders Redding, eds. Calvacade: Negro American Writing From 1760 to the Present. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. Dietzel, Susanne B. “The African American Novel and Popular Culture.” The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel. Maryemma Graham, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Quest of the Silver Fleece: A Novel. 1911. Reprint. Miami, FL: Mnemosyne Publishing Co., 1969. Dunbar, Paul Laurence. “Worn Out.” The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 887–888. ———. “Ode to Ethiopia.” The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 886–887. Ellis, Trey. “The New Black Aesthetic.” Callaloo 12 (Winter 1989): 233–243. Ellison, Ralph. “The Art of Fiction: An Interview.” In Shadow and Act by Ralph Ellison. 171–172. New York: Signet Book, 1964. Ervin, Hazel Arnett. African American Literary Criticism, 1773 to 2000. New York: Twayne, 1999.

AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE Fauset, Jesse. There Is Confusion. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1989. Gates, Henry Louis and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997. Hammon, Jupiter. “An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ with Penetential [sic] Cries.”Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition. Patricia Liggins Hill, Bernard W. Bell, Trudier Harris, William J. Harris, R. Baxter Miller, and Sondra A. O’Neal, eds. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Henderson, Stephen E. Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Hogue, Lawrence. Race, Modernity, Postmodernity: A Look at the History and the Literatures of People of Color Since the 1960s. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003. hooks, bell. “‘Homeplace’: A Site of Resistance.” In Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, 411–450. Boston: South End Press, 1990. Horton, George Moses. “On Liberty and Slavery.” Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition. Patricia Liggins Hill, et al., eds. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1998, 373. ———. “The Slave Complaint.” Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition. Patricia Liggins Hill, et al., eds. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1998, 372. Hubbard, Dolan. The Sermon and the African American Literary Imagination. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri, 1994. Hughes, Langston. “Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” In African American Literary Criticism, 1773 to 2000. Hazel Arnett Ervin, ed. New York: Twayne, 1999, 44–48. ———. “The Weary Blues.” The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Henry Louis Gates and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997, 1257. Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. 1912. Reprint. New York: Hill and Wang, 1960. ———, ed. The Book of American Negro Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922. Rev. ed. San Diego, CA: Harvest Books, 1969. Locke, Alain. “Art or Propaganda?” In African American Literary Criticism, 1773 to 2000. Hazel Arnett Ervin, ed. New York: Twayne, 1999, 49–50. McMillan, Terry. Introduction. Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Fiction. Terry McMillan, ed. New York: Penguin, 1990, xv–xxiv. Morrison, Toni. “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation” (1980). In African American Literary Criticism, 1773 to 2000. Hazel Arnett Ervin, ed. New York: Twayne, 1999, 198–202. Neal, Larry. “And Shine Swam On.” In Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing. LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal, eds. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1988, 638–656. O’Neale, Sandra. “Jupiter Hammon.” Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of The African American Literary Tradition. Patricia Liggins Hill, et al., eds. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1998, 69. Rodgers, Carolyn. “Uh Nat’chal Thang—The WHOLE TRUTH—US.” Black World 60 (September 1973): 4–14. Smith, Jeanne. “Plantation Literature.” The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris, eds. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, 736–737. Tate, Greg. “Cult-Nats Meet Freaky Deke.” Voices Literary Supplement (December 1986): 5–8.

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ARAB AMERICAN LITERATURE Terry, Lucy. “Bar’s Fight.” The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Henry Louis Gates and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997. Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit, African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Random House, 1984. Toomer, Jean. “A Song of the Son.” Cane. 1923. Reprint. New York: Perennial Classic, 1969. Wideman, John Edgar. Preface. Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Fiction. Terry McMillan, ed. New York: Penguin, 1990, x–v. Wright, Richard. “A Blueprint for Negro Writing.” (1937). In The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. David L. Lewis, ed. New York: Viking Press, 1994.

Further Reading Andrews, William L., Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris, eds. The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997; Dickson-Carr, Darryl. The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005; Gabbin, Joanne V. Furious Flower: African American Poetry from the Blacks Arts Movement to the Present. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2004; Graham, Mary Emma, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel. Boston, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2004; Hogue, Lawrence. Race, Modernity, Postmodernity: A Look at the History and the Literature of People of Color Since the 1960s. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003; Major, Clarence. Calling the Wind: Twentieth Century African American Short Stories. New York: Perennial, 1992; McMillan, Terry. Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Fiction. New York: Penguin, 1990; Miller, E. Ethelbert. Beyond the Frontier: African American Poetry for the Century. Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Poets, 2002; Nelson, Emmanuel S. Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999; Ostrom, Hans, and J. David Macey. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature. Westport, CT: 1990; Quashie, Kevin Everod, R. Joyce Lausch, and Keith D. Miller, eds. New Bones: Contemporary Black Writers in America. Upper Saddle, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000.

HAZEL ARNETT ERVIN

ARAB AMERICAN LITERATURE Definition. Arab American literature was already growing by leaps and bounds in the late 1990s, but the Sept. 11, 2001, hijacking attacks fueled an upsurge of interest in all things Arab and Muslim and helped broaden the mainstream appeal of poetry and prose by American authors of Arab descent and the work of Arab immigrants who have settled in the United States. The early years of the twenty-first century have seen the publication of a spate of new works of Arab American fiction and poetry, autobiographical memoirs, anthologies, and a growing body of literary criticism of this emerging body of work. Anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism has continued to limit the number and range of works that have been published, prompting increasing numbers of Arab Americans to create venues of their own to present works of literary and cultural production. The definition may change as this emergent genre matures, but for now, it includes poetry and prose by Arab immigrants residing in the United States and American writers of Arab descent, regardless of the “Arabness” of the content. That includes writers such as Mona Simpson and Samuel Hazo who are of Arab descent but whose work does not significantly touch on “Arab” themes. History. Contemporary Arab American writers are heirs to a group of poets active in the 1920s that was known as Al-Mahjar or “the immigrant poets,” which included writers from Lebanon and Syria such as Gibran Kahlil Gibran, Ameen

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Rihani, and Mikhail Naimy. Some wrote in Arabic but collaborated closely with their translators. Others wrote in English, embracing more fully the culture and language of their adopted country. Together as a group, these writers are credited with sparking an interest in immigrant writing among the mainstream American audience (Abinader 2001). Rihani, whose works include The Book of Khalid (1911), The Green Flag (1911), The Quatrains of Abul-‘Ala’ (1903), Myrtle and Myrrh (1905), and A Chant of Mystics and Other Poems (1921), is often described as the “father of Arab American literature,” and one of his most notable accomplishments was to introduce free verse to the formulaic and traditional Arab poetic canon around 1905 (Abinader 2000, 1). Gibran, who was prominent among the early Arab American writers and kept company with U.S. literary figures such as the poet Robinson Jeffers and playwright Eugene O’Neill, eventually became one of the most popular authors in the United States. Gibran was born in Bsharri, Lebanon, in 1883 and emigrated to the United States in 1895, living first in Boston and later in New York. His works include The Madman, His Parables and Poems (1918), The Forerunner (1920), Sand and Foam (1926), and Jesus, The Son of Man (1928). His opus, The Prophet (1923), has been translated into more than 40 languages and has remained a top seller for Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., for more than half a century. For many years, it was the best-selling book in the United States after the Bible, with some eight million copies in print (Abinader 2000, 2; Orfalea and Elmusa 1988, xvi). The U.S. Congress recognized Gibran’s contribution to American arts and letters in 1990 by authorizing creation of the Kahlil Gibran Memorial Poetry Garden in Washington, D.C., which was dedicated by then President George H.W. Bush in 1990. It remains the only park dedicated to a writer in the nation’s capital. Despite Gibran’s immense popularity, the first serious anthology of American poetry to include his work was Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab-American Poetry, published in 1988. He remains revered by ordinary people and literary critics in the Arab world, but Gibran has been scorned and dismissed by the literary establishment in the United States. This may change after the release of a feature film about Gibran’s life being made by Arab American writer Rana Kazkaz, whose screenplay has already won a national prize. From the late 1940s through the early 1980s, there was little self-identification by writers as Arab American, although strong independent poets and writers such as Samuel Hazo, D.H. Melhem, and Etel Adnan established their reputations in this time period. Elmaz Abinader, an award-winning writer herself, says these writers “distinguished themselves initially as writers independent of ethnic categorization

Although there is a centuries-old tradition of Arab letters and philosophy, it has remained largely outside Western consciousness.When these works are available in English translation, Arab literary and religious classics are often grouped with Third World literature, emergent literature, and post-colonial literature, something Fedwa Malti-Douglas describes as a “grave injustice” given their rich history (Malti-Douglas 1994, 226). One of the few Arab writers with a strong publishing record in the United States was Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, but his works became readily available only after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, the first and only Arab to achieve that honor.

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(and) later donned the cloak of the Arab American identity” (Abinader 2000, 3). She describes them as a bridge between the two generations, as well as between Arab American writing and the American literary canon. For instance, Melhem, the author of the first comprehensive study of African American poet Gwendolyn Brooks, helped mainstream Arab American literature by organizing the first Arab American poetry reading at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in 1984 (Abinader 2000, 3). Adnan created her own publishing company, The Post-Apollo Press, which has helped ensure publication and distribution of many works by Arab American writers (Abinader 2000, 3). She also served for years as president of the Radius of Arab American Writers, Inc., a writers’ group founded in the early 1990s. Several important anthologies and periodicals have helped generate interest in Arab American literature over the past decade, including Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab-American Poetry, published in 1988 by Gregory Orfalea and Sharif Elmusa, and Food for Our Grandmothers: Writings By Arab-American and Arab-Canadian Feminists, an anthology of unusually frank essays and often jarring poetry published by Joanna Kadi in 1994. Kadi’s anthology gave voice to a community she dubbed “the most invisible of the invisibles” and paved the way for candid discussions by and about Arab American women. Post Gibran: Anthology of New Arab American Writing (1999) showcased poetry and prose by recognized writers and introduced a host of newer writers, including Hayan Charara, Mohja Kahf, and Suheir Hammad. The editors encouraged crossgenre experiments, asking poets to send in fiction, and essayists their attempts at drama: “We wanted to know what adjustments Arab American writers are making, both in their own self-image and the understanding of their Americanness, now that their Arabness has become more visible and is gaining a seemingly lasting presence” (Khaled and Akash 1999, xiii). Poet Nathalie Handal’s collection, The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology (2001), was published by Interlink Publishing and has sold more than 10,000 copies. Michel Moushabeck, who founded Interlink in 1987 to introduce more Arab writers to the U.S. public, described sales of Handal’s anthology as a “phenomenal” achievement for a book of poetry in the difficult U.S. market (Shalal-Esa 2007). Another important collection, Dinarzad’s Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction, followed in 2004, published by Mattawa and co-editor Pauline Kaldas. In addition, the work of an increasing number of Arab Americans has also found its way into broader anthologies of women’s writing and other postcolonial collections. Barbara Nimri Aziz, a journalist, also deserves credit for establishing Radius of Arab American Writers, Inc., or RAWI, in the early 1990s. The organization has grown immensely since its inception and now includes over 100 Arab American writers and maintains a Web site that features member profiles and original writing. In 2000, writers D.H. Melhem and Leila Diab compiled an anthology of the work of RAWI members, and the group has begun hosting annual literary conferences to further promote Arab American literary production. Playwright Kathryn Haddad founded the award-winning journal Mizna: Prose, Poetry and Art Exploring Arab America in 1999, facilitating publication of the work of hundreds of Arab American writers and visual artists whose work might not otherwise have seen the light of day. In addition, the new Arab American

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National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, has also begun hosting annual conferences on Arab arts and culture, another important venue for discussion about and presentation of Arab American literature. Together these efforts have contributed significantly to the emergence of a rich and growing body of Arab American literature, and they are making this literature increasingly accessible to scholars and students in disciplines such as English, comparative literature, American studies, and women’s studies. In addition, these collections have helped to create a national community of Arab American writers, many of whom had felt isolated within their own regional communities. The emergence of this community has helped fuel more collaborative projects and remains a key driver behind conferences and other events that showcase and encourage Arab American literary production. Trends and Themes. Major themes in the works of contemporary Arab American writers include heritage, family, food, hybridity, gender, exile, assimilation, alienation, nationalism, displacement, and the horrors of war. Although many of the earliest Arab American writers were men, including the famed poet and artist Gibran Kahlil Gibran, many of the emerging contemporary writers are women, and the entire body of current work is clearly influenced by feminism, postmodernism, and a deep sense of connection to other communities of color. Twentieth-century Arab American writers focused mainly on the genre of poetry; they were led by such writers as Naomi Shihab Nye, Lawrence Joseph, D.H. Melhem, and Samuel Hazo. These writers were followed in the 1990s by Hayan Charara, Nathalie Handal, Suheir Hammad, and David Williams. In Dinarzad’s Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction (2004), co-editors Pauline Kaldas and Khaled Mattawa cite a sense of isolation felt by Arab American writers even within their own communities and suggest that the lyric poem afforded writers a safer “way to speak as individuals to individuals” rather than representing a larger bloc (Kaldas and Mattawa 2004, xi). In a climate of negative stereotyping about Arabs and hypersensitivity to any criticism of Israel, many Arab American writers may have found it easier to express themselves in the abstracted way that poetry makes possible. Majaj notes that the poetic compression of the lyric mode favors vignettes rather than narratives and “moments of insight over sustained analysis” (Majaj, “New Directions” 1999, 70). Poetry remains popular, but Arab American writers have increasingly turned to prose narratives and plays to tell their stories. Burgeoning cultural production by Arab American writers may also have come as a reaction to an increasingly hostile environment characterized by anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism spurred by the 9/11 attacks and the continuing war in Iraq. The political and social situation of Arab Americans in general has worsened since 2001, civil liberty violations are up, and stereotypical representations of Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood films and the media are more prevalent than ever. Long invisible on the American literature scene, Arab American writers are now responding to growing interest in their lives and simultaneously trying to set the record straight. Increasingly, that includes performances on the stage. For instance, San Francisco-based playwright, screenwriter, and actor Betty Shamieh has written over 15 plays, including Roar, and Iraqi American Heather Raffo won wide acclaim for 9 Parts of Desire, which has been performed around the world. Although earlier literary works were haunted by a deep sense of nostalgia, contemporary Arab American writers are wielding their pens to chronicle decades of

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racism, oppression, and marginalization in the United States, and to begin uncovering the particularities of their own ethnic histories. They are also beginning to address conflicts within a beleaguered ethnic community. These conflicts were largely ignored during the ethnic identity politics of the 1970s that focused mainly on a trinity of African American, Asian American, and Latino writers. Collectively, Arab Americans have been subject to decades of racism, discrimination, negative stereotyping, and hostility in the United States, a phenomenon which has made some Arab American writers wary of discussing issues that could deepen already debilitating stereotypes about Arabs in America. For many years, the real or perceived need for unity among a beleaguered minority has hampered an honest discourse by Arab American writers about patriarchal structures, arranged marriage, and other controversial topics. Stereotypes are still prevalent, even in the academy. Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair Majaj published a collection of essays on the transnational reception of Third World women writers, a project that grew out of their frustration about just this phenomenon. They noted that even when they were invited to panels, certain discursive, institutional, and ideological structures preempted their discourse and determined what they could and would say. Any critique of Arab society or culture they seemed to utter would confirm the audience’s vision about “the patriarchal, oppressive nature of Third World societies,” but when they challenged these stereotypes, they were accused of defensiveness and their feminism was questioned (Amireh and Majaj 2000, 3). Reaction from within the Arab American community can also be fierce if it perceives any kind of attack or challenge to its prevailing social and familial structures, especially from one of its “own.” Many fear that candid discussions of problems within the community could be further used against Arabs in the United States. At the same time, mainstream publishers have tended to encourage what critic Steven Salaita calls “stories of escape” and other plotlines that reinforce existing stereotypes while remaining skeptical about the marketing prospects for more complex tales that do not fit into such neat categories (Shalal-Esa 2007). Context and Issues. Contemporary Arab American writers are concerned with dispossession, exile, loss, and grief, but rather than sinking into an abyss of introspection, they envision possibilities for taking action, seizing power, and building alliances with other groups. One thread that unites these newer writers is a conscious decision to identify as—and with—communities of color. They claim the margins as their native soil and honor the inherent contradictions of their identities. Their works see identity not as a fixed essence but a social construction, a product of the multiple and overlapping forces of geography, historical moment, gender, ethnicity, age, and class. Memoirs. The past decade has also seen the publication of several important memoirs by Arab American writers, including Edward Said’s remarkable 1999 autobiography Out of Place, a moving story of exile, displacement, and an identity forever torn between languages, places, and even ways of thinking. Said embarked on the writing of the memoir after being diagnosed with cancer, and his writings represented a deliberate attempt to reclaim and record his brilliant memories of the lost landscapes and communities of his childhood, many of which literally no longer exist. The book gives the reader an intimate look at the forces that shaped one of the most important intellectuals in recent memory, narrating his often painful experiences as an immigrant, an exile, and ultimately, an outsider. Naomi Shihab Nye’s book, Never in a Hurry: Essays on People and Places (1996), Suheir Hammad’s Drops of This Story (1996), and Diana Abu-Jaber’s food

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memoir, The Language of Baklava (2005), further illuminate the rich diversity of Arab American lives. Literary Criticism. Aside from selected individual reviews, it was only in the 1990s that one could identify any serious tradition of Arab American literary criticism, aided largely by the work of a few “pioneers,” including Lisa Suhair Majaj, Therese Saliba, Nathalie Handal, Evelyn Shakir, Mohja Kahf, and Elmaz Abinader. One excellent example of the serious scholarship emerging is Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist (2002), which provides a comprehensive look at Adnan’s literary and artistic accomplishments through analysis and close readings. Its authors, Lisa Suhair Majaj and Amal Amireh, have elevated the genre of Arab American writing to a secure place within U.S. academic circles and helped situate it for English-speaking readers. In addition, their work to gather and disseminate secondary sources has helped spawn public appetite for more Arab American writing. Another notable book is Ameen Rihani: Bridging East and West: A Pioneering Call for Arab-American Understanding (2004), a book of scholarly essays compiled by editors Nathan Funk and Betty Sitka to explore the work of this prolific early Arab American writer. The U.S.-based journal, Al Jadid: A Review & Record of Arab Culture and Arts, launched in 1993 by Elie Chalala, has also been an important force facilitating the study of Arab and Arab American texts. Al Jadid includes timely book reviews, translations, and a host of original articles on topics ranging from music to theatre, books to journals, fiction to fine art, poetry to performing arts. It provides a forum for continuing scholarship and acts as an important bridge connecting Arab American artists to the Arab world. Selected Authors Naomi Shihab Nye. Naomi Shihab Nye, born in St. Louis to a Palestinian father and an American mother, is an accomplished poet and essayist who has also published several children’s books and two novels for young adults, Habibi (1997) and Going, Going (2005). Nye has also played an important role in showcasing the work of Arab writers and artists in various anthologies, including The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems and Paintings from the Middle East (1998). Although her Arab heritage is an important factor in her work, Nye’s writing draws on and reflects a wide variety of cultural contexts and sources, including the American Southwest where she lives and the many places she has traveled. Saddeka Arebi, a Saudi Arabian scholar, has also done important work to claim a positive and separate space for Arab women writers, citing an important Islamic concept of “middleness” or Wasat, and concluding that being in the middle “does not have to mean ‘between-ness,’ being torn or on shaky ground, but can be a firm and advantageous position from which one can see both sides more clearly” (Arebi 1994, xi). Nye has inherited this sense of empowerment present in the concept of “middleness,” and it pervades her work. In contrast to some Arab Americans who feel fragmented because of their bicultural identities, Nye developed a feeling even as a young child that her “difference” was “always a strength. You were free” (Nye 2000). This sense of detachment calls to mind Abdul JanMohamed’s use of the term “specular border intellectual,” a person he defines as being equally familiar with

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two cultures but unwilling or unable to be “at home” in these societies, subjecting the cultures to analytic scrutiny rather than combining them (JanMohamed 1990, 97). For instance, Edward Said, the late Palestinian American scholar, wrote that he always felt he belonged to both the Arab and the Western worlds, “without being completely of either one or the other” (Said 1993, xxvi). Nye’s poetry often gives one exactly this sense of standing somehow apart. In a poem entitled “Over the Fence,” she addresses the lack of fit that sometimes plagues people with a bicultural or multicultural heritage, staging the poem as a dialogue that takes place between two neighbors over the fence that divides their properties and lives. Nye yearns for the steadiness of having lived one’s whole life in one town, perhaps even one house, as her neighbor has. But the neighbor sees Nye’s life as far more exciting than the yawning tedium of her own, with each day marked only by her husband’s departure, when “the world clicks shut/like a little dead door” and with the endless cycle of dirty dishes to wash (Nye 1986, 69). Even the plants seem more glamorous on Nye’s side of the fence, where purple iris “float their silken heads”; on her side, the neighbor sees her rose as “a stick forever” (Nye 1986, 69). For her part, Nye refuses to be put on some pedestal for her worldliness, concluding that she would gladly “take one tongue if it fit me.” She doesn’t consider herself any more fortunate than her neighbor. “I say no one is lucky. We have faces, they get old,” she writes, reminding them both of their common frailty as human beings (Nye 1986, 69). Although Nye chafes at “voices chiding me to ‘speak for my people,’” her Palestinian American heritage informs earlier poems such “The Man Who Makes Brooms” (Nye 1986, 36), while her outrage about the war in Iraq looms large in more recent poetry. In one poem, an ode to “The Sweet Arab, the Generous Arab,” Nye implores, “Please forgive everyone who has not honored your name.” She paints a portrait of the “Arabs I know, generous to a fault, welcoming, with the same wish for a safe daily life as millions of other people around the world. Who packed the pieces, carried them, to a new corner. For whom the words rubble and blast are constants” (Nye 2005, 57). Despite the frustration and grief apparent in her newer poems, Nye holds fast to a sense of agency and empowerment. Her heroine in Going, Going is a courageous teenage girl who rallies her friends and neighbors to boycott the growing corporate influences on her community and fight to save small local businesses. The overall theme is a metaphor for Nye’s own effort to salvage the particularities of our rich divergent histories and avoid the generalizations and homogenization that Wal-Mart represents. Diana Abu-Jaber. Diana Abu-Jaber is a novelist and essayist who has broken into the mainstream media market through several novels and a food memoir. Her 1993 novel Arabian Jazz, about an Arab immigrant and his two daughters, received excellent reviews in the mainstream U.S. press, although it was controversial within the Arab American community, mainly due to its discussion of sensitive topics such as arranged marriage, racism, abject poverty, female infanticide, and incest. Using multiple narrators and continually blurring the lines between the past and the present, the book provides a potent materialist critique of America while casting an equally skeptical eye on the patriarchal vestiges of the Arab world. It tracks the journey of Jemorah, one of the main characters as she begins to develop a clear view of the racism that surrounds her. Abu-Jaber’s second novel, Crescent (2003), delves further into the issues of exile and hybridity as the central character, Sirine, an Arab American chef, learns a new appreciation for her own tangled identity through her relationship with an exiled

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Iraqi literature professor. The book also examines the lives of other so-called hybrids, people who navigate between borders, countries, languages, and ethnicities, providing an interesting mosaic of the many ways there are to be Arab, American, or some combination of the two. Abu-Jaber says writing gave her a way to imagine herself in the world, a “way to say the deepest sorts of truths that I had been taught it was not polite or reasonable for a young woman to speak out loud” (Abu-Jaber 2004, 123). In Arabian Jazz, she used comedy and hyperbole to portray her characters and the difficult situations they encountered, but this approach backfired with the Arab American community. Mainstream reviewers loved the book, but Arab Americans felt betrayed by Abu-Jaber’s farcical tone. In her food memoir The Language of Baklava (2005), she writes about the “betrayed” readers of Arabian Jazz, who wrote her letters complaining about a “sense of being unfairly cast, unrepresented, their unique stories and voices . . . unheard and ignored.” She empathizes, acutely aware of feeling alone in a country where “the only media images of Arabs are bomb throwers and other lunatics.” But at the same time, these critical voices leave Abu-Jaber feeling vulnerable and a bit exiled herself, cut off from family, home, and her cultural community— the very people she had hoped would provide her with a sense of acceptance and connection. In her short story, “My Elizabeth,” Abu-Jaber explores what she describes as “deep cultural ambivalences,” weaving the tale of an Arab American girl who is brought to live with relatives in Wyoming after the suicide of her father (Abu-Jaber 2005, 235). Her great aunt Nabila, known as Great-aunt Winifred, gives her a new American name and instructs her sternly, “Never, ever speak Arabic. . . . Wipe it out of your brain. It’s clutter, you won’t need it anymore” (Abu-Jaber, “My Elizabeth” 2004, 297). Estelle, as she is now called, becomes friends with a Native American girl named Elizabeth. The two girls both lack fathers, have secret names, and are haunted by the duality of shuttling between public and private languages. “We were descended from nations that no map had names or boundaries for,” writes AbuJaber in this poignant story of friendship, the jagged edge of memory, and the pain of growing up (Abu-Jaber, “My Elizabeth” 2004, 299). Suheir Hammad. Strengthening the connections among marginalized populations is also a priority for spoken-word poet Suheir Hammad. Hammad draws inspiration from her poor, working-class childhood in Brooklyn, where she grew up mostly among Puerto Rican children, went to terrible public schools, and experienced firsthand what it means to be poor and of color in America. Hammad’s poetry is filled with images of violence, sexuality, and rage, as well as compassion for the nation’s dispossessed and wrongly imprisoned.

DEF POETRY JAM Suheir Hammad’s most recent poetry collection, ZaatarDiva, was published in late 2005 by Rattapallax Press, but she has also won great acclaim and public recognition as a cast member of the award-winning Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, as well as a regular participant in HBO’s “Def Poetry Jam.” Hammad adopts a direct and combative style in her poetry, which is written to be delivered orally. Her poetry throbs with the rhythm of urban life, a hip-hop beat pulsating to the words as they damn oppression, racism, fascism, and violence in any form—in the war zones of our families, streets, and nations.

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She locates herself proudly as a woman of color, as evidenced by the title and content of her first book of poetry, born Palestinian, born Black (1996). Its title is taken from “Moving towards Home,” a poem that African American poet June Jordan wrote in response to the massacre of Palestinians in Lebanon in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps after Israel’s 1982 invasion. In that poem, Jordan proclaims: “I was born a Black woman/and now/I am become a Palestinian” (Jordan 1989, 143). Hammad, writing in the foreword to born Palestinian, born Black, says that line of Jordan’s changed her life: “I remember feeling validated by her statement. She dared speak of transformation, of re-birth, of a deep understanding of humanity” (Hammad, born Palestinian 1996, xi). Uncovering racism and sexism in her essays and poetry, Hammad urges women of color to accept themselves as they are. In her poem, “bleached and bleeding,” Hammad catalogs the misery of young women living under the yoke of these Westernized ideals of beauty: in the end, after decimating and reshaping our bodies, “we hate ourselves/we kill ourselves” (Hammad, born Palestinian, 1996, 75–76). Only by accepting themselves as they are can women of color finally be free, Hammad argues in a poignant vignette about women “bleaching their hides to reach an impossible shade of porcelain,” when their skin was so beautiful in its natural state. “Don’t need blush, even on sallow days . . . This beauty is of earth; ain’t no plastic here” (Hammad, Drops 1996, 90). Risking the wrath of the conservative Arab community, Hammad also begins to expose sexual abuse and harassment of women—within her family, the Arab community, and the larger world. In “letter to anthony (critical resistance),” a letter poem to a friend in prison, Hammad writes about working on poetry with women in prison: in the end, “every home she has ever inhabited,” the poet writes, has been broken into and exploited, “starting with her body” (Hammad 2005, 65). Mohja Kahf. Sexuality is also a critical concern for Mohja Kahf, a Syrian-born poet, novelist, and scholar, who writes a regular column, “Sex and the Ummah,” for the Web site www.muslimwakeup.com, which examines sexuality from a Muslim perspective through advice and short stories. In one story, a Saudi woman Wedad confesses to her sister as they leave the mosque after praying together that she was praying for an orgasm—something she hasn’t experienced in four years. A blunt discussion ensues, in which the sister, Hamida, advises Wedad that she is responsible for her own body and pleasure. “There’s fingers and mouths and things, darling,” Hamida said. “There’s more to a man than one body part, for heaven’s sake. And then there’s technique to consider, and positions that can help you on your merry path . . . Point being, take responsibility for your pleasure, ya sheikha. Take your orgasm into your own hands!” (Kahf 2005). Kahf, who teaches literature at the University of Arkansas, argues that Islam includes many positive teachings about sex and that it “can be a form of ibada (worship) like any other act” (Mack 2007). She sees her writing as being connected to a rich literary tradition in the Middle East that includes often racy stories from 1001 Arabian Nights as well as Sufi poetry. Her poem, “More than One Way to Break a Fast,” pays homage to the dark, datelike lips of her lover, and captures the anxious waiting for dusk and the ritual breaking of the Ramadan fast, after a long day of doing without food, drink, and sex. Kahf’s first book of poetry, E-mails from Scheherazad, addresses the discomfort of being a Muslim woman in America, including a series of poems about the damning— and sometimes liberating—consequences of wearing a hijab, or head scarf. Another poem relates the story of Kahf’s Syrian grandmother washing her “well-groomed”

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feet in the sink of the ladies’ room at Sears to prepare for a Muslim prayer—and the shocked reactions of the white American women, who consider the act “an affront to American porcelain,/a contamination of American Standards/by something foreign and unhygienic/requiring civil action and possible use of disinfectant spray” (Kahf 2003, 26). The incident ends with Kahf holding the door open for all the women as they lose themselves “in the great common ground/of housewares on markdown” (Kahf 2003, 28). Kahf’s first novel, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006), examines the life of Khadra Shamy, who grows up in a devout Syrian Muslim family in the middle of Indiana. The book draws on some of Kahf’s own experiences growing up in Indiana, but it is not primarily autobiographical. This coming-of-age novel presents an array of Arab American characters and perceptions but also transcends the immigrant story to examine friendships, family, racism, violence, and the realities of life in the contemporary United States. Nathalie Handal. Poet, playwright, and scholar Nathalie Handal has played a central role in the renaissance of Arab American literature, contributing her own sensual, luscious poetry and plays, directing plays and performances, and anthologizing the work of Arab women poets and young Arab writers from all over the English-speaking world. “It’s very much a question of eradicating invisibility and bringing awareness to who we are as Palestinians and Arabs,” says Handal (Handal 2006), whose works of poetry include The Neverfield (1999) and The Lives of Rain (2005) and two CDs combining poetry and music, Traveling Rooms (1999) and Spell (2006). Handal defies categorization. She hails from a big Palestinian family from Bethlehem, but was born in Haiti and spent years in the Caribbean, Latin America, the United States, and Europe. She writes in English but slips fluidly from English to Arabic to French in conversation. Her poetry is also peppered with Spanish words because so much of her family lives in Latin America that these experiences also inform her life and work. Like many other contemporary Arab American writers and poets, Handal grapples with the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian territories captured in the 1967 war. In some ways, one could say current U.S. military engagements are a defining issue for younger writers in a manner not unlike the role the Vietnam War played in defining the generation of the 1960s. In her poem “Twelve Deaths at Noon,” Handal writes poignantly of “the prisons in our souls” and the voices of the murdered sons and husbands echoing “like drumbeats in our ears” (Handal 2005, 15). She meticulously records the deaths of civilians, including “a dead man, perhaps thirty/with a tight fist, holding some sugar for morning coffee” and “coffee cups full/left on the table/in a radio station/beside three corpses” (Handal 2005, 15). In “Jenin,” a poem for the Palestinian city where more than 50 people were killed during a massive Israeli incursion in April 2002, Handal chronicles the devastation. Hayan Charara. Violence is also a central theme in the poetry of Hayan Charara, an Arab American poet and scholar who grew up in Detroit and first attended college at age 13. The author of two poetry books, The Alchemist’s Diary (2001) and The Sadness of Others (2006), Charara’s poetry chronicles the full gamut of death and violence, including the rape of a fellow student, the death of two young Arab engineers killed in an apparently intentional gas explosion, suicides, the death of his mother, and even the stampede of a herd of cattle. His earlier work focused heavily on narrating his experience as a Muslim growing up in Detroit, a town he describes as “a shithole, it’s where/you were pulled from the womb/into the streets” (Charara

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2001, 13). For Charara, it is a city “where boys are manufactured into men/where you learn to think in American” (Charara 2001, 13). It is the place where he and his friends swam in a dammed river, daring each other to go over the edge, despite the drowning of a boy from a neighboring town. “We stood in line, hesitant,/until someone shouted ‘pussy’/or ‘chicken-shit’/and we knew what we had to do” (Charara 2001, 58). It is also the place where his mother died and his father was held up at gunpoint by a thief—a criminal “who believed himself/a failure, pulled back/the pistol in his hand,/and said as he left,/“This is your lucky day, camel jockey” (Charara 2001, 25–26). Rabih Alameddine. Rabih Alameddine delves into issues of violence, death, AIDS, sexual identity, racism, and homophobia in his writing. His writings include Koolaids: The Art of War (1998) and a book of short stories, The Perv (1999). These were followed in 2001 by an experimental novel in first chapters, I, The Divine, which uses a fragmented, nonlinear approach to examine the ravages of the Lebanese civil war and the life of Sarah Nour El-Din, a Lebanese immigrant in the United States, who remains haunted by Lebanon even after she flees to America. “In Lebanon, during the war, however, all unhappy families were not unhappy in their own way. They suffered because at least one family member was killed. It did not matter why a family was unhappy before; death became the overpowering reason,” she writes in one of her many tantalizing unfinished attempts to start a novel or memoir (Alameddine 2001, 63). Alameddine told one interviewer the civil war “permeates every corner of my life. I can’t seem to write about anything else. The war taught me how to deal with impermanence, how to sharpen my sense of the absurd, and how to function in a chaotic world” (Devlin 2002). Like Kahf, Alameddine candidly explores the sexuality of his characters and the pain of living with HIV. In one passage of Koolaids, Samir, the main character, receives a letter from his 93-year-old great-uncle, who explains that he too is gay, although he married and had children and “had a good life,” while another relative died a bitter man because his homosexuality was never accepted. The great-uncle tells Samir he regrets “not having shared my bed with a man even once, but after a while, even those feelings dimmed” (Alameddine 1998, 129). Laila Lalami. In her debut novel Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, Laila Lalami, a Moroccan American writer and critic, traces the story of four desperate Moroccans caught among love for their homeland and families, the quiet desperation of their lives in Morocco, and their unflinching efforts to build a better life in Spain. Translated into five languages, the novel has won critical acclaim for its spare but elegant prose exposing the ravages of globalization and the trials of refugees everywhere. Grappling with 9/11. Clearly the events of Sept. 11, 2001, left huge marks on the U.S. psyche and particularly on Arab Americans. The hijacking attacks and their aftermath

RECEPTION Blogging on Arab American literature, politics, and culture Laila Lalami, educated in Morocco, Britain, and the United States, also writes a well-designed and substantive blog—www.moorishgirl.com—that covers a wide range of topics, including reviews of current literature, movies, events, essays on Arab American issues and politics, information about her publications, recommendations of “underappreciated books,” guest columns, “All Things Moroccan,” and more. Archives extend back to October 2001.

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figure prominently in several of the recent works discussed—and prompted a swathe of new poems and essays. Naomi Shihab Nye appealed to “would-be terrorists” to “find another way to live. Don’t expect others to be like you. Read Rumi. Read Arabic poetry . . . Plant mint” (Nye 2002, 287–91). D.H. Melhem, a lifetime resident of New York City, described “cloud messages/from the plume of hell,/I breathe you, taste the mist—/concrete dust, chairs, shoes,/files, photos, handbags, rings, a doll,/upholstery, breakfast trays,/body parts and parting words/and screams” (Melhem 2005, 165). Poet Lawrence Joseph, who works as a lawyer, struggles to make sense of the attacks in “Why Not Say What Happens,” describing the lingering trauma of the attacks as well as the city’s efforts to move forward. He captures individual vignettes from the day of the attacks, including, “one of Garfinkle’s patients/tripped over a severed foot while evacuating/the Stock Exchange,” as well as the sentiment of a policeman who doesn’t want to talk about it at all (Joseph 2005, 25–26). But Joseph and Melhem also see the need for renewal and rebuilding, capturing the city’s resilience in myriad ways. Joseph describes a sunset over the Hudson, evoking the promise of tomorrow for the city, its people—and perhaps for Arab Americans specifically: “The sky blue, dark blue/yet pure in color, not blackened/or tarnished, above the low, old/buildings, like a painting of something/solid rather than the solid thing itself,/a high and low composition. But what/light there is in that landscape . . .” (Joseph 2005, 32). And what light there is in this landscape of Arab American literature. Each passing year brings more works to relish, every word helping to create a more complex, rich, and vibrant mosaic of the real and imagined lives of this growing and increasingly vocal minority. Bibliography Abinader, Elmaz. “Children of the Al-Mahjar: Arab-American Literature Spans a Century.” 2000. http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itsv/0200/ijse/abinader.htm. Abu-Jaber, Diana. Arabian Jazz. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993. ———. Crescent. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. ———. The Language of Baklava. New York: Pantheon, 2005. ———. A Life of Stories. In Scheherazade’s Legacy: Arab and Arab American Women on Writing. Susan Muaddi Darraj, ed. Praeger, 2004: 121–129. ———. My Elizabeth. In Dinarzad’s Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction. Pauline Kaldas and Khaled Mattawa, eds. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2004: 295–312. Alameddine, Rabih. I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. ———. Koolaids: The Art of War. New York: Picador, 1998. Amireh, Amal. Writing the Difference: Feminists’ Invention of the ‘Arab Woman.’ In Interventions: Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women’s Literature and Film. Bishnupriya Ghosh and Brinda Bose, eds. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997: 185–211. Amireh, Amal, and Majaj, Lisa Suhair. Introduction. In Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers. Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair Majaj, eds. New York: Garland Publishing, 2000: 1–25. Arebi, Sadeeka. Women and Words in Saudi Arabia: The Politics of Literary Discourse. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Darraj, Susan Muaddi, ed. Scheherazade’s Legacy: Arab and Arab American Women on Writing; Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004. Devlin, Kieron. “A Conversation with Rabih Alameddine.” Mississippi Review Online 8.2. (Spring 2002). http://www.mississippireview.com/2002/leilani-devlin-alameddine.html. Hammad, Suheir. born Palestinian, born Black. New York: Harlem River Press, 1996.

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ARAB AMERICAN LITERATURE ———. Drops of This Story. New York: Harlem River Press, 1996. ———. “Interview with Nathalie Handal. Drops of Suheir Hammad: A Talk with a Palestinian Poet Born Black.” In Al Jadid: A Record of Arab Culture and Arts 3.20 (Summer 1997): 19. ———. ZaatarDiva. New York: Rattapallax Press, 2005. Handal, Nathalie. The Lives of Rain. Northampton, MA: Interlink, 2005. ———. The Neverfield. Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo Press, 1999. ———. Spell. Northampton, MA: Interlink, 2006. ———. Poetry as Homeland: A Letter to Lisa Suhair Majaj. In Post-Gibran: An Anthology of New Arab American Writing. Khaled Mattawa and Munir Akash, eds. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999: 139–144. ———, ed. Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology. New York: Interlink, 2001. JanMohamed, Abdul. “Worldiness-Without-World, Homelessness-as-Home: Toward a Definition of the Specular Border Intellectual.” In Edward Said: A Critical Reader. Michael Sprinker, ed. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992. 96–120. Jawdat, Nameer Ali. “Melvina and Jemorah in a Promised Land.” Review of Arabian Jazz by Diana Abu-Jaber. The Washington Post 13 June 1993: X6. Jordan, June. Naming Our Destiny. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989. Joseph, Lawrence. Into It. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. Kadi, Joanna, ed. Food for Our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American and ArabCanadian Feminists. Boston: South End Press, 1994. Kahf, Mohja. E-Mails from Scheherazad. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2003. ———. The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006. ———. “Wedad’s Cavalry.” Muslim Wake Up website. Apr 10, 2005. http://www. muslimwakeup.com/sex/archives/2005/04/wedads_cavalry_1.php. Kaldas, Pauline, and Khaled Mattawa, eds. Dinarzad’s Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2004. Lalami, Laila. Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits. Orlando: Harcourt, 2005. Mack, Mehammed. “Sex and the Freethinker.” LA Weekly 3 Jan. 2007. http://www.laweekly. com/news/features/sex-and-the-freethinker/15330/. Majaj, Lisa Suhair. Arab American Literature and the Politics of Memory. In Memory and Cultural Politics: New Approaches to American Ethnic Literatures. Amritjit Singh, Joseph Skerrett, and Robert E. Hogan, eds. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996. 266–90. ———. The Hyphenated Author: Emerging Genre of ‘Arab-American Literature’ Poses Questions of Definition, Ethnicity and Art.” In Al Jadid: A Review and Record of Arab Culture and Arts 5 (Winter 1999): 26. http://leb.net/~aljadid/features/0526majaj.html. ———. New Directions: Arab American Writing at Century’s End. In Post-Gibran: An Anthology of New Arab American Writing. Khaled Mattawa and Munir Akash, eds. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999. 67–77. ———. “Two Worlds Emerging: Arab-American Writing at the Crossroads.” Al Jadid: A Review and Record of Arab Culture and Arts 3.16 (March 1997): 8–9. ———, Paula Sunderman, and Therese Saliba, eds. Gender, Nation, and Community in Arab Women’s Novels. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002. Malti-Douglas, Fedwa. Dangerous Crossings: Gender and Criticism in Arabic Literary Studies. In Borderwork: Feminist Engagements with Comparative Literature. Margaret Higgonet, ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994: 224–26. Mattawa, Khaled, and Munir Akash. Introduction. In Post-Gibran: An Anthology of New Arab American Writing. Khaled Mattawa and Munir Akash, eds. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999: xi–xiii. Mehlem, D.H. New York Poems. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005. Mehlem, D.H., and Leila Diab, eds. A Different Path: An Anthology of the Radius of Arab American Writers. Detroit: Ridgeway Press, 2000.

ARTHURIAN LITERATURE Nye, Naomi Shihab. “Bread.” Sycamore Review 3:1. http://www.sla.purdue.edu/sycamore/ v31-e2.html. ———. Fuel. Rochester: BOA Editions, 1998. ———. Going, Going. New York: Greenwillow, 2005. ———. The Gravities of Ancestry. In Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab-American Poetry. Gregory Orfalea and Sharif Elmusa, eds. New York: Interlink Books, 2000: 266. ———. Never in a Hurry: Essays on People and Places. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. ———. Personal interview. June 6, 2000. ———. Red Suitcase. Brockport: BOA Editions, 1994. ———. Sitti’s Secrets. New York: Four Winds Press/Macmillan, 1994. ———. “This Crutch That I Love: A Writer’s Life, Past and Present,” U.S. State Department. http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/writers/nye.htm. ———. Words Under the Words. Portland, OR: Eighth Mountain Press, 1995. ———. Yellow Glove. Portland: Breitenbush Books, 1986. ———. You & Yours. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2005. ———, comp. The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems and Paintings from the Middle East. New York: Simon & Shuster Books for Young Readers, 1998. ———, comp. This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from Around the World. New York: Four Winds Press/MacMillan, 1992. ———, comp. What Have You Lost? New York: Greenwillow, 1999. Orfalea, Gregory, and Sharif Elmusa, eds. Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab-American Poetry. New York: Interlink Books, 2000 Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. ———. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Afred A. Knopf, 1999. Shakir, Evelyn. “Arab American Literature.” In New Immigrant Literatures in the United States: A Sourcebook to Our Multicultural Literary Heritage. Alpana Sharma Knippling, ed. Westport, CT: 1996: 3–18. ———. Bint Arab: Arab and Arab American Women in the United States. Westport, CT: Praeger. 1997. Shalal-Esa, Andrea. “One Book at a Time.” Saudi Aramco World 58.6 (2007). http://www. saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200706/one.book.at.a.time.htm. ———. “Arab American Writer Is Ambassador to Middle East.” December 19, 2006. Reuters. Williams, David. Far Sides of the Only World. Durham, NC: Carolina Wren Press, 2004.

Further Reading Arida, Holly, and Anan Ameri, eds. Etching our Own Image: Voices from the Arab American Art Movement. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006 (forthcoming); Darraj, Susan Muaddi, ed. Scheherazade’s Legacy: Arab and Arab American Women on Writing; Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004; Kaldas, Pauline, and Khaled Mattawa, eds. Dinarzad’s Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2004; Majaj, Lisa Suhair. “Of Stories and Storytellers.” In Saudi Aramco World. March/April 2005: 24–35; Orfalea, Gregory. The Arab Americans: A History. Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2006; Radius of Arab American Writers Inc. Web site. http://rawi.org/index.html.

ANDREA SHALAL-ESA

ARTHURIAN LITERATURE Definition. Arthurian tradition is like a mighty river: long, and wide, and deep. It is long in that it stretches far back into the mists of time, some one and a half millennia, to when a military leader named Arthur (or some such variant spelling) may (or may not) have fought to preserve Britain against the invaders who came to

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plunder and settle after the departure of the Roman legions in the fifth century A.D. Moreover, many tributaries have flowed into this river, reaching back into even earlier eras. The love story of Tristan and Isolde and the Grail legend appear to have had an independent existence before they attached themselves to Arthurian tradition; and the stories told of Arthur and many of his warriors, as well as the figures themselves, may have sources in historical events and legends from Celtic lands and beyond, through continental Europe and the Middle East, and deep into the steppes of Asia (Lacy 1996, 17–21, 396–97). It is wide in that it has found expression in most of the languages of Europe, and a few even beyond, and it has been carried throughout the world, wherever these languages are now spoken. It remains, however, one of the great ironies of a tradition that preserves many ancient cultures and tongues that it should find its strongest and most persistent voice in English, the language spoken by the tribes that were Arthur’s most determined foes. It is deep in that it has expanded into a bewildering range of literary forms, genres, and subgenres; it has yielded reams of scholarship and commentary, some scrupulously learned and some wildly speculative, some concerned only with historical “facts” and some with mystical significance; it has ventured into nonliterary forms of creative activity as well, including art, music, and games; and although the Arthurian element may be minor in some works, in many the legend is exhaustively re-created. History Early Development—The Middle Ages. The earliest references to Arthur and his champions appear in Latin chronicles and in Welsh poems and heroic tales during the Dark Ages. Four major developments, however, propelled the legend onto a wider stage. The first was Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, a Latin chronicle composed around 1138. This includes the first extended account of Arthur’s wars: defeating invaders at home; then conquering parts of Europe; and finally falling in the Battle of Camlann against his nephew Mordred, who had usurped the throne in his absence. This account proved very popular, and it spread the legend throughout Europe. This international attention coincided with the evolution of a new literary form, the medieval romance, and the success of Arthurian legend was guaranteed when the greatest French master of the form, Chrétien de Troyes, made it the subject of his major poems in the latter part of the twelfth century. His example encouraged other poets to compose their own Arthurian romances, not only in French, but also in other languages, especially German. In the thirteenth century, romances also were written in prose, developing into great cycles. The romances switched attention from military campaigns and battles to the adventures of individual knights as they rode throughout Arthur’s realm, jousting with adversaries, dining at castles, and righting wrongs. They also introduced two of the great themes of Arthurian romance: love, as exemplified by figures such as Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guenevere; and the Grail quest, which inspired knights like Perceval and Galahad. The third development was the emergence of Arthurian legend in English literature in the fourteenth century. The chronicles viewed Arthur as an English warrior-hero; the romances focused upon the exploits of his knights, especially his nephew Gawain. He is the hero of arguably the finest Arthurian romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

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The fourth development was Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (completed about 1470). Not only did this work present the complete Arthurian story in very readable prose, but it had the good fortune not only to be written in an accessible dialect of English, and it was also one of the first works printed by William Caxton in 1485. It thus could reach a much wider audience than romances copied by hand. Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries. As the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance, interest shifted to new literary forms, and the Arthurian legend, like its major vehicle the romance, fell out of favor. It languished until it was rediscovered in the nineteenth century during the Arthurian Revival. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem Idylls of the King achieved wide popularity, and the legend was adapted, with mixed results, into the new forms of drama and opera. Its appearance in prose fiction, however, most notably Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), marked the direction that it was destined to pursue with greatest success in the next century. Twentieth Century. As the twentieth century advanced, the focus of Arthurian legend shifted from poetry and drama to prose fiction. Initially, the favored genre was historical fiction, in which Arthur was presented as either a sixth-century war leader or a monarch in the high medieval setting made popular in the romances. The great surge in the popularity of fantasy in the second half of the century, however, much of it written for younger readers, proved a boon to Arthurian tradition, for it permitted the inclusion of the magical elements that marked some of its best-loved figures and stories, such as Merlin and the Lady of the Lake, the Sword in the Stone, and the last voyage to Avalon. The legend also spread into various other byways: it turns up in such subgenres asscience fiction, mystery fiction, historical romance, and time-shift novels; plays have rarely aroused much interest, but films for both cinema and television, sometimes animated, often with special effects to portray magic, have reached a wide audience; art is found most frequently as illustrations in books for children or in comics and graphic novels; games have followed fashion shifts, from board games, to role-playing games, and now interactive computer games (Lacy 1996, 97–98, 174–176, 590; Lacy and Thompson 2001, 204–205, 218; Thompson and Lacy 2005, 111–113). Although the legend attracted some attention in other languages, particularly German, it has attained by far its greatest popularity in English, and increasingly that popularity has been created by North American authors. In part, this reflects the size of the American market. Moreover, a number of authors have been transplanted across the Atlantic in both directions, so that their national affiliation is ambivalent. It is well to remember, however, that trends within Arthurian literature may be initiated or augmented by authors who are from Britain, Australia, and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, as well as by translations from other languages; and these trends do influence authors in North America. For the legend it matters little, for Arthur’s return from Avalon in the pages of literature ignores national distinctions. Trends and Themes. Although the rise and fall of Arthur’s kingdom remains a central concern, increasingly authors focus attention upon one figure in an attempt not only to impose some unity upon events, but also to reinterpret them from a fresh perspective. One of the ways to achieve this has been to give a voice to characters who might be considered overlooked or unjustly maligned in earlier accounts, and one such group is women. Moreover, because many Arthurian authors are themselves women, it is no surprise that they should wish to give a voice to their sisters.

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Guinevere has achieved considerable popularity in recent years as a number of authors rally to the defense of the queen often blamed for the fall of the Round Table (Brewer 1991). Their books include not only Nancy McKenzie’s Queen of Camelot, but also The Dragon Queen (2001) and The Raven Warrior (2003) by Alice Borchardt, and Sword of the Rightful King (2003) by Jane Yolen. Reflecting modern preferences, all three authors depict Guinevere as high spirited, independent, and noble minded: McKenzie makes her a skilled horsewoman as well as kind and modest; Borchardt portrays her as a mighty warrior and powerful Pictish queen; and Yolen has her travel to Arthur’s court in the guise of a young boy so that she can avenge her heartbroken sister. There she becomes Merlinnus’s assistant and the king’s trusted advisor before foiling Morgause’s plot to prevent Arthur from drawing the Sword from the Stone. When her true identity is revealed, she agrees to marry Arthur. Sara Maitland, by contrast, offers a more conventional portrait in “Foreplay” (2003), although the queen speaks her mind with a modern frankness. After failing to conceive an heir, Guinevere recognizes bitterly, “I had been the perfect wife for nothing” (Maitland 2003, 86), and she initiates an affair with Lancelot: “It was not love . . . it was lust” (79). Nor has Guinevere been the only woman to attract the attention of authors. Sarah L. Thomson tells the Arthurian story from four points of view in The Dragon’s Son (2001), and three of them are women: the wife of Myrddin (Merlin), Arthur’s half-sister and wife Morgan, and a maidservant of another half-sister. Elsewhere, Morgan, the narrator of I Am Morgan le Fay (2001) by Nancy Springer, describes her early years, during which she developed both her supernatural powers and her enmity to Arthur (Thompson 1992, 231); Anna, Arthur’s sister in the medieval chronicles, is the protagonist in The King’s Sister (2000) by Kate Schafer; in Judith Tarr’s “Finding the Grail” (2001), Beaumains turns out to be the disguise, not of Gawain’s younger brother but his sister Elaine, and she finds the Grail among the holy women of the Isle of Avalon; and in Cabot’s Avalon High, the witty narrator and female hero turns out to be none other than a modern reincarnation of the Lady of the Lake, much to everyone’s surprise (including her own). Men have, of course, continued to attract attention. Merlin is the protagonist of novels by King and Barron, and he plays an important role in many other novels and short stories (Goodrich 2002). For example, in Guler’s In the Shadow of Dragons, he is a druid who helps his father and uncle (Ambrosius and Uther) against the plots of their enemies; in Mallory’s Merlin trilogy, he helps Arthur to become king; and in Keith Taylor’s “A Spear in the Night” (2002), he makes use of his foresight to trap an ambitious king who tries to poison the child Arthur. He also frequently makes a brief appearance as a convenient magic worker: in Jernigan’s Christmas in Camelot, for example, he turns up in time to heal the mortally wounded hero and so allow a happy ending. The encounters between Arthur’s nephew Gawain and both the Green Knight and the Loathly Lady have proved a fruitful source of inspiration not only for Mitchell’s free-wheeling retelling, but for other authors who have drawn upon them to initiate a series of novels. The former is the basis for Ride South to Purgatory, the first novel in Work’s Keystone Ranch saga, and for Meredith Lahmann’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: The Quest (2003). Lahmann includes the latter story in Sir Gawain’s Challenge (2004), her second novel. In his Squire’s Tales series, Morris reverses the sequence: the hero meets the Loathly Lady in his opening novel, The Squire’s Tale (1998), and the Green Knight in his second, The

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Squire, His Knight, and His Lady (1999). In later novels in the series, Gawain reappears, and he almost invariably displays kindness and good sense to those he meets; as in the medieval verse romances upon which most are based, he serves as an encouraging mentor and friend to the young protagonists, both male and female. Zettel also includes both motifs in In Camelot’s Shadow. To these authors Gawain is an admirable figure, the noblest knight at Arthur’s court despite Lancelot’s preeminence. By drawing upon the medieval verse romances, they offer a welcome defense of a hero too long maligned in the prose romances of Sir Thomas Malory and his predecessors (Thompson 2006). Gawain’s half-brother and Arthur’s nemesis, Mordred, has also proved a fascinating figure recently, not only to British authors such as Beric Norman in Mordred’s Version (2005), but also to Nancy Springer, who wrote I Am Mordred (1998), and to Douglas Clegg, whose Mordred, Bastard Son (2006) announces itself as Book One of the Mordred Trilogy, a dark fantasy. Most fiction portrays Mordred as evil, driven by ambition and a desire for revenge, as does The Book of the Stone (2000), the fourth and concluding book of Diana Paxson’s series The Hallowed Isle. Increasingly, however, authors try to present a more balanced view of his conduct, either by emphasizing his efforts to resist an inexorable fate or by shifting blame onto others, a tradition begun by Mary Stewart in The Wicked Day (1983). In Wein’s Coalition of Lions, he even fights for, not against, Arthur at the last, fatal Battle of Camlann. In Grail Prince, McKenzie thoughtfully reinterprets the story of Galahad’s quest for the Grail and Spear, although it is only after he learns compassion and humility and seeks the forgiveness of his beloved (the sister of Perceval) and their child that he finally succeeds. He chooses, however, not “the glory of Britain,” but “the loving embrace of his wife and child, the kingdom that awaited him, and the responsibilities that went with it . . . and without looking behind him, slipped back into the warmth of the world” (McKenzie 2003, 510). In The Quest of the Fair Unknown (2006), Morris adopts a humorous approach to Galahad’s story. These two novels humanize the figure of Galahad, whose unswerving virtue on the quest for the Holy Grail irritates most modern readers. A typical response is found in “Me and Galahad” (2001) by Mike Resnick and Adrienne Gormley, who transpose the story to the American West: here an arrogant and sanctimonious Galahad fails to recognize the Grail when it is offered to him by a woman he considers inferior. The love story of Tristan and Isolde attracted relatively little attention in fiction during the second half of the twentieth century, in part because it was “largely neglected by fantasy,” the most prolific genre of Arthurian literature (Thompson 1985, 125). This situation changed at the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, when their love story inspired several works: the film Tristan and Isolde; the Tristan and Isolde trilogy by British author Rosalind Miles (2003–2004), and two works by American authors. In Prince of Dreams, McKenzie integrates the version found in the medieval prose romances with the characters and Dark Age setting she created in her earlier novels. By contrast, in his novella “The King in the Tree” (2003), Steven Millhauser draws upon verse tradition as he re-creates the intensity of the psychological impact of the lovers’ affair on Mark (Lacy 1996, 463–465). Less prominent figures have also sprung into the limelight in this century. Morris relates the adventures of Parsifal in Parsifal’s Page (2001) and of Dinadan in The Ballad of Sir Dinadan (2003); and he amusingly reinterprets the story of how Gareth rescues Lyonesse in The Savage Damsel and the Dwarf (2000), how Lancelot

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rescues Guinevere in The Princess, the Crone, and the Dung-Cart Knight (2004), and how Ywain rescues Laudine in The Lioness and Her Knight (2005). Ywain’s story also inspired Work’s Ride West to Dawn and Ride to Banshee Cañon. Sarah Zettel imaginatively adapts the tale of Geraint and Enid in For Camelot’s Honor (2005), her second Arthurian novel, and that of Gareth and Lynet in her third, Under Camelot’s Banner (2006). Sometimes, however, the narrator or central figure is invented rather than traditional. Guinevere provides Arthur with a spirited daughter in both Kemp’s Firebrand (and a forthcoming sequel The Recruit) and Wein’s Coalition of Lions; Karr relates the adventures of a minor knight of Arthur’s realm in The Follies of Sir Harald; and in “The Fall of the Kingdom” (2001) by Mary Soon Lee, Guinevere’s nursemaid confesses that it was she who told Arthur about her mistress’s affair with Lancelot because she was angered by Guinevere’s long years of self-centeredness. Wein is not alone in carrying on the Arthurian story through survivors and successors: in “The Shadow of a Sword” (2000) by Ed Greenwood, Constantine refuses to give Excalibur to Morgan le Fay, returning it to the lake as Arthur ordered; in Albion: The White Phantom (2000) by Patrick McCormack, Bedwyr searches for Gwenhwyvar after Arthur’s death; in Rexcalibur (2001) and Eternity’s Hope (2001) by Mitzi Kleidon, descendants of the knights of the Round Table fight dark forces in an attempt to restore Camelot. However, the links can stretch even farther. In Kingdom of the Grail (2000), Judith Tarr blends Arthurian legend with the story of Charlemagne when she makes Roland a shape-shifting descendant of Merlin and Nimue. After the disaster at Roncesvalles, he is taken to the Grail Castle to lead its warriors in the Grail War. Irene Radford has written an ongoing series entitled Merlin’s Descendants (1999–), and Bertrice Small has written The Dragon Lord’s Daughters (2004) about three descendants of an illegitimate son of Arthur. As events grow more distant in time, the Arthurian links in these historical romances become more tenuous. Context and Issues Poetry and Drama. Poetry on the Arthurian legend has dwindled over the years. Long poems have become rare, often confined to the pages of limited-run chapbooks or print-on-demand publications, such as The Song of Sir Rod the Long (2000) by Larry Howard, which describes itself as a rowdy, ribald novel in verse with a gay twist. Short poems do appear in poetry magazines, for example, Pamela Constantine’s “The Royal Dream” (2001), and in such collections as Guy Gavriel Kay’s Beyond the Dark House (2003), but they are few and far between. A favorite topic is love, both its dangers and delights. Play scripts also continue to be written, but they are usually intended for children and performed in schools. More ambitious was the ballet Merlin, performed by the Atlantic Ballet Theatre of Canada in 2003, but drama only reached a wide audience in the form of film and television. Sometimes the Arthurian elements are no more than borrowings of objects such as Excalibur or characters such as Merlin, who appears, along with Morgan le Fay and reincarnations of Guenevere and Mordred, in the television series Guinevere Jones (2002). This Canadian/ Australian co-production is set in a high school, as is Neil Mandt’s Arthur’s Quest (2000), in which Arthur is sent to the modern era through Merlin’s magic. More often, however, modern figures return to the past, a tradition inspired by Mark

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Twain’s Connecticut Yankee: in Gil Junger’s Black Knight (2001), after falling into a moat at a medieval theme park, a maintenance man resurfaces in medieval England and there encounters Perceval; in Derek Hayes’s Otherworld (2002), when three teenagers in modern Wales investigate an underwater island, they find themselves reliving events drawn from several medieval Welsh tales. The grittily imagined Dark Ages are the setting for three more ambitious films: a two-part telefilm The Mists of Avalon (Turner Television, 2001), King Arthur (Touchstone Pictures, 2004), and Tristan and Isolde (Twentieth Century Fox, 2006). The first is based upon Marion Zimmer Bradley’s popular fantasy, while the other two offer what are intended to be historically plausible accounts of Arthur’s rise to power after the withdrawal of the Roman legions and the doomed relationship of the lovers, respectively. Reviews have been unenthusiastic. Television series have also spawned novelizations, such as James Mallory’s trilogy Merlin (1998–2000) based on the miniseries of the same name. Prose Fiction. By far the most prolific literary form of Arthurian legend since the nineteenth century is prose fiction, in the form of the short story and novel. The former has received a substantial boost since 1988 from the publication of anthologies specifically devoted to the legend (Thompson and Lacy 2005, 100), and although the trend seems to be waning, it has continued into the twenty-first century with The Doom of Camelot (2000) and Legends of the Pendragon (2002), both edited by James Lowder, and Out of Avalon (2001), edited by Jennifer Roberson. Novels remain as popular as ever, thanks in part to the development of print-on-demand publication. Moreover, authors who treat the legend are increasingly likely to expand to a trilogy, as did Bernard Cornwell in his Grail Quest series (2000–2003), or to embark on an even longer series. Jack Whyte’s Arthurian cycle eventually extended to nine long novels (1992–2005); the Squire’s Tales series by Gerald Morris numbers nine and counting (1998–); and although the Arthurian element is usually confined to the frame for the protagonists’ adventures, Mary Pope Osborne’s popular Magic Tree House series of first-chapter books for early readers currently extends to 36 books. Retellings. Prose fiction can be divided into various categories (Thompson 1985, 4–6). Retellings, usually for children, adapt and abbreviate the familiar stories from Malory and the romances into modern, often simplified, English. Many of those currently available are reprints, but new versions continue to appear as publishers seek to tap fresh markets—by providing lavish illustrations, as does King Arthur’s Knight Quest (2005) by Andy Dixon, with full-page illustrations by Simone Boni, and by employing language considered suitable for particular age groups, as does Jane Bo Mason’s King Arthur (2005) from Scholastic Press, which is aimed at readers aged 9 to 12. Sometimes the Arthurian stories are set within a frame provided by a figure from the past, such as Merlin or Arthur, who tells his story to modern children. In The Dragon Stone (2001) and A Cup of Kindness (2003) by John Conlee, however, the story is told by Cabal, Arthur’s dog. In Sir Gawain’s Little Green Book (2000), which is intended for adult readers, Mark J. Mitchell allows Gawain considerable freedom to comment upon his feelings and conduct when he tells us about his encounters with both the Green Knight and the Loathly Lady. Realistic Fiction. Realistic fiction introduces the Arthurian story into the modern world without recourse to fantasy, and it is divided into two main groups: mystery thrillers and modern transpositions. The former are rare, but Amy Myers does include descendants of King Arthur in her short story “The Rightful King of

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England” (2002). Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is constructed around a modern quest for the Holy Grail, although it turns out to be the bloodline of Jesus through his offspring with Mary Magdalene (Lacy 2004). Interestingly, the twenty-first century has seen the sudden emergence of transpositions of Arthurian legend in the form of American westerns. James C. Work sets his ongoing Keystone Ranch saga in Wyoming, where Art Pendragon and his wife Gwen, owners of the biggest ranch in the territory, dream of order and justice in the West. Ride South to Purgatory (1999) recasts the English fourteenth-century romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Ride West to Dawn (2001) and Ride to Banshee Cañon (2002) deal with the story of Yvain/Owain; The Dead Ride Alone (2004) is based upon Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shalott”; and Riders of Deathwater Valley (2005) adapts from the twelfth-century poem Lancelot by Chrétien de Troyes the tale of Guenevere’s abduction. In Code of the West (2001), Aaron Latham focuses on the figure of Arthur himself and includes many familiar motifs: he is fostered by Indians, taught by the tribal shaman (Merlin), draws an ax (sword) from an anvil, and acquires a wife and a first hand (Guinevere and Lancelot), whose love is disclosed by a man (Mordred) claiming to be his son by his cousin. His second novel, Cowboy with the Tiffany Gun (2003), is a very loose adaptation of the story of Percival’s quest for the Holy Grail. Although much of the interest in these novels lies in the ingenuity with which they adapt traditional Arthurian material to a new context, both authors are careful to maintain the credibility of the setting. Historical Fiction. As these novels demonstrate, American authors are understandably interested in their own history, but this focus has led them to pay less attention to that of others. As a consequence, historical novels about King Arthur are more likely to be written by authors from Britain or elsewhere in Europe. The two most prolific authors of Arthurian historical fiction in this century are Bernard Cornwell and Jack Whyte. The former, who wrote the Warlord Chronicles (1995–97) and the Grail Quest series (2000–2003), is English, although he now lives part of the time in the United States; the latter, who wrote an Arthurian cycle (1992–2005), was born in Scotland and only emigrated to Canada as an adult. Cornwell’s Grail Quest trilogy follows the adventures of an English archer during the Hundred Years War against France. The search for the Holy Grail is less important, to both the hero and the author, than the campaigns against the French and the Scots, although it forms a useful narrative link for his adventures. Whyte’s first six novels tell the history of the post-Roman colony of Camulod, mainly through the eyes of Merlyn; Uther (2000) revisits and expands upon part of the story from the point of view of Uther, the father of Arthur; in Clothar the Frank (2003, published in the United States as The Lance Thrower, 2004) and in The Eagle (2005), Clothar (Lancelot) brings the sprawling narrative to a conclusion. The novels offer plenty of battle scenes and fast-paced action, but the care with which both authors construct their settings is indicative of their attention to historical research into each period. When American authors do explore Arthurian legend through historical fiction, they are inclined to introduce elements of fantasy into the story. This is the case with Nancy McKenzie’s trilogy: two earlier novels about Guinevere, The Child Queen (1994) and The High Queen (1995), were revised and published as a single volume, Queen of Camelot (2002); Grail Prince (2003) deals with Galahad’s quest for the Grail and Spear; Prince of Dreams (2004) tells the tragic story of the love between Tristan and Essylte. Into what is essentially historical fiction, McKenzie introduces features such as Merlin’s second sight, Galahad’s mystical visions of the Grail and

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Arthur, and the magical love potion that binds Tristan and Essylte. Throughout the trilogy, McKenzie examines the vulnerability of women in a violent and patriarchal society, where those who lack protectors may be beaten and raped, by brutal husbands as well as lustful suitors. Debra A. Kemp presents an even darker picture of the suffering of female slaves in The Firebrand (2003), which describes the savage mistreatment of King Arthur’s daughter at the hands of Morgause and Modred. In A Coalition of Lions (2003) by Elizabeth Wein, however, Arthur’s daughter finds a kindly welcome when she journeys to the African kingdom of Aksum (Ethiopia). Kathleen Cunningham Guler also adds supernatural elements, such as her heroine’s gift of visions, into her ongoing Macsen’s Treasure series (1998–), which is set in the years before Arthur’s reign. In the author’s notes to the second novel, In the Shadow of Dragons (2001), she defends the use of this “bit of mysticism” as part of the beliefs of the age, although she admits, “To some, the visions may represent an element of fantasy” (11). Science Fiction. Although Arthurian legend is, by and large, unsuited to treatment as science fiction (Thompson 1985, 77), it does figure occasionally in two types of stories: those that provide alien origins for some of its elements, and those that involve time travel. Robert Doherty has written Area 51, an action-packed series about the struggle of humanity against predatory aliens. In Area 51: The Grail (2001) and Area 51: Excalibur (2002), it is revealed that the Grail and Excalibur are powerful devices of alien origin; in Area 51: The Truth (2003), Arthur and Mordred are discovered to represent rival alien factions; and Area 51: Legend (2004) follows the lives of the two characters known to later ages as Gawain and Morgana, from their extraterrestrial origins and voyage to Earth, through the fall of Atlantis, down the millennia to the Battle of Camlann. Their longevity is preserved by an alien device that transfers their personalities to new bodies grown from their own DNA. In For King and Country (2002) by Robert Asprin and Linda Evans, the fifth novel in their Time Scout series, a captain in the British special forces follows an Irish Republican terrorist and an Ulster Protestant extremist back in time to the sixth century in order to prevent them disrupting history and changing present conditions. There the three find themselves sharing with the original characters the bodies of Ancelotis (Lancelot), Morgana, and the minstrel Lailoken, respectively. Ancelotis and Morgana form an alliance to help Artorius against the plotting of his half-sister Morguase and her protégé Corianna Nim (Nimue) that culminates at the Battle of Badon. Fantasy. By far the most popular genre for Arthurian fiction is fantasy. That this should prove the case is no surprise given the tenacity of such supernatural elements as Arthur’s sword Excalibur, the Grail, and the love potion that binds Tristan and Isolde; and the magical powers of Merlin, Morgan le Fay, and the Lady of the Lake. Throughout the pages of medieval romance, moreover, lurk giants and dragons, shape-shifters and talking beasts, sorcerers and faery folk from the Other World, waiting to test the mettle of Arthur’s knights as they ride forth from the Round Table in search of adventure. Amid so many works, it is helpful to subdivide the genre further into three categories: mythic, ironic, and heroic. Mythic Fantasy. In mythic fantasy. the primary battle is waged between the forces of good and evil, often represented as light and dark. A striking example of this category is J. Robert King’s trilogy, Mad Merlin (2000), Lancelot du Lethe (2001), and Le Morte d’Avalon (2003), in which the war between their followers mirrors the

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war between the gods, with the Norse gods and the more malevolent older gods of Britain ranged against most of the Celtic gods and nature spirits. Merlin himself is none other than a fallen Jupiter who has lost most of his power. T.A. Barron’s The Lost Years of Merlin (1996–2000), a series for younger readers, also presents a clash between good and evil. The series recounts the untraditional adventures that befall Merlin during his childhood years in the legendary Isle of Fincayra, and in the fifth and concluding novel, The Wings of Merlin (2000), evil is at last vanquished by the sacrifice and love of the Fincayrans, who put their mutual hostilities aside in order to battle the external threat. Merlin’s experiences enable him to develop both the magical powers and wisdom that will serve him later when he meets Arthur. Barron’s trilogy The Great Tree of Avalon (2004–2006) continues the struggle between good and evil in the world of Avalon, but Arthurian figures such as Merlin and the Lady of the Lake make only infrequent appearances. Ironic Fantasy. The high-minded ideals of Arthur and his knights, although admirable, do have their comical side, and when this perception dominates the approach to the material, the fiction falls into the category of ironic fantasy. American humorists have enjoyed deflating the pretensions of the Arthurian aristocracy since Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, and Thomas Berger’s Arthur Rex (1978) was one of the finest Arthurian novels of the last century. In this century, American authors have followed in their predecessors’ footsteps. Esther M. Friesner has written many humorous short stories, and in 2000 she collected several in Up the Wall, including “Articles of Faith.” Here the Grail’s inherent virtue frustrates a demonic plot to steal it, but a later story, “In Days of Old” (2002), offers a scurrilous account of the deception that leads to the Quest for the Holy Grail; in The Follies of Sir Harald (2001), Phyllis Ann Karr explores the humor inherent in the conventions of medieval romance; and in The Squire’s Tales, a series for younger readers, Morris continues to find a rich source of comedy in such romance conventions as love and chivalry. By contrast, it is not Arthurian romance but the attitudes of teenage high-school students that Meg Cabot mocks in Avalon High (2006). Heroic Fantasy. Most Arthurian fantasies belong to this category in which the heroes, as in medieval romance, prove their worth by overcoming various challenges. Sometimes these figures are traditional, whether a major character such as Guinevere or Merlin, or one who is less well known, such as Arthur’s sister Anna or the sister of Gawain. Often, however, the characters are invented by the author to serve as convenient narrators or to experience adventures in their own right. These adventures may occur within Arthur’s court or at a distance, both in space and time. Occasionally, the latter are set before the establishment of Arthur’s realm, preparing for what will happen, but more often they take place later, involving descendants and reincarnations of Arthurian figures, or artifacts such as Excalibur and the Grail. One popular subgenre of heroic fantasy is the romantic novel (Thompson 2004; Romance, 467). Sometimes the story is set in Arthur’s day, as in Christmas in Camelot (2002) by Brenda K. Jernigan and in Sarah Zettel’s In Camelot’s Shadow (2004); sometimes the story is set in the present and features characters who are reincarnations of their Arthurian predecessors, as in Cabot’s ironic fantasy Avalon High. The conventions of the genre follow the Cinderella pattern: the quest of the heroine is “to dodge her father, and if not kill at any rate pretty severely neutralise her mother, and make it possible for her man to get her” (Brewer 1980, 9). Although the father and mother figures may be displaced and their role played by others, their control must be broken and obstacles overcome if the heroine is to find true love

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KING ARTHUR IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Arthurian literature in America is alive and well in the twenty-first century. Some authors are as likely to owe a debt to a role-playing game or a film as they are to a medieval romance; others may have been inspired by John Waterhouse’s nineteenth-century painting of the Lady of Shalott, or by Camelot, the 1960 musical by Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner; and Dan Brown, author of the best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code (2003), makes use of theories about the Holy Grail that were articulated in Holy Blood, Holy Grail (1982), a speculative history by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. Nor has Arthurian literature shown signs of losing its popularity. Indeed the proliferation of new literary genres and subgenres, as well as the advent of electronic media (especially the computer), has spurred creative activity in the field of publishing and in forms such as films and games, including the 2004 movie King Arthur and the continued popularity of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) (Thompson and Lacy 2005, 100).

with the partner of her choice. This pattern does, in fact, underlie virtually all Arthurian fiction that includes romantic love, but in romantic fiction the conventions are more noticeable, sometimes even formulaic. Reception. Arthurian literature in this century continues developments that emerged in the last, including the focus on prose fiction and filling in the gaps in earlier accounts. This entails a fuller description of both the cultural and geographical setting (Thompson 2004; Sense), for although medieval genres like the romance usually paid scant attention to background details, readers of the novel have different expectations. They also expect a fuller and more realistic characterization of both major and minor figures. Servants and peasants must be people with feelings, not a shadowy presence; villains must have motivation; women and children must be both seen and heard. One result is a more critical assessment of the dominant hierarchy of Arthur’s realm, as those excluded from power are given a voice. Another is the projection of modern social values onto figures in the past: women are much more likely to be active rather than passive figures, as the proliferation of warrior queens attests, and although they still welcome worthy partners, they are ready to go out and find them, not quietly accept their parents’ choice; heroes reveal a sensitive as well as an aggressive side, readily deferring to their talented partners; children give witness to neglect or abuse and to its consequences later in life; heroes are flawed, and villains struggle against their darker impulses (Thompson 2002, 97). This may distort history, but it is a pattern that Arthurian literature has adopted throughout the ages, shaping itself to reflect prevailing attitudes and concerns. It is, moreover, the main reason that the legend has continued to appeal to each generation, despite the changes that have transformed the world since its inception. Selected Authors Quests. Another device through which authors extend the range of Arthurian legend is the quest for artifacts, the most famous of which are Excalibur and the Grail. The former appears before it comes into Arthur’s possession in Barron’s Wings of Merlin, Doherty’s Area 51 series, and Valerie Frankel’s “Tea and Company” (2002), in which Merlin promises to return and live with Niniane under her lake if she will give Arthur the sword and scabbard. In “Metal and a Man of Good Heart” (2002),

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Lee Martindale describes the forging of both the sacred sword and chalice during the Roman era. In The Anvil Stone (2006), Kathleen Cunningham Guler makes the sword one of the five ceremonial symbols used by the high kings of Britain and sets the quest to find it before the birth of Arthur. The Grail has yielded even more fiction (Thompson 2000; Lupack 2002), most famously perhaps Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. As an artifact rather than a bloodline, however, the Grail has been sought in many places throughout the ages: in the Middle East during the Crusades in Stephen R. Lawhead’s The Mystic Rose (2001); in France and England during the Hundred Years War in Cornwell’s Grail Quest series; and in the American West during the nineteenth century in “Me and Galahad” by Resnick and Gormley. Sometimes the quest can be for a place rather than an object. Avalon is sought not only in short poems, in which it is conceived as an ideal place removed from the stress of a busy world, but also in fiction. In Priestess of Avalon (2001) by Marion Zimmer Bradley and Diana L. Paxson, the protagonist trains in Avalon as a priestess long before Arthur’s day; in “The Heart of the Hill” (2001) by the same two authors, Morgaine recalls an episode in her early training there; and in “Avalonia” (2001) by Kristen Britain, an American tourist’s visit to Glastonbury inspires her own work as a biologist at a wildlife refuge in a modern Avalon. Barron, meanwhile, has completed Great Tree of Avalon (2004–2006), another fantasy trilogy for younger readers set in the world of Avalon. Timeslip Fiction. Since Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, authors, like filmmakers, have played with the idea of sending a character from the present back to Arthur’s day. Asprin and Evans accomplished the journey by means of a mechanical device, but more often supernatural powers are invoked. In “A Connecticut Welshman in Artognov’s Court” (2001) by Peter T. Garratt, a young American physicist of Welsh descent travels back to Arthur’s time and tries to alter history by helping fight the Saxons; Angelica Harris sends an American woman and her family to the Arthurian past in The Quest for Excalibur (2001) and Excalibur and the Holy Grail (2002); in Osborne’s Magic Tree House series, Morgan le Fay and Merlin use their magic to send two children on exciting learning adventures in different places and ages, including Arthur’s Camelot in Christmas in Camelot (2001). Sometimes the journey is goes forward in time, as characters from the past travel to the future. In Charmed: The Legacy of Merlin (2001) by Eloise Flood, a novel based on the television series, modern druids bring Merlin’s son into the twenty-first century. More often, however, characters from the Arthurian past appear in modern times because they are either magically long-lived or else reincarnations. Magical powers preserve Morgan le Fay and Merlin (who lives backwards in time) in Peter David’s Knight Life (2002) and its sequel One Knight Only (2003); in a series of short stories, including “The Final Score” (2000), which is set at a medieval fair in Oklahoma, Bradley H. Sinor transforms Lancelot into a vampire who does not age (the vampire from whom he contracted the condition was, we are told in an earlier story, none other than Guinevere herself). Reincarnation is the most common device for making characters from the past available to a later era. In David’s two books, the other Arthurian characters, who include Arthur and Guinevere, Lancelot and Percival, are all reincarnations; as part of the cycle of their eternal return, several Arthurian figures appear in Renee Bennett’s “The Fey” (2000); a modern Guinevere is the central figure in Andre Norton’s “Ravenmere” (2001); in Trevor Denyer’s “Glastonbury” (2000), Joseph

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of Arimathea is reincarnated to prepare for the return of the king; and in “Artie’s Angels” (2001) by Catherine Wells, Arthur and Morgan, reborn into a postapocalyptic future, start a bicycle gang dedicated to protecting their community. Fiction for Younger Readers. One of the most entertaining books that make use of Arthurian reincarnations is Cabot’s Avalon High, which is written for a teenage audience, and a large proportion of Arthurian fiction is, in fact, directed at younger readers: illustrated retellings for the youngest; stories, both old and new, in simplified language for early readers; and exciting adventures for the adolescent market. The presence of young protagonists, the often explicit effort to instruct readers about conditions in the past and right conduct in any age, and the avoidance of difficult issues such as incest, are some of the traits of this material, which has been helpfully surveyed in Adapting the Arthurian Legends for Children (Lupack 2004). Because they focus on the childhood years of the characters, these books have filled in an area neglected in medieval accounts, which jump from birth to early adulthood. Bibliography Asprin, Robert, and Evans, Linda. For King and Country. Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2002. Barron, T.A. The Wings of Merlin. New York: Philomel Books, 2000. Brewer, Derek. Symbolic Stories: Traditional Narratives of the Family Drama in English Literature. London: Brewer, 1980. Brewer, Elisabeth. The Figure of Guenevere in Modern Drama and Fiction. In Arturus Rex: Acta Conventus Lovaniensis 1987. Willy Van Hoecke, Gilbert Tournoy, and Werner Verbeke, eds. Leuven: University Press, 1991. Reprinted in Arthurian Women: A Casebook. Thelma S. Fenster, ed. New York: Garland, 1996. Brown, Dan. The Da Vinci Code. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Cabot, Meg. Avalon High. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Doherty, Robert. Area 51: Legend. New York: Bantam Dell, 2004. Goodrich, Peter H. Merlin in the Twenty-First Century. In New Directions in Arthurian Studies. Alan Lupack,ed. Cambridge: Brewer, 2002; 149–162. Gormley, Adrienne, and Resnick, Mike. “Me and Galahad.” Out of Avalon. Jennifer Roberson and Mark H. Greenberg, eds. New York: ROC, 2001; 209–219. Guler, Kathleen Cunningham. In the Shadow of Dragons. Steamboat Springs, CO: Bardsong, 2001. King, J. Robert. Le Morte d’Avalon. New York: St. Martins, 2004. Lacy, Norris J., et al., eds. The New Arthurian Encyclopedia. New York: Garland, 1996. ———. The Da Vinci Code: Dan Brown and the Grail That Never Was. Arthuriana 14.3 (2004): 81–93. ———, and Raymond H. Thompson, eds. Arthurian Literature, Art, and Film, 1995–1999. In Arthurian Literature XVIII. Keith Busby, ed. Cambridge: Brewer, 2001. Latham, Aaron. Code of the West. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001. ———. Cowboy with the Tiffany Gun. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003. Lupack, Alan. “A Very Secondary Position”: Perceval in Modern English and American Literature. In Perceval/Parzival: A Casebook. Arthur Groos and Norris J. Lacy, eds. New York: Routledge, 2002. Lupack, Barbara, ed. Adapting the Arthurian Legends for Children: Essays on Arthurian Juvenilia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Maitland, Sara. Foreplay. In On Becoming a Fairy Godmother. London: Maia, 2003. Malory, Thomas. Le Morte d’Arthur. London: Cassell Illustrated, 2003. McKenzie, Nancy. Grail Prince. New York: Ballantine, 2003. Thompson, Raymond H. The Return from Avalon: A Study of the Arthurian Legend in Modern Fiction. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985.

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ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE ———. The First and Last Love: Morgan le Fay and Arthur. In The Arthurian Revival. Debra Mancoff, ed. New York: Garland, 1992. ———. The Grail in Modern Fiction: Sacred Symbol in a Secular Age. In The Grail: A Casebook. Dhira B. Mahoney, ed. New York: Garland, 2000. ———. Darkness over Camelot: Enemies of the Arthurian Dream. In New Directions in Arthurian Studies. Alan Lupack, ed. Cambridge: Brewer, 2002. ———. The Sense of Place in Arthurian Fiction for Younger Readers. In Adapting the Arthurian Legends for Children: Essays on Arthurian Juvenilia. Barbara Lupack, ed. New York: Palgrave, 2004. ———. Twentieth-Century Arthurian Romance. In A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary. Corinne Saunders, ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. ———. Gawain in Post-Medieval English Literature. In Gawain: A Casebook. Raymond H. Thompson and Keith Busby, eds. New York: Routledge, 2006. ———, and Norris J. Lacy, eds. The Arthurian Legend in Literature, Popular Culture, and the Performing Arts, 1999–2004. In Arthurian Literature XXII. Keith Busby and Roger Dalrymple, eds. Cambridge: Brewer, 2005. Mckenzie, Nancy. Queen of Camelot. New York: Ballantine, 2002. ———. Grail Prince. New York: Del Ray, 2003. Mitchell, Mark J. Sir Gawain’s Little Green Book. Philadelphia, PA: Xlibris, 2000. Osborne, Mary Pope. Christmas in Camelot. New York: Random House, 2001. Tarr, Judith. Kingdom of the Grail. New York: ROC, 2000. Whyte, Jack. The Eagle. New York: Forge, 2007. Work, James C. Ride South to Purgatory. Unity, ME: Five Star, 1999. Zettel, Sarah. In Camelot’s Shadow. New York: Luna, 2004.

Further Reading Harty, Kevin J., ed. Cinema Arthuriana: Twenty Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002; Lupack, Alan C. “Merlin as New-World Wizard.” In Merlin: A Casebook. Peter H. Goodrich and Raymond H. Thompson, eds. New York: Routledge, 2003, pp. 230–249; Lupack, Alan, and Barbara Tepa Lupack. King Arthur in America. Cambridge: Brewer, 1999; Thompson, Raymond H. “The Enchanter Awakes: Merlin in Modern Fiction.” In Merlin: A Casebook. Peter H. Goodrich and Raymond H. Thompson, eds., pp. 250–262; Thompson, Raymond H. “Rationalizing the Irrational: Merlin and His Prophecies in the Modern Historical Novel.” Arthuriana 10.1 (Spring 2000); 116–126.

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ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE Definition. Asian American literature refers to writings in English by Americans with cultural and ethnic origins in East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. The term Asian American was coined during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. During that movement, Asian ethnic community activists and college students strove to unify isolated Asian ethnicities into a political and cultural solidarity for racial equality and social justice in the United States. The term “implies that there can be a communal consciousness and a unique culture that is neither Asian nor American, but Asian American” (Wei 1993, 1). Emerging as a distinctive genre in the wake of the civil rights movement, Asian American literature is primarily defined as “published creative writings in English by Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Filipino descent” (Kim 1982, xi). However, like its modifier “Asian American,” which initially designated national origins in such East Asian countries as China, Japan, and Korea but has now been widely used to accommodate other Asian ethnic groups from South and Southeast Asian countries, Asian American

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literature has “broadened to include writings by Americans of Bangladeshi, Burmese, Cambodian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Indonesian, Laotian, Nepali, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Thai, and Vietnamese descent” (Cheung 1997, 3). This expansion is in response to the development of Asian American communities as a result of the influx of immigrants from those countries in the past three decades or so. In addition to representing multicultural Americans’ lives, especially those of the underrepresented, Asian American writers, from their earliest manifestations to contemporary expressions, have inevitably confronted their cultural origins and presented perspectives that are foreign to the American mainstream. Yet, writing about different racial memories and ethnic experiences of Asian immigrants as well as their second, third, or even fourth and fifth generations in the United States should be considered part of American literature, which is, or should be, multifaceted and is supposed to reflect the pluralistic American society. Indeed, Asian American literature has battled to be recognized as part of American literary tradition. Maxine Hong Kingston, one of the most celebrated Asian American writers, for example, once asserted a strong resistance to being considered as writing stories of the “other”: Actually I think that my books are much more American than they are Chinese. I felt that I was building, creating myself and these people as American people. . . . Even though they have strange Chinese memories, they are American people. Also, I am creating part of American literature, and I was aware of doing that, of adding to American literature. The critics haven’t recognized my work enough as another tradition of American literature. (qtd. in Rabinowitz 1987, 182)

A branch of American literature now, Asian American literature is taught in American educational institutes and studied in scholarships as such. Moreover, recently the rubric of Asian American literature has actually stretched to denote writings in English by Asian diasporic residents in North America, including Canada (Ty and Goellnicht 2004, 2) and Hawaii (Lim and Ling1992, 4). For the sake of clarity, however, discussion of Asian American literature in this chapter is basically confined to writings in English about existential experiences in the United States by Americans with cultural and ethnic origins in East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, and in accordance with current practice in the field, writings exclusively on non-American experiences by Asian Americans, such as Ha Jin and Nien Cheng, are not included. History. Although defined in the 1960s, the origin of Asian American literature can be traced to the turn of the twentieth century. Edith Maude Eaton, a Eurasian also known as Sui Sin Far, is generally regarded as the first Asian American writer. Writing about Chinese American lives in a social context of intense Sinophobia in the early twentieth century, Eaton’s autobiographical and fictional writings manifested racial oppression in her contemporary American society. Moreover, the issue of ethnic identity, an issue frequently recurring throughout Asian American literature, was embedded unavoidably in her writing. The fiercely racist environment presented in Eaton’s works and those of other early Asian American writers, such as Younghill Kang, a Korean American, continued to appear in mid-century Asian American writings when the demographics and numbers of Asian Americans were

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limited due to restriction policies of the United States government on immigration (Lawrence and Cheung 2005, 15). Two representative writers of this period are Carlos Bulosan, a Filipino American, and John Okada, a Japanese American. Both lived and wrote in the period of the Great Depression through World War II and the Cold War, and they attempted to confront American society through their oft-gendered exploration of identity and depiction of psychological wounds of racial violence and discrimination. Along with the emergence of an Asian American consciousness during the 1960s and an influx of immigrants from the Philippines, China, Korea, and India in the post-1960s due to the relaxation of immigration laws (Lowe 1996, 7), the 1960s and 1970s witnessed a distinct and prolific development of Asian American literature. Louis Chu’s 1961 novel, Eat a Bowl of Tea, is an authentic portrayal of the Chinatown culture in which he grew up. In the 1970s, a few distinctive collections of Asian American creative writings were published, such as Asian-American Authors (1972), edited by Kai-yu Hsu and Helen Palubinskas, which comprises works by two generations of Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino American writers, and Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers (1974), edited by Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong, a collection of works by American-born Asian Americans. However, other works reflected the Asian American experience of the time, such as Frank Chin’s play entitled The Chickencoop Chinaman (1972) and Maxine Hong Kingston’s influential work, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976). In depicting lives of their contemporary Asian Americans who still “share common experiences of immigration, discrimination, acculturation, conflict, and generational strains,” and whose “originating cultures set then apart from the dominant Euro-American ones” (Lim and Ling 1992, 4), writings by these Asian American writers either interrogate or seek answers to problems of ethnicity. To a great extent, particular issues such as ethnic or cultural identities, which Amy Ling theorizes as “between worlds,” are strongly and sensitively represented by these writers (Ling 1990, v). Moreover, in reifying this identity, most authors and their characters adopted strategies of resistance rather than accommodation. Landmarks of Asian American Literature. Following are principal works by influential Asian American writers whose works were published before the 1980s. Edith Eaton’s “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” (1909). Edith Maude Eaton (1865–1914) was born in England to an English father and a Chinese mother. She traveled widely first with her family, who moved in 1872 from England to New York then to Montreal, and later by herself mainly between Canada and many cities in the United States. Published under the pen name Sui Sin Far (meaning “Chinese lily”), Edith Eaton’s literary output was small. Yet of her fictional and biographical works, the 1909 autobiography titled “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” has drawn critical attention. In this seven-or-so-paged autobiographical essay that chronicled her experiences from age four to forty, Eaton provided the reader with sincere and straightforward sketches of her life, which included experiences with racist bigotry and prejudice in a hostile social environment. From her childhood, Eaton frequently involved herself in direct confrontation of racism. The word “battle” is often used in the autobiographical essay, as Amy Ling notes, and is “initially in a literal sense and later figuratively” (Ling 1990, 35): “They pull my hair, they tear my clothes, they scratch my face, and all but lame my brother; but the white blood in our veins

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fights valiantly for the Chinese half of us” (qtd. in Ling 1990, 35). Although often suffering pain as a Eurasian woman who was neither Chinese nor Caucasian and who would try to be “‘invisible’ and attempt to ‘pass,’” or preferably be mistaken, as a lady of the more fortunate Japanese (White-Parks 1995, 81; 39), Eaton took her mixed heritage and diverse readership as advantages. She strongly sensed the middle space between her Europeanness and Chineseness, no matter how insignificant it might be for others, and made efforts to connect the two by building a bridge over it. Furthermore, in her autobiographical writing Eaton embraced her Chinese heritage and established an ethnic consciousness and pride. The Chinese, as she wrote in the essay, were grateful for her efforts in asserting and defending her Chinese ethnicity in her writing: “My heart leaps for joy when I read one day an article signed by a New York Chinese in which he declares ‘The Chinese in America owe an everlasting debt of gratitude to Sui Sin Far for the bold stand she has taken in their defense’” (qtd. in Ling 1990, 32). Writing half a century before distinctive Asian American writers such as Louis Chu and Maxine Hong Kingston, Eaton offered an early voice to Asian American literature—in doing so, she was sometimes joined by her younger sister Winnifred Eaton (1875–1955), who, writing under a Japanese pseudonym Onoto Watanna, was a very successful writer of popular stories with Asian themes. Younghill Kang’s The Grass Roof (1931) and East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee (1937). Younghill Kang (1903–1972) received his early education in Chinese classics in his hometown of Song-Dune-Chi in Korea and youth education in modern science and Western culture in Japan. At the age of eighteen he immigrated to North America and thereafter completed his English education with a B.S. from Boston University and an M.A. from Harvard. Kang’s major works, The Grass Roof and East Goes West, are regarded by critics as autobiographical novels. Told in the voice of a Korean young intellectual Chung-pa Han, the two novels sequentially portray the narrator-author’s quest for Western civilization in America. As a pioneer Korean writer who wrote in English and represented Korea and early Korean Americans in these novels, Kang is regarded as the founder of Korean American literature. The Grass Roof, a recollection in nostalgia, tells of Chung-pa Han’s origin in Korea, his upbringing in a Korean village, and extended stories of the Han clan. Set entirely in Korea with memorized and fictionalized exotic events and people, the autobiographical novel attracted a great deal of critical attention. However, it served mainly “as a necessary psychological bridge to East Goes West, the record of his experience in America and Canada as a displaced person” (Yun 1999, 172). It is thus East Goes West that deserves more attention in terms of Kang’s literary reflections of early Asian immigrants in America. East Goes West narrates Chung-pa Han’s life, as well as the lives of a few other Korean Americans, in the urban United States during the 1920s and 1930s, starting from the protagonist’s arrival in the United States in 1921, three years before the 1924 anti-Asian Immigration Act. Although written in an oft-humorous style and cautiously, the novel presents a critical portrayal of the Korean intellectuals who are rejected by arrogant and ignorant Americans, and who experience brutality, loneliness, and even hunger. On their path to “enter into the economic life of Americans,” or “to the West to find a new beauty, a new life” (Kang 1937, 277; 178), the protagonist and the other major characters only encounter a complete shutout from American social and intellectual life by societal prejudice and discrimination. Even

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so, Chung-pa Han does not seem to give up his seeking the American Dream. KingKok Cheung remarks: East Goes West ends with Han’s dream of being locked in a dark cellar with some blacks, as torch-bearing white men are about to set them all on fire. His only hope is a Buddhist interpretation of the dream: that he will be reincarnated to a better life. (Cheung 1997, 159–160)

Instead of taking the reader on an immigrant’s journey from penniless foreigner to successful citizen, The Grass Roof and East Goes West interrogate U.S. history and American nationalist narratives of progress, equality, assimilation, and upward mobility. If the first novel “is a justification of Han’s departure from Korea” (Kim 1982, 34), the second novel, considered to be more mature in style and highly developed in content, offers American readers access to Korean immigrants’ endless struggles for inclusion and assimilation during the 1920s and 1930s. Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart: A Personal History (1946). The Filipino American writer Carlos Bulosan (1911–1956) was born in a small village in the Philippine Islands. He immigrated to the United States in 1930, soon after California had set up restrictions on the flood of East Asian immigrants, and spent most of his immigrant life on the West Coast among Filipino field and cannery workers before he died of poverty and illness. Compared to Younghill Kang who spoke basically for himself and a small elite group of individuals, Bulosan wrote about the poor and the oppressed Asian Americans with consciousness: “What impelled me to write? The answer is—my grand dream of equality among men and freedom for all. To give literate voice to the voiceless one hundred thousand Filipinos in the United States, Hawaii, and Alaska” (Bulosan 1995, 216). His many published works of prose and poetry reflected the Depression and Filipino immigrants’ frustrated and disappointed feelings, their experiences of racism and economic inequality in American society, and their painful memories of the homeland, but his most famous work is the fictionalized recounting of Bulosan’s personal history in the United States titled America Is in the Heart: A Personal History. Considered by critics as “a composite portrait of the Filipino American community, a social document from the point of view of a participant in that experience” (Kim 1982, 48), American Is in the Heart narrates the life story of a male Filipino immigrant variably called Carlos, Carl, or Allos. For his American Dream, the narrator of the book comes to the United States from his hometown of Binalonan. Like the author himself, the narrator works as both a migrant worker in the fields of California and a cannery worker in Alaska and Seattle, and together with many other Filipino workers, he encounters filthy working conditions and violent racism. Moving among drunks and criminals in different episodes, the narrator witnesses poverty, fear, assaults, and merciless murders, experiencing the ugly side of his American Dream. In Bulosan’s opinion, the social problems that bedeviled Filipino Americans did not come out of man’s nature, rather, they were caused by racial oppression and economic exploitation. In relation to this oppression and exploitation, Bulosan portrays Carlos and his Filipino American folks as “men of subordinate masculinities,” who were denied politically and materialistically “the roles, privileges, and accomplishments of hegemonic masculinity” in American society (Nguyen 2002, 67). Even

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though the narrator expresses his disappointment and disillusionment and conveys a confrontational critique of the inequality of American society, he is still of the conviction that America has the potential for man’s ideals and democracy: My faith in America . . . was something that had grown out of my defeats and successes, something shaped by my struggles for a place in this vast land . . . something that grew out of the sacrifices and loneliness of my friends, of my brothers in America and my family in the Philippines—something that grew out of our desire to know America, and to become a part of her great tradition, and to contribute something toward her final fulfillment. (Bulosan 1973, 327)

John Okada’s No-No Boy, a Novel (1957). John Okada (1923–1971) was born to Japanese immigrant parents in Seattle, Washington. After receiving a B.A. in English and library science from the University of Washington, he went to Columbia University, where he graduated with an MA in English. Like many other Japanese Americans, Okada and his family were evacuated and interned at Minidoka of Idaho during the Second World War. Yet, he served in the U.S. Air Force and was discharged in 1946. As Okada’s only published work, No-No Boy is about confusion, loss, and the quest for self-identity. It starts with Ichiro Yamada, the protagonist, returning to the Japanese American community in Seattle at the end of World War II from a prison term at McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary in Washington for refusing to join the armed forces. Caught up in a war involving the country of his citizenship, the United States, and the country of his ancestry, Japan, Ichiro lost his identity; after two years in prison, he is still uncertain about why he answered “No-s” to the two key questions on the loyalty oath known as “War Relocation Authority Form 126 Rev.”: Question No. 27: Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty whenever ordered? Question No. 28: Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and foreswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, to any other foreign government, power or organization? (qtd. in Fujita 1992, 240)

Yet, being labeled a “no-no boy,” isolated from his ethnic community, and severely excluded from the country he loves, he sees his past actions as a fatal judgmental lapse and wishes to be redeemed from them. On his two-week journey of “redemption,” in which the fictional story takes place, Ichiro compares himself to other Japanese Americans he knows and examines his relationships with his family. For instance, tracing his childhood within the family headed by a mother with an “unreckoning force” (Okada 1979, 20) helps Ichiro find the formation of his being a no-no boy: “There was a time when I was your son. There was a time. . . . You used to smile a mother’s smile and tell me stories. . . . [W]e were Japanese with Japanese feelings and Japanese pride and Japanese thoughts” (Okada 1979, 15). Identifying with his mother, who claimed to be loyal to the Japanese emperor and called those Japanese Americans enlisting in the U.S. military “traitors,” Ichiro acted according to her will and refused the draft. Like Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, Okada’s novel also tackles the issue of “subordinate” masculinities in American society; for Ichiro, being a middleclass man with access to commodities would signify the American “dominant”

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masculinity. Moreover, written during the Cold War, No-No Boy’s thematic disloyalty and insecurity are connected by critics to the domestic Cold War environment of the country: “In No-No Boy, two modes of disloyalty are in operation: the original disloyalty of the no-no boy and the invisible, overarching presence of the communists and other ‘un-American’ types who presumably infested America at the time of No-No Boy’s writing and publication” (Nguyen 2002, 65). Foreshadowing the lesson many Americans learned during the McCarthy era, Ichiro’s “plight as a suspected traitor and the consequences he suffers of exclusion, isolation, imprisonment, paranoia, and stigmatization . . . can also be read as an implicit commentary on the domestic Cold War” (Nguyen 2002, 74). No-No Boy did not receive serious attention during the author’s lifetime. But the novel was revived in 1976 by the Combined Asian American Resources Project in Seattle and then republished by the University of Washington Press in 1979. Within the Japanese American public the novel was rejected because of its topic of the internment camps, which most Japanese Americans wanted to forget, and because of its representation of Japanese Americans as “tormented, uncertain, and incapacitated by self-hatred” and “violently distorted by racism” (Kim 1982, 156). Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961). Louis Chu (1915–1970) was born in China. In 1924, the year when the National Origins Law banned all subsequent immigration from Asia, he immigrated to the United States with his parents. He graduated from Upsala College in New Jersey with a B.A. in English and sociology and then worked in New York City’s Department of Welfare before enlisting for military service in which he was dispatched to China for a year in 1945. After the war, working as the director of a social center, serving as executive secretary for an association in New York’s Chinatown, and hosting a radio program called “Chinese Festival,” Chu witnessed many Chinese Americans’ sociopolitical and economic dislocations and displacements, which he inevitably used as rich sources for his only book, the novel Eat a Bowl of Tea. From an insider’s perspective, Eat a Bowl of Tea approaches the issue of ethnicity through depiction of the racial, patriarchal, and familial tensions experienced by a father, Wang Wah Guy, and his son, Wang Ben Loy, in New York’s Chinatown. Wang Wah Guy is made a Chinatown bachelor by the 1924 National Origins Law that prohibits the entry of Chinese wives into the United States, and he is too old to change his bachelor lifestyle when those immigration restrictions are lifted in 1943. His son Ben Loy, following the footprints of many Chinese bachelors in the late 1940s, has to go back to China to find a wife. After returning to New York City, Ben Loy works long hours at a restaurant, leaving his bride Mei Oi at home alone, leading to Ben Loy’s impotence and Mei Oi’s adultery. Their marriage is in danger; and this damaged relationship critically reflects the problematic “bachelor society” created by restrictive immigration policies. Although set in New York’s Chinatown in 1947, the novel represents the social and economic marginalization of the Chinese in the United States in the larger context of sociopolitical problems, including the consequence of nineteenth-century anti-miscegenation laws and the impact of McCarthyism. Jinqi Ling pointed out the following: As a university-trained sociologist working for government welfare agencies, Chu could not have failed to notice bureaucratic indifference toward Chinatown’s continued marginal existence both before and during the cold war. And certainly as a

ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE member of New York’s Chinatown community in the 1950s and 1960s, he could not have been unaffected by the consequences of the relentless anticommunist campaigns, the widespread distrust of people of Chinese origin or descent. (Ling 1998, 57)

In depicting Chinese bachelors’ poverty, isolation, and struggle in New York’s Chinatown as an ethnic community, Chu chose a spare, realistic style. The novel’s explicit sexuality and frankness about sexual problems, such as impotence and prostitution, are unusual for its theme and era. Yet perhaps because of this, and because of its unlikeness of “rags-to-riches prototype in many immigrant memoirs” (Hsiao 1992, 158), the novel unfolds before the reader an authentic portrayal of Chinatown culture in which male Chinese American immigrants, and especially their sons, are frustrated with the confines of patriarchal tradition, unfulfilling marriages and relationships, and racism. The novel was not seriously reviewed by major American newspapers and magazines after its publication, probably due to the literary Eurocentric bias then. However, the advent of new Asian American literary sensibilities and consciousness in the late 1960s and 1970s reclaimed the importance of the novel. The novel was also adapted into a movie in 1989 by the Asian American film director Wayne Wang. Frank Chin’s The Chickencoop Chinaman (1972). Frank Chin was born in Berkeley, California, in 1940 to a Chinese immigrant father and a fourth-generation Chinese American mother. While attending the University of California at Berkeley, Chin began publishing as a contributor to the University of California, Berkeley’s humor magazine, the California Pelican. From 1959 to 1960 he served as the associate editor for the magazine and as its editor later in 1960. Some of Chin’s literary characters, as well as his upsettingly humorous style and singular ethnic sensibility, can be traced back to his early short writings published in the magazine. Appearing Off Broadway at the American Place Theatre in 1972, Chin’s first play Chickencoop Chinaman manifested the identity crisis in Asian American masculinity and evoked an authorial gender politics. The plot of the play revolves around a Chinese American filmmaker named Tam Lum. Struggling with the historical and cultural falsification and distortion of Asian male imagery in America, the protagonist undergoes a search for a metaphorical replacement of his absent, “emasculated” father who, according to Tam Lum himself, was “an old dishwasher,” wearing his underpants in the bath due to his fear of the peek through the keyhole by those “old toothless goofy white ladies” (Chin 1981, 16; 17). Disdainful of his own father, Tam rallies several other father figures, including Ovaltine Jack Dancer, a professional boxer, and Charley Popcorn, a black fatherlike trainer of boxers, who gives a different version of Tam’s father as a lover of boxing with a fierce sense of dignity. Mainly through humor, deliberate self-irony, voices of other ethnic males, such as the black boxing trainer, wordplay, and presentation of interethnic and intergenerational conflicts, Chin interrogates the historical and cultural consequences of the “emasculation” of the Chinese American father and foregrounds an ethnic masculinity that he would ultimately call “Chinaman.” In empowering the masculine image of the Asian American man, Chin situates Tam’s “authentic” ethnic identity in languages of synthesis and hybridity: I am the natural born ragmouth speaking the motherless bloody tongue. No real language of my own to make sense with, so out comes everybody else’s trash that don’t conceive. . . . I am a Chinaman! A miracle synthetic! Drip dry and machine washable. . . .

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ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE I speak nothing but the mother tongues bein’ born to none of my own, I talk the talk of orphans. (Chin 1981, 7–8)

Thus, the play acknowledges the multifaceted identities of Asian Americans and their synthetic and hybrid cultural and genealogical inheritances. Tam’s “Chinaman” has a history of myth, theft, Sierra railroad, and Oakland Chinatown. The play concludes with Tam’s monologue on the issue of language, a recurring focus of the play: just as the Asian American heroic tradition is invisible, the Asian American man lacks a proper cultural expression. “For Chin,” as Jinqi Ling notes, the crisis in masculinity is bound up not only with the Asian American man’s socially inflicted “emasculation” but also with the crisis in language facing the artist; his ultimate hero therefore becomes not only the idolized ancestral Chinese American male . . . but also the emerging Asian American artist, who must not only envision and connect with an Asian American heroic tradition but also fight to make his voice effective in the present. (Ling 1997, 318)

Frank Chin emerged on the Asian American literary scene in the early 1970s and, as reflected in the mixed responses to the tone of The Chickencoop Chinaman and its challenges to ethnic minority writers, has remained a prominent and contentious figure in contemporary Asian American literature and Asian American literary studies. On the one hand, his resistance to the externally imposed image of Asian American men and his construction of Asian American male subjectivity have significantly contributed to the development of Asian American literature and the field of ethnic literary studies. On the other, as critics have pointed out, his literary formation of Asian American cultural identity, which is based on American birth and effectively neglects women, “conceals rather than accentuates the emerging multiple agendas and the changing ethnic composition of the Asian American communities” (Ling 1997, 319). Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976). Born in Stockton, California, in 1940 to first-generation Chinese immigrant parents, Kingston started showing her talents in writing by the time she attended high school. While majoring in English at UC Berkeley, she wrote for the university newspaper. She graduated from UC Berkeley in 1962 with a B.A. in English and earned her teacher’s certificate from the same university in 1965. Together with her husband, fellow Berkley graduate and stage actor Earll Kingston, Kingston was active in anti-Vietnam War movements and efforts protecting freedom of speech during the 1960s. In 1976, right after it was published, The Woman Warrior became an immediate popular and critical success—it was a long-standing bestseller for paperbacks until 1989 and won Kingston the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction in 1976. The book is catalogued as an autobiography, but it is actually a mixture of personal and communal facts, elements of fantasy and mythology, newly created fiction, as well as folktales and familial history. The Woman Warrior is about the life of a young Chinese American girl who lives between two different cultures, between reality and fantasy, and in face of racial and sexual prejudices in America. Kingston fantasizes of becoming Fa Mu Lan (Hua Mulan), the fearless, celebrated Chinese legendary warrior woman who, in man’s armor, avenges her father and brother by attacking an evil baron and beheading the emperor. Besides this fantasized legendary swordswoman who empowers the author

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spiritually, Kingston also identifies herself intellectually and more realistically with another powerful ancient woman Ts’ai Yen (Cai Yan), a Chinese princess who was kidnapped by northern barbarians but expressed her lonely, sad feelings through self-created Chinese songs with the barbarians’ reed pipes. Revolving around her family stories and oral histories, Kingston creates an autobiographical text that crosses boundaries of genres to simultaneously incorporate myths and fictionalizations, weaving and meshing undistinguished characters and events: “Night after night my mother would talk-story until we fell asleep. I couldn’t tell where the stories left off and the dream began, her voice the voice of the heroines in my sleep. . . . At last I saw that I too had been in the presence of great power, my mother talking-story” (Kingston 1976, 20). This unconventional style establishes her intent to probe the Asian American identity effectively and raise questions about various cultural definitions. Metaphorically subverting the socially constructed stereotypical identity of Chinese Americans, for example, Kingston draws a similarity between herself and the Chinese legendary warrior woman: The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar. May my people understand the resemblance soon so that I can return to them. What we have in common are the words at our backs. The idioms for revenge are “report a crime” and “report to five families.” The reporting is the vengeance—not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words. And I have so many words—“chink” words and “gook” words too—that they do not fit on my skin. (Kingston 1976, 53)

Like the legendary warrior woman, who refused to act in accordance with her appointed gender role and gained respect from her family and community by avenging the wrong-doing against them, Kingston deconstructs and subverts the racial, ethnic, and gender definitions by voicing loud her opposing point of view about the stereotypical images and perceptions of Chinese Americans. Kingston’s creative amalgamation, on the one hand, has become the benchmark against which Asian American writings are measured: The Woman Warrior remained the first text to both enter the arena of national culture and arrest American public imagination. Its appeal to the shared category of gender produced a heterogeneous readership beyond ethnicity; its postmodern play of the folk fanned commercial interest in the future publication of Asian American texts; and its extensive review and study by critics of legitimate cultural affiliations also enabled the scholarly excavation and preservation of Asian American literary tradition. (Li 1998, 44)

On the other hand, it has problematized the generic boundary between fiction and nonfiction, as well as the legitimate representation of Asian American culture and community. Nevertheless, the book made Kingston the most studied Asian American writer of the twentieth century, as evidenced by the MLA’s 1991 publication of Approaches to Teaching Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. After The Woman Warrior, Kingston produced two other important, award-winning texts, China Men (1980), which won the American Book Award, and the John Dos Passos Prize-winning Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989). Trends and Themes. Correspondingly, apart from literature by writers with initially designated national origins such as China, Japan, and Korea, the rubric of Asian American literature has broadened to bring out writings by authors of Southeast

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Asian descent, such as the Vietnamese American writer Le Ly Hayslip, and South Asian descent, such as the Indian-born Chitra Divakaruni. Moreover, because veteran writers; younger American-born authors, such as Chang-rae Lee; and writers from the recent immigrant influx have all been making their imprints on the contemporary Asian American cultural milieu, it has become more problematic to distinguish the recently arrived Asian immigrants from those native-born Americans of Asian origins. This indistinctness has challenged the constructions of Asian and American, and in part has conceptually complicated the Asian American identity and identification. As Elaine Kim notes in her 1992 forward to Reading the Literatures of Asian America: As the world has changed, so have our conceptions of Asian American identity. The lines between Asian and Asian American, so important in identity formation in earlier times, are increasingly been blurred. . . . The notion of either as monolithic and homogeneous dissolves when placed against the multiplicitous identities and experiences of contemporary Asian Americans. (Lim and Ling 1992, xiii)

As part of post-modernist American literature, which is characterized with conflict and contradiction, contemporary Asian American literature has assumed various attitudes and perspectives toward issues regarding the immigrant experience in America, such as assimilation, ethnicity, and multiculturalism. On the one hand, Asian American texts, such as those by Hisaye Yamamoto and Amy Tan, continue to retain or build a distinct ethnic or cultural identity both by focusing on gender roles and family relations, as well as through a discourse that resists and disrupts the lingering marginalization of minority ethnics by the mainstream. On the other hand, many Asian American writers with different ethnic and cultural backgrounds either approach issues of ethnicity in different tones and shifted narratives, such as Jessica Hagedorn and David Henry Hwang, or espouse to be accepted as Americans, such as Gish Jen, and no longer see Asian American identities simply as orbiting around vacillation between Asian and American or conflict between the core and the peripheral, but as more universal human issues. Subjectivities in writings by the latter camp of Asian American writers, thus, “are forged upon numerous interstices involving variables such as economic and social status, religious affiliation, physical ability, gender and sexuality, degree of linguistic competence, and acceptance and integration into Western capitalist and consumer culture” (Ty and Goellnicht 2004, 5). The development of a diverse, heterogeneous Asian American literature that features a great variety of genres, themes, and styles, enacts both a continuation of and a departure from previous Asian American literature. Context and Issues. Since the 1980s, “Asian American writers have been extremely productive,” and all types of their writings, such as novels, poems, stories, plays, memoirs, and autobiographies have drawn attention from and been published by mainstream presses, “often garnering national awards and international recognition” (Lim and Ling 1992, 3). The rapid growth and wide recognition of Asian American literary production in the last quarter of the twentieth century through the cusp of the twenty-first century, have not only made the voice of Asian American literature heard loud and clear but have also helped break the conventional thematic, generic boundaries of this literature. As Maxine Hong Kingston once hoped (Rabinowitz 1987, 182), Asian American writing is now, like its earlier

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African and Native American counterparts, assuming an undisputable and undeniable position in contemporary American literature. The coming-of-age of Asian American literature flourishes in response to changing patterns of Asian immigration. In reality, the Asian groups embraced by the rubric “Asian America” encompass not a static list but a dynamic collection of immigrant communities. According to some census statistics, the Chinese American community is the largest, which also includes the largest percentage of American-born members. The Filipino community is the second largest group, and next to it is the Japanese community with many of its members born in the United States. The most recent Asian immigrants to the United States are the Southeast Asians, such as Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, and South Asians, comprising peoples from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Maldives. Reception. The changes and maturity in Asian American literature have been witnessed by and reflected in critical studies. Scholars and critics of Asian American literature have been raising significant questions, varying from those about immigration, assimilation, and acculturation to those concerning gender conflicts, stereotypes, the relations between Asian American and mainstream American literature, and aesthetics. As King-Kok Cheung aptly elaborates, A significant switch in emphasis has also occurred in Asian American literary studies. Whereas identity politics—with its stress on cultural nationalism and American nativity—governed earlier theoretical and critical formulations, the stress is now on heterogeneity and diaspora. The shift has been from seeking to “claim America” to forging a connection between Asia and Asian America; from centering on race and on masculinity to revolving around the multiple axes of ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality; from being concerned primarily with social history and communal responsibility to being caught in the quandaries and possibilities of postmodernism and multiculturalism. (Cheung 1997, 1)

Before we turn to the selected representative writers in contemporary Asian American literature since the 1980s, it is worth mentioning that a few anthologies of Asian American literature published at the beginning of the twenty-first century have made contribution to the expanded representation of this literature: Shirly Geok-lin Lim’s Asian-American Literature: An Anthology (2000), Bold Words: A Century of Asian American Writing edited by Rajini Srikanth and Esther Y. Iwanaga (2001), and Victoria Chang’s Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (2004). Selected Authors. Hisaye Yamamoto (1921–), one of the most-studied Asian American short story writers, was born in Redondo Beach, California, to issei parents (first-generation immigrants from Japan). In her early teens Yamamoto started writing, and her experience of the Japanese American internment during 1941–1945 became an important source for her fictional writing later. After Los Angeles’s Excelsior High School, she attended Compton Junior College, where she graduated with an associate of arts degree in European languages and Latin. Yamamoto’s first and only collection of short fiction, Seventeen Syllables: 5 Stories of Japanese American Life, was published in Tokyo in 1985; through its republications in newer, revised, and enlarged editions in 1988 by Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, and in 1994 and 2001 by Rutgers University Press, this book has become her most celebrated work. Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, Yamamoto’s works appeared in such noted journals as Kenyon Review and

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Arizona Quarterly and were anthologized in books such as Best American Short Stories (1950) and Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction (1993). Recognizing her contribution to Asian American literature, Yamamoto was awarded the American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Before Columbus Foundation in 1986. Yamamoto’s most famous short stories in her collection, the title story “Seventeen Syllables,” “Yoneko’s Earthquake,” and “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara,” are critical retrospective ones; they are about Japanese Americans’ life experiences in California farmlands before World War II and in the concentration camps during the war. With Japanese American women at the center, these stories often weave complicated issues of gender, domestic relationships, and ethnic identity into double or multiple plotlines. In “Seventeen Syllables,” the familial and farm life of a Japanese American couple is narrated from the point of view of their teenage daughter, Rosie Hayashi. Mrs. Hayashi’s attempt to pursue her artistic talents by writing haiku is objected by her husband, a traditional-minded farmer, whose ideas about his wife’s role stick to the constricting boundaries of daily necessity. Sophisticatedly “[using] the haiku as a submerged structuring device” (Grice 2002, 89), the story connects its exploration of female ethnic subjectivities with issues of language and sexuality through the paralleled plots: Rosie, on the brink of adulthood, undergoes the process of sexual awakening; her mother, throughout the story, becomes more and more focused on writing her haiku. Sexuality and art are closely associated, connected through their relation to language and silence. (Yamamoto 1999, 170)

Similarly, in “Yoneko’s Earthquake,” which is about the orange-growing Hosoume family, female subjectivities, especially maternal subjectivity, are explored via parallel situations of Yoneko, the ten-year-old daughter, and Mrs. Hosoume, her mother. The haunting story “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara” is set in an Arizona Japanese American internment camp and depicts another type of family relationship. The girl narrator suffers both neglect from her father, a Buddhist minister, and rejection from her community because of her unpredictably strange behaviors, even though she has musical and writing talents and is religiously loyal to her father. In 1991, “Seventeen Syllables” and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” were adapted for a PBS movie titled Hot Summer Winds for American Playhouse. Born in Los Angeles and raised in a middle-class Chinese American family, David Henry Hwang (1957–) graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in English in 1979. During his undergraduate years, he developed a strong interest in drama and started writing his first play FOB, which premiered in 1980 and won him an Obie Award. Hwang’s training in drama included a playwriting program at the Yale University School of Drama in 1980–1981. Since the early 1980s, Hwang has produced, co-produced, and published numerous plays, such as The Dance and the Railroad (1983), The Sound of Voice (1984), Trying to find Chinatown (1996), Golden Child (1998), Flower Drum Song (2003); and Yellow Face (2007), and most of these plays have drawn critical and popular attention. Besides plays, Hwang also writes opera librettos, books for musicals, and motion picture and television screenplays. Among his many honors and fellowships are a Rockefeller Foundation playwright-in-residence grant and a National Endowment for the Arts Artistic Associate Fellowship.

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Among Hwang’s plays, M. Butterfly (1988) is the most celebrated and studied work. It was the first Asian American play to be performed on Broadway and won the Outer Critics Circle Award and the Tony Award for best play of 1988. Centering on a dramatic interplay of perception, misperception, and deception in the relationship between the Chinese male spy Song Liling, who masquerades as a female, and the French diplomat Rene Gallimard, M. Butterfly foregrounds what is at the heart of many of Hwang’s works: the harsh split between the images of Chinese/Asian Americans represented in the dominant culture and what really exists and a subsequent subversion of those stereotypes that accompany ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Tina Chen noted the following: Hwang suggests that the stereotype about and practice of Asian subterfuge is emblematized by the figure of the Asian/American spy. Song Liling’s flamboyance as a secret agent . . . ; his ability to impersonate a female Chinese opera singer contingent not only on his skill in deception but on the willingness of his partner, Rene Gallimard, to believe in the fantasy of the submissive Asian woman that he exploits. . . . Because Hwang’s play attempts to deconstruct the stereotype of the submissive Asian woman, particularly as it was represented in Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly, Song’s spying does predominantly act as a metaphor through which issues of desire, secrecy, and racial in/visibility can be explored. (Chen 2005, 261–262)

A poststructuralist, postcolonial dramatic work, M. Butterfly undoubtedly problematizes a series of contemporary issues, such as racism, colonialism, sexism, homosexuality, and East-West relations, and, its use of masquerade, as noted by critics, holds rich implications and of which a single interpretation can impossibly convey its whole meaning (Li 1998, 154–164). The play was adapted in 1993 into a movie of the same title by David Cronenberg. Amy Tan (1952–) was born in Oakland, California, to Chinese parents John and Daisy Tan. She attended San Jose State University, earning a B.A. in English and linguistics in 1973 and an M.A. in linguistics in 1974. One of the most significant women writers in contemporary Asian American literature, Tan has enjoyed popular as well as critical success since the publication of her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, in 1989. This novel was on The New York Times hardcover best-seller list for about ten months, sold more than four million copies, was translated into twenty-five languages, and was adapted for a movie (1993) by Asian American director Wayne Wang; it also received glowing critical reviews, and its honors and awards included finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award for Best Fiction, the American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults Award, and the Commonwealth Club Gold Award. The Joy Luck Club addresses issues regarding displaced immigrant individuals in America, dual cultural identities as healing devices, mother-daughter relationships, and generational, intercultural gaps. These thematic concerns are repeated over and over, though in different plots and narrative modes, in her other major novels: The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), and The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001). Life stories of Tan’s parents and those she heard from relatives were the main sources for some of her novels. The Joy Luck Club is about the ethnic malaise of four families in San Francisco. Focusing on four pairs of mothers and daughters in the four families, the novel tells sixteen inter-related short stories about these women told by them in nonlinear

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narration. The ethnic malaise depicted here is manifested in the relationship between the four Chinese immigrant mothers, who have formed a mahjong group called the Joy Luck Club; their cherished ideologies of old China; and their four American-born daughters who believe in modern American individuality and independence. The generational and intercultural gap between mothers and daughters unfolds with the daughters getting confused and angry toward their mothers while growing up. The conflict in the relationships between the Chinese mothers and American daughters is the dilemma that many immigrants are faced with: living between worlds. Also, the novel structurally devotes equally two chapters to each of the mothers and daughters, who tell their stories therein, and thus places equal weight on both sides of the Chinese American—the mothers being portrayed as representatives of traditional Chineseness and daughters as Americanness. By giving equal weight to both sides, Tan, from a feminist standpoint, makes these Chinese-born mothers’ experiences comparable to that of their American daughters in order to blur “the distinction between the progressive (Euro-American) woman and the traditional Asian woman” and polemically record “the marginalization and disempowerment of all women within patriarchal institutions—whether in China or America” (Schueller 1992, 78–79). Tan’s idea of this universalized female identity is emphatically reflected in the mother-daughter bond in the second part of the novel. Jing-mei June Woo’s (one of the daughters) returning to China at the end of the novel and seeing the resemblance among herself, her two lost sisters, and their dead mother can be read as a trope for a return to cultural origins: “And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in your blood. After all these years, it can finally be let go” (Tan 1989, 331). By connecting with the larger family of China, the rupture in an ethnic American family is eventually healed. Le Ly Hayslip (1949–) was born on a rice farm in Vietnam. She lived in the United States for many years before returning to Vietnam to live and oversee her philanthropic projects there. Hayslip published two autobiographical books in which her life in wartime Vietnam and in the United States is remarkably recorded. The first book, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1989), alternates between narration of her youthful life in Vietnam and her return to Vietnam in 1986. Memories of being caught in the war, struggling for a living in the big city, being impregnated by a rich employer, and married to an American civilian who took her to the United States in 1971 juxtapose her concerns about her reentering Vietnam as a rich capitalist at a risky time. The second book, Child of War, Woman of Peace (1993), is a more linear narrative structure that follows her life chronologically in the United States from 1972 to 1986 and then her travels back and forth between Vietnam and America after 1986. Hayslip is the first Vietnamese American writer to receive significant attention from reviewers and critics: For American readers, Hayslip has become representative of those anonymous millions of Vietnamese in whose name the Vietnam War was fought by both sides. Through her extraordinary personal story, she not only symbolically bears their collective pain but also bears the victim’s burden of forgiveness. (Nguyen 2002, 108)

Another testament to the influence of her Vietnam stories was the release in 1993 of Oliver Stone’s movie, Heaven and Earth, based on Hayslip’s autobiographical

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writing. Hayslip’s texts, however, are often ambivalent or even contradictory in their politics. Yet, this also best reveals her hybrid encounters. As Viet Thanh Nguyen points out, “In rewriting this victimized body and making it her own, she is caught, to use her own expression, ‘in between’—Viet Nam and the United States, war and peace, hell and heaven, and . . . the needs of ‘representation’ and those of ‘reconciliation’” (Nguyen 2002, 109). Jessica Hagedorn (1949–), the Filipino American poet and fiction writer, dramatist, multimedia artist, performance artist, and singer, was born in Manila. Influenced by her mother and grandmother, Hagedorn showed at an early age strong interests in art and writing. Along with her youthful absorption of multiple types of cultural media and her studies at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, those interests developed into a hybrid sensibility and multifarious literary and artistic accomplishments. Hagedorn’s contribution to Asian American literature lies mainly in her poetic and fictional writings. Her representative poems were collected in such anthologies as Pet Food and Tropical Apparitions (1981), which won the American Book Award in 1983. Her first novel, Dogeaters, published in 1990 and nominated for the National Book Award, is mainly about the hierarchical Filipino society under the Marcos regime and yet provides an “authenticity . . . of the exiled voices . . . with competing identities” (Davis 1997, 117). Dogeaters was followed by two more novels: The Gangster of Love (1996) and Dream Jungle (2003), a story about sexual abuse and a mother’s anguish over the loss of her child in the backdrop of the Philippines. Hagedorn’s depiction of ethnicity is enriched with her wide-ranging experiences in music and drama, reflecting a postcolonial literary sensibility. For example, The Gangster of Love is based on her experience in the New York City music circle. The narrator-protagonist Raquel “Rocky” Rivera, “a mixed-race woman of Chinese, Filipino, and Spanish descent who matures into adulthood after immigrating from the Philippines with her mother and brother to the U.S.,” forms a rock band with her friends traveling across the United States—searching for “a sense of home, identity, and community amid the contradictions of American postmodern capitalism” (Santa Ana 2004, 37). Along with the band’s musical experiments and disbandment, Hagedorn depicts a disenchanted American society, where the reader is led to encounter street people, prostitutes, and poor artists like Rocky who are faced with drug abuse, political corruption, denigration of women, and “a dialectical struggle between her desire for the hybridity of consumer individualism and her ties to family and the Filipino immigrant underclass” (Santa Ana 2004, 37). In subverting the mainstream’s racial stereotyping of Filipino Americans, however, Hagedorn comically uses the toy yo-yo in her story, because I have this fascination with the Filipino yo-yo champions who used to do the exhibitions. . . . To me, they were a kind of matinee idol, running around the country showing off. Yet, underneath, there was this horrible tension because they had to travel to places where segregation was imposed and they were attacked. (qtd. in Lawsin 2000, 36)

The Korean American novelist Chang-rae Lee was born in South Korea in 1965 but brought up in the United States from three years old. Besides a B.A. in English from Yale in 1987, Lee also earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Oregon in 1993.

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Lee’s first novel, Native Speaker (1995), was very well received by American readers. It won first-time novelist laudatory reviews and literary awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction, the American Book Award, and the Barnes and Noble Discover Award. His second novel, A Gesture Life (1999), also garnered vibrant reviews and honorable awards, such as the Anisfield-Wolf Prize and the Myers Outstanding Book Award. In 2004 Lee surprisingly introduced to his readers a Caucasian protagonist in his third novel Aloft. Native Speaker has been Lee’s most acclaimed work. The novel narrates the suffering of a crisis of both professional and personal faith by a Korean American spy, Henry Park, who works for a company specializing in racial and ethnic matters. Interrogating the politics of ethnicity in American culture and society, Lee “cleverly incorporates the stereotype of the inscrutable Asian into his plot and uses it to dismantle traditional notions of the benefits of assimilation” (Hawley 1997, 189). As the novel’s protagonist tells I think my father would choose to see my deceptions in a rigidly practical light, as if they were similar to that daily survival he came to endure, the need to adapt, assume an advantageous shape. My ugly immigrant’s truth, as was his, is that I have exploited my own, and those others who can be exploited. This forever is my burden to bear. But I and my kind possess another dimension. We will learn every lesson of accent and idiom, we will dismantle every last pretense and practice you hold, noble as well as ruinous. (Lee 1995, 297)

Likewise, A Gesture Life continues the revelation of the problems of immigration and assimilation through the various life phases of its principal character, Franklin “Doc” Hata, from a native Korean to a Japanese soldier and then to a medical supply store owner in the United States. The layers of Hata’s constant displacement and problematic assimilation in his host countries are best peeled through the trope of naming in the novel: Doc Hata’s Americanized name is Franklin Hata and the transit of his name symbolically maps his journey toward U.S. citizenship and identity formation. Franklin is an assumed name; his Japanese name is Jiro; and Hata is a shortening of Kurohata, his Japanese last name. This typical immigrant renaming is further complicated when the reader discovers that Doc Hata, who is of ethnic Korean ancestry, was adopted as a boy and that Jiro Kurohata is not his original name. . . . Arguably, this absence of origins is precisely what Hata hopes to overcome in his transit to U.S. citizenship. (Carroll 2005, 597)

Born in 1956 and raised in Calcutta, India, in a traditional middle-class family, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni obtained an M.A. in English from Wright State University in Ohio in 1977 and earned a doctorate in English at UC Berkeley in 1984. With topics closer to her life experiences as an immigrant and woman, Divakaruni started her writing career in poetry; her first collection of poems is Dark Like the River (1987). Following that, she published two volumes of short stories: Arranged Marriage (1995), which won the 1996 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (2001). But Divakaruni is more prolific with novels: The Mistress of Spices (1996), chosen by the Los Angeles Times as one of the best books of 1997, Sister of My Heart (1999), and The Vine of Desire (2002).

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Divakaruni’s writing is thematically concerned with South Asian women immigrants dealing with issues of violence, marriage, and family and the sociocultural inequities and injustices concerning South Asian men immigrants. However, as a prolific writer at the turn of the century and a member of the “new set of South Asian American authors” (Rajan 2006, 105), Divakaruni’s fictional subjects are not simply presented in traditional narratives that attempt to evoke sympathy for ethnic or cultural malaise and convey ideological messages; rather, they are freshly probed through a sort of “feminist ethics.” In other words, she portrays her subjects and situations that become memorable by invoking other kinds of aesthetic responses, something akin to brief or fleeting but pleasurable instances of shared cultural reminiscences or poignant memories of loss as they grapple with new realities. . . . The formal devices . . . create a space between readers and texts to locate one’s aesthetic responses in the dynamic gap, where one encounters crises in the narratives and formulates a reaction that is based upon assessing the risk factor in not acting ethically. (Rajan 2006, 105)

Moreover, her fiction challenges the current transparency of gender and sexuality concerning South Asian Americans and has evoked hot debates in the Asian American literary circles (Srikanth 2004, 127–128). Born in 1955 to Norman and Agnes Jen, immigrants from China in the 1940s, Gish Jen was raised in Scarsdale, New York. Jen graduated from Harvard in English in 1977; she completed the M.F.A program at the University of Iowa in 1983. A critically acclaimed author of fiction, Jen began her writing career with short fiction. Her talent in this genre is evidenced by many short stories published in ethnic and mainstream American journals and magazines, and some collected in anthologies, such as The Best American Short Stories: 1988, and The Best American Short Stories of the Century (1999). However, as reflected in her collection Who’s Irish?: Stories (1999), Jen does not confine herself to representing the Asian American experience only; some stories deal with Americanization of other ethnic or hyphenated Americans. Among her numerous awards are a National Endowment for the Arts Award (1988), a Lannan Literary Award for fiction (1999), and a Strauss Living from the American Academy for Arts and Letters (2003). Jen is widely known for her novels. Although still probing contemporary issues of immigration, ethnicity, and cultural dilemma, these novels are written in such different ways that they convey something “beyond . . . ‘typical’ themes of cultural dislocation, generational conflict, and immigrant success” (Lee 2000, 215), and they exhibit a group of characters who are much more than Asian American stereotypes. Typical American (1991), her first novel, depicts the pursuit of the American dream by a Chinese immigrant family with humor and comedy. In the novel, things are temporary and changing; “America’s glorious promise to the (soon-to-be-disabused) immigrant is symbolized by a joy ride in a commandeered convertible” (Wong 1993, 120). Mona in the Promised Land (1996), more comical than the first novel and with an even lighter tone, continues the ethnic American theme but in a larger context. What is more significant is that the novel complicates the issue of identity in the postmodernist American society through the title character Mona’s attempt to convert to Judaism. “In a way, I’ve tried to contribute to the process of boundary crossing, to painting pictures that are little less black and white—a little more complicated” (qtd. in Lee 2000, 229). If in her homecoming toward the end of Mona

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in the Promised Land Mona is “symbolically ‘homeless’ . . . because [her] embrace of multiple ethnic affiliations results in a loss of family identification” (Ho 2005, 146), in her third novel The Love Wife (2004), Jen moves one step further to launch an exploring yet more ironic inquiry into complicated issues involving America’s multi-ethnicity and multiculturalism. With a story centering on the happiness, discrimination, vacillation, and identity problems of the members of an “American family” consisting of white Americans and Asian Americans, the novel tackles not only the problematic Americanization of Asian Americans but also, more important, essential human issues in the pluralistic American society. Bibliography Bulosan, Carlos. On Becoming Filipino: Selected Writings of Carlos Bulosan. Philadelphia, PA: Temple Unversity Press, 1995. ———. American Is in the Heart: A Personal History. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1973. Carroll, Hamilton. Traumatic Patriarchy: Reading Gendered Nationalisms in Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life. Modern Fiction Studies 51 (3) (2005): 592–616. Chang, Victoria, ed. Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Chen, Tina. “Recasting the Spy, Rewriting the Story: The Politics of Genre.” In Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee. In Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature. Zhou Xiaojing and Samina Najmi, eds. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2005, 249–267. Chin, Frank, et al., eds. Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. Chin, Frank. The Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of the Dragon. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1981. Chu, Louis. Eat a Bowl of Tea. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Davis, Rocio G. “Ninotchka Rosca’s State of War and Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters: Revisioning the Philippines.” In Ideas of Home: Literature of Asian Migration. Geoffrey Kain, ed. Michigan State University Press, 1997, 115–127. Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee. The Palace of Illusions: A Novel. New York: Doubleday, 2008. ———. The Vine of Desire. New York: Doubleday, 2002. ———. Sister of My Heart. New York: Doubleday, 1999. ———. The Mistress of Spices. New York: Doubleday, 1996. ———. Arranged Marriage. New York: Doubleday, 1995. Eaton, Edith Maude. Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Fujita, Gayle K. “Momotaro’s Exile: John Okada’s No-No Boy.” In Reading the Literatures of Asian America. Shirley Geok-lin and Amy Ling, eds. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992, 239–258. Grice, Helena. Negotiating Identities: An Introduction to Asian American Women’s Writing. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Hagedorn, Jessica. The Gangster of Love. Boston, MA: Houghton, 1996. Hawley, John C. Gus Lee, Chang-rae Lee, and Li-young Lee: The Search for the Father in Asian American Literature. In Ideas of Home: Literature of Asian Migration. Geoffrey Kain, ed. Michigan State University Press, 1997, 183–195. Hayslip, Le Ly, and Jay Wurts. When Heaven and Earth Changed Places. New York: Doubleday, 1989. Hayslip, Le Ly, and James Hayslip. Child of War, Woman of Peace. New York: Doubleday, 1993.

ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE Ho, Jennifer Ann. Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels. New York: Routledge, 2005. Hsiao, Ruth Y. Facing the Incurable: Patriarchy in Eat a Bowl of Tea. In Reading the Literature of Asian America. Shirley Geok-lin and Amy Ling, eds. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992, 151–162. Hsu, Kai-yu, and Helen Palubinskas, eds. Asian American Authors. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1972. Hwang, David Henry. Trying to Find Chinatown: The Selected Plays. New York: Theater Communication Group, 2000. ———. FOB and Other Plays. New York: New American Library, 1990. ———. Broken Promises: Four Plays. New York: Avon Books, 1983. Jen, Gish. The Love Wife. New York: Knopf, 2004. ———. Who’s Irish?: Stories. New York: Knopf, 1999. ———. Mona in the Promised Land. New York: Knopf, 1996. ———. Typical American. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1991. Kang, Younghill. East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937. ———. The Grass Roof. New York: C Scribner’s Sons, 1931. Kim, Elaine H. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1982. Kingston, Maxine Hong. Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. ———. China Men. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980. ———. The Woman Warrior. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. Lawrence, Keith, and Floyd Cheung, eds. Recovered Legacies: Authority and Identity in Early Asian American Literature. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2005. Lawsin, Emily Porcincula. “Jessica Hagedorn.” In Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers. King-Kok Cheung, ed., Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000, 21–39. Lee, Chang-rae. Aloft. New York: Riverhead, 2004. ———. A Gesture Life. New York: Riverhead, 1999. ———. Native Speaker. New York: Riverhead, 1995. Lee, Rachel. “Gish Jen.” In Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers. King-Kok Cheung, ed., Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000, 215–232. Li, David Leiwei. Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, and Amy Ling, eds. Reading the Literatures of Asian America. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992. Lim, Shirly Geok-lin, ed. Asian-American Literature: An Anthology. Lincolnwood, IL: NTC Publishing Group, 2000. Ling, Amy. Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry. Elmsford, NY: Pergamon Press, 1990. Ling, Jinqi. Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. ———. “Identity Crisis and Gender Politics: Reappropriating Asian American Masculinity.” In An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature. King-kok Chueng, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 312–337. Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Okada, John. No-No Boy. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1979. Rabinowitz, Paula. “Eccentric Memories: A Conversation with Maxine Hong Kingston.” Michigan Quarterly Review 26 (1) (1987): 177–187.

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ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE Rajan, Gita. “Poignant Pleasures.” In Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing. Rocio G. Davis and Sue-Im Lee, eds. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006, 104–120. Santa Ana, Jeffrey J. “Affect-Identity: The Emotions of Assimilation, Multiraciality, and Asian American Subjectivity.” In Asian North American Identities Beyond the Hyphen. Elenor Ty and Donald C. Goellnight, eds. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004, 15–42. Schueller, Malini Johar. “Theorizing Ethnicity and Subjectivity: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club.” Genders 15 (1992): 72–85. Srikanth, Rajini. The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2004. Srikanth, Rajini, and Esther Y. Iwanaga, eds. Bold Words: A Century of Asian American Writing. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Tan, Amy. Saving Fish from Drowning. New York: Putnam, 2005. ———. The Bonesetter’s Daughter. New York: Putnam, 2001. ———. The Hundred Secret Senses. New York: Putnam, 1995. ———. The Kitchen God’s Wife. New York: Putnam, 1991. ———. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Putnam, 1989. Ty, Eleanor, and Donald C. Goellnicht, eds. Asian North American Identities Beyond the Hyphen. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004. Wei, William. The Asian American Movement. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993. White-Parks, Annette. Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Yamamoto, Hisaye. Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories. Revised and Expanded Edition. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Yun, Chung-Hei. “Beyond ‘Clay Walls’: Korean American Literature.” In Asian American Writers. Harold Bloom, ed. Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1999, 171–185.

Further Reading Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Amy Tan. Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House, 2000; Chueng, King-kok, ed. Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000; Chueng, King-kok, ed. An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; Cheung, King-Kok. Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993; Chu, Patricia P. Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000; Davis, Rocio G., and Sue-Im Lee, eds. Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006; Duncan, Patti. Tell This Silence: Asian American Women Writers and the Politics of Speech. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004; Eng, David L. and Alice Y. Horn, eds. Q & A: Queer in Asian America. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998; Kain, Geoffrey, ed. Ideas of Home: Literature of Asian Migration. Michigan State University Press, 1997; Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, et al., eds. Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006; Palombo-Liu, David. Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999; Pao, Angela. The Critic and the Butterfly: Sociocultural Contexts and the Reception of David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly. Amerasia Journal 18 (3) (1992): 1–16; Simmons, Diane. Maxine Hong Kingston. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999; Singh, Amritjit, et al., eds. Memory and Cultural Politics: New Approaches to American Ethnic Literatures. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1996; Skandera-Trombley, Laura E, ed.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston. New York: G. K. Hall & Co, 1998; Yamamoto, Traise. Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999; Yin, Xiao-huang. Chinese American Literature since the 1850s. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000; Xiaojing, Zhou, and Samina Najmi, eds. Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2005.

LI ZENG

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR Definition. Autobiography and memoir are personal narratives of an individual’s life experiences, either written by that individual or “as told to” another writer, as distinct from biography, in which a writer researches and recounts the events of another person’s history. An autobiography is a life history; memoir spans only a certain portion of that life. Often they are a look into another culture and time—by such notables as Maya Angelou, Richard Wright, and Frederick Douglass—and portions of these works are often anthologized. Autobiographies have been written by such diverse persons as Bill Clinton and Bob Dylan, Sylvia Plath and Carol Burnett, Adolf Hitler and Benazir Bhutto. In a 2005 Poets & Writers article, Sven Birkerts, editor of AGNI and author of six books including a memoir, My Blue Sky (2002), and a book on memoir, The Art and Time of Memoir: Then, Again (2006), discusses the function and importance of the genre. “For whatever story the memoirist may tell, she is at the same time modeling a way to make sense of experience. . . . Reading the work of memoirists, we borrow their investigative energy and contemplate similar possibilities of access to our own lives. . . . The contemporary memoir, then, assumes that the path to self-awareness makes a universally relevant story that we, as readers, can apply as a supple screen to our very different experiences” (2005, 26). History. Early autobiography included historic or political events, or philosophical viewpoints. “At one time the actual memoirist was considered insignificant to the memoir,” writes Barrie Jean Borich, author of the memoirs My Lesbian Husband: Landscapes of a Marriage (1999) and Restoring the Color of Roses (1993) on her Web site. When a soldier described a battle, for instance, it was the battle that mattered, not the soldier. Public events were considered historical, while private life was seen as inappropriate to the written word, unless you were a person considered of singular historic importance, Winston Churchill, or a Kennedy, for instance. All of this has changed in our postmodern day-to-day. Feminism has privileged the personal, changing the paradigms of what is worthy of cultural notice and recovering the stories of lives previously absent from history. Identity and cultural politics redirected attention to people of color, gays and lesbians, the disabled, and anyone else who was up to that point missing from the public record. (Borich 2008)

“One of the first great Western autobiographies was written by St. Augustine . . . describing his lustful and dissolute ways. . . . Its title was Confessions.” Further, “Confession (always linked to redemption) remained the model for autobiographical writing for more than a thousand years until the Renaissance when entertainment became more popular than redemption,” says Steve Zousmer, author of You Don’t Have to be Famous, a how-to on autobiography writing, (2007, 185). Because so much excellent work exists within the genre, it is not possible to cover all of it here. A brief survey follows.

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Early Americans read the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and huge blocks of history involving the slave narrative, including such titles as Narrative of the Life of Frederic Douglass, an American Slave in 1845, Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery in 1901, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs (1862). Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden in 1854, Helen Keller The Story of My Life in 1903, and Mark Twain his Mark Twain’s Autobiography in 1917. Mahatma Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth appeared in 1927 and was reprinted in 1929. Black Elk Speaks by Black Elk and John J. Niehardt, Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and William Butler Yeats’s Autobiography were written in 1931, 1933, and 1936, respectively. The Holocaust era produced a wealth of literature. Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, which recorded her life in hiding from June 12, 1941, to August 1, 1942, and Elie Wiesel’s Night are two of the better known. Among classic African American autobiographies are Amiri Baraka’s The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (1984), Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on the Road (1942), and Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945). The civil rights and women’s liberation movements and the Vietnam War era produced autobiographies by Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks, to name a few. Maya Angelou’s 1969 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings expanded into a six-volume autobiography with later installments published in 1974, 1976, 1981, 1986, and 2002, including Gather Together in My Name, Singin’ and Singin’ and Getting’ Merry Like Christmas, The Heart of a Woman, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, and A Song Flung Up to Heaven. Other notable titles include Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), John Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers (1984), and Henry Louis Gates’s Colored People: A Memoir (1994). In 1993, A Child Called “It,” Dave Pelzer’s memoir about an abusive childhood, shocked its readers and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for five years. It was followed up by The Lost Boy and A Man Named Dave. Feminist memoir includes the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Adrienne Rich, and Alice Walker, among many others. Included in the abundant work of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered, and Queer (GLBTQ) community are classics such as Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, May Sarton’s work, and the writing of Adrienne Rich. Later works include Lance Bass’s (of the pop music group ’N Sync) autobiography, Out of Sync, and a memoir by Greg Louganis, Breaking the Surface. Other notable memoirs and autobiography have been written by Eleanor Roosevelt, Annie Dillard, Gore Vidal, Virginia Woolf, bell hooks, Joseph Stalin, Jimmy Carter, and Sidney Poitier. Trends and Themes. Literature tends to cluster around events of historical significance or events that affected large segments of humanity. As mentioned, Holocaust literature, literature exposing racial injustice, works concerning the Vietnam War, the civil rights, and feminist movements, and GLBTQ voices have been popular. No doubt we will soon see works by American soldiers in Iraq that will tell the rest of us what it is like to be a person who has lived through that situation. As Maya Angelou so aptly puts it, “I speak to the Black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition” (Comley et al. 2007, 43). Although recent efforts have concentrated more on private lives, these works have also spoken to the human condition. Recent books about alcohol/substance abuse

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and recovery, and others speaking candidly about sexuality, are breaking taboos and telling stories that have seldom been heard in the past. A first memoir often leads to a series and a movie, as happened with Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, (Paramount/Universal, 1999) and Augusten Burroughs’ Running with Scissors (Sony, 2006). McCourt followed up with ’Tis (1999) and Teacher Man (2005); Burroughs with Dry (2003), Magical Thinking (2004), and Possible Side Effects (2006), not to mention an earlier novel, Sellevision (2000). In addition, the current popularity of the genre has created a real market for courses and books on how to write one’s own autobiography or memoir. For example, the Writers Digest Book Club offers works such as Writing Life Stories by Bill Roorbach and You Don’t Have to Be Famous by Steve Zousmer. Context and Issues. One issue to be dealt with is the difference between escapist literature and interpretive literature, sensationalism and serious social or personal statement. Laurence Perrine in Literature: Structure, Sound and Sense, a standard volume, defines escapist literature as that which is “written purely for entertainment,” whereas interpretive literature “illuminates some aspect of human life and behavior” and “helps us to understand our world, our neighbors, ourselves” (1988, 4). Other functions of the artist are to make the personal universal and to speak for those who can’t (or won’t) speak for themselves. Works such as Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Black Elk’s Black Elk Speaks (with John J. Neihardt) have given us insights into the struggles of race. Nguyen gives a first-person account of Amerasian children left behind by American fathers in the Vietnam War era, writing of the results of the prejudice he experienced due to his mixed race, the terrors of war, and tyrant regimes. Joan Didion gives a less sweeping but certainly affecting glimpse into living with grief. Augusten Burroughs, Carolyn Knapp (Drinking: A Love Story), and Pete Hamill (A Drinking Life) portray the reality of the alcoholic or addict. By contrast, a culture of television voyeurism is certainly at work in today’s society, and that can create an atmosphere of sensationalism for sensationalism’s sake. “This is, after all, a time when you can turn on afternoon television to see people confessing to astonishingly shameless and sordid behavior, usually sexual or violent or both” (Zousmer 2007, 186). Borich (2008) partially concurs. “The negative view of these cultural changes suggests that we are interested in the private story and the personal vantage point only because we are held hostage by talk show and tabloid culture.” But she goes on to say, “I believe that these phenomena are coupled with what has become a healthy intellectual and emotional curiosity about the world as it actually exists” (Borich 2008). Birkerts quips, “Were you abused, neglected, discriminated against; did you turn your pain into pills, drink, or satanic cults? Write a memoir!” (2005, 22). But he then defends the genre. The fact of a boom in rampant sensationalism must not be allowed to obscure another fact, which is that recent decades have seen the flourishing of a sophisticated and quietly vital mode of literary expression . . . In the last quarter century or so, it has refurbished itself in a contemporary way, and that tall stack of books marks a genuine contribution to our literature. (2005, 22)

Coupled with this is the fact that the border between other types of writing and memoir, originally a nonfiction genre, is often blurred—for instance, in the cases of

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Maxine Hong Kingston, whose works blend fiction and nonfiction, and by Tim O’Brien, who calls his The Things They Carried “auto fiction”—or they may be out-and-out violated (allegedly) by writers such as Stephen Frey, who is quoted in Smoking Gun as saying “events ‘were embellished for obvious dramatic reasons’” (Wyatt 2006). Burroughs admits that his time frame was often compressed for story-telling purposes. Several writers have addressed this issue. Gore Vidal makes this distinction in Palimpsest: “A memoir is how one remembers his own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked” (1995, 3). In his poem “Dangers,” Rodney Jones tells us, “Memory, at best, retrieves maybe 6 percent in studio light” (Jones 1989: 13). Barrie Jean Borich writes on her Web site, “Writing about a subject inevitably changes the way we know a subject” (Borich 2008). Sara DeLuca sums it up beautifully in the acknowledgments of Dancing the Cows Home: A Wisconsin Girlhood: “Memory is fragile and fluid. Sifted through layers of time and experience, some edges soften. Others reveal themselves with increased clarity. Disjointed happenings continue to shift and warp and seek out new connections” (DeLuca 1996, ix). The problem then remains for the audience to decide how much of this “shifting and warping” is a legitimate difference between the perspective of the memoirist and the perspective of the human subjects, and if and where the line is crossed from nonfiction to fiction. Concerning a recent lawsuit, Augusten Burroughs “acknowledge[s] that the family members portrayed recall the past differently” (Deahl 2007). In his “Preface to This Edition” of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers states, “For all the author’s bluster elsewhere, this is not, actually, a work of pure nonfiction. Many parts have been fictionalized in varying degrees, for various purposes” (Wheeler 2002, ix). James Frey, however, makes no such disclaimer, and his work has been called into question. However, “one fan who identified herself only as Julie [on Frey’s Web site] wrote, ‘Even if his story is fake, he opened up the eyes of so many people’” (Wyatt 2006). Reception. In 1997, Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature and topped the best-seller list for more than two years. ’Tis and Teacher Man, however, met with mixed reviews. The Austin Chronicle praises ’Tis, “He has the nerve to write what he felt. This makes the difference between a real writer and a merely good storyteller. . . . You miss his voice once the book has been completed” (Stacy Bush), while the Washington Post accuses it of being filled with “mawkish self-pity” (Ron Charles), and the Herald Tribune calls it “sour, resentment-filled” (Michiko Kakutani). Of Teacher Man, USA Today says this “is as good as writing” gets about teaching and learning and finding yourself through writing (Minzesheimer), and Publishers Weekly says, “It should be mandatory reading for every teacher in America.” In contrast, the San Francisco Chronicle complains that it “seems listless, forced, . . . its sporadic moments of passionate brilliance only reminding the reader of how disengaged the rest of the book seems” (Skloot). “Those looking for an involving story will be disappointed, as will those hoping for a fresh look at teaching,” says Brendan Halpin of the Boston Globe. The film version of Angela’s Ashes (Paramount/Universal, 1999) was billed as “Rotten Tomatoes” by the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The New York Times accused it of presenting “a quaintly romantic view of poverty. The film isn’t wrenching enough to do [the pain in the novel] justice. The family’s suffering . . . is curiously

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unreal,” and “even the father’s drunkenness is somehow sugar coated” (Maslin 1999). Similarly, the film Running with Scissors (Sony, 2006), based on Burroughs’s memoir of an abusive childhood, doesn’t fare well with critics. Justin Chang of Variety notes, “This rudderless adaptation never gets a firm grip on the author’s deadpan tone or episodic narrative style.” He calls the film “more of a crazy-quilt . . . than a cohesive drama. It’s a messy, discursive piece of work.” The book Dry, though, receives kind attention. Entertainment Weekly described it as “a stylish memoir about a messy life” (Emma Forrest). A medical doctor noted in the Permanente Journal, “Dry is the alarmingly open and shockingly honest autobiography of . . . an alcoholic man who . . . just might provide the insight we physicians need to understand the complexity surrounding alcoholism.” Gregorio D. Saccone claims that the “brief-but-helpful glimpse into the life that preceded [the alcoholism]” shows “the importance of dealing with these [childhood] events and the emotions they birthed” (Saccone). Kein Nyugen enjoys nothing but praise from the literary world. Douglass Brinkley, director of the Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans, says, “The Unwanted is a haunting memoir of both nightmarish agony and redemptive self-discovery destined to become a literary classic” (2007). The Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Richard C. Kagan exclaims, “Kien’s story deserves a place with the best memoirs of immigration and exile” (2007). Publishers Weekly also praises Nguyen’s The Tapestries, calling it “a daringly complex and vividly imagined debut novel.” He has won the 2005 NCM Pulitzer award for ethnic writers and was nominated for the 2004 Grinazne Cavour Prize. Likewise, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking is immensely popular. A Time magazine a reviewer calls it “an act of consummate literary bravery, a writer known for her clarity narrating the loss of that clarity” (Lev Grossman). “Didion has written a lacerating yet peculiarly stirring book,” says The Washington Post. It is “a work of surpassing clarity and honesty . . . a journey into a place none of us can fully imagine until we have been there” (Yardley). “The writing is exhilarating,” says Robert Pinsky of The New York Times. Selected Authors. Because an abundance of fine literature exists within this genre, it will be necessary to examine only a few works. In The Unwanted (Little, Brown, 2002), Kien Nguyen exposes the plight of Amerasian children abandoned by their American fathers in 1970s Vietnam. The memoir spans his life from before the 1975 fall of Saigon, when he and his family watched from the top of the American Embassy as U.S. Army helicopters left without them, until his immigration 10 years later. Nguyen skillfully illustrates major issues in prose so natural and vibrant it feels as if you were reading a novel for pleasure. He first hears the term half-breed from his own cousins, and at one point his mother, in a fit of disgust or fright, pours liquid black dye over her two blonde sons’ heads. Nguyen portrays a mother so vain and cruel that the reader feels little sympathy when the Communists strip her of her wealth and status—that is, until it’s made clear that the new regime is every bit as corrupt and power and money hungry as the capitalists to whom they claim superiority. Of this woman who gave his puppy to his cousins to use as a football until it was dead, he says, “Her heart had no room for any relationship stronger than a detached friendship,” and “she despised anyone

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beneath her” (Nguyen 2001, 15). When Loan, the maid who cared for Kien and his brother Jimmy, boarded the van in which the family escaped the mansion and “ . . . bow[ed] down to press her face to my mother’s hands, my mother pulled away as if touched by fire. Her face darkened, and her eyes burned at the girl with hatred. With a swift movement that startled everyone, my mother struck a hard blow across Loan’s left cheek” (Nguyen 2001, 18). Although it takes over half of the 339-page memoir, Madame Khoun finally redeems herself. Reduced from her position as a powerful and prosperous banker, she takes on the lowest form of employment—trafficking in the illegal marketplace— and goes on to finally sell both her body and her blood to feed the family. Her situation encapsulates the fate of many of that time who were seen as “capitalists.” The Unwanted takes the reader into a world where citizens are so afraid of their government that they are eager to report anything in their comrades’ past that might be deemed counterrevolutionary for the reward of “earning up to 30 points [that] would exempt [them] from a day of volunteer work in the jungle” (Nguyen 2001, 110). Another aspect of repressive Communist rule is shown when a favorite teacher disappears. The leaders have deemed that she is not worthy of concern. At morning assembly, the dean tells the schoolchildren, “You are all curious about her absence. My advice to you is: don’t be . . . It is none of your business. It is an act of opposition for anyone to continue probing this matter” (Nguyen 2001, 144–145). It is learned that Miss San was shot trying to escape the country on a boat. Due to Nguyen’s similar attempt later, the audience is “treated” to a description of a reeducation camp—actually a concentration camp. The first stop for the “criminals” is a dark pit where they stand in stagnant water for several hours. Some prisoners are driven to insanity. She clutched a child of about six or seven years old against her naked chest. . . . Hold her please, the mother said . . . I accepted the heavy child from her mother. In my arms, her head fell backward like that of a broken toy. The wet blanket dropped from her face and my fingers came into contact with her clammy skin, as wrinkled and rough as a piece of leather. I could feel her lips, which were swollen to the size of two filled leeches on her small lifeless face. (Nguyen 2001, 248)

Yet throughout his harsh life, Nguyen doesn’t forget the universal aspects of childhood anywhere: family love, friendship, jealousy, bullying, and first love. The book begins with Nguyen’s first and happiest memory, his fifth birthday, where “chefs stood around an enormous table, decorating a gigantic white cake with bunches of red roses, brown vines, and green leaves made from heavy whipped cream and food coloring” (Nguyen 2001, 6), making an effective contrast to the scenes of deprivation and horror to come. Nguyen’s other books are the novels The Tapestries and Le Colonial (2002; 2004). Augusten Burroughs writes Dry (2003) in the immediacy of the present tense. Throughout are scenes of alcoholic dysfunction. In one particular scene, he starts out with his drinking buddy, Jim, at 9 o’clock in the evening and, at 4:15 in the morning, he is standing on a stage at a karaoke bar somewhere in the West Village. The spotlights are shining in my face and I’m trying to read the video monitor in front of me, which is scrolling the words to the theme from The Brady Bunch. I see double unless I close one

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR eye, but when I do I lose my balance and stagger. Jim’s laughing like a madman in the front row, pounding the table with his hands. The floor trips me and I fall. (Burroughs 2003, 7)

After less than two hours of sleep, he showers, eats breath mints, and even sprays cologne on his tongue, but the odor of alcohol seeps from his pores so strongly that it is entirely noticeable to his coworkers at the ad agency where he works. In a similar instance, he misses entirely a meeting with one of the firm’s most important clients, arriving at noon just when everyone else is packing up their briefcases. This behavior precipitates an intervention on the part of the staff. Scenes of early rehab present his denial of the extent of his addiction. Hearing others’ stories in group therapy, he says to himself, “Car accidents, facial lacerations, paralyzed mothers . . . I am definitely in the wrong place. This is for hard-core alcoholics. Rock-bottom, ruined-their-lives alcoholics. I’m an Advertising Alcoholic” (Burroughs 2003, 52). Finally, he comes to a slow realization of the extent of his problem when he admits in therapy that in order to drink his liter or more of Dewars nightly he had to down 10 to 15 Benadryl because of an allergy that was so severe that he’d often have difficulty breathing. His therapist asks him, “And the recommended dose? What is that?’ But she’s not really asking me about the dosage, she’s asking me if I recognize insane when I see it” (Burroughs 2003, 58). This could be almost any alcoholic’s or addict’s story. Honest and gutsy, it is at once painful and funny—as life can often be. Against the horrors of addiction, the author’s internal monologue can be hilarious. The memoir also gives a glance into gay lifestyle, with a surprisingly beautiful love story, (surprising because of his previously going out to “get some penis” at bars). He’s dealing with an ex-lover’s AIDS and cross-addicting to an unhealthy relationship with a sometimes-recovering crack addict. After an account of a relapse so serious that he suffers from alcohol poisoning, Burroughs’s book ends with the chapter “One Year Later” and his successful sobriety. He is at work on a new memoir about his father—A Wolf at the Table. A key theme in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) is this: “One thing I noticed during the course of those weeks at UCLA was that many people I knew . . . shared a habit of mind usually credited to the very successful. They believed absolutely in their own management skills. They believed absolutely in the power of the telephone numbers they had at their fingertips, the right doctor, the major donor, the person who could facilitate a favor at State or Justice. . . . I had myself for most of my life shared the same core belief in my ability to control events” (Didion 2005, 98). This is a memoir of attempting to deal with death and loss. Home from visiting their seriously ill daughter in the hospital, Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, sit down to dinner at which he collapses and dies as a result of a heart attack. Throughout the text, Didion repeats this haunting chorus: “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” Didion’s mourning is delayed because Quintana, once released from the hospital, is stricken again and hospitalized for several months. The work recounts Didion’s search for meaning. She turns to psychiatric texts to understand the process of grief, to medical texts to try to grasp the reasons for both John’s death and Quintana’s illness, to poetry, even to Emily Post. Surprising facts are uncovered in her research. She cites Melanie Klein’s, Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States (1940), and Freud’s Mourning and

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Melancholia (1917). “‘The mourner is in fact ill . . . ,’” states Klein, and Freud says, “‘It never occurs to us to regard it [mourning] as a pathological condition and refer it to medical treatment’” (Didion 2005, 34). This disordering of the mental functions is the reason for the book’s title. “There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible” (Didion 2005, 32). “Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed. They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car. They live by symbols” (Didion 2005, 152). “Had I not misread the meaning of the red flashing light in 1987, would I be able to get in my car today and drive west on San Vicente and find John at the house in Brentwood Park? Standing by the pool?” (Didion 2005, 132). When the organ bank calls after she had been cleaning out her husband’s closet and couldn’t force herself to give away the rest of his shoes, she wonders, “How could he come back if he had no organs, how could he come back if he had no shoes?” (Didion 2005, 41). There is a beautiful if mournful quality to the writing and the subject matter that sometimes gives way to almost aggravatingly technical medical terminology. This, however, is not so strange in such a situation. It accentuates the alienation one must feel when confronted by a situation this large, in hospital settings where all the language seems foreign. She copies medical explanations meticulously, especially after Quintana’s second hospitalization. Perhaps this is the way for her to understand. The idea that knowledge is power, wanting to control the outcome (with knowledge) and knowing that she can’t, she feels her helplessness. She explains, “In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control” (Didion 2005, 44). Hers is a story that anyone who has experienced grief will recognize. She writes of coming home from places with news to tell John, then remembering there is no John to tell. For other works by Joan Didion, please see the “Bibliography” section. Angela’s Ashes (McCourt 1999), originally published by Scribner in 1996, recounts a poverty-stricken childhood in Ireland. Frank, Malachy Jr. and Margaret, the children of Irish immigrants Angela and Malachy Sr., were born in the Bronx. Due to the Depression and the death of baby Margaret, their parents return with them to Ireland. There his alcoholic father rarely worked, blaming it on the prejudice of the southern people against the northern Irish, (which was truly present), but McCourt Senior had a habit of drinking his wages over the weekend and being absent from work on Mondays. After going on the dole, he drinks that money as well, ignoring the need for groceries. When World War II breaks out, the senior McCourt goes to England because there is work there. After that, the family only sees the father twice, he sends wages home only once, and he finally disappears entirely by the end of the memoir. The family lives in damp cold quarters, and at one place they were not able to inhabit the downstairs portion of their rented home due to floods carrying sewage from the one lavatory on the lane. McCourt includes scenes of neighborhood boys chasing rats out of their homes with sticks almost as if it were a game. Due to substandard living conditions and lack of proper nourishment, twin younger brothers die—as well as an infant at birth. Frank will contract typhoid and later conjunctivitis for the same reasons. The conjunctivitis is the most heartbreaking ailment to him because it deprives him of a job (and the pay) of which he was so proud—helping a neighbor deliver coal. Because of the father’s inability to

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support the family, the mother, Angela, frequently endures shame and verbal abuse going to St. Vincent de Paul Society, then while receiving public assistance, and finally she is seen, after the abandonment by the elder Malachy, by the 11-year-old Frank begging with others at the back door of the rectory for food the priests have left over from their meal. At times Angela’s Ashes reads like a novel by Dickens or Bronte. When Angela applies for public assistance, one of the workers enjoys torturing her. (There is a curious lack of quotation marks around dialogue in the book.) He didn’t send us a penny in months, Mr. Kane. Is that a fact? Well, we know why, don’t we? We know what the men of Ireland are up to in England. We know there’s the occasional Limerickman trotting around with a Piccadilly tart, don’t we? He looks out at the people on the queue and they know they’re supposed to say, We do, Mr. Kane, and they know they’re supposed to smile and laugh or things will go hard with them when they reach the platform. They know he might turn them over to Mr. Coffey and he’s notorious for saying no to everyone. (McCourt 1999, 326)

Schoolmasters and certain church officials also enjoy torturing children. Because Brendan Quigley asks too many questions in catechism class, Mr. Benson, the master “flogs Question [Quigley] across the shoulders, the bottom, the legs. He grabs him by the collar and drags him to the front of the room” (McCourt 1999, 160). Frank McCourt and his brothers begin to steal food from stores, milk from the steps of rich people’s homes, even lemonade from a delivery van behind a tavern when their mother falls ill. When he is old enough, Frank gets a job delivering telegrams, saves up his money, and the memoir ends with his move to America at age 19. ’Tis begins with McCourt’s arrival in America and chronicles his next 20 years. McCourt’s latest memoir is Teacher Man and tells of his experiences of 30 years of teaching in New York City. Bibliography Birkerts, Sven. “Then, Again: Memoir and the Work of Time.” Poets & Writers 33.3 (2005): 21–26. Borich, Barrie Jean. “What is Creative Nonfiction Writing?” January 14, 2008. http://www. barriejeanborich.net; Burroughs, Augusten. Running with Scissors. New York: St. Martins Press, 2002. Bush, Barbara. Barbara Bush: A Memoir. New York: Scribner, 1994. Conway, Jill Ker. When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. Clark, Mary Higgins. Kitchen Privileges. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002. Deahl, Rachel. “‘Running with Scissors’ Lawsuit Settled.” Publishers Weekly. 30 Aug 2007. www.publishersweekly.com/eNewsletter. De Luca, Sara. Dancing the Cows Home. St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1996. Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. ———. Political Fictions. New York: Random House, 2001. ———. The Last Thing He Wanted. New York: Vintage, 1996. ———. After Henry. New York: Random House, 1992. ———. Miami. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. ———. Democracy: A Novel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.

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AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR ———. Salvador. New York: Vintage, 1983. ———. The White Album. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979. ———. A Book of Common Prayer. New York: Knopf, 1977. ———. Play It as It Lays. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1970. ———. Slouching Towards Bethlehem. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1968. ———. Run River. New York: Vintage, 1963. Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York: Bantam, 1974. ———. Teaching a Stone to Talk. New York: HarperPerennial, 1982. Knapp, Caroline. Drinking: A Love Story. NewYork: Dial Press, 1997. McCourt, Frank. Angela’s Ashes. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. ———. Teacher Man. New York: Scribner, 2005. Sparks, Nicholas. Three Weeks with My Brother. New York: Time Warner, 2004. Vidal, Gore. Palimpsest: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 1995. ———. Point to Point Navigation—A Memoir 1964 to 2006. New York: Doubleday, 2006. Wright, Richard. Black Boy, The Restored Text. New York: Perennial Classics, 1993.

Further Reading Brinkley, Douglas. “Biography.” Dec 27, 2007. www.aviv2.com/kien; Bush, Stacy. “Book Reviews.” The Austin Chronicle. 1 October 1999; Chang, Justin. “Running with Scissors.” Oct 13, 2006. http://www.variety.com; Charles, Ron. “Class Act.” The Washington Post. 13 Nov 2005; Comely, Nancy R., et al. Fields of Reading. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007; Forrest, Emma. “Dry.” Entertainment Weekly. 21 May 2002. www.ew.com; Friedman, Vanessa V. “Book Capsule Review: Angela’s Ashes.” Entertainment Weekly. 20 Sept 1996. www.ew.com; Grossman, Lev. “The Color of Grief.” Time. 3 Oct 2005: 56–57; Halpin, Brendan. Boston Globe. 21 Jan 2008. http://www.metacritic.com; Jones, Rodney. “Dangers.” Transparent Gestures. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1989; Kagan, Richard C. “Biography.” Minneapolis Star Tribune. 27 Dec 2007. http://www.aviv2.com/kien; Kakutani, Michiko. “Teacher Man: A Memoir.” International Herald Tribune. 18 Nov 2005: 10; Maslin, Janet. “Angela’s Ashes Film Review: A New Gloss on Poverty in Ireland.” New York Times. 24 Dec 1999. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B04E0D71539F937A15751C1A96F958260; Minzesheimer, Bob. “Before ‘Ashes,’ He Was a Teacher.” USA Today 21 Jan 2008. http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/reviews/2005-11-14-teacher-man_x.htm?POE; Nguyen, Kien. The Unwanted. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 2001; Pelzer, Dave. A Child Called “It.” Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, Inc., 1993; Perrine, Laurence. Literature: Structure, Sound and Sense. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1988; Pinsky, Robert. “‘The Year of Magical Thinking’: Goodbye to All That.” The New York Times Sunday Book Review. 9 Oct 2005: 7.1; Saccone, Gregorio D. “Dry: a Memoir by Augustine Burroughs.” The Permanente Journal 8(1) (2004): 112; Skloot, Floyd. “Frank McCourt Learns as Much as He Teaches is America.” San Francisco Chronicle. 11 Dec 2005: sec. M: 6; Wyatt, Edward. “Best-Selling Memoir Draws Scrutiny.” The New York Times. 10 Jan 2006: E1; Yardley, Jonathon. “The Year of Magical Thinking.” The Washington Post. 2 Oct 2005: sec. WBK: 2; Zousmer, Steve. You Don’t Have to Be Famous. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 2007.

DEBBIE K. TRANTOW

B BEAT POETRY Definition. Spontaneous, anti-bourgeois, and metaphysical, Beat poetry fuses transcendent themes with idiosyncratic forms. First gaining notoriety in the mid1950s, the Beats heavily influenced the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s before achieving canonical status as a “movement” if not for individual poets. As with most so-called movements and schools of poetry, Beat poetry is less a unified, manifesto-driven faction than a loose grouping of similarly minded experimentalists dissatisfied with both the sociopolitical conformity demanded by the Cold War and the austere formalism of much of the academic poetry of the 1940s and 1950s. Looking back to Walt Whitman as a model of the open, organic form championed by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay “The Poet,” the Beat poets bridle against traditional metrics and conventions. Via hyper-enjambed lines, fuguelike repetitions, eccentric grammar, and other strategies of excess, Beat Poetry offers a rhetorical counterpart to contemporaneous developments in music and art, such as be-bop and abstract expressionism. Simultaneously delirious and profoundly calm, Beat poetry sounds the depths and scales the heights of the human quest for meaning in a potentially sterile milieu of materialism and ideological paranoia. Intensely spiritual, although never orthodox, Beat poetry’s thematic palette ranges widely, from drug use, sexuality, and madness to myth, apocatastasis, and political satire—often within the same poem. Beat poetry’s heterodoxy ultimately finds its source in the dissolution of opposites found in Eastern religions such as Zen Buddhism and Hindu as well as in writers such as Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Miller, William Carlos Williams, Charles Baudelaire, William Blake, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Existentialism is another key influence. Individually, the Beat poets seek an authentic voice, a new vision that helps reveal the process of their journey toward enlightenment and away from the stagnation of materialism and its institutions. Although many of the Beat poets received formal academic training, most found the hothouse atmosphere of university poetry both precious and stifling. In reaction to the well-wrought urns of the 1950s’ academic poets, the Beats’ poems exude raw

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emotion and employed ragged, free-flowing (anti-) structures. Consequently, performability proves central to the Beats’ aesthetic. The Beats consciously strive to rekindle poetry’s oral dimension, and their efforts are designed to produce visceral responses from the audience. Concomitant with Beat poetry’s impulsive orality, themes of liberation and mindfulness course through the poems. In the earliest poems, from the late 1940s and 1950s, American patriotism and commodity-driven ideology provoke, simultaneously, a cynicism tinged with gallows humor and an innocence born of spiritual rebirth. This jarring admixture of themes creates a type of electroshock therapy that allows the poets and their audiences to detach from the mind-numbing buzz of jingoism and advertising, as well as from the inconceivable specter of nuclear winter, and empty their minds of the desire that—for the Buddhist—leads only to pain. The earliest Beat poets included Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Diane di Prima, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Later writers included LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Joanne Kyger, Ann Waldman, Michael McClure, Ed Sanders, Ted Joans, Lenore Kandel, Bob Kaufman, and many others. Most critics note a distinction between the East Coast and West Coast Beats, with the former at times overlapping with the New York School and the latter paralleling the San Francisco renaissance. Some writers, such as Ginsberg and Kerouac, were active on both coasts, however, and Beats were also active in Denver, Wichita, Venice Beach, and other locales. History. Legend holds that Jack Kerouac coined the phrase “beat generation” while holding a narcotic-induced conversation with Allen Ginsberg and John Clellon Holmes in 1948. In the midst of his musings, Kerouac declared that his was a beat generation, which prompted Ginsberg to concur with passion. Holmes would later codify the phrase—without due credit to Kerouac—in a November 16, 1952, article in the New York Times. While Kerouac—who, Joyce Johnson recalls, appropriated the term “beat” from Herbert Huncke—initially drew upon the word’s slang meanings—exhaustion, lacking resources—he and others quickly saw the term’s multifarious possibilities (Charters 2001, 620). Various commentators have associated “beat” with music, religion (beatification), victory/loss, and formal disarray (a mixture). Regardless, from their first informal gatherings in 1943–1944, Kerouac and the earliest Beats saw their aesthetic as both oppositional and energizing, as a “New Vision.” Ginsberg later characterized this New Vision as a “return to an appreciation of idiosyncrasy as against state regimentation” leading toward spiritual, sexual, and artistic liberation (Ginsberg 1995, 19). The area around Columbia University formed the original Beat epicenter, with Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Lucien Carr, among others, attending the school. Other early members of this subterranean world—hardly a “movement” during the 1940s—included William Burroughs, Huncke, Holmes, and Neal Cassady, none of whom attended Columbia. The friends recognized that their dissatisfaction with the status quo led to what Holmes called a “lust for freedom, and the ability to live at a pace that kills . . . led to black markets, be-bop, narcotics, sexual promiscuity, hucksterism, and Jean-Paul Sartre” (Holmes 2001, 224). This effort to, in the words of Jennie Skerl, “erase the boundaries between art and life” (Skerl 2004, 2) resulted in urgent, delirious conversations, passionate sexuality (homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual), all-night parties, and, haltingly at first, literature. In a post-atomic world, the group felt that traditional methodologies, conventional lifestyles, and unexamined patriotism not only lacked spiritual and artistic

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substance but also were dangerous, deadening. Ginsberg later noted that the group all detected “some kind of spiritual crisis in the West and the possibility of decline instead of infinite American Century Progress—The idea of an apocalyptic historical change” (Gifford 2005, 38). Troubling setbacks, however, accompanied the embryonic movement, none more life-altering than the 1944 murder of David Kammerer by Carr. Kammerer, a friend of Burroughs, had fought with Carr after the latter had rebuffed his sexual advances. Apparently in self-defense, Carr stabbed Kammerer to death and threw the body in the Hudson. Carr told both Kerouac and Burroughs about the murder, and the men were ultimately held as material witnesses despite Carr’s confession. The shock of the ordeal tightened the bond between Burroughs, Kerouac, and Ginsberg. Another traumatic event occurred in 1949 when Ginsberg, who had been allowing Huncke and his confederates to store stolen goods in his apartment, was arrested after a stolen vehicle in which he was a passenger crashed (Raskin 2004, 88). Ginsberg escaped jail, but he was committed to the New York State Psychiatric Institute. This event, along with his possibly apocryphal 1948 vision of William Blake, was pivotal in altering Ginsberg’s, and thus the Beats’, poetic sensibility. In the hospital, Ginsberg met Carl Solomon, to whom he would later dedicate “Howl,” and who would inspire him and validate his unorthodox lifestyle (Raskin 2004, 97). Upon his release from the hospital, Ginsberg briefly attempted to conform to society’s expectations, but the experiment was short-lived and Ginsberg much preferred the “subterranean” crowd of Greenwich Village’s Pony Stable and San Remo, bohemian bars where he and the other Beats met Gregory Corso, smoked pot, and philosophized (Watson 1995, 121–22). By the 1952 appearance of Holmes’s “This Is the Beat Generation,” most of the published “original” Beat writing was in prose, with Holmes and Kerouac having published novels and Burroughs soon to publish Junky in 1953. Kerouac’s western connections, stemming most famously from his 1948 cross-country trip with Cassady, however, were instrumental both in providing a receptive audience for Ginsberg and Corso and in exposing young West Coast poets such as Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen to a Beat sensibility that dovetails nicely with their own burgeoning poetic of eastern spiritualism. On October 7, 1955, the mythic gathering at the Six Gallery in San Francisco—where Ginsberg moved in 1954—announced the maturity of the Beat poets in stellar fashion, with Ginsberg and several San Francisco Renaissance poets, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen, all reciting their verse. Ginsberg’s performance of a draft of “Howl,” however, stole the show. The year 1955 also saw the publication of Corso’s first volume as well as one by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Despite Holmes’s early publicity, it was not until Ferlinghetti published Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems in 1956 and Kerouac’s novel On the Road was published to acclaim in 1957 that the Beats reached the national consciousness. Ginsberg skipped the 1957 obscenity trial prompted by his first book, leaving Ferlinghetti and the ACLU to fight the battle (Raskin 2004, 216–217). On October 3, 1957, almost two years after the Six Gallery reading, Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems was cleared of obscenity charges. Many of the Beat poets would take advantage of this ruling and pursue themes and images deemed taboo only a few years before. The increased publicity, however, spawned what Herb Caen termed the “beatnik” movement, young people attracted more to the nonconformist image of the Beats than to the poetry itself. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the beatnik fad resulted in stock characters such as Maynard G. Krebs in the television show The

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Many Loves of Dobie Gillis and beret-wearing, finger-snapping outcasts in Mad magazine and on The Flintstones. Low-budget films such as The Beat Generation (1959) and pulp fiction such as Beat Girl, Beatnik Wanton, and Lust Pad further contributed to the appropriation of the Beat’s milieu (Watson 1995, 260–261). Kerouac, among others, lamented this devolution, particularly its divorce from spirituality and literature. The late 1950s also saw many poets, such as Kenneth Rexroth, Ferlinghetti, and Bob Kaufman, perform their poetry while accompanied by jazz, an innovation that further expanded both the influence of the movement and parodies of its affectations. Nevertheless, the attention did attract talented poets such as Diane di Prima and LeRoi Jones to the fold, and a flurry of poetry volumes appeared, including ones by Kaufman, di Prima, Snyder, Corso, and Ferlinghetti. The 1960s saw not only some of the Beats’ best work—including Ginsberg’s Kaddish and Other Poems and Reality Sandwiches, Snyder’s Myths and Texts and Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems, Jones’s Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, di Prima’s Poems for Freddie, and Lenore Kandel’s The Love Book, among many others—but a marked shift in their literary and political influence. Cultural and political events such as Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964), cheap and reliable birth control, the maturation of the Baby Boomers, recreational drugs, feminism, gay rights, and the Vietnam War laid the groundwork for a significant interest in the anti-materialist ethos expounded by the Beat poets. The youth culture in particular looked to poets such as Ginsberg and Ed Sanders for guidance and inspiration in protesting the war and its cultural enablers. Ironically, sales of Beat literature exploded, even as its antimaterialist message failed to inspire many in the academy. Additionally, a “second wave” of Beat poets, such as Ann Waldman and Janine Pommy Vega took heart from the Beat example and expanded its boundaries. Starting in 1969, with the death of Kerouac, however, the Beat movement began to become mythologized. While its living members continued to write poetry, fans born long after the original Beats began a long process of transforming (or beatifying) the group into a collection of latter-day heroes. In the 1970s and 1980s, numerous popular anthologies, reprints, and testimonials appeared (the academy was more sluggish in praising the Beats), even as new material, such as Snyder’s Pulitzer-winning Turtle Island and Ginsberg’s Mind Breaths, appeared. Although some, such as Whalen and Kaufman, withdrew from the public eye, others, such as Ginsberg and Corso, capitalized on their celebrity and lectured and read poetry on a regular basis. Ginsberg in particular reveled in his role as generational spokesman and was quoted frequently by journalists seeking his opinion on important matters of the day. By his death in 1997, most recognized Ginsberg as a giant among contemporary poets. Many of the younger Beats, as well as older ones such as Snyder and Joanne Kyger, now distance themselves from a Beat label they find too constricting. As living, working poets, many feel either trapped, like Snyder, by the legend or believe with Waldman that its influence was merely one of many in their lives. The academy eventually began studying the Beats in earnest in the 1990s and 2000s, and numerous scholarly monographs and articles began to codify the Beat aesthetic and ideology. Trends and Themes Open Form. The 1940s and 1950s saw the hegemony of the New Criticism, an approach to literature that emphasized close reading and formalism. As a consequence of this influential movement, much of the poetry produced during this time

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adhered to strict formal conventions, a phenomenon lamented by the Beat poets, who felt that poems by such luminaries as Cleanth Brooks, early Robert Lowell, and Howard Nemerov lacked emotional significance. In contrast, the Beat poets saw organic, improvisational forms such as those employed by Whitman and Williams, as well as the spontaneous improvisation of Dada and be-bop, as strategies for expanding the range of American poetry. Like Henry Miller, the Beats wanted to destroy the “gold standard” of literature and pursue a form of selfexpression that was raw and true. Ginsberg later remarked that “even to entertain the conception in advance of creating a work of art would block your mind from getting at the actual heart-throb of direct expression of the material you started out trying to articulate or voice” (Ginsberg 1974, 106). Ferlinghetti, furthermore, described the core of the Beat aesthetic as an oral one: “The printed page has made poetry so silent. But the poetry that I am talking about here is spoken poetry, poetry conceived of as oral messages” (2001, 169). Open form allows the poetry to be more authentic (of the “street,” as Ferlinghetti put it), although the Beats certainly did revise their work, myths to the contrary notwithstanding. In achieving this open, oral form, the Beats took two primary paths, radical enjambment and dislocation, although techniques such as repetition, catalogues, uneven lines, collage, and others were common in Beat poetry. Different recordings of Beat poems, such as Ginsberg’s “Howl,” indicate the performable aspect of the poetry, with the poets employing different rhythms, cadences, and tones as their moods and relationship to their work alters over time. In poems such as Snyder’s “Night Highway Ninety-Nine,” McClure’s “Peyote Poem,” Janine Pommy Vega’s “Junk (and the Old Man) Changes,” Elise Cowen’s “Death I’m Coming,” and Jones’s “Hymn for Lanie Poo” all exhibit a loose structure that allows the poets to follow their minds without distraction, to free their thoughts from the strictures of convention. This nonlinear construction lets the Beats break free from paradigmatic, and even rational, logic and pursue a more unorthodox (at times transcendent) path. Despite the openness of the form, however, the Beats do not sacrifice complexity of thought, linking their free-flowing lines to themes as varied as atomic annihilation, racism, and Buddhism. Spirituality. Along with their skepticism of mainstream concepts such as capitalism, formal education, and patriotism, the Beats often found traditional Judeo-Christian religions lacking. Some of the Beats felt that the dogma of such religions robbed them of spiritual purity and of an immediate connection to God. Consequently, many of them, such as Kerouac, Snyder, Kyger, Whalen, and Welch, turned to various strands of eastern religions, among them Buddhism (Theravedan, Zen, and others), Tao, and Hinduism. Like the transcendentalists before them, the Beats focused on ways to expand their consciousness and break free from the homogenized sociocultural milieu of 1950s America. Among the many lessons that the writers learned was the concept of abandoning desire, which can only lead to suffering (Dukka). They also tried to purify themselves through meditation, although, as Snyder pointed out, many Beats were aided by “systematic experimentation with narcotics” (1992, 306). The goal, Snyder continued, was not to be constantly high, for that “lacks intellect, will, and compassion,” all necessary for true illumination. The illuminated individual would be in tune with the natural world and would strive to be compassionate and loving. For the Beats, spirituality and sin was a personal quest. Examples of Beat spirituality may be found in poems such as Ginsberg’s

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“Thoughts Sitting Breathing,” Kerouac’s “Sea,” Snyder’s “Smokey the Bear Sutra,” and Waldman’s “Pratitya-Samutpada.” Observing America’s post-war prosperity as shallow, many Beats held that the superstructures of American capitalism—and of other societies wherein individuals were valued less than the collective—tend to dehumanize and enervate citizens. According to the Beats, technology and progress, although beneficial for improving material wealth and entrenching political and military power, distract many people from reaching their potential. Progress, narrowly defined as technological advancement, leads not to self-knowledge and self-worth—or to an enlightened society—but to accumulation and power. In short, progress shackles most people because it compels them to turn away from their potential in an endless quest for more material goods. If a material need is met, progress creates a new “need” that becomes the focus of attention. A herd mentality ensues, wherein “group think” stifles individual creativity and spirituality. In contrast, the Beats, like Emerson before them, encouraged people to break out of limiting roles—consumer, parent, student, employee, and the like—and search for their true path. Sexuality. As the censorship travails of “Howl” suggest, a frank treatment of sexuality formed one of the thematic interests of many of the Beat poets and is one reason for their problematic early relationship with the scholarly community. Many Beats felt that just as universities, churches, and businesses had become hollow, enervating institutions that encouraged homogeneity and punished critical thinking, sexuality too had been bound in a straitjacket of anxiety, repression, and hypocrisy. Alternative sexualities, particularly same-sex relationships, nonmarital sex, and so-called fetishes were publicly demonized yet privately practiced, resulting not in healthy, natural enjoyment but in guilt-ridden, closeted behavior. For the Beats, part of self-liberation meant facing one’s sexuality and expressing it fully, both physically and rhetorically. Many of the Beats courageously proclaimed their gay and lesbian desires, no small act in an environment where deviation from “normative” sexual behavior could be punished by law or homophobic violence. While the Kinsey reports (Sexual Behavior in the Human Male [1948] and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female [1953]) and the pioneering sexual research of individuals such as Gershon Legman clearly showed the diversity of American sexual preferences, those tastes were not to be shared publicly if they contradicted the image of the heterosexual nuclear family. Ginsberg’s experiences with Carl Solomon, a man institutionalized partly because of his homosexuality, ultimately prompted him to be blunt about his own gay proclivities. Among its other achievements, “Howl” is remarkable for its descriptions of gay sex and for appropriating anti-gay slurs long before the Queer nationalism of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Obscenities, descriptions of intercourse, sexual metaphors—all of these taboo subjects and strategies found their way into Beat poetry, sometimes functioning as the primary theme, as in Kandel’s The Love Book, sometimes in support of other subjects, as in Ferlinghetti’s “Away Above a Harborful.” In most cases—although less so in the female Beats—sexuality is employed as a positive, joyous experience that contrasted with the guilt and fear surrounding its official manifestations. Sexuality is posited as a means of breaking away from the bonds of convention and requires neither marriage nor long-term commitment. As with mind-altering drugs such as peyote and LSD, sex is sometimes also seen as a method of reaching beyond one’s intellectual limits and tapping into a higher

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spiritual consciousness. Some Beat women, however, employ sexuality to investigate power and its relation to gender roles. Context and Issues Marginalization of Women and Minorities. Despite new collections highlighting the achievements of the female Beats and articles on African American Beat poets, most mainstream readers remain unfamiliar with poets such as Diane di Prima, Anne Waldman, Bob Kaufman, and Ted Joans. To a large degree, this ignorance stems from a lack of inclusion in mainstream undergraduate anthologies, in which students are exposed to various literary movements. In the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, no Beat poets are included, and only Kaufman appears in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (Jones/Baraka is represented by non-Beat works). Such omissions tend to underplay the range of Beat themes, such as abortion (di Prima’s “Brass Furnace Going Out”), criticism of the Black Arts Movement (Joans’s “A Few Blue Words to the Wise”), metafiction (Waldman’s “avant la letter”), and the healing power of jazz (Kaufman’s “Round about Midnight”). Concomitant with the absence of women and minorities, however, is canonical indifference to the poetry of the Beat poets in general, save for Ginsberg (the most entrenched in the canon), Snyder (a rising figure), Ferlinghetti, Rexroth, and Kerouac. Although figures such as Corso, Whalen, and McClure form part of the Beat myth, they, like Elise Cowen, Janine Pommy Vega, and (early) A.B. Spellman, find little to no representation in key academic anthologies. A key question is whether the continued exclusion of such Beat poets primarily stems from systemic racism/sexism, academic preferences, or popular stereotypes. War. The Beats grew out of the ashes of World War II, and the Korean War. The Cold War and the Vietnam conflict were key events in shaping the Beat aesthetic in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Poems such as Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” “Ed Sanders,” “Poem from Jail,” Rexroth’s “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” Corso’s “Bomb,” and di Prima’s “Goodbye Nkrumah,” for example, all rail against the military-industrial complex and espouse pacifist principles. With America at war once more, many readers are again turning to the alternative political views espoused by the Beat poets. In 1992, Ginsberg, in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, explained the resurgence of interest in the Beat message thusly: “The literature and mythology of the Beat Generation runs counter to the current hypertechnological, homogenized, money-obsessed, security/fear-based, militaristic gross-out. [ . . . ] All these themes make the original Beat ethos quite user-friendly, compared to the destructiveness of the supposed ‘straight’ world that can go nuts, killing one hundred fifty thousand people in Iraq for the sake of oil that’ll pollute the planet” (Ginsberg 1992, 13–14). The Beats’ message of spirituality, love, and peace clearly runs counter to the dictates of blind patriotism, the politics of fear, and go-it-alone foreign policy. A key question with respect to this issue is whether this message is actionable on a national scale or whether it leads to a dangerous quietism in the face of systematic brutalities. Canonical Rebels. A final issue for considering the Beats in 2007 concerns the effect of their mythos, both academically and popularly. While few younger readers of the Beats will disconnect the poets from their legend to the extent that many beatniks and hippies did in the 1950s and 1960s, many are still more fascinated with the Beats’ rebel lifestyle than with their often challenging poetry. Too often, the Beats

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BEAT POETRY PREDICTS THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT Even before the popular environmental movement unofficially started with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), many of the Beat poets showed an affinity for ecological awareness, particularly how it impacted spirituality. With an apparent majority of scientists concurring on the human impact on global warming, Beat poetry’s reverence for the natural world and its skeptical view of unrestrained technological progress is again attracting an audience. The Beats’ treatment of the environment fuses the personal, the spiritual, and the political in varying degrees, and nature is presented both in its (relatively) untouched state and in its relation to destructive human practices. Poems such as Whalen’s “3 Days Ago” and Kyger’s “September,” Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra,” and Snyder’s “Logging” section of Myths and Texts exemplify the quiet contemplation of nature and its ability to spark a heightened spiritual awareness, yet they also interrogate the unintended consequences of human activity on the environment. Snyder especially has welcomed the mantle of spokesperson for the environment, supplementing his poetry with essays on the subject. The Beats’ concern with more than “sustainability,” with a deeper ecology, holds great appeal for a readership grappling with the consequences of peak oil, global warming, and suburban sprawl. A key question prompted by the Beat poets is whether environmental idealism can gain political traction in a materialist society.

are seen as outrageous rebels rather than as superior poets, with their names carrying a talismanlike quality and their poems—apart from a few frequently anthologized poems by Ginsberg (“Howl,” “America,” “A Supermarket in California”) and Snyder (“Riprap,” “Wave,” “Axe Handles”)—largely unread. Selections from the most common anthologies of American literature, such as those published by Norton, Harper, Bedford, and Heath, do little to demystify the Beats as larger-than-life figures willing to fight the powers-that-be at all costs. Such a limited view becomes problematic, however, in the face of commercials for Gap khakis (silently deleting Joyce Johnson from the original photo), endless repackaging of biographical material, coffee mugs, refrigerator magnets, songs (for instance, 10,000 Maniacs’ “Hey Jack Kerouac”), and T-shirts. Such reification clearly departs from the antiestablishment tenor of the poetry, and it bespeaks of a Beat “industry” more than it does for the ability of the literature to stir the souls and minds of the audience. A key question, therefore, is whether the fetishization of the Beat legend will serve to enhance or to harm the Beats’ long-term poetic reputation. Reception. The Beats’ initial reception reflected their interest in marginal themes and open forms and was thus largely dismissive. Norman Podhoretz opined in 1958 that the Beats’ evinced love of “primitivism and spontaneity is more than a cover for hostility to intelligence; it arises from a pathetic poverty of feeling as well” (Podhoretz 2001, 491). Also in 1958, Herb Caen coined the term beatnik, which described marginalized societal dropouts without the drive for serious literary aspirations. Kerouac responded, but the term stuck, resulting in further marginalization for serious Beat poetry. Lawrence Lipton’s 1959 volume The Holy Barbarians further entrenched the popular notion of the beatnik. In the early 1960s, however, the Beats did find some admirers, including Thomas Parkinson, editor of an academic volume called A Casebook on the Beats in 1961, who noted that the Beats preached not rebellion but “social refusal” and that the poetry’s unusual syntax is an “attempt to increase the vocality of the verse” (Parkinson 1995, 450, 460–461). Another early

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volume on the beatniks was Francis J. Rigney and L. Douglas Smith’s. The Real Bohemia: A Sociological and Psychological Study of the “Beats,” which saw a range of human behavior rather than just the stereotypical behavior. By the late 1960s, the Beats’ popular reception was entrenched, as Baby Boomers strained against institutional conformism. In the early 1970s, the emphasis was on hagiography, as represented by books such as John Tytell’s Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation and Bruce Cook’s The Beat Generation. With volumes such as Lee Bartlett’s The Beats: Essays in Criticism, the academy slowly started to catch up with the public in the 1980s, although popular books by far outpaced their academic counterparts. During this period, some of the Beat poets (Ginsberg, Snyder, Ferlinghetti) entered mainstream anthologies and started to receive serious critical attention. Many others, however, including di Prima, Joans, and Waldman lingered on the edge of both the canon and the Beat myth, and even some of the acknowledged figures lacked much sustained criticism. As a result, many critics in the 1990s and beyond began to reevaluate the Beat myth and explore both some of the more marginalized poets and the more “central” figures. Such critics often noted that race and gender were often at play in this marginalization, although such white males as Corso and Welch fared little better in terms of poetic evaluation (although they were constantly present in the biographical and cultural analysis of the Beats). Examples of this trend include Ronna C. Johnson and Nancy M. Grace’s Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation, Brenda Knight’s 1996 anthology Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution, and Richard Peabody’s A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation. Recent anthologies, articles, and books have somewhat rectified the secondary status of many of the Beat poets, but a clear caste system in the criticism and especially in undergraduate anthologies such as the Norton Anthology of American Literature and Anthology of Modern American Poetry still exists. Despite lacking the critical attention of contemporaries such as Plath and Brooks, Ginsberg is clearly the most studied of the Beat poets, and his reputation shows no sign of falling since his death in 1997. Most articles, however, focus on Ginsberg’s early career, particularly “Howl,” and his later work is still awaiting extended debate. The rise of ecocriticism in the 1990s and beyond has led to increased attention for Snyder, but with the possible exceptions of Rexroth, Whalen, and Ferlinghetti, few of the Beats receive substantial individual attention. Jones/Baraka, of course, does receive attention, but not primarily for his Beat phase, and Kerouac’s poetry is not nearly as studied as his fiction. An occasional article appears on poets such as McClure or Welch, but it hardly constitutes a trend. In sum, much critical work remains to be done on the Beats, particularly on “peripheral” figures and the later poetry. Many collections of esoteric primary material, as well as Beat “encyclopedias” have appeared in the last two decades, but largely, the Beat myth continues to overshadow much of the poetry, and the criticism reflects this. Selected Authors Gregory Corso (1930–2001). Although Corso did not take part in the famous Six Gallery reading, he is now regarded as one of the “core” Beat poets. Combining humor with biting social commentary, in poems such as “Marriage” and “Bomb,” Corso reveals fundamental paradoxes in the American way of life and respectively challenges both uncritical romanticism and apocalyptic paranoia. Rarely inventive

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as a stylist, Corso eschews subtlety for attempts to jolt his readers out of their complacency with violent juxtapositions, such as in “Power,” where at one point he alternates between love and howitzers, suggesting that power is, at its core, motivated by love. Corso’s definitive collection is Mindfield: New and Selected Poems (1989). Diane di Prima (1934–). Along with Waldman, di Prima is among the two most influential female Beats. In collections such as This Kind of Bird Flies Backward (1958) and Seminary Poems (1991), di Prima feminized Beat poetry by commenting on subjects, such as abortion, female mythology, and pregnancy, ignored or underplayed by her male contemporaries. Poems such as “The Quarrel,” “The Practice of Magical Evocation” (a response to Snyder’s “Praise for Sick Women”), and “The Killing” intermingle tenderness, humor, and pain in exploring what it means to be a talented female in a world controlled by men. A practicing Buddhist, di Prima also, like many of the Beats, used hallucinogens, at one point living in the notorious Timothy Leary’s Millbrook commune. In the 1970s and beyond, di Prima tried her hand at a feminist epic, the Loba sequence (16 parts as of 1998), which investigates the experience of women via an archetypal, mythological strategy that plumbs the depths and scales the heights of feminine (un)consciousness. Formerly editing the important Beat periodical Floating Bear with Jones, di Prima has also written several plays. Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919–). Poet, publisher, cultural spokesman, Ferlinghetti has published over three dozen collections, some of which are A Coney Island of the Mind (the title of which alludes to a line from Henry Miller’s Black Spring), Tyrannus Nix?, and These Are My Rivers: New and Selected Poems, 1955–1993. Founder of the City Lights bookstore, an influential Beat hangout, Ferlinghetti published many books of Beat poetry, most famously Ginsberg’s Howl and other Poems in 1956. Ferlinghetti, like Ginsberg, valued the oral elements in poetry, and his style owes much to the improvisational quality of jazz. A ferocious wit, Ferlinghetti employed satire to tackle the most pressing issues of his day, including nuclear annihilation, anti-communist jingoism, and pollution. In poems such as “A Nation of Sheep,” “No. 25” (from Coney Island), and “Christ Climbed Down,” Ferlinghetti indicts the “blather” that arises from an inability to distance one’s self from American materialism. The stylistic stamp of e.e. cummings is unmistakable, as is Ferlinghetti’s debt to surrealism. Nevertheless, his allusive, boisterous voice is a singular achievement. Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997). Founding Beat poet and a giant of twentieth-century poetry, Ginsberg was influenced by, among others, Whitman, William Blake, eastern spirituality (especially Buddhism), Henry Miller, Arthur Rimbaud, surrealism, and W.C. Williams. In contrast to the strict formalism that he saw taking root in the 1940s and 1950s, Ginsberg was at his best when employing long enjambed lines packed full of startling images and juxtapositions, as seen in poems ranging from “Howl” and “Wichita Vortex Sutra” to “White Shroud” and “Reverse the Rain of Terror.” In writing collections such as Kaddish and Other Poems, Planet News, and Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986–1992, he critiqued the repressive and conformist attitudes of the Cold War era and took on an activist’s role during the Vietnam War and beyond, proudly exhibiting his open, experimental approach to life and literature. Although his poetry eventually became highly popular, Ginsberg rejected materialism in favor of visionary, ecstatic spiritualism that alternated between the violent and the sublime. Like many Beats, he drew on autobiography,

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but he placed it in a radically altered context. From his epic performance at the Six Gallery to the end of his life, Ginsberg considered the performable, public aspect of poetry crucial. Ted Joans (1928–2003). In collections such as Beat Poems, Funky Jazz Poems, and Afrodisia: New Poems, Joans infused a jazz sensibility with a vigorous sense of social justice. Joans was inspired foremost by the musicality of Langston Hughes, whose work motivated him to pay particular attention to rhythm, and dramatic tension, as in poems like “.38,” “It Is Time,” and “Think Twice and Be Nice.” Joans was renowned for his live performances, which greatly impressed Hughes. Like Jones/Baraka, Joans became disenchanted with the Beat movement, and the political engagement of the Black Arts movement attracted him, resulting in poems such as “Home,” “God Blame America,” and “To Every Free African.” LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) (1934–). Later renowned for his seminal poetic and theoretical work with the Black Arts movement, Jones was initially an influential Beat poet, supporter, and editor. With di Prima, Jones edited Floating Bear, and he established Totem Press, an important alternative publishing venue for several of his Beat contemporaries. He also wrote a blistering retort to Podhoretz’s dismissal of the Beat aesthetic. His Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note . . . is a key Beat collection that unveils Jones’s restless spirit, anticonformism, and unorthodox line. Poems such as “The Bridge” and “In Memory of Radio” underscore his improvisational bent, while “To a Publisher . . . cut-out” and “Notes for a Speech” anticipate Jones’s growing social concerns. Dead Lecturer shows growing tensions within Jones that would ultimately lead to his new, more polemical, aesthetic, with poems such as “An Agony. As Now” and “Short Speech to My Friends” problematizing the self-absorption (as opposed to transcendent spiritualism) evident in many of the Beats. Disgusted both with Beat poetry’s commercialization and its racial indifference, Jones spearheaded the Black Arts movement and became one of its leading writers, arguing not for individual transcendence but for collective action and true street poetry (i.e., poetry comprehensible for nonspecialists and designed to raise racial and class consciousness). Jones changed his name to Amiri Baraka in 1968. Lenore Kandel (1932–). Aiming for thematic and linguistic authenticity, Kandel’s most famous poems, such as “To Fuck with Love,” “Hard Core Love,” and “Love-Lust Poem,” merge raw sexuality, ecstatic self-awareness, and (eastern) metaphysical contemplation, although she did not limit herself to erotica. Subjects such as modern alienation, drug use, circuses, and mental anguish emphasize Kandel’s connection to the Beat aesthetic, and her style is influenced by bop and jazz. Kandel never collected her work, which remains accessible only in chapbooks such as The Love Book and A Passing Dragon, A Passing Dragon Seen Again, and in the small volume Word Alchemy, which contained a variety of her lyric poems. Following a devastating motorcycle accident, Kandel vanished from the literary scene in 1967, her small output an everlasting testimony to her potential. Bob Kaufman (1925–1986). A wide-ranging stylist, Kaufman drew on traditions as diverse as the African griot, Whitman, bop, and surrealism, and he thrived on the live recital of his poetry. He initially eschewed publication in favor of improvisational performances. In works such as Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness and The Golden Sardine, Kaufman announced his presence as an innovative social critic and jazz appropriator. He also helped found Beatitude Magazine, an important Beat periodical. Like Lenore Kandel, Kaufman underwent a self-imposed silence and published virtually nothing in the last part of his life.

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Jack Kerouac (1922–1969). Primarily noted for his “spontaneous prose” novels, Kerouac ventured into poetry in works such as Mexico City Blues, Scattered Poems, and the final section of Big Sur. Although he did write haiku, Kerouac, perhaps predictably, preferred the more epic style visible in the choruses of Mexico City Blues, wherein he riffs on metaphysical topics in a sort of cosmic dialectic. Many of the elements of his “spontaneous prose” (for example: “submissive to everything, open, listen”; “Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition”) are echoed in the poetry. Hyperdynamic and formally challenging, the choruses in Mexico City Blues engage subjects as diverse as bop, time (and Proust), and alienation. Kerouac’s haiku extended from the writer’s investigation of Buddhism and were often composed “on the spot” as a jazzy barrage of sound and crystallized metaphysics. Although Kerouac’s poetic output pales with that of Ferlinghetti, Jones, Corso, and his other Beat contemporaries, many critics note that his prose is highly poetic and that its rhythms are similar to the open form of the best Beat poetry. Joanne Kyger (1934–). A poet with an epic sensibility but a lyrical form, Kyger, as H.D. and Adrienne Rich, infuses classical myths with a distinctly feminist view. Challenging the rough-and-ready ethos of many of her male Beat peers, Kyger marries a multifaceted spiritualism with an interrogation of feminine archetypes. Unlike the more transparent autobiographical approach of some of her contemporaries, Kyger employs a “deep” approach to self-examination in collections such as The Tapestry and the Web, The Wonderful Focus of You, and Patzcuaro. In the former, for example, Kyger reworks The Odyssey and subverts Penelope’s role as a loyal, if limited, helpmeet by imbuing her with the power to control Odysseus’s destiny and in other ways expanding her role. Kyger is also very interested in revealing the importance, humor, and energy inherent in everyday life. Her most recent work has been highly critical of U.S. involvement in Iraq. Michael McClure (1932–). As both poet and playwright, McClure explores the nexus of the physical and the spiritual, often employing the former as a conduit for the latter. Reveling in the body, seeking synergy with nature, McClure’s poetry emphasizes an awareness that leads to unrestrained joy, even amid viciousness and hypocrisy. A prolific poet, McClure, in such books as Hymns to St. Geryon and Other Poems, Dark Brown, September Blackberries, and Simple Eyes, makes ample use of animal imagery, ecstatic visions, and physical candor. McClure’s style ranges widely, but it frequently accentuates the pictorial elements of poetry (capitalization, alternation between long lines and single words, visual symmetry/asymmetry, parentheses, dashes, etc.). Other pervasive features, as seen in such poems as, “Love Lion,” “For the Death of 100 Whales,” “Rant Block,” and “Plum Stones,” include mantralike repetition, catalogs, and surprising imagery. Janine Pommy Vega (1942–). Employing her private pain as a catalyst for transcendence, Pommy Vega investigates how loss can crystallize one’s experience of love, self, and spirituality. A teen when she turned her back on middle-class conformity, Pommy Vega became an autodidact, soaking up influences such as Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams, and William Blake, yet she managed to develop a strong individual voice. From early collections such as Poems to Fernando and Journal of a Hermit to later books such as Mad Dogs of Trieste: New and Selected Poems, 1975–2000 and The Green Piano: New Poems, Pommy Vega documents her ability to withstand both personal (deaths of her husband and parents, abortion, automobile accident, etc.) and political (Cold War, Sarajevo, Iraq, etc.) trauma while expanding her spiritual horizons. Pommy Vega typically

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uses a plain, direct style that juxtaposes simple, yet often terrifying, images with emblems of survival. Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982). A mentor for both many Beat and San Francisco Renaissance poets, Rexroth was himself influenced by Chicago’s socialist and avantgarde scene in the 1920s, although he avoided being overly dogmatic. Rexroth’s anti-establishment poetics clearly attracted the Beats, though, and although Rexroth later rejected the commercialization of the Beats, he has many similarities with them. Among these are Rexroth’s jazzlike rhythms, contemplative themes, and colloquial specificity. In collections such as The Signature of All Things, In Defense of the Earth, and The Love Poems of Marichiko, Rexroth reveals a growing interest in Asian philosophy and technique, directly presenting his images and revealing a quiet passion reminiscent of some of Snyder’s less polemical work. Common Beat themes such as sexuality, anticapitalism, and the environment are present, but Rexroth eschews the explosive rhetoric of a Ginsberg or Sanders, adopting a more restrained poetics that presents sharpened emotions on the verge of release rather than the release itself, a technique evident in poems such as “VII” (from The Love Poems of Marichiko), “Fish Peddler and Cobbler,” and “Married Blues,” although exceptions such as “Thou Shalt Not Kill” appear with fair regularity. Ed Sanders (1939–). Editor of the important Beat periodical Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts and member of the avant-garde poet-rock band the Fugs (“Swinburne Stomp,” “Carpe Diem”), Sanders is a classically trained poet who produces highly unorthodox, colloquial, and confrontational verse. Politically conscious from the start, Sanders has employed derisive, feverish wit in satirizing the destructive powers of war and unrestrained capitalism from Vietnam to Iraq. In such Dionysian books as Peace Eye, 20,000 A.D., Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century: Selected Poems, 1961–1985, and America: A History in Verse (this latter an example of what Sanders calls “investigative poetry”), Sanders combines serious themes with irreverent poetics, playful images, and sexual language. Gary Snyder (1930–). Somewhat younger than the original Beats, Snyder is nevertheless one of the most influential of the movement, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for Turtle Island, a collection that cemented his reputation as an environmental activist. Snyder’s early work in Riprap and Myths and Texts contrast materialist societies with the harder, but ultimately more spiritually rewarding, aboriginal cultures. As with Robinson Jeffers, Snyder could at times appear misanthropic, but like Jeffers, he reserved his most stinging rebukes for those individuals and societies that had lost touch with the land and its spiritual lessons. In poems such as “Ripples on the Surface” and “Straight-Creek—Great Burn,” Snyder merges precise environmental detail with human possibilities and losses. Some critics, however, fault Snyder for an overly moralizing, judgmental tone in some of his nature poetry, such as “Mother Earth: Her Whales” or “Smokey the Bear Sutra.” Apart from his concern for the environment, Snyder is best known for his spiritual themes. Unlike some of the Beats, Snyder studied Zen Buddhism systematically and strived to avoid a diluted, “Americanized” strain of the lifestyle. His poetry tends to integrate this meditative approach to existence, as in “What Happened Here Before” and “The Blue Sky.” A.B. Spellman (1935–). A student of Sterling A. Brown, who encouraged him to explore the artistic and social possibilities of music, Spellman developed an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz, which helped him to craft an aesthetic that veers between the understated and explosive in his sole book of poetry, The Beautiful

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Days. In The Beautiful Days, Spellman also has made sporadic poetic contributions to various periodicals and anthologies. Anne Waldman (1945–). Two decades younger than the original Beats, Waldman nevertheless held important roles in later Beat ventures, such as the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. A prolific poet, Waldman’s early works revealed an affinity with ur-Beats such as Ginsberg and Corso. In volumes such as Baby Breakdown and Fast Speaking Woman, Waldman displays a Whitmanesque open line and a fondness for pastiche. In poems such as “All of My Kingdoms” and “Miles Above,” Waldman bursts with vibrant energy as she subverts rigid patriarchal institutions and thinking. In recent years, Waldman has turned to the epic, with her multivolume sequence, Iovis, which contains both her familiar collage technique and a sweeping, mythic range that interrogates both individual transcendence and collective impediments. Additionally, Waldman, in the anti-academic tradition of the earliest Beats, is a performance artist of the first water and avails herself of a variety of media in her dynamic public events. A practicing Buddhist, Waldman offers feminist spiritual insight lacking in many of her Beat peers. Lew Welch (1926–1971[?]). A classmate of Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen, Welch was something of a tragic enigma, what Snyder called a “casualty.” A talented poet, Welch suffered from both depression and alcoholism, severely limiting his published output. Nevertheless, Welch, influenced by such writers as Robert Service, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams, transformed his poetic voice from a fairly traditional one to a tight, crisp style that avoided “literary” allusion. In his collection On Out and chapbooks such as Hermit Poems and The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings, Welch combined an economical vocabulary with a brisk rhythm to explore his troubled life honestly and directly. Philip Whalen (1923–2002). Although often labeled a Beat, Whalen, as with many of the western Beats, was also a driving force in the San Francisco Renaissance. In collections such as Like I Say, On Bear’s Head, and Every Day, Whalen offers a gentle, playful contrast to some of his more exuberant contemporaries among the Beats. Whalen experimented, like many of the Beats, with open typographical forms, but his subject matter is generally more self-deprecating and quotidian. A Buddhist monk, Whalen’s commitment to spiritual matters is unparalleled among the Beats, and his poetry reflects this concern in poems such as “The Dharma Youth League,” “Sourdough Mountain Lookout,” and “The Expensive Life,” although he rarely employs hyperserious rhetoric, preferring to juxtapose metaphysical principles with a variety of earthly pursuits. Bibliography Baraka, Amiri. Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note. New York: Totem Press, 1961. Barlett, Lee, ed. The Beats: Essays in Criticism. Jefferson: McFarland, 1981. Burroughs, William S. Junky. New York: Ace, 1953. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1962. Charters, Ann. “Panel Discussion with Women Writers of the Beat Generation.” Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation?. Ann Charters, ed. New York: Penguin, 2001, 611–632. Cook, Bruce. The Beat Generation. New York: Scribner, 1971. Corso, Gregory. Mindfield: New and Selected Poems. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989. di Prima, Diane. Freddie Poems. Point Reyes, CA: Eidolon Editions, 1974.

BEAT POETRY ———. Seminary Poems. Point Reyes, CA: Floating Island, 1991. ———. This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards. New York: Totem Press, 1958. Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. “Note on Poetry in San Francisco.” Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation?. Ann Charters, ed. New York: Penguin, 2001, 169. ———. A Coney Island of the Mind. New York: New Directions, 1968. ———. These Are My Rivers: New and Selected Poems, 1955–1993. New York: New Directions, 1993. ———. Tyrannus Nix? New York: New Directions, 1969. Gates, Henry Louis, and McKay, Nellie Y. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. Gifford, Barry, and Lee. Lawrence. Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, eds. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. Ginsberg, Allen. Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness. Gordon Bell, ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974. ———. Howl and Other Poems. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1956. ———. Kaddish and Other Poems. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1961. ———. “Prologue.” Beat Culture and the New America: 1950–1965. Lisa Phillips, ed. New York: Whitney Museum/Flammarion, 1995, 17–19. Ginsberg, Allen. Reality Sandwiches. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1963. Ginsberg, Allen, and Daurer, Greg. “The High Times Interview.” High Times. February (1992): 13–16. Holmes, John Clellon. “This Is the Beat Generation.” Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation?. Ann Charters, ed. New York: Penguin, 2001, 222–228. Joans, Ted. Afrodisia: New Poems. New York: Hill & Wang, 1970. ———. Jazz Poems: Beat Funky. New York: Rhino Review, 1959. Johnston, Allan. “Consumption, Addiction, Vision, Energy: Political Economies and Utopian Visions in the Writings of the Beat Generation.” College Literature 32.2 (2005): 103–126. Kandel, Lenore. The Love Book. San Francisco, CA: Stolen Paper, 1966. Kaufman, Bob. Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness. New York: New Directions, 1965. ———. The Golden Sardine. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1967. Kerouac, Jack. Big Sur. New York: Penguin, 1962. ———. Mexico City Blues. New York: Grove Press, 1959. ———. On the Road. New York: Viking, 1957. ———. Scattered Poems. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1961. Knight, Brenda, ed. Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution. 2nd ed. San Francisco, CA: Conari, 1998. Kyger, Joanne. Pátzcuaro. Bolinas, CA: Blue Millenium, 1999. ———. The Tapestry and the Web. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1965. ———. The Wonderful Focus of You. Calais: Z Press, 1979. Lipton, Lawrence. The Holy Barbarians. New York: Messner, 1959. McClure, Michael. Hymns to St. Geryon and Other Poems and Dark Brown. San Francisco, CA: Grey Fox, 1980. McClure, Michael. September Blackberries. New York: New Directions, 1974. ———. Simple Eyes. New York: New Directions, 1994. Peabody, Richard. A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997. Podhoretz, Norman. “The Know-Nothing Bohemians.” In Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation?. Ann Charters, ed. New York: Penguin, 2001, 481–493. Raskin, Jonah. American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004.

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BIOGRAPHY Rigney, Francis J., and Smith, L. Douglas. The Real Bohemia: A Sociological and Psychological Study of the “Beats.” New York: Basic Books, 1961. Rexroth, Kenneth. The Love Poems of Marichiko. Santa Barbara, CA: Christopher’s Books, 1978. Sanders, Ed. America: A History in Verse. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 2000. Skerl, Jennie. Introduction. In Reconstructing the Beats. Jennie Skerl, ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 1–7. Snyder, Gary. Myths and Texts. New York: Totem, 1960. ———. “Note on the Religious Tendencies.” In The Portable Beat Reader. Ann Charters, ed. New York: Viking, 1992; 305–306. ———. Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1965. ———. Turtle Island. New York: New Directions, 1974. Spellman, A.B. The Beautiful Days. New York: Poets’ Press, 1968. Tytell, John. Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. van Elteren, Mel. “The Subculture of the Beat: A Sociological Revisit.” Journal of American Culture 22.3 (1999): 71–99. Vega, Janine Pommy. Poems to Fernando. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1968. ———. Journal of a Hermit. Cherry Valley, NY: Cherry Valley Editions, 1974. Waldman, Anne. Baby Breakdown. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970. ———. Fast Speaking Woman. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1975. ———. Iovis. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1997. Watson, Steven. The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944–1960. New York: Pantheon, 1995. Whalen, Philip. Every Day. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1965. ———. Like I Say. New York: Totem, 1960. ———. On Bear’s Head. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1969.

Further Reading Barlett, Lee, ed. The Beats: Essays in Criticism. Jefferson: McFarland, 1981; Charters, Ann. Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation? New York: Penguin, 2001; Johnson, Ronna, and Nancy M. Grace, eds. Girls who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002; Knight, Brenda, ed. Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Conari, 1998; Lee, Robert A., ed., The Beat Generation Writers. London: Pluto, 1996; Phillips, Lisa. Beat Culture and the New America: 1950–1965. New York: Whitney Museum/Flammarion, 1995; Raskin, Jonah. American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004; Skerl, Jennie, ed. Reconstructing the Beats. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004; Stephenson, Gregory. The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990; Tytell, John. Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.

JAMES M. DECKER

BIOGRAPHY Definition. In everyday usage, the term biography is generally understood to refer to an account of an individual’s life. Attempts to define the proper aim, form, and scope of such accounts, however, have provided ample fodder for heated debates among biographers, their subjects, their readers, and their critics, the reasons and rationales for writing and reading biographies being diverse enough that there exist multiple standards for evaluating the success of a work. These include whether the biographer sought to be definitive or “of the moment” in his account of the subject’s

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life; whether the account purports to be comprehensive or focused on a specific aspect of the subject’s achievements; and whether the biographer sees his primary role to be that of an entertainer, an educator, a reporter, or a historian. Although these roles are not mutually exclusive—and, indeed, the most well-received biographies are often a hybrid of historical writing and literary journalism—the biographer’s perception of his responsibilities affects the style, format, content, and marketing of the published account, including whether it is reviewed and catalogued as history, fiction, or general nonfiction. The term biography encompasses scholarly monographs with hundreds of footnotes; glossy coffee-table books consisting primarily of anecdotes and photographs; gossip-spiced chronicles of a celebrity’s rise to fame; extended speculation about the subject’s inner life, based on clues derived from the subject’s artistic output; novelistic portraits with invented scenes and dialogue; and other combinations of textual and visual narrative. Also referred to as life writing, the genre attracted enough academic interest during the twentieth century to merit the establishment of an interdisciplinary Center for Biographical Research (CBR) at the University of Hawaii in 1976. The center and the University of Hawaii Press began publication of a quarterly journal in 1978; other periodicals devoted to the genre include a/b: Auto/Biography Studies (first issue 1985), the Journal of Historical Biography (first issue 2007), the Journal of Medical Biography (first issue 1993), Life Writing (first issue 2004), and Lifewriting Annual: Biographical and Autobiographical Studies (first issue 2006). Other programs devoted to development, discussion, and promotion of the genre include the Center for the Study of Lives (University of Southern Maine, founded 1988) and the International Auto/Biography Association (founded 1999), the latter a sponsor of biennial conferences. Genealogical and historical organizations that coordinate biographical programs, publications, and resources include the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society (founded 1869). Support groups for professional biographers include the Biography Seminar at New York University (founded 1980) and Women Writing Women’s Lives (City University of New York, founded 1990). There are many issues for scholars of the genre to examine and explore. The range of narrative forms available to biographers raises associated questions about the methods of research and interpretation they elect to pursue; many biographers choose to address this by detailing the parameters and scope of their specific projects in a remarks or acknowledgments section. For example, in his biography of John Wilkes (1726–1797), published by a university press, retired English professor Arthur Cash (b. 1922) signals his awareness of the different types of readers likely to peruse his book: I have written this book for a general audience of well-read, intelligent people. I hope scholars will approve of it, but I did not have them in mind as I wrote. I seldom say “it seems” or “the evidence suggests,” and I seldom call attention to the quality of the evidence. On the other hand, the notes, which will be of little help to the general reader, are made for the scholar. My view of Wilkes is so different from that usually held by historians, it will certainly be challenged. I want the challengers to have no doubt of the primary evidence I have used, or from what secondary sources I have taken facts. (2006, 395)

In his biography of Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), published by a commercial press, history professor David Nasaw begins with his evaluations of earlier portrayals of Carnegie, taking pains to note the constraints imposed upon his predecessors

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and highlighting his access to archives that had been closed or unknown to them. At 878 pages, Nasaw’s version of Carnegie’s life is clearly intended to serve as a definitive reference work, and he emphasizes his role in judging the evidence presented in older volumes: “My account of Carnegie’s life leaves out several of the familiar stories told in the Autobiography and retold by his biographers, because I could not independently confirm their validity” (ix). At the same time, Nasaw had previously demonstrated his ability to write popular books with his biography of William Randolph Hearst (1862–1951); consequently, Andrew Carnegie was featured in holiday gift catalogs and heavily reviewed in general-interest newspapers and magazines, including two separate assessments in The New York Times (Gordon 2006; Hitchens 2006; Parker 2006; Stiles 2006; Yardley 2006). It reached The New York Times bestseller list and was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography (the other finalist was Cash’s biography of Wilkes). Its success notwithstanding, several of the book’s reviewers expressed dissatisfaction with Nasaw’s handling of his resources. Salon reviewer T.J. Stiles, himself an award-winning biographer, lauded Nasaw’s effort as “the most thorough, accurate and authoritative biography of Carnegie to date . . . I came away convinced that he has read everything Carnegie ever wrote.” However, Stiles also opined that Nasaw had fallen short in other areas. In Stiles’s view of the genre, he noted: Researcher . . . is only one of three roles played by a good biographer. Just as important are the parts of historian and writer—the first to explain the times, the second to craft a purposeful narrative. To put it another way, the researcher provides depth, the historian breadth, the writer life. (2006)

Stiles’s conclusion—that Nasaw had concentrated too much on depth—was voiced by another well-regarded biographer, book critic Jonathan Yardley (b. 1939), who declared that: Andrew Carnegie would be a better book had it been pared down from 800 pages of text to, say, 650, because Nasaw is in love with his research and cannot let go of it even when it becomes redundant, but only readers laboring under constraints of time are likely to complain; this is biography on the grand scale, and on the whole it lives up to its author’s ambitions. (2006)

Yardley’s prediction of Andrew Carnegie’s welcome among other readers suggests a set of universal expectations regarding biographical narratives, but his claim is better treated as a reflection of an individual’s personal definition of the genre—one with which other biographers and readers do not necessarily concur. Yardley’s belief in an ideal balance of research and exposition informs his reviews of other biographies. For instance, in an appraisal of a study of H.L. Mencken (1880–1956), Yardley simultaneously praises the author’s “refusal to get bogged down in quotidian biographical minutiae” and casts it as a weakness, seeing it as the reason several topics were not given the attention he felt they merited (2002). Yardley’s preference for “serious inquiry” over the mere “accumulation and recording of facts” colors his use of the term “biography,” as does his open disdain for gossip and ideological message mongering. At the same time, Yardley acknowledges that his notions of what constitutes a “biography” are more conservative and idealistic than those espoused by career biographer Nigel Hamilton (b. 1944), who argues that the term “needs to be redefined

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to encompass the many, many different ways in which real-life depiction is practiced in Western society,” including via documentary films and blogs (2007, 2). Although Yardley considers himself “well aware of the limitations” of traditional print biography, he is nonetheless distinctly uncomfortable with Hamilton’s eagerness to embrace forms that lean more toward entertainment than enlightenment: Where is the line between fact and interpretation? Is biography history or psychological speculation? Is the purpose of biography to celebrate the lives of the famous and notable and thus to provide exemplars for the rest of us, or to reduce them to their mere humanity and thus to comfort us in the knowledge that they too are imperfect? . . . Do we read biography to understand and profit from the lives of others, or do we read it because we want the inside skinny? (2007)

In contrast, biographer and English professor Carl Rollyson applauds Hamilton’s efforts to broaden the definition of the genre, agreeing with Hamilton that “biography” has been underrated and underserved as an area of study. Along similar lines, historian Gary Ianziti urges his fellow humanities and social science researchers not to dismiss biographical narratives out of hand when conducting their investigations, observing that the genre has proven itself to be “capable of infinite transformations” (2003, 12), resulting in both books “of high scholarly standard” and others in which the overriding aim is “to provide a good read” (9). Analyzing the genre from the perspective of its detractors, British biographer Michael Holroyd (b. 1935) cheerfully labels it “the unwanted offspring” of history and literature—a hybrid form that has not yet succeeded in commanding widespread respect or trust (2002, 8–9). Nick Webb (b. 1949), an executive in science fiction publishing, declared that “Contemporary biography is the Area 51 of the literary world. There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence that it exists, but very few get to visit” (2003, xiii). Joyce Carol Oates’s 1988 tirade against “pathography” is often cited in such discussions (see Backscheider, Hamilton, Rollyson), as are the efforts of literary giants such as T.S. Eliot (1888–1965), W.H. Auden (1907–1973), William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863), and Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) to discourage would-be biographers (see Holroyd 2002, 29; Edel 1984, 20–21). Vladimir Nabokov tagged biographers as “psycho-plagiarists” (Edel 1984, 20). The combination of formal resistance and healthy sales points to a disconnect that some observers see between high-minded commentators and the tastes of the public at large. For instance, Laura Claridge (herself a former professor with

THE POPULARITY OF BIOGRAPHY The suspicion and disdain of such luminaries notwithstanding, the genre’s immense popularity among mainstream readers is highly visible in multiple venues. Biographies frequently appear on best-seller charts and year-end “best of” compilations.They are often nominated for major book awards and merit their own category of Pulitzer Prize.They are heavily advertised and regularly reviewed, to the extent that reviews of biographies even attract their own reviews, such as history professor David Greenberg’s assessment of the reaction to psychologist C.A. Tripp’s thesis on Abraham Lincoln’s sexuality (Greenberg 2005). The New York Times frequently double-reviews major biographies, printing an evaluation by one of its staff reviewers in a weekday edition and featuring a second assessment in the Sunday Book Review.

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tenure) credits non-U.S. colleagues with helping her compare “the intimidation of Americans by institutional criticism” against “the greater freedom abroad to stand by one’s sensuous reaction to art as a valid criterion for its worth,” the latter being more in line with the approach she adopted for her biography of artist Norman Rockwell (2001, xx–xxi). Journalist and editor Tina Brown (b. 1953) breezily admits to perusing Kitty Kelley’s “doorstopper” about the Bush family not for insight into “the great issues” but for the gossip: The 600 pages of her newest bioporn may get more traction among the public than the snob press would allow . . . most of us know that much of life on and off the world stage is driven by the accidental trivia of vanity, rivalry and buried grudges. (2004)

The hunger for such “trivia” can be witnessed in the longevity of glossy periodicals (and their online incarnations) such as People (founded 1974), Us (founded 1977), Entertainment Weekly (founded 1990), and Vanity Fair (1914–1936, relaunched 1983), as well as supermarket-rack tabloids and celebrity-tracking Web sites. The Biography Channel (premiered 1987) runs documentaries around the clock and is considered a cornerstone of the Arts & Entertainment (A&E) cable network; its Web site (www.biography.com; established 1996) contains over 25,000 entries, some in the form of short articles and others as video clips. The proliferation of free online resources such as Wikipedia and “fansites” (Web sites developed in homage to a specific celebrity or group of celebrities, such as the cast of a television show) also attests to the eagerness of the public to collect details about famous people’s lives. However, the market for biographies in printed book form shows no signs of dwindling. Some of the format’s longevity can be attributed to individuals who elect to read longer works offline for reasons of physical comfort or situational convenience (such as “beach reading,” in which biographies with the portability and pace of light paperback novels are preferred). As sources of information, printed biographies are considered more stable than Web pages, many of which become obsolete or simply vanish when their creators lose interest in maintaining them. Also, prior to its arrival on bookstore shelves, a biography published by a commercial or academic press is typically screened, vetted, and edited by a series of professionally trained staff who have a fiscal stake in the book’s success, distinguishing it from the unfiltered and often unattributed content that characterizes many “for the love” nonprofit Web sites. The reputation of a publisher’s name may also influence a potential reader’s perception of the book’s quality; for instance, the Knopf imprint

Thus, a growing trend among print publishers is the use of companion Web sites to host expanded versions of the notes and bibliographies for printed biographies. For example, readers of A Thousand Miles of Dreams are advised that “a comprehensive bibliography of Chinese and English language materials by and about Ling Shuhua and other further reading suggestions” are available on the publisher’s Web site (Welland 2006, 329). Debby Applegate begins her bibliography to The Most Famous Man in America by noting that space limitations compelled her to be extremely selective about which sources to list, thus causing her to “peg my citations to the most accurate and accessible versions, referring to digitized copies whenever possible” (495). Applegate established a site, www.themostfamousmaninamerica.com, “to publish much of the information that could not make it into the book.”

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of Random House has attracted notice for consistently promoting authors who become Pulitzer finalists or winners (Rich 2007). At the same time, Web sites are easier and cheaper to update than printed volumes and permit the storage of immense quantities of information at relatively little cost. Likewise, readers of Brotherhood of the Bomb are encouraged to visit www.brotherhoodofthebomb.com to download copies of the “much longer and more comprehensive set of endnotes” (Herken 2002, 335). Additional issues arise when one considers the popularity of autobiography. These issues are discussed in a separate entry in this encyclopedia. History. In surveys and discussions about the history of biography, the author most frequently named from classical times is Plutarch (c. 46–c. 120), although Xenophon (c. 431–355 B.C.E) and Suetonius (c. 71–c. 135) are also considered major figures (Whittemore 1988, 11–12). James Boswell (1740–1795) called Plutarch “the prince of ancient biographers” (23). Plutarch’s most influential work has been Bioi Paralleloi (Parallel Lives), which includes his study of Alexander the Great (356 B.C.E.–323 B.C.E.). Its strategy of analyzing the characters of famous individuals in pairs—for instance, that of Alexander and Julius Caesar (100 B.C.E–44 B.C.E), Theseus and Romulus (c. 771 B.C.E.–c. 717 B.C.E.), and Demosthenes (384 B.C.E.–322 B.C.E.) and Cicero (106 B.C.E.–43 B.C.E.)—can be seen in countless contemporary works, including Phyllis Rose’s study of five Victorian marriages, also titled Parallel Lives (1983); other titles include To Kill a Black Man: The Shocking Parallel in the Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. (Lomax 1968); Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (Bullock 1992), Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington (Epstein 2004), and Jesus and Paul: Parallel Lives (Murphy-O’Connor 2007). Rose’s book, in its turn, has been acknowledged by Katie Roiphe (b. 1968) as one of the inspirations for Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910–1939 (Winner 2007). The popularity of Plutarch’s Lives helped preserve it for later generations as it caused many copies of the manuscript to be made, thereby increasing the odds of several of them lasting through the centuries (McCutchen 1998). The Lives proved to be immensely popular during the Renaissance era in western Europe; according to Robert Lamberton, “only Aristotle and Plato, among writers of Greek prose, were better represented in the collections of Italian libraries of the fifteenth century,” and over 50 Latin translations had been made of sections from Lives by 1450 (2001, 190). During this era, editions of the Lives also appeared in Italian, Spanish, German, French, and English (McCutchen 1998). Of these, the 1559 French translation by Jacques Amyot (1513–1593) is regarded as especially important because it was the version used by Thomas North (c. 1535–c. 1601) to create the first English translation. North’s rendition of Plutarch’s Lives was in turn actively consulted by William Shakespeare (1564–1616) during the writing of plays such as Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. The next major translation of the Lives into English was produced by a team of translators led by poet and playwright John Dryden (1631–1700). This translation was updated by poet Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861) and republished in 1859. The Dryden-Clough edition is still in active circulation among twenty-first century readers. There is one other “complete” English edition (that is, of the texts pieced together from the various surviving manuscripts; these texts make reference to other sections that have not been found) that was produced by classicist Bernadotte Perrin

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(1847–1920), as well as assorted selected Lives by other translators. Poet and critic Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) favored North’s version and asserted that: . . . .like the Bible and Shakespeare, Parallel Lives is a desert-island book. Classical literature contains a good many greater works of art, and many truer pictures of the ways of men. But Plutarch never palls. He is always engaging, interesting, and above all else, to use a word that will provoke smiles today, elevating. (1968)

Depending on one’s definition of the genre, practitioners of “biography” during the Renaissance include Italian architect and painter Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), best known for Le vite delle più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori [commonly known in English as Lives of the Artists] (1550); English antiquarian John Aubrey (1626–1697), whose irreverent style animates his Brief Lives (organized and published after his death by assorted editors); Protestant clergyman John Foxe (1516–1587), whose Actes and Monuments of These Latter and Perillous Dayes (1563) became known as the Book of Martyrs; ironmonger and fisherman Izaak Walton (1593–1683), who wrote about such poets as Herny Wotton (1568–1639), John Donne (1572–1631), and George Herbert (1593–1633); and Thomas Fuller (1608–1661), another clergyman, whose History of the Worthies of Britain appeared the year after his death. Selected Authors. Reed Whittemore observes that “Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) could not have been the first interesting biographical subject who ever lived, but we have so much information about him that it is easy to think the genre began with him” (1988, 101). Johnson’s biographer was Scottish lawyer James Boswell (1740–1795), whose name has become synonymous with “a person who records in detail the life of a usually famous contemporary (Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition); a famous literary example of such usage is Sherlock Holmes’s claim, “I am lost without my Boswell” (Doyle 1891, 12). Johnson was a lexicographer, editor, and writer; his output included Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets, which became known as Lives of the Poets (1781) (Lynch n.d.). Boswell was not Johnson’s only biographer, or even the first, but his exhaustive efforts to document Johnson’s conversation set a new standard for the genre. Whittemore states: Never before had so much had material been amassed in the way of actual conversation with a great mind. Never had there been a loyal disciple so industrious in walking about with pen and paper and dutifully collecting his subject’s pearls. And, therefore, never before had wholeness in biography been so strenuously reached for. (1988, 129)

Scholar Leon Edel (1907–1997) likewise labels Boswell’s Life of Johnson “the first great modern biography” (1984, 55). In the eyes of Edel, Harold Nicolson (1886–1968), and other major biographers, Boswell (with significant assistance from Edmond Malone) transformed expectations for biographical writing with his 1,400-page tribute to Johnson and its plethora of “fine everyday details which make Johnson come alive” (Edel 1984, 54–56). According to www.samueljohnson.com, Johnson ranks behind only Shakespeare as the most-quoted English author, and interest in both Johnson and Boswell will likely surge with the 300th anniversary of

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Johnson’s birth in 2009. Boswell’s tactics to steer Johnson’s conversation, Johnson’s awareness of Boswell’s literary ambitions, and other points of debate continue to fascinate contemporary readers, with modern biographies such as Peter Martin’s Life of James Boswell (2000) striving to assess their achievements anew. The next landmark biographical work in English literature is widely considered to be Eminent Victorians (1918) by (Giles) Lytton Strachey (1880–1932). Strachey was an admirer of Aubrey and a disciple of Freud (Whittemore 1989, 105–106), and his understanding of psychological self-sabotage informs his profiles of Roman Catholic cardinal Henry Edward Manning (1808–1892), nurse Florence Nightingale (1820–1910), educator Thomas Arnold (1795–1842), and general Charles George Gordon (1833–1885), as well as his books Queen Victoria (1921) and Elizabeth and Essex (1928). Strachey was a member of the Bloomsbury group of writers and artists famed for their eccentricities and defiance of conventional manners, and his antisentimental style is frequently described as “sardonic” and “mocking” (cf. Hamilton 2007, 151–52), even though Strachey also regarded biography as “the most delicate and humane of all the branches of writing” (qd. by Edel 1984, 33). Katie Roiphe, herself known among cultural critics for her rejection of conventional wisdom on feminist issues, cites Eminent Victorians as one of the books that led her to consider the study of relationships “as a way of looking at a culture” (Winner 2007). Michael Holroyd says, “We do not imitate Strachey, but it was he who liberated the form for all of us. He was the enfant terrible” (2002, 26). Victorian scholar Richard Altick (b. 1915) concludes that Strachey effectively triggered a fad for “book-length debunking of reputations” that resulted in “brightly written, studiously irreverent biographies by the hundreds” (qtd. by Hamilton 2007, 152–153). This post-Strachey period of life writing is sometimes characterized by scholars as the era of “New Biography” (cf. Edel 1984, 31). Of this era, Paula Backscheider states that “most people would agree with Park Honan’s judgment that Richard Ellmann is the best literary biographer to have written in English in the twentieth century” (1999, 12), an opinion reportedly shared by novelist and reviewer Anthony Burgess (1917–1993). Honan is himself regarded as one of the top biographers of Jane Austen (1987), William Shakespeare (1999), and Christopher Marlowe (2005), all of whom perennially attract new efforts to interpret both the facts and the gaps of their lives (Burgess wrote on Shakespeare as well in 1970). Ellmann (1918–1987) specialized in Irish literature and wrote about William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), James Joyce (1882–1941), and other luminaries; his 1989 biography of Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) won the Pulitzer Prize. Ellmann dominates the biographical landscape for anyone wishing to offer new material on these individuals. As one reviewer observed: Biographers of James Joyce have a simple choice: tussle with Richard Ellmann or don’t try to compete. Ellmann’s huge biography, published in 1959 and reissued in a thoroughly revised and expanded 1983 edition, relied not only on the biographer’s profound familiarity with primary sources, but interviews, chance encounters, gossip and a whole world of acquaintanceship that no other writer will ever be able to rival. (Lacey 2004)

Another landmark work of biography in the twentieth century was Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson (1973), which featured three chapters composed by their son, Nigel Nicolson (1917–2004), and two penned by

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Sackville-West (1892–1962), using text from a notebook Nigel Nicolson had discovered after her death. In his own memoir, Long Life, Nicolson describes canvassing family members and friends to determine whether to pursue publication of his mother’s manuscript and the strong reaction to the book (ranging from enthusiastic to “pained”) once it saw print (1998). In addition to becoming a best seller, it inspired additional studies of Sackville-West’s life and relationships, including Victoria Glendinning’s Vita (1983), which tied for the Whitbread Biography Award. Nicolson wryly observed that his mother had “posthumously become more central to my life than when she was alive because of the books that I and others have written about her” (1998). In his history of biography, Nigel Hamilton lauds the book for its candid portrayal of nonheterosexual relationships and asserts that it “broke yet another taboo in biographical portraiture,” effectively leading the way for biographers to focus more intensely on details previously considered inappropriate for public consumption (2007, 235–39). Journalist Janet Malcolm’s analysis of the fallout from a less successful marriage, that of poets Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) and Ted Hughes (1930–1998), also created a commotion when it appeared (Seligman 2000, 3). Its portrayal of the decades-long antagonism between Plath’s survivors and her would-be biographers was viewed by some observers as a “brilliant exposé of the workings of modern biography, as well as an eloquent attack on biography’s ghoulish popularity” (Hamilton 2007, 276), whereas others judged Malcolm’s defense of Ted Hughes to be suspect and her attitude toward Plath less than charitable (cf. Seligman 2000; Nehring 2004). As English professor Christina Nehring observes, “The history of biographical writing on Plath is vexed; her biographers have had their names made, their health wrecked (Anne Stevenson), and their hearts broken (Emma Tennant) in their endeavors” (2004). Given Plath and Hughes’s stature as twentieth-century poets, their outsize personalities, and the unresolvable questions inherent in the tragedy of Plath’s suicide and Hughes’s destruction of her papers, as well as Malcolm’s own tendency to attract controversy, The Silent Woman will likely remain essential reading both for individuals fascinated by the Plath-Hughes drama and those interested in contemplating the larger questions of biographical practice and ethics. Trends and Themes. English professor Paula Backscheider states: Until very recently, readers of biographies seemed to have strong preferences, most notably the quest, the marked ambition and achievement of same, the adventures of a hero or dedicated public servant, ‘the man of destiny,’ and the difficult, misunderstood, often impoverished life of the great literary artist whom we now appreciate more than his contemporaries did. (1999, 103–104)

Elsewhere in her study, Backscheider argues that “each generation asks new things from its writers and new questions about the people who shaped the world we live in” (39). She also observes that: biographers, like their readers, are drawn to the culture’s favourite stories and kinds of achievement. Many times the choice of a subject is born in a complex desire to answer lingering questions about a particular kind of life story and in the hope of better understanding it—or even sharing in it by recording or celebrating it. (46)

This perhaps articulates the public’s abiding interest in books about the Founding Fathers. In spite of the dozens of books already published on the early presidents and

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other statesmen, new ones continue to sell extremely well and win major prizes. For example, professor Joseph J(ohn) Ellis (b. 1943) won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in History for Founding Brothers, a group biography of John Adams (1735–1826), Aaron Burr (1756–1836), Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), James Madison (1751–1836), and George Washington (1732–1799). After the Pulitzer, Ellis’s 1993 biography of Adams was reprinted, and His Excellency: George Washington (2004) reached the best-seller lists. Historian David McCullough (b. 1933), who had won a Pulitzer for his 1992 biography of Harry S. Truman, won a second Pulitzer for John Adams (2001). McCullough had originally intended to write a book focusing on both Adams and Jefferson but decided to focus on Adams once his research was under way, realizing that “The problem with Adams is that most Americans know nothing about him”; McCullough said that he himself hadn’t truly recognized Adams’s heroic qualities until writing the book. In the same interview, McCullough responded to a dissenting reaction to his characterization of Adams’s colleagues by stressing that “these men are not perfect. . . . If they were marble gods, what they did wouldn’t be so admirable. The more we see the founders as humans the more we can understand them. Imagine starting out to create a country—at the risk of their lives” (Leopold 2001). The widespread interest in the imperfection of the Founding Fathers—and in the imperfect efforts to interpret aspects of their lives—is especially visible in the case of Benjamin Franklin, about whom over 75 biographies have been registered with the Library of Congress since 2000. This figure includes books for children but does not include the additional dozens of “in his own words” collections in which selections from Franklin’s own Autobiography and other writings have been repackaged into “new” books. The high volume of activity can be attributed in part to the 300th anniversary of Franklin’s birth, which was celebrated in 2006. Interest in Franklin was also heightened by a 2002 PBS documentary that won an Emmy Award, a 2004 History Channel documentary, and an assortment of other television productions centered around the principal actors and events of the American Revolution (including a filmed adaptation of Ellis’s Founding Brothers). Franklin also attracts attention because his life was long, complex, and multifaceted, with many elements that can strike a potential author as exaggerated, mythical, or misunderstood by the general public. The urge to investigate such elements has proved irresistible to numerous biographers, including seasoned scholars such as Gordon S. Wood (b. 1933), who had won a history Pulitzer for The Radicalization of the American Revolution (1992). In The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, Wood set out: to penetrate beneath the many images and representations of Franklin that have accumulated over the past two hundred years and recover the historic Franklin who did not know the kind of massively symbolic folk hero he would become. At the same time [Wood’s book] hopes to make clear how and why Franklin acquired these various images and symbols. (Wood 2004, ix)

Put another way, Wood is fascinated not just by the life of Franklin, but by the history of reactions to Franklin’s life. He declares that “the criticism that Franklin has aroused over the past two centuries has been as extraordinary as the praise” (4) and later reviews the mythologization of Franklin by Parson Mason Weems (1756–1825) and other admirers (235–246).

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Walter Isaacson (b. 1952), another prominent writer, explicitly connects attitudes toward Benjamin Franklin to his biographers’ own environments, stating that “each new look at him reflects and refracts the nation’s changing values. He has been vilified in romantic periods and lionized in entrepreneurial ones. Each era appraises him anew, and in doing so reveals some assessments of itself” (2003, 3). Isaacson sees such assessments as barometers of the writers’ own attitudes toward upward mobility, middle-class utilitarianism, and other socioeconomic movements. Isaacson observes that, while nineteenth-century transcendentalists and early twentiethcentury Marxists railed against Franklin’s unromantic, bourgeois sensibilities, Franklin was honored as “the most popular subject of American biography” during the decades following the Civil War—an era of industrial revolution—and likewise a figure of admiration following the Great Depression, when Franklin’s values again seemed relevant (477–484). He finds current attitudes toward Franklin similarly indicative of early twenty-first–century concerns, citing David Brooks’s characterization of Franklin as America’s “Founding Yuppie” and dissecting the extent to which the actual details of Franklin’s life bear out his reputation (485–493). As the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, Isaacson heads an institution created as a retreat for executives, intellectuals, professional artists, and other high-powered individuals to consider “the meaning of the good life, leadership, and sound public policy” (2007a). The institute’s mission mirrors the questions Isaacson uses to frame his biography of Franklin: Whatever view one takes, it is useful to engage anew with Franklin, for in doing so we are grappling with a fundamental issue: How does one live a life that is useful, virtuous, worthy, moral, and spiritually meaningful? For that matter, which of these attributes is most important? These are questions just as vital for a self-satisfied age as they were for a revolutionary one. (2003, 4)

Stacy Schiff (b. 1961) centers her 400-page profile of Franklin (2005) on the last decade of his life, which he spent primarily in France. Schiff’s style, notable for its blend of factual detail and memorable characterizations, has helped her earn her status as an elite biographer; her study of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) was named the 2000 Pulitzer Prize winner in biography, and an earlier book on Antoine Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944) was a finalist for the 1995 prize. Schiff’s preoccupation with the play of personalities is evident from the start of A Great Improvisation, which she begins with a detailed cast of characters: John Adams (1735–1826) is introduced as “brilliant Massachusetts writer, orator, lawyer, statesman; austere, thin-skinned, fretful. . . . Trailed through Paris a reputation for vanity and gracelessness” (xi). Schiff concludes her capsule resumé for statesman Arthur Lee (1740–1792) with a series of pithy observations: “Like Franklin, a youngest son of a vast family. Unlike Franklin, a man of bilious temperament. Never married, as no woman could be found who met his standards” (xvi). Another individual, Paul Wentworth (d. 1793), is summed up with “Audacious, artful master spy. With 20 aliases, assorted disguises, and a host of invisible inks, eluded even the peerless Paris police. Highly cultivated; in Beaumarchais’s nervous opinion, ‘one of the cleverest men in England’” (xvii). Schiff’s account of Franklin’s adventures in France likewise feature significant attention paid to character-defining details. For instance, in discussing playwright Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’s correspondence with the French minister

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of foreign affairs, she notes that “Beaumarchais signed his name only when he feared that distress, or fatigue, had disfigured his handwriting. It never did. And his inimitable style was signature enough” (69). Schiff’s epilogue casts Franklin’s diplomatic achievements as a triumph of his personal traits: He was indeed a man of frightening versatility, more difficult to embrace for his very breadth. He was a natural American in only one respect: He proved that there is no such thing. He was willing at all times to put practice before theory, especially in France, when his country’s fate hung in the balance. To the end he favored modest experience over grandiose hypotheses. The latter were all too pleasing “till some experiment comes and unluckily destroys them,” he observed, proof that he was not a Frenchman after all. He was no less the revolutionary for being a congenial and coolheaded late bloomer. (412)

Schiff’s supplementary materials similarly display her flair for mixing lively assessment with scholarly organization. Her chronology of Franklin’s life includes entries such as, “1716: Serves as his father’s assistant; dislikes the business” (413) and “1789: Bastille falls on July 14. Franklin submits first three parts of Autobiography to French friends. Subsists on diet of laudanum” (417). In the “Notes” section, Schiff offers candid assessments of the sources she consulted with judgments such as “All of Benjamin Franklin’s letters combined do not pack the descriptive punch of a single Abigail Adams missive” (424), “The Letters of Richard Henry Lee (ed. Ballagh) and Letters of William Lee (ed. Ford) make for spellbinding reading; the diary of Arthur Lee less so” (439), and “Andrew Stockley’s Britain and France at the Birth of America (2001) makes for a useful corrective to years of lopsided French and American accounts” (447). Other recent biographers have found it profitable to concentrate on Franklin’s scientific endeavors. Historian Joyce E. Chaplin felt that, prior to her own book, most biographies of Franklin had failed to “make sense of the connections between the public life and the life in science” (2006, 5). Chaplin voices grave concerns about present-day scientific illiteracy, presenting Franklin as a model she clearly wishes twenty-first–century policy makers would strive to emulate (357–359). Science writer Tom Tucker, for his part, sees Franklin’s penchant for hoaxes as a trait “not fully explored by scholars until the mid-twentieth century and ever since then has remained curiously beyond mainstream notice” (2003, xvii). Convinced that Franklin never flew the famous kite, Tucker is as invested as his historian counterparts in separating Franklin’s purported achievements from his actual accomplishments (which, in Tucker’s view, include manipulating the myth of his experiments with electricity into diplomatic leverage). The desire to educate the general public about an individual’s true personality, as opposed to the persona developed by that individual or that perpetuated by his or her contemporaries, can also be witnessed in the biographies produced of living political figures such as Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (b. 1947). Clinton’s campaign for the U.S. presidency, her complex marriage, the rumors of corruption dogging both her career and that of her husband (former president Bill Clinton, b. 1946), and her status as a role model for other women (cf. Broder 1997) are among the controversial elements of her life that make her a highly marketable subject, such that the on-sale dates of two recent biographies on her (Gerth and Natta 2007, and Bernstein 2007) caused high-profile jockeying for sales advantage by the books’

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publishers. The strong credentials of the books’ authors (all three of them having won Pulitzer Prizes for investigative reporting) also fueled interest in their content. The authors were taken to task by some of their reviewers for excessive bias, insufficient insight, or both (cf. Dallek 2007 and Kakutani 2007), but this has become inevitable with virtually any noteworthy book published on Clinton; journalist Christopher Andersen’s American Evita (2004) drew similar heat during its stint on the best-seller lists. Another woman whose marital woes were widely publicized during her lifetime was Diana, Princess of Wales (1961–1997). The tenth anniversary of her death prompted a renewal of magazine and television attention to her story, including reviews of Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles, which drew particular attention not only because of the timing but because of Brown’s own status as a glamorous media executive (cf. Maslin 2007; Kimmelman 2007; and Weber 2007). However, interest in Diana’s life and death had remained substantial through the decade since her passing, sustained by high-profile motion pictures such as The Queen (2006), by the combination of romance and tragedy shaping the trajectory of her life, and by the charisma that had elicited near-worship from thousands of admirers during her lifetime. As of 2007, the Library of Congress listed over 40 separate subject headings for “Diana, Princess of Wales”; recent titles include The Way We Were (Burrell 2006) and A Royal Duty (Burrell 2003), books by a former servant; and Diana (2006) by Sarah Bradford, an aristocrat and historian whose earlier book on Queen Elizabeth II (1996) had caused a sensation in her native Britain; the front cover on one of the paperback editions of Diana proclaims, “Finally, the complete story.” The members of the Kennedy family, often described as the U.S. equivalent to royalty, have also continued to interest biographers and their readers. Bradford titled her book on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929–1994) America’s Queen (2000); Andersen, too, has written about both the British royal family (The Day Diana Died, 1998; Diana’s Boys, 2001; and After Diana, 2007) and the Kennedys (The Day John Died, 2001; Sweet Caroline, 2003); and writer Jay Mulvaney compared the two in Diana and Jackie (2002). Newer books about the Kennedys include Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (Talbot 2007), The Kennedy Mystique (Goodman 2006), The Private Passion of Jackie Kennedy Onassis (Moon 2005), Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House (Smith 2004), and Mrs. Kennedy: The Missing History of the Kennedy Years (Leaming 2001). As the titles suggest, the Kennedys continue to be alluring subjects in part because the general public perceives an ongoing disconnect between the images they projected and the realities of their lives, and in part because a number of readers are specialists or collectors for whom the minutiae of the Kennedys’ lives are as fascinating as their major accomplishments (The Private Passion, for instance, is actually about Onassis’s love of horses). Nigel Hamilton sees the focus on “fragments” of people’s lives (including entire books on the aftermaths of their deaths) as part of a trend that has been building since the 1960s (2007, 215–16). The urge to reassess a famous person’s life against his or her reputation— particularly if any of the evidence hints at conditions formerly considered shameful, such as mental illness or homosexuality—can be witnessed in books such as Lincoln’s Melancholy (Shenk 2005), which examines Abraham Lincoln’s (1814–1882) battles with depression, and The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln (Tripp 2005), which argued that Lincoln’s deepest attachments were to men. Although Tripp’s book was generally deemed weak and unconvincing, its publication prompted reviewers to

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produce thoughtful commentary on trends in historical scholarship, the provability (or lack thereof) of hidden traits, and the relevance of sexuality-based theses (cf. Capozzola 2005; Greenberg 2005; O’Hehir 2005; Stansell 2005; and Shenk 2005, 34–37). Lincoln’s Melancholy, which was named a “best book” of its year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, impressed its readers in part because the author had taken pains to document trends in interpretations of Lincoln’s inner life, noting shifts in critical perception over the twentieth century and how they affected the types of evidence historians were willing to evaluate (Shenk 2005, 4–8, 221–43). Shenk observes that “works on Lincoln in recent years bear the mark of increased appreciation for the firsthand observations of his life. At the same time, we’ve seen an increase in narrowly focused studies, some of which pluck out bits and pieces from the Lincoln record to assemble a cartoon portrait of modern fantasies” (242–43). Writing several years after Lincoln’s Melancholy, essayist Adam Gopnik (b. 1956) echoes a similar theme, having followed a reading list of “the recent Lincoln literature” provided to him by an acquaintance: There’s a lot to read. In books published in the past two years alone, you can read about Lincoln’s “sword” (his writing) and about his “sanctuary” (the Soldiers’ Home just outside Washington, where he spent summers throughout the war). You can read a book about Lincoln’s alleged love affair with a young officer, and one about Lincoln’s relations, tetchy but finally triumphant, with Frederick Douglass. There is no part of Lincoln, from manhood to death, that is not open and inscribed. You can learn that some of Lincoln’s intimates believed his melancholy was rooted in extreme constipation (“He had no natural evacuation of bowels,” a friend explained) and also what formula was used to embalm him, a gruesome but far from trivial point. (2007)

Efforts to debunk popular myths and opinions of Lincoln also appear to be on the rise, leading to titles such as Lincoln Legends: Myths, Hoaxes, and Confabulations Associated with Our Greatest President (Steers 2007) and Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know About Dishonest Abe (DiLorenzo 2006). The awareness that interpretations shift with time plays a role in the development of series such as “The American Presidents,” which debuted in 2002, featuring each chief executive of the United States in a new book about his life and career. According to its Web site (www.americanpresidentsseries.com), each book is designed to be “compact enough for the busy reader, lucid enough for the student and authoritative enough for the scholar”; as such, the books are uniform in size and each less than 200 pages long. The stature of the editor-in-chief, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (1917–2007), helped attract prominent contributors such as convicted Watergate counsel John Dean (b. 1938) on Warren G. Harding (1865–1923), former Harper’s editor Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935) on William Howard Taft (1857–1930), and retired senator Gary Hart (b. 1936) on James Monroe (1758–1831), which in turn sparked interest in readers who might have otherwise bypassed the volumes on these men. Biographies on active politicians are inherently nondefinitive, given their subjects’ ongoing activities, and inevitably subject to accusations of bias, no matter how neutral a stance the author may strive to maintain. They range from glossy photo-heavy narratives on Barack Obama (Dougherty 2007) to behind-the-scenes accounts such as Ambling into History (Bruni 2002), presented by a reporter who covered George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign. Because one of the unique features of the

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Bush presidencies is the father-son connection between George H.W. Bush (b. 1924) and George W. Bush (b. 1946), many of the books produced during George W.’s terms in office have focused on the family and its hold on power, with titles such as American Dynasty (Phillips 2004); Secrecy and Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq (Parry 2004); The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty (Schweizer and Schweizer 2004); and The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty (Kelley 2004). Books about individual members of the family tend to refer to “dynasty” as well, including Barbara Bush: Matriarch of a Dynasty (Kilian 2002); First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty (Minutaglio 1999); and W: Revenge of the Bush Dynasty (Mitchell 2003). In general, traditional biographies for adults—even those concentrating on a specific trait or era of the subject’s life—currently tend to average between 300 and 500 pages. Among nontraditional formats, graphic novels have appeared on the lives of Danish physicist Niels Bohr (Ottaviani and Purvis 2004), American activist Malcolm X (Helfer and DuBurke 2006), and French Canadian revolutionary Louis Riel (Brown 2006), with “graphic biographies” of Ronald Reagan, Nelson Mandela, and Fidel Castro formally scheduled for publication in the near future as well. Context and Issues. In the introduction to her biography of Rockwell, Laura Claridge asserts that: . . . most readers nowadays hold truth to be a complicated achievement, and few among us believe anyone’s telling of a life to be the final word, the only way of its telling. Because those of us in the twenty-first century are close to Rockwell’s times— seeing them, quite rightly, as the context from which our own lives emerge—we mine such lives as a means to understand the families that spawned us and the selves we’ve become. (2001, xx)

Although many other writers have voiced perspectives similar to Claridge’s, the degree to which biographers present themselves as experts on the lives of other individuals remains one of the most contentious aspects of the genre. A biographer’s assumption of such authority—particularly if the subject did not or could not authorize or condone his or her decision—may be considered flattering or judged presumptuous. The biographer’s determination to ascertain and confirm the details of another individual’s life may be seen as a worthy quest to obtain and present the truth, but even when biographers enjoy “authorized” status, conflicts may arise when their interpretations of events fail to match the recollections of the subjects or their heirs. As Webb wryly notes, “There are many people over whose feelings the author can clodhop, and they will all have a different view of the person from the one offered. Some of those views will appear not to refer to the same person at all” (2003, xiii-xiv). Backscheider asserts that: . . . good biography must be collaboration—even with a dead subject, there must be empathy and a real or developed understanding of the social, emotional, and historical world. But good biography is always at his its heart somewhat adversarial. The biographer must ferret out the hidden, the buried, the most shameful secrets. (1999, 45)

Some biographies are produced when a writer feels compelled to investigate discrepancies or gaps in their family histories. In her prologue to A Thousand Miles of Dreams (2006), Sasha Su-Ling Welland (b. 1969) outlines some of the cultural, linguistic, and philosophical issues she wrestled with in attempting to reconcile her

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grandmother and great-aunt’s conflicting accounts of their lives: “What I often misinterpreted as dishonest hiding behind [the Chinese] language is a cultivated ability to move between formal and informal registers. . . . Suppressing my American desire for exposé and working toward an understanding of these equally meaningful levels of language, I moved beyond the quest for a single immutable truth” (12). An anthropology and women’s studies professor, Welland presents her interpretation of the lives of Amy Shuhao Ling Chen (1904–2006) and Ling Shuhua (1900–1990) both as an academic study, with formal bibliographic citations, and as a memoir, interweaving the details of Shuhao and Shuhua’s lives with her own adventures in China, delineating her interactions with her grandmother and questioning her motives in reading her great-aunt’s short stories, asking “Can I learn to approach them as literature rather than clues to a family I understand too little?” (174). In a similar vein, Jennet Conant’s interest in the lives of atomic physicists was fueled by her “peculiar legacy” (xviii) and her family’s reluctance to discuss her grandfather’s involvement with the Manhattan Project, a mystery compounded by the myths surrounding a great-uncle’s suicide during the bomb’s development. As Nigel Nicolson had with Portrait of a Marriage, Conant wrestled with her awareness that her airing of long-held secrets would be regarded in some circles as unseemly and even disloyal: I . . . struggled with the problem of prying into what many of my grandfather’s friends and colleagues might regard as a dark corner of his illustrious career. James Conant was a very private, proud, and tidy man and placed a premium on appearances. He would have loathed seeing his family’s mess tipped onto the page. There were also gaping holes in the story. My grandmother was acutely aware that graduate students would one day paw her private papers, and she set about methodically destroying anything incriminatingly personal in the record, ripping pages out of diaries and burning most of her mother’s and brother’s letters. (2002, xvii)

Biographies written by members or friends of the subject’s family command interest in part because such individuals frequently do have access to sources not available to the general public. However, their direct participation in their subjects’ lives also means that these writers’ versions of events must be treated with additional caution. Screenwriter Gavin Lambert (1924–2005), a friend of Natalie Wood (1938–1981), characterized her sister Lana’s 1984 memoir (Wood 1984) as “remarkably untruthful” (2004, 326) and credits the existence of his own account to Wood’s surviving spouse, Robert Wagner, whom Lambert quotes as saying, “When you tell the truth about Natalie as you see it, I shall be at peace” (355). The multiple biographies about Wood highlight the issue of competing agendas among family members: Lambert wrote his account with the blessing and cooperation of Natalie Wood’s widower and daughters, whereas Suzanne Finstad (b. 1955) consulted Lana Wood for Natasha (2001), later stating that Wood had provided her with “insight and intimate information she had not revealed in her own memoirs” (Finstad 2001a). Although the San Francisco Chronicle named Finstad’s account the best film book of its year, Lambert cites it sparingly in his notes. Other biographers may view their projects as complementary rather than competing, such as Nick Webb and M.J. Simpson, whose biographies of science fiction author Douglas Adams (1952–2001) both appeared within a few years of Adams’s untimely death. Webb was a friend of Adams and his family as well as a professional colleague; as the official biographer, he had access to Adams’s papers, and his aim

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was to produce a book that was “good company—like the man himself” (2003, xiv). His style is wry and informal, with phrasings such as “Two minor digressions from this period . . .” (in order to relate anecdotes about Adams’s personal generosity to the author and another friend, 268–270) and pronouncements such as, “Of course it would be lovely for any chap if the woman in his life gave him unconditional support and admiration for every notion, no matter how daft, but in the long term she would not be doing him a favour at all” in describing the ruthless intelligence of Adams’s wife (227). In a similar vein, Webb calls Adams’s family tree “something I will not attempt to describe. What with infant mortality, marriage between distant cousins, and age disparities it looks as if someone quite disturbed had tried to draw the Tube map from memory” (23). Simpson, a journalist specializing in science fiction criticism, completed a book of similar length that focused on Adams’s career, supporting his detailed examination of Adams’s history with almost 30 pages of references (2003). Although Webb was the biographer formally commissioned by Adams’s heirs, Simpson had been one of the most prominent fans of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, to the extent that he was entrusted with updating and expanding Don’t Panic, a much-revered guide to the series often regarded as an Adams biography in its own right (Gaiman 2002). Simpson’s pocket volume on The Hitchhiker’s Guide (2001) was praised in Webb’s acknowledgments as “very useful” and “essential reading” (xi). Thus, the majority of Adams’s friends and colleagues were happy to assist his project as well as Webb’s. In the words of one reviewer: Ultimately, I find myself unwilling to recommend either book at the exclusion of another. As with most people, Douglas Adams is too complex for a single interpretation. While Webb and Simpson don’t offer very different views, there are facets covered in one work that aren’t covered in the other. Read both in close succession (preferably right after The Salmon of Doubt, which could be called Douglas’ own fragmented autobiography) and you’ll get the idea. (Sauvé 2005)

In Adams’s case, his biographers all also agree that he was not fully trustworthy where specifics of his life were concerned. Webb noted Adams’s tendency to offer biographical revelations that had evolved into “suspiciously polished artifacts” (xiv). Gaiman elaborates upon the same theme: The other thing that fascinates me now [in addition to “accidental” elements of the Hitchhiker series], especially looking at some of the biographies that are coming out now, is how much of Douglas’ story has been invented post–1987 when I did the first draft of the book. There are major Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy antidotes [sic] that cannot be found in Don’t Panic because Douglas hadn’t made them up yet. (Huddleston 2003)

Simpson, whose efforts to debunk Adams’s invented anecdotes garnered both praise and scorn, included a lament in his introduction to the American edition of Hitchhiker. Speaking of Adams’s underproductive collaboration with comedian Graham Chapman, Simpson writes that “trying to determine the accuracy of conflicting stories told by two notoriously inaccurate raconteurs after more than two decades is a thankless and ultimately pointless task” (xix). Simpson also used the introduction to include information about Adams’s life that had surfaced since the publication of the first British edition, rather than attempting to “shoehorn” the new material into the original text (xvii).

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The drama of conflicting, irreconcilable stories and personality clashes helps drive the sales of biographies on nuclear physicists. Some of the major storylines in the saga of twentieth-century atomic energy research include a secret meeting between Niels Bohr (1885–1962) and Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) in 1941 that came to be seen as the end of their friendship; a series of arguments between Bohr and Albert Einstein (1879–1955) regarding Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics; and the 1953 government hearing on J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967). The Bohr-Heisenberg meeting inspired Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen (1998), which won the 2000 Tony Award for best play and was later adapted for television with renowned actors Stephen Rea, Daniel Craig, and Francesca Annis. The play, in turn, generated so much interest that Bohr’s family decided to release unpublished documents related to the meeting in 2002, 10 years ahead of schedule, the better “to accommodate the present interest and to avoid undue speculation about the contents” (NBA 2002). The Oppenheimer hearing, which resulted in Oppenheimer’s security clearance being revoked, created permanent rifts in the scientific community between his defenders and his detractors (cf. Conant 2002, 291–92; Herken 2002, 316). At the turn of the millennium, some of the participants and witnesses to these conflicts were still alive and available to discuss their perception of these events. At the same time, most of the central figures had passed away. As individuals become incapacitated or die, researchers lose direct access to those individuals as sources of oral history; on the other side of the coin, out of consideration for the other participants in their activities, some individuals or their heirs stipulate that their archives remain sealed for a given period after their deaths. Thus, the total range of source material for books on the atomic era will remain in flux for several decades to come, triggering fresh interpretations of familiar stories as letters, notes, and other materials become known and available to biographers. In Einstein, which reached the top of the New York Times best-seller list in 2007, Walter Isaacson notes that he received “early and complete access to the wealth of new Einstein papers that became available in 2006” (2007, xv). In Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma, Jeremy Bernstein described the incidents and concerns that had caused 40 years to elapse before he felt ready to write about the man: Things are both easier and more difficult—for the same reason. Nearly all the actors in this drama are dead. There are still a few of Oppenheimer’s California students left, and a few of the people who were at Los Alamos with him, but nearly every week I read a new obituary. This means that I am no longer constrained by their presence, but it also means that I can no longer get their advice. (xi)

Science historian Abraham Pais (1918–2000) died before finishing his own book on Oppenheimer. Robert P. Crease, who completed the manuscript, was charged with adding only enough material to make the biography publishable, thus restricting him from “addressing topics that Pais himself clearly intended to discuss” or that would otherwise have been expected in a biography of Oppenheimer (Pais 2006, xvii–xviii). In contrast, American Prometheus (Bird and Sherwin 2005) was widely lauded upon its publication as the most ambitious book on Oppenheimer to date and received the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in biography. The attitudes of subjects and their families toward biographical subjects vary widely, ranging from cheerful cooperation to active hostility. In his biography of

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Bohr, Pais noted that Bohr’s sons declined to review his manuscript, “essentially because they felt that mine should be an independent view and assessment” (1991, vi). Andrew Wilson says that his subject, novelist Patricia Highsmith, “was adamant a biography should not be written while she was alive—indeed, she blocked several attempts—but secretly quite proud that one might be written when she was no longer around to witness the result” (2003, 9). When the children of businessman Joseph P. Kennedy (1888–1969) asked Nasaw to write his biography, Nasaw initially refused the opportunity, accepting it only after the family made it clear that they would not demand final approval of Nasaw’s manuscript (Mehegan 2006). Regarding her biography of Aristotle Onassis, Bradford indicated that she had notified Onassis’s children of the project but that they were under strict orders from their mother not to authorize or collaborate with any biographers; at the same time, she believed her track record as a reputable biographer helped her obtain interviews with other individuals who seldom granted them (CNN 2000). Some biographers, such as Hamilton, Rollyson, and Kitty Kelley, revel in their unauthorized status, believing that it frees them to tell unflattering truths that an authorized biographer would be pressured to suppress. Their methods are both deplored and admired by their colleagues; Backscheider, for instance, notes that Hamilton’s obsessive collection of nontraditional evidence allowed him to craft an unprecedentedly detailed portrait of John F. Kennedy’s early years, but that Hamilton’s style was self-centric enough “to trigger the testing and doubting of evidence” (1999, 75–76); the same can be said of reactions to Rollyson and Kelley’s works (cf. Brown 2004). A New Republic editor concluded, “The real shame here isn’t that Kitty Kelley resorts to shoddy journalistic methods to uncover some basic truths. It’s that so few others have used scrupulous journalistic methods to find them” (Crowley 2004). Reception. The 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner, The Most Famous Man in America, attracted praise both for its vivid portrayal of a nineteenth-century sex scandal and the writer’s ability to highlight its relevance to modern concerns: One cannot view Beecher’s career without thinking of the many charismatic men who were driven to heady heights by their unquenchable longing for approbation and who risked their legacies by letting this longing shade into lust—men of indisputable stature such as Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Bill Clinton. (Applegate 2006, 471)

Major prizes such as the Pulitzer automatically result in publicity for a book, raising its profile and often its sales. According to a Knopf representative, sales of American Prometheus doubled after it was named the 2006 Pulitzer winner (Rich 2007). Columbia University administers both the Pulitzer Prizes (via its Graduate School of Journalism) and the Bancroft Prizes (via its trustees). The Bancroft Prizes reward outstanding work in the fields of American history and diplomacy; recent Bancroft winners include works on Jonathan Edwards (Marsden 2003) and William Randolph Hearst (Nasaw 2000). The Lambda Literary Foundation, which supports gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender literature, administers an annual biography prize; recent winners include February House: The Story of W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof in Wartime America (Tippins 2005); Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde (De Veaux 2004); Ridiculous! The Theatrical Life and Times of Charles Ludlam (Kaufman 2002); and The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin—A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal (Werth 2001).

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PULITZER PRIZES IN BIOGRAPHY OR AUTOBIOGRAPHY The most recent Pulitzer prizes in biography or autobiography have included: 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000

The Most Famous Man in America:The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher by Debby Applegate (Doubleday) American Prometheus:The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (Alfred A. Knopf) de Kooning: An American Master by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan (Alfred A. Knopf) Khrushchev:The Man and His Era by William Taubman (W.W. Norton) Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro (Alfred A. Knopf) John Adams by David McCullough (Simon & Schuster) W.E.B. Du Bois:The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 by David Levering Lewis (Henry Holt and Company) Vera (Mrs.Vladimir Nabokov) by Stacy Schiff (Random House)

Source: Pulitzer Prize Web site, http://www.pulitzer.org/.

Milestones such as deaths can also revive interest in a biography (cf. Bosman 2007), as can “biopics” (movies based on the lives of real people). Some motion-picture directors buy the rights to popular biographies to use as their primary sources; films produced from specific books include Marie Antoinette (based on Fraser 2001), A Beautiful Mind (based on Nasar 1998), and The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (based on Lewis 1997). Many of the authors named above (Bradford, Isaacson, and Nasaw among them) have developed a substantial following among readers of nonfiction. Other established authors in the genre include Robert Caro (b. 1935), Robert Dallek (b. 1934), Victoria Glendinning (b. 1937), David Levering Lewis (b. 1936), Diane Middlebrook (b. 1939), Arnold Rampersad (b. 1941), and Claire Tomalin (b. 1933). In her essay on the art and appeal of biography, Selma G. Lanes observes that the genre exerts a special hold on its readers because it is “a socially and intellectually acceptable form of voyeurism. It can be instructive, even spiritually or morally uplifting for us with regard to our own lives in flux” (Lanes 2004, 28). The first decade of the twenty-first century saw many rules and customs in transition as the United States sought to cope with the events of September 11, 2001; with advances in technology; and with emotionally charged debates among both policy makers and the general public about issues such as gay marriage and the war in Iraq. As society adjusts to new realities, the expectations of mainstream readers regarding biographers’ choices of approach, method, and style will likewise shift. Biographers will continue to offer stories about the Kennedys, the Windsors, and other charismatic celebrities, as well as strive to do justice to new subjects, but their interpretations will inevitably reflect the concerns of the era in which they themselves are living, rather than that of the subject or those of earlier biographers. Bibliography Andersen, Christopher. The Day Diana Died. New York: Morrow, 1998. ———. The Day John Died. New York: Morrow, 2000. ———. Diana’s Boys: William and Harry and the Mother They Loved. New York: Morrow, 2001.

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BIOGRAPHY ———. Sweet Caroline: Last Child of Camelot. New York: Morrow, 2003. ———. American Evita: Hillary Clinton’s Path to Power. New York: Morrow, 2004. ———. After Diana: William, Harry, Charles, and the Royal House of Windsor. New York: Hyperion, 2007. Applegate, Debby. The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher. New York: Doubleday, 2006. http://www.themostfamousmaninamerica.com. Backscheider, Paula R. Reflections on Biography. New York: Oxford, 1999. Bernstein, Carl. A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton. New York: Knopf, 2007. Bernstein, Jeremy. Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004. Bird, Kai, and Sherwin, Martin J. American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. New York: Knopf, 2005. www.americanprometheus.org. Bosman, Julie. “Death Propels Anna Nicole Smith Biography from the Backlist to the Front Burner.” New York Times 15 Feb. 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/15/books/ 15anna.html. Boswell, James. Life of Johnson. 3rd ed. R.W. Chapman, ed. Introduction by Pat Rogers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1799. Bradford, Sarah. Elizabeth: A Biography of Britain’s Queen. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1996. ———. America’s Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. New York: Viking, 2000. ———. Diana. New York: Viking, 2006. Broder, Jonathan. “Diana’s Big Sister.” Salon 3 Sept. 1997. http://www.salon.com/sept97/ news/news970903.html. Brown, Chester. Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2003. Brown, Tina. “Kitty Kelley, Derided and Delicious.” Washington Post 16 September 2004. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24853-2004Sep15.html. ———. The Diana Chronicles. New York: Doubleday, 2007. Bruni, Frank. Ambling Into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. Bullock, Alan. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. New York: Random House, 1992. Burrell, Paul. A Royal Duty. New York: Putnam, 2003. ———. The Way We Were: Remembering Diana. New York: Morrow, 2006. Capozzola, Christopher. “The Gay Lincoln Controversy.” Boston Globe 16 Jan. 2005. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/01/16/the_gay_lincoln_ controversy. Cash, Arthur H. John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Cassidy, David. “Werner Heisenberg and the Uncertainty Principle.” Online exhibit based on book of the same name. College Park, MD: Center of the History for Physics, 2002. http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg. Chaplin, Joyce E. The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius. New York: Basic Books, 2006. Claridge, Laura. Norman Rockwell: A Life. New York: Random House, 2001. Conant, Jennet. Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002. CNN. “Sarah Bradford Chats about Her Jackie Kennedy Onassis Biography, America’s Queen.” Transcript. CNN.com 26 Oct. 2000. ———. “Interview with Two Writers About New JFK Jr. Book.” Transcript, interview of Jay Mulvaney and Susan Tift regarding Klein 2003. CNN.com 1 July 2003. http:// transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0307/01/se.08.html. Crowley, Michael. “Kitty Kelley: Colonoscopist to the Stars.” Slate 15 Sept. 2004. http:// www.slate.com/id/2106746.

BIOGRAPHY Dallek, Robert. “Shining a Halogen Light on a Senator’s Dark Corners.” New York Times 5 June 2007. De Veaux, Alexis. Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde. New York: Norton, 2004. DiLorenzo, Thomas J. Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed to Know about Dishonest Abe. New York: Crown Forum, 2006. Dougherty, Steve. Hopes and Dreams: The Story of Barack Obama. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007. Doyle, Arthur Conan. “A Scandal in Bohemia.” In The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Leslie S. Klinger, ed. New York: Norton, 1891 [2005]. Edel, Leon. Writing Lives: Principia Biographica. New York: Norton, 1984. Ellis, Joseph. Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. New York: Knopf, 2000. ———. Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams. New York: Norton, 2001 [1993]. ———. His Excellency: George Washington. New York: Knopf, 2004. Epstein, Daniel Mark. Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington. New York: Ballantine, 2004. Finstad, Suzanne. Natasha: The Biography of Natalie Wood. New York: Harmony, 2001. ———. “Live Online” discussion of Natasha. Washingtonpost.com 26 July 2001. Fraser, Antonia. Marie Antoinette: The Journey. New York: Talese, 2001. Gaiman, Neil. Don’t Panic: Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. London: Titan, 2002. Gerth, Jeff, and Van Natta, Don, Jr. Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton. New York: Little, Brown, 2007. Goodman, Jon. The Kennedy Mystique: Creating Camelot. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2006. Gopnik, Adam. “Angels and Ages: Lincoln’s Language and Its Legacy.” New Yorker 27 May 2007. Gordon, John Steele. “The Sunny Steel Baron and His Bootstraps Fortune.” New York Times 30 Oct. 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/30/books/30gord.html. Greenberg, David. “The Gay Emancipator? What’s Wrong with The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln?” Slate 14Jan. 2005. http://www.slate.com/id/2112313. Hamilton, Nigel. Biography: A Brief History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Helfer, Andrew, and Randy DuBurke. Malcolm X: A Graphic Biography. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006. Herken, Gregg. Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller. New York: Henry Holt, 2002. Additional material at http://www.brotherhoodofthebomb.com. Hitchens, Christopher. “Rich Man’s Burden.” Atlantic Monthly December (2006) Republished at Powell’s Books “Review-a-Day” Web site (19 December 2006). http:// www.powells.com/review/2006_12_19.html. Holroyd, Michael. Works on Paper: The Craft of Biography and Autobiography. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2002. Huddleston, Kathie. “Neil Gaiman Hitchhikes Through Douglas Adams’ Hilarious Galaxy.” Science Fiction Weekly 1 Dec. 2003. http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue345/interview.html. Ianziti, Gary. “Re-Thinking Biography.” Paper presented to the Social Change in the 21st Century Conference, Centre for Social Change Research, Queensland University of Technology, 21 November 2003. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00000131/01/ Gary_Ianziti.pdf. International Auto/Biography Association (IABA), 2007. http://www.iaba.org.cn. Isaacson, Walter. Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. ———. Einstein: His Life and Universe. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. ——— 2007a. “Letter from Walter Isaacson.” http://www.aspeninstitute.org. [Accessed May 17, 2007.]

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BIOGRAPHY James, Caryn. “The Importance of Being Biased.” New York Times 27 Mar. 1994. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E00E7DC1E3DF934A15750C0A96 2958260. Kakutani, Michiko. “Today’s Managing Partner in Team Clinton & Clinton.” New York Times 5 June 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/05/books/review/05kaku.html. Kaufman, David. Ridiculous! The Theatrical Life and Times of Charles Ludlam. New York: Applause, 2002. Kelley, Kitty. The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. New York: Doubleday, 2004. Kilian, Pamela. Barbara Bush: Matriarch of a Dynasty. New York: Dunne, 2002. Kimmelman, Michael. “The Former Queen of Buzz Conjures a Golden Heyday.” New York Times 11 June 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/books/11tina.html. Lacey, Josh. “Only an Irish Clown.” The Guardian 12 June 2004. http://books.guardian.co. uk/review/story/0,,1236066,00.html. Lambert, Gavin. Natalie Wood: A Life. New York: Knopf, 2004. Lamberton, Robert. Plutarch. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Lanes, Selma G. Through the Looking Glass: Further Adventures and Misadventures in the Realm of Children’s Literature. Boston: Godine, 2004. Leaming, Barbara. Mrs. Kennedy: The Missing History of the Kennedy Years. New York: Free Press, 2001. Leopold, Todd. “David McCullough Brings ‘John Adams’ to Life.” CNN.com 7 June 7 2001. http://archives.cnn.com/2001/SHOWBIZ/books/06/07/david.mccullough/index.html. Lewis, Roger. The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. New York: Applause, 1997. Lomax, Louis E. To Kill a Black Man: The Shocking Parallel in the Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1968. Lynch, Jack. n.d. “A Guide to Samuel Johnson.” http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/ Johnson/Guide/index.html. [Accessed July 1, 2007.] Malcolm, Janet. The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. New York: Knopf, 1994. Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Maslin, Janet. “The Diana Chronicles.” New York Times 8 June 2007. http://www. nytimes.com/2007/06/08/books/08book.html. McCullough, David. Truman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. ———. John Adams. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. McCutchen, Wilmot H. “Plutarch.” Postscript to 15 Ancient Greek Heroes from Plutarch’s Lives, 1998. http://www.e-classics.com/index.html. Mehegan, David. “Author Enjoys Full Access for Book on Kennedy Patriarch.” Boston Globe 5 Aug. 2006. http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2006/08/05/author_ enjoys_full_access_for_book_on_kennedy_patriarch/. Minutaglio, Bill. First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty. New York: Times, 1999. Mitchell, Elizabeth. W: Revenge of the Bush Dynasty Rev. ed. New York: Berkeley, 2003. Moon, Vicky. The Private Passion of Jackie Kennedy Onassis: Portrait of a Rider. New York: Regan, 2005. Mulvaney, Jay. Diana and Jackie: Maidens, Mothers, Myths. New York: Griffin, 2002. Murphy-O’Connor, Jerome. Jesus and Paul: Parallel Lives. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2007. Nasar, Sylvia. A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash. New York: Touchstone, 1998. Nasaw, David. The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. ———. Andrew Carnegie. New York: Penguin, 2006. Nehring, Christina. “Domesticated Goddess.” Atlantic Monthly April 2004. http://www. theatlantic.com/doc/200404/nehring.

BIOGRAPHY Nicolson, Nigel. Long Life: Memoirs. New York: Putnam, 1998. Niels Bohr Archive (NBA). “Release of Documents Relating to 1941 Bohr-Heisenberg Meeting.” Niels Bohr Archive (6 Feb. 2002). http://www.nba.nbi.dk/release.html. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Adventures in Abandonment.” New York Times 28 Aug. 28 1988. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE4D81539F93BA1575BC0A96 E948260. O’Hehir, Andrew. “The Sexual Life of Abraham Lincoln.” Salon 12 Jan. 2005. http://dir.salon.com/story/books/review/2005/01/12/lincoln/index.html. Ottaviani, Jim, and Leland Purvis. Suspended in Language: Niels Bohr’s Life, Discoveries, and the Century He Shaped. Ann Arbor, MI: G.T. Labs, 2004. Pais, Abraham. Niels Bohr’s Times, In Physics, Philosophy, and Polity. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991. ———. J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life. With supplemental material by Robert P. Crease. New York: Oxford, 2006. Parker, Richard. “Pittsburgh Pirates.” New York Times 5 Nov. 2006. http://www.nytimes. com/2006/11/05/books/review/Parker.t.html. Parry, Robert. Secrecy and Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq. Arlington, VA: Media Consortium, 2004. Phillips, Kevin. American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush. New York: Viking, 2004. Rexroth, Kenneth. “Plutarch, Parallel Lives.” In Classics Revisited. New York: New Directions, 1968. Rich, Motoko. “3 Books from Knopf Take Prizes in Pulitzers.” New York Times 18 Apr. 18 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/books/18puli.html?fta=y. ———. 2007a. “Rival Books on Hillary Clinton Play Leapfrog on Debut Dates.” New York Times 22 May 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/books/22book.html. Rollyson, Carl. A Higher Form of Cannibalism? Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005. ———. “Biography: The Highest Form of Cannibalism?” New York Sun 14 March 14 2007. http://www2.nysun.com/arts/biography-the-highest-form-of-cannibalism/. Rose, Phyllis. Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages. New York: Knopf, 1983. Sauvé, Christian. Sept. 2005. www.christian-sauve.com. Schiff, Stacy. A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America. New York: Holt, 2005. Schweizer, Peter, and Rochelle Schweizer. The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty. New York: Doubleday, 2004. Scott, Janny. “For Unauthorized Biographers, the World Is Very Hostile.” New York Times 6 Oct. 1996. http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/22/specials/welty-unauthorized.html. Seligman, Craig. “Brilliant Careers: Janet Malcolm.” Salon 29 Feb. 2000. http://archive. salon.com/people/bc/2000/02/29/malcolm/index.html. Shenk, Joshua Wolf. Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. www.lincolnsmelancholy.com. Simpson, M.J. Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams. 1st American ed. Boston: Justin, Charles & Company, 2003. Smith, Sally Bedell. Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House. New York: Random House, 2004. Stansell, Christine. “What Stuff!” New Republic (9 Jan. 2005 online; 17 January 2005 print). Republished at Powell’s Books “Review-a-Day” Web site 13 Jan. 13 2005. Steers, Edward, Jr. Lincoln Legends: Myths, Hoaxes, and Confabulations Associated With Our Greatest President. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2007. Stiles, T.J. “Man of Steel—and Ink.” Salon 25 Oct. 2006. http://www.salon.com/books/ review/2006/10/25/nasaw/index.html. Talbot, David. Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years. New York: Free Press, 2007.

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BIOGRAPHY Tippins, Sherrill. February House: The Story of W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Tripp, C.A. The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln. Lewis Gannett, ed. New York: Free Press, 2005. Tucker, Tom. Bolt of Fate: Benjamin Franklin and His Electric Kite Hoax. New York: Public Affairs, 2003. Webb, Nick. Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams. New York: Ballantine, 2003. Weber, Caroline. “Tabloid Princess.” New York Times 10 June 2007. http://www.nytimes. com/2007/06/10/books/review/Weber-t.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/ People/D/Diana,%20Princess%20Of%20Wales. Welland, Sasha Su-Ling. A Thousand Miles of Dreams: The Journeys of Two Chinese Sisters. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. Werth, Barry. The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin—A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal. New York: Talese, 2001. Whittemore, Reed. Pure Lives: The Early Biographers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1988. ———. Whole Lives: Shapers of Modern Biography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1989. Wilson, Andrew. Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith. New York: Bloomsbury, 2003. Winner, Lauren. “Creative Marriage, British Style: PW Talks With Katie Roiphe.” Publisher’s Weekly 23 April 2007. http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6434983.html. Wood, Gordon S. The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. New York: Penguin, 2004. Wood, Lana. Natalie: A Memoir by Her Sister. New York: Putnam, 1984. Yardley, Jonathan. “The Sage of Baltimore.” Atlantic Monthly Dec. 2002. Republished at Powell’s Books “Review-a-Day” Web site (17 Dec. 2002). http://www.powells.com/ review/2002_12_17.html. ———. “How an Ambitious Scottish Immigrant Rose from Hardscrabble Roots to the Pinnacle of Industry.” Washington Post 15 Oct. 2006. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/ content/article/2006/10/12/AR2006101201097.html. ———. “Why Are We So Fascinated by the Lives of Others?” Washington Post 25 Mar. 2007. h t t p : / / w w w. w a s h i n g t o n p o s t . c o m / w p - d y n / c o n t e n t / a r t i c l e / 2 0 0 7 / 0 3 / 2 2 / AR2007032201670.html.

Further Reading Backscheider, Paula R. Reflections on Biography. New York: Oxford, 1999, www.biography.com; Hamilton, Nigel. Biography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2007; Holroyd, Michael. Works On Paper. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2002; Rollyson, Carl. A Higher Form of Cannibalism? Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005; Shenk, Joshua Wolf. “Afterword: ‘What Everybody Knows.’” In Lincoln’s Melancholy, 221–243. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003; Whittemore, Reed. Whole Lives: Shapers of Modern Biography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1988; Zarnowski, Myra. History Makers: A Questioning Approach to Reading and Writing Biographies. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003.

PEGGY LIN DUTHIE

C CHICK LIT Definition. Much of the fiction written by American women in the twenty-first century can be termed “popular,” owing to its sustained engagement with an expansive but clearly defined readership. Since the 1990s, popular women’s fiction has been dominated by “chick lit,” a term that has come to signify a particular brand of commercial fiction. In her article “Who’s Laughing Now? A Short History of Chick Lit and the Perversion of a Genre,” novelist Cris Mazza credits herself with inventing the taxonomy in her capacity as co-editor of an anthology of new women’s writing. The stories in Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction sought “not to embrace an old frivolous or coquettish image of women but to take responsibility for our part in the damaging, lingering stereotype” (Mazza 2000, 18). Mazza coined the term hoping that critics would recognize its “ironic intention”; as she observes, the ironic inflection of the term evaporated with the inception of the “second incarnation” of chick lit (2000, 18). It is this second incarnation that became a publishing phenomenon in the 1990s and continues to thrive in the twenty-first century. Arguably, tone is the defining characteristic of the genre. The signature tone of chick lit is humorous, irreverent, and journalistic. Many writers of chick lit novels began their careers as columnists and use their social commentaries as source material for their fictional worlds. Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) evolved from British writer Helen Fielding’s newspaper columns for the Independent and later the Daily Telegraph. Candace Bushnell’s column “Sex and the City” provided the material for her first novel and the hugely influential HBO television series (1998–2004). From its inception, chick lit secured the readership of the younger demographic through its engagement with contemporary issues and popular culture. Over the past decade, chick lit has sprouted a variety of subgenres. Although commentators on the genre regularly announce its decline, it continues to expand and attract a wider range of women readers.

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“IT’S ABOUT YOU!” Today’s chick lit is written by, about, and for women. When asked to explain the popularity of the genre, readers emphasize the importance of identification. The epigram of the Web site “chicklitbooks.com” reflects this appetite for the familiar: “It’s hip. It’s smart. It’s fun. It’s about you!” (Ferriss and Young 2005, 1). For many readers, chick lit provides an antidote to the unrealistic images of women’s lives presented by the media. As women’s choices seem to proliferate, the media continues to fixate on issues of female identity and to debate women’s place and function in contemporary society. Many chick lit novels privilege multiple viewpoints, enabling readers to experience vicariously the narratives of women who chose differently from them.

History. Chick lit entered the public’s consciousness as a generic term after the publication of Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary in 1996. In her introduction to The Feminist Bestseller, Imelda Whelehan observes that Fielding’s novel “facilitated a shift in the way contemporary young women’s lives were discussed and described” and “spoke to a new generation of women about the complexities of their lives” (Whelehan 2005, 4). Writers of the genre trace its roots as far back as the nineteenth century, claiming parentage in Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Edith Wharton. Reviewers register these affinities while recognizing the relative frivolity of chick lit: the Sunday Telegraph’s image of Bushnell as “Jane Austen with a martini” graces the covers or opening pages of her novels. Bushnell has identified herself as a postmodern Edith Wharton. Regarding the heroine of Trading Up (2003), her third novel, Bushnell states: “If anything, Janey. . . is like Lily Bart from The House of Mirth” (“Lipstick Jungle”). In “Hypotext in the City: The House of Mirth at the Millennium,” Pamela Knights examines Wharton’s presence in contemporary American women’s fiction; her illuminating essay includes an analysis of Bushnell’s engagement with Wharton’s narratives. In “Mothers of Chick Lit?” Juliette Wells compares Wharton’s representation of New York society in The House of Mirth with postmodern depictions.

THE CHICK-LIT BRAND Bridget Jones’s Diary sparked a publishing boom in Great Britain and the United States. A multitude of novels chronicling the daily struggles of single women followed in its wake. Chick lit became an instantly recognizable brand, which, a decade later, continues to sell itself. The packaging of chick lit novels testifies to its status as a distinct genre: readers scan the pastel covers for the familiar motifs of chick lit as much as they seek out individual authors: shoes, lipsticks, cocktails, and handbags are prevalent. Publishing houses have created imprints to cater solely to this burgeoning market. “Strapless,” an imprint of Kensington Publishers, and “Red Dress Ink,” a division of Harlequin Publishing, dedicate themselves entirely to the production of chick lit. “Red Dress Ink” identifies itself in this way:“a women’s fiction program that depicts young, single, mostly citydwelling women coping with the pressures that accompany a career, the dating scene, and all the other aspects of modern life in America” (Ferriss 2005, 194). Web sites dedicated to chick lit assert its credentials as a distinct genre: they offer definitions, forums, bibliographies, and dictionaries of chick lit slang, as well as advertising the novels themselves.

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Plum Sykes, a British-born chick lit writer who lives in and writes about Manhattan, also claims parallels with Wharton: “Honestly, if Edith Wharton published The Custom of the Country now, it would be considered chick lit” (Solomons 2004). Bridget Jones’s Diary shared some of the plot of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, including the lead male character named Darcy, who initially shuns and insults the female lead character. To further cement the connection, Colin Firth, the actor who played Mr. Darcy in the acclaimed 1995 BBC television production of Pride and Prejudice, also played the Mark Darcy character in the 2001 movie of Bridget Jones’ Diary. Publishers have attempted to capitalize on these broad, thematic parallels by remarketing nineteenth-century literary classics. In 2006, Bloomsbury and Headline published editions of Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and the novels of Jane Austen with pastel covers sporting silhouettes of the young heroine. Reviewers have identified young adults as the primary market for these editions; the Guardian includes the repackaged Bloomsbury classics in its recommendations for teenage readers (“Teenage Picks”). However, Bloomsbury clearly issued these new editions with the readers of chick lit in mind. American popular fiction writers such as Meg Cabot have been chosen to write brief prefaces to the novels, entitled “Why You Should Read . . .” Literary critics continue to dispute these lines of descent. Many acknowledge the parity in basic subject matter but argue that the similarity ends there. In “Mothers of Chick Lit?” Juliette Wells illuminates the stylistic differences between nineteenthcentury literary texts and today’s popular women’s fiction. She compares Fielding’s description of the hero in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason with Charlotte Brontë’s rendering of Rochester in Jane Eyre, emphasizing the richness of Brontë’s prose: While Helen Fielding supplies us only with a succinct declarative statement about Mark Darcy’s looks, Charlotte Brontë captures in words the features of Mr. Rochester’s face, relates them to the qualities of his personality, convincingly explains why Jane should be so drawn to a man who would not usually be considered handsome, and tantalizes our interpretive skills by insistently using language of mastery and enslavement. Fielding’s sentence, immediately comprehensible, passes by almost without our noticing it; Brontë’s sentences invite us to savor and ponder her choice of words. (Wells 2005, 65)

Twentieth-century touchstones open up the most fertile line of enquiry into the history of the genre. Modern paradigms for today’s chick lit include Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything (1958), Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl (1962), Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963), Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls (1966), and, more recently, Nora Ephron’s Heartburn (1983). Indeed chicklit Web sites have begun to identify such novels as models for the genre (Skurnik 2006). Written on the brink of second-wave feminism, these mid-century novels broke new ground with their candid representations of female sexuality and the issues that informed women’s everyday lives. In The Best of Everything, Jaffe explores taboos such as abortion, infidelity, and sexual harassment. The novel’s epigram comes from an advertisement in the New York Times: “You Deserve the Best of Everything,” in many ways the mantra of today’s chick lit. The Best of Everything was reissued in 2005 in recognition of its contemporary relevance. Speaking with Renée Montagne

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in 2005, Jaffe registers parallels with Sex and the City (1996). She recalls writing the novel to engage with the covert narratives of women living in the “hypocritical” and “secretive” atmosphere of the fifties. She credits her novel’s enduring success to its identifiable narratives: “people saw themselves reflected in it . . . they realized that . . . they weren’t alone and it made them feel great.” In her foreword to the 2005 edition of the novel, Jaffe asserts, “The honesty of The Best of Everything paved the way for other authors” (Jaffe 2005, ix). The heroines in The Best of Everything have come to the city seeking the best career, the best man, and the best apartment. The novel opens with the image of the hundreds of women who navigate the city every morning: You see them every morning at a quarter to nine, rushing out of the maw of the sway tunnel, filing out of Grand Central Station, crossing Lexington and Park and Madison and Fifth avenues, the hundreds and hundreds of girls . . . Some of them are wearing chic black suits (maybe last year’s but who can tell?) and kid gloves and are carrying lunches in their violet-sprigged Bonwit Teller bags. None of them has enough money. (Jaffe 2005, 1)

This opening paragraph launches the predominant themes and images of today’s chick lit: the frenzy of the city, the career girl working to support herself, the preoccupation with acquisition and aesthetics. Jaffe’s representation of New York anticipates chick lit’s preoccupation with urban spaces. She presents the city as an arena attuned to the demands of the single woman. The heroines’ emotional trajectories are mirrored by the city’s seasonal changes, and their demands are catered to by New York’s social calendar: “Some girls know that there is a fifth season in New York, the season of the Summer Bachelor” (Jaffe 2005, 243). Jaffe’s primary heroine, 20-year-old Caroline Bender, serves as a model for the chick lit heroine. Having lost her fiancé, she seeks work at a publishing firm, a popular line of work for the postmodern heroine. Caroline’s initiation into a treacherous work environment foreshadows novels such as Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada (2003) and The Nanny Diaries (2002) by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Krause. On her first day at the office, Caroline realizes that “the working world was more complicated than she had ever dreamed” (Jaffe 2005, 14). Although chick lit writers distinguish their narratives from romance novels, the undeserving suitor masquerading as the hero remains a staple of their fiction. Caroline’s fiancé reappears, but it takes her most of the novel to understand that he is not worthy of her. The satellite heroines pursue narrative lines that have retained their place as subsidiary stories in today’s chick lit: the narrative of the divorced, single mother and the struggling, doomed actress. Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl undoubtedly paved the way for writers of chick lit, not only by foregrounding the single woman’s narrative but also by contesting generic boundaries. Brown’s text is a generic hybrid: part autobiography, part journalism, part survival guide. Formally and thematically, Sex and the Single Girl anticipates Bushnell’s Sex and the City, another taboo-defying text that resists generic categorization. In 2003, Barricade Books reissued Brown’s novel with a prefatory title, announcing it as the prototype for Bushnell’s text; the cover of the latest edition reads, Before There Was Sex and the City, There Was Sex and the Single Girl. Brown’s defiant tone and journalistic technique set the standard for contemporary

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chick lit writers: the rallying cries of independence, the cataloguing of masculine types, and emphatic rejection of the “singleton” stigma echo throughout today’s chick lit. Chapter titles such as “Where to Meet Them,” “Money Money Money” and “The Apartment” would not look out of place in a twenty-first-century chick lit novel. Brown’s opening characterization of the single girl as sassy, tough, and desirable prefigures the heroines of today’s chick lit: the single woman, far from being a creature to be pitied and patronized, is emerging as the newest glamour girl of our times. She is engaging because she lives by her wits. She supports herself. She has had to sharpen her personality and mental resources to a glitter in order to survive in a competitive world and the sharpening looks good. Economically she is a dream . . . Why else is she attractive? Because she isn’t married, that’s why! She is free to be The Girl in a man’s life or at least his vision of The Girl, whether he is married or single himself. (Brown 2003, 6)

Another notable model for contemporary American chick lit is Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963). Bushnell observes that The Group tells “the same story” as her latest novel, Lipstick Jungle (2005), and Susann’s Valley of the Dolls: “It has lousy men, crappy apartments, birth control, lesbian friends” (“Lipstick Jungle”). The Group follows the lives of eight Vassar graduates; each chapter presents a different center of consciousness. Again, McCarthy’s novel engages frankly with the taboo subjects of the day: lesbian relationships, contraception, the breast/bottle debate. Although the controversy surrounding some of these subjects has diminished, the reflections of McCarthy’s heroines remain relevant. One heroine, Polly, discovers that she can feel “quite happy and self-sufficient” without a man and wonders whether “it might be almost a deprivation to get married” (McCarthy 1966, 245). Polly later marries but believes that her married classmates secretly covet the lives of resolutely single women, such as Helena: “It was felt that they at least had ‘done something’” (McCarthy 1996, 284). As the single girl determined to establish herself in the male-dominated publishing world, Libby MacAusland is clearly another paradigm for the twenty-first–century chick lit heroine. The term gossip surfaces frequently in association with popular women’s fiction: in her introduction to Valley of the Dolls Julie Burchill describes the text as “three decades of gossip columns distilled into one fat novel” (Burchill 2005, x); Michiko Kakutani (1989) of the New York Times characterizes McCarthy’s The Group as “a chatty gossip sheet” (Bushnell’s novels have been categorized as ‘Gossip Lit’; Mark Goldblatt (2003) describes Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada as “the most gossipy novel in recent years.” However, McCarthy’s text differs from chick lit in several ways. Literary critics stress the disposability of chick lit, but The Group continues to resonate with a wide readership. Unlike many chick lit writers, McCarthy does not segregate women’s preoccupations from broader social issues. The thirdperson narrator of The Group casts a satirical eye over America’s privileged classes. The novel opens on the familiar image of single women assembling in New York, but the appreciation of the city’s plurality is captured with a tinge of irony that is rare in today’s chick lit: They were in the throes of discovering New York, imagine it, when some of them had actually lived there all their lives, in tiresome Georgian houses full of waste space in the Eighties or Park Avenue apartment buildings, and they delighted in such out-of-theway corners as this . . . (McCarthy 1966, 5)

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Where today’s chick lit heroines wrangle over designer labels, McCarthy’s Vassar graduates argue over political affiliations and worry about the effects of privilege: “Great wealth was a frightful handicap; it insulated you from living” (McCarthy 1966, 26). The influence of the feminist movement on the group is clear. The women insist that they are a “different breed . . . from the languid buds of the previous decade” and that they will work in the fall, “at a volunteer job if need be” (McCarthy 1966, 12). One heroine, Priss, regrets relinquishing her “job and social ideals” for her husband and suspects that he would be “far happier himself if she were where she longed to be—in Washington, as a humble cog in the New Deal, which he hated—and he could boast of ‘my Bolshevik wife’” (McCarthy 1966, 325). Susann’s Valley of the Dolls is often cited as the best-selling novel of all time. In the television series Sex and the City, a reformed New York party girl who has moved to the suburbs insists on the redundancy of Susann’s narratives: “Life isn’t a Jacqueline Susann novel, ‘four friends looking for life and love in the big city’” (“The Baby Shower”). At the end of the episode, the suburban housewife returns to New York in a desperate attempt to recuperate this narrative. This nod to Susann testifies to the novel’s relevance for the single heroines of American chick lit. Spanning three decades, Valley of the Dolls charts the lives of three friends striving to climb the ladder of the entertainment industry. Like Jaffe, Susann opens her novel with the most sympathetic character, Anne Welles, securing her position as primary heroine. The novel begins in 1945 with a moment that has become a staple of the chick lit plot: the arrival of the heroine in New York: “The temperature hit ninety degrees the day she arrived. New York was steaming—an angry concrete animal caught unawares in an unseasonable hot spell. But she didn’t mind the heat or the littered midway called Times Square. She thought New York was the most exciting city in the world” (Susann 2003, 1). For chick lit heroines, the city, usually New York, is a site for reinvention, adventure, and enterprise: “There was an acceptance at face value in New York, as if everyone had just been born, with no past heritage to acknowledge or hide” (Susann 2003, 6). Valley of the Dolls is undoubtedly darker than contemporary chick lit. The “dolls” of the title signify the red or black pills that the heroines come to rely on as relationships begin to founder. In this world, even female friendship—often the only anchor for the chick lit heroine—is tainted by betrayal. Like Jaffe and McCarthy, Susann admits the reader into uncharted territory, tackling taboos such as birth control, breast cancer, sexual experimentation, and prenuptial agreements. The novel also dramatizes the alienation experienced by women who seem to “have it all”—a theme that Bushnell in particular would explore toward the end of the century. In Heartburn, Ephron gives voice to the woman scorned. Wells speculates that this narrative is “too wrenching” for chick lit but notes that this subject takes center stage in British writer Elizabeth Buchan’s Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman (2002) (Wells 2005, 68). One is more likely to encounter this narrative in “hen lit,” a subgenre for more mature readers. However, Ephron’s heroine ends up pursuing the narrative line of the single women of chick lit. It is well documented that the novel is a thinly veiled account of the breakdown of Ephron’s marriage. Heroine Rachel Samstat, a Jewish American food writer, is seven months pregnant with her second child when she discovers that her husband has been having an affair. She leaves Washington and heads for New York where she will claim her identity as a single woman. Through Rachel, Ephron presents the single woman’s narrative as one of mobilization: “Things happen to you when you’re single. You meet new

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men, you travel alone, you learn new tricks, you read Trollope, you try sushi, you buy nightgowns, you shave your legs. Then you get married and the hair grows in” (Ephron 1983, 14). Rachel’s evaluation recalls Brown’s account of the single life and reads like a commentary on the lives of today’s chick lit heroines. On the plane to New York, she recognizes: “part of me was secretly relieved to be done with swatches and couches . . . and that part of me was thinking: Okay, Rachel Samstat, finally something is happening to you” (Ephron 1983, 16). Upon arriving, her “heart does a little dance” at the sight of “people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world’s greatest chocolate chip cookie” (Ephron 1983, 35). Contemporary chick lit writer Jennifer Weiner recalls reading Ephron’s novels and “being completed taken” by her “frank, funny, wry voice” (“Snarkspot”). Through Rachel’s voice, Ephron addresses the questions that continue to dominate women’s fiction today. She wonders why women view marriage as their ultimate destination and unveils the secret longings of the married woman: “It seemed to me that the desire to get married—which, I regret to say, I believe is fundamental and primal in women—is followed almost immediately by an equally fundamental and primal urge, which is to be single again” (Ephron 1983, 84). Such speculation is echoed by one of the heroines in the television series Sex and the City: “Married people just want to be single again” (“The Chicken Dance”). Rachel narrates with the signature irreverence of the chick lit heroine, satirizing the hypocrisy of men and Washington’s social scene. Some of her humor is directed at herself. Intertextual references acknowledge the hold of fictional narratives over women. Rachel scoffs at the myths that shape women’s aspirations—the “Lillian Hellman fantasy” that “the big man and the big woman march into the sunset together and live happily ever after” (Ephron 1983, 134, Ephron’s italics)—but concedes that she has capitulated to a particular stereotype, exemplified by a heroine in an earlier popular novel: “I felt like a character in a trashy novel; I even knew which trashy novel I felt like a character in, which made it worse: The Best of Everything” (Ephron 1983, 153). The metatextual dimension of Heartburn foreshadows twentyfirst century chick lit; as the conventions of the genre become ever more familiar, chick lit has become increasingly self-referential. In her metatextual commentary Rachel anticipates one of the conventions of contemporary chick lit—the need for the happy ending. Halfway through the novel, she assures the reader that her story will end happily because she “insist[s] on happy endings” (Ephron 1983, 99). A happy ending for Rachel constitutes self-assertion rather than union with a new man; she throws a key lime pie at her husband’s face before leaving him for good. Popular women’s fiction has undergone significant changes over the past 50 years. Mid-century incarnations confronted the possibility of death, illness, suicide, and depression. In The Best of Everything, Gregg, the would-be actress, dies after trying to escape a man she mistakes for a rapist. The Group opens where many chick lit novels leave off and refuses to reward all its heroines with a happy ending. At the beginning of the novel, “pairs and trios of young women” arrive at the wedding of one of their classmates, the beautiful Kay (McCarthy 1966, 5). It takes Kay’s death, a probable suicide, to reunite “the group” in the final chapters. Valley of the Dolls registers the dearth of plotlines for women in the fifties and sixties: marriage, motherhood, and beauty are finite. By the end of the novel, the women’s ideals are in tatters. Jennifer, the beautiful “actress,” seeks self-definition beyond her body but kills herself after a mastectomy; Neely is locked into the narrative of the self-destructive

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movie star; Anne wins the man she loves but capitulates to the lure of the “dolls” when he is unfaithful. At the end of the novel she looks forward only to a time when there would be “nothing left—no hurt, no love” (Susann 2003, 467). Trends and Themes. In its formative years, chick lit centered on the preoccupations of the single, young female. The genre has since expanded to incorporate many aspects of women’s lives, such as marriage, motherhood, careers, and self-image. Not all chick lit trades on the identification factor by presenting readers with the world of their everyday lives. The comedy of manners, a different but equally popular strain of chick lit, transports readers into the glamorous worlds captured on the covers of women’s magazines. By satirizing the modeling or entertainment industries, these novels offer escapism while reassuring the reader that the image belies the reality. In some of the most popular chick lit novels, the two worlds collide—hapless, neurotic, single women are let loose among the princesses of the social elite. In Bergdorf Blondes (2004), Plum Sykes places the dowdy English girl in the company of New York’s platinum blondes: young women who “work” only to sustain the impression that their lives “are fabulous beyond belief” (Sykes 2005, 1). In Everyone Worth Knowing (2005), Weisberger drops an English 20-something into the heady world of Manhattan’s hot spots. For many chick lit heroines, financial status is the most significant identity category. As the beneficiaries of feminism, these professional, independent, urban heroines flaunt their credentials as consumers. Consumerism is frequently presented as a bonding experience that connects the most estranged chick lit heroines. The sisters in Weiner’s In Her Shoes (2004) have only one thing in common: their love of footwear. Chick lit novels abound with references to brand names, signaling the predominance of the “must have” mentality. Even heroines on limited salaries equate acquisition with success. Moments of personal triumph are usually accompanied by material gain of some kind. In The Nanny Diaries, Mrs. X gives Nan a pair of old Prada shoes. For Nan, this offering represents a victory over Manhattan’s most conspicuous consumers: “PRADA! P-R-A-D-A. As in Madonna. As in Vogue. As in, watch me walk off in style, you khaki-wearing, pager-carrying, golf-playing, Wall Street Journal toting . . . arrogant jerk-offs!” (Krause and McLaughlin 2002, 67). HBO’s adaptation of Sex and the City continues to exert its influence on chick lit in many ways, but its celebration of consumerism has had perhaps the most enduring effect. Every week viewers tuned in to find out what designer labels the heroines were brandishing. At times, shopping is presented as a means of overcoming boredom, loneliness, or sexual frustration. In one episode, Carrie, the primary heroine, reports: “With no man in sight I decided to rescue my ankles from a life of boredom by purchasing too many pairs of Jimmy Choo shoes” (“Where There’s Smoke,” 1998). Much popular women’s fiction celebrates female community and presents friendship groups as a form of surrogate family. Most heroines are single at the beginning of the chick lit novel and rely on urban networks for support. Emulating Jaffe, Susann, and McCarthy, contemporary women writers often privilege plural perspectives and voices to reflect the relational sensibility of their heroines. The titles of chick lit often announce friendship or community as their dominant theme: Rebecca Wells’s Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (1996) and Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s The Dirty Girls’ Social Club (2003). The forms of some chick lit novels reflect this theme. The Dirty Girls’ Social Club is a sequence of stories, each focusing on an individual heroine. Elissa Schappell’s acclaimed novel Use Me (2000) is composed

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of linked but self-contained stories, two of them narrated by the primary heroine’s best friend. Bushnell’s Four Blondes (2000) is a sequence of stories and novellas. The heroines do not know each other, but their stories of alienation are linked by strong thematic resonances. Many heroines of contemporary women’s fiction work in the same fields as their creators: publishing, journalism, or advertising. Novels, such as Sex and the City, The Nanny Diaries, and The Devil Wears Prada have been read as coded autobiographies. Chick lit heroines often favor “confessional form[s]” such as diary entries, e-mails, and newspaper columns: spaces where they are licensed to address taboo subjects and express self-doubt (Whelehan 2005, 5). One of the most prevalent conventions of contemporary chick lit is the happy ending. Where Susann and McCarthy spurned neat, upbeat resolutions, contemporary writers rarely leave readers worrying about the futures of their heroines; marriage usually beckons. Exceptions include The Devil Wears Prada, in which the heroine begins the novel with the apparently perfect boyfriend and ends it single. She is rewarded, however, with a burgeoning career in writing. Sensing perhaps the saturation of the market for tales of the singleton in the city, some writers have begun to test the boundaries of the genre. One of the fastestgrowing subgenres is “mystery lit,” a hybrid that interweaves the paradigmatic narratives of chick lit and crime novels. Janet Evanovich’s immensely popular Stephanie Plum stories cross generic and formal boundaries: the detective heroine appears in novels, novellas, and short stories. Helen Fielding’s latest novel, Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination (2003), has a spy for its heroine. In these generic hybrids, narratives begin to overlap. As they delve into the secret histories of their neighbors, the sleuthing heroines start to question their own choices. The appeal of this trend is reflected in the popularity of the television series Desperate Housewives, which first aired in the United States in 2004 on ABC. Created by Marc Cherry, the series is a dark comedy about the lives of suburban housewives. The themes of the series resonate strongly with chick lit; the characters are immediately recognizable types: the mother who has foregone her career to raise her hyperactive children; the bored ex-model who is having an affair; the single mother seeking love; and the control freak obsessed with the art of housekeeping. Generic suburban narratives are offset by the murder mystery that brings the housewives together. When fellow housewife Mary Alice commits suicide, the women unite to solve the mystery of her death. A tale of abduction, murder, and blackmail unfolds. Multiple murders follow in the second season. “Ethnic lit” is a particularly popular subgenre that addresses the standard themes of chick lit alongside broader social issues. Race and class ideology shape the lives of these heroines as much as gender politics. The success of Terry McMillan’s novel, Waiting to Exhale (1992), alerted publishers to a gap in the market. Until this point, most chicklit depicted and targeted white, middle-class women. McMillan’s novel centers on four African-American women who support each other through relationship difficulties. Like most ensembles in popular women’s fiction, the characters follow different trajectories—the single mother, the mistress, and the betrayed wife all feature—but are empowered by their connections with each other. As Lisa A. Guerroro notes, romance and career trajectories in Waiting to Exhale are circumscribed by race and gender ideology; each of McMillan’s heroines must counter the potency of the “Ideal of White Womanhood” in their daily lives (McMillan 1993, 177). The only forum for self-actualization is friendship.

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In 2001, Latina journalist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez earned an advance of $475,000 for her first novel, The Dirty Girls’ Social Club. Following the publication of the novel, Time magazine hailed Valdes-Rodriguez as “the Godmother of chica lit.” Reviews noted strong affinities with McMillan’s novel and praised Valdes-Rodriguez for fusing light fiction with political commentary. The novel follows the experiences of six Boston University graduates who assemble twice a year to catch up on each other’s lives. Friendship is the one constant in the lives of the sucias (Spanish for “dirty girls”). One heroine describes the sucias as her “anchor in this city for a decade” (Valdes-Rodriguez 2001, 109). Lauren serves as the primary narrator and draws on the narratives of the “dirty girls” in her newspaper column, My Life. Lauren fulfills all the criteria of the identifiable chick lit heroine: she is a neurotic, irreverent journalist who uses her column to confess her flaws, and she falls in love with the wrong men and eats only when she is happy. Through her representation of six women of varied ethnic backgrounds, ValdesRodriguez challenges the homogenization of Latinas in America. In her spirited commentary, Lauren confronts these issues head-on: Here’s how my job interview went: You’re a Latina? How . . . neat. You must speak Spanish, then? . . . With a name like Lauren Fernández, they figured Spanish was part of the package. But that’s the American disease as I see it: rampant, illogical stereotyping. We would not be America without it. I admit I did not tell them I was half white trash, born and raised in New Orleans. (Valdes-Rodriguez 2004, 10)

Valdes-Rodriguez strains the boundaries of chick lit and delivers—through Lauren—a metacommentary on the limitations of the chick lit heroine. When Lauren proposes writing about racial tensions, her boss instructs her to tone down the aggression and aim for “you go, girl, sassy” (2004, 180). He designates her column as the “‘syncopated counterbalance to all the dreary stuff in the rest of the paper’” (180). By the end of the novel, secrets have been shared—stories of domestic abuse and hidden sexuality are released—and the group affirms its bonds. The Dirty Girls’ Social Club concludes with the wedding of one heroine and looks forward to the wedding of another. Other sucia have abandoned unhealthy relationships and discovered the values of solitude. Valdes-Rodriguez has since written two more novels and founded a festival entitled the “Chica Lit Club Fiesta.” Some of the most popular chick lit novels of the twenty-first century focus on career paths, treating romance as a subsidiary plot. Young, single heroines striving for financial independence take assistant positions in the hope of working their way into publishing or supporting themselves through postgraduate courses. Chauvinistic co-workers and tyrannical women bosses are a common feature of “work lit,” also known as “office lit” and “assistant lit.” These novels often blur the line between fiction and autobiography; two of the most successful incarnations of this subgenre evolved from the experiences of the authors. Co-written by two former Manhattan nannies, The Nanny Diaries is a comedy of manners. Nan, a 20-something student from a liberal, middle-class family, supports herself by looking after the dysfunctional children of Manhattan’s social elite. The prologue of the novel reads like a nanny’s survival guide; it is peppered with “Nanny Facts” and warnings about Manhattan’s affluent mommy figures:

CHICK LIT She is always tiny. Her hair is always straight and thin; she always seems to be inhaling and never exhaling. She is always wearing expensive khaki pants, Chanel ballet flats, a French striped T-shirt, and a white cardigan. Possibly some discreet pearls. In seven years and umpteen interviews the I’m-mom-casual-in-my-khakis-but-intimidatingin-my-$400-shoes outfits never changes. (Krause and McLaughlin 2002, 2)

When Nan meets Mrs. X, an apparently typical Park Avenue mommy, she becomes nanny to her son, Grayer. How Mrs. X fills her time remains a mystery, yet she expects Nan to adhere to her tight schedule of pedicures and “charity work”; she asks her to run personal errands for her without specific instructions and airs her dissatisfaction with Nan through condescending, “exquisitely passive aggressive” notes (Mendelsohn 2002): “It has come to our attention that after you left in such a hurry last night there was a puddle of urine found beneath the small garbage can in Grayer’s bathroom . . . Such a glaring oversight gives me pause as to the consistency of your performance” (Krause and McLaughlin 2002, 221). The novel satirizes the twenty-first century cult of childhood and unveils the child’s function as status symbol: Mr. and Mrs. X approach child rearing as a kind of competitive sport. Nan is quizzed by a development consultant on Grayer’s progress and upbraided for neglecting to read him the Wall Street Journal and serve “‘bilingual meals’” (Krause and McLaughlin 2002, 178). Mrs. X abdicates responsibility for her son by adopting the latest jargon of parenthood: when Grayer is rejected by a prospective school, she wonders if Nan has “‘set him up for a potentially deleterious self-esteem adjustment’” (176). The novel also makes a serious political point. One of the “Nanny Facts” registers the race and class prejudice of Manhattan’s parents: “in every one of my interviews, references are never checked. I am white. I speak French. My parents are college educated. I have no visible piercings and have been to Lincoln Center in the last two months. I’m hired” (4). In The Nanny Diaries, Krause and McLaughlin venture into new territory, but the staples of chick lit are present: Nan intimates her frustration to the reader through capitalized inner monologue, a technique also deployed by Bushnell. When her roommate’s boyfriend moves in, Nan begins the familiar, fruitless quest for an affordable studio apartment; then a romance develops with a man who lives in the same building as the X family. Krause and McLaughlin observe the stylistic conventions of chick lit. Chapter titles resemble column headings: “Holiday Cheer at $10 an Hour” and “Night of the Banking Dead.” The Nanny Diaries reached number one in the New York Times best-seller list and was declared a “national phenomenon” by Newsweek. The success of Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada verifies the appeal of voyeuristic “revenge” narratives. Reviewers of the novel immediately commented on affinities with The Nanny Diaries. The Devil Wears Prada dramatizes a year in the life of Andrea Sachs, a college graduate who moves to New York, having spent 23 years “embodying small-town America” (Weisberger 2003, 10). She lands a job as junior assistant to Miranda Priestly, the “Devil in Prada,” and the most powerful woman in the fashion world. Assured that she will be able to fast-track her way into journalism if she survives the year, Andrea endures months of humiliation before finally standing up to Miranda. In the process, she loses her “supportive and adorable” boyfriend, Alex (127, Weisberger’s italics). Like The Best of Everything, The Devil Wears Prada deals with the difficult transition from college to the workplace. At the beginning of the novel, Andrea reflects that all of her friends are in

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entry-level jobs that provide no outlet for creativity or self-expression: “Each swore she’d actually gotten dumber in the short amount of time since graduation, and there was no escape in sight” (18). In work lit novels, the workplace demands the same compromises as romantic relationships. Women can lose their identities to jobs just as easily as they can to men. Readers have expressed frustration that heroines such as Nan and Andrea fail to challenge the older, wealthier woman; Weisberger and Krause and McLaughlin save self-assertion for the final pages. Having been dismissed unceremoniously by Mr. and Mrs. X, Nan records her excoriating verdict of their parenting on the Nanny-cam. Weisberger bucks one chick lit trend by leaving the romantic destiny of her heroine open. Andrea’s knight in shining armor arrives in the form of a female mentor; an editor serves as deus ex machina. Andrea acknowledges the triteness of her ending: “It was storybook-like, nauseating, really, how well we’d instantly hit it off” (Weisberger 2003, 388). In the final pages, Andrea claims the voice of the chick lit writer who capitalizes on her experience to expose the realities of the entertainment and fashion industries. She writes “tongue-in-cheek pieces on fashion shows” and “snarky stuff on being a celebrity assistant” (388). Context and Issues. Chick lit’s status as literature remains the subject of much debate. Many women writers object to the term and draw a firm line between chick lit and more literary incarnations of women’s fiction. The most savage indictments come from acclaimed women writers such as Doris Lessing and Beryl Bainbridge. In an interview for the Guardian, Bainbridge describes chick lit as “a froth sort of thing” and adds: “As people spend so little time reading, it’s a pity they perhaps can’t read something a bit deeper, a bit more profound, something with a bit of bite to it” (Bainbridge 2001). Some commentators voice reservations about the connotations of the term “chick lit.” Curtis Sittenfield of The New York Times writes: “To suggest that another woman’s ostensibly literary novel is chick lit feels catty . . . doesn’t the term basically bring down all of us?” (“Sophie’s,” 2005). Other commentators express concern that chick lit has closed down other narratives for women. Stacey D’Erasmo laments the paucity of plots reflected in contemporary popular women’s fiction: “the marital quest of the fashionable, sexually welltraveled, 30-something woman has become so popular as to seem like the dominant narrative of life on earth right now” (Howard 1999). In an article for Book Magazine, Anna Weinberg parodied the genre by compiling a “Make Your Own Chick Lit” recipe, listing the formulae of the successful chick lit novel (Harzewski 2005, 34). Some writers welcome associations with chick lit. Valdes-Rodriguez views the genre as a vehicle for delivering her “message”: “I like being called a beach read. I don’t want to preach to the choir. I can sit here and say Latinos come in all shades for the rest of my life and no one would care. I’m trying to create a human being in a fun, fashion-y way and get the message across” (Acosta 2006). In 2005, Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young edited a lively collection of essays entitled Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, outlining the themes and preoccupations of the genre as well as its limitations. The essays focus specifically on chick lit’s cultural significance. Imelda Whelehan examines chick lit’s embattled relationship with feminism in detail in The Feminist Bestseller. She observes that “feminism lurks in the background” of much chick lit “like a guilty conscience” (Whelehan 2005, 176). Whelehan acknowledges that the genre engages women readers for whom feminism has lost its currency: “Chick lit is built on a tacit acknowledgement that feminism has failed to speak to ‘ordinary’ women” (214). As Whelehan

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notes, overt feminists feature primarily as objects of parody in chick lit. Feminism is misunderstood by some of Bushnell’s heroines. Trading Up openly asks whether the tenets of feminism have a place in twenty-first century New York. Dodo Blanchette, a dowdy lifestyle reporter, exemplifies the contradictions of contemporary feminism: “[she] called herself a neofeminist; she believed in women helping other women . . . She had tons of girlfriends, and her favorite expression was ‘Women rule!’ . . . Like many young women of her generation, she had no qualms about using sex to get ahead’” (Bushnell 2004, 187). From its inception, chick lit has provided rich source material for film and television adaptations: Sex and the Single Girl, The Group, Valley of the Dolls, The Best of Everything, and Heartburn have all been made into films. Contemporary filmmakers continue to capitalize on the genre’s identifiable narratives. Fielding’s Bridget Jones novels, McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale, Weiner’s In Her Shoes, and Wells’s Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood have been made into highly successful romantic comedies. Weiner’s Little Earthquakes (2004) has been optioned by Universal Pictures, and HBO has bought the rights to the Weiner novel Good in Bed (2002). Francis Ford Coppola purchased the rights to Melissa Bank’s best seller, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing (1999) shortly after its publication. The Devil Wears Prada was released as a film starring Meryl Streep in 2006; the film bowed to convention more than the novel by granting its heroine both a fulfilling new job and reconciliation with her boyfriend. The most influential adaptation of contemporary chick lit is HBO’s television series Sex and the City. The critical volume of essays, Reading Sex and the City (2004), attends primarily to the television series. Bushnell’s text features the dominant motifs of chick lit, such as the cocktail, the handbag, and the shoe, but it was the television series that planted these images firmly in the public’s consciousness. In many ways, HBO’s adaptation approximates chick lit more than its source material. In the frenetic world of Bushnell’s novel, relationships are fleeting, and plot lines are fragmented. The television series centers consistently on a surrogate family of four single New York women. Although some viewers praised the series for its candid depiction of female sexuality, others saw only pathos in the lives of the characters. In “Sex, Sadness, and the City,” Wendy Shalit writes: “Despite the hype, Sex and the City is not about girls who just want to have fun . . . in fact it is a lament for all the things of inestimable value that the sexual revolution has wrecked.” She criticized the series for its skewed message about female liberation, claiming that it “confus[ed] sexual sameness with equality and imagin[ed] that competing with men in debauchery was part of [the heroines’] social emancipation” (Shalit 1999). Reviewers repeatedly observed that the heroines deride wives but bemoan the dearth of available men in the city: “The new single-girl pathos seems more like a plea to be unliberated, and fast. These characters really do just want to get married; they just don’t want to look quite so naïve about it” (D’Erasmo 1999). Occasionally, the characters themselves comment on these contradictions. Miranda Hobbes, played by Cynthia Nixon, often articulates the feminist viewpoint. In “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” she complains that the friends’ dialogue centers persistently on men: “How does it happen that four smart women have nothing to talk about, other than boyfriends?” By the end of the series, the women are pursuing the familiar narratives of chick lit. In “Sex and the City: A Farewell,” executive producer Michael Patrick King claims that the series is “about defining different ways to be.” However, the series

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ends by securing each woman in a long-term relationship. Fairy-tale plotlines that the women dismissed as “urban relationship myth[s]” in previous episodes come to fruition. The commitment-phobic male, Mr. Big, tracks Carrie down and tells her that she is “the one” (“The Man” and “An American Girl”). In the end, the heroine is not only reunited with Mr. Big but with New York, which, in an earlier episode, she speculates “may be her one great love” (“Anchors Away”). Miranda morphs into a different archetype. She marries the father of her baby and is removed from Manhattan, no longer a suitable setting for her life. Living in Brooklyn and caring for her mother-in-law as well as working as a lawyer, she resembles the heroines of “mommy lit,” struggling to juggle multiple roles. The final line of the television series shifts the emphasis firmly back to self-fulfillment: Carrie’s voice-over assures the viewer that “the most exciting, challenging and significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself” (“An American Girl”). However, like the contemporary chick lit novel, the series refuses to contemplate the narrative of the mature singleton; rather it acknowledges the paucity of plots for women who will remain alone. In one of the final episodes, Carrie tells her friends: “Ladies, if you are single in New York, after a certain point there is nowhere to go but down” (“Splat!”). Selected Authors Candace Bushnell (1959–). With the publication of her first work of fiction, Sex and the City, Bushnell established herself as a spokesperson for “a particular type of single woman—smart, attractive, successful, and . . . never married” (Bushnell 2004, 25). All four of Bushnell’s texts navigate New York’s social scene and comment explicitly on sexual politics and urban subjectivity. Read together, they form a kind of linked sequence, as characters and plotlines cross textual boundaries. Although classified and marketed as a novel, Bushnell’s Sex in the City is, like Sex and the Single Girl, a generic hybrid. It is composed of columns written by Bushnell in the 1990s for the New York Observer. The text reads more like a collection of essays than a novel. Bushnell initially envisaged Sex and the City as fiction, but her publisher “wanted it to be journalism.” They eventually reached a “quiet, happy understanding” that her first text would be “fiction written as journalism” (Bushnell 2003). The columns are narrated by two 30-something women: an anonymous firstperson commentator, whom Bushnell later acknowledged as herself, and her alter ego, Carrie, who writes a column. Bushnell’s fiction regularly appears in chick lit bibliographies, but this categorization is in some ways misleading. The aggressive pace and fractured structure of Bushnell’s fiction distinguishes it from much chick lit. Most significantly, Bushnell feels no obligation to make her characters sympathetic. Simon Hattenstone of the Guardian refers to the cast of characters in Four Blondes as “a gallery of vile creatures” (Hattenstone 2001). In Bushnell’s fictional world, characters and narratives are dispensed with once they have served their purpose; genuine enduring relationships are elusive. The on/off relationship between Carrie and Mr. Big constitutes one of the few sustained narrative lines in Sex and the City. Also missing in Bushnell’s fictional world is the optimistic tenor of much chick lit. The tone of Sex and the City is often mordant, and the mood is resolutely unromantic. Moreover, Bushnell’s first novel focuses on men as much as women. As Mandy Merck notes in “Sexuality and the City,” the novel’s first chapter features four straight men, a gay male couple and eventually “my friend Carrie” (Merck 48; Bushnell Sex 7).

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In Sex and the City, Bushnell casts an unflinching eye over the mating rituals of New York. She immediately broadcasts the redundancy of the romantic narratives associated with the city’s past: Welcome to the Age of Un-Innocence. The glittering lights of Manhattan that served as backdrops for Edith Wharton’s bodice-heaving trysts are still glowing—but the stage is empty. No one has breakfast at Tiffany’s, and no one has affairs to remember—instead, we have breakfast at seven A.M. and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible. (Bushnell 2004, 2)

Some of the city’s women capitalize on this shift by adopting male habits; they congratulate each other on their one-night stands, their ability to control their emotions, and their objectification of men. Very few of the men in the novel are named; the narrators categorize them into subspecies: “Toxic Bachelor,” “Modelizer,” “Mr. Big,” “Mr. Groovy,” “Mr. Marvelous.” Despite their protests to the contrary, the single women in the novel are pursuing the destiny of New York’s iconic romantic heroines. As well as boasting about their sexual enterprises, they share strategies for snaring a man: “The thing you have to realize is that, in terms of socialization for men, getting them ready for marriage, New York is a terrible place . . . Single men don’t tend to hang around with couples. They’re not used to that idea of coziness and family. So you have to get them there mentally” (Bushnell 2004, 154). Bushnell revised the ending of her first novel to champion the single woman. In its original incarnation, Sex and the City closed with the reassurance that “Carrie and Mr. Big are still together” (Bushnell 1996, 228). When the novel was reissued in 2004, Bushnell changed the ending. The final line of the latest version violates the conventions of chick lit by inverting gender roles and affirming the possibility of happiness for the woman without a mate: “Mr. Big is happily married. Carrie is happily single” (Bushnell 2004, 245). Described by Bushnell as “four novellas,” Four Blondes was also marketed as a novel. The four heroines do not cross over into each other’s narratives, but some characters do recur. Significantly, it is the male power players who move between stories: Tanner Hart, the movie star, and Comstock Dibble, the movie producer, feature in two of the stories. Bushnell distinguishes between the heroines of this text and the women in Sex and the City: the blondes “are not looking for men, they’re looking for some kind of meaning, and their place in the world” (Hattenstone 2001). For Bushnell’s blondes, the quest for meaning gathers pace when they reach 30. The narrator of the first story, “Nice ’N Easy,” is Janey Wilcox, “a sort of lukewarm celebrity” who trawls the upper echelons of New York, seeking men to spend the summer with (Bushnell 2001, 3). Now in her thirties, she struggles to maintain the persona of the “It girl”: “Something happens when you get into your thirties. People catch on to your shit. Especially men. It’s important to look like you’re doing something, even if you’re not” (35). Janey objects to the assumptions that frame beautiful women, yet her beauty ultimately redeems her. She lands a lucrative modeling contract and finds a way of telling her story. In a commercial she tells the camera: “‘I don’t know where I’m going . . . But I know I’m going somewhere’” (94), a line that resonates with female viewers. In the second story Bushnell lifts the veil from the world of the “Smug Marrieds” who torment singletons such as Fielding’s Bridget Jones. Having “hit all her landmarks

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in style” by the age of 34, Winnie wakes up every morning feeling depressed (109). She berates herself for investing in the myth that propels women towards marriage: “What was all that crap about men that she grew up with? That one day, one of these (pitiful) specimens was going to fall in love with her . . . and make her whole” (Bushnell 2001, 155). However, men provide short-term answers for Bushnell’s blondes. An affair with a movie star revitalizes Winnie. The longest and darkest story in Four Blondes concerns Cecelia Luxenstein, a society princess suffocating under the pressure of living the dream. Like Winnie and Janey, she is trying to calculate her next move but, having achieved the life that women are supposed to covet, she is obliged to disguise her misery: “I’m the one who’s miserable, but you can’t tell people that, can you? Especially if you’re a woman. Because marriage is supposed to make you happy, not make you feel like a rat trapped in a very glamorous cage with twenty-thousand-dollar silk draperies” (Bushnell 2001, 191). For Cecelia, as for Janey and Winnie, the thirties usher in uncertainty and dread. She mourns the loss of the vitality that characterized her twenties: “I was all instinct then. Raw, aggressive instinct, and I lived my life like an alien thing was driving me. But now that thing is gone” (208). Four Blondes concludes with “Single Process,” a story that revisits the premise of Sex and the City. The journalist narrator travels to London to discover what men and women really want. When she encounters what appears to be the perfect family, the wife shatters her illusions, revealing her “black fantasy” in which her husband dies and she is “still young” and “free” (Bushnell 2001, 305). Reflecting on the wife’s confession, the narrator acknowledges her investment in the Cinderella story: “I wanted the big, great, inspiring story about an unmarried career woman who goes to London . . . and meets the man of her dreams and marries him. She gets the big ring and the big house and the adorable children, and she lives happily ever after” (306). The journalist’s wish becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In true chick lit style, Bushnell’s heroine meets a promising man on the way back to New York. Bushnell refers to Trading Up as “technically my first novel” (“Writer’s Craft,” 2003). In this more unified narrative, Janey Wilcox takes center stage as a MAW, a twenty-first–century acronym that stands for “Model/Actress/Whatever.” She hovers precariously on the fringes of the entertainment industry, “convinced that she has great reserves of untapped talents” (Bushnell 2004, 7). Trading Up delivers Bushnell’s most ruthless dissection of New York society. The narrator constantly reminds us of the city’s hidden agenda: “The surface of New York’s social interactions was as smooth and shiny as a sheet of ice, but underneath were water moccasins and snapping turtles” (Bushnell 2004, 37). The hypocrisy of urban discourses is epitomized by the city’s most powerful media conglomerate Splatch Verner: “On the surface, ‘the company’ appeared to take care of its employers . . . it was politically correct, spouting its commitment to multiculturalism . . . but below the surface it was business as usual, run by men who tacitly agreed that their work was the closest thing to going to war without going to war” (74). Gender boundaries remain fixed in Bushnell’s twenty-first–century New York. An old lover’s insinuations serve as a “niggling reminder” to Janey of “everything that was wrong with New York: A man could sleep with as many women as he liked, but when it came to sex, there were still quite a few people in society who clung to the old-fashioned notion that a woman shouldn’t have too many partners” (Bushnell 2004, 14). Janey spends much of the novel trying to mask her sexual history. When Bushnell takes a lengthy detour

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into her heroine’s past, we learn why: Janey once worked as a sex slave on a rich man’s yacht. In Trading Up, sex is treated repeatedly as a form of currency or consumption. Comstock Dibble expresses sexual aggression by demanding payment for a screenplay that Janey never completed for him. Janey’s sister Patty views the “‘traditional marriage’” as “a woman’s obviously cynical exchange of sex, housework and childraising for a roof over her head” (Bushnell 2004, 135); a man at a party identifies the fantasy of “the girl in the ad” as “the driving force behind the consumer-oriented male” (256). Bushnell engages explicitly with Wharton’s narratives in this novel. Janey proposes a cinematic adaptation of Custom of the Country, clearly perceiving affinities between Undine Spragg’s strategies and her own. She meets Selden Rose, a successful movie producer, who pursues her as a candidate for his second wife. As Knights observes, Rose casts himself as the heroine’s rescuer, thereby emulating his namesake, Lawrence Selden in Wharton’s The House of Mirth: “He had fervently believed that if he could get her away from this world, the real Janey Wilcox would blossom” (Bushnell, 91). Bushnell’s narrative commentary exposes his romantic spin as the replication of a hackneyed narrative: “Many of his counterparts . . . had recently taken second wives, trading in their first wives . . . for more exciting women who were ten or fifteen years younger” (Bushnell 2004, 74–75). Marriage to Selden does little to quell Janey’s ambition. By the end of the novel, details of her transaction with Dibble emerge and the media brand her a “Model?/Actress?/Whore?” When Selden is issued an ultimatum by his boss—his job or his wife—he fulfills his role as rescuer and chooses Janey. The city is less forgiving. Janey receives an invitation to the post-Oscar party and leaves Selden. She is unaware that by accepting the invitation she is participating in one of the “in-jokes” of show business; every year the hosts invite the “Bimbo of the Year.” Again Bushnell pondered several destinies for her heroine. The first draft of the novel left Janey “crazy on the plane” to Los Angeles (“Writer’s Craft,” 2003). Bushnell’s publisher suggested that she reward Janey for her trials, and Bushnell agreed to give her the last laugh in true chick lit style; Janey meets Dibble on the plane and hands him her screenplay. As the novel ends, she is on the brink of Hollywood fame. By turning her story into gold, she forges her own revenge narrative, managing to “beat everyone and all these men at their own game” (“Writer’s Craft,” 2003). Bushnell has referred to her next novel, Lipstick Jungle, as “my Valley of the Dolls” (“Lipstick Jungle”). The narrative observes a familiar structure, following the lives of three highly successful New York women: Wendy Healy, a movie producer, who is married to a metrosexual househusband; Victory Ford, a fashion designer, who has yet to find a relationship that can equal her career; and Nico O’Neilly, a married magazine editor who has an affair with an underwear model to escape feelings of “desperate emptiness” (Bushnell 1996, 28). Lipstick Jungle registers how female narratives have expanded since the era of Susann’s dolls. All three heroines are financially independent; Nico is the main breadwinner, and Wendy supports her husband. Like Susann, Bushnell deals with taboos affecting contemporary women. Wendy, who at times yearns to be “a single, self-actualized person on her own,” suffers physical abuse at the hands of her six-year-old son (Bushnell 1996, 107). Victory reflects on the lies that society feeds women: “Still being single and in your forties was a state of being the world couldn’t really comprehend . . . But if you were wildly successful, you could make your own rules for how you wanted to

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live your life . . . Why did the world never tell women about this kind of happiness?” (367–368). Lipstick Jungle delivers Bushnell’s most positive outlook on women’s urban narratives so far. The novel presents New York as an empowering site for the single woman. Bushnell populates the urban landscape with feminine tropes that align the power of female sexuality with the glamour of the city: “As the helicopter swooped low, past the tall buildings that resembled a forest of lipsticks, Nico felt a frisson of something close to sexual excitement . . . New York City was . . . certainly one of the few places in the world where women like her could not only survive but rule” (Bushnell 1996, 34). Like Susann, Brown, and Jaffe, Bushnell dramatizes both sides of urban life, illuminating its hazards well as its possibilities. Her heroines marvel at the roles that the city offers them but raise objections about the stereotypes and prejudices that threaten to contain them. The greatest fear of the women is that they will be consumed by the city’s demands. With imagery redolent of Susann’s novel, they remind themselves of the cautionary tale of Sarah-Catherine, “the quintessential example of a particular kind of girl who came to New York, thrived for a while, and then was eaten alive” (Bushnell 1996, 112). In Valley of the Dolls, Susann represents the city as “an angry concrete animal” (1996, 1). In Lipstick Jungle, Bushnell ties up some of the narrative threads from Trading Up. Readers have surmised that she left Janey on the brink of stardom to set up a sequel. The next installment of Janey’s life has yet to materialize, but in Lipstick Jungle Bushnell pursues Selden Rose’s story. Shortly after divorcing Shane, Wendy marries Selden; he finally provides a happy ending for a woman who can match his talent but does not need to be rescued from herself. By leaving Shane and marrying Selden, Wendy subverts gender stereotypes: “Wendy was like one of those successful men who gets divorced and finds new happiness right away, while the woman is left steaming at home” (Bushnell 1996, 418). Victory finds a man who comes to terms with her success, and Nico recovers her enthusiasm for life and ends the affair. The novel ends with the women marveling at all they have achieved. Melissa Bank (1960–). Commentators on American chick lit often trace the genre back to Bank’s best-selling debut novel, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing. However, critics continue to debate Bank’s status as the godmother of American chick lit, some arguing that the label does not reflect the subtlety of her writing. The 2005 publication of her second novel, The Wonder Spot, did little to settle the debate. The conventions of chick lit characterize both novels. Jane Rosenal and Sophie Applebaum are single, slightly neurotic, and witty; they move from the suburbs of Philadelphia to the city where they take jobs in publishing and advertising. When Sophie arrives in New York, she is buoyed by the sense of possibility. As she walks through the city she “feel[s] like there were a thousand ways my life could go” (Bank 1999, 85). The reality is less exhilarating. Urban life for Bank’s heroines is fragmented and restless. Dingy apartments and unsuitable boyfriends come and go, and expectation gives way to estrangement. At one point, Sophie seems to articulate questions about the limitations of the generic chick lit heroine and her place in the world: “I realize that I don’t know anything about the history of New York or the history of the United States or the history of anywhere, modern or ancient; I have no grasp of geography; I don’t even really know what physics is. All this contributes to my overall lack of substance” (Bank 2005, 199). Marketed as a novel, The Girls’ Guide is a collection of linked stories covering 20 years of the heroine’s life. This more open, pliable form enables Bank to explore

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key moments that shape Jane’s identity rather than limiting herself to the single, enddetermined trajectory of much chick lit. In one story, “You Could Be Anyone,” Bank shifts tense and narrative perspective. The narrator shares Jane’s tone but does not identify herself explicitly. The shift to the present tense and detached second-person narration enables Jane to distance herself from her most harrowing narrative: breast cancer and the breakdown of her relationship. The self in this story remains strictly provisional. Through her form, Bank addresses but contains some of the more serious issues that chick lit shuns. The Wonder Spot is more unified in its consistent use of Sophie’s perspective, but each “chapter” could stand alone as a short story. The title story appeared in Speaking with the Angel, an anthology edited by Nick Hornby. In The Girls’ Guide, Bank also uses her flexible form to explore tangential narratives. The narrator of one story, “The Best Possible Light,” is Nina, Jane’s neighbor and a mother of three adults. Jane is referred to only once in the story, and Nina herself does not feature in Jane’s stories. Affinities between these two heroines are immediately apparent. Like Jane, Nina is painfully aware of who she is supposed to be. Through Nina, Bank enters the territory of “hen lit,” exploring identities that are projected upon mature women. On hearing that her son is to father his fiancée’s baby as well as his ex-wife’s, Nina narrates: “Then, everyone turns to me, as though I’m going to deliver some kind of pronouncement. I get these voices in my head of what The Mother is supposed to say—maybe something about how it will all work out” (Bank 1999, 121). The presence and influence of parents also distinguishes Bank’s fiction from much chick lit, in which surrogate families dominate. The most defining event in Jane’s young adulthood is the death of her father. Through this loss, Bank reveals how the patriarchal gaze shaped her heroine’s narrative: “Something changed then. I saw my life in scale: it was just my life. It was not momentous, and only now did I recognize that it had once seemed so to me; that was while my father was watching” (Bank 1999, 189). This epiphany opens up Jane’s destiny; her father’s mantra, “Don’t take the easy way out, Janie,” gradually loses currency in her narrative (192). Bank returns to this theme in The Wonder Spot. When Sophie loses her father, she takes her first risk, leaving her job to travel to Los Angeles with her boyfriend. Like Jane, she struggles to tune out the patriarchal voice: “It was the idea of my father that I couldn’t shake. I knew what he would have thought of Demetri— not that he would’ve said so. He would’ve said, What are you going to do in Los Angeles?” (Bank 2005, 166). Jane’s commentary provides much of the humor in The Girls’ Guide. Throughout the novel, Bank engages with and subverts the jargon of popular psychology, which is both a shaping discourse and object of parody in much chick lit. Bank prefaces each of her stories with sound-bites from self-help books, often overturning them in the stories themselves. Jane expresses suspicion toward these discourses: “I think, ‘Self-help? If I could help myself, I wouldn’t be here’” (Bank 1999, 240). Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider’s best-selling guide to snaring a husband, The Rules (1995) not only prefaces the title story but infiltrates the narrative itself; the authors become speaking subjects in Jane’s imagination, goading her on as she embarks on a new relationship. To her horror, Jane finds that the advice initially works, but she is so exhausted by adhering to the rules that she eventually gives up. Jane is irked by one rule in particular, “Don’t be funny,” and protests: “Funny is the best thing I am” (Banks 1999, 214; Bank’s emphasis, 255). Her objection to this rule is a rallyingcry for the witty heroines of chick lit.

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Both Sophie and Jane eventually find love in relationships that promise to be empowering. Despite Bank’s allegiance to the conventions of chick lit, critics disagree about her place on the continuum of popular women’s fiction. Some identify her as one of the innovators of the genre. Booklist’s Kristine Huntley describes The Girls’ Guide as a “standout in a genre that was finding its footing at the time.” Elisabeth Egan protests at the way that Bank is “unceremoniously lumped together with fellow literary It girl Helen Fielding” and notes that Jane Rosenal, the heroine of The Girls’ Guide, “share[s] none of the flibbertigibbet qualities so celebrated in her British counterpart.” Egan praises Bank for moving beyond the unitary plotline of the quest for Mr. Right: “It’s as though she suspects her audience is tired of all the Bridget Jones clones trooping through the best-seller list.” Reviews of The Wonder Spot were more restrained. Sittenfield reluctantly classifies the novel as standard chick lit, arguing that Bank’s subject matter is by no means “lightweight” but that she writes about it in a “lightweight way.” Catherine Shoard writes: “There really is no plot here other than the no-show of Mr. Right, and, for all its literary noodlings, The Wonder Spot is chick lit.” Joanne Briscoe of the Guardian states that “There is not much further [Bank] can go in this particular direction” but adds that “within the limits she sets herself, she achieves something close to perfection.” Jennifer Weiner (1970–). Jennifer Weiner began her writing career as a journalist commenting on, among other matters, Generation X culture. Her first novel, Good in Bed, became an international best seller. Weiner associates herself with chick lit and identifies tone as the genre’s essential characteristic: “I think the only must-have is the book’s voice—funny, woeful, smart, sarcastic, wounded but still strong.” She defines the chick lit heroine thusly: “A smart-yet-wounded female heroine, who’s young(ish), accomplished but insecure, dealing with (pick one) body image woes, misery, a dysfunctional family, or a tyrannical boss, trying to find her way in life” (“Roundtable,” 2004). Weiner’s fiction abides by these rules. Cannie Shapiro, the heroine of Good in Bed, fits this model and, like most chick lit heroines, dwells on her shortcomings. Like Ephron’s Rachel Samstat, she recognizes herself as an incarnation of a fictional stereotype: “So here I am. Twenty-eight years old, with 30 looming on the horizon. Drunk. Fat. Alone. Unloved. And, worst of all, a cliché, Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones put together” (Weiner 2002, 19). Like Weiner, Cannie is a journalist whose job is to be “the eyes and ears on 20-something Philadelphia” (Weiner 2002, 60). Her ex-boyfriend also writes a column, “Good in Bed,” in which he shares the trials of “Loving a Larger Woman” (Weiner 2002, 14). Wish fulfillment drives Weiner’s narratives. In particular, she has been praised by reviewers and readers for rewarding plus-size heroines with happy endings. In the course of Good in Bed, Cannie tries to lose weight, win her boyfriend back, and sell her screenplay: her own fairy tale about a film star who falls in love with a journalist. She achieves the one goal that is not informed by social pressures. She ends the novel happily married to a new man and financially independent after selling her screenplay. In Her Shoes (2004) explores women’s identities and choices by following the divergent narratives of two sisters, Maggie and Rose. Rose, Weiner’s signature heroine, is overweight—frumpy but smart. Maggie is beautiful but unable to hold down a job or establish any roots. After their mother’s death, their father marries a woman who is obsessed with controlling Rose’s weight. Weiner interweaves the sisters’ narratives with the story of an elderly woman, Ella, who has become estranged

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from her granddaughters, who turn out to be Rose and Maggie. The friction between the sisters reaches its height when Maggie sleeps with Rose’s boyfriend. The separation of the sisters prompts a re-examination of their lives. For Rose, this involves giving up her job as an attorney and becoming a dog-sitter. Maggie finds a letter from Ella and tracks down her grandmother. By the end of the novel, the sisters are reunited, and Rose marries the man whom readers have recognized as Mr. Right from the start. In her next two novels, Weiner ventures into the territory of chick lit subgenres. Little Earthquakes is “mommy lit”: it presents three female friends who support each other through the challenges of new motherhood. Becky, instantly recognizable as the sympathetic, overweight nurturer of the group, has an interfering motherin-law; the beautiful Ayinde discovers that her husband has been unfaithful; Lia is recovering from a miscarriage; Ephron’s influence on Weiner emerges in Little Earthquakes; Becky, a chef, shares her menu ideas with the reader, just as Rachel Samstat shares her recipes. Goodnight Nobody (2005) is mystery lit. When an apparently perfect wife and mother is found dead, neighbor Kate Klein turns detective. Kate has substituted the signature narrative of chick lit for the domestic narrative of hen lit. A former New York gossip columnist, she is now a Connecticut wife and mother. As the mystery unravels, Kate begins to seek satisfaction beyond these roles. When her ex-lover becomes her accomplice, her marriage begins to fall apart and Kate must re-evaluate her life. Although Weiner identifies herself as a writer of chick lit, she is eager to test the limits of the genre. On her blog, she expresses light-hearted relief that the cover of her collection of short stories, The Guy Not Taken (2006), bears “the minimum daily allowance of pink.” Rebecca Wells (1952–). Rebecca Wells’s Ya-Ya novels achieved best-seller status by word of mouth; sales of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood soared after a recommendation from Oprah’s Book Club. Although they are a staple of chick lit glossaries, the Ya-Ya novels straddle the boundary between the literary and the popular. Dan Webster describes Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood as “a literary icon of pop culture” and places Wells in the esteemed company of Anne Tyler and Fannie Flagg. Spanning 60 years in their entirety, the Ya-Ya novels appeal to a broad age range. So far, the series consists of three novels: Little Altars Everywhere (1992), Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and Ya-Yas in Bloom (2005). The Ya-Yas are four lifelong friends who grew up together in the South in the 1930s and 1940s. The novels trace the development of their friendship alongside the present-day relationship between Ya-Ya Vivi Walker and her daughter Sidda. As the series progresses, the Ya-Yas take up a more central position: Little Altars Everywhere is composed of the first-person narratives of the Walkers and their servants; Divine Secrets juxtaposes Sidda’s present with the Ya-Yas’ past; and Ya-Yas in Bloom transports us back to the genesis of the Ya-Ya sisterhood. Set primarily in Louisiana, Wells’s novels depart from some of the norms of chick lit. Moving through the stories of the past and present, Wells explores the political and religious ideologies that inform the heroines’ lives. Elizabeth Boyd identifies the southern belle narrative as a burgeoning “subgenre” of contemporary popular women’s fiction and attributes this resurgence to Wells’s Ya-Ya novels. Where some texts satirize southern manners, others endorse “the old feminine ways” as a means of regaining power (Boyd 2005, 160). Wells’s novels both celebrate and lightly

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satirize the figure of the southern belle while illuminating the conventions that contain her. Underpinning the Ya-Ya sisterhood is a strong oral tradition. The friends delight in recounting their pasts and retelling their stories. Fragments of narratives are released across the three novels, and stories overlap and expand as new details are revealed. Wells’s primary themes will be familiar to chick lit aficionados: female community, gender politics, and postmodern alienation. Like Valdes-Rodriguez, Wells champions female friendship as the only outlet for self-definition and expression: Four children—a husband—a house, dripping goddamn boiling water over the chicory coffee every morning of the world. Everything gets sucked out of me, every ounce of my high school goldenness, every single iota of my college education—gone. The only thing left is the Ya-Yas. (2000, 84)

Like most chick lit heroines, the Ya-Yas rely on humor as their most effective survival strategy: “Of all the secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood the most divine was humor” (Wells 2000, 422). The Sisterhood becomes a means of debunking gender roles and contesting romantic paradigms. Sidda recalls vividly how the husbands of the Ya-Yas registered the primacy of the Sisterhood: “Every year the Ya-Yas threw themselves a party to celebrate another anniversary of their friendship. And the husbands actually brought gifts! Sidda remembered more about Ya-Ya anniversaries than she did about Vivi and Shep’s” (Wells 1996, 90). Vivi Walker’s narrative addresses the preoccupations of hen lit and dramatizes the dilemma of the older woman: what does the heroine do when her children have left home? The present-day Vivi struggles to make sense of her children’s departure: “It was all so fast and furious—having them, raising them, watching them go. I thought when Baylor left: Alright now, this is when my life can begin! But it never did begin and I can’t tell you why” (Wells 2000, 289, Wells’s italics). In Little Altars Everywhere, Vivi’s narrative opens with a lament for her girl self. She hankers after the choices that are available to women in the 1990s: “Maybe if I’d been born later, I wouldn’t have gotten married. I’d have enjoyed what I wanted, then moved on . . . But I was born before you could do what you wanted” (Wells 2000, 280). Wells tempers cries for sexual liberation and independence with nostalgia for the communal sensibility of the rural South. Through Sidda’s narrative, she questions the value of urban narratives and queries the authenticity of the celebrated support networks that feature so heavily in chick lit. She asks whether communities such as the Ya-Ya sisterhood are sustainable in postmodern urban America. Divine Secrets opens with the voice of a 40-year-old Sidda who seems to have it all. She lives in Manhattan and has a highly successful career and a loving fiancé. Nevertheless, she wrestles with the malaise common to Bushnell’s heroine: “Sidda had the life she’d always dreamed of; she was a hot director, engaged to marry a man she adored. But all she wanted to do was lie in bed, eat Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, and hide from the alligators” (Wells 1996, 7). As a young girl, Sidda resists becoming a “full-fledged Junior Ya-Ya” (Wells 1996, 297); as an adult she yearns for the intimacy of the Sisterhood: “The four of their scents were in key. Their very bodies harmonized together. Surely this made it easier for them to forget things and forgive each other, not to have to constantly ‘work’ on this, the way we do now. This has never happened to me with a group of women” (Wells 1996, 62, Wells’s italics). Whelehan notes how Fielding engaged women readers who, like Bridget Jones, were “lamenting an

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excess of freedom and stumbling under the burden of choice and autonomy” (Whelehan 2005, 5). Sidda’s narrative reads like such a lament. She longs for the “improvisational laziness” of the Ya-Yas and seeks release from urban introspection: “She felt ashamed of her insularity. She longed for rambunctiousness, for the communal craziness in which she’d been raised. She felt sick at the thought of her constant questioning, her constant self-examination” (Wells 1996, 207). All of the Ya-Ya novels end on a note of celebration as connections between women are reaffirmed. By Ya-Yas in Bloom, Vivi is an active 68-year-old: “My life is so full. I might be a card-carrying member of AARP, but I am not retired. Or retiring, for that matter! Hah! I am busy, busy, busy. Workout at the club every single weekday. Bourrée with the Ya Yas. Cruises with Shep. And spending time in that garden of his” (Wells 2005, 2, Wells’s italics); Vivi asserts her identity in the conversational tone of chick lit: triumphant exclamations, italics, and repetition exemplify the discourse of the chick lit heroine. Through her voice, Wells opens up the chick lit narrative of reinvention and self-acceptance to women of all ages. Wells is currently working on a novel entitled Splitting Hairs about a new heroine, a Louisiana beautician. She plans to return to the Ya-Yas in her next novel. Bibliography Acosta, Marta. “Celebrity Dish and ‘Chica Lit’: Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez writes of music, stars, fashion, love affairs and la vida loca.” May 7 2006. . Akass, Kim, and Janet McCabe, eds. Reading Sex and the City. New York: Macmillan, 2004. “Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez: The Godmother of Chica Lit.” Aug. 13 2005. . “An American Girl in Paris—Part Deux.” Sex and the City. DVD. Directed by Tim Van Patten. HBO: 2004. “Anchors Away.” Sex and the City. VHS. Directed by Charles McDougall. HBO: 2003. Bank, Melissa. The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing. New York: Penguin, 1999. ———. The Wonder Spot. London: Viking-Penguin, 2005. “Beryl Bainbridge denounces chick-lit as froth.” Aug. 23 2001. . Boyd, Elizabeth B. “Ya Yas, Grits, and Sweet Potato Queens: Contemporary Southern Belles and the Prescriptions that Guide Them.” In Chick Lit: The New Women’s Fiction. Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, eds. New York: Routledge, 2005, 159–172. Briscoe, Joanne. “Carrot Pennies and Cashmere Twinsets.” July 2 2005. . Brown, Helen Gurley. Before There Was Sex and the City There was Sex and the Single Girl. New York: Barricade Books, 2003. ———. Sex and the Single Girl. New York: Random House, 1962. Burchill, Julie. “Valley of the Dolls.” In Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann. London: Virago, Sykes, Plum, 2005, ix–xii. Bushnell, Candace. “Candace Bushnell on the Writer’s Craft.” 2003. Interview by Bill Thompson. . ———. Four Blondes. London: Abacus, 2001. ———. “Jungle Fever: Candace Bushnell’s Women Grow Up.” Interview by Alex Richmond. Sept 21–28 2000. . ———. Lipstick Jungle. London: Abacus, 2005. ———. Sex and the City. London: Abacus, 1996. ———. Sex and the City. London: Abacus, 2004. ———. Trading Up. London: Abacus, 2004. “Chick Lit Author Roundtable.” 2004. .

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CHICK LIT “Chick Lit Books: Hip, Smart Fiction for Women.” 2008. . D’Erasmo, Stacey. Review of Sex and the City by Bushnell. New York Times Magazine. qtd. in Howard, Gerald. Salon. Sept. 28 1999. <www.salon.com/books/feature>. Desperate Housewives. Created by Marc Cherry. ABC 2004. Egan, Elisabeth. “Melissa Bank Scores with No. 2.” Review of The Wonder Spot by Bank. May 29 2005. . Ephron, Nora. Heartburn. New York: Knopf, 1983. Ferriss, Suzanne, and Mallory Young. Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2005. Fielding, Helen. Bridget Jones’s Diary: A Novel. London: Pan-Macmillan, 1997. ———. Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination. London: Picador, 2003. Goldblatt, Mark. “The Devil and the Gray Lady.” Review of The Devil Wears Prada by Weisberger. June 10 2003. . Guerrero, Lisa A. “‘Sistahs Are Doin’ It for Themselves’: Chick Lit in Black and White.” In Chick Lit: The New Women’s Fiction by Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young. New York: Routledge, 2005, 87–101. Harzewski, Stephanie. “Tradition and Displacement in the New Novel of Manners.” In Chick Lit: The New Women’s Fiction by Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young. New York: Routledge, 2005, 29–46. Hattenstone, Simon. “All About Sex.” Review of Four Blondes by Bushnell. Feb. 5 2001. . Heffernan, Virginia. “Cosmopolitan Girl.” Review of Trading Up by Bushnell. July 13 2003. . Howard, Gerald. “How Dawn Powell Can Save Your Life.” Salon. Sept. 28 1999. <www.salon.com/books/feature>. Huntley, Kristine. Review of The Wonder Spot by Bank. March 15 2005. . Jaffe, Rona. “Foreword.” In The Best of Everything New York: Penguin, 2005, vii–ix. ———. The Best of Everything. New York: Penguin, 2005. “Jaffe’s ‘Best of Everything’ Stands the Test of Time.” Interview by Renée Montagne. Morning Edition 27 July 2005. Kakutani, Michiko. “Mary McCarthy, 77, Is Dead; Novelist, Memoirist and Critic.” Oct. 26 1989. . Knights, Pamela. “‘Hypertexts’ and the City: The House of Mirth at the Millennium.” In Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Janet Beer, Pamela Knights, and Elizabeth Nolan, eds. New York: Taylor and Francis, 2007, 127–142. Krause, Nicola, and Emma McLaughlin. The Nanny Diaries. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2002. Mabry, A. Rochelle. “About a Girl: Female Subjectivity and Sexuality in Contemporary ‘Chick’ Culture.” In Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction by Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young. New York: Routledge, 191–206. Mazza, Cris. “Who’s Laughing Now? A Short History of Chick Lit and the Perversion of a Genre.” In Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction by Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young. New York: Routledge, 17–28. ———. Review of The Group by McCarthy. . Mazza, Cris, and Jeffrey DeShell, eds. Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction. New York: Fiction Collective, 2000. McCarthy, Mary. The Group. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966. McMillan, Terry. Waiting to Exhale. New York: Pocket Books, 1993. Mendelsohn, Daniel. “Nanny Cam.” March 4 2002. . Memmott, Carol. “Chick Lit, for Better or Worse, is Here to Stay.” June 20 2006. . Merck, Mandy. “Sexuality in the City.” In Reading Sex and the City. Kim Akass and Janet McCabe, eds. New York: Macmillan, 2004, 48–64.

CHICK LIT Schappell, Elissa. Use Me. New York: Perennial-Collins, 2000. “Sex and the City: A Farewell.” Directed by Rachel McDonald Salazar. HBO: 2004. Shalit, Wendy. “Sex, Sadness and the City.” Autumn 1999. . Shoard, Catherine. “Still Mad About the Boys.” Review of The Wonder Spot by Bank. Oct. 7 2005. . Sittenfield, Curtis. “Sophie’s Choices.” Review of The Wonder Spot by Bank. June 5 2005. . Skurnik, Lizzie. ‘“Good Girl Chick Lit.”’ July 7 2006. Solomons, Deborah. “Hazards of New Fortunes.” May 30 2004. . “Splat!” Sex and the City. DVD. Directed by Julian Farino. HBO: 2004. Susann, Jacqueline. Valley of the Dolls. London: Virago, 1966, 2003. Sykes, Plum. Bergdorf Blondes. London: Penguin, 2005. “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Sex and the City. VHS. Directed by Allen Coulter: HBO: 1998. “Teenage Picks.” The Guardian 3 Oct. 2006. http://books.guardian.co.uk/childrenslibrary. “The Baby Shower.” Sex and the City. VHS. Directed by Susan Seidelman. HBO: 1998. “The Chicken Dance.” Sex and the City. VHS. Directed by Victoria Hochberg. HBO, 1998. “The Man, the Myth, the Viagra.” Sex and the City. VHS. Directed by Victoria Hochberg. HBO, 1998. Valdes-Rodriguez, Alisa. The Dirty Girls’ Social Club. Arrow: London, 2004. Webster, Dan. “Rebecca Wells.” March 3 2003. . Weinberg, Anna. “She’s Come Undone.” Book Magazine July-Aug. 2003: 47–49. Weiner, Jennifer. Good in Bed. London: Simon and Schuster, 2002. ———. Goodnight Nobody. London: Simon and Schuster, 2005. ———. In her Shoes. London: Simon and Schuster, 2004. ———. Little Earthquakes. London: Simon and Schuster, 2004. Weiner, Jennifer. “Snarkspot.” 18 and 23 July 2006. ———. The Guy Not Taken. London: Simon and Schuster, 2006. Weisberger, Lauren. The Devil Wears Prada. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003. ———. Everyone Worth Knowing. New York: Downtown Press, 2006. Wells, Juliette. “Mothers of Chick Lit? Women Writers, Readers, and Literary History.” In Chick Lit: The New Women’s Fiction by Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young. New York: Routledge, 47–70. Wells, Rebecca. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. London: Pan-Macmillan, 1996. ———. Little Altars Everywhere. London: Macmillan, 2000. ———. Ya-Yas in Bloom. London: HarperCollins, 2005. Whelehan, Imelda. The Feminist Bestseller: From Sex and the Single Girl to Sex and the City. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005. “Where There’s Smoke.” Sex and the City. VHS. Directed by Michael Patrick King. HBO: 1998.

Further Reading Akass, Kim, and Janet McCabe, eds. Reading Sex and the City. New York: Macmillan, 2004; Benson, Heidi. “10 Years After ‘Bridget Jones,’ Chick Lit Grows Up, Gets Serious and Stops Wearing Pink.” http://www.sfgate.com; Dellecese, Cheryl. “Love, Life, and Literature.” Smith Alumnae Quarterly 2005 http://saqonline.smith.edu; Boyd, Elizabeth B. “Ya Yas, Grits, and Sweet Potato Queens: Contemporary Southern Belles and the Prescriptions That Guide Them.” In Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction by Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young. New York: Routledge; Whelehan, Imelda. The Feminist Bestseller: From Sex and the Single Girl to Sex and the City. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005.

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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Definition. In “Publishers and Publishing,” an essay in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, university professor Daniel Hade asserts that “the production of children’s books is an enterprise conducted by adults for children in order to make a profit” (Zipes 2006, 3, 298). Although the circulation of children’s books in the twenty-first century involves countless nonprofit entities such as schools, libraries, and literacy organizations, Hade’s cynicism-tinged statement does highlight the modern reality of children’s book publishing as a multi-billion-dollar business. Sales of hardcover and softcover books for children totaled over $4.7 billion in 2005, accounting for nearly 20 percent of total industry sales (and nearly 45 percent if one factors in textbooks) (AAP 2006, viii). The 2007 Children’s Writer’s and Illustrator’s Market, a 440-page directory, details the submission requirements of “more than 800 places to get published.” It has become customary for bookstores and libraries to have separate, sizable children’s departments, featuring junior-scale furnishings, playful decorations, a story-time series, and even child-configured computer terminals, all designed to attract children, their parents, and their teachers. Periodicals such as Publisher’s Weekly and The New York Times Book Review often produce several special issues per year to highlight new and forthcoming books for children. There are graduatelevel programs specializing in the study of children’s literature at The Ohio State University, Illinois State University, the University of Georgia, and other accredited institutions; and formal academic journals such as The Lion and the Unicorn circulate studies on themes such as “The First World War and Popular Culture” (2007) and “Asian American Children’s Literature” (2006). However, despite all this activity, defining what constitutes “children’s literature” is a problematic exercise, and one inevitably resistant to consensus—so much so that the very difficulty of defining the genre inhabits a recurring lament among critics and theorists specializing in the field (see, for instance, Sutton and Paravanno 2004 and Jones 2006). One factor is the considerable overlap between mature and juvenile audiences, particularly in the realms of science fiction, fantasies, and mysteries. For instance, the works of J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973) and J.K. Rowling (b. 1965), initially marketed to children, command such devotion among their adult fans that there are entire societies and conferences devoted to analyses of their novels. Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) and Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass (2001), categorized as children’s books, each were named Whitbread Book of the Year—an award that encompasses the entirety of British publishing for all ages. Similarly, the tales of authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930), Agatha Christie (1890–1976), Bram Stoker (1847–1912), and Orson Scott Card (b. 1951) have demonstrated sustained cross-generational appeal even though they were originally written for adults. The bibliographies of authors such as Gregory Maguire (b. 1954), Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929), Sharyn McCrumb (b. 1948), and Madeleine L’Engle (b. 1918) testify to their successes in creating works for audiences spanning a variety of ages, and the more enduring efforts of classic raconteurs such as Mark Twain (1835–1910) and Charles Dickens (1812–1870) are frequently cross-shelved in both the children’s and general inventories of libraries and bookshops. History. Individuals interested in learning about the history and scope of children’s literature in depth have an abundance of resources at their disposal. When it first appeared in 1953, A Critical History of Children’s Literature (Meigs et al.

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1969) was a landmark publication in the field, but it has since been superseded by more up-to-date surveys such as The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature: The Traditions in English (Zipes et al. 2005). The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature (Zipes 2006) devotes four volumes to significant authors, illustrators, characters, themes, and genres. The Children’s Literature Review: Excerpts from Reviews, Criticism, & Commentary on Books for Children and Young People (1976–present) is a hardcover reference journal, featuring an average of 20 selections per year. Something about the Author: Facts and Pictures About Authors and Illustrators of Books for Young People is another series published by the same company (Thomson Gale) that compiles biographical sketches of individuals who have written or illustrated at least one book-length work for children. Major periodicals specializing in reviews of children’s books include The Horn Book Magazine (founded 1924), Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books (founded 1947), and School Library Journal (founded 1954). All three publications supplement their printed issues with well-developed, frequently updated Web sites that offer archives, news, and other resources. All three magazines also sponsor annual prizes, of which the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award is the most prominent. The Horn Book also issues a comprehensive semi-annual guide that strives to assess almost all the hardcover children’s books newly published during the prior season (totaling over 2,000 titles per Guide). A number of reference works are marketed not only to institutions but to the general public as well, and have proven popular enough to merit revised and updated editions. These include The Essential Guide to Children’s Books and Their Creators (Silvey 2002, 2nd ed.,), The New York Times Parent’s Guide to the Best Books for Children (Lipson 2000, 3rd ed.), Valerie and Walter’s Best Books for Children (Lewis and Mayes 2004, 2nd ed.), Children Tell Stories (Hamilton and Weiss 2005, 2nd ed.), and The Read-Aloud Handbook (Trelease 2006, 6th ed.). Such books frequently contain themed chapters, indices, and hundreds of annotated recommendations, enabling individuals interested in a specific topic or genre to pursue it in depth and more efficiently than a keyword or subject header search (via print or online) might otherwise allow. The first edition of Kathleen Odean’s Great Books for Girls (1997) received exceptional reviews, leading to a revised edition in 2002 and three additional works in the series: Great Books for Boys (1998), Great Books about Things Kids Love (2002), and Great Books for Babies and Toddlers (2003). Other reference guides bear the names of retail organizations with a following among consumers keen on supporting independent booksellers. These include Book Sense Best Children’s Books (2005) and Under the Chinaberry Tree (Ruethling and Pitcher 2003). The use of the term booktalk, now commonplace among reading professionals and enthusiasts, gained significant traction after the publication of Aidan Chambers’s Booktalk (1985). Defined by education consultant Ellen A. Thompson as “an energetic discussion about a book or books, done with a whole class, small groups, or an individual child,” booktalks are short “pitches” designed to hook prospective readers into reading the books themselves (Thompson n.d.). Booktalks differ from traditional reports and reviews in their scope and intent because they are geared to be teasers rather than summaries or assessments of the books in question; library media specialist Nancy Keane likens the aim of a booktalk to that of a trailer for a movie (Keane n.d.). A leading proponent of this approach, Keane maintains an online database of over 5,000 “ready to use” booktalks and has published print

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compilations of them as well, including Booktalking across the Curriculum (2002). (Her “ready-to-use” thematic bibliographies, such as The Big Book of Children’s Reading Lists [2006], are also well regarded.) Other influential advocates of booktalking include Lucy Schall (Booktalks and More, 2003), Rosanne J. Blass (Booktalks, Bookwalks, and Read-Alouds, 2002), Ruth Cox Clark (Tantalizing Tidbits for Middle Schoolers, 2005), and Kathleen A. Baxter (co-writer of a series called Gotcha! with Marcia Agnes Kochel and Michael Dahl). Although some booktalks are generated merely as assigned projects—one online tip sheet styled itself as a guide to “Book Talks: You Can’t Live With Them and You Can’t Pass Without Them”—their ability to foster interest in deserving books has proved effective, such that many authors, institutions, and publishers now incorporate them into publicity campaigns as a matter of course (Coiro 2000; Young 2003). In addition to in-person presentations, enterprising educators have also utilized digital technology, including podcasts and Web videos to engage students in the production and dissemination of booktalks. Trends and Themes Categorizing Children’s Books. Subcategories commonly employed to describe children’s books defy easy standardization. For instance, a library or retailer may elect to organize the books in its collection based on age-related reading levels, labeling each item as “preschool” (approximately ages 0–4), “beginner” or “easy” (approximately ages 4–8), “intermediate” or “middle” (approximately ages 8–12), and young adult (approximately ages 12–18). To optimize the use of limited space, books sorted into the first two categories may be combined into a larger section or redivided based on the books’ physical formats (for instance, creating one section for picture books and a separate one for the slender paperbacks known as “chapter books”). Another age-based scheme is the one used by the Borders bookstore chain, which defines the stages as “read to me” (all ages), “baby” (0–4 years), “read together” (3–6 years), “learn to read” (3–7 years), “read to myself” (7–9 years), “independent reader” (8–12 years), and “young adult” (13 years and older). Grade-based rubrics for catalogs, reviews, and reading lists are also popular. Bookmuse.com divides its recommendations into “grades K–2,” “grades 3–5,” “grades 6–8,” and “young adult” (and its themed categories include a section for “reluctant readers”). The children’s literature journal The Horn Book uses the terms “preschool,” “primary,” “intermediate,” and “high school,” coding some books to more than one level. The Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), compiles annual “Children’s Notable Lists” in which the categories “loosely” correspond to the following groups: Younger readers—preschool–grade 2 (age 7), including easy-to-read books Middle readers—Grades 3–5, ages 8–10 Older readers—Grades 6–8, ages 11–14 All ages—Has appeal and interest for children in all of the above age ranges (ALSC 2007)

The Children’s Book Council guidelines for “Choosing a Children’s Book” are organized in the following sequence: “Babies and Toddlers,” “Nursery School and Kindergarten,” “Early School Years (Ages 5–8),” and “Older Children (Ages 9–12 and older)” (CBC 2006).

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The placement of a book into a specific category may be dictated not only by the reading ability of its intended readers, but also by its subject matter, particularly in relation to the perceived maturity (or lack thereof) of the age group in question. This sometimes becomes a matter of debate, formal complaints, and even lawsuits when adults seek to protect children from topics or narratives they consider too difficult or out-of-bounds. In recent years, books frequently condemned for “being unsuited to age group” have included It’s Perfectly Normal (Harris and Emberley 1994); And Tango Makes Three (Richardson and Parnell 2005); What My Mother Doesn’t Know (Sones 2001); and Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants series (1997–present). The ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom tallied over 1,750 formal complaints in this category between 1990 and 2005, and estimates that the actual number of incidents probably totaled four or five times that figure (ALA 2006). Similarly, book retailers reportedly field comments such as “I have a fifth grader who reads at an eighth-grade level, but I don’t want him/her to be exposed to ‘young adult content’” on a regular basis (Powells 2007), and some stores display “mature content” cautions on the shelves intended for older children. In short, some adults view the age or grade classification of a book as much a warning as a recommendation. Although they may not necessarily object to the book’s availability to the general public, they may protest its inclusion in a school’s library or on a classroom syllabus, particularly if they consider the topic sensitive enough to require direct parental supervision (such as a child’s introduction to sexual education). That said, children’s books are often targeted by individuals who feel certain topics, styles, or attitudes are wholly inappropriate for the genre, or indeed for any book in current circulation. Would-be censors may be politically, culturally, and religiously conservative or liberal: some books have drawn fire for “offensive language” and “anti-family content” and others for “racism,” “sexism,” “insensitivity,” and “anti-ethnic” content (ALA 2006). At this writing, the most frequently challenged books during the first decade of the twenty-first century include Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997–2007), Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), Judy Blume’s Forever (1975), Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War (1974), Chris Crutcher’s Whale Talk (2001), Jane Leslie Conly’s Crazy Lady (1993), Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Alice series (1985–present), John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937), Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories series (1981–1991), and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) (ALA 2006). In addition to the reasons cited above, children’s books have also been deemed objectionable due to their perceived mishandling of sexuality, violence, or religion. (Attempts to ban the Harry Potter novels have often focused on the books’ setting at a boarding school for wizards; some adults consider Rowling’s world a glorification of witchcraft to an unacceptable degree.) Many of the above-mentioned books are over a quartercentury old, and some of them were best sellers and award nominees as well (for example, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban captured Stoker and Whitbread awards, and Crazy Lady was a Newbery Honor Book) . In spite of repeated efforts to remove them, many of these books have attained the status of literary classics, well regarded not only among professional educators but by the public at large. Since 1981, a coalition of prominent book-related associations (including the ALA, the American Booksellers Association, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the Association of American Publishers) have co-sponsored an annual “Banned Books Week” in hopes of increasing general awareness of (and, by extension, resistance to) campaigns to restrict access to books tagged as controversial.

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A positive aspect of age- and grade-based recommendations is their function as benchmarks for individuals working with children, provided they are regarded as prescriptive rather than restrictive. Given the diversity of children’s interests and abilities within any specific age- or grade-based range, there are invariably both “reluctant readers” and “gifted” students for whom the average will respectively prove to be either overly ambitious or insufficiently engaging. However, given the staggering number of children’s books in print (as well as many out-of-catalog titles still in active circulation via libraries and secondhand vendors), the task of matching a child to the books most appropriate to his or her abilities, interests, and needs has perhaps never been so daunting or overwhelming, and the recommendations in guidebooks such as E.D. Hirsch Jr.’s Core Knowledge series (What Your First Grader Needs to Know; What Your Second Grader Needs to Know, etc. [revised editions 1998]) at least provide a starting point for parents and tutors seeking a frame of reference. This chapter is intended to serve as an introduction to children’s literature popular in recent years and will focus primarily on works created for readers under 13, as well as the plethora of resources available to individuals interested in the genre. There is a separate entry in this encyclopedia delineating current trends in Young Adult Literature, as well as surveys of contemporary Fantasy Literature, Graphic Novels, Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, and other genres with strong followings among both juvenile and adult readers. This chapter will profile mainly authors and illustrators from the United States, but it should be remembered and recognized that there are many creators of children’s books from other countries—such as Britain’s Pauline Baynes (b. 1922), Eva Ibbotson (b. 1925), Michael Morpurgo (b. 1943), Jacqueline Wilson (b. 1945), David Almond (b. 1951), Debi Gliori (b. 1959), and Christian Birmingham (b. 1970), to name but a few—who have enjoyed critical and commercial success in North America as well as on their native continents. Another caveat is that this entry can introduce only a few of the individuals and works currently prominent in children’s literature, no matter what criteria one ultimately uses to define it; because the boundaries of the genre are themselves blurry and subject to constant reassessment, virtually any survey of its leading practitioners is likely to encounter dissenting opinions about which authors and illustrators merit such attention. Contexts and Issues. Although reading stories aloud to children has existed as an informal parenting strategy for generations, it was not widely endorsed as a teaching method until the final decades of the twentieth century, and at times it has even been disparaged as a poor use of classroom time. The shift toward viewing regular reading aloud as an essential component of raising and educating children began to gather momentum in the early 1980s, with journalist Jim Trelease at the vanguard. As an elementary school volunteer, Trelease had noticed a correlation between children whose teachers read aloud to them and children who enjoyed reading on their own, as well as the enthusiastic response of students to his booktalks. After consulting academic publications on the subject, Trelease concluded that there was both a need to publicize this correlation to the general public and, at the time, a need to remedy the dearth of guides to suitable books (Trelease 2006, xxi). First published in 1979, and updated approximately every five years since then, Trelease’s The Read-Aloud Handbook has sold over two million copies and is now considered a classic reference for parents and educators. Since its initial publication, a number of read-aloud programs have been established, many of them devoted to

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recruiting community volunteers to read to schoolchildren and supplying free books. One such program, BookPALS (Performing Artists for Literacy in Schools), also sponsors “Storyline Online” and “Storyline Phone Lines,” through which it offers video and audio recordings of professional actors reading picture books (www.bookpals.net). Another initiative, Reach Out and Read, was founded in 1989 and encourages pediatricians to act as read-aloud advocates. It distributes over 4.6 million books a year through its 3,200-plus programs (www.reachoutandread.com). Corporations, such as Motheread, address “child development and family empowerment issues” by offering classes on both storytelling and selfesteem, not only among traditional families but among those with special challenges such as that of a parent in prison (www.motheread.org). Another prominent read-aloud advocate is Esmé Raji Codell, a “readiologist” also known as “Madame Esmé.” In addition to writing How to Get Your Child to Love Reading: For Ravenous and Reluctant Readers Alike (2003), Codell established a private children’s library in Chicago and maintains an influential Web site (www.planetesme.com). Former school librarian Judy Freeman now performs as a “children’s literature troubadour” and has published a series on Books Kids Will Sit Still For (1990–2006), as well as compiling detailed annual guides to the 100 children’s books she rates as the best of the previous year’s publications. Australian author Mem Fox, popular in the United States for picture books such as Where Is the Green Sheep? (2004), A Particular Cow (2006), and The Magic Hat (2002), is also well known for her passionate advocacy of reading aloud, both via her lectures and her book Reading Magic (2001). The increase of interest in read-aloud curricula in recent years has spawned additional resources for teachers (and, by extension, librarians and parents) in the form of curriculum guides such as Judy Bradbury’s Children’s Book Corner series. The Association of Booksellers for Children established the E.B. White Read Aloud Award in 2004. Its winners have included Deborah Wiles’s Each Little Bird that Sings (2005); Chris Van Dusen’s If I Built a Car (2005); Judy Sierra and Marc Brown’s Wild About Books (2004); Judy Schachner’s Skippyjon Jones (2003), which has since become a series; James Howe’s Houndsley and Catina (2006), also now a series; and Watty Key’s Alabama Moon (2006). Multimedia Promotions and Spin-Offs. The public television shows Reading Rainbow (premiered 1983) and Between the Lions (premiered 2000) have done much to enhance the visibility of good picture books both on the air and online, as have the Web sites of major literacy organizations such as Reading is Fundamental (www.rif.org). Some children’s publishers make a point of featuring interactive games, quizzes, contests, polls, forums, and other bonuses on their Web pages to attract repeat visits from grade-school readers, a tactic also employed by creators such as Beverly Cleary (b. 1916), Eric Carle (b. 1929), R.L. Stine (b. 1943), Jan Brett (b. 1949), and Kevin Henkes (b. 1960) on their official sites. Characters with such sites include Holly Hobbie’s eponymous heroine; Marc Brown’s Arthur; Stan, Jan, and Mike Berenstain’s Berenstain Bears; Eric Hill’s Spot; and Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit (ALA 2006a). The use of celebrity power to promote reading is evident in the poster campaigns of both the American Library Association and the Association of American Publishers. The ALA’s “READ” series has included images of heartthrobs Orlando Bloom (with Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings) and Ewan McGregor (with Beatrix Potter: The Complete Tales), as well as stars of children’s films such as Alan Rickman

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(with J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye) and Dakota Fanning (with E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web). The AAP’s “Get Caught Reading” campaign has included popular characters from Star Wars, Avenue Q, Batman, and Naruto, as well as singeractress Queen Latifah, baseball player Johnny Damon, and various members of the U.S. Congress. The premiere of a film adaptation also characteristically increases sales of a book. The release of a movie from a major studio may be coordinated with a reprinting of the book with a “tie-in” cover; if the subject matter or characters are sufficiently franchisable, there may also be action figures, calendars, production diaries, and other collectibles that help heighten the book’s profile. For instance, the tie-ins to the 2007 movie version of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix included a flip book, a deluxe coloring book, two poster books, a sticker book, and a set of slottogether “building cards” with which one could create a model of Hogwarts (Childrens Bookshelf 2007). The 2005 adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950) triggered 25 tie-in books and put a boxed edition of The Chronicles of Narnia onto the New York Times best-sellers list; a similar surge was seen in sales of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work from 2001 to 2003 when the Lord of the Rings films premiered (La Monica 2005; Mehegan 2005). Other successful film adaptations during the first decade of the twenty-first century include Shrek (2001; based on the 1990 picture book by William Steig); Bridge to Terabithia (2007; based on the 1997 novel by Katherine Paterson); The Night at the Museum (2006; based on the 1993 picture book by Milan Trenc); The Polar Express (2005; based on the 1985 picture book by Chris Van Allsburg); Nanny McPhee (2006; based on Christianna Brand’s Nurse Matilda novels from the 1960s); Holes (2003; based on the 1998 novel by Louis Sachar); Meet the Robinsons (2007; based on William Joyce’s A Day with Wilbur Robinson, 1990) and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004; based on the first three books in that series). With advances in computer-generated imagery (CGI) technology making special visual effects more feasible, live-action remakes of book-based animation classics were also a noticeable trend. These included Charlotte’s Web (2006; based on the 1953 novel by E.B. White); How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000; based on the 1957 picture book by Dr. Seuss); and The Cat in the Hat (2003; based on another 1957 picture book by Dr. Seuss) (Box Office Mojo 2007). Some classics are repeat favorites for radio, television, film, and theatrical adaptations; these include Mary O’Hara’s My Friend Flicka (1941), Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series (1932–1943), Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (1952), Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew series (1930–present), and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess (1905). “Junior novelizations” of blockbuster movies such as Pirates of the Caribbean are common, as are simplified versions of books for older children. For example, the “movie storybook” version of Charlotte’s Web (for ages five to seven) reached the New York Times best-seller list for picture books during the winter of 2007. Toys and clothing inspired by popular children’s books have become a staple both of upscale retail bookshops and mail-order catalogs. For instance, How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? (Yolen 2000) (and its more than half-dozen sequels) have been the inspiration for a pajama set and a plush toy as well as a rag book (one printed on fabric instead of paper, for children too young to handle standard picture books with care); the Ella the Elegant Elephant (D’Amico and D’Amico 2004)

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series has received similar treatment. Other picture books deemed both appealing and enduring enough to be marketed with toys based on their characters include Michael Bond’s Paddington Bear (1958); Don Freeman’s Corduroy, another bear (1968); Holly Hobbie’s Opal the pig (1997–present); David Shannon’s No, David!, a troublemaking toddler (1998); Dan Vaccarino’s Good Night, Mr. Night (1997); and Simms Taback’s There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly (1998). Bestsellers and classics are also frequently candidates for multiple formats, in which the book may be produced not only as a hardcover and a softcover, but abridged, re-illustrated, and sold in a format more accessible to younger readers. Laura Joffe Numeroff’s If You Give a Mouse a Cookie (1985) and its sequels have been packaged in many combinations, including book-and-doll, mini-book-andcassette-tape, and printed as a 17 ⫻ 15-inch “big book” (a format in which enlarged illustrations help the reader-performer overcome the visibility issues otherwise inherent in group story times). The Best Mouse Cookie (1999) is a board-book variation of the story (in which the “pages” are sturdy slabs of cardboard, the better to withstand the direct attention of infants and toddlers), and Mouse Cookies and More: A Treasury (2006) offers recipes, songs, and other activities to supplement the series. Other spin-offs from established classics include Mary Poppins in the Kitchen (Travers 1975 [2006]) and Green Eggs and Ham Cookbook (Brennan 2006). Another category of spin-off is the expansion, reformulation, and repackaging of a familiar series into multiple versions or threads. One type of expansion can be seen in the dozens of products related to A.A. Milne’s “Winnie the Pooh,” some bearing images drawn by the original illustrator, Ernest Shepard (1879–1976), whereas others are licensed derivations of the many Disney animated movies. Another type consists of series that are updated and reformulated to reflect changing cultural norms or to revive their appeal to contemporary audiences. The “Nancy Drew” and “Hardy Boys” mystery brands now consist of more than 100 volumes, some belonging to the original series established by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, and others to later generation “Files,” “Notebooks,” “Clue Crew” stories, graphic novels, and other permutations (Fisher 2007). The publishing history of Wilder’s Little House series offers examples of all the spin-off types mentioned above. The first eight books of the series (from Little House in the Big Woods to These Happy Golden Years) were published between 1932 and 1943 and were originally illustrated by Helen Sewell and Mildred Boyle. (A ninth manuscript, The First Four Years, was posthumously published in 1971.) In 1953, the series was reissued as a uniform set with illustrations by Garth Williams. This edition became established as the “classic” version of the series to the majority of its readers, many of whom were unreservedly vocal in expressing their dismay when the publisher revealed plans to increase interest in the series among contemporary children by replacing the Williams drawings with staged photographs (Marell-Mitchell 2006). Prior to the 1990s, individuals interested in reading beyond the original series were generally limited to a selection of Wilder’s travel writings, several biographies, and Barbara M. Walker’s The Little House Cookbook (1979), the last also illustrated by Williams. During the 1990s, with the blessing and cooperation of the Wilder literary estate, the expansion of the Little House franchise kicked into full gear. Four spin-off series were created, each centered on the childhood of a female relative of Laura Ingalls: the books on Wilder’s great-grandmother and grandmother began to appear in 1999 and were initially written by Melissa Wiley; the series on

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Rose Wilder Lane (Wilder’s daughter) was published between 1993 and 1999 with the byline of Roger Lea Macbride, Lane’s heir; and the series on Caroline Quiner Ingalls (Wilder’s mother) featured seven books (1996–2005), four by Maria D. Wilkes and three by Celia Wilkins. Additional volumes in the Martha and Charlotte series are anticipated, but the publisher’s decision to replace the existing books with significantly shorter versions prompted Wiley to resign from the project (Wiley 2007). During the height of the franchise’s popularity (from approximately 1997 to 2000), dozens of excerpts from the core novels were formatted anew as picture books and chapter books, rendering them accessible to children younger than Wilder’s original audience. Additional selections were combined to produce gift anthologies such as Little House Sisters (1997). During this period, activity books such as My Little House Sewing Book (1997) also proliferated. Although the pace of spin-off publications has slowed down, interest in the Little House series remains intense enough to inspire countless events, tours, clubs, and other educational efforts in Wilder’s honor, and the museums associated with sites she immortalized in her novels average over 20,000 visitors each year (Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society 2007). William Anderson and Leslie A. Kelly’s The Little House Guidebook (rev. ed. 2002) has provided both historical background and extensive sightseeing tips for would-be tourists. L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series (1908–1939) commands a large-scale following comparable to that of the Little House sequence, bringing over 130,000 pilgrims each year to the Green Gables homestead on Prince Edward Island, Canada. Venerated as a Canadian icon, the character of Anne is wildly popular in Japan as well as in the United States, where numerous film, television, and stage adaptations have met with commercial success, and the Anne of Green Gables Licensing Authority had granted almost a hundred licenses as of spring 2007; detailed plans to commemorate the 2008 centenary of the first book were already in full development by mid-2006, including the commissioning of an estate-authorized “prequel” and a gift book based on Montgomery’s scrapbooks (Gordon 2006; Hunter 2006). As a career writer, Montgomery was far more prolific than Wilder, and the Anne series continues the heroine’s story into middle age, with Anne’s role becoming increasingly peripheral as the narrative focus shifts to her children and their friends. Given these factors, and the entry of the earlier books into the public domain, the publication history of Anne of Green Gables (outside of the 100th-anniversary publications) more closely resembles that of another classic, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868): rather than generating spin-offs and sequels, publishers have generally elected either to reissue the writers’ lesser-known works or to produce new editions of the opening book in each series, competing with existing editions on the basis of price, illustrations, or supplemental material. For instance, the 2001 Aladdin edition of Anne of Green Gables includes a foreword by highly regarded novelist Katherine Paterson (b. 1932). Little Women remains another perennial favorite for dramatizations. Recent versions include a 2005 Broadway musical, which toured nationally for a year, and a critically acclaimed opera by Mark Adamo (b. 1962) that was broadcast on “Great Performances” in 2001 and has since been added to the repertory of over 20 companies (Schirmer 2007). The book’s continuing influence on American literature was also evident when the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction was awarded to Geraldine Brooks’s March, a novel featuring the father of Alcott’s “little women” as its central

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character. As with other writers of her stature, there is a society dedicated to preserving her Massachusetts home as a museum, and running educational programming based on events and activities depicted in Little Women, such as “Plumfield Fun Week” and “Meg’s Wedding” (Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association 2007). Literary Tourism. The popularity of a children’s character, book, or franchise can both inspire and perpetuate interest in locales associated with either the story or its production. During the first decade of the twentieth century, a number of new books offered assistance to travelers interested in planning their vacations with childhood favorites in mind. These included Storied City: A Children’s Book Walking-Tour Guide to New York City (Marcus 2003), Storybook Travels: From Eloise’s New York to Harry Potter’s London (Bates and La Tempa 2002), and Once Upon a Time in Great Britain (Wentz 2002). The interest in this subgenre was perhaps heralded by the 1999 republication of How the Heather Looks: A Joyous Journey to the British Sources of Children’s Books by legendary editor and reviewer Joan Bodger (1921–2002). Previously out of print for over 30 years, Bodger’s travelogue had attained the status of “an underground classic” among aficionados of children’s literature (Donnelly 2000) and reportedly enjoyed the status of “the book most often stolen by retiring children’s librarians” (Bodger 1999, 299). The reception of its return to print was mixed, however; although Bodger’s sunny narration was celebrated by some critics with encomiums such as “timeless” (Thomas 2000) and “smart” (Donnelly 2000) by some contemporary reviewers, others felt that the book exhibited an “absent-minded elitism” (Cohoon 2001) that modern readers might find “an exclusionary drag” (Wilson 2000). Travel accounts of a more recent vintage can be found on LiteraryTraveler.com, a well regarded Web site featuring professional essays on literature-inspired travel. The site regularly posts articles on pilgrimages inspired by popular children’s books (including Faith Ringgold’s Tar Beach and J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye) and the reports in the March 2007 children’s literature issue explored locations associated with iconic characters and authors such as William Blake (1757–1827), Ludwig Bemelmans (1898–1962), Roald Dahl (1916–1990), Astrid Lindgren (1907–2002), Robert McCloskey (1914–2003), and P(amela) L(yndon) Travers (1899–1996). Detailed online travelogues have become a common practice on personal Web sites as well; the affordability of digital photography and the flexibility of online storage permit online authors to illustrate their chronicles more lavishly than would generally be feasible in a printed equivalent, as well as to share their experiences with like-minded enthusiasts. For instance, Susan Cooper’s “The Dark Is Rising” sequence (1965–1977) has inspired a number of its devotees to seek out Wales for themselves (see Given 2002 and Green 2007 for examples). Mark Scott’s account of his visit, featuring photographs taken by another fan of the series, cites Jean Valencia’s description of her trip as the nudge he needed to finish assembling his own recollections (Scott n.d.; Valencia 1997). The American Girl collection of books, dolls, and accessories has become one of the most recognizable franchises in upscale children’s “edutainment,” so much so that a New York Times review recently began with the observation, “Anne of Green Gables [an off-Broadway musical adaptation] appears to be going for the American Girl demographic” (Midgette 2007). The demographic in question has made the “American Girl Place” entertainment complexes in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles popular destinations for mother-daughter vacations. Billed as “More than just a store—it’s an experience!,” each Place consists of multiple

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shops (including a girl-centric bookstore), a theatre, and a cafe. Originally centered on heroines representing historical periods in America’s past, the brand has evolved to include contemporary characters (such as their “2007 Girl of the Year,” a 10-year-old service-dog trainer named Nicki. In tandem with Nicki’s story (Creel 2007), the company released a nonfiction treasury called Girls and Their Dogs (American Girl 2006). It has also attracted praise for its “Smart Girl’s Guides” (such as The Smart Girl’s Guide to Friendship Troubles (Criswell 2003), written by a certified social worker) and other advice tomes such as The Big Book of Help (Holyoke 2004). Reception. In their introduction to a Horn Book issue on “the line between books for children and books for adults,” the magazine’s editors quoted John Rowe Townsend’s 1971 declaration that “the only practical definition of a children’s book today—absurd as it sounds—is ‘a book which appears on the children’s list of a publisher’” (Sutton and Paravanno 2004). Although this is indeed an absurd line to draw, it underscores the inherent inconclusiveness of attempts to confine the genre to any one set of age- or topic-delimited boundaries. In discussing the books that children fix upon as their favorites, critic Selma G. Lanes observed that “the meeting of a book and a child’s individual need is a fragile and fortuitous happening” that may seem random or peculiar, although adults can foster suitable connections by ensuring the child’s access to a wide variety of books (1972, 201–202). Because adults handle the bulk of children’s literature purchases—be it for their dependents or for themselves—the popularity and shelf-life of such books is ultimately determined as much by their ability to capture and retain the attention of mature as well as juvenile readers. When asked about controversy and contentiousness in children’s literature, historian Leonard S. Marcus mused about how the events of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire “seemed to comment on some of the things that were happening in the world” during the period he was reading it aloud to his son, which coincided with the horrors of September 11, 2001. Marcus concluded that, although such connections are seldom specifically anticipated or intended, “children’s books have a way of resonating with real experience in unexpected ways. And the children’s books we remember make sense in precisely that way” (Serlin and Selznick 2002). Selected Authors The Harry Potter Phenomenon. When the seventh and final book of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series became available for pre-order, it captured the top spot on several online retailers’ best-seller lists within hours and remained there for weeks. The last four books in the series each broke records for first printings, with a run of 12 million copies set for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007). The opening volume, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997; U.S. title Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone), appears to be established as a classic, with approximately 0.5 million copies in annual sales a decade after its initial publication (Rich and Bosman 2007), as well as over 60 authorized editions in translation. The movie versions of the books were produced and marketed with the author’s active cooperation and have been box-office blockbusters as well (Pandya 2007). The popularity of Rowling’s storytelling has been attributed to a number of elements, including her inventive sense of humor, her playful allusions to classical myths and fairy tales, her realistic portrayal of human relationships, and her ability

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to sustain a suspenseful, mystery-laden plot across the seven years depicted in the seven-book saga. Her cast of characters includes unreliable or unhelpful adults, devious and daring children, and a host of unpredictable magical creatures (some amusing, others malevolent). As reviewers such as Alison Lurie and Stephen King have observed, some readers are drawn to the series because they can readily identify with its orphan hero and his Cinderella-style emergence into the wizarding world: From the point of view of an imaginative child, the world is full of Muggles [the series’ term for non-wizards]: people who don’t understand you, make stupid rules, and want nothing to do with the unexpected or the unseen. Harry’s story also embodies the common childhood fantasy that the dreary adults and siblings you live with are not your real family; that you have more exciting parents, and are somehow special and gifted. (Lurie 2003, 117)

Other readers are enthralled by the books’ richly detailed settings, which range from the medieval castle housing Harry’s boarding school to the contemporary sports stadium conjured for the Quidditch World Cup. Others find themselves entranced by the complexity of the series’ heroes and villains: Rowling is unafraid to invest her protagonists and their allies with significant flaws and blind spots, which contribute to numerous misperceptions, misunderstandings, and miscalculations. These, in turn, help fuel the narrative drive of the series: as university professor Barbara Carman Garner stated, “The most pressing question in the Potter books is, ‘Who can be trusted?’” (Zipes 2006, 3: 369). With each volume in the series, the question becomes increasingly urgent—and its possible answers correspondingly difficult to discern, with the true loyalties of certain key characters the subject of passionate debate among their fans. The Harry Potter series is not without its faults or its detractors. For some readers, the laws governing the Harry Potter universe are inconsistent and poorly constructed. Some critics find Rowling’s “good” characters unlikable, arguing that they are no better than bullies and elitists, and others feel that the books endorse lying and other undesirable behaviors. Some readers relish the ethnic diversity of Rowling’s cast and the strong personalities of her female characters, but others regard her handling of these elements as superficial. And, as with any other popular author, some readers consider Rowling to be overrated or discover that her prose is simply not to their taste (in a poll of “books Brits are most likely to own but are unable to finish,” Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was the fiction runner-up [Jury 2007]). On the other hand, the books also have been praised by children’s literature specialists not only for their literary merit, but for their ability to engage “reluctant readers.” Jim Trelease calls Harry Potter “the best thing to happen to children’s books since the invention of the paperback” (250); in a chapter titled “Lessons from Oprah, Harry, and the Internet,” Trelease analyzes Rowling’s popularity both in comparison to other children’s best-sellers and in the context of other claims on children’s leisure time. He cites the length of books as a positive factor, asserting that “consuming that many words, students are getting prodigiously better at reading— many for the first time—and enjoying it. . . . Harry Potter has children willing to read books that are eight times longer than Goosebumps and twice as long as Heidi” (Trelease 2006, 142–143).

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Unfortunate Events and Fractured Fairy Tales. By the time the last book in A Series of Unfortunate Events appeared on October 13, 2006, Lemony Snicket’s saga of the much persecuted Baudelaire children had appeared on the weekly New York Times “Children’s Best-Sellers” list over a hundred times. In addition to the 13 novels that form the core of the series, there have also been authorized side entertainments such as a CD of songs (originally composed for the audiobook editions of the novels), several blank books, an Unauthorized Autobiography (2002), and The Beatrice Letters, a collection of simulated correspondence in the style of Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine (1991). Snicket is the pseudonym of Daniel Handler (b. 1970), who poses as the author’s representative during promotional events and interviews. Laden with literary allusions and melodramatic disclaimers, the series was acclaimed for its combination of shameless erudition, twisted humor, and outrageous plots. One reference guide describes the first book as “an Edward Gorey drawing come to life, or a parody of every dreadful Victorian orphan novel you’ve never read . . . one of the funniest books for children ever written” (Lewis and Mayes 2003, 336). As with many traditional fairy tales, the stories offer their readers the vicarious pleasure of identifying with the brave, talented, and wildly unlucky Baudelaire orphans as they contend with villainous adults and other menaces. At the same time, the arch narration and baroque plot contrivances help sustain an atmosphere of unreality that serves as a cushion, distancing readers from the protagonists’ travails. In his assessment of the full series, reviewer Henry Alford (b. 1962) admired Handler’s “interesting and offbeat” efforts to educate his readers: In between all the exotic ethnic food references and the gallows humor and the teaching of words like “denouement” and “vaporetto,” the books seem at times like a covert mission to turn their readers into slightly dark-hued sophisticates. To be sure, there’ll be a payoff for those gothically inclined young readers who, as adults, see the sick joke at the heart of characters named Klaus and Sunny. Or consider the series’ early lessons in postmodernism—the author loves to tell us to put the book we’re reading down, and in The Carnivorous Carnival, he repeatedly gives us the definition of déjà vu; in The Penultimate Peril, he tells us we don’t need to read the next three chapters in any particular order. The reader who receives such training is amply prepared for the rocky narrative landscapes of Borges and Eco. (2006)

In a sense, Handler’s droll manipulations can be considered heirs of the narrative strategies deployed in The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales (1992), a picture book that cemented the reputations of writer Jon Scieszka (b. 1954) and illustrator Lane Smith (b. 1959) as masters of satirical, multilayered storytelling. The team had already caused a sensation with their first collaboration, The True Story of the Three Little Pigs (1989), which presented its version of events from the perspective of an “Alexander T. Wolf” protesting his innocence. For The Stinky Cheese Man, Scieszka, Smith, and designer Molly Leach combined their talents to produce a bold, attitude-packed book in which their text, art, and layout choices all amplify the stories’ seemingly freewheeling plots and characterizations. In an essay examining the power of good design, Scieszka observed that “some people have described our books as ‘wacky’ and ‘zany’ and ‘anything goes.’ . . . In order to create the humor and illusion of wacky/zany/anything goes, there has to be a reason for everything that goes” (Scieszka 1998).

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Thirteen years after the book’s publication, The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature asserted, “As an ‘advanced’ multireferential text, The Stinky Cheese Man has not (yet) been bettered. It assumes intertextual skills, its collage medium is deliberately ironic, and its characters try to break the bounds of the book” (Zipes et al. 2005, C32). Stinky Cheese Man’s runaway success (so to speak) has been credited with paving the way for other creators to pursue unconventional and experimental approaches to storytelling (Britton 2002), having proved that “dark,” “weird,” and “sophisticated” work for children can be commercially viable; Scieszka himself notes that The Three Pigs was “rejected everywhere” until an editor at Viking elected to gamble on it (Scieszka 2006). In addition to promoting a climate in which personas such as Lemony Snicket could flourish, Scieszka and Smith’s collaborations also raised the profile of the “fractured fairy-tale” genre. Lewis and Mayes observe that “now, a season doesn’t go by without an abundance of fairy-tale retellings that are fractured, skewed, or otherwise toyed with” and make a point of highlighting several dozen of their own favorites (225–226). David Wiesner’s version of The Three Pigs (2001) earned the Caldecott Medal for its virtuosic depictions of the pigs’ escape from the traditional storyline into several others (collecting a fiddling cat and a besieged dragon along the way), with the visual action merrily sliding from one style of picture-book illustration into the next. At one point, the pigs fold a “page” of the original story into a paper airplane, and they are later shown tilting and arranging the remaining pages to re-enter and conclude the story. A subcategory of the “fractured fairy-tale” genre consists of myths reinterpreted through a feminism-informed lens. For readers troubled by the passivity of traditional damsels in distress (or repelled outright by celebrations of womanly victimhood)— and also for readers who simply enjoy sassy parodies—these often-humorous variations offer alternate scenarios where princesses aren’t always yearning for rescue, much less automatically grateful to their would-be rescuers. Such re-imaginings include Falling for Rapunzel (Wilcox 2003), in which the heroine cheerfully misinterprets the prince’s increasingly frustrated commands for access to her tower; The Princess and the Pizza (Auch and Auch 2002), in which the impoverished heroine enters a cooking contest in order to win the hand of “Prince Drupert”; and Gerald Morris’s The Squire’s Tale series (1998–present), in which an assortment of young protagonists struggle to make sense of the disconnect they witness between the idealism of Arthurian chivalry and the less admirable behaviors of the knights and courtiers they encounter during their adventures. Although Morris’s straightforward prose is stylistically worlds removed from Lemony Snicket’s eccentric excesses, it could be argued that the two authors share an irony-tinged awareness of the distance and self-delusion that so often exists between cherished principles and actual practice—an awareness lurking beneath both Morris’s sly glimmers of humor and Snicket’s outlandish posturings, as well as Scieszka’s skewerings of “happy ever after” transformations. Morris’s compassionate but realistic acknowledgment of his heroes’ flaws echoes Snicket’s refusal to spare the Baudelaire children from uncomfortable and regrettable decisions. After one such error results in tragedy, Snicket sadly reflects, “It is very difficult to make one’s way in this world without being wicked at one point or another, when the world’s way is so wicked to begin with” (Handler 2005, 316). The moral ambiguity inherent in such a declaration is not far removed from the ancient, maddening complexities and unresolved conundrums that have driven other twenty-first-century authors to construct radically

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altered versions of familiar stories, to craft new narratives that liberate stock characters from unsatisfactory fates, or to challenge a story’s postulates by presenting its events from the perspective of an antagonist or a secondary character. Other Trends among Recent Best Sellers. The success of “Harry Potter” has been both blamed and credited for the plethora of new books in the 2000s featuring magic, dragons, and other fantastical elements, but humorous escapism has also long acted as a key ingredient in explicitly educational series such as Joanna Cole’s The Magic School Bus (1986–present) and Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House (1992–present). Both retailers and educators unabashedly use “If you like Harry Potter, you’ll like . . .” stratagems to interest children toward other fantasy sequences such as tales of “Septimus Heap” (2005–present, by Angie Sage) and “The Spiderwick Chronicles” (2003–present, by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black). The latter has also elicited comparisons to Lemony Snicket’s series in both design and tone, prompted by such devices as leaves artistically obscuring back-cover blurbs and pseudo-cautionary mottoes such as “Go away/close the book/put it down/do not look.” Another recurring element among top-selling titles is the perennial irresistibility of bunnies. They may appear as sentient toys, such as in The Remarkable Journey of Edward Tulane (DiCamillo 2006), or as anthropomorphic representations of children, such as in Not a Box (Portis 2007) and in dozens of titles by Rosemary Wells (b. 1943). Their popularity echoes that of enduring classics such as Margery Williams’s The Velveteen Rabbit (1922) and Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon (1947). A notable trend in intermediate-level literary fiction has been the popularity of books featuring a type of self-reliant, unconventional pre-teen girl—enough to attract a measure of backlash against the frequency of such characters (cf. Sutton 2007a). One reviewer admitted groaning upon realizing she had received “another book with a plucky, young, motherless heroine—if she gets a dog and names it after a supermarket, I’m out of here [an allusion to Kate DiCamillo’s Because of WinnDixie]” (Smith 2007). The current parade of feisty female orphans, however, including Maud Flynn in A Drowned Maiden’s Hair (Schlitz 2006) and Karen Cushman’s Rodzina (2003), appeal to readers eager for antidotes against portrayals of passive, prettiness-defined heroines—a contingent substantial enough to merit compilations such as The Anti Princess Reading List (Mommy Track’d 2007). In the beginning reader realm, series featuring imperfect yet likable leads such as Junie B. Jones (1992–present, by Barbara Park) and Judy Moody (2000–present, by Megan McDonald) have proved popular. Picture-book characters in the 2000s praised for their confidence and style include Olivia the pig (in the Ian Falconer series, 2000–present) and Fancy Nancy (2005–present, by Jane O’Connor and Robin Preiss Glasser), both of whom have been compared to Kay Thompson’s classic Eloise (1955). Another intriguing trend has been the attention given to novels in which the illustrations are integral to the narrative rather than merely decorative. These include Lynne Rae Perkins’s Criss Cross (2005), Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret: A Novel in Words and Pictures (2007), and Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006), the last a graphic novel shortlisted for several prizes traditionally granted to conventional chapter books. The success of these titles may well inspire more writer-artists to investigate this variation of storytelling.

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Awards. The Newbery and Caldecott Medals, administered by the American Library Association, are regarded as two of the top prizes in the field of children’s literature. The Newbery Medal program was initiated in 1921 by Frederic G. Melcher, a prominent bookseller and Publisher’s Weekly editor. During the years that followed, it became apparent that a second, separate award for picture books would be welcome; as a result, the Caldecott Medal was established in 1937. For each award, a winner and several runners-up are named; the runners-up are known as “honor” books, a designation used by several other children’s award programs as well. A title that wins the Newbery or Caldecott Medal is ensured a permanent listing in many reference books and library brochures. The prizes are well publicized and customarily increase both the immediate and long-term sales of the award winners. A number of schools, libraries, and retailers have adopted the practice of holding “Mock Newbery” and “Mock Caldecott” elections each winter, in which the participants read and vote upon books perceived as contenders for each award. Such exercises help stimulate discussion and sales of new titles since books are generally eligible only within their first year of publication. The official criteria of the awards mandate that they are to be granted only on the basis of excellence, rather than “for didactic intent or for popularity” (ALSC 2007). Although many authors on the winners and honors lists become established classroom and household favorites, others never catch hold among the general public, and still others fall out of favor (and subsequently lapse out of print) as fashions in storytelling and scholarship change. As with any major prize, the decisions of the Newbery and Caldecott award committees have not lacked critics. In 2007, the selection of Susan Patron’s The Higher Power of Lucky became front-page news on The New York Times (as well as the subject of an editorial in support of the book) after Publisher’s Weekly reported significant debate about the winner among children’s literature professionals (Bosman 2007; Maughan 2007a and 2007b). The controversy centered on the author’s use of the word “scrotum” and whether it rendered the book age-inappropriate for its intended audience. In the judgment of some librarians, the book was too problematic to add to their collections, whereas other participants in the debates criticized decisions against purchasing the title as tantamount to censorship. In discussing the contretemps, some longtime observers of the field noted that vocal dissent was to be expected with any awards process. Horn Book editor Roger Sutton commented, “In my going-on-30 years in this field I can’t think of a Newbery choice that wasn’t reviled and/or ridiculed by a significant number of librarians” (Sutton 2007b). Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, which received the 1964 Caldecott Medal, was pronounced to be too frightening for its intended audience in such venues as Ladies Home Journal by experts such as child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim (1903–1990) (March 1969; excerpted in CLR 1976). The strong reaction both for and against Sendak’s story has become legendary in the lore of children’s literature, and its status as a landmark picture book has been the subject of extended analyses (CLR 2002). Smoky Night, a story set during the 1992 Los Angeles race riots, won the 1995 Caldecott Medal; its author, Eve Bunting, recalled “a lot of disgruntled talk after the Caldecott. One of the judges said she got so much flack she had to take to her bed” (Bunting 2006). On the other side of the coin, questions regarding whether the award shortlists lack diversity are also raised on a regular basis (cf. Parravano and Adams 1996;

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Sutton 2007a). That said, the authors of Newbery winners since 2000 include an African American (Christopher Paul Curtis (1954–) and two Asian Americans (Linda Sue Park (1960–) and Cynthia Kadohata (1956–)), and recent Caldecott honors titles have included books about Harriet Tubman (Weatherford 2006), Rosa Parks (Giovanni 2005), and Martin Luther King Jr. (Rappaport 2002). Jacqueline Woodson was a Caldecott finalist for Coming On Home Soon (2004) and a Newbery finalist for Show Way (2005), both works inspired by African American history, as were Marilyn Nelson’s Carver (2001) and Russell Freedman’s The Voice that Challenged A Nation (2004). The ALA sponsors a number of other prizes, including the Belpré Medal (for Latino authors and illustrators) and the Coretta Scott King Award (for African American authors and illustrators). The Boston Globe-Horn Book (BG-HG) Awards, established in 1967, are also influential among children’s literature professionals. There is often overlap among the BG-HB finalists and those of the Newbery and Caldecott committees: The Hello, Goodbye Window (Juster 2005) was the 2006 Caldecott medalist and a BG-HB honors book; The Man Who Walked Between the Towers (Gerstein 2003) won both the Caldecott medal and the BG-HB picture-book prize; An American Plague (Murphy 2003) was a BG-HB winner in nonfiction and Newbery honors book. Illustrators appearing multiple times on major awards lists include David Wiesner (b. 1956), Chris Raschka (b. 1959), and Mo Willems (b. 1968); favorite authors among the committees include Susan Cooper (b. 1935), Sharon Creech (b. 1945), Marilyn Nelson (b. 1946), Cynthia Rylant (b. 1954), Lynne Rae Perkins (b. 1956), Kate DiCamillo (b. 1964), and M(atthew) T(obin) Anderson (b. 1968). Nonfiction. Although the awards programs generally highlight outstanding standalone volumes, nonfiction children’s books are often generated in series that are specifically “reinforced” or “library bound”—a colorful, durable, jacketless hardcover format that holds up well to repeat shelvings. There are series devoted to virtually every area of interest, including crafts, holidays, science, social studies, arts, animals, and sports. Enslow Publishers’ Fun Holiday Crafts Kids Can Do! series includes games and activities in honor of Earth Day and Kwanzaa as well as Christmas and Halloween. Scholastic’s second Cornerstones of Freedom series includes a profile of Air Force One, the U.S. commander-in-chief’s airplane, that offers anecdotes about individual presidents’ styles (such as the meals they enjoyed eating) as well as a historical and logistical overview of “the Flying White House” and photographs conveying how its occupants conduct business en route (January 2004). In history series such as Heinemann’s Picture the Past, there is a marked effort to convey details that will help the student visualize the reality of distant cultures; for instance, in Life in a Roman Fort (Shuster 2005) informs its readers that “sponges and sticks were used as toilet paper, and then washed and reused” (19) and features a recipe for “army porridge” (29). Series for older children such as Lerner’s Military Hardware in Action feature more advanced vocabulary and data, such as the beam, propulsion, and displacement details for assorted U.S. vessels in Mark Dartford’s Warships (2003). Collections developed in reaction to recent events include Scholastic’s Natural Disasters set, which covers emergency responses to hurricanes, tsunamis, and other calamities. Many of these nonfiction series are deliberately formulaic in tone and design, relying on well-chosen stock photographs, simple line illustrations, colored backgrounds, and frequent use of sidebars to maintain the reader’s interest. Such books

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often incorporate the use of boldface type to emphasize key terms to the student; there is also customarily a glossary in the back, as well as several books or Web sites listed for those interested in further reading, and sometimes additional appendices such as timelines or places to visit. Four notably well-designed series that stand out from the crowd are the Eyewitness guides produced by Dorling Kindersley, the biographies produced by National Geographic, and the Encyclopedia Prehistorica volumes produced by Candlewick. One of the more engaging series to appear in recent years has been Franklin Watts’s You Wouldn’t Want to Be . . . narratives, which have included You Wouldn’t Want to be a Pirate’s Prisoner! Horrible Things You’d Rather Not Know (2002), You Wouldn’t Want to Be a Civil War Soldier! A War You’d Rather Not Fight (2004), You Wouldn’t Want to Be at the Boston Tea Party! Wharf Water Tea You’d Rather Not Drink (2006), and the like. As their titles indicate, these books feature second-person storytelling in which the student is treated to playful but deromanticized perspectives of life in the specified role, with cartoon-style yet historically grounded depictions of the scenarios such individuals would have encountered. The You Wouldn’t Want to Be . . . volumes include the anecdotal sidebars and elementary glossaries of more traditional series, but in attitude, they reflect the trend in larger society of viewing history through a more realistic lens, even at the popular culture level (as witnessed in PBS-based reality television shows such as “Frontier House” and “Texas Ranch House”). Efforts to distinguish myth from actual practice can also be seen in books such as Piratepedia, where the writers note that there has only been one verifiable case of “walking the plank” (Niehaus and Hecker 2006, 122). Poetry. The design of poetry books for children has evolved into a lively and sophisticated art, one in which the use of multiple fonts and colors help accent the texts and concepts presented. The strategy of getting children interested in poetry by encouraging them to write their own is on display in engaging picture guidebooks such as A Kick in the Head (Janescko 2005) and Jennifer Fandel’s Understanding Poetry series, which examine a broad range of forms and techniques in tandem with hip, humorous illustrations. A Kick in the Head delineates the format of more esoteric forms (such as blues poems and pantoums) as well as those of more familiar poetic structures (such as haiku and sonnets), and represents a second collaboration by veteran anthologist Paul Janescko and popular illustrator Chris Raschka (the first being A Poke in the I, a collection of concrete poems). In Puns, Allusions, and Other Word Secrets, intermediate-level readers are asked to consider concepts such as “wrenched rhyme” and “dramatic monologues” in poems by John Ciardi, Audre Lorde, and others, as well as to participate in activities such as writing a poem about a single day from three different points of view (Fandel 2006, 44). Robin Hirsch’s FEG: Stupid (Ridiculous) Poems for Intelligent Children (2002) also revels in wordplay, comedy, and loopy footnotes; for the poem “But Not Now a Wonton Tub,” Hirsch comments, “This . . . may well be the lamest, most pathetic palindrome ever composed. Actually, the poem was written (or rather made up spontaneously) in the car to try and justify the pitiful palindrome that comes at the end. Surely, you can do better” (23). Among living practitioners, the most prominent representative of children’s poetry is currently Jack Prelutsky (b. 1960), who was designated Children’s Poet Laureate in September 2006 by the Poetry Foundation (itself founded in 2003 as a result of a $100 million donation to Poetry magazine). Other major poets and

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poetry editors for children active in the 2000s include Lee Bennett Hopkins, with anthologies such as Got Geography! (2006) and Oh, No! Where Are My Pants? and Other Disasters (2003); Douglas Florian, author of Handsprings (2006) and A Pig is Big (2000); Susan Katz, whose books include Looking for Jaguar (2005), A Revolutionary Field Trip (2004), and Mrs. Brown on Exhibit (2002); J. Patrick Lewis, with Please Bury Me in the Library (2005) and Once Upon a Tomb (2006), as well as Wing Nuts: Screwy Haiku, a collection co-written with Janeczko (2006); Georgia Heard, who selected the poems for This Place I Know (2002), an anthology created in response to September 11, 2001; and Janet S. Wong, whose collections include Twist (2007) and Knock on Wood (2003), as well as a creative writing book (You Have To Write, 2002) and assorted picture books. Among deceased poets, individuals whose works continue to captivate new generations of readers include Shel Silverstein (the 20th anniversary edition of A Light in the Attic appeared in 2001, and the 30th anniversary edition of Where the Sidewalk Ends in 2004), Dr. Seuss (Oh the Places You’ll Go! routinely returns to the New York Times best-seller list during graduation season), and Robert Louis Stevenson, whose Child’s Garden of Verses has been reprinted since 1885 in dozens of editions, of which the most popular include versions illustrated by Tasha Tudor (1981/1999) and Thomas Kinkade (1999). The Poetry for Young People picture-book series, initiated in the mid-1990s, continues to grow, adding annotated volumes on topics such as “Animal Poems” (Hollander 2004) and “The Seasons” (Serio 2005), as well as ones on individual poets such as Langston Hughes (2006) and William Blake (2007). Bibliography Association of American Publishers (AAP). 2005 Industry Statistics. New York: AAP, 2006. ALA (American Library Association). “Challenged and Banned Books.” 2006. http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/challengedbanned/challengedbanned.htm. ———. “Great Web Sites for Kids.” 2006a. http://www.ala.org/ala/alsc/greatwebsites/ greatwebsitesfavorite.htm. Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC). “ALA—Awards and Scholarships.” 2007. http://www.ala.org/ala/alsc/awardsscholarships/awardsscholarships.htm. Alford, Henry. “Children’s Books” [review of Lemony Snicket’s The End and The Beatrice Letters]. New York Times, Oct. 22 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/books/ review/Alford.t.html?_r=2&ref=review&oref=slogin&oref=slogin. American Girl. Girls and Their Dogs. Middleton, WI: Pleasant Company Publications, 2007. Anderson, William. The Little House Guidebook. Rev. ed. Photographs by Leslie A. Kelly. New York: Harper, 2002. Auch, Mary Jane, and Auch, Herm. The Princess and the Pizza. New York: Holiday House, 2002. Bates, Colleen Dunn, and Susan La Tempa. Storybook Travels: From Eloise’s New York to Harry Potter’s London, Visits to 30 of the Best-Loved Landmarks in Children’s Literature. New York: Three Rivers, 2002. Blake, William. Poetry for Young People: William Blake. John Maynard, ed. Illustrated by Alessandra Cimatoribus. New York: Sterling, 2007. Blass, Rosanne J. Booktalks, Bookwalks, and Read-Alouds: Promoting the Best New Children’s Literature Across the Elementary Currriculum. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2002. Bodger, Joan. How the Heather Looks: A Joyous Journey to the British Sources of Children’s Books. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1999 [Originally published 1965].

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Book Sense. Book Sense Best Children’s Books: 240 Favorites for All Ages Recommended by Independent Booksellers. New York: Newmarket, 2005. Bosman, Julie. “With One Word, Children’s Book Sets Off Uproar.” New York Times, 18 Feb. 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/books/18newb.html. Box Office Mojo. 2007. http://www.boxofficemojo.com. Bradbury, Judy. Children’s Book Corner: A READ-ALOUD Resource with Tips, Techniques, and Plans for Teachers, Librarians, and Parents (Grades 1 and 2). Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2004. Brennan, Georgeanne. Green Eggs and Ham Cookbook: Recipes Inspired by Dr. Seuss! New York: Random House, 2006. Britton, Jason. “A New Day for Design: Five Art Directors Discuss the Evolving Field of Children’s Book Design.” Publisher’s Weekly, 28 Oct. 2002: 28–32. Borders. Borders Monthly 10, 26 Dec.–29 Jan. 2007. Bunting, Eve. Interview by DownHomeBooks.com. May 2006. http://www.downhomebooks. com/bunting.htm. Children’s Book Council (CBC). “Choosing a Children’s Book.” 2006. http://www.cbcbooks. org/readinglists/choosing.html. Children’s Literature Review (CLR). “Maurice Sendak.” Children’s Literature Review 1 (1976): 166–173. ———. “Maurice Sendak.” Children’s Literature Review 74 (2002): 12–185. Codell, Esmé Raji. How to Get Your Child to Love Reading: For Ravenous and Reluctant Readers Alike. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 2003. Coiro, Julie. “Motiviating Middle and High School Readers with Booktalks.” Suite 101, Oct. 1, 2000. http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/reading/49394. Cohoon, Lorinda B. Review of Joan Bodger, How the Heather Looks: A Joyous Journey to the British Sources of Children’s Books. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. March 2001. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=11635985222013. Creel, Ann Howard. Nicki. Illustrated by Doron Ben-Ami. American Girls Today series. Middleton, WI: American Girl, 2007. Criswell, Patti Kelley. A Smart Girl’s Guide to Friendship Troubles: Dealing With Fights, Being Left Out and the Whole Popularity Thing. Illustrated by Angela Martini. American Girl Library series. Middleton, WI: American Girl, 2003. D’Amico, Carmela, and Steven D’Amico. Ella the Elegant Elephant. New York: Arthur A. Levine, 2004. Dartford, Mark. Warships. Military Hardware in Action series. Minneapolis, MN: Lerner, 2003. Donnelly, Daria. “Hey! Harry Potter Has Cousins!” Commonweal 7 Apr. 2000. http:// findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1252/is_7_127/ai_61764170. Driscoll, Michael, ed. A Child’s Introduction to Poetry: Listen While You Learn About the Magic Words that Have Moved Mountains, Won Battles, and Made Us Laugh and Cry. Illustrated by Meredith Hamilton. New York: Black Dog and Leventhal, 2003. Fandel, Jennifer. Puns, Allusions, and Other Word Secrets. Mankato, MN: Creative Education, 2006. Fisher, Jennifer. “The Nancy Drew Sleuth Unofficial Website.” 2007. http://www. nancydrewsleuth.com. Fox, Mem. Reading Aloud: Why Reading Aloud to Our Children Will Change Their Lives Forever. New York: Harcourt, 2001. Freedman, Russell. The Voice that Challenged a Nation: Marian Anderson and the Struggle for Equal Rights. New York: Clarion, 2004. Freeman, Judy. Books Kids Will Sit Still For: The Complete Read-Aloud Guide. 2nd ed. New York: Bowker, 1990. ———. Books Kids Will Sit Still For 3: A Read-Aloud Guide. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2006.

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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE ———. More Books Kids Will Sit Still For: A Read-Aloud Guide. New Providence, NJ: Bowker, 1995. Giovanni, Nikki. Rosa. Illustrated by Brian Collier. New York: Henry Holt, 2005. Given, David. “Susan Cooper’s Wales: A Literary Pilgrimage” [online travelogue]. 2002. http://www.cowlark.com/susan-cooper.html. Gordon, Shelley M. “Anne 2008” press release, July 24 2006. http://www.gov.pe.ca/visitorsguide/ index.php3?number=1016050. Green, Michele Erica. “Our Trip to England, March–April 2007.” 2007. http://www.littlereview. com/england2/englnd07.htm. Guignon, Anne. “Reading Aloud: Are Students Ever Too Old?” Education World 5 Nov. 2001. http://www.education-world.com/a_curr/curr081.shtml. Hamilton, Martha, and Mitch Weiss. Children Tell Stories: Teaching and Using Storytelling in the Classroom. Katonah, NY: Richard C. Owen, 2005. Handler, Daniel. The Penultimate Peril. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Harris, Robie H., and Michael Emberley. It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health. Boston: Candlewick, 2004. Hollander, John, ed. Poetry for Young People: Animal Poems. Illustrated by Simona Mulazzani. New York: Sterling, 2004. Holyoke, Nancy. The Big Book of Help! Both of the Absolutely Indispensable Guides to Life for Girls. [Combines Help! and More Help!, two earlier volumes.] Illustrated by Scott Nash. Middleton, WI: American Girl, 2004. Hughes, Langston. Poetry for Young People: Langston Hughes. David Roessel and Arnold Rampersad, eds. Illustrated by Benny Andrews. New York: Sterling, 2006. Hunter, Yvonne. “Penguin Group (Canada) to Become the Official Book Publisher of L.M. Montgomery 100th Anniversary Editions” press release, October 26 2006. http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/October2006/26/c5272.html. Janeczko, Paul B., ed. A Poke in the I: A Collection of Concrete Poems. Illustrated by Chris Raschka. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick, 2001. ———. A Kick in the Head: An Everyday Guide to Poetic Forms. Illustrated by Chris Raschka. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick, 2005. January, Brendan. Air Force One. Cornerstones of Freedom, Second Series. New York: Children’s Press, 2004. Jones, Katharine. “Getting Rid of Children’s Literature.” Lion and the Unicorn 30.3 (2006): 287–315. Jury, Louise. “Unfinished Masterpieces: Beckham Joins Joyce on List of Books We Never Complete.” The Independent 12 March 2007. http://www.independent.co.uk/ arts-entertainment/books/news/unfinished-masterp.htmls-beckham-joins-joyce-on-listof-books-we-never-complete-439913.html. Keane, Nancy. Booktalking Across the Curriculum: The Middle Years. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2002. ———. The Big Book of Children’s Reading Lists: 100 Great, Ready-to-Use Book Lists for Educators, Librarians, Parents, and Children. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2006. ———. n.d. “Booktalks Quick and Simple.” http://nancykeane.com/booktalks/faq.htm. King, Stephen. “Wild About Harry.” New York Times 23 July 2000. http://www.nytimes. com/books/00/07/23/reviews/000723.23kinglt.html. La Monica, Paul R. “The Fox, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: Disney Has a Lot Riding on the Success of The Chronicles of Narnia but So Does News Corp.” CNNMoney.com, Dec. 9 2005. Lanes, Selma. Down the Rabbit Hole: Adventures and Misadventures in the Realm of Children’s Literature. New York: Atheneum, 1972. Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society. 2007. http://www.discoverlaura.org. Lefebvre, Benjamin. “The Little House Archive.” 2006. http://roomofbensown.net/lhotp.

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Lewis, Valerie V., and Walter M. Mayes. Valerie & Walter’s Best Books for Children: A Lively, Opinionated Guide. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Leonard, John Leonard. “Nobody Expects the Inquisition.” New York Times 13 July 2003. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9c04e1de113af930a25754c0a9659c 8b63. Lipson, Eden Ross. The New York Times Parent’s Guide to the Best Books for Children. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2000. Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association. “Orchard House—Home of the Alcotts.” 2007. http://www.louisamayalcott.org. Lurie, Alison. Boys and Girls Forever: Children’s Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter. New York: Penguin, 2003. Marcus, Leonard M. Storied City: A Children’s Book Walking-Tour Guide to New York City. New York: Dutton, 2003. Maughan, Shannon. “Listservs Buzz Over Newbery Winner.” Publisher’s Weekly, 15 Feb. 2007a. http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6416737.html. ———. “Controversy Over Newbery Winner: A Followup.” Publisher’s Weekly, 22 Feb. 2007b. http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6418417.html. Mehegan, David. “‘Narnia’ Books Getting a Boost from Film.” Boston Globe 5 Oct. 2005. http://brothersjuddblog.com/archives/2005/10/supersized_subc.html. Meigs, Cornelia, Anne Thaxter Eaton, Elizabeth Nesbitt, and Ruth Hill Viguers. A Critical History of Children’s Literature: A Survey of Children’s Books in English. Rev. ed. New York: Macmillan, 1969. Midgette, Anne. “An Orphan’s Tale Retold, Refined and Repackaged.” New York Times 10 Apr. 2007. http://theater2.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/theater/reviews/10gabl.html. Mitchell-Marell, Gabrielle. “Little House Under Renovation.” Publisher’s Weekly 4 Dec. 2006. http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6396630.html. Mommy Track’d. “The Anti Princess Reading List.” Mommy Track’d—The Working Mother’s Guide to Managed Chaos. 2007. http://mommytrackd.com/readingroom. php?id=5. Murphy, Jim. An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793. New York: Clarion, 2003. Niehaus, Alisa, and Alan Hecker. Piratepedia. New York: Dorling Kindersley, 2006. New York Times. “One Troublesome Word.” New York Times 21 Feb. 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/opinion/21wed4.html. Pandya, Gitesh. “All Time Domestic Blockbusters.” Box Office Guru. http://www.boxofficeguru. com/blockbusters.htm. [Accessed April 2, 2007] Parks Canada. “Attendance 2001–2002 to 2005–2006.” Sept. 15 2006. http://www.pc.gc.ca/ docs/pc/attend/table2_e.asp. Parravano, Martha V., and Lauren Adams. “A Wider Vision for the Newbery.” Horn Book (January/February 1996). http://www.hbook.com/magazine/editorials/jan96.asp. Portis, Antoinette. Not a Box. New York: Harper, 2006. Powell’s. Powellsbooks.kids newsletter, January 19 2007. http://www.powells.com/ kidsnews.html. “Children’s Bookshelf.” Publisher’s Weekly electronic newsletter, 12 Apr. 2007. Rappaport, Doreen. Martin’s Big Words: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Illustrated by Bryan Collier. New York: Hyperion, 2001. Rich, Motoko, and Julie Bosman. “‘Bye Harry,’ Sob Booksellers, Investors . . . Oh, and Kids.” New York Times 2 Feb. 2007. http://gawker.com/news/new-york-times/bye-harry-sobbooksellers-investors----oh-and-motoko-rich-and-julie-bosman-233471.php?mail2=true. Richardson, Justin, and Peter Parnell. And Tango Makes Three. Illustrated by Henry Cole. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005. Ruethling, Ann, and Patti Pitcher. Under the Chinaberry Tree: Books and Inspirations for Mindful Parenting. New York: Broadway Books, 2003.

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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Scieszka, Jon. “Design Matters.” Designed by Molly Leach. Horn Book (Mar./Apr. 1998). http://www.hbook.com/publications/magazine/articles/mar98_scieszka_leach.asp. ———. Interviews. Reading Rockets. 2006. http://www.readingrockets.org/books/interviews/ scieszka/transcript. Schirmer Inc. “Mark Adamo.” Jan. 2007. http://www.schirmer.com. Schlitz, Laura Amy. A Drowned Maiden’s Hair: A Melodrama. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick, 2006. Scott, Mark. n.d. “Susan Cooper’s Wales.” http://www.thelostland.com/scwales.htm. Serio, John N. Poetry for Young People: The Seasons. Illustrated by Robert Crockett. New York: Sterling, 2005. Serlin, David, and Brian Selznick. “Where the Wild Things Were: An Interview with Leonard S. Marcus.” Cabinet 9 Winter 2002–2003. http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/9/ wherewild.php. Shuter, Jane. Life in a Roman Fort. Picture the Past series. Chicago: Heinemann, 2005. Silvey, Anita, ed. The Essential Guide to Children’s Books and Their Creators. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. School Library Journal (SLJ), Staff of. “One Hundred Books that Shaped the Century.” School Library Journal 1 Jan. 2000. http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/ CA153035.html. Smith, Julia Null. “Review of Picture Books.” Austin American-Statesman Apr. 1 2007. http://www.statesman.com/life/content/life/stories/books/04/01/1kidsbooks.html. Sones, Sonia. What My Mother Doesn’t Know. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001. Sutton, Roger. “I Just Want To Say This One Thing About the Newbery.” Read Roger Web log Jan. 24 2007a. http://www.hbook.com/blog/2007/01/i-just-want-to-say-this-onething.html. ———. “Second Verse, Same as the First.” Read Roger Web log Mar. 6 2007b. http:// www.hbook.com/blog/2007/03/second-verse-same-as-first.html. Sutton, Roger, and Martha V. Parravano. “Guess How Much I Love You, Catcher in the Rye?” Horn Book May/June 2004. Thomas, Mary. Review of Joan Bodger’s How the Heather Looked. CM: Canadian Review of Materials, Sept. 22 2000. http://www.umanitoba.ca/cm////vol7/no2/heather.html. Thompson, Ellen A. n.d. “Rah-rah reading!” http://www.scholastic.com/librarians/ab/ articles/rahrah.htm [Accessed Apr. 15, 2007.] Travers, P.L. Mary Poppins in the Kitchen: A Cookery Book with a Story. Illustrations by Mary Shepard. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1975 (reissued 2006). Trelease, Jim. The Read-Aloud Handbook. 6th ed. New York: Penguin, 2006. Valencia, Jane. “An American Harper in Wales.” 1997. http://www.eldalamberon.com/ jane.html. Vandergrift, Kay. “Vandergrift’s Children’s Literature Page.” 2007. http://www.scils.rutgers. edu/~kvander/ChildrenLit/reading.html. Weatherford, Carole. Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom. New York: Hyperion, 2006. Wentz, Melanie. Once Upon a Time in Great Britain: A Travel Guide to the Sights and Settings of Your Favorite Children’s Stories. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002. Wilcox, Leah. Falling for Rapunzel. Illustrated by Lydia Monks. New York: Putnam, 2003. Wiley, Melissa. “Here in the Bonny Glen: Little House.” 2007. http://melissawiley.typepad. com/bonnyglen/little_house/index.html. Wilson, Martin. “Off the Bookshelf” column (review of How the Heather Looks). Austin Chronicle 5 Nov. 1999. http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/review?oid= 74524. Yolen, Jane. How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? Illustrated by Mark Teague. New York: Blue Sky Press, 2000. Young, Terrence E., Jr. “Booktalking.” American Library Association. 2003. http://www.ala. org/ala/aasl/aaslpubsandjournals/kqweb/kqreviews/networth/v32n1.htm.

CHRISTIAN FICTION Zipes, Jack, ed. in chief. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Zipes, Jack, Lissa Paul, Lynne Vallone, Peter Hunt, and Gillian Avery. The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature: The Traditions in English. New York: Norton, 2005.

Further Reading Griswold, Jerry. Feeling Like a Kid: Childhood and Children’s Literature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 2006; Lanes, Selma G. Through the Looking Glass: Further Adventures and Misadventures in the Realm of Children’s Literature. Boston: David R. Godine, 2004; Smith, Cynthia Leitich. Children’s and Young Adult Literature Resources. http://www. cynthialeitichsmith.com/lit_resources/cyalr_index.html; Trelease, Jim. The Read-Aloud Handbook. 6th ed. New York: Penguin, 2006; Zipes, Jack D. Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter. New York: Routledge, 2001.

PEGGY LIN DUTHIE

CHRISTIAN FICTION Definition. Christian Fiction is a term used to designate works of fiction specifically intended for or marketed to Christian readers. Unlike most literary genres, Christian Fiction is delineated primarily in marketing terms. While particular authors are associated with and prominent in the production of Christian Fiction, the primary factors in whether or not a work is designated as such are more often its publisher and consumer identification. Rather than thinking of Christian Fiction as a unique genre, it may be helpful to think of it as a compilation of subsets of other genres. Some of the most popular genres within Christian Fiction include: Historical Fiction, Romance Novels, Fantasy Literature, Supernatural Fiction, and Children’s Literature. Christian Fiction addresses itself predominantly to Protestant readers. A broad definition of the term can be used to allow the inclusion of Roman Catholic authors and commercially successful or historically significant works that deal with religious themes or characters. As the term is currently most widely used, however, Christian Fiction generally refers to works specifically tailored to meet the specifications and guidelines of its publishers in order to create a fictional work that is deemed appropriate for the target audience. Because the definition of Christian Fiction depends upon extrinsic factors as well as intrinsic qualities to distinguish it from mainstream works by Christian authors, the categorizing of works within the genre can appear somewhat arbitrary. This qualification is especially true of works old enough to be in the public domain. John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress has all the intrinsic features of Christian Fiction but is readily available in over a dozen editions, many by commercial publishers not

IS THERE A WIDER AUDIENCE FOR CHRISTIAN FICTION? The narrow focus of a marketing-derived definition, combined with the exclusion of works of academic or historical interest from the category, may appear to make Christian Fiction a deprecatory label. For an author to eschew it is generally not thought of as a rejection of his or her identity as a Christian but rather a desire to address a wider audience. John Grisham, Graham Greene, and Madeleine L’Engle are examples of writers who have been open about their religious affiliations, but whose literary success and reputation extend beyond Christian audiences and hence are not widely thought of as authors of Christian Fiction.

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marketing directly to Christian audiences. Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, like Bunyan’s work, is widely anthologized. Despite these works’ obvious Christian themes and historical influence, they do not lend themselves to the designation of Christian Fiction since interest in them extends beyond exclusively Christian readers. History. If Christian Fiction is thought of as a marketing term, then its history is that of a series of canonical authors and more that of its publishers. The major publishers of Christian Fiction are Zondervan, Tyndale House, Thomas Nelson/Westbow Press, Bethany House Publishers, and Harvest House Publishers. Christian Fiction is usually a product line or division within a company and not an exclusive focus. Alternately, it may be the central focus of the subsidiary of a larger company that has a diverse range of publishing or media related products. Defining Christian Fiction by market also means that authors who achieve success both within and outside of Christian reading circles will be difficult to classify. The two most prominent examples of this difficulty are C.S. (Clive Staples) Lewis and George MacDonald. Lewis’s renown for writing Christian apologetics combined with the explicitly Christian themes of his allegorical and fantasy fiction helped make his works fixtures at Christian bookstores even before Christian Fiction was thought of as a separate genre. Lewis would be a notable figure for his literary criticism (A Preface to Paradise Lost, Studies in Words, and An Experiment in Criticism, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama) and apologetics (Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Great Divorce) even if he had not written fiction. It could be argued that Lewis wrote for a Christian audience, but that this audience was viewed as a subset of the general reading audience and not totally divorced from it. George MacDonald was a Scottish minister and author of fiction in the nineteenth century. Although he was widely known and read during his lifetime, many of MacDonald’s works fell out of print during the twentieth century. C.S. Lewis edited an influential anthology of excerpts from MacDonald’s works and famously credited MacDonald’s fantasy work, Phantastes, for influencing his own thought. G.K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton similarly praised MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin. In addition to his fantasy works and compilations of sermons, MacDonald also wrote novels revolving around the lives of Christian characters beginning with David Elginbrod (1862). These works, sometimes referred to as the Scottish Novels, helped the genre of Christian Fiction to take shape when they were reissued in edited and abridged form by Michael Phillips beginning in the 1980s. It must be conceded that Phillips has been successful in reviving interest in MacDonald’s novels, which can be found increasingly in unedited, reissued form in addition to the edited forms more widely sold in Christian Fiction venues. Whether this renewed interest has come at the cost of marginalizing MacDonald as a literary figure is an open question. One of Phillips’s biographical sketches states that his purpose in editing MacDonald’s fiction was to attract a publisher and “to make MacDonald’s stories and spiritual wisdom attractive and compelling to a new and less literarily patient reading audience” (Macdonaldphillips.com Web site 2006, Online). This quote implies a tailoring of the material to the tastes and requirements of the market audience, which is a primary feature of Christian Fiction, but it also helps clarify the distinction between MacDonald’s work and Phillips’s use of it. Ultimately, it could be argued that it is Phillips (as an editor and author) who is producing Christian Fiction and not MacDonald, even if variants of MacDonald’s work are currently more widely read than the originals.

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The literary work from the past that most closely resembles the description, effect, and cultural work of the Christian Fiction of today may be Charles M. Sheldon’s In His Steps. Sheldon’s novel, originally published in 1896, is best known for popularizing the slogan “What would Jesus do?” It was published serially by a weekly religious magazine, The Advance, and proved immensely popular among Christian readers (Neighbors 1998, Online). The novel focuses on the Reverend Henry Maxwell and his parishioners, who experience spiritual growth and insight as they respond to a stranger’s call to help the poor and powerless by vowing to act in their respective professions as they believe Jesus would have acted were he in their place. Like George MacDonald, Sheldon was also a Christian minister, but he wrote while still heading a congregation. Perhaps for that reason, In His Steps is generally more positive in its depiction of institutional religion, an attitude that is more typical of Christian Fiction since it is directed toward a religiously orthodox and socially conservative audience. In addition to its generally positive portrayal of institutional religion, In His Steps shares several other stylistic features with later Christian Fiction. The style is plain in order to attract the broadest possible audience. Chuck Neighbors points out that Sheldon developed In His Steps as one of a series of sermon stories designed to increase church attendance. The context in and purpose for which the narrative was created required an episodic and thematic repetitiveness, features that make it easy to pick up or put down at any point within the narrative, but which can lead to criticisms that it lacks narrative or moral complexity. This style is not without historical antecedents or parallels, but it differs widely from the movement toward psychological depth, ambiguity, and narrative complexity privileged throughout most of the twentieth century. The late 1970s and the 1980s began to see the emergence of Christian Fiction as a genre with Christian publishers marketing contemporary authors producing new works and not simply disseminating classic literature deemed appropriate for Christian audiences. Paul C. Gutjahr has argued persuasively that the growth of Christian Fiction in general, and the Christian Novel in particular, can be tied to the emergence of the Internet company, Amazon.com, which provided a means of word-ofmouth advertising (in the form of customer reviews), distribution, and marketing previously lacking for product lines geared toward a niche audience (Gutjahr 2002, 218). The Internet provided an alternate means of distribution for products not carried by more traditional or conservative independent Christian booksellers. Two writers whose success at this time helped define the nature and future direction of Christian Fiction were Janette Oke and Frank Peretti. Trends and Themes. The Left Behind series, conceived by Tim LaHaye and written primarily by Jerry B. Jenkins, had an unquestionable influence in the development and direction of Christian Fiction as a literary genre. Published by Tyndale House, a publishing company of Christian books and other media, its popularity coincided with (and could reasonably said to have helped prompt) a greater interest in publishing companies to produce works of fiction directly targeted at Christian readers. The seminal novel in the franchise, initially published in 1995, was entitled Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days. Set during and immediately after the rapture (instantaneous ascent into heaven of true Christians), the novel is roughly structured around the responses to world events of four characters that are left behind on earth after the rapture: Rayford Steele, a pilot; Chloe Steele, Rayford’s daughter; Buck Williams, a journalist; and Bruce Barnes, an assistant pastor.

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Although garnering mixed reviews, Left Behind achieved a commercial success that is indisputable. It prompted twelve sequels and another three prequels as well as a series of books for adolescents that mirror the events in the novel but center around youthful protagonists. At least three of the novels have been made into motion pictures, although these have been primarily disseminated through church showings and direct to video sales rather than theatrical runs. The series was also the subject of at least one computer video game, Left Behind: Eternal Forces, in which players assume the role of characters in the novel and attempt to evangelize and recruit onlookers to fight the propaganda and attacks of the Global Community Peackeepers. The first two novels, Left Behind and Tribulation Force have also been reproduced as graphic novels, each in five volumes. Critical responses to Left Behind have been sparse. While some Christian readers and critics have used the series popularity to promote or question theological interpretations of its source material, most secular reviews have tended to engage in cultural criticism, opting to conjecture about the causes and meaning of the work’s popularity rather than engaging in any sort of formal analysis. Some of the more notable critical responses are mentioned in the “Context and Issues” section below. One of the most significant effects of the Left Behind franchise may have been that its success instigated a broader and more sustained effort within Christian and secular publishing to service the market of Christian readers. Before the success of Left Behind, the prevalent attitude appears to have been that for a Christian artist (writer, musician, or performer) to be successful, he or she would have to produce a “cross-over” work—one that appealed to audiences outside of the target demographic of his or her genre. Left Behind demonstrated in the publishing industry what Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ would illustrate a decade later in the film industry: niche marketing could, in some circumstances, result in commercial profits that could be comparable to those generated by mass market works of fiction or film. Since the publication and success of Left Behind in the mid-1990s, no other single work or series of Christian Fiction has emerged to rival its popularity and impact. What has emerged is an awareness of the Christian consumer as a marketing force. Niche marketing as a trend is not unique to Christian publishing. However, it has had an especially marked effect in changing the face of that industry as indicated by the growing diversity of product lines within Christian Fiction and the increasing participation in major publishing corporations in servicing the Christian market, either through the creation of subsidiaries, or through business partnerships with traditional Christian publishers. Founded in 1931 as a bookselling company, Zondervan is one of the oldest and most widely recognized publishers of Christian books, in large part because of its partnership with the International Bible Society in producing the New International Version of the Bible in the 1970s and its chain of bookstores bearing its name (Zondervan Web site 2006, Online). Gutjahr has classified Zondervan as the publishing house “most committed to producing Christian novels in the mid-twentieth century” but points out that its success in doing so was hindered by independent Christian bookstore owners (Gutjahr 2002, 213–214). Its visibility has risen more recently due to the success of Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life in 2002. Although Zondervan is prominent among Christian publishers, its production of Christian Fiction has not been as extensive as its production of other types of Christian publications. Authors of Christian Fiction who have published with Zondervan include Karen Kingsbury and Cindy Kenney.

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Karen Kingsbury’s biography identifies her as an inspirational novelist, and she has trademarked the label Life-Changing Fiction to describe her work. This definition is used to characterize the desired effect of the fiction on the audience as opposed to the intrinsic qualities of it. These desired effects include “improved marriages, spiritual awakening and new-found hope” (Karen Kingsbury: Life Changing Fiction Web site 2006, Online). Kingsbury has had at least one novel, Deadly Pretender, adapted into a made for television film, Every Woman’s Dream. Her work also includes two titles, One Tuesday Morning and Beyond Tuesday Morning in the “911 Series,” which focuses on fictional characters responding to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. Cindy Kenney has written over twenty children’s books featuring the characters from VeggieTales. These characters were developed in a line of home videos by Big Idea, Inc., in which simply animated vegetables reenact Biblical stories or other stories designed to reinforce moral lessons. Kenney is identified as a senior managing editor for Big Idea, which owns the VeggieTales name. The VeggieTales books, which bear her name as author, are published by Zonderkidz, the children’s group of Zondervan, and carry the series label Big Idea Books. Established in 1962, Tyndale House Publishers was founded by Kenneth N. Taylor. Primarily known for publishing The Living Bible, a paraphrase of the Christian Bible in contemporary English, Tyndale House also published works from prominent Christian authors of non-fiction, including Josh McDowell and James Dobson. In addition to the Left Behind franchise, Tyndale also publishes works by Karen Kingsbury, Frank Peretti, Catherine Palmer, Francine Rivers, Dee Henderson, and Brock and Bodie Thoene. Brock and Bodie Thoene have written over forty novels in various series of Historical Fiction. Much of their work centers on the nation of Israel, much with a pro-Zionist flavor. Bodie Thoene is the primary writer of the team, with Brock providing historical research necessary for the genre (Bodie and Brock Thoene Official Web site 2007, Online). Francine Rivers wrote Romance Novels before becoming a “born-again” Christian, at which time she began writing works with Christian themes (Francine Rivers Web site 2007, Online). Her best known title is probably The Last Sin Eater, which was adapted into a feature film by FoxFaith in 2007. Thomas Nelson is one of the oldest and longest established Christian publishers. Named after its founder, Thomas Nelson’s original mission was to provide Christian works and literary classics to the general public. Thomas Nelson was acquired by Sam Moore and the National Book Company in the 1960s (Thomas Nelson Web site, Online). Spurred by sales of the New King James Version of the Christian Bible, Thomas Nelson was also an active participant in the renaissance of Christian Fiction, publishing works by Frank Peretti, Stephen R. Lawhead, and Ted Dekker. Stephen R. Lawhead has written novels in the genre of mythic history as well as imaginative fiction. He was an editor and staff writer for Campus Life magazine before writing The Dragon King Trilogy and The Pendragon Cycle. The latter consisted of five novels set against the backdrop of Arthurian Romance: Taliesen, Merlin, Arthur, Pendragon, and Grail (Stephen R. Lawhead Web site 2007, Online). He has also published a novel, Hood, using the Robin Hood legend as inspiration. Ted Dekker is part of the second wave of Christian Fiction authors, writing fulltime since 1997. Dekker writes Horror Fiction and, as mentioned above, collaborated

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with Frank Peretti to write House. His best known title is probably Thr3e, which was made into a feature film in 2006. Context and Issues. The genre and its authors have not escaped criticism. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Christian Fiction’s rise paralleled the success of political and religious conservatism in the United States symbolized by the popularity and political success of Ronald Reagan. Because the targeted readers of Christian Fiction are part of an evangelical tradition that is in general suspicious of the purported demoralizing power of art and hostile to the ideologies and philosophies informing most of the prominent literary movements of the twentieth century, it may not be surprising that work directed toward them is often accused of lacking rhetorical sophistication, imagination, ambiguity, or complexity. Jay R. Howard has described Peretti’s work as part of what Donald Heinz called the New Christian Right’s attempt to create a “counter-mythology” against that of “secular humanism” (Howard 1993, 195). Kenneth R. Morefield has gone so far as to label LaHaye’s and Jenkins’s Left Behind franchise “evangelical pornography.” Implicit in both critiques is the observation that the moral belief system informing the producers and consumers of Christian Fiction support an “oversimplified picture of social reality” (Howard 1993, 195) that distorts or caricaturizes antagonists to Christian characters and, by implication, the readers who share their beliefs. A less dramatic but still substantial criticism of Christian Fiction is that by promoting the production of fiction tailored to the beliefs of a particular audience, it obscures the value of moral or spiritual insight into the human condition that may be embedded or found in traditional genre works directed toward a general audience. Scott Derrickson argues that the production of great art consistent with any ideological perspective is to some degree dependant upon familiarity with the historical movements and masterpieces of its medium. He also states that “nothing is more easily resisted than subcultural religious language” (Derrickson 2002, 23). The creation of a separate genre in which Christian themes can be unilaterally addressed and advocated without serious resistance from readers or opposition from other works can potentially create a marginalized ghetto that retards not only Christian interaction with secular art, but secular culture’s interaction with Christian ideas. Compartmentalizing art from different ideological or theological perspectives could be argued to mitigate whatever latent power art has to engender dialogue which might retard the increasing polarization over religious and social issues currently so prevalent in the United States. Reception. The commercial success of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ in 2004 was large enough to make studios and publishing companies take note of the economic potential in marketing to evangelical Christians. Twentieth-Century Fox has since launched FoxFaith, a distribution label for “morally driven” films with “overt Christian Content.” As is typical in the industry in general, the publishing of Christian Fiction is increasingly one part of a company’s diverse product line that spans several media forms. There have been theatrical, television, and direct-tovideo adaptations of works by LaHaye, Dekker, and Oke within the last decade, and Walden Media has begun producing film adaptations of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series. While Fox created its own distribution line to target the Christian audience, it is likely that there will continue to be cooperative efforts between larger studios with production resources and smaller, faith-based companies that hold the rights to titles of possible interest to the Christian market. Zondervan, for example, became a subsidiary of HarperCollins in 1988.

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CHRISTIAN FICTION AWARD WINNERS The Evangelical Christian Publishers Association sponsors the Christian Book Awards.These awards (formerly the Gold Medallion Awards) recognize the best books in these categories: Bibles, Bible Reference and Study, Children and Youth, Inspiration and Gift, Christian Life, and Fiction. 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000

Ever After by Karen Kingsbury (Zondervan) (Winner of the 2007 Christian Book of the Year); When Crickets Cry by Charles Martin (Thomas Nelson) The Ezekiel Option by Joel Rosenberg (Tyndale House Publishers) Oceans Apart by Karen Kingsbury (Zondervan) Thr3e by Ted Dekker (WestBow Press) Mission Compromised by Oliver North (Broadman & Holman Publishers) Safely Home by Randy Alcorn (Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.) Paul: A Novel by Walter Wangerin (Zondervan) A New Song by Jan Karon (Penguin Putnam Inc.)

[From the Evangelical Christian Publishers’ Association (ECPA).] http://www.ecpa.org/ christianbookawards/

The increased attention paid to Christian consumers of media entertainment has generally been looked upon favorably by those consumers. There have, however, been some cultural critics who have raised questions about the rising commercialization of Christian art and media entertainment. E.J. Park has suggested that “commercialized forms make a mockery of serious things without even intending to do so, because they exist to serve the logic of commercialism” (Park 2006, 70). He further reminds Christian readers that form matters and, echoing Marshall McLuhan, that the medium as well as the content carries with it messages, some of which may ironically or deliberately undermine that of the content. M. Leary has further commented that commercial concerns have not only affected Christian art but the criticism surrounding and evaluating it as well. Leary claims that there is a “theoretical vacuum” in which “Christian film criticism” operates. According to Leary, unless critics of Christian media “respond to this vacuum with a set of focal points, identity markers, and theologically-based critical strategies,” (Leary 2007, Online) then critical inquiry into Christian film and fiction will continue to be dominated by the marketers, rather than by consumers or critics. The blurred line between marketing and criticism is neither new nor unique to fiction or film directed toward Christians. Because Christian Fiction has garnered very little academic interest or inquiry, the bulk of criticism of individual titles has been in commercial venues that are, perhaps, more susceptible to the influence of the marketing efforts of studios and publishers. Selected Authors. If there is a single title or work that marks the beginning of Christian Fiction in its current form, it is probably Janette Oke’s Love Comes Softly. Published in 1979 by Bethany House, Love Comes Softly eventually sold over eight million copies and spawned a made-for-television film adaptation. Oke would eventually pen seven additional novels in the series, which eventually grew to comprise over seventy novels. Love Comes Softly is an historical romance, combining the genres of Historical Fiction and Romance Novel as is common in Christian Fiction.

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The protagonist of the novel is Marty Clarige, a pregnant 19-year-old who suddenly finds herself a widow while traveling West during the 1800s and, in desperation, accepts a marriage of convenience. The predominance of the Romance Novel within the genre of Christian Fiction, both in its emergent and current form, is testament to the preponderance of women readers in the Christian Fiction market (Fisher 2000, 6). While it may initially seem odd that the Romance Novel would be such a popular genre within Christian Fiction, Oke’s success demonstrated that there was a market for work that conformed to the conventions of the Romance Novel but which did not endorse nor portray sexual encounters that would be inconsistent with conservative religious or social values. It is not uncommon for publishers of Christian Fiction to provide publishing guidelines that specifically address the depiction of human sexuality in such a way that helps clearly delineate examples of Christian Fiction from other Romance Novels or from Historical Fiction. Tyndale House Publishers, for example, instructs prospective authors that: “While many Christian stories have characters that are romantically attracted to each other, they must at the same time uphold the principles of Biblical sexual purity. Along with physical attraction, healthy Christian dating relationships should also involve spiritual, intellectual and emotional attractions.” (Tyndale House Publishers 2006, Online)

Tyndale was not Oke’s publisher, nor is Christian Romance one of its major product lines, but its publishing standards are not unique. As with secular Romance Novels, there can be variations between publishers and series in what sorts of content is permitted. The foundation of such restrictions upon current, orthodox interpretations of Biblical guidelines for sexual relationships is, of course, the major demarcating line between Romance Novels that are Christian Fiction and those that are not. Frank Peretti published his first novel, This Present Darkness in 1986. It deals with the denizens of a small town, Ashton, whose conflicts are paralleled by a battle between angelic and demonic forces. It was followed by a sequel, Piercing the Darkness, in 1989. The two novels have sold over 3.5 million copies (Frank Peretti Web site 2006, Online), helping expand the parameters of Christian Fiction beyond the Romance Novel and demonstrating that new works could be commercially successful. Peretti’s other works include Tilly (1988), a prose retelling of a radio drama that deals with the issue of abortion, Prophet (1992), a thriller set in the world of media journalism, The Oath (1995), a murder mystery/horror story, and The Visitation (1999), about a self-proclaimed messiah who appears in a small town in Washington. He has also written youth fiction, including an eight book series called The Cooper Kids Adventure Series and an additional two book series called The Veritas Project, about a family of investigators that alternately evokes The X-Files and The Hardy Boys. More recently, he has teamed with Ted Dekker to produce House (2006), a supernatural thriller. Peretti’s role in expanding the borders of Christian Fiction cannot be understated. While maintaining themes and techniques similar to earlier, didactic fiction such as Sheldon’s In His Steps, Peretti’s work skirted the fringes of genres previously rejected by Christian readers: Horror, Suspense Novels, and Political Thrillers. While his early work might be called derivative—This Present Darkness sometimes

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reads like C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters in narrative form—Peretti’s ability to put a Christian spin on hot button issues or popular genres helped create diversity within Christian Fiction that a slavish adherence to formula or historical tastes would not. Rather than simply repeat the success of This Present Darkness with further allegorical works about spiritual warfare, Peretti’s subsequent work used different genres to explore contemporary issues from an evangelical Christian perspective. He describes that progression this way: In This Present Darkness, it was spiritual warfare and intercessory prayer. In Piercing the Darkness, it had to do with the encroachment of neo-paganism into the educational and legal system. And in Prophet, it dealt with the Truth and really living by the Truth. In The Oath, it was sin depicted as this monster waiting to devour us that we just kind of ignore. In The Visitation, it was the false Christ that so many of us are serving. We have our own idea of what Jesus ought to be like. And in Monster—whoooh!—there’s a whole lot of different messages. My first idea was evolution. One of evolution’s bestkept secrets is that mutations don’t work. They’re not beneficial. I believe that if I can just create a story that somehow addresses that one leg of evolution, I can get people thinking. I can’t make a big scientific argument. I can just tell the story. One of the best ways to really combat the fortress of Darwinism is to allow people to wonder about it, to acquaint them with the controversy so that they know there is one. (Frank Peretti Web site 2006, Online)

Peretti’s influence on the formation of Christian Fiction is undeniable. Peretti created a template for the integration of overtly Christian content into genre work that has been utilized by subsequent authors of Christian Fiction such as Ted Dekker and Terri Blackstock. Peretti also illustrated that Christian Fiction could perform the cultural work of reinforcing the theological, cultural, and political positions of its audience by embodying the perceived consequences of those positions in narrative form. Unlike its antecedents, Peretti’s Christian Fiction—most notably Piercing the Darkness and The Prophet—did not limit itself to depicting the individual lives of Christians and their immediate environment but also depicted those individuals and their subculture interacting with the largely secular cultural and political world from with which they are enmeshed. This latter trait was picked up on and extended by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins in their Left Behind franchise, and Peretti’s literary (if not theological) influence on the series is evident. In fact, LaHaye reportedly approached Peretti about writing Left Behind before settling on Jenkins as his partner (Gutjahr 2002, 216). With the emergence of a Christian market of readers and a group of authors following in Peretti’s wake who were willing to tailor their fiction to it, Christian Fiction became a staple of Christian publishers and not merely an afterthought. Bibliography Dekker, Ted. Thr3e. Nashville, TN: Word Publications, 2003. Kingsbury, Karen. Beyond Tuesday Morning. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2004. ———. Deadly Pretender. New York: Dell, 1994. ———. One Tuesday Morning. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003. LaHaye, Tim, and Jerry B. Jenkins. Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1995. Lawhead, Stephen R. Arthur. Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1989. ———. Grail. New York: Avon, 1996.

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CHRISTIAN FICTION ———. Hood. Nashville, TN: WestBow, 2006. ———. Merlin. Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1988. ———. Pendragon. New York: W. Morrow, 1994. ———. Taliesen. Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1987. Oke, Janette. Love Comes Softly. Minneapolis, MN: Bethany Fellowship, 1979. Peretti, Frank. The Oath. Dallas, TX: Word Publications, 1995. ———. This Present Darkness. Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1986. ———. Piercing the Darkness. Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1989. ———. Prophet. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1992. ———. Tilly. Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1988. ———. The Visitation. Nashville, TN: Word Publications, 1999. Rivers, Francine. The Last Sin Eater. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1998.

Further Reading About Fox Faith [Online, 2007]. FoxFaith Web site. ; About the Author [Online, 2006]. Frank Peretti Web site. ; About the Author [Online, 2007]. Stephen R. Lawhead Web site. ; About the Authors [Online, 2007]. Bodie and Brock Thoene Official Web site ; Become an Author. [Online, 2006]. Tyndale House Publishers Web site. ; Biography. [Online, 2007]. Francine Rivers Web site. ; Carpenter, Humphrey. The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends. London: Allen & Unwin, 1978; Christopher, Joe R., and Joan K. Ostling. C.S. Lewis: An Annotated Checklist of Writings about Him and His Works. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1973; Derrickson, Scott. “Behind the Lens: A Christian Filmmaker in Hollywood” The Christian Century 30 Jan. 2002: 20–24; Duriez, Colin. The C.S. Lewis Encyclopedia : A Complete Guide to His Life, Thought, and Writings. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2000; Fisher, Allan. “Evangelical-Christian Publishing: Where It’s Been and Where It’s Going.” Publishing Resource Quarterly 14.3 (Fall 1998): 3–11; Frequently Asked Questions. [Online, December 2006]. Frank Peretti Web site. ; Full Biography [Online, December 2006]. Karen Kingsbury: Life Changing Fiction Web site ; Gutjahr, Paul C. “No Longer Left Behind: Amazon.com, Reader-Response, and the Changing Fortunes of the Christian Novel in America.” Book History 5 (2002): 209–236; Hein, Rolland. George MacDonald: Victorian Mythmaker. Nashville: StarSong, 1993; Howard, Jay R. “Vilifying the Enemy: The Christian Right and the Novels of Frank Peretti.” Journal of Popular Culture 28.3 (1994): 193–206; Leary, M. How Should We Then Review? [Online, 2007]. The Matthew’s House Project Web site. ; MacDonald, Greville. George MacDonald and His Wife. 1924. With an Introduction by G.K. Chesteron. Whitehorn, CA: Johannesesn, 1998; Miller, Timothy. Following In His Steps: A Biography of Charles M. Sheldon. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988; Morefield, Kenneth R. Left Behind as Evangelical Pornography. [Online, 2007]. The Matthew’s House Project Web site. ; Morefield, Kenneth R. “Why Christian Fiction?: Expressing Universal Truth in a Relative World.” PhD dissertation, Northern Illinois University, 1998; Neighbors, Chuck. The Story of In His Steps. [Online, December 2006]. ; Our History [Online, December 2006]. Zondervan Web site ; Park, E. J. “A Tale of Two Kitties.” Christianity Today 50.2 (2006): 68–70; Raeper, William, ed. The Gold Thread: Essays on George MacDonald. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990; The Future: Who is Michael Phillips? [Online, December 2006]. Macdonaldphillips.com Web site. ; Thomas Nelson History [Online, July 2007]. Thomas Nelson Web site. .

KENNETH R. MOREFIELD (LAURA K. SCHUBERT CONTRIBUTED RESEARCH FOR THIS ENTRY.)

COMEDIC THEATRE Definition. The word comedy is derived from komos, a Greek term denoting acts of celebration, revelry, or merrymaking. In theatre, the word comedy is often tied to Aristotle’s description of the genre that exists in opposition to his seminal definition of tragedy. In The Poetics, Aristotle is credited with saying that Comedy [is] an imitation of men worse than the average; worse, however, not as regards any and every sort of fault, but only as regards one particular kind, the Ridiculous, which is a species of the Ugly. The Ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others [ . . . ]. (Aristotle 2000, 48–49)

Traditional definitions of comedy, with roots in Aristotle and neoclassicism, have set up expectations of the genre that include amusing plots, as well as light and funny characters whose adverse situations ultimately result in happy, morally acceptable conclusions. However, the notion of combining elements of comedy and tragedy in theatre has long been broached by playwrights and theorists, further complicating definitions of each genre. The mixing of elements of comedy and tragedy has become especially prominent in the twentieth century, giving rise to multiple subgenres of comedy including tragicomedy, tragifarce, and satirical drama. Leonard Pronko suggests that, “In a universe without absolutes tragedy is impossible. [ . . . ] pure comedy is no longer possible either [ . . . ],” and that the rise of relativism has blurred, if not erased, clear delineations such as those put forth by Aristotle (Pronko 1962, 205). Further tensions lie in debates about high and low, official and unofficial elements of comedy in theatre. Moreover, comedy has historically played a significant role in the expression of difficult or taboo issues, or even politically dangerous points of view. Despite the blurring of various genres and definitions, comedy in theatre continues to embrace elements of humor, silliness, light-heartedness, and entertainment. Comedy as dramatic literature remains difficult to separate from theatrical performance. As such, the definition of comedic theatre has grown to include many popular forms of entertainment, such as stand-up comedy, musical comedy, musical revue, burlesque, farce, vaudeville, puppet shows, and other forms of amusement. History. American theatre history often credits the Greeks, specifically Aristophanes (The Birds, The Frogs, The Clouds), with legitimizing comedy on the stage. The history of comedy spans many centuries and countries, offering a rich but often undocumented tradition of humor and merriment on the stage. Historians recognize the presence of comedy throughout the development of European theatre: Greek comedy, Roman comedy, farces from the Middle Ages, various Renaissance comedy including commedia dell’arte, commedia erudita (intellectual/educated comedy), and romantic comedy, as well as English Restoration comedy, sentimental comedy, comedy of tears, and comedy of manners—among others. The complicated history of comedic forms across Europe contributed to a diverse tradition of comedy in the American theatre, reflecting specific cultural and socio-political circumstances of the country. Moving away from specifically

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British sensibilities, playwright Anna Cora Mowatt has been credited with creating a distinctly American comedic theatre. Her play, Fashion, or, Life in New York (1845), is a satirical comedy commenting on high-society manners of nineteenth century New York City. Around the same time, vaudeville and burlesque shared the stage with comedy of manners, demonstrating the co-existence of high and low society in the city centers, as well as diversity in the realm of the comedic American theatre. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century gave birth to a number of performances focusing on specific ethnic experiences by Jewish comedians, including the famous George Burns and Fanny Brice, and black minstrel performers, such as Bert Williams, who employed elements of song and dance, physical comedy, and vaudevillian techniques on stage. Importantly, during the Harlem Renaissance (1920s), black comedy flourished in theatres, popular cabarets, and newly published literature by and about blacks. This era also gave way to great musicals—written by and starring black artists—most importantly the legendary Shuffle Along (1921), which became a major Broadway hit. Also in the 1920s, The Marx Brothers became hugely popular with their improvisational comedy, which included vaudeville acts, musical revues, and musical comedy. Animal Crackers (1928–1929), one of their most successful musical comedies, was developed in collaboration with George S. Kaufman. Kaufman, who often depicted eccentric characters and poked fun at high society manners and values, pushed the boundaries of situational comedy by adding elements of farce to wellstructured commercial comedic plays. He successfully collaborated with Moss Hart on plays such as You Can’t Take It with You (Pulitzer Prize in 1937) and The Man Who Came to Dinner (1940), both of which continue to be produced on American regional, community, and school stages. The late 1920s and 1930s were further marked by a proliferation of comedy of manners, written by notable playwrights such as Phillip Barry (Paris Bound [1927] and The Philadelphia Story [1939]) and S.N. Behrman (Biography [1932], Rain from Heaven [1934], and End of Summer [1936]). Behrman, one of Broadway’s most recognized writers of “high comedy,” questioned the role of comedy in a violent and unjust world in his play No Time for Comedy (1939). Robert E. Sherwood used humor to address the stupidity of war in his plays The Road to Rome (1927) and Idiot’s Delight (1936), commenting on the horrors of war and satirizing its political players. In general, playwrights of this period employed light-hearted comedy to frame social issues of the day. With the start of the Great Depression, the 1920s and 1930s also saw a rise in the popularity of musical theatre. Musical theatre writers began to incorporate dramatic stories into light comic forms such as farce and burlesque, moving away from showgirl musicals, such as the Ziegfeld Follies, and toward musical theatre that integrated music, dance, character, and setting to advance an actual plot. Showboat (1928), written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, set the stage for musical comedies, such as Anything Goes (1934), Guys and Dolls (1950), and Hello, Dolly! (1964), which depicted everyday American characters and continued to bridge the gap between story and music. Overall the 1940s saw little in the way of new comedic plays. Historian Oscar Brockett refers to the period between 1940 and 1970 as the “golden age of musical comedy” (Brockett 2003, 504). In addition, Mel Watkins suggests that the Harlem Renaissance gave rise to sophisticated black humor that was “pointedly critical of American racism [and that] by the late 1940s,

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some of this material was creeping into the stage humor of pioneer comics like Redd Foxx and Moms Mabley” (Watkins 2002, 112). With the rise of realism on the American stage (in plays by Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Lillian Hellman—to name a few), the mid-twentieth century comedic theatre began to focus on psychological realism and complex characters. The sense of comedy no longer [resulted] from misunderstanding and mistaken identity, as in the majority of comic plays and farces; rather, it [emerged from] characters’ mismatched personalities [and their] differing life attitudes. (Listengarten 2004, 460)

Additionally, a significant cross-pollination existed at this time between comic writers for the stage, television, and film—a trend that continues to permeate writing in the twenty first century—and further complicated the nature of comedy on stage. Neil Simon’s romantic comedy Barefoot in the Park (1963), as well as his plays The Odd Couple (1965) and The Sunshine Boys (1972), frequently include “sharp one-liners” typical of comedy sketches for television and film. Despite comedy’s increasing interest in psychologically defined characters, popular commercial theatre at this time remained removed from the rather serious public reaction to the country’s political upheavals, namely the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. T.S. Hischak points out that “Broadway had come to depend on Neil Simon for reliable and satisfying comedies” (Hischak 2001, 9), but in the 1970s and 1980s comedic theatre of other forms gained attention at Off Broadway, Off-Off Broadway, and regional theatres. John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves (1971), a successful dark farce; Tina Howe’s The Art of Dining (1979) and A.R. Gurney’s The Dining Room (1982), comedies of contemporary manners; Beth Henley’s dark comedy Crimes of the Heart (1978); and Charles Ludlum’s The Mystery of Irma Vep (1984), an Edwardian style spoof, all employ elements of comedy to raise questions about relationships and social norms of the time period. In many ways, comedy in the late twentieth century became a platform for exploring (sometimes philosophically) issues of identity as they relate to gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, and class. Furthermore, comedy on the stage often challenged the status quo as writers and performers began to confront traditional American values and represent marginalized topics and minority voices on the stage. In addition to the development of many important stand-up comics and monologists (such as Richard Pryor, Lily Tomlin, Whoopi Goldberg, and Spalding Gray), this time period saw the commercial success of playwrights such as Wendy Wasserstein (Isn’t it Romantic 1981), Herb Gardner (I’m Not Rappaport 1985), Christopher Durang (Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You 1979) and Jane Wagner (The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe 1985), all of whom used comedy to draw attention to, if not subvert, prescribed societal roles and values. This period also produced a number of quirky, farcical comedies such as Reckless (1983) by Craig Lucas and All in the Timing (1994) by David Ives, among others, pushing the genre of comedy into the realm of fantasy and absurdity. If the 1970s and 1980s foregrounded issues of self-identity on stage, comic theatre in the 1990s is marked by intellectual humor, popularization of culturally specific comedy, as well as political satire. Playwrights such as Steve Martin (Picasso at the Lapin Agile 1993) and Theresa Rebeck (Spiked Heels 1992) employ humor to

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reflect on post-modern sensibilities and notions of relativism, which continue to permeate intellectual debates in the twenty first century. Moving between stage and screen, commercially successful comedians such as Latino artists John Leguizamo and George Lopez, Asian American performer Margaret Cho, black stand-up comedians Whoopi Goldberg and David Chappelle, as well as lesbian performer Ellen DeGeneres achieved broad popular appeal with their culturally specific humor. Furthermore, the use of comic elements within serious and often political plays is reflected in the work of Suzan Lori-Parks, Jose Rivera, and Russell Lee, who, like many playwrights of this time, employ dark irony and cynicism to disrupt the audience’s complacency, while enabling the audience to process uncomfortable realities. At the same time, physical comedy based in uncomplicated plots and improvised situations continued to co-exist with darker, more serious forms of comedy; artists such as Bill Irwin (Fool Moon 1993, developed in collaboration with David Shiner) adapted the comic styles of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton for contemporary audiences. In the same way, commercially popular, light-hearted comedies continued to entertain Broadway and regional theatre audiences. Trends and Themes. Trends in theatre emerge out of societal contexts and issues. The twenty-first century reflects many of the same issues confronted by artists in the late twentieth century, but is further marked by increased globalization, international conflict, and national and personal isolation. Stand-up comedy and solo performance, which once relied on exploding audience expectations and identity constructs, have come to focus on developing complicity between the artists and audience around issues of race, gender, sexuality, and politics. An explosion of comedy on the American stage that addresses issues of identity (cultural and otherwise) reflects “the political potential of comedy as an activist theatrical discourse” (Glen 2005, 426). For instance, playwright Richard Greenberg uses comedy to address race, sexuality, and national identity politics in his awardwinning play Take Me Out (2003). The Nibras Theatre Collective, and other Arab American theatre troupes, formed a yearly New York Arab American Comedy Festival in 2003 “to negotiate stereotypes and joke about ‘their’ habits, fears, accents, misunderstandings, and the challenges of living between two cultures” (Basiouncy 2006, 331). Similarly, performance groups such as the Chicano troupe Culture Clash employ biting satire and intellectual humor, coupled with song, dance, and pop culture references, to resist stereotypes and cultural assumptions (Glen 2005: 413). Other writers and performers from marginalized groups employ self-deprecating jokes about cultural and social practices and familial relationships to both satirize stereotypes and celebrate cultural idiosyncrasies.

COMEDIC THEATRE ON BROADWAY On Broadway, musical comedy remains the most popular genre. Urinetown (2001) ventures into the territory of satire, making fun of local and national political systems, while also rejecting conventions of musical theatre through self-parody. Other commercially successful musicals, such as The Producers (2001), Avenue Q (2003), The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (2005), and Monty Python’s Spamalot (2005), further illustrate recent trends in musical theatre, including the use of satire and spoof to poke fun at theatrical convention, political-correctness, the sanctity of childhood, and cultural myths and narratives.

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Several themes and through-lines define the scope of contemporary American comedic theatre. As artists explore their role in an increasingly unstable political and cultural landscape, comedy highlights Americans’ anxiety about fulfilling social roles and expectations. With the rise in minority rights, contemporary comedy draws on new complexities in relationships, acknowledging expanded and multifaceted notions of what constitutes family and romantic love in the twenty first century. Contemporary comedic theatre pokes fun at idealized dating and courting rituals, as well as social expectations of various human relationships and gender roles. Contexts and Issues. Contemporary comedy is shaped by often serious philosophical and political currents. Post-modern thinking, or the questioning of universal or accepted norms, permeated the twentieth century and pushed theatre artists to question the stability of meaning in life and on stage, addressing notions of “real” and “constructed” identity. The destabilization of authority and the destruction of hierarchies have blurred traditional boundaries of class and culture, as well as distinctions between high and low art. With globalization, or increased access to shared knowledge, culture, and markets, the American theatre has become a place for exploring questions of identity and responsibility—not just to one’s self, but to the world at large. Playwrights and performers use the stage to comment on moral and political relativism, as well as concepts of identity as they relate to the politics of religion, gender, class, sexuality, and nationalism. Although globalization and postmodern thinking already permeated the psyche of the American theatre, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, followed by the Iraq War (2003–) and an increase in America’s political polarization, heightened the theatre’s attention to the relativity of truth and the constructed nature of identity. Furthermore, the increased popularity of television and film pushed American theatre to acknowledge broader audience expectations while seeking a distinct identity from media-based, popular entertainment. Although aspects of multi-media have found their way into contemporary American theatre, both stylistically and thematically, theatre often addresses issues and experiments with styles that generate less mass appeal. The similarities and tensions among these different mediums are negotiated by many commercially successful comedic writers and performers who currently work across television, film, and theatre. Comedy remains an important tool for artists in the twenty first century to explore contemporary contexts. Issues of isolation and alienation, societal polarization, and fear of lost identity, as well as the relativity of moral values, are some of the serious topics that permeate various comedic plays. Artists’ seeming obsession with the instability of meaning has resulted in a body of plays and performances that address questions of power in representation, as well as issues of self-reflection, identity, and diversity. At the same time, artists use comedy to parody social anxieties, as well as offer a humorous perspective on life. Reception. While diverse artists and audiences have found a voice in various arenas of contemporary comedy, critics continue to criticize the genre for its mass appeal and frequent lack of sophistication. With the advance of technology and the rise of popular culture, theatre developed a symbiotic relationship with television and film. Many of today’s popular comedians got their start on television shows such as Saturday Night Live, and comedic

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CRITICS AND COMEDIC THEATRE Critics continue to have a complicated relationship to comedy. As early as fourth century B.C.E., comedy was viewed as trivial, and thus second class, in relation to more serious approaches to drama. However, at the same time, comedy is celebrated for its ability to broach dangerous or controversial topics such as political corruption, war, and hypocrisy, as well as its ability to make audiences laugh at life’s irony and personal folly. Even well-structured and commercially popular comedies have been criticized for appealing to audiences’ baser nature, as well as lacking depth.

writers regularly move between stage and screen. Writers often adapt their stage scripts for the screen (Prelude to a Kiss 1992 and Freak 1998), while some develop original works for television, film, and theatre. Moreover, comic writers for theatre have found success in publishing novels, stories, and essays, adding additional layers to the interdisciplinary nature of drama. In opposition to the mass appeal of comedy in television and film, several contemporary writers employ theatre as a somewhat elitist venue to experiment with innovative styles and explore complex social and philosophical concepts. Simultaneously, the increasing cost of theatre tickets further contributes to the elitist stature of the art form, an interesting paradox to comedy’s longstanding tradition of speaking to the masses and satirizing those in power. Selected Authors. Christopher Durang is a prolific playwright, and occasional actor and screenwriter, known most for his daring and often dark comedies that seriously address issues of religion, sexuality, child abuse, and family dysfunction. While his full-length plays have enjoyed successful runs on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and prominent regional stages, they continue to attract professional, community, and school-based venues nationally. Durang also has written over 1,000 one-act plays and satirical sketches that parody and satirize everything from sex and politics to well-known plays and artists. Critics have referred to Durang’s comedies as autobiographical and angry, as well as absurdist and biting. In 1978, A History of the American Film, a playful parody of Hollywood movies, was produced on Broadway, earning the young Durang a Tony nomination for Best Book of a Musical. One of Durang’s most popular plays, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You (1981), which satirizes the traditional practice and dogma of Catholic school teachers from the mid-twentieth century, ran for two and a half years Off-Broadway. Durang’s success continued throughout the 1980s with several new plays, including Beyond Therapy (1982), Baby with the Bath Water (1983), and The Marriage of Bette and Boo (1985)—the latter being an admittedly autobiographical play about his parents’ troubled marriage. More recently, Durang has attracted audiences with Betty’s Summer Vacation (1999), which Durang labels as a play about the “tabloid-ization” of American culture; Mr. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge (2002), a playful parody of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol; and Miss Witherspoon (2005), a contemplative farce that delves into notions of an afterlife, which was listed on Time Magazine’s “Ten Best Plays of 2005.” While not all of Durang’s plays have gained critical acclaim, Durang’s body of work is celebrated for being wickedly funny and, above all, truthful. Many of Durang’s plays are timely, referencing pop culture and addressing social issue of the

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day, making several of his pieces feel outdated only a decade after their original productions. His comedies, however, remain honest reflections on life’s challenges and absurdities, and never fail to make audiences both laugh and cringe. Durang’s new musical, Adrift in Macao, opened in Philadelphia in 2006. Whoopi Goldberg (formerly Caryn E. Johnson) is a well-known American comedian, film actor, and singer who is often referred to as both “a clown and social critic.” She received her first major recognition as a stand-up comedian in 1983 for The Spook Show, in which she performed four different characters. A year later, under the direction of Mike Nichols, the show was transformed into the famous Broadway production titled Whoopi Goldberg (1984); twenty years later, the show was successfully remounted at the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway as Whoopi (2004). For her numerous theatre, film, and television credits in the genre of comedy, Goldberg received the prestigious Mark Twain Prize for American Humor (2001), as well as an invitation to host the Academy Awards. Goldberg is a master of improvisation and belongs to the type of stand-up comedians who sharpen their craft on feet before writing their stories down on paper. She is also a master of total transformation; in her show Whoopi, she leads her audience through the lives of six distinct characters, capturing their diverse personalities, experiences, worldviews, and accents and ultimately presenting a multifaceted picture of life. Goldberg’s comic sensibility allows for the fusion of farcical incongruity, satirical tone, and compassion. Mel Gussow writes in his New York Times theatre review that As she tells her tales of misfits and outcasts, and even as she offers wry satiric comments, she is consistently disarming. Bantering mischievously with the audience, she warms up a Broadway theater, winning us as her confederates. (Gussow 1984)

As her work expresses strong commitment to issues of gender, poverty, and race, Goldberg simultaneously emphasizes the universal nature of the concerns she explores and refuses to be pigeonholed as “female comedian” or “African American” (Lavin 2004, 104). While embracing the voices of diversity in contemporary American comedy, she is extremely attuned to the humanistic qualities of her characters. Suzanne Lavin notes: “[Goldberg’s] characters are bound together, not by race or gender, but by the vulnerability of human beings as they try to negotiate the tough obstacles of life” (Lavin 2004, 110). Lisa Kron’s playwriting and acting career was fomented in the 1980s by the East Village performance art climate. Coming to New York City from a small Michigan town, she immersed herself in East Village performance venues such as Dixon Place, P.S. 122, WOW Café, and La MAMA, where the spirit of experimentation encouraged artists to push aesthetic and socio-political boundaries through their unorthodox artistic explorations. Making her career as a writer and solo performer in shows such as 101 Humiliating Stories (1993) and 2.5 Minute Ride (1996), Kron also became a co-founder of the award-winning theatre company “The Five Lesbian Brothers.” Her most recent play, Well (2004), had a successful run at the Public Theatre in New York City and made a Broadway debut in 2006. In all three performance pieces, Kron uses elements of autobiography to explore both the emotional implications of remembering and the limitations of memory in performance. In 101 Humiliating Stories, Kron presents her personal account of a series of

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mortifying episodes from various stages in her life, ranging from embarrassing junior high school incidents to public declarations—perhaps imaginary—of her homosexuality. In 2.5 Ride, Kron chronicles her personal journey to the Holocaust Museum in Auschwitz with her aging father whose parents perished in the Holocaust. In this piece, she collides horrifying moments with humor to experiment with audience reaction; she notes, “[ . . . ] you might not know for a second whether you are at Auschwitz or at an amusement park. The show does not tell you when to laugh and when to be solemn. The response is up to you” (Kron 2001, xiv). In Well, Kron steps away from a purely solo performance aesthetic, but remains faithful to her stylistic principle in which comedy is often born out of a sense of discomfort or awkwardness. The action in Well revolves around her complicated relationship with her mother, as well as the playwright’s own complex attitude toward issues of health and illness. This play moves beyond traditional storytelling and toward an exploration of the process of both “dramatizing” and “performing” memory on stage. Critics have noted Kron’s theatrical talent for creating a balance between heartwrenching emotional moments and “high-flying comedy.” Critics have also referred to Kron as one of the best American stand-up memoirists, continuing the legacy of the late Spalding Gray. John Leguizamo is an actor/performer and writer, most known for starring in films such as Romeo and Juliet (1996), Moulin Rouge (2001), and Land of the Dead (2005). However, despite his popular roles on the big screen, Leguizamo is also noted for his dynamic personality and hilarious sense of humor on the American stage. In a series of one-man shows, Leguizamo takes on multiple characters and voices, mimicking people from his past (and present) and employing humor to reflect on his difficult childhood, relationships, and multi-ethnic stereotyping. Leguizamo, who writes and performs his own material, hit Off-Broadway in 1991 with his witty show, Mambo Mouth, in which he portrayed seven different Latino characters. Two years later, he returned to the stage with Spic-O-Rama (1993), in which he humorously satirized stereotypes of Latinos in the United States. Leguizamo then debuted on Broadway in 1998 with Freak, his somewhat autobiographical oneman show in which he used comedy to comment on family dysfunction. Later, Leguizamo toured John Leguizamo Live! (2001), which later became Sexaholix: A Love Story (2002), incorporating physical and vocal comedy, dancing, and sentimental stories of family and love to win his audiences over. Importantly, Leguizamo also created and starred in the 1995 Latino-oriented variety television show called House of Buggin’ which gained positive reviews but only lasted for one season. “Leguizamo was rightly identified as the first Latino performance artist/stand up monologist with cross-over star potential” (Winer-Bernheimer 1998, 1). Each of Leguizamo’s stage shows was eventually filmed for television, and his performances appealed to audiences from various ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. Leguizamo has earned Obie, Emmy, and CableACE awards, and was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for his achievements as a comedian. While Leguizamo continues to garner praise as a colorful and energetic writer and performer, many critics have hopes that his comedy will become more mature, edgy, and complicated. Leguizamo’s memoir, Pimps, Hos, Playa Hatas and All the Rest of My Hollywood Friends: A Life, was released in 2006. David Lindsay-Abaire’s farcical comedy Fuddy Meers (1998), which began as a playwriting project during his studies at Julliard, brought the playwright instant

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public and critical acclaim. Following its completion, the play was workshopped at the Julliard School and then received a staged reading at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in 1998. After its successful opening at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Stage II, the play was transferred to the Minetta Lane Theatre in 2000. “I love dark and disturbing inappropriate humor. [ . . . ] I’m trying to write outrageous farce with an underlying sadness, a real weight that peeks through the silliness,” writes LindsayAbaire (Lindsay-Abaire 2000, 35). In his stylistic approach, marked by the infusion of dark farce and absurdity with light lyrical comedy, he is similar to his peer Craig Lucas. Other artists who influenced his style and technique include Georges Feydeau, Eugene Ionesco, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, The Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello, as well as the more contemporary Christopher Durang, one of Lindsay-Abaire’s Julliard playwriting professors. The inspiration for the plot of Fuddy Meers came from a television news report on a book about neurological disorders; in particular, Lindsay-Abaire was drawn to the story’s description of amnesia in which a patient’s memory was erased during sleep. In Fuddy Meers, Claire suffers from this form of amnesia, and her inability to remember her past thrusts her into a kaleidoscope of silly, absurdist, and violent events. She is kidnapped by a limping, lisping, half-deaf man in a ski mask, a nod to Lucas’s masked character in Reckless, who tries to convince Claire that her husband is about to murder her. In the remainder of the play, Claire faces a series of absurd revelations and grotesquely violent situations revolving around her dysfunctional and abusive family. The tragifarcical world of this play is dangerous and unpredictable, but aspects of “joyous lunacy” prevail in the end producing a thoroughly entertaining effect for the audience. Critics have referred to this play as a “wild ride comedy,” an “absurdist-nightmare farce,” and a “dark, sweet and engaging comedy.” Lindsay-Abaire’s less successful, whimsical comedies include A Devil Inside (1997) and Wonder of the World (2001). His later play Rabbit Hole (2006) departs from his earlier comedic work in its lyrical and heartbreaking exploration of parental grief over a child’s tragic death. The play’s heartfelt and grave scenes, however, are frequently interspersed with lighter moments of laughter and humor, helping the characters to cope with their loss and ultimately leading the family through a healing process. Craig Lucas’s career in theatre encompasses play and screen writing as well as theatre and film directing. His comedies, Reckless (1983) and Prelude to a Kiss (1988)—which brought him popular and critical recognition, are riddled with suspense and the threat of violence—perhaps reflecting some of Lucas’s personal experiences. After writing romantic comedies in the 1980s and early 1990s, he ventured into the realm of tragedy in plays such as The Dying Gaul (1998) and Singing Forest (2004). His screenwriting includes adaptations of several of his own plays. Lucas is a master of constructing plots in which a chain of coincidences results in comic absurdity. Rachel Fitsimmons in Reckless runs away from her house on Christmas Eve in a desperate attempt to save her life after her alienated husband announces that he has taken “a contract out on [her] life” (Lucas 1989, 8). Her extraordinary journey is laden with peculiar encounters and incredible circumstances adding elements of both fantasy and eccentricity to a story about a woman who ultimately finds herself in search of identity and purpose in life. The whirlwind of events in the play fuses comedy with tragedy as the main character ends up in a homeless shelter and others die of champagne poisoning and a self-imposed hunger

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strike. The play’s development seems rather random but the arbitrary events in Reckless give away the playwright’s intention to emphasize the problematic relationship between the irrational and the logical, between chance and predictability. In Prelude to a Kiss, Lucas foregrounds elements of fantasy in the structure and style of romantic comedy, resulting in a blend of fantasy and romance. A young woman is suddenly drawn to a strange old man who unexpectedly appears at her wedding party; they kiss and exchange souls. As a result of the soul exchange, she is forced to experience both the physical and psychological challenges of old age, which prompts her to re-evaluate her own humanity. Critics have praised Lucas’s plays for raising important issues of identity, sexual or otherwise, and exploring connections (or lack thereof) between chance and logic. The surreal and the realistic are infused together as the playwright interweaves disparate plot lines while embarking his characters on “identity” trips full of comic and serious encounters. Recently, Lucas received attention for writing the book to the light-hearted musical drama, Light in the Piazza, which was produced at the Lincoln Center Theatre in 2005 and won six Tony Awards. Critics emphasized the distinct humanistic quality of this musical; Michael Feingold, a theatre critic for The Village Voice, posits: It’s not a self-reflexive spoof of anything, not a carpentered-up trip through anyone’s catalog of songs, not a technological barrage of noise and effects. [ . . . ] It is a story about human beings told through music—a phenomenon so rare nowadays that it deserves praise just for existing. (Feingold 2005)

Steve Martin has been called “the leading man of American Comedy” and is a well-known film actor, stand-up comedian, and writer of screenplays, novels, stories, editorials, and plays. He started writing jokes for the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour during his college years and later performed with Saturday Night Live before spending decades as an actor and screenwriter for films such as Roxanne, My Blue Heaven, and The Pink Panther. In the 1990s, Martin took a hiatus from his career in film and began writing comedic plays. In his first play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile (1996), Martin details a fictional meeting between a young Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso at a bar in Paris, combining low comedy with philosophical musing on notions of relativity and aesthetics. In 2001, Theatre Communications Group (TCG) listed Picasso at the Lapin Agile in its top ten most produced plays of the year, and productions continue to receive critical acclaim over a decade after the play’s premiere in 1993. Martin’s play The Underpants (2002), an adaptation of Carl Sternheim’s classic 1910 farce, was an Off-Broadway success and demonstrates Martin’s penchant for physical humor and “literary slapstick.” “The play, written as a wicked satire on the middle class, has become in Mr. Martin’s hands an ambitious amalgam of comic book and social commentary, made out of sex jokes, slamming doors and sophisticated repartee” (Weber 2002). Martin’s other comedic plays include Wasp, Zig-Zag Woman, and Patter for the Floating Lady (each published in a 1996 collection of his work), as well as the yet unpublished Guillotine. Martin’s comedies often rely on witty dialogue and elements of farce, parody, and self-referential humor, while his stand-up routines include self-deprecating jokes and “schoolboy” humor. While Martin is certainly a celebrated icon of American pop culture, he has occasionally been criticized for tedious jokes or over-the-top, silly

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gags. However, Martin’s comic genius earned him the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2005, as well as invitations to host the Academy Awards and serve as editor for the Modern Library’s Wit and Humor Series. Theresa Rebeck, whose writing has been produced extensively on prominent American stages, as well as television, film, and radio, has earned the title of “brainy, matter of fact woman of theatre” (Hart 2005, 46). With an early background in acting and writing, and a Ph.D. in Victorian Literature, Rebeck writes smart and emotionally compelling plays. However, “much to her own surprise, she is frequently cited as a ‘funny’ playwright,” says Sarah Hart of American Theatre magazine, who agrees that, “[Rebeck’s] plays are funny—but not one-liner funny” (Hart 2005). In fact, Rebeck’s writing has been called everything from sickly funny to dark and absurd—and often in a review of a single play. Rebeck is also considered a master of satire, and many of her plays offer sharp commentary on society, culture, politics, and human relationships. Rebeck’s plays move away from comedy in the purest sense of the word, and borrow elements of style and form from Chekhovian and Shakespearian drama, as well as Victorian melodrama and Greek tragedy, to name a few. Her play The Scene (2006), which details the affair of an out-of-work New York actor who is married to a successful news producer, played to sold-out houses and has been called a shrewd comedy “which updates a film-noir, femme-fatale story for today’s Manhattan” (Isherwood 2007). Rebeck’s one-woman show Bad Dates (2003) is a fantastical comedy that chronicles the sometimes scary humor of a single mother re-entering the dating scene, while her play Spiked Heels (1992) is a contemporary comedy of manners that draws on elements from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion to explore sexual harassment, as well as the nature of power, perception, and gender roles. Rebeck’s other comedies include View of the Dome (1996), Loose Knit (1994), and The Family of Mann (1994). While Rebeck’s comedies sometimes have been criticized as trivial and seemingly unfinished, her plays are repeatedly produced and celebrated for their poignant commentaries on various aspects of society. Rebeck also has earned multiple awards for her work on NYPD Blue, won the National Theatre Conference Award (for The Family of Mann), and earned the William Inge New Voices Playwriting Award. Her play Omnium Gatherum (co-written with Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros 2003) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Wendy Wasserstein, who died in 2006 at the age of 55, was an award-winning writer whose comedies are rooted in the tradition of American Jewish culture. She employed humor to celebrate life under most calamitous circumstances. Her body of work includes many commercially successful plays, film and television scripts, as well as other genres of literature. In Wasserstein’s early play Isn’t It Romantic (1981) the main character Janie Bloomberg—a young idealistic writer, somewhat overweight, somewhat confused about her identity—embarks on a painful journey of self-discovery leading her to defy the conventional social norms imposed by her domineering mother. Wasserstein’s ability to diffuse feelings of sadness and disillusionment in her plays with humorous situations and her characters’ self-deprecating humor has frequently been noted by critics. C.W.E. Bigsby writes that Isn’t It Romantic “in some ways elaborates a familiar vaudeville and Jewish routine, and much of its humor derives precisely from the familiarity of the central character [who] is vulnerable, unclear what she wants, but aware that she is, indeed, a comic figure” (Bigsby 1999, 340).

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In The Sisters Rosensweig (1993) Wasserstein similarly aims at creating a delicate balance “between the bright colors of humor and the serious issues of identity [and] self-loathing” (Wasserstein 1993). The action in the play revolves Sara Goode’s fiftyfourth birthday celebration, during which an unexpected guest tries to compel Sara to return to her Jewish roots which she relinquished years earlier. Through humorous repartees and painful discussions, Sara ultimately finds emotional solace in familial relationships and recognizes the significance of her past. Despite the abundance of poignant personal discoveries in the play, its spirit is far from being melodramatic or melancholy. Wasserstein’s characters laugh at their own inability to confront their loneliness and disillusionment; they mock their own idiosyncrasies and, sometimes, narrow-mindedness, as they struggle to both re-assert themselves in society and stay true to their ideals and beliefs. In Wasserstein’s last play, Third (2005), the sense of humor is less prevalent than in her earlier plays, but the characters’ resilience and their need to celebrate life and human connection remain as strong. In Third, Wasserstein continues to focus on strong, independent female characters in their search for emotional fulfillment. In this play, Laurie Jameson, a prominent Shakespeare scholar at a small, liberal college, mistakenly accuses her student of plagiarism. Fiercely passionate about her political views, Wasserstein’s main character is eventually forced to confront her own ethical value system. What makes Wasserstein’s heroines unique is their ability to both grasp the extent of alienation from their family and/or community and recognize the necessity for change, which manifests in either acknowledging their identity or transforming their path. Their sincere appreciation for humor is what helps Wasserstein’s characters persevere. Critics have consistently praised Wasserstein’s gift for comedy, often citing the commercial success of her plays. The popular appeal of Wasserstein’s comedies should not overshadow the important issues the playwright raises regarding her female characters’ plight for independence and professional satisfaction that often comes with the sacrifice of their familial and communal contentment. Bibliography Aristotle. The Poetics. Trans. Ingram Bywater. In Theatre/Theory/Theatre: The Major Critical Texts from Aristotle and Zeami to Soyinka and Havel. Daniel Gerould, ed. New York: Applause, 2000. Basiouncy, Dalia. “New York Arab America Comedy Festival.” Theatre Journal 58.2 (2000): 327–331. Bermel, Albert. Comic Agony: Mixed Impressions in the Modern Theatre. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993. Bigsby, C.W.E. Contemporary American Playwrights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ———. Modern American Drama, 1945–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Bogosian, Eric. The Essential Bogosian. New York: TCG, 1994. Buckley, Michael. “A Chat with Theresa Rebeck; Remembering Uta Hagen.” Playbill, 18 January 2004. http://www.playbill.com/news/article/83844.html. Brandt, George. “Twentieth-Century Comedy.” In Comic Drama: The European Heritage. W.D. Howarth, ed. London: Methuen, 1978. Brantley, Ben. “Life: Does it Get Any Better after Death.” New York Times, 30 Nov. 2005. http://theater2.nytimes.com/2005/11/30/theater/reviews/30with.html. ———. “Lisa Kron’s ‘Well’ opens on Broadway, With Mom Keeping Watch.” New York Times, 31 March 2005. http://theater2.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/theater/reviews/31well.html.

COMEDIC THEATRE Brockett, Oscar G., and Franklin J. Hildy, eds. The History of the Theatre. 9th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2003. Carr, C. On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1993. Charney, Maurice. Comedy High and Low. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Cohen, S.B., ed. From Hester Street to Hollywood: The Jewish-American Stage and Screen. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1983. Durang, Christopher. Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2005. Elliott, Robert C. The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960. Feinberg, Leonard. The Satirist: His Temperament, Motivation, and Influence. Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1963. Feingold, Michael. “Passione All’Americana.” The Village Voice, 19 April 2005. http://www.villagevoice.com/theater/0516,feingold1,63169,11.html. Foley, F. Kathleen. “Intimate, Wryly Agile ‘Picasso.’” Los Angeles Times, 28 Feb. 2002. Gelven, Michael. Truth and the Comedic Art. Albany, NY: State University of New York press, 2000. Gilbert, Joanne R. Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender, and Cultural Critique. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004. Glen, Antonia Nakano. “Casting Themselves: Culture Clash and the Comedy of Resistance.” Contemporary Theatre Review 15.4 (2005): 413–426. Guthke, Karl S. Modern Tragicomedy: An Investigation into the Nature of the Genre. New York: Random House, 1966. Goldberg, Whoopi. Book. New York: Rob Weisbach Books, 1997. Greene, Victor R. “Ethnic Comedy in American Culture.” American Quarterly 51.1 (1997): 144–159. Gussow, Mel. “Whoopi as Actress, Clown and Social Critic.” New York Times, 28 Oct. 1984. http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?_r=1&res=9A0DE1D E1539F93BA15753C1A962948260&oref=slogin. Hart, Sarah. “A Date with Theresa Rebeck.” American Theatre, October 22.9 (2005): 26–28, 146. http://www.tcg.org/publications/at/Oct05/rebeck.cfm. Hirst, David. Tragicomedy. London: Methuen, 1984. Hischak, T.S. American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1969–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Hoy, Cyrus. Hyacinth Room: An Investigation into the Nature of Comedy, Tragedy, and Tragicomedy. New York: Knopf, 1964. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Forms. New York: Methuen, 1985. Isherwood, Charles. “The Tuna Fish Can Incident and Other Injustices of Life.” New York Times, 16 June 2005. http://theater2.nytimes.com/2005/06/16/theater/reviews/ 16laug.html. ———.“All About Ego, Showbiz and a Little Black Dress.” New York Times, 16 Jan. 2007. http://theater2.nytimes.com/2007/01/12/theater/reviews/12scen.html?fta=y. Jenkins, Ron. Acrobats of the Soul: Comedy and Virtuosity in Contemporary American Theatre. New York: TCG, 1988. Kron, Lisa. 2.5 Minute Ride and 101 Humiliating Stories. New York: TCG, 2001. ———.Well. New York: TCG, 2006. Lang, Candace. Irony/Humor: Critical Paradigms. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Lavine, Suzanne. Women and Comedy in Solo Performance. New York: Routledge, 2004. Lindsay-Abaire, David. Fuddy Meers. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2000. ———.“Lost in the Funhouse: An Interview with Lindsay-Abaire.” By Celia Wren. American Theatre 17.6 (2000): 35.

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COMEDIC THEATRE Listengarten, Julia. “From Eccentricity to Endurance: Jewish Comedy and the Art of Affirmation.” In A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Literature. D. Krasner, ed. London: Blackwell Publishing, 2004, 456–472. Lucas, Craig. Reckless. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1989. ———. Prelude to a Kiss. New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 1990. Littleton, Daryl J. Black Comedians on Black Comedy: How African Americans Taught Us to Laugh. New York: Applause, 2006. Martin, Steve. Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Other Plays. New York: Grove, 1996. Olson, Kirby. Comedy after Postmodernism: Rereading Comedy from Edward Lear to Charles Willeford. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2001. Olsen, Lance. Circus of the Mind in Motion: Postmodernism and the Comic Vision. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1990. Segal, Eric. The Death of Comedy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. Shershow, Scott Cutler. Laughing Matters: The Paradox of Comedy. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986. Simon, Neil. Proposals. New York: Samuel French, 1998. Sorell, Walter. Facets of Comedy. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1972. Styan, J.L. The Dark Comedy: The Development of Modern Comic Tragedy. 2nd ed. London: Cambridge University Press, 1968. Sutton, Dana F. The Catharsis of Comedy. Boston, MA: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994. Wasserstein, Wendy. The Sisters Rosensweig. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1993. ———. Isn’t It Romantic. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1998. ———.“Third.” American Theatre 23.4 (2006): 72–87. Watkins, Mel. On the Real Side. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999. ———, ed. African American Humor: The Best Black Comedy from Slavery to Today. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2002. Weber, Bruce. “Knickers in a Twist, or Panties with a Mind of Their Own.” New York Times, 5 April 2002. Winer, Linda. “Celebrity Culture Caught with its Pants Down.” Knight Ridder Tribune Business News, 12 Jan. 2007. Winer-Bernheimer, Linda. “Funny, but Little to Freak Out About.” Los Angeles Times, 14 Feb. 1998.

Further Reading Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984; Bogosian, Eric. [online January 2007] Official Web site of Eric Bogosian. www.ericbogosian.com; Bottoms, S.J. Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004; Curry, R.R., ed. Perspectives on Woody Allen. New York: G.K. Hall, 1996; Durang, Christopher. [online January 2007]. “Christopher Durang: Playwright and Actor.” www.christopherdurang.com; Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988; Kolin, Philip C., and Colby H. Kullman, eds. Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1996; La Farge, Benjamin. “Comedy’s Intention.” Philosophy and Literature 28 (2004): 118–136; Limon, John. Stand-up Comedy in Theory; or, Abjection in America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000; Martin, Steve. [online January 2007]. Official Web site of Steve Martin. www.stevemartin.com; Nelson, T.G.A. Comedy: The Theory of Comedy in Literature, Drama, and Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990; Schechter, Joel. Durov’s Pig: Clowns, Politics, and Theatre. New York: TCG, 1985; Ulea, Vera. A Concept of Dramatic Genre and the Comedy of a New Type: Chess, Literature, and Film. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002.

JULIA LISTENGARTEN AND MEGAN ALRUTZ

COMIC BOOKS

COMIC BOOKS Definition. Comic books contain narrative, sequential series of images, usually accompanied by text in a thin magazine-like format, and typically include traditional literary components such as plot, subplots, characters, setting, dialogue, and symbolism. While some comic books contain complete single narratives in one issue, most are serialized across multiple issues over time and develop multiple storylines and arcs across the entire series. The sequential images and text within comic books are usually written to be read horizontally, but occasionally may be read vertically, or in other alternative ways. Multiple “panels” on a comic book page that contain illustrations and characters’ thoughts or speech are scripted within “balloons,” while narrative or explanatory text typically appears in boxes on the edges or outside of the panel frame. Comic book images emphasize the text and dialogue, allowing for quick and frank communication, though exploring the relationship between the images and text is necessary for fleshing out the story and understanding and interpreting what goes on in the “gutters” between the panels. Most comic books are created by teams of writers and artists rather than by individuals. Often writers pitch ideas to editors or vice versa and next seek out collaborators while considering desired talent, finances, and scheduling. Heavy consultation between writers and artists is typically required, with inkers and pencillers brought in later in the process to add color and text to the work. Comic books are a versatile genre used for educational, commercial, and most commonly entertainment purposes. Teachers may use them for developing student’s reading skills or may have students write and illustrate their own comic books as a composition or narrative writing exercise. Commercial uses of comic books seem to be less prominent, but may be produced for promotional materials such as giveaways, product information guides or instructions, and newsletters. However, most comic books created, purchased, and read in the United States are those written and published for leisure and entertainment purposes. There are many different audiences and readers of mainstream entertainment comic books, though most typically attract adolescent and adult male readers, many titles are available for children as well as other audiences depending on the purpose of the comic book and nature of its contents. Comic book fans and readers tend to maintain active online communities to share criticism and analysis of titles and actively participate in the growing comic book convention circuit. Comic books relate to other forms of literature such as comic strips, graphic novels, manga, and zines. Argued to be the predecessor of the comic book, comic strips are frequently collected and published in comic book or book format after initial publication and distribution in newspaper or online environments. Graphic novels, an emerging literary form over the last thirty years, are related to comics in a couple ways. First, their methods and modes of narrative storytelling images are similar, and second, many titles commonly referred to as “graphic novels” are actually known in the industry as “trade paperbacks.” Trade paperbacks are comic book issues of the same title collected into hard- or softbound volumes usually containing six issues or a complete story arc. Graphic novels, on the other hand, are works usually defined as not previously published in serialized comic book form, are often lengthier than comic books, and tend to appeal to a wider variety of audiences. Manga, the Japanese term for comics and cartoons, refers to comic books from Japan or those of similar aesthetic. Manga in the United States typically sells in the same formats as comic books or graphic novels, but also may come in pocket-sized

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books. It is recognized for its distinct artistic style, which includes exaggerated and youthful facial features and often communicates and depicts ideas rather than actual physical realities. Manga has recently grown in popularity in the United States, especially among children and pre-teens. Lastly, often self-published zines have a relationship to comic books. A zine (an abbreviation of magazine) is a non-commercial publication containing text and images, usually offering some sort of narrative or storyline. They may be originally created by hand or computer and are usually reproduced for distribution by photocopying or printing multiple copies of the original. Zines often address political, personal, social, or sexual content outside of the mainstream and more traditional media, and can be found in underground social circles and more recently on the shelves of independent book and comic book sellers and libraries. History The Silver Age. Superhero comics survived under the Code’s strict guidelines because they often depicted worlds where good and evil were clearly distinct and justice prevailed. However, some publishers had to re-launch superheroes in compliance with the Code. This phenomenon started the trend of re-imagining superheroes for new audiences and resulted in more heroes earning their own titles. Marvel’s director at the time, Stan Lee, also contributed to the success of the superhero comic book movement. Working in the industry since the age of seventeen, Lee collaborated with artists Jack Kirby and Steve Dick to create a new breed of superheroes that struggled with their human flaws. Lee’s superheroes were not perfect or godlike, but behaved more like people who happened to be superheroes and exemplified undesirable yet endearing human characteristics like confusion, insecurity, and alienation. Others were re-developed with a science fiction influence, like the Green Lantern, while superhero teams like the Justice League of America and The Avengers also emerged. Readership and fan interest in comic books continued to grow throughout the early 1960s. By now, many creators in the industry had grown up with comic books and had received formal training to enter the profession. The Academy of Comic Book Arts and Sciences was formed and sponsored and distributed annual fan awards, or “Alleys,” going to the best comic books of the year. Sales were good, prices were raised, and superhero popularity continued, but did drop off later in the decade due to low sales. Many consider this drop in sales and readership the end of the Silver Age of American comic books, though publishers continued to experiment with new distributors, pricing models, means of circumventing the Code, and new genres, all in an attempt to maintain or entice new readers. The Bronze Age. Underground comics emerged during the late 1960s and grew throughout the early 1970s, transitioning into the Bronze Age of American comic books. Based primarily in San Francisco, but with artists and publishers in New York and other cities, underground comics were produced by individuals and addressed social issues or concerns of the counterculture, such as experimentation, drug-altered states of mind, rejection of sexual taboos, and ridicule of “the establishment.” Mainstream comic books continued to change in attempt to maintain and attract readership. Popular creators were shuffled around, non-superhero comic books reemerged, and the Code was loosened, to name a few changes. At about forty years

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UNDERGROUND COMICS Underground comics commonly contained profanity, nudity, and drug use or sex perversion and bent the rigid social mores typically found in public expression of the time. They attracted liberal youth and college students and were often sold in shops with other counterculture expressions like drug paraphernalia or underground art. Robert Crumb was a prominent figure in underground comics, with additional contributors S. Clay Wilson, Art Spiegelman, Trina Robbins, and many others. As the women’s liberation movement also emerged, underground comics offered a prime vehicle for feminist art and expression, and introduced women to the comic book industry. The Wimmen’s Comix Collective was formed in 1972 and published several long-running anthologies and comics featuring women artists. Mainstream comic book publishers even tried to break into the underground scene by establishing their own “mainstream underground” titles. However, by the mid-1970s, distribution networks for underground comics began to break down as many shops selling them became outlawed.

strong, major players in the industry began to retire while some switched publishers, like Jack Kirby’s move from Marvel to DC Comics. Non-superhero titles exploded in popularity, while many others strived to address relevant social issues like drug abuse, feminism, or civil rights. In 1971, the Comics Code Authority loosened its rules in order to allow for better reflections of modern society within comic books. Stories about drug addiction were now permissible if they were presented in a vile and unjustifiable manner. In response to the changes in the Code and the emerging interest in depicting current social and political issues, a number of ambitious new titles appeared during this time and attempted to advance comic books as a genuine literary and art form. While many of those titles failed with mainstream audiences, their core fan bases supported and drove the future of some titles with their interest in comic art and narrative constructs. As small bookshops and newsstands became less interested in stocking comic books due to their low profit margin, entrepreneurial specialty comic book shops, publishing companies, and distribution companies emerged throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s. New models of creation and distribution offered more control for comic book creators and publishers began granting more freedom on projects, ownership of their characters, and profit shares. Publishers began targeting their most loyal readers rather than continually trying to entice mainstream or new readers. Marvel and DC Comics’ duel for top sales fostered the creation of numerous new characters and titles, and social issues of the counter-culture revolution surfaced in new titles featuring female and African American superheroes. The Modern Age. The 1978 feature film release of Superman and the subsequent licensing of superhero and comic book characters for toys and other merchandise set the stage for growth and revitalization of the industry, bringing comic books and superheroes into mainstream media and retail for the Modern Age. Star Trek, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Alien, are a few examples of 1980s comic book movies that came to be the highest grossing genre in Hollywood (Jones 2004, 326). The resulting increase in revenues to the comic book publishers caused concern for creators and artists who did not maintain ownership of their characters or receive cuts of profits they generated. Newer publishers on the scene offered creators unprecedented ownership and profit-sharing plans, forcing DC Comics and Marvel to offer

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royalties or other incentives to keep their talent. Jack Kirby, creator of Superman, was involved in a dispute with Marvel over their failure to return his original artwork or grant him proper credit or rights to his co-creations, like the Hulk, X-Men, Fantastic Four, and many others. The issue was resolved after fans actively came to his support, while other artists embraced their new freedom to create and tell stories of a range and complexity they had not dared before. The Modern Age of comics also presented characters with a more hard-edged, self-examining style. Artist and writer Frank Miller’s re-inventive work on the Daredevil series explored the darker side of the hero by examining the psychological motivations behind his actions. In Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Miller revised Batman into a bitter, over the hill vigilante fighting against a fascist Superman in a Gotham City gone to hell, ultimately motivating Warner Brothers to make the Batman movie a reality (Jones 2004, 330). Miller’s work redirected the superhero genre and helped set the stage for future creators through his development of superheroes with human emotions, conflicts, and problems. Newspaper editorials and fundamentalist religious groups publicly criticized the increase of darker themes and content. DC Comics responded in 1986 by launching its own rating system in attempt to alert parents and readers to age-appropriate titles. The revision of superheroes and storylines to reflect a darker, more grim and gritty reality also generated popular anti-heroes such as the Punisher, Wolverine, Spawn, and independent publishers like Dark Horse Comics. Independent and small press comic books were growing, and while limited by distribution channels, they helped to revitalize and strengthen the entire comic book industry by establishing a collector’s market spawning independent titles and specialty comic book shops. By the late 1980s collectors would buy almost any new title to get in on the comic book collector market, even as publishers produced more titles of questionable quality. DC Comics and Marvel maintained control of the mainstream market, yet to compete and boost readership and collectibility they created storylines stirring up their respective superhero universes. DC Comics’ Crisis on Infinite Earths, aimed to simplify and reorganize their universe of worlds and characters, revitalizing their whole line of superheroes. A year later Marvel launched its New Universe series, marking the beginning of Marvel’s second cosmological and mythological universe, but the series never took off and was phased out. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, superheroes again dominated the comic book and mass market world. Marvel celebrated its 50th anniversary as well as the success of the 1989 feature film Batman, which broke every box office record to date (Jones 2004, 331) and increased the influx of comic book movie franchises into American popular culture. A number of independent comic book publishers arose, like Image Comics, and DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint, offering alternatives to superheroes, like Neil R. Gaiman’s Sandman, Miller’s Sin City, and Todd McFarlane’s Spawn, the latter two of which were eventually adapted into feature films. The 1990s appeared to be a time of growth, but things changed in the mid-1990s with the fall of the collector market and Marvel’s declaration of bankruptcy. Even the new Batman and Robin feature film was a critical and financial flop. Marvel eventually worked its way out of financial trouble, but publishers had to continue offering gimmicks to attract readers back to the genre. Trends and Themes. The American comic book industry today is comprised of many successful writers and artists like Geoff Johns, Jim Lee, Alex Ross, and particularly Brian Michael Bendis, along with a growing number of women creators

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like Jessica Abel, Devin Grayson, and Gail Simone. Yet, some of today’s most influential writers are native to England and Scotland, such as Warren Ellis and Mark Millar. Bendis, Ellis, and Millar are known particularly for their carefully developed characters and storylines, dynamic dialogue, attention to and commentary on political and global issues, and for vastly redefining and re-envisioning American superheroes. Context and Issues The Golden Age. The modern American comic book emerged in the 1930s when two sales employees at Eastern Color Printing Company, Max C. Gaines and Harry I. Wildenberg, decided to package regular newspaper comic strips into a tabloid-sized magazine, called Funnies on Parade, to pass on to distributors for use as advertising premiums or giveaways. A successful model, imitations of the comic book format grew and became widely recognized in 1935 when new and original content was commissioned. Many comic books during this time grew from detective story and science fiction roots; it wasn’t until 1938 that the industry was put on the map with its first “star” in Superman. Created by teenagers Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, Superman became the United States’ first hero since Davy Crockett and Paul Bunyon, and offered readers fantastic realities unworkable in other visual entertainment media of the time. The success of Superman and other heroes like Batman and the Green Lantern resulted in hundreds of costumed imitators throughout the next several years as comic books flourished, sales climbed, and readership reached its prime. The emergence of World War II and decreasing health and economic standards cultivated readers’ desires for happy stories and humor, adventure, magic, fantasy, detective, war, romance, crime, and Wild West genres were developed for comic books. Teenage romance characters such as Archie and adventure stories about Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, helped meet this need, while “kiddie” comic books from Disney and Looney Toons offered humor to children and adults with fun characters like Donald Duck, Porky Pig, and Elmer Fudd. By 1945 comic books reflected women’s more visible role in society of joining the workforce while men were away at war. Female heroines emerged with Pocket Comics’ Black Cat, the first major costumed action heroine in comic books, and later with Wonder Woman. Aside from superheroines, characters like Patsy Walker, Millie the Model, and Nellie the Nurse offered stereotypically portrayed American career women in the workplace with humor and innocent romance, setting the stage for the romance comic boom that hit in 1947 as publishers looked for ways to expand readership and audiences due to the slump in superhero sales and circulation. Educational and animal comic books also became popular as comic book reading became a habit of most children and teenagers. Humor comics further fueled the boom as the industry continued to grow at a fast pace. Cowboy comics briefly emerged as the next hot trend, but were quickly eclipsed by criminal stories depicting sex, violence, and lurid tales of murder and mayhem to re-entice adult readers. The crime comic book boom morphed into horror comics, which continued to depict murder and gore; although stories were carefully crafted to include social, moral, and philosophical messages. However, vociferous parents and critics focused only on the violent, gothic plots and sensually drawn women, which plummeted the general public’s opinion of comic books. People feared that

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the messages these comic books communicated to children and teens were undermining or replacing parents, teachers, and religious leaders as moral authorities. This attitude created the climate for a fallout of comic book success and invited the censorship of the Comics Code Authority. In 1954, psychiatrist Fredric Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent, positing a petition against comic books. Wertham spun his contention that comic books were stimulus for destructive and criminal behavior, even though none of his research demonstrated such conclusions. Critics of Wertham felt his logic discredited the ability of children and teenagers to distinguish fantasy from reality, and omitted evidence that comic books help children learn to read. In fact, many organizations were dedicated to producing educational comic books with subjects ranging from religious messages, prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, or messages against smoking, drinking, and drugs. Regardless, Wertham’s speculations stirred up a storm and led the comic book industry to self-censor to protect itself from overzealous censors or lawsuits. The industry adopted the Comics Code Authority in October 1954, to monitor editorial and advertising content in comic books. A seal of approval displayed on comic book covers alerted news dealers and parents to the suitability of what was being sold to children, and many news dealers refused to sell comic books not displaying the seal. Wertham and the Code are often credited for the downfall of the Golden Age of American comic books. Critics of the Code felt it placed comic books on a childlike level through the prohibition of plot devices like crime, triumph of evil, violence, illicit sexual relations, and narcotics or drug addiction. Comic book writers and artists also were not able to deal with real world social or political issues with any sort of honesty or truthfulness. Formerly popular crime and horror comic books nearly vanished after being relegated to relying more on suspense in the stories rather than detailed gore, resulting in the emergence of mystery stories and the revival of superheroes. Reception. The turn of the millennium saw a rise in independent and literary comic books and graphic novels, with the continuing influence of comic books in other areas of popular culture. Fantagraphics’s independent publications garnered increased attention, like Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, serialized in the Acme Library, and Gilbert and Jamie Hernandez’s revival of their Love and Rockets series. Mainstream comics continued to stimulate American film and television and more movies and shows based on comic books were developed. Film adaptations of the X-Men, Spider-Man, and other superheroes and comics became prominent in the market while television shows such as the Smallville and the Justice League Unlimited cartoon were successful. Selected Authors Brian Michael Bendis (b. 1967). Following art school, well-known comic book writer and occasional artist Brian Michael Bendis emerged in the comic book world in the 1990s with independent, creator-owned series and later began working with Image Comics where he developed Torso, about the hunt for the Cleveland Torso Murderer. Well known for his dialogue style and story arc pace, Bendis’s transition from crime and noir stories to superhero noir stories began in 2000 when Marvel asked him to revitalize Spider-Man for their Ultimate line. Bendis embraced the opportunity and was largely successful revamping the popular superhero and appeased even hardcore fans. In Ultimate Spider-Man Bendis

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brought Peter Parker into the new century and created a story about a kid who gets powers during modern times as opposed to the Peter Parker of 1962. Instead of getting bit by a radioactive spider as in the original, Bendis’s Parker gets bitten by Osborn Industries’ genetically engineered spider that has been subject to drug tests. Rather than working at the Daily Bugle print newspaper office, the new Parker is employed at the eBugle, an online newspaper. Parker’s Aunt May and Uncle Ben are younger than in previous iterations, and his love interest, Mary Jane, has more intellectual interests than her 1960s predecessor. Bendis’s Spider-Man remains a human being underneath the costume and has more problems than powers. Spider-Man is strong, but he can also be hurt physically and emotionally, just like anyone else, and Parker has everyday problems like the rest of us: getting laundry done, money worries, and deadlines at work. Bendis’s leisurely pace allows readers to better know Spider-Man and his supporting cast, rendering more depth of character, a major point of praise for Bendis’s reworking of this title. Ultimate Spider-Man was generally well received by old and new fans alike. A best seller its first month in publication and later a successful feature film, some fans still had their criticisms, but most were pleased Bendis did not mess with the essentials of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s original character. In fact, many argue Bendis improved upon the original by creating a more enriched Spider-Man mythos through his fleshed out characters and dialogue. Bendis’s Alias was another groundbreaking title he contributed to the American comic book scene. In 2001, Alias was the debut title in Marvel’s new “MAX Comics,” a mature-themed line aimed at adult readers, often depicting scenes of sex and violence. Bendis was prepared to tone down the sex and violence when he pitched Alias to Marvel, but instead they decided to bypass the irrelevant Comics Code Authority and released their own rating system, one demonstration of Bendis’s influence on today’s comic book industry. Blending crime and superhero genres, Alias focuses on Jessica Jones, a former superheroine turned private investigator. Through Jessica Jones and the MAX Comics line, Bendis was able to explore typically taboo aspects of superheroes’ lives, such as their moral principles, decisions, and “humanity.” Jones, a self-declared failed superheroine, is self-destructive and has quite an inferiority complex due to her lack of acceptance within the superhero loop. When a routine missing persons case not only reveals, but video records the secret identity of Captain Marvel, Jones finds herself in a dilemma calling into question Jones’s principles and the power dynamics of her former and current relationship to the superhero world. Not only is she faced with “outing” one of the most well-known heroes, but also with the decision to render him powerless by exposing his true identity. In essence, Jessica realizes absolute power can inflict powerlessness and loss of will on others, and wrestles over which side of this power dynamic she belongs on. Readers experience her struggle through her self-destructive behavior including excessive drinking, foulmouthed blow-ups, and promiscuity. Moral and ethical decisions are not typically fleshed out for comic book characters, especially superheroes, but Bendis shows readers explicitly how Jessica battles her dilemma and her self-worth through her reckless actions, ultimately rendering her more human and relatable. Alias illustrates Bendis’s knack for natural, engaging dialogue, and for altering the Marvel universe to influence the comic book industry one character at a time. Within the first two months on the stands, Alias sold out despite its graphic scenes of violent or sexual nature inappropriate for younger audiences.

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Warren Ellis (b. 1968). British writer Warren Ellis has played a prominent role in today’s American comic books as a prolific creator displaying breadth and diversity of subjects, genres, and forms. He is known for his approachable and consistent Internet presence through various comics and culture message boards, forums, and blogs he hosts online, creating a strong connection with his fans. A writer of comic books since 1994 when he began working for Marvel, Ellis has been key in redefining and ushering the superhero into the twenty-first century. Ellis’s work often displays grim worldviews and frequently explores various futures rather than pasts while also addressing current issues around popular culture, technology, gender roles, global politics, and human rights. In 1999, Ellis and artist Bryan Hitch collaborated on one of his most highlighted titles, The Authority, featuring a team of superheroes striving to change the world for the better, rather than merely maintain the status quo. Critics and readers alike responded positively to Ellis’s treatment of the superhero in The Authority. Ellis avoided stereotypical superpowers and personalities by developing human characters that happen to have superpowers and display a sense of humor regarding their overblown celebrity status, demonstrating their ability to deconstruct their roles within society and explicitly recognize and comment on the importance of world peace and human rights over their own notoriety. Rather than traditional powers like flying or superhuman strength, Ellis’s Authority heroes display more advanced and unique powers. Jack Hawskmoor, “King of the Cities,” demonstrates superhuman agility and strength and has the capability to “read” and control urban environments through telepathy, allowing him to link into and control any city through such means as the animation and possession of architecture and infrastructure. Meanwhile, Angie Spica distilled numerous intelligent technological devices into nine pints of liquid machinery to replace her blood and became “The Engineer” with nanotechnology flowing through her body offering infinite mechanical abilities, such as tapping into technological infrastructures or creating weapons. The Authority was also groundbreaking through its positive portrayal of a homosexual couple on the team. Apollo and Midnighter, at first glance, seem to be stereotypical muscle-ridden, masculine heroes yet are romantic partners in a caring, monogamous relationship. While homosexual characters are not new to comic books, positive and prominent portrayals of homosexual characters are. Ellis’s readers see the tender, intimate side of their relationship several times without being distracted from the main plot. He illustrates a healthy rather than dysfunctional homosexual relationship between essential characters when typically homosexual comic book characters are portrayed in poor light or end up killed off. Apollo and Midnighter’s groundbreaking relationship in The Authority generally garnered positive responses from readers. There was some controversy regarding a panel illustrating a kiss between the two men and Ellis was asked to alter it to show Apollo kissing Midnighter on the cheek instead. Readers responded indignantly to DC Comics editors questioning why a series regularly depicting murder, genocide, and events of mass destruction should warrant censoring an innocuous kiss between a homosexual couple. Aside from pushing the boundaries of the superhero and gender roles, The Authority also speaks volumes to current world issues such as global politics and human rights. At the turn of the millennium, the team encounters global political and economic superpowers such as the Europe and Japan, as well as terrorist-prone and vulnerable cities such as London, Los Angeles, and New

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York. Fighting to protect inhabitants of planet Earth the team fights colonization by other planets and protects human rights by punishing those committing genocide and political corruption in their nations. Ellis’s more recent collaboration with artist Ben Templesmith on Fell is another series widely recognized for its dense storytelling and experimentation with comic book forms and models of production. In Fell, Detective Richard Fell has been transferred “from over the bridge” to Snowtown, a resident described “feral city” that is run-down, decayed, and plagued with poverty and crime. An illustration of Ellis’s grim worldview, Snowtown offers an anonymous depiction of a mixture of many existing urban contexts and problems, and Templesmith’s gloomy colors and gritty illustrations enhance that feeling. Detective Fell goes about his work trying to make sense of this city whose desperate citizens have given up on it yet spray paint the city’s tag everywhere as a form of protective magic, in hopes the city won’t destroy what has already been labeled its own. Fell goes about solving unique and bizarre crimes in each issue, but citizens question his practices. Crime is such a prevalent part of daily life in Snowtown, they don’t understand Fell’s motivations for solving crimes that will just occur again the very next day, or hour, for that matter. It seems as if Fell wants to change Snowtown for the better, rather than maintaining the status quo, sentiments Ellis’s characters in The Authority also exhibit. Aside from the dense and meaningful stories, Ellis’s experimentation with the form of Fell is perhaps its greatest contribution to modern American comic books. Creator owned, Fell was conceived by Ellis and designed to be accessible to readers financially and contextually. At $1.99 per issue (well under the price of today’s comics costing between $2.50 and $3.99) readers could enter a comic shop with pocket change and leave with a self-contained story in one issue rather than longer story arcs requiring the purchase of multiple issues. Undertaking a comic sticking to this price point meant both Ellis and artist Templesmith remained uncompensated until issues were printed and actually sold. Ellis’s low cost model required compressed stories with shorter page counts, but was supplemented with “back material” including unfinished artwork, author notes expanding on the story, and reader responses. Still in production, Fell has been positively received by readers and critics alike for both its form and content, and has garnered several comic book award nominations. Readers have shown gratitude to Ellis and Image Comics for developing a low cost pricing model and appreciate Ellis’s full use of the shorter page count through carefully developed dense and full storylines in each issue. Mark Millar (b. 1969). Scottish comic book writer Mark Millar began writing comics as a college student. Initially his work was submitted to and published by British comic book presses, like the popular Saviour, which Trident Comics published in the early 1990s. DC Comics brought Millar into the mainstream American comics scene where he immediately established a high-profile by taking over Warren Ellis’s The Authority in 2000. However, scheduling, artist, and censorship problems with editors and competing lucrative offers from publishers caused Millar to move to Marvel in 2001 where he began working on their Ultimate line of comics. Marvel’s Ultimate line aimed to increase readership by revamping popular Marvel Universe characters to make them accessible and attractive to new readers. Millar played a seminal role in re-writing the Marvel character histories through his work on Ultimate X-Men, Ultimate Fantastic Four, and most notably The Ultimates. In

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the Ultimate Marvel Universe, The Ultimates (known as The Avengers in previous Marvel Universes) are a team of superheroes banded together to fend off supervillains and other superhuman threats. Millar’s task was not to merely provide a facelift to these Marvel Universe characters, but to start from scratch and rebuild them anew. The Ultimates included core members from The Avengers, like Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Wasp, Giant Man, and The Hulk, with a handful of others. The Ultimates team is funded by the United States military through S.H.I.E.L.D. (Strategic Hazard Intervention, Espionage and Logistics Directorate), a counterterrorism intelligence unit directed by Nick Fury, former U.S. Army hero and spy. Fury, with the backing of the U.S. government, hopes to reinvigorate the super-soldier program that originally spawned Captain America and recruits The Ultimates to fight against increasingly threatening global meta-human and mutant activity. Emergent themes in Millar’s The Ultimates series reflect current global and domestic issues such as homeland security, colonization and genocide, and the United States’ motives and involvement with the Middle East. Early on The Ultimates face protecting homeland security and the challenge of controlling their own member, The Hulk, as he rampages New York City going after his ex-girlfriend’s date in a jealous rage, killing over eight hundred civilians. Millar carefully develops his characters before moving on to his next story arc where The Ultimates protect the Earth from colonization and possible extinction, reflecting current genocide crimes and the imperialistic global climate. Millar wanted his superheroes to be working and fighting relevant and meaningful battles rather than chasing down supervillains, and this is apparent in the sequel, The Ultimates 2, where the team begins to face potential involvement in United States foreign relations in the Middle East. Pressured by the White House to work with European Union supersoldiers, members of The Ultimates begin to question their role in helping the United States push for increasing global power and control of oil resources. Climatically the group faces off against the Liberators, a superhero force comprised of recruits from enemy nations in the series like Iran, North Korea, China, Russia, and Syria, reflecting the recent threat of attacks on American land. Battling the Liberator’s invasion on United States soil, The Ultimates organize a counter-offensive and successfully defeat the invaders one-by-one. Throughout the larger obstacles facing The Ultimates Millar weaves in subplots and themes allowing for character development such as: Janet (the Wasp) and Hank Pym’s (Giant Man) marital issues; Bruce Banner’s (The Hulk) internal struggles over his abilities as a research scientist trying to reformulate the super soldier serum; and Steve Rogers’s (Captain America) adjustments to living in the modern world after being resurrected from a World War II incident in 1945. The rich subplots also reveal tensions within the group. Some members distrust Bruce Banner because of his volatility and perceived lack of mental stability, while Hank Pym is jealous of the attention Steve Rogers has been paying his wife, Janet. Other tensions relate to the goals and mission of their team. Thor, in particular, feels they should not be used as a tool for the U.S. to establish its power with preemptive strikes, and is quite vocal about his opinions, causing some to question his loyalty to the group. Meanwhile, their celebrity status causes other tensions. Some team members share snide remarks regarding Tony Stark’s (Iron Man) numerous television news talk show appearances and romantic trysts with leading ladies of Hollywood, or demonstrate jealousy about Captain America’s potential movie deal.

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Readers familiar with the Marvel Universe were likely skeptical Millar could successfully re-write decades old mythology without alienating fans and characters or destroying the continuity of the existing Marvel Universe, but responses to The Ultimates were mostly favorable, especially among reviewers and critics. Some hardcore fans blasted Millar and his work on various comic book message boards and blogs, but the soaring sales figures spoke to the success of Millar’s undertaking. Millar’s exploration of American domestic issues continued in his much anticipated seven-part Civil War series published by Marvel Comics in 2006 and 2007. Considered a “Marvel Comics Event,” the storyline included superheroes fighting against one another in an ideological battle that could forever change the Marvel Universe. The basis of the conflict regarded the Superhuman Registration Act, a law passed by the U.S. government that required all superhumans to register their powers and identities with the government or be persecuted by S.H.I.E.L.D. (the government-funded superhuman counterterrorism and intelligence unit). The law registered superhumans, and non-government enforcers like civilian supporters. Reaction to the policy among superheroes was mixed, creating a divide between former allies with the pro-registration camp, led by Iron Man, and the anti-registration camp, led by Captain America. Millar uses this conflict as a basis to explore many current domestic issues facing the United States, such as the immigration reform debate, the politically and ideologically divided climate of the nation, and the erosion of civil liberties. The Superhuman Registration Act and the superhuman’s reactions to it reflect some of the debates surrounding the United States’ immigration reform issue. Some heroes feel they shouldn’t have to register with the government since they already positively contribute to society by capturing supervillains or protecting the public. On the other hand, the pro-registration camp recognizes the value of standardized training for superhumans and feels the registration process would allow for more legitimacy and respect from the American public. Millar’s political allegory continues with the divided superhero community replicating the currently divided political ideologies of the American public under the current administration. The philosophical war the superheroes are experiencing brings up issues of government oversight and involvement in the private lives of its citizens, including the erosion of civil liberties. The anti-registration camp feels that being forced to work for the government produces governmental lackeys and, ultimately, that it undermines their freedom to perform their work as they choose. They also feel that their civil liberties are threatened because if they register and reveal their true identities, then their privacy and safety are at risk. Regardless of whether or not they register they will be subject to heavy surveillance by registration enforcers or by S.H.I.E.L.D. Millar’s Civil War was highly anticipated and sales soared, though reader response remained mixed, as is normal with a major comic book event such as this. Millar’s undertaking changed the Marvel Universe in a big way and readers will continue to learn to what extent the future Marvel storylines involving Civil War characters develop from the outcome of the war. Even Civil War’s numerous “crossovers” or “tie-ins” (stories that combine two or more otherwise separated characters, stories, settings or universes that meet and interact with each other) demonstrated the multitude to which this conflict altered and influenced the mythology of the Marvel Universe. While crossovers and tie-ins are normal in the comic book industry, Millar’s Civil War spawned over one hundred comic book issues under over twenty titles, demonstrating the impact of Civil War on the Marvel

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Universe and comic book industry. Numerous new titles were also developed from the plotlines in Civil War, which illustrate and unfold the results of the war in the entire Marvel Universe. Women in Today’s Comic Book Industry. Some criticize the comic book industry for remaining a “boys club” due to the prominent number of males in the field, yet female editors, writers, and artists are becoming more common and gaining more recognition for their work in the medium. American writer Devin Grayson’s (b. 1971) Batman: Gothic Knights emerged in 2000, making her the first woman to have a regular ongoing writing assignment on the Batman title and garnered distinction and recognition among the industry and from fans. Grayson’s Batman marked a new direction in that she brought a concern for relationships to the character, something her male contemporaries did not display as well in their stories. Nominated in 1999 and 2000 for the Comics Buyer’s Guide Award for Favorite Writer, Grayson is still an active comic book writer today. In 2005 she wrapped up a five year run on Nightwing, wrote the creator owned Matador for DC Comics’ Wildstorm imprint, and in 2006 published DC Universe: Inheritance, a novel about fathers and sons, starring Batman, Nightwing, Green Arrow, Arsenal, Aquaman, and Tempest. Jessica Abel (b. 1969) is another American comic book writer and artist gaining recognition whose work leans more toward the independent or alternative genre of comic books. Abel self-published her embellished hand-bound comic book Artbabe in the early 1990s, which was eventually picked up by Fantagraphics for publication. Abel delved into longer comic books in 2000 when she started La Perdida, originally a five part series later reissued as a single volume in 2005. Receiving positive critical response, La Perdida featured a Mexican American woman, Carla, venturing into Mexico City in search of her identity after being raised only by her white American mother. Abel’s work often includes the experiences of Generation X characters and demonstrates careful attention to communicating her characters’ gestures and facial expressions. Recently Abel has worked on Carmina, a prose novel for teens, Life Sucks, a new graphic novel, and a textbook about making comics. Gail Simone is yet another prominent woman writer in today’s comic book industry. Simone first entered mainstream comics with her work on Deadpool (later relaunched as Agent X) in 2002, but had previously been noticed by comic book fans through her Women in Refrigerators website cataloging the many instances in which female comic book characters were victimized in plot devices for male protagonists. Simone took over DC Comics’ Birds of Prey, featuring an all-female cast of characters. Her work on this title has garnered credit for her balance of suspenseful action, thoughtful character development, and humor. Simone has also contributed to DC Comics’ 2006 “Infinite Crisis” event through the Villains United series, in which she revitalized the Catwoman character. She remains active in the online comic book community through her “You’ll All Be Sorry” weekly column on the Comic Book Resources website, and through Bloodstains on the Looking Glass, her blog. She continues to write and recently has worked on a series for Gen 13 as well as Welcome to Tranquility, a creator owned project for Wildstorm. Bibliography Abel, Jessica. Artbabe [Issues 1–5]. Self-published, 1992–1996. ———. Artbabe [Vol. 2] [Issues 1–4]. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics, 1997–1999. ———. La Perdida. New York: Pantheon Books, 2006.

COMIC BOOKS ———. Carmina. New York: HarperCollins, forthcoming in 2007. ———. Life Sucks. New York: First Second, 2008. Bendis, Brian Michael. Torso. Orange, CA: Image Comics, 2001. ———. Ultimate Spider-Man: Power and Responsibility [Vol. 1]. New York: Marvel Comics, 2001. ———. Ultimate Spider-Man: Learning Curve [Vol. 2]. New York: Marvel Comics, 2001. ———. Alias. New York: Marvel Comics, 2002. Benton, Mike. The Comic Book in America: An Illustrated History. Dallas, TX: Taylor Publications, 1989. Burton, Tim. Batman. Warner Home Video, 1989. Donner, Richard. Superman. Warner Home Video, 1978. Ellis, Warren. The Authority: Relentless [Vol. 1]. LaJolla, CA: Wildstorm/DC Comics, 2000a. ———. The Authority: Under New Management [Vol. 2]. LaJolla, CA: Wildstorm/DC Comics, 2000b. ———. Fell [Issues 1, 2, 4, 5]. Orange, CA: Image Comics, 2006. Gaiman, Neil. The Sandman [Issues 1–75]. New York: Vertigo, 1989–1996. Grayson, Devin. Batman: Gothic Knights [Issues 1–32]. New York: DC Comics, 2000–2002. ———. Nightwing [Issues 53, 71–100, 108–117]. New York: DC Comics, 2000–2005. ———. Matador [Issues 1–6]. LaJolla, CA: Wildstorm/DC Comics, 2005. ———. DC Universe: Inheritance. New York: Warner Books, 2006. Jones, Gerard. Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book. New York: Basic Books, 2004. Justice League Unlimited. 2001–2007. Created by Gardner Fox. Warner Brothers Entertainment. Lucas, George. Raiders of the Lost Ark. Paramount Home Video, 1981. McFarlane, Todd. Spawn [Issues 1–73]. Orange, CA: Image Comics, 1992–1998. Millar, Mark. Saviour [Issues 1–5]. Leicester, UK: Trident Comics, 1990. ———. Ultimate X-Men [Issues 1–12, 15–33]. New York: Marvel Comics, 2000–2003. ———. The Ultimates: Superhuman [Vol. 1]. New York: Marvel Comics, 2002. ———. Ultimate Fantastic Four [Issues 1–6]. New York: Marvel Comics, 2003–2004. ———. The Ultimates: Homeland Security [Vol. 2]. New York: Marvel Comics, 2004. ———. The Ultimates 2: Gods and Monsters [Vol. 1]. New York: Marvel Comics, 2005. ———. Civil War [Issues 1–3, 5, 6]. New York: Marvel Comics, 2006–2007. Miller, Frank. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns [Issues 1–4]. New York: DC Comics, 1986. ———. Daredevil [Issues 168–191]. New York: Marvel Comics, 1981–1983. ———. Sin City [Issues 1–13]. Dark Horse Comics, 1991–1992. Milwaukie, OR. Schumacher, Joel. Batman and Robin. Warner Home Video, 1997. Scott, Ridley. Alien. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 1984. Simone, Gail. Deadpool [Issues 65–69]. New York: Marvel Comics, 2002. ———. Agent X [Issues 1–15]. New York: Marvel Comics, 2002–2003. ———. Birds of Prey [Issues 56–102]. New York: DC Comics, 2003–2007. ———. Villains United [Issues 1–6]. New York: DC Comics, 2005. ———. Gen 13 [Vol. 4] [Issues 1–4]. LaJolla, CA: Wildstorm/DC Comics, 2006–2007. ———. Welcome to Tranquility [Issues 1–6]. LaJolla, CA: Wildstorm/DC Comics, 2006–2007. ———. Bloodstains on the Looking Glass [Online January 2007]. http://happystains. blogspot.com/. ———. You’ll All Be Sorry [Weekly Column] [Online January 2007]. www.comicbookresources. com/columns. ———. Women in Refrigerators [Online January 2007]. http://www.unheardtaunts.com/wir/. Smallville. 2001–2007. Created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar. Warner Brothers Entertainment. Ware, Chris. Acme Novelty Library. New York: Pantheon, 2005. Wertham, Fredric. Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Rinehart, 1954. Wise, Robert. Star Trek. Paramount Home Video, 1980.

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Further Reading Benton, Mike. The Comic Book in America: An Illustrated History. Dallas, TX: Taylor Publications, 1989; Klock, Geoff. How to Read Superhero Comics and Why. New York: Continuum, 2002; McCloud, Scott. Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology are Revolutionizing an Art Form. New York: Perennial, 2000; McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994; and Wright, Bradford. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

LESLIE BUSSERT

COMING OF AGE FICTION Stories of adolescents confronting the travails of growing up constitute one of the most readily identifiable genres in American fiction. Oddly enough, the preponderance of such works has resulted in critical inattention, with few scholars willing to take on the formidable project of taxonomizing a hurly-burly form whose twentyfirst-century exemplars can range from winsome explorations of savant idealism (Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, 2005) to prurient exposés of teenage decadence (Nick McDonnell’s Twelve, 2002). The relative paucity of scholarship is unfortunate, for how authors deploy the genre’s conventions can reveal a great deal about how the cultural identity of the American teenager is construed at any given historical moment—a concern usually left to sociologists, who more likely look to film and popular music rather than literature as proof texts. Although works such as John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960) helped shaped perceptions of the Silent Generation, and, to a far less canonical extent, cult classics like Richard Fariña’s Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me (1966) and Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (1991) influenced enduring images of hipsters and slackers, the social function of coming-of-age fiction is frequently subsumed within more familiar academic concerns such as gender, race, and class. For contemporary fiction, this means that a stellar novel such as Tobias Wolff’s Old School (2003) garners attention more for what its prep-school setting says about Fitzgeraldesque aspiration and elitism than how its pre-Kennedy assassination milieu reflects the predominance of baby-boomer nostalgia. Debut efforts by J.T. LeRoy (Sarah, 2000), Nell Freudenberger (Lucky Girls, 2004), and Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep, 2005), meanwhile, are alternately praised as wunderkind achievements or dismissed as publishing hype. As a result, what their protagonists’ maladjustment says about the current state of the American family and its effect on such central teenage temptations as sex, drug abuse, and consumerism remains unexamined. To appreciate fully how coming-of-age fiction at least reinforces, if not directly enables, the construction of generational identity, authors and readers alike must acknowledge how the genre’s central themes and traits are constantly rearticulated within ongoing “moral panics”—those cultural debates in which the official or press reaction to a deviant social or cultural phenomenon [associated with young people] is ‘out of proportion’ to the actual threat . . . It implies that public concern is in excess of what is appropriate if concern were directly proportional to objective harm. (Springhall 1999, 7)

Definition. At its most basic, coming-of-age fiction involves young people confronting one or more moral crises associated with maturation. Although these crises typically revolve around major initiation rituals—loss of virginity, high-school

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE The quintessential example of the resistance to growing up, of course, is J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), in which Holden Caulfield clings furiously to childhood innocence in a desperate effort to elude the contagion of “phoniness” that he believes infects adults. Despite the rebellion and insouciance that the genre promotes, its exemplary narratives rarely challenge the underlying ideologies of adulthood. Nowhere, for example, does The Catcher in the Rye question whether the “traditional” nuclear family is a historical quirk rather than a universal ideal—it merely expresses sorrow over parents being too distracted by material pursuits to give that ideal more than lip service.

or college graduation, entry into the work world, even marriage and/or unplanned parenthood—the protagonists’ attitude toward initiation is usually influenced by his or her regard for the moral example set by parents and mentors, which in turn determines the degree to which characters are willing to assume the responsibilities of productive adulthood. From the 1920s to the 1980s, coming-of-age stories expressed reservation about the moral compromises that these responsibilities entail and questioned the meaningfulness of the rewards society dispenses for fulfilling them. The genre thus has a long, canonical history of valorizing youth as the ethical apogee of the life cycle, with any capitulation to elders’ standards deemed a falling away from the idealism and intuitive certainty that young people are said to embody. History. By and large, contemporary novels reiterate this ideal. As such, what Leslie Feidler first asserted in 1958 remains true today: fictional adolescents are often a “projection of our [adult] moral plight . . . of our guiltiness in failing to protect and cultivate children’s original purity with enough love and security” (24). This projection is never more apparent than when a fictional text such as Tom Wolfe’s salacious campus parody I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004) is cited as anecdotal evidence of youth’s disaffection in nonfiction studies such as Jean M. Twenge’s Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before (2006). That is, fictional teens are often taken as prima facie evidence of what real adolescents are experiencing, with little critical investigation into who writes such narratives and who their intended audience might be. One reason that most critics shy away from cataloguing the genre’s formal traits is that, in practice, just about every element of the above definition requires qualification. For starters, there is no consensus on the age boundaries that constitute “young people.” Works such as Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River (2001) take their cues from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1961) and employ Scout Finch-style characters on the cusp of puberty. Others—Marshall Boswell’s Alternative Atlanta, Dave King’s The Ha-Ha (both 2005)—recall Beat Generation classics by centering upon aimless thirty- and even forty-year-old protagonists suffering from extended adolescences. Nor does the genre display any consensus about the success of maturation. Some efforts follow the David Copperfield model by concluding with heroes and heroines completing the bildung process (Lauren Grodstein’s Reproduction is the Flaw of Love, 2004; Kim Wong Keltner’s The Dim Sum of All Things, 2005). Others are more akin to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise by resisting the equation of growing up and narrative closure (Dan Pope’s In the Cherry Tree, 2003).

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Attitudes toward popular culture and its potential effect on identity formation differ as well. In some cases (Debra Weinstein’s Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z., 2004, Gordon Korman’s Born to Rock, 2006), art is a genuine medium of selfmaking; in others, it represents the soullessness of consumerism (Brad Whittington’s Welcome to Fred, 2003). In the end, one cannot even say that the genre appeals to a specific reader. Coming-of-age narratives aimed at teenage readers tend to be tagged “young-adult fiction” (Lauren Myracle’s TTYL, 2004, and TTFN, 2005). Those aimed at a generational segment are generally marketed to a “hip” collegiate audience (Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics, 2006), while others fall into that unfortunately named “chick-lit” category (Ann Brashare’s Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series, 2001–). Still others achieve recognition as “serious” literature (Mark Haddon’s The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time, 2003). In select cases—Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002), Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason’s The Rule of the Four (2004)—the maturation drama may even seem secondary in comparison to more prominent generic elements drawn from supernatural, horror, or mystery/suspense. Additionally, coming of age need not even dramatize the concerns of the present generation. In many cases, the form appears in historical novels as a means of dramatizing social changes in a past decade, as when Mark Childress in One Mississippi (2006) explores racism and homophobia in the mid-1970s South or Don DeGrazia in American Skin (2000) treats the same topics in the late 1980s Chicago hardcore punk scene. Nor can one speak of a definitively “American” experience. By far, the most pronounced trend in the genre in recent years is the preoccupation with multiculturalism, with authors such as Edwidge Danticant, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chris Abini, and Jeffrey Eugenides exploring issues of double consciousness, assimilation, and nationalism through the maturation plot’s standard conventions and motifs. Despite the variety of works that can be labeled coming-of-age fiction, the genre draws its conventions from several recognizable narrative forms that imbue it with mythic depth and relevance. Foremost among these is the quest plot found in classic Greek epics such as the Odyssey and later medieval romances, whether the Romance of the Rose or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Because quest narratives are structured as a series of temptations that test a young warrior’s moral virtue, the plot functions as an allegory of the journey of life, with young people striving to maintain the purity of their convictions in a fallen world rife with sin. Holden Caulfield’s fantasy of protecting children from falling off the cliff of rye while they play is his version of the knightly charge, with the fall a symbol of the Biblical fall into knowledge that would cost the children their prelapsarian innocence. In contemporary versions, Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close most overtly evokes this motif. After his father is killed in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the book’s precocious narrator, Oskar Schell, sets out through New York City to discover the meaning of a secret key belonging to his lost parent. Other exemplars of this tradition subvert and even parody its pretension to chivalric nobility: Tristan Egolf’s Skirt and the Fiddle (2002) reads like a slapstick inversion of Pilgrim’s Progress, with its violin-prodigy hero, Charlie Evans, attempting to maintain his love for Louise Gascoygne as he navigates farcical scenarios instigated by his best friend, the anarchist Tinsel Greetz. A related genre from which coming-of-age fiction has long borrowed is the picaresque. Emerging from sixteenth-century Spain with the anonymously published Lazarillo de Tormes and in eighteenth-century England with Henry Fielding’s

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Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones (not to mention Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders) the picaresque chronicles the adventures of a roguish hero whose journey is more of an episodic ramble than a moral quest. In the American tradition, the most influential picaresque novel has been Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). With the popularity of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), the American picaresque became known as the “road novel” by employing the thrill of interstate travel as a metaphor for adrenaline-rush exploration of illicit sex, drugs, and music. Like many a contemporary picaresque, Dave Eggers’s You Shall Know Our Velocity! (2002) wears its Beat Generation affinities on its sleeve, but with a twist: instead of emulating the scheming and petty thievery of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, Eggers’s Will and Hand jaunt the globe attempting to give away an undeserved inheritance. In a similar vein, David Schickler’s Sweet and Vicious (2004) updates another popular variation of the picaresque, the “on-the-lam” novel, with a pair of star-crossed lovers, Henry and Grace, running both from mobsters and their own haunted pasts. It is perhaps indicative of the increasingly global and multi-ethnic mindset of contemporary writers that twenty-first-century road novels rarely stay within American borders. In addition to Eggers’s Velocity, several modern picaresque roam to international as opposed to domestic settings. Even more than the quest narrative and the picaresque, coming-of-age fiction emerges from the bildungsroman tradition said to begin with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1794–1796). The earliest Romantic versions of the “novel of development” resisted the entry into adulthood by equating innocence with childhood. By the Victorian era, however, this resistance gave way to an emphasis on social adjustment, with characters like Dickens’s eponymous David Copperfield and Pip in Great Expectations (1861) assimilating painful lessons in love, money, and social standing to become respectable (and productive) young men. This Side of Paradise (1920), Fitzgerald’s first novel (and his most popular during his lifetime), significantly broke with the Dickens model in one important aspect: rather than depict Amory Blaine shouldering the burden of maturity, Paradise ends with him still stranded in uncertainty: “I know myself, but that is all—” reads the book’s final line. The lack of resolution was why Fitzgerald’s publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons, twice rejected the novel before finally recognizing its virtues lay in style rather than plot resolution. From the 1950s through the 1970s, it became something of a political statement for bildungsroman to follow Fitzgerald’s example and resisting narrative closure as a means of protesting the supposed conformity demanded by adulthood. Thus the famous final scene of Charles Webb’s The Graduate (1963), in which Benjamin Braddock, after rescuing his girlfriend, Elaine, from an undesirable wedding ceremony, poses a question with generational implications: “Where does this bus go?”

BILDUNGSROMAN In 1921, the bildungsroman was such a conventional form that F. Scott Fitzgerald could complain that “the most overworked art-form at present in America is this ‘history of the young man . . . [which] consists chiefly in dumping all your youthful adventures into the reader’s lap with a profound air of importance, keeping carefully within the formulas of Wells and James Joyce” (1921, 43).

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(237). Interestingly, in the 1980s and 1990s, it became more common in works such as David Leavitt’s The Lost Language of the Cranes (1986) and Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) for bildungsroman to reject adolescent indirection with emphatic recognitions of the need to grow up. Especially for writers born after 1960, this trend reflects the Generation X insistence that the babyboomer unwillingness to relinquish youth forced the subsequent generation to assume responsibility for maintaining familial and communal ties at an early age. It is too soon to measure how Generation X’s children will regard the bildung process, but a cursory glance suggests that contemporary novels lean more toward the Victorian model. Some (Sandra Cisnero’s Caramelo, 2002; Claire Massud’s The Emperor’s Children, 2006) outright insist on maturation as necessary for emotional well-being. Others seem to reject it by challenging conventional definitions of what it means to be “grown up” (Ann Packer’s The Dive from Clausen’s Pier; Joyce Carol Oates’s I’ll Take You There, both 2002). Even so, such works do so less out of a Salinger-like nostalgia for childhood innocence than a desire to retain the right to define one’s own milestones of maturity. Trends and Themes. In my study of twentieth-century coming-of-age narratives, Alienated-Adolescent Fiction (2001), I suggest that five general themes can be traced through the genre. They provide a functional paradigm by which to measure the changes in post-2000 works. Five Themes in Coming-of-Age Narratives 1) Alienated-youth fiction portrays rebellion as youth’s response to adults’ view of them as a social problem. Stereotyped as a potential threat to cultural stability, adolescents realize that the sole power they possess is their ability to fluster and frighten their elders. By defying convention, youth act out their status as “different” in order to insist that they exist beyond the norms of adult comprehension . . . 2) Although alienated-youth fiction celebrates teenage rebellion, it does not suggest that withdrawal will cure youth’s discontent. Instead, teen readers are urged to recognize that they can begin to overcome the spiritual emptiness of modern America only by addressing these problems rather than running away from them. These works thus teach youth that they can transform the conditions through engagement, not detachment . . . 3) Alienated-adolescent fiction presents the view that one key to the growth of selfunderstanding is the development of a unique voice. Through personalized forms of expression, young people are able to articulate and thus comprehend their disaffection . . . 4) As they depict the process of adolescent self-development, authors encourage teens to open themselves to new experiences, to experiment, and to make identifications across cultural boundaries. In particular, popular culture provides a resource through which young people can fashion their sense of who they are—and who they would like to be . . . 5) Alienated-adolescent fiction does not speak exclusively to young people. It also addresses adults, seeking to energize their concerns for teenagers by reminding them of their responsibility to provide youth a meaningful future . . . (99–105)

While contemporary coming-of-age fiction has not abandoned these themes, it deploys them in proportions that are markedly different from such genre classics as Catcher or Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), resulting in a curiously distinct impression of its regard for maturation. Whereas earlier works dramatized the adolescent dread of growing up, contemporary versions depict youth as having, out of necessity,

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to assume the gauntlet of adult responsibility, largely because of the failure and ineptitude of elders. As noted above, the pendulum seems to have swung more to the adult side of the youth continuum. These novels are ultimately less interested in the agency of youth as social protest than with young people’s obligation to the repair of institutions like home and the family that, in their decayed state, are said to subject teenagers to duress and uncertainty. 1.Youth as a Social Problem. The most striking trend among contemporary depictions of these themes is the relative lack of emphasis on the first topic. In previous decades, youth was a social threat that young people were only too happy to act upon as a means of defining themselves against adult foils. Nowhere was this most evident than in what I call the “youth-at-risk” narrative, a subgenre that extends from pulpy juvenile-delinquent tales of the late-1940s and 1950s (Irving Shulman’s The Amboy Dukes, Evan Hunter’s The Blackboard Jungle) to the 1980s’ two most notorious descent-into-decadence novels, Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (1984) and Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero (1985) (Alienated Youth Fiction 88–91). Perhaps because these latter two works are now as widely ridiculed as they ever were read, imitations have dwindled since the peak of the Generation X debates in the mid-1990s. Before then, publishers routinely hyped potential blockbusters such as Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) as literary extensions of Zero, but now such comparisons are likely to invite derision. Consider the fate of Nick McDonnell’s Twelve, one of only a handful of works since 2000 to openly embrace the “youth-at-risk” tradition. Nearly every reviewer felt compelled to remark upon the similarities between Twelve and Less Than Zero, in part because, like Ellis, McDonnell published his debut at an exceedingly young age (eighteen, as opposed to Ellis’s twenty) but also because, in light of the Zero template, the downward spiral of its main character, White Mike, seems exceedingly predictable. If not for the era-specific brand names, whole passages could be mistaken for Ellis’s disaffected prose: Claude walks down Mulberry Street in his dark green North Face parka. In his pockets he is carrying: One clear plastic prism filled with weed, one Coach wallet containing $965 . . . one Citibank ATM card, one American Express Platinum card . . . and one Nokia cell phone . . . (McDonnell 2006, 77)

Although Twelve sold a striking 300,000 copies, reviews were mixed at best, with many commentators dismissing McDonnell as an example of publishing nepotism. (His father was at the time the managing editor of Sports Illustrated and his godfather brokered a book deal with good friend Morgan Entrenkin, head of Atlantic Monthly/Grove Press [Quart 171]). Significantly, McDonnell’s second novel, The Third Brother (2005), tones down the chic detachment in favor of a conventional narrative grounded in the far more somber context of September 11, 2001. Despite the rarity of narratives like Twelve, at least one prominent “moral panic” has emerged throughout the past decade to distinguish contemporary coming-of-age fictions from past treatments. On April 20, 1999, two students at Littleton, Colorado’s Columbine High School, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, massacred twelve fellow teenagers and a teacher with assault rifles, in the process wounding two dozen others before committing suicide. The incident was the deadliest school shooting in American history, but it was by no means the only one of its era. At least five

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incidents had occurred by 1999 (Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi) inspiring heated debates over issues as diverse as gun control, high school bullying, and violent rock music. As the bloodiest of them, “Columbine” quickly became a cultural touchstone inspiring numerous literary adaptations that have appeared with only a little less frequency than the lamentable (and seemingly endless) real-life copycat incidents. A short list of coming-of-age novels based on Harris and Klebold’s killing spree includes Todd Strasser’s Give a Boy a Gun (2000), Mark A. Rempel’s Point Blank (2002), Douglas Coupland’s Hey, Nostradamus! (2003), Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin (2003), Francine Prose’s After (2004), Jim Shepard’s Project X (2005), Kali VanBaale’s The Space Between (2006), Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes (2007), and C.G. Watson’s Quad (2007). Typically, the main dramatic concern of these novels is the survivors’ struggle to determine who or what is responsible for such explosions of teen violence. There is no shortage of blame to go around: bullying, high-school cliques, parental neglect, and the supposed emptiness of American life all come under indictment. What is most dramatically interesting is how these books structure the postlapsarian plot of the conventional coming-of-age narrative into redemptive quests for adult solutions to these social ills. Typically, these works involve a dramatic admission of culpability on the part of either fellow students or parents that, without absolving the actual murderers of criminal responsibility, nevertheless insists that society at large is to blame, and not the killers’ individual pathology. In some cases, the culpability is even literal. In Picoult’s best-selling Nineteen Minutes, Josie Cormier shocks a packed courtroom during the trial of a teen assailant when she admits that she, not the killer, had shot her boyfriend Matt Royston during a locker-room siege. However unpremeditated, her firing upon Matt is an empathic act of identification with the ostracized gunman, Peter: [Josie] realized that in that one moment, when she hadn’t been thinking, she knew exactly what he’d felt as he moved through the school with his backpack and guns. Every kid in this school played a role: jock, brain, beauty, freak. All Peter had done was what they all secretly dreamed of: be someone, even for just nineteen minutes, who nobody else was allowed to judge. (Picoult 2007, 440–441)

Although certainly not justifying Peter’s murder spree, Josie’s actions are meant to explain how adolescents can snap under the psychological pressures of growing up and resort to such heinous crimes. In other cases, the redemptive gesture is less a confession than a Christ-like sacrifice on the part of survivors to redeem adults who have allowed these adolescent pressures to build. In Coupland’s Hey, Nostradamus, Jason manages to disarm and kill a gunman in a 1988 attack in his high school, only to have the fellow senior whom he secretly married the weekend before, Cheryl, die in his arms. The following fifteen years covered in the novel find Jason suffering not only survivor’s guilt, but enduring community suspicion that he was involved in the massacre. At a climactic moment, Jason’s father, a religious fanatic named Reg, even denounces him as a murderer. Unable to bear the burden of suspicion, Jason simply vanishes into the woods, insisting that “[r]edemption exists, but only for others. I believe, and yet I lack faith. I tried building a private world free of hypocrisy, but all I ended up with was a sour little bubble as insular and exclusive as my father’s” (Coupland 1991, 135). Jason’s disappearance remains unsolved at the narrative’s end, but it

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proves a catalyst for shaking Reg out of the intolerance that allowed him to suspect his own son of homicide. A secondary theme among school-shooting novels is teenagers’ response to adult efforts to police their youth culture to prevent future murder sprees. Prose’s After takes this topic to dystopian extremes. Just as post-Columbine commentators blamed Harris and Klebold’s homicidal rage on video games and Goth-rock music, so, too, school authorities in After ban kids from reading The Catcher in the Rye and establish a detention facility called Camp Turnaround, from which no teens ever return. Marketed to a young-adult audience (as were Point Blank and Project X), After panders a little too blatantly to teen paranoia over the equation between parental oversight and totalitarianism. At the same time, novelists can be too arch in insisting that moral panics are inspired as much by adult prurience as concern for adolescents. DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little, a surprise 2003 Booker Prize winner, satirizes parental anxieties over youth’s indiscretions as part of a larger American fascination with crime, celebrity, and spectacle. When the eponymous hero is accused of being a conspirator in a school rampage committed by his friend Jesus Navarro, he takes to the road to escape to Mexico, but his pursuit by the police becomes the subject of a reality television show. This plot point owes a great deal to Oliver Stone’s 1994 film Natural Born Killers and suggests how its real interest is not adolescence but American media culture. Indeed, Pierre (real name: Peter Warren Findley) is so intent on ridiculing the phenomenon of moral panics that the empathic power of the Columbine story completely evaporates, and the characters prove little more than caricatures. If a conclusion can be drawn from post-2000 coming-of-age novels’ treatment of the “at risk” theme, it is that few authors are willing to depict teenage delinquency as a genuine crisis. Instead, authors insist that moral panics elevate maladjustment to epidemic status so adults can seize upon scapegoats for adolescent problems. Whereas The Blackboard Jungle and even Less Than Zero emphatically insist that youth have fallen prey to amorality, contemporary works portray youth as victims of adult prejudice, arguing that elders fixate on teenagers to excuse themselves from confronting social ills of their own making. As such, there is a paucity of true “bad boys” in contemporary narratives—even the mass murderers are merely misunderstood. 2. Ethical Engagement. Because contemporary coming-of-age novels seem less inclined to threaten adults with rebellion and anarchy, it should not be surprising that they likewise deemphasize withdrawal and insist instead on the imperative of moral agency. One sure sign of this commitment is fictional youth’s essential traditionalism. Whereas mid-century novels reveled in sexual experimentation and pharmacological derring-do, recent bildungsroman yearn for a return to the security of conventional mores, which it is youth’s duty to preserve and reinvigorate. This surprising conservatism is perhaps most overt in narratives about children of the 1960s, who must decide whether the legacy of that vaunted decade is personal liberation or solipsism. In a majority of such works, the answer is decidedly the latter. An example of this trend is Goldberry Long’s Juniper Tree Burning (2001), which tells the story of a child of hippies who so resents her unconventional upbringing that she rebels by embracing upper-class suburban life. So thoroughly does Juniper reject her parents’ alternative lifestyle that she changes her name to the anonymous sounding “Jennifer Davis.” Even when Jennifer abandons her perfect husband to take to the road and retrace the final days of her dead brother Sunny Boy Blue, she

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is not questing for bohemian gnosis but resenting the instability of her nomadic childhood, which has left her feeling unworthy of love: If I’ve ever wanted anything, it’s a membership in the real world of family and kids and bedtime stories, the reliable progression of the small rituals like cornflakes for breakfast and after-school piano lessons . . . I couldn’t imagine a man who was capable of loving me . . . or, for that matter, a man I could love back. (Long 2001, 79–80)

Although Juniper/Jennifer’s journey involves accepting and forgiving those responsible for her past, it also requires a commitment to avoiding the divorce, drug abuse, and poverty that marked her and Sunny Boy’s childhood. Only by doing so will she spare her own daughter the confusion and self-loathing that has impeded her maturation. Another obvious subgenre in which the ethical engagement theme is prominently configured as entry into adulthood is that unfortunately labeled niche known as “lad lit,” the male counterpart to “chick lit.” “Lad lit” novels include: Thomas Beller’s The Sleepover Artist (2001), Mark Barrowcliffe’s Girlfriend 44 (2001), Steve Almond’s My Life in Heavy Metal (2004), Kyle Smith’s Love Monkey (2004), and Scott Mebus’s Booty Nomad (2006). These novels follow a common arc in which— regardless of their individual, often madcap plot premises—the struggle to outgrow promiscuity parallels a quest for paternal acceptance, usually culminating in an afterward in which the formerly directionless hero finds happiness at least in monogamy, if not in matrimony. The best of such works is Boswell’s Alternative Atlanta, in which graduate-school dropout Gerald Brinkman pines for the married love of his life, Nora, while struggling to reconcile with his eccentric, distracted father, Paul. Only when Gerald learns a secret that explains his and Paul’s alienation can he assure himself he can avoid a similar pattern of irresponsibility, and he can save Nora from her unhappy relationship. The novel ends with a flash forward that demonstrates Gerald’s commitment to adulthood: not only are he and Nora married, but he has given up his unremunerative career as a local music critic to finish his doctoral degree. In this way, such books insist that young men must resolve their conflicts with their fathers before they themselves can become men. Yet ethical commitment is not always marked by as climactic an entry into adulthood as marriage and parenthood. At other times, protagonists may come of age by making small stands for their intuitive sense of right instead of giant leaps for maturity. In Peace Like a River, eleven-year-old Reuben Land must choose between breaking the law and betraying his brother, Davy, who is hiding from the law after being charged with murder. Rueben’s ultimate unwillingness to turn Davy in reflects his growing awareness that, because adult laws are prone to corruption, individual conscience must guide one’s decisions in life. In Jack Riggs’s When the Finch Rises (2003), Raybert Williams resolves not to perpetuate the brutality of the adult world after his best friend Palmer Conroy chastises him for gratuitously killing a bird with his new BB-gun. Palmer’s anger teaches Raybert the necessity of breaking the cycle of violence into which the two friends have been raised. In other cases, the choices are more whimsical. In Jim Lynch’s The Highest Tide (2005), thirteen-year-old Miles O’Malley’s obsession with ecologist Rachel Carson leads him to discover a rare sea creature. The sudden attention he receives corrupts the purity of his conservationism until he decides to reject his celebrity and rejoice in the humility of scientific pursuit. As these examples suggest, these moral gestures can be self-consciously

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modest. Not unlike James Joyce’s classic epiphany story “Araby,” however; contemporary works suggest that the crucibles of initiation come from the most everyday of experiences. Consequently, these books argue, moral development requires a consistent conscientiousness on the part of young people, for the danger of committing harm in the world may lie in the mundane rather than the melodramatic. A subgenre in which this smaller sort of ethical commitment is especially apparent is the Southern coming-of-age novel, the majority of which are cast in the kiln of To Kill a Mockingbird. Much as Scout Finch recognizes the responsibility she inherits by virtue of her father Atticus’s heroic defense of the falsely accused African American Tom Robinson, so, too, modern-day Southerners find themselves taking decidedly unpopular stances for racial equality, often at great personal risk. Thus, in Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees (2001), fourteen-year-old Lily Owen escapes the racism of her rural South Carolina hometown with her African American nanny, Rosaleen, after Rosaleen insults a group of white men. In Michael Morris’s Slow Way Home (2003), Brandon Willard helps rebuild the pauper’s hospital founded by his spiritual mentor, Sister Delores, when it is burned to the ground after the nun commits to aiding impoverished blacks as well as whites. And in Childress’s One Mississippi, Daniel Musgrove must aid the first-ever African American prom queen at Minor High School, Arnita Beecham, to regain her identity after a bout of amnesia from a car accident leaves her with no memory of her race. Other Southern works insist these heirs of Scout must recognize their own racism. In “Segregation,” one of the short stories that constitute George Singleton’s composite novel, Why Dogs Chase Cars (2004), Mendal Dawes undergoes a public excoriation at the hands of a black friend who lets him know in the middle of a segregated South Carolina movie theatre that he is not as racially aware as he would like to believe: Shirley Ebo went into her high-whining voice and said things about how white people thought they knew everything, how white people didn’t know what really went on in the world, how white people were the poison of the earth. She yelled, “Mendal sits down there now, but he wants to be up here with me.” (Singleton 2004, 126)

A further development in the genre is the employment of African American protagonists whose ethical commitment requires overcoming the self-hatred that racism can imbue in blacks. Such is the storyline of Christopher Wilson’s Cotton (2005), in which the titular hero outgrows his bitterness at 1960s racism by identifying with other persecuted minorities, specifically gay women. As Cotton declares upon summarizing what his friendship with Fay teaches him, “I want to live among ugly and beautiful, young and old, black and white, man and woman, with beast, fish, and fowl” (Wilson 2005, 299). However diverse the types of ethical engagement, their aim in these novels is similar: they allow fictional teens to enter adulthood assured of their moral purpose. If one criticism can be made of this trend, it is that these books’ insistence on resolving the maturation drama suggests contemporary novelists are not truly confronting the temptations that discourage young people from growing up. That is, in an increasing youth-oriented American culture—some would say an increasingly juvenile culture—the majority of these books accept adulthood as a goal instead of recognizing the countervailing pressures in popular culture to remain all that youth connotes: carefree, selfish, and irresponsible. As such, their endings can sometimes

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feel like a narrative obligation rather than authentic growth. Whereas the comingof-age novel once equated growing up with growing old, today’s versions are apt to accept that maturity is achieved through a single initiation rite rather than through an ongoing process of trial and error. 3. Cultivating Voices. An important vehicle for realizing maturity in the genre is the development of an individual voice that will allow young people to articulate their values. This is the area in which contemporary coming-of-age novels are most progressive. Fictional teens not only avail themselves of the verbal ingenuity that is the legacy of Salinger, Kerouac, and other canonical spokesmen for alienated youth; they also employ dialogic strategies, innovative points of view, unconventional mixtures of typography, and even emulations of new technologies to create selfactualizing languages. While there is no shortage of Holden-esque irony, most novelists recognize that hipster glibness and au courant slang by themselves are ineffectual means of avoiding conformity. Nor, with the exception of McDonnell’s Twelve, is there much interest in emulating the zombie-like detachment of Less Than Zero. Because contemporary teens seek engagement, they must couple these devices of resistance with more positive techniques that allow for the creation of empathy and community. One consistent technique handed down from canonical works from Huckleberry Finn to Kaye Gibbons’ Ellen Foster (1984) is the use of a voice that conveys the saintly outsiderness of the main character. Several recent bildungsroman project a savant aura meant to demonstrate the essential purity of their child-heroes—even Gibbons retains the disarmingly folksy style that account for much of Foster’s popularity in her recent sequel, The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster (2005). The novel opens with a letter to the president of Harvard in which a petitioning Ellen explains why her application for admission (at fifteen) cannot be completed in its entirety: A person who graduated from there is supposed to grade me on how close I come to being Harvard material, and I need to let you know that I went to town to meet the man we have, but when I got to his nursing home I found him unaware. He’d had another stroke the day before . . . (Gibbons 1984, 2–3)

Instead of Southern whimsy, Foer in Everything Is Illuminated employs frequent malapropisms as his teenaged narrator, Alexander Perchov, attempts to translate his Ukrainian observations into broken English: “All of my many friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name. Mother dubs me Alex-stop-spleening me! because I am always spleening her” (Foer 2002, 1). Still other authors seize upon various cognitive disorders in order to project a peculiarity of perspective. Much of the interest in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time arose from Mark Haddon’s use of an autistic point of view: “My name is Christopher John Francis Boone. I know all the countries of the world and their capital cities and every prime number up to 7,057” (Haddon 2003, 2). While these devices can grow gimmicky and even grating, they allow authors to suggest the nonconformity of their character’s innate innocence. Curiously, the technique least conducive to realizing maturity is the most traditional: humor. As a satire of moral panics, Pierre’s Vernon God Little utilizes a number of comedic tools to convey the absurdity of social attitudes toward youth: there are outlandish similes (“Mr. Abdini is fat the way anvils are fat” [Pierre 2003,

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49]), deflating honorifics that undermine adult authority (“ole Silas,” “ole Mr. Deutschman”), and generous helpings of obscenity (Vernon’s favorite word is “fucken”). While Pierre deftly sustains this voice throughout the narrative, the lack of variation disallows any hint of growth, and Vernon ends the book as much as he begins it: as a smart aleck. Perhaps the most obvious sign of the character’s lack of mature reflection is the homosexual slur with which he metes justice to two characters who turn out to be the real accomplices in the school shooting for which Vernon is nearly executed: “Now they’ll have all the boys they could wish for, up there in prison. Somehow you sense they might be doing a little more receiving than giving, though” (275). More effective are narrative voices in which such derision attacks prejudice instead of perpetuating it. The tone of Rebcecca Godfrey’s The Torn Skirt (2002), for example, never impedes empathy for Sara Shaw’s descent into drug abuse and crime because its mordancy has a discernable purpose. Sara is rebelling against the bureaucratic clichés that define young women’s behavior without any effort to understand it. As Sara scoffs upon reading a juvenile-hall report on her delinquency: “‘Impressionable’ and ‘troubled.’ They should have called me a harlot and a slut, a poseur and a tease, a nubile and naïve, a slattern and a sleaze, a vandalist, an anarchist, a dirty dilettante with a fatal and fervent disease” (Godfrey 2002, 176). Here alliteration allows Sara to parody the moral presumptions plied to young women to police their sexual maturation; the exaggeration is her way of appropriating and emptying such terminology by implying the prurience motivating it. The Torn Skirt demonstrates how young women must rebel against such stereotypes, lest the “bad” girl remain a mere stimulant for scandal instead of a true liberator of sexual prejudice. Yet even this type of humor is essentially reactionary, for by responding to adult anxieties, it remains inexorably yoked to them. To free teenagers from elders’ discourse, authors often employ a plethora of metatextual methods that, more than simply denounce adults’ narrative authority to judge teen behaviors, outright fracture it through narrative framing. On the surface, for example, Joe Meno in Hairstyles of the Damned (2004) seems to accomplish little but express contempt for adult values when hero Brian Oswald begins a mock history report with a burst of invective: “American History can suck it. The U.S.A. can suck it. The Thirteen Colonies can suck it. George Washington can suck it . . .” (Meno 2004, 21). Yet in telling the story of Brian’s unconventional romance with fellow punk-music lover Gretchen, Meno mixes in several forms meant to reproduce the non-linear modes in which teens speak to each other, including lists, lyrics excerpted from their favorite music, and even Internet icons. A particularly clever device is the sporadic use of typefaces that approximate handwriting. Shifting out of standard Roman type for a passage or chapter in scripts like Bradley-Hand or SM_scriptism has become common in adolescent narratives since 2000—Picoult also does it in Nineteen Minutes, as does Watt Key in his Huckleberry Finn-style picaresque Alabama Moon (2006). The effect is to lend authenticity to the narrative voice, for print styles emulating chirography suggest that readers have gained immediate access to a teenage protagonist’s mind. One could even argue that this design trend represents an innovation analogous to the use of (supposedly) unedited diary passages in Go Ask Alice (1971), the young-adult classic “discovered” by drug-counselor Beatrice Sparks after one of her teen patients overdosed in the late 1960s. It elides any hint of adult mediation in the

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text, and encourages us to “hear” that voice as we see it “written” in a young person’s own hand. The recent rise of e-mail- and text-message epistolary novels like Myracle’s TTYL and TTFN likewise accomplish something similar by seeming to recreate not only young people’s language, but the media through which they communicate. Yet the title of Myracle’s third entry after TTYL and TTFN in her “Internet Girls” series—l8r, g8r (2007)—suggests the limits of these metatextual efforts. It is one thing for an adult author to borrow Internet-speak for such post-2000 “tween” phrases as talk to you later and ta-ta for now. To translate into this code an oldfashioned saying like later, gator that is more reminiscent of Bill Haley and the Comets than Paris Hilton reveals just how difficult it is to create an “authentic” adolescent voice without revealing one’s adult subjectivity. Arguably, such techniques are most effective when they are part of a variety of strategies that help give voice to adolescence by paradoxically calling attention to how rarely teenagers are able to break out of adult frames and speak directly in narrative. The most celebrated coming-of-age novel of recent years, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), makes these frames manifest in such a way to remind us that the paysage moralisée is a social experience that affects not only individual teenagers but siblings, friends, and family. By using multiple perspectives (including Oscar’s mother, Beli, his sister, Lola, and his best friend), chapter cue cards, footnotes, and a mélange of styles, Díaz depicts “voice” (and, by extension, identity) as more than mere attitude and slang. Rather, in Oscar Wao it is a process of discovery that involves a synthesis of influences. As one reviewer noted, The tale of Oscar’s coming-of-age is in some ways the book’s thinnest layer, a youngadult melodrama draped over a multigenerational immigrant family chronicle that dabbles in tropical magic realism, punk-rock feminism, hip-hop machismo, postpostmodern pyrotechnics and enough polymorphous multiculturalism to fill up an Introduction to Cultural Studies syllabus. (Scott 7:9)

One might simply revise this to say that elevating the maturation process beyond melodrama requires representing (and understanding) it through a myriad of “polymorphous” voices. 4. Popular Culture and Identity Formation. Another interesting difference between contemporary and classic maturation narratives is how uncontroversial the place of popular culture has become in the genre. Classic texts like The Catcher in the Rye evince a strain of modernist elitism by denouncing movies, television, and popular music as agents of conformity that youth must resist to avoid the soulless consumerism of post-WWII America. (Even the celebrated be-bop fixation of the Beat Generation was less about embracing popular art forms than about mining the last few subcultural veins of authenticity that the “culture industry” had yet to obliterate). By the 1980s, it was common for reviewers of Bobbie Anne Mason’s In Country (1985) or Jay McInerney’s Story of My Life (1988) to decry the constant namedropping of mass-culture artifacts. By and large, post-2000 coming-of-age novels reveal little anxiety about the moral consequences of characters looking to comic books or hip-hop for models of self-making. The marketplace is here to stay, these works insist, and, as a result, few resort to the old “Frankfurt School” argument of cultural studies by portraying teenagers as victims of false needs instilled by corporate interests. Rather, these novels are apt to support the more recent stance

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of theorists who argue that teenagers are not passive receptacles but active creators who produce the meanings of the goods they buy. Wolff’s Old School is one of the few recent works seemingly preoccupied with whether popular culture possesses sufficient aesthetic value to inspire adolescent development. When Ayn Rand visits an elite New England prep school in the early 1960s, she shocks the unnamed narrator by recommending Mickey Spillane over Ernest Hemingway. “What you find in Hemingway is what is wrong with the socalled literature of this country,” she declares. “Weak premises. Weak, defeated people”—as opposed to Spillane, whose Mike Hammer “doesn’t torture himself in the current fashion with the decadent niceties. Mike knows evil from good and destroys it without hesitation or regret” (Wolff 2003, 85). While Wolff parodies Rand’s will-to-power positivism, his main point is to illustrate the dangers of consuming any cultural commodity, high or low, without sufficient awareness of the solipsism it may encourage. Desperate to win a creative-writing contest whose prize is a tête-à-tête with Hemingway, the protagonist plagiarizes a short story and is promptly expelled from his prestigious institution. Interestingly, he comes to recognize his dishonesty in passing someone else’s experience off as his own in both the story and in his life, for the ambition that drove him to err had nothing to do with craft or work—it was to become as famous as Hemingway. Only by recognizing the juvenility of this fantasy can the narrator appreciate that the truest reward of art is self-awareness. As such, Old School is less concerned with what literature is “legitimate”—Spillane or Hemingway—than in limning its value in cautioning against vanity. As Wolff’s hero decides, Even as I lived my life I was seeing it on the back of a book. And yet in all those years [of adolescence] I actually wrote very little, maybe because I was afraid of not being good enough to justify this improvised existence, and because the improvising became an end in itself and left scant room for disciplined invention. (Wolff 2003, 156)

Childress’s One Mississippi dramatizes an ancillary danger: what happens when adults appropriate those cultural models that are youth’s province. After his family moves from Indiana to the Deep South, Daniel Musgrove discovers that music is one of the few resources for overcoming regional differences and making with friendships with new classmates. Whether Billy Paul’s “Me and Mrs. Jones” or Cher’s “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves,” the hits of 1973 serve as networks of identification by which he can appreciate the diversity of his peers’ tastes and personal investments in art. When the local Baptist youth minister decides to make religion more accessible by producing an original rock opera, Daniel and his friends feel their favorite medium has been stolen. Entitled Christ! and featuring such numbers as “Joseph, You’ve Got to Believe Me” (sung by Mary, of course), the musical is an obvious take-off on Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell, and other early 1970s ersatz efforts to recast youth music as all-ages entertainment. As Daniel realizes, the power of rock music to foster communal ties among adolescents is dampened when adults seize upon it to instill doctrinal lessons. Whereas One Mississippi satirizes pop culture, Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude (2003) treats its power to create connections with a seriousness that borders on reverential. In addition to their dramatic function, references are textural, recreating the sprawl of 1970s culture, highlighting the moment when comic books and AM radio first became media for mainstreaming racial diversity after the hard-fought

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Civil Rights battles of the 1960s. In effect, pop culture for Lethem is an image of integration: as white child Dylan Ebdus develops a fondness for soul music and African American Mingus Rude revels in Superman comic books, their friendship has the potential to transcend racial difference. That promise is foiled, however, by a series of sociocultural events that lock the friends into stereotypical opportunities and pitfalls. While Dylan is sent to a prestigious college to become an artist, Mingus ends up in and out of addiction and prison. In the end, the two friends have little substantive connection but the memories of their mutual fascinations of their childhood (including the magic ring that they believe allowed them to fly). As many reviewers noted, the title of the book refers to the Arctic ice castle that is both Superman’s base of operations and hideaway. As such, it reflects the extremes of pop culture’s influence on young people: its power, on the one hand, to encourage the imaginative flights of fancy that can change the world, but also the escapist lure that can tempt them to retreat into fantasy. 5.The Ideal Adult Addressee. Critics are apt to think of coming-of-age novels as speaking to a generational cohort. The books seem to either look back in time to assess the cultural changes that shaped the author and audience’s mutual childhood (as in the case of The Fortress of Solitude and One Mississippi), or, in the case of young-adult fiction, they examine the current-day conditions influencing the peer group presently in the throes of maturation (as in Twelve and TTYL). Often overlooked, however, is the presence of an implied adult audience who bears responsibility for fictional teens’ struggles—the audience who most likely has the power to rectify those dilemmas. As Charles Acland writes, the narratological design of adolescent fiction is usually staged as a “plea for that guiding hand that demonstrates the method of integration back into the realm of the normal youth, which in turn signifies the easy flow toward the adult” (Acland 1995, 121). Appealing to the lending of that “guiding hand” thus becomes the purpose of the story, and modeling its function is the job of implied addressee. That audience may be the non-specific, unnamed “you” that Holden addresses throughout Catcher, or it may be a more fully dramatized mentor figure like Dr. Nolan in Plath’s The Bell Jar. Regardless of the degree to which the addressee is physically present, the aim is to “interpellate” real-life readers by urging them to recognize the failings of these fictional authority figures in their own responses to teen problems and to spark a recommitment to solving them. This function is overt in school-shooting novels that are narrated from the perspective of the killers’ parents, as opposed to the teenage victims. In both Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin and VanBaale’s The Space Between, it becomes the job of mothers in particular to break the silence of grief and guilt to acknowledge the family issues that led to their children’s devastating violence. In The Space Between, Judith Elliott admits her negligence in a court deposition when she and husband Peter are sued by families of the teens that their son murders: “There were moments Peter or I sensed something was wrong [with Lucas], knew something was wrong and didn’t act on it. Yes, we squandered . . . we squandered opportunities to do more, to help him” (VanBaale 2006, 268). More than an acceptance of guilt, the confession forces the plaintiffs to recognize their own similarly squandered opportunities to shepherd their children’s maturation because, like the Elliotts, they were distracted by careers and pastimes, and the lawsuit is dropped. The plot twist is meant to urge to adult readers to not blame such incidents on aberrant parenting, but to recognize the Elliotts’ failures in themselves. Only then, such novels argue, will future tragedies be averted.

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Because contemporary bildungsroman tend toward the Dickensian model of maturation by resolving their protagonists’ initiation process, the message to the implied reader is apt to be one of reconciliation instead of remonstrance. Much of Jennifer Davis’s self-destruction in Juniper Tree Burning is fueled by her resentment of her unconventional mother, Faith. As she outgrows the selfishness that drives her to abandon her husband, however, Jennifer comes to recognize the bond she and Faith share as women, and the direct address becomes a gesture of forgiveness for the daughter’s own abandonment: “Faith. You made Sunny Boy Blue. You made me. Don’t that count for anything at all? . . . Oh, Mama. We are the same, you and me. We aren’t opposites at all” (Long 2001, 441–442). In both cases, growing up requires what may be the most mature of gestures: forgiveness. Sebold’s The Lovely Bones takes this idea even further as the impossible reconciliation (because the narrator has been murdered) leads to the blessing of letting go. As Susie Salmon watches helplessly from the afterlife, her parents and sister succumb to grief and bitterness over her unsolved case. Susie finally resolves to free them of their burden, first by bringing love to her sister and second by avenging her own death and protecting other young women. The novel’s final words bespeak the self-sacrifice of allowing her family closure by fading into their past: “I wish you all a long and happy life” (Sebold 2002, 328). In still other cases, the interpellation is achieved through metatextual devices that dramatize the need for adult concern. Both Gibbons’s The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster and Curtis Sittenfeld’s The Man of My Dreams (2006) include epistolary chapters that serve as direct addresses to the ideal reader. Strasser’s Give a Boy a Gun includes footnotes that excerpt real-life accounts of Columbine and other school shootings to lend urgency to his insistence (explicitly stated in his dedication) that “gun use and gun availability is horribly, insanely, out of control” (Strasser 2000, i). The last words of Martone’s Slow Way Home belong not to Brandon Willard, but to a statistic in the author’s acknowledgments meant to dramatize the seriousness of the parental neglect that leads Brandon’s grandparents to abduct and raise him: “It is estimated that 2.5 million grandparents are raising grandchildren in the United States. Most are doing so with little or no financial support. I thank them for taking responsibility for the future and offer my humble gratitude” (Morris, 280). The key words here, of course, are “taking responsibility for the future”: coming-of-age novels dramatize the duty adults have in ensuring that youth are given the security and tools requisite for growing up. If there is a major difference between past and present in how this point is made, it is that contemporary authors have little compunction about stating it directly and explicitly. Context and Issues. Unfortunately, the coming-of-age novel seems to play a decreasing role in the cultural construction of the post-2000 teenager. As recently as the 1990s, as the example of Coupland’s Generation X demonstrates, novels had the power to shape sociological perceptions as much as Catcher and On the Road did in the 1950s and 1960s. (Indeed, Generation X was so influential in this regard that few people even remember it was a novel and not a nonfiction study). Despite the unprecedented popularity of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1996–2007), fiction is wholly overshadowed by music, television, movies, and video games as commentators search for proof texts for understanding the mindset of the emerging generation. That said, one concern that does consistently bring bildungsroman to the forefront of moral-panic debates is the subject matter of young-adult novels. As American

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culture grows more explicit, the appropriateness of books marketed directly to a twelve-to-eighteen-year-old demographic and tackling such issues as sex, drugs, and violence becomes a matter of controversy. In such discussions, the issues addressed can range from the putative harmfulness of exposing youth to such topics to their realism, with commentators questioning the degree to which adult prurience motivates the inquiry into just how wild youth have gone. Thus, in a 2004 Harper’s article, Frances FitzGerald asks why the subgenre of young-adult fiction known as the “problem novel”—a coming-of-age story in which the protagonist must confront a pressing social issue, whether unplanned pregnancy, incest, self-mutilation— “constitute[s] the largest category of books published for teens” when teens themselves show a marked preference for fantasies like Harry Potter or “junior chick-lit series about girls with snarky attitudes and great clothes” (i.e. Ceicily von Zeigesar’s Gossip Girl books, 2001–). The answer, FitzGerald argues, rests in the adult belief that literature should serve a “therapeutic” function by “realistically depict[ing] the problems adolescents face these days . . . from drug addiction to child abuse”—a desire that creates an “increasing grimness” in youth fiction as authors and publishers scramble to tackle ever darker concerns. However noble the desire of these adults to offer teens tools for navigating young-adult dilemmas, the problem novel presupposes that “what [adults] call ‘edgy Action’ or ‘gritty realism’ reflects the lives of most young people,” overlooking the fact that many children do not suffer these ills and read not for “healing” but “out of sheer curiosity” (Fitzgerald 2004, 68; emphasis added). For Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic Monthly, the adult fixation with the adolescent loss of innocence is never more unrealistic than when these books address sexual mores. Young-adult novels such as Paul Ruditis’s The Rainbow Party (2005)—which claims to expose the phenomenon of the teen “train party,” at which girls line up to fellate a series of male partners—so exaggerate parental fears as to degenerate into ludicrousness: [T]he current oral-sex hysteria [that both the ‘train-party’ panic and Ruditis’s narrative appeal to] presupposes not only that a limitless number of young American girls have taken on the sexual practices of porn queens but also that American boys are capable of having an infinite number of sexual experiences in rapid succession. It requires believing that a boy could be serviced at the school-bus train party—receiving oral sex from ten or fifteen girls, one after another—and then zip his fly and head off to homeroom . . . (Ruditis 2005, 169)

Such moral panics, Flanagan argues, risk perpetuating rather than redressing the sexualization of adolescence. By insisting that teen indulgence in such baroque, dehumanizing practices is widespread enough to constitute a crisis, portraits like The Rainbow Party drown out serious discussion of what is “normal” and healthy erotic initiation and discourage dialogue between adults and youth. As the supposed “train party” crisis suggests, gender is another central concern in which contemporary novels play a role. This is especially apparent in the debates surrounding bildungsroman marketed as “chick lit.” While not every book in this genre focuses on the coming-of-age experience, several do. Their protagonists’ quest for romantic fulfillment is often indicative of the desire to enter adulthood through marriage. The question involving these female-centered initiation plots is whether they stereotype women as dependent upon male affection. As supporters defend the

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genre for foregrounding women’s experience and creating more economic opportunities for women writers, detractors question whether the emphasis on dating and fashion limits women’s right to tackle “serious” subject matter. The mixed reviews accorded Melissa Bank’s The Wonder Spot (2005) are indicative of the disagreement that plagues cultural attitudes toward female maturation. Joanna Briscoe praises the story of Sophie Applebaum’s coming of age for bringing depth and poignancy to the overly familiar elements of chick-lit: The chick-lit phenomenon has done a great disservice to Melissa Bank. While still packaged in a format suggesting an urban odyssey of man-hunts and screw-ups for its wacky-little-me heroine, her books are infinitely finer than [books inspired by Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, 1996]. There is such depth to her shallows, such art to her artlessness, that her work resembles chick lit purely in its surface details. (Bank 2005, 27)

Yet in the New York Times, Curtis Sittenfeld concludes the exact opposite: To suggest that another woman’s ostensibly literary novel is chick lit feels catty, not unlike calling another woman a slut—doesn’t the term basically bring down all of us? And yet, with The Wonder Spot, it’s hard to resist. A chronicle of the search for personal equilibrium and Mr. Right, Melissa Bank’s novel is highly readable, sometimes funny and entirely unchallenging; you’re not one iota smarter after finishing it. I’m as resistant as anyone else to the assumption that because a book’s author is female and because that book’s protagonist is a woman who actually cares about her own romantic future, the book must fall into the chick-lit genre. So it’s not that I find Bank’s topic lightweight; it’s that Bank writes about it in a lightweight way. (2005, 7:9)

These opposing views suggests a deep divide about what extremes constitute “deep” and “lightweight” treatments of female experience—a divide that is itself reflective of the wholly understandable vulnerability and defensiveness women feel toward representations of “growing up female.” Yet another cultural concern arising from the coming-of-age novel involves the publishing industry’s role in discovering and promoting young practitioners of the genre. Since F. Scott Fitzgerald, the marketplace has hungered for wunderkinds who may or may not possess the talent to live up to the attention that the cultural fixation with adolescence attracts. Since 2000, at least two major scandals have rocked the publishing industry by demonstrating the duplicitous ends to which some writers will go to feed the demand for phenoms. After winning raves for Sarah—a supposedly autobiographical novel of teenage prostitution— J.T. LeRoy was hailed as the first voice of Generation Y. Yet rumors immediately began to circulate that the twenty-year old street orphan was the invention of an older author previously unable to break into the fiction market. The rumors were finally proven true in 2005–2006 when independent investigations by New York Magazine and the New York Times exposed LeRoy as forty-year-old Laura Albert, a Brooklyn-born, San Francisco-based freelance writer who hired her boyfriend’s half-sister, Savannah Koop, to play the part of J.T. in public appearances. While Albert defended the hoax by claiming J.T. was an alter ego, her unmasking led many critics to disparage the verisimilitude of Sarah and subsequent LeRoy books—the exact same verisimilitude, coincidentally, that many of those same critics had previously applauded. The controversy also raised doubts about the viability of Albert’s career. As of late 2007,

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the third LeRoy novel, Labour, remains unpublished, two full years after it was originally scheduled to appear. The second controversy to impugn coming-of-age authors’ veracity involves Kaavya Viswanathan, who at the precious age of eighteen won a $500,000 advance from Little, Brown for a young-adult novel entitled How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life. Shortly after the book’s publication in 2006, The Harvard Crimson accused Viswanathan of plagiarizing passages from two bildungsroman by Megan McCaffrey, Sloppy Firsts (2001) and Second Helpings (2004). Subsequent investigations revealed additional phrases and sentences lifted from Meg Cabbott’s The Princess Diaries (2000) and Sophie Kinsella’s Can You Keep a Secret? (2003). Viswanathan initially denied the charges, but she and her publishers were shortly forced to issue an apology to McCaffrey—though to little avail. When the controversy did not subside, Little, Brown recalled Opal and cancelled the young student’s contract for a second novel. While Viswanathan was rightly excoriated for plagiarizing, the book industry was itself condemned for being so eager to capitalize on the teenage market that it failed to properly ensure the book’s originality. The uproar not only raised questions about the maturity and professionalism of publishing wunderkinds but the commodification of adolescence as well. As it turned out, the co-owner of Opal’s copyright with Viswanathan was a well-known “bookpackaging company,” Alloy Entertainment, whose editorial teams often “craft proposals for publishers and create plotlines and characters before handing them over to a writer (or a string of writers)” (Rich and Smith 2006, 24). While no Alloy employee was accused of complicity in Viswanathan’s plagiarism, the company was harshly criticized for its “assembly-line” production to literature for young people. Aside from its ethical implications, the scandal was perhaps the most vivid reminder of the past decade that coming-of-age novels are products produced by adults for young people. As such, their “plotlines and characters” speak as much to what adults presume about teens as about how youth themselves experience adolescence. Reception. While the cultural debates over coming-of-age novels focus on the genre’s extratextual effect on young readers and writers, the critical reception is apt to address intratextual issues of voice, form, and storyline. Despite differing in orientation, aesthetic assessments and sociological analyses share a common concern with the realism of maturation narratives. In particular, book reviewers ask whether the Bildungsroman has become such a publishing staple that its narrative conventions have degenerated into formula, leading authors to merely imitate the Catcher in the Rye model instead of reflecting the true experience of teens today. The question is understandable given how frequently readers are encouraged to regard contemporary novels as “updates” of Holden Caulfield’s story. Thus, a blurb on the back cover of Vernon God Little describes its eponymous hero as “Holden Caulfield on Ritalin,” while a reviewer of Katherine Taylor’s Rules for Saying Goodbye deems its heroine, Katherine, a “female Holden for our day” (Eyre 2007, D:8). Robin MacKenzie, the hero of K. M. Soehnlein’s The World of Normal Boys (2001) is a “gay Holden Caulfield,” while Tangy Mae Quinn in Delores Phillips’s The Darkest Child (2004) is “Holden Caulfield reborn as African American and female.” The comparisons have grown so commonplace that they even take place within the novel. As blogger Megan Walton noted of Randall DeVallance’s Dive (2005): Arthur Trezeguet, the first-person narrator, is intended to be a modern-day Holden Caulfield. This is not to say he actually reminds anyone of Holden Caulfield, but it is

COMING OF AGE FICTION glaringly obvious that this was precisely what the author had in mind. If you missed the various clues connecting Arthur Trezeguet to the original angsty, sensitive, Holden, Arthur is kind enough to help you: “My English teacher told me I reminded her of Holden Caulfield . . . I’ve always liked Holden Caulfield. He’s sort of like a brother to me.” (Walton 2005)

Such invocations of Holden almost dare reviewers to deride the aim of these contemporary novels as cashing in on Salinger’s enduring popularity. Reviewing Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision (2005), New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani affected her own mock-Holden voice to dramatize what she interpreted as Kunkel’s lack of originality: If you really want to hear what I think about this guy Dwight Wilmerding [the protagonist of Indecision], the first thing I should tell you is that he kind of reminds me of me . . . In Indecision, Dwight—or this ghostwriter he got, Benjamin Kunkel—goes into a lot more of all that David Copperfield kind of stuff than I ever would, and he’s a helluva lot older than I was when I went through my madman phase, but still, you’ve gotta admit we’re coming from the same sort of place. (Kakutani 2005, E:1)

Kakutani concludes her assessment by seizing upon one of Holden’s favorite words to suggest that Kunkel wholeheartedly imitates Catcher in order to reap the rewards of reaching the target audience associated with the book: [The conclusion] reads more like something [Holden’s] brother [D. B.] might have written for the movies than a real-life experience . . . Old Dwight’s book really knocked me out, and if there’s one thing I hate, it’s Hollywood. But then Dwight—who doesn’t have as big a thing about phonies as I do—might not mind selling his story to some producer. He might not even mind being played by [young Hollywood actors like] Jake Gyllenhaal or Josh Hartnett or Topher Grace. (Kakutani 2005, E:1)

The implication is that a genre that was once the refuge of those who refused to conform has become a hot product for those hoping to hawk a commodity. Such criticism is part of a larger trend among reviewers that ask whether post2000 coming-of-age novelists draw from a too-common vernacular of adolescent touchstones that adds little to the canon. If reviews are any indication, commentators are growing impatient with adolescent angst, romantic uncertainty, and parental disaffection. In an otherwise positive review in the New York Times, Mark Sarvas describes Larry Doyle’s I Love You, Beth Cooper (2006) as “less a novel than a novelization of a movie not yet made, a bibliography of teenage-loser angst” (Sarvas 2007, 7:19). The review suggests that Doyle channels not only Holden Caulfield, but stereotypical cinematic antecedents like those who populate such John Hughes films as The Breakfast Club (1985). When another reviewer describes Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep as “George Eliot writ[ing] Sweet Valley High” (the popular 1980s YA series), one senses critics questioning whether adolescent narrative have not become so commonplace as to lose any specifically “literary” value (Eyre 2005, 26). Another Sittenfeld reviewer enforces the point by comparing the novel to a popular teen TV show: “Prep seems to be about rich-girl teenage drama, and who needs that when we have The O.C.?” (Steuver, C:1). That attitude is especially apparent in the drubbing given Wolfe’s campus farce I Am Charlotte Simmons. The thought of a zeitgeist-defining observer as influential as the author of The Right Stuff and The

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Bonfire of the Vanities turning his microscope on the frat parties, keg tapping, and sex escapes of American co-eds drove reviewers to distraction. “Like an epidemiologist tracing contamination downstream, Wolfe has shifted his laboratory of elegant rot from the adult world into that of its children,” wrote the Boston Globe (Elder 2004, D:6). When Wolfe detailed how bond traders and speculators work [in Bonfire], he caricatured power, always worth doing. Here he is attempting to caricature college life with a ponderous if sharp-clawed intensity quite beyond its subject’s weight. Also skewing it. Few of us, after all, trade bonds or run real estate empires; many of us, and our children, have been to college and know that Wolfe presents, at best, a dumbed-down part as a dumbed-down whole. (Elder 2004, D:6)

In other words, Wolfe’s depiction of adolescence resembled the image of teenagers perpetuated in exploitative teen films and reality TV shows more than “real” adolescents, reinforcing the idea that youth as a topic no longer bears the “weight” of seriousness accorded it during the heyday of The Catcher in the Rye. Other reviewers look to internal traits instead of the marketplace to measure the relative realism of literary adolescence. In a Commentary essay, Sam Munson complains that Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (Munson 2003, 68–72) and Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude fall prey to the “shapelessness to which every novel dealing with childhood and its sequels seems prone” (69). Because maturation dictates stages of character development, authors are apt to lose dramatic potency as they follow a protagonist from milestone to milestone, thereby causing the singularity of the epiphanic moment to flatten into a dispassionate humdrumness over the course of a plot. The Namesake, Munson claims, is thus “linear to the point of monotony,” with Gogul Ganguli, the American-born son of Bengali immigrants, going “through the same set of motions with the same uneasy indifference throughout: unsure of himself in primary school, unsure of himself at Yale, unsure of himself as he studies for his licensing exam as an architect” (Munson 2003, 70). Similarly, the hero of The Fortress of Solitude to Munson is “made of exceptionally thin stuff” because of the sameness of his reactions to events: About his inner life we learn very little other than that he feels uncomfortable in Brooklyn as a child, in Vermont as a college student, and in Berkeley as an adult. Since he also serves as his author’s chosen lens on reality, it is perhaps no wonder that the world around him tends to assume a similar characterlessness. (72)

As a result, “[l]ike Gogol in The Namesake, Dylan remains without shape . . . [as] does the world he inhabits” (Munson 2003, 72). What Munson suggests is that the obligation of following a character across an age span enervates a plot’s rising action until the form becomes too verisimilitudinous: like adolescence itself, these books degenerate into muddles. Selected Authors. A four-decade-old observation by W. Tasker Witham in The Adolescent in the American Novel, 1920–1960 (1964) remains relevant today: “Even a cursory glance at the fiction about adolescence . . . reveals two very obvious facts[:] First, the majority of novels emphasizing the adolescence of the protagonist are first novels, and secondly, most of them are largely autobiographical” (Witham 1964, 17). These “facts” suggest why so few authors work within the genre for the entirety of their career. To cite but one representative example, Sue Monk Kidd

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followed The Secret Life of Bees with The Mermaid’s Chair (2005), the story of a middle-aged protagonist. That minority of writers who do repeatedly examine adolescence are often harshly criticized for not “outgrowing” their interest in the coming-of-age process and tackling more epic (i.e. adult) issues. Such authors may even be labeled “minor” writers for merely reiterating the conventions and formulae of the bildungsroman instead of forging more original artistic visions. Judgments on wunderkind writers who fail to follow up the breakthrough books at all— whether due to premature death, writer’s block, or exasperation with the publishing industry—are often treated especially harsh. These authors are said to repeat the pattern of Salinger, Plath, and Harper Lee as opposed to, say, Joyce Carol Oates or Philip Roth: if at all, they are remembered for a single work as opposed to an oeuvre. The first new millennium writer heralded for a bildungsroman was Tristan Egolf (b. 1972), whose Lord of the Barnyard: Killing the Fatted Cat and Arming the Aware in the Corn Belt was celebrated in 1999–2000 as a hipster take on breadbasket America reminiscent of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America (1967). As a New York Times reviewer noted, Egolf had the sort of a “mediagenic” back story guaranteed to garner interest in a debut novel: The twenty-seven-year-old American author, something of an autodidact, collected over fifty rejection slips from publishers [in America] before being befriended by the daughter of the French novelist Patrick Modiano. She found him busking on the streets of Paris and introduced his manuscript to her father. And, sure enough, Lord . . . is exactly the sort of fauvist extravaganza Europeans welcome as quintessentially American: brash, vigorous, violent and crude. (Miller 1999, 10)

Nearly every review of the novel mentions Egolf’s history as an aspiring punk rocker with an aversion to the creative-writing programs minting most young writers today; having dropped out of Temple University after only three semesters and spending several subsequent years vagabonding through Europe, Egolf struck the press as a decidedly unique if undisciplined talent. As the Times concluded, Lord of the Barnyard is the book a shrewder novelist would have stashed in a drawer, chalking it up to various lessons learned and letting a second, more polished work serve as his debut. The question is: Can Egolf learn to write dialogue, to fully imagine characters and to get over his adolescent misanthropy without refining the fire right out of his work? (Miller 1999, 7:10)

The question, unfortunately, would prove moot. Although Egolf’s second novel, Skirt and Fiddle, is indeed “more polished” than Lord, it received far less attention and sold poorly. Shortly afterward, Egolf began suffering from depression and personal problems that culminated in his May 7, 2005, suicide at the age of thirty-three. Speculation began almost immediately as to whether this tragic end would transform the fading star into a romantic cult figure. As a rather tasteless Toronto Star headline read, “Death Be Not a Career Killer”: “The awful truth is that creating a muchpraised, little-read work like Egolf’s Lord of the Barnyard is only half the job when you’re striving for artistic immortality,” the paper insisted. “You need mystique, and the best route to it is to die young” (Fraser 2005, H15). Sadly, the observation has proved at least partially true. Egolf remains an admired figure among collegiate-aged audiences, albeit more for his tragic biography than for the artistry of Lord. His other works, however, garner modest interest. When posthumously published in

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2006, his final completed novel, Kornwolf, generated fewer reviews and sales than Skirt and Fiddle. The same year that Skirt and Fiddle appeared, an even younger author burst upon the scene with a bildungsroman that achieved broad commercial (as opposed to Egolf’s cult) success. Born in 1977, Jonathan Safran Foer was barely twenty-five when Everything is Illuminated was hailed as the novel of 2002 by a range of tastemakers, including his former Princeton professor Joyce Carol Oates. Based on a 1999 journey to the Ukraine to uncover Foer’s family past, the picaresque proved a captivating mixture of postmodern ambition and faux-naif voice. Contrasting a selfconsciously “literary” narrative by a fictionalized character named “Jonathan Safran Foer” with a broken-English version of the same trip by an American-obsessed translator named Alex, Everything Is Illuminated struck many as nothing less than a twenty-first century Tristram Shandy, with Foer even borrowing the Sternian trick of inserting unconventional graphic devices into the text. (Thus, on one page, the phrase “We are writing” is repeated more than two hundred times). For most reviewers, the book’s audacity alone suggested a writer of major significance. The [London] Times both summarized and repeated the praise when it stated, You will have to ignore everything you read about this novel. For you will read that Everything Is Illuminated is a work of genius, that its author, at twenty-four, has staked his claim for literary greatness, that it’s a new kind of novel, that after it things will never be the same again. You won’t believe it and you’ll decide not to read the book on principle. And that would be a disaster, because it’s all true. (“Luminous Talent,” 2005)

Inevitably, such unabashed hyperbole invited a backlash against Foer’s second, 9/11-inspired novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which appeared three years later in 2005. To his credit, Foer avoided the dreaded sophomore slump by integrating this picaresque into the context of American fears of terrorism, thereby avoiding the appearance of repeating himself. Nevertheless, a greater number of critics took issue with his multimedia devices. Especially controversial was the book’s conclusion, in which hero Oskar Schell claims to discover photographs of his father falling from the Twin Towers: “I found the pictures of the falling body. I ripped the pages out of the book. I reversed the order, so the last one was first, and the first was last. When I flipped through them, it looked like the man was floating up through the sky” (Foer 2005, 325). The final fifteen pages recreate the illusion of Oskar’s “flip book” by reprinting in reverse sequence photographs by eyewitness Lyle Owerko of an actual 9/11 victim hurtling through space. This child-oriented form, coupled with Oskar’s insistence that such imaginative tricks allow Americans to remember how, if events had been otherwise, “[w]e would have been safe” come September 12, 2001, offended critics who found it overly sentimental and escapist (2005, 351). New York Press commentator Harry Siegel was especially vocal in his objections, claiming that Foer’s fondness for “saintly” child narrators was solipsistic and that the ultimate message of this “Oprah-etic paean to innocence” amounted to nothing more than the sort of life lesson found in any feel-good self-help tome: “Most of all, we learn the search, not the treasure, is the thing, which readers may recognize from the pages of Robert Fulghum’s classic of inspirational mush All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” (Siegel, “Extremely Cloying”). However vituperative, Siegel’s critique reflects a burgeoning

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belief among critics that Foer must move beyond precocious child protagonists to maintain his reputation. Another rare author to follow a widely praised coming-of-age novel with a second bildungsroman is Curtis Sittenfeld, whose The Man of My Dreams (2006) followed eighteen months after her best-selling Prep. Although not as technically inventive as Everything Is Illuminated, Prep was touted for breathing contemporary life into the boarding-school genre that had seemingly gone out of fashion since the days of Catcher and A Separate Peace. Like those books, it criticizes the temptation of its heroine, Lee Fiora, toward snobbery and East-Coast elitism while also providing a female perspective on the typical maturation experiences (especially sex). Exactly what accounted for the book’s unexpected sales (140,000 hardbacks and nearly three times as many paperbacks) remains a mystery that the publishing industry continues to ponder. Some credited it to “creative marketing and publicity”: A team of four publicists made belts that matched the cover for giveaways, and sent splashy gift bags (holding pink and green flip-flops, the belt, notebooks, lip gloss) with the galleys to magazines. The pitch letter included photocopies of the publicists’ own high school yearbook photos . . . (Boss 2007)

Yet that explanation fails to take into account Sittenfeld’s talent, which created “coveted crossover market appeal: in addition to young women, [Prep] was read by adolescents, more mature readers and males”—at least, “according to anecdotal evidence” (Boss 2007, 3:1). In the end, Prep’s popularity suggests the enduring appeal of the coming-of-age novel and how readers discover fresh pleasure in its established conventions. Yet that appeal seems most intense with first-time novelists, especially young first timers. Audiences are far more fickle when writers like Sittenfeld are perceived as going to the well of adolescence once too often. At about two-thirds the length of Prep’s fourhundred-plus pages, The Man of My Dreams is more economical in its storytelling, suggesting that Sittenfeld has matured in terms of tempo and dramatic buildup. (Prep’s slow pace was one of its few recurring criticisms). Yet the persistent focus on the minutiae of teen dating rituals led some reviewers to accuse the author of “navel-gazing”: Sharp glimpses of dull phenomena . . . were [Prep’s] hallmark. And Ms. Sittenfeld’s embrace of the unremarkable is even clingier the second time around. In The Man of My Dreams her drab heroine is made special mainly by endless reserves of myopia and self-pity. An amazing number of episodes involve pizza, despite the limited range of pizza as a literary device. (Maslin 2006, E:9)

The story of Hannah Gavener’s dependency on older men—prompted by her father’s inattentiveness—also troubled critics. Many found the heroine “defined almost entirely in terms of her relationships,” a perception due in part to [Hannah’s] own myopia, but also to the structure of the narrative: Hannah doesn’t have hobbies, interests or real friends—nothing outside her interactions with men. The only other thing that motivates her is paying off her student loans, and even that’s to stick it to dear old dad. When, at the book’s end, she ostensibly finds fulfillment teaching autistic children, it feels forced. Her emotional world is too constrained. Such a limited worldview makes for a limited character; to show how much

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COMING OF AGE FICTION she’s grown, she tells a story about one of her students, but she seems equally pleased that she’s no longer embarrassed to talk to people ‘with food in [her] teeth.’ Even in a world where small victories matter, it is difficult to call this a real triumph. (Thomas 2006, R:9)

Again, what is striking is that Prep likewise ended with a “small victory,” yet few commentators found fault with it. The tendency for writers to be criticized for using techniques and devices employed in previous novels suggests that it may be harder to write a successful bildungsroman the second time out, as opposed to the first. Conclusion. As this essay suggests, the coming-of-age novel faces little danger of extinction. Its prominence among fictional genres is matched only by its resiliency as it adapts to the needs and ideals of succeeding generations. If the prevailing trends of the twenty-first century hold true, we can expect continued emphasis on completing the Bildung cycle and less Holden-esque resistance to growing up. This suggests that authors are still reassessing the legacy of the 1960s and the fixation with youth that characterized the baby-boom generation. We can also expect more heterogeneous amalgamations of styles as authors ground the traditional maturation plot in other literary forms. If there is one failing to the novel’s development over the past decade, it is that, for all the experimentation of Everything Is Illuminated and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, authors have avoided any metafictional exploration of the genre’s history and social function. That is, coming-of-age novels accept at face value the importance of initiation rites without tackling in any extensive way the manner in which those rites allow American culture to both police and sensationalize youth. Indeed, “youth” as a social value appears to be falling out of fashion in these books. From Fitzgerald to Salinger and Kerouac, the genre depicted the paysage moralisée as a felix culpa—a fall out of moral surety into compromise and hypocrisy. Today’s authors are more likely to look to adulthood as a reward for surviving the perils of adolescence. It would be tempting to regard this tendency as itself mature if it were not for the aura of nostalgia in these books. Longing for family and community, many fictional teenagers pine for a past in which meanings and mores were stable—a past that never existed, in other words. While the genre deserves kudos for outgrowing the fatalism of Less Than Zero, books like Jupiter Tree Burning would do well to demonstrate a more self-reflexive awareness of how its regard for adulthood risks appropriation in the ongoing culture wars over “traditional” values. Bibliography Almond, Steve. My Life in Heavy Metal. New York: Grove, 2004. Bank, Melissa. The Wonder Spot. New York: Viking, 2005. Barrowcliffe, Mark. Girlfriend 44. New York: St. Martin’s, 2001. Beller, Thomas. The Sleepover Artist. New York: Norton, 2001. Boswell, Marshall. Alternative Atlanta. New York: Delacorte, 2005. Brashare, Ann. Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. New York: Delacorte, 2001. Caldwell, Ian and Thomason, Dustin. The Rule of the Four. New York: Dial, 2004. Childress, Mark. One Mississippi. Boston: Little, Brown, 2006. Cisneros, Sandra. Caramelo. New York: Knopf, 2002. Coupland, Douglas. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991.

COMING OF AGE FICTION ———. Hey, Nostradamus! New York: Bloomsbury, 2003. Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead, 2007. DeGrazia, Don. American Skin. New York: Tandem, 2000. Eggers, Dave. You Shall Know Our Velocity! San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2002. Egolf, Tristan. Lord of the Barnyard: Killing the Fatted Calf and Arming the Aware in the Corn Belt. New York: Grove, 2000. ———. Kornwolf. New York: Grove, 2006. ———. Skirt and Fiddle. New York: Grove, 2002. Enger, Leif. Peace Like a River. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. This Side of Paradise. New York: Scribners, 1920. Foer, Jonathan Safran. Everything Is Illuminated. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. ———. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Gibbons, Kaye. The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster. New York: Harcourt, 2005. Godfrey, Rebecca. The Torn Skirt. New York: Harper Perennial, 2002. Grodstein, Lauren. Reproduction is the Flaw of Love. New York: Free Press, 2004. Haddon, Mark. The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Keltner, Kim Wong. The Dim Sum of All Things. New York: Avon, 2005. Key, Watt. Alabama Moon. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2006. Kidd, Sue Monk. The Secret Life of Bees. New York: Viking, 2002. King, Dave. The Ha-Ha. Boston: Little, Brown, 2005. Korman, Gordon. Born to Rock. New York: Hyperion, 2006. Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. Lethem, Jonathan. The Fortress of Solitude. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Long, Goldberry. Jupiter Tree Burning. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001. Lynch, Jim. The Highest Tide. New York: Bloomsbury, 2005. Massud, Claire. The Emperor’s Children. New York: Knopf, 2006. McDonnell, Nick. The Last Brother. New York: Grove, 2006. ———. Twelve. New York: Grove, 2002. Mebus, Scott. Booty Nomad. New York: Miramax, 2004. Meno, Joe. Hairstyles of the Damned. Chicago: Akashic Books, 2004. Miller, Laura. “Down on the Farm.” The New York Times March 28, 1999: sec. 7:10. Morris, Michael. Slow Way Home. San Francisco: HarperSan Francisco, 2003. Munson, Sam. “Born in the U.S.A.” Commentary 116 (November 2003): 68–72. Myracle, Lauren. L8r, g8r. New York: Abrams, 2007. ———. TTFN. New York: Abrams, 2005. ———. TTYL. New York: Abrams, 2004. Oates, Joyce Carol. I’ll Take You There. New York: Ecco, 2002. Packer, Ann. The Dive from Clausen’s Pier. New York: Knopf, 2002. Pessl, Marisha. Special Topics in Calamity Physics. New York: Viking, 2006. Phillips, Delores. The Darkest Child. New York: Soho, 2004. Pierre, DBC. Vernon God Little. New York: Canongate, 2003. Picoult, Jodi. Nineteen Minutes. New York: Atria, 2007. Pope, Dan. In the Cherry Tree. New York: Picador, 2003. Prose, Francine. After. New York: Joanna Colter, 2003. Quart, Alissa. Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers. New York: Perseus, 2003. Rempel, Mark A. Point Blank. New York: Thomas Nelson, 2002. Riggs, Jack. When the Finch Rises. New York: Ballantine, 2003. Ruditis, Paul. The Rainbow Party. New York: Simon Pulse, 2005. Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951. Schickler, David. Sweet and Vicious. New York: Dial Press, 2004. Sebold, Alice. The Lovely Bones. New York: Picador, 2002. Shepard, Jim. Project X. New York: Vintage, 2005.

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COMING OF AGE FICTION Shriver, Lionel. We Need to Talk about Kevin. New York: Counterpoint, 2003. Singleton, George. Why Dogs Chase Cars. New York: Algonquin, 2004. Sittenfeld, Curtis. The Man of My Dreams. New York: Random House, 2006. ———. Prep. New York: Random House, 2005. ———. “Sophie’s Choices.” The New York Times July 5, 2005: sec. 7:9. Smith, Kyle. Love Monkey. New York: Morrow, 2004. Soehnlein, K. M. The World of Normal Boys. New York: Kensington, 2001. Strasser, Todd. Give a Boy a Gun. New York: Simon Pulse, 2000. VanBaale, Kali. The Space Between. Montgomery, AL: River City Publishing, 2006. Watson, C. G. Quad. New York: Razorbill, 2007. Webb, Charles. The Graduate. New York: NAL, 1963. Weinstein, Debra. Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z. New York: Random House, 2004. Whittington, Brad. Welcome to Fred. Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2003. Wilson, Christopher. Cotton. New York: Harcourt, 2005. Wolfe, Tom. I Am Charlotte Simmons. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2004. Wolff, Tobias. Old School. New York: Knopf, 2003.

Further Reading Acland, Charles. Youth, Murder, Spectacle: The Politics of “Youth in Crisis.” Boulder, Co: Westview, 1995; Boss, Shira. “The Greatest Mystery: Making a Best Seller.” The New York Times May 13, 2007: sec. 3:1; Briscoe, Joanna. “Carrot pennies and cashmere twinsets: Melissa Bank’s stories may look like chick lit, but they have surprising depths, says Joanna Briscoe: The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank.” The Guardian July 2, 2005: 27; Curnutt, Kirk. Alienated-Youth Fiction. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2001; Elder, Richard. “College Try: Tom Wolfe’s Overwrought Attempt at Skewering University Life Is Nasty, Brutish, and Long.” The Boston Globe November 7, 2004: sec. D:6; Eyre, Hermione. “I Didn’t Know George Eliot Wrote Sweet Valley High . . .” The Independent October 2, 2005: 26; —. “A Female Holden for Our Age: The Like-Named Narrator of Katherine Taylor’s Debut Novel is, Like Her East Coast Boarding School Girlfriends, Haunted by the Need to Suffer. So Suffer They Do, in Blue-chip Misery and Nothing Good Can Come of That.” The Toronto Star July 27, 2007: sec. D:8; Fiedler, Leslie A. “Boys Will Be Boys!” New Leader 41 (28 April 1951): 24–26; FitzGerald, Frances. “The Influence of Anxiety: What’s the Problem with Young Adult Novels?” Harper’s 309 (September 2004): 62–69; Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “Public Letter to Thomas Boyd.” 1921. F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli with Judith S. Baughman. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. 43–44; Flanagan, Caitlin. “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Monica: How Nice Girls Got So Casual about Oral Sex.” The Atlantic Monthly 297 (January/February 2006): 167–182; Fraser, Garnet. “Death Be Not a Career Killer.” The Toronto Star May 21, 2005: sec. H:15; Kakutani, Michiko. “Who’s Afraid Of Holden Caulfield?” The New York Times August 23, 2005: sec. E:1; “Luminous Talent in the Spotlight.” The [London] Times July 7, 2005. http://entertainment.timesonline. co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/books_group/article541500.ece; Maslin, Janet. “The Myopic Navel-Gazer Can’t See Her Way to Love.” The New York Times May 18, 2006: sec. E:9; Rich, Motoko and Dinitia Smith. “Teen-lit Packages: Forget the Writer in the Garret.” The International Herald Tribune April 28, 2006: 24; Sarvas, Mark. “Beauty and the Geek.” The New York Times July 1, 2007: sec. 7:19; Scott, A.O. “Dreaming in Spanglish.” New York Times Book Review September 30, 2007: sec. 7:9; Siegel, Harry. “Extremely Cloying & Incredibly False: Why the author of Everything Is Illuminated is a fraud and a hack.” New York Press (undated). http://www.nypress.com/18/15/news&columns/harrysiegel.cfm; Springhall, John. Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gangsta Rap, 1830–1996. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999; Steuver, Hank. “Move Over, Holden: Curtis Sittenfeld Writes About Boarding School Life as if She’s Been There.” The Washington Post February 23, 2005: sec. C:1; Thomas, Louisa. “Love’s Labors.” The Los Angeles Times May

CONTEMPORARY MAINSTREAM AMERICAN FICTION 14, 2006: sec. R:9; Twenge, Jean M. Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before. New York: Free Press, 2006; Walton, Megan. “Dive by Randall DeVallance.” Bookslut (May 2005). http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2005_05_005389.php; Witham, W. Tasker. The Adolescent in the American Novel, 1920-1960. New York: Ungar, 1964.

KIRK CURNUTT

CONTEMPORARY MAINSTREAM AMERICAN FICTION Definition. As with most attempts at a normative definition, any prescriptive characterization of “contemporary mainstream American fiction” necessarily remains both partial and subjective. All four of the words in the category lead to judgment calls and, thus, controversy. “Contemporary,” for instance, is highly relative, with some critics defining the term as roughly equivalent to post-World War Two, while others push the date back to the 1960s or 1970s. In the former instance, the war functions as the boundary between “high modernism” and “postmodernism.” In such a view, new theories regarding the nature, or possibility, of Truth started to proliferate in literature and thus mark a new phase in prose fiction. The middle date pushes back the “start” of postmodernism, while the latter pursues a more strictly chronological path. Narrower perspectives are certainly possible, and many younger readers would challenge the notion that a 37-year-old book, written decades before their birth, could possibly be contemporary. Roughly, then, the debate over what constitutes “contemporary” regards whether the category should highlight simple chronology or underscore what James M. Mellard calls, after Thomas Kuhn, a paradigm shift in which nascent, “naïve” literary experiments “explode” into the dominant mode before approaching “entropy” and becoming largely supplanted by a new hegemonic discourse (Mellard 1980, 11, 39). Mellard adds, however, that any novel could be “identified as naïve or critical, or sophisticated depending on its relationship to other items in a hypostatized series,” a remark that problematizes the application of the label “contemporary” based on chronology alone (6). The paradigm approach thus employs a “big picture” approach that seeks to identify the general moment—usually a malleable one based on the publication of a significant text (which one, though?) or a clustering of writers pursuing similar thematic and aesthetic aims—when a new spirit infused the fiction of an era. One problem with such a view, however, is that the “landmark” texts are often poorly received by the public and critics of the day, with the older mode still dominating both the marketplace and the critical investigation. Another dilemma with the paradigm approach is that it can offer undue weight to the exceptional text and ignore modest inroads made by less experimental writers. Thus, the stylistic excursions of a William Faulkner or T.S. Eliot overshadow the tentative—but possibly more influential in terms of readying a wide audience for more radical strategies—steps of a James Branch Cabell or a Vachel Lindsay. Further, critics on the cusp of a paradigm shift will likely misidentify or overemphasize certain traits and ignore or underplay others. The chronological approach, of course, offers its own limitations, not the least of which is an ever-receding past. Does one limit “contemporary” to five years? Ten? Twenty? The period under question will necessarily appear arbitrary and subject to revision. A strictly agebased definition might also over stress a writer’s connection to the present and diminish his or her response to previous generations of fiction. A compromise position might merge a manageable segment of time with an awareness of how this period fits into past and emerging trends. Given the scope of this entry, the period

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from 2000–2006 will suffice, but with an effort to contextualize recent fiction with a more paradigmatic view. The idea of “mainstream” is no less ineffable than that of “contemporary.” A simple equation of “mainstream” with “popular,” for instance, breaks down when one contemplates that much so-called “genre fiction,” such as romance novels or science fiction, frequently outsells fiction deemed by many critics to be mainstream. Another possible explanation of mainstream, that it appeals to a broad audience (with respect to education, class, race, etc.), might hold more promise. Yet, it too fails under scrutiny in that the primary category contains a variety of sub-categories, such as historical fiction or bildungsroman, which do not necessarily attract a wide swath of the reading public, whereas some genre fiction, such as mysteries or “chick lit” do. Mainstream might denote confluence with the cultural zeitgeist, yet American culture, with its highly fragmented niche markets—reflected in the plethora of television networks, music genres, Web sites, sneakers, pain relievers, toilet bowl cleaners, and other entertainment formats and consumer products that are ubiquitous in the United States—hardly embraces a monolithic approach to entertainment. One might view mainstream as a transparent catch-all category for any book that fails to fit squarely into any of the major genres (romance, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, or horror), but this seems fruitless as well, depending on it does on a negative definition (i.e., mainstream is not genre fiction). An ideological approach to the question might suggest that “mainstream” functions as a reflection of a particular socio-political outlook—capitalism—even when it appears to be in opposition to the hegemonic discourse. In this view, even the most vicious of a mainstream writer’s attacks leave most questions unasked—and thus reinforce the ideological base. It seems apparent, though, that “mainstream” denotes readier access for an audience, that a familiarity with conventions (as with genre fiction) or an ability to decode intricate linguistic or formal experiments (as with avant-garde fiction) is not expected. While mainstream fiction might draw from multiple generic codes, it reorganizes them sufficiently enough that the non-specialist reader can negotiate them with ease. Simultaneously, mainstream fiction does not overly stress the experimental nature of its language or structure. Its goal is not to privilege esoteric skills, but to encourage readers to engage the material. Mainstream fiction thus represents a bridge between the niches of convention (genre fiction, which establishes parameters for characterization, theme, etc.) and anti-convention (avant-garde fiction, which self-consciously extols the idiosyncratic). It lacks both the transparency of the genre—where even “surprise” endings are coded—and the opacity of the radically experimental—where disorientation is de rigueur. “American” might initially appear the easiest term to define, yet it, too, poses some challenges. First, one might apply the broad label “American” to writers of both South and North America—which in turn would open the canon to works written in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and a host of indigenous languages. Nevertheless, one might also claim that the word “American” is sufficiently associated around the globe with the United States that debate is moot. Nevertheless, even with a narrowly nationalistic use of the word, interpretive problems arise. Chief among these regards whether residency, citizenship, and birth are co-equal in determining whether one is an “American” writer. T.S. Eliot, born and educated in the United States yet residing in England, appears in anthologies of both American and English writers. W.H. Auden, born and educated in England, yet residing in the United States, appears for the most part only in anthologies of English writers. Both

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were naturalized citizens of their adopted countries. What, moreover, is one to do with novelists such as Vladimir Nabokov or Anaïs Nin, both of whom were born outside of the United States yet wrote significant bodies of work within their adopted countries. Are they treated differently than Saul Bellow, who was born in Canada, yet immigrated to the United States as a young child? Self-identification offers one possibility: which country does a writer claim? The problem, though, is that many writers resist precisely such limiting notions of identity. Some writers indeed revel in their multi-nationalistic status. For the purposes of this entry, “American” will connote a writer with strong self-identified geographic and thematic connections to the United States, but not necessarily citizenship. Fiction itself is a problematic category, particularly when juxtaposed with another prose rubric, autobiography. As recent controversies connected with James Frey and JT LeRoy (Laura Albert) demonstrate, the public often demands a “purity” of autobiography that it would not require of fiction, a category that theoretically has more license to rely on “complete” imagination. As James Olney, a prominent theorist of autobiography, observes, however, the notion of autobiography as revealing verifiable Truth requires an archeological metaphor in which “memory is something fixed and static” (Olney 1998, 19). This contrasts with a more flexible metaphor, weaving, in which the writing process “will bring forth ever different memorial configurations and even a newly shaped self” (20). The latter metaphor, the one that Olney champions, clearly holds more in common with fiction, that supposed bastion of the imagination, than it does with unadulterated transcriptions of autobiographical experience. Given the propensity for memory to filter, distort, and omit, autobiography shares definite traits with the fabulist nature of fiction. The boundary blurring travels both ways, however, as fiction frequently draws upon historical models—as in Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter, for instance—or the author’s own experiences (as with Tim O’Brien’s Going after Cacciato). The “accuracy” and frequency of such factual information varies widely, however, with some authors seeking to replicate their models in painstaking detail and others using them more as catalysts than as templates. Still other writers consciously undercut their factual paradigms, employing what Linda Hutcheon calls “historiographic metafiction,” a process wherein “theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs . . . is made the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past” (Hutcheon 1988, 5). Yet another group of writers seeks to reject photographic mimesis in order to “disturb us by dislodging us from our settled sense of reality” by proffering “[a] new version of the real” (Hume 1984, 56). Thus, in both autobiography and fiction, writers contemplate the interpenetration of empirical fact and imaginative construct. Fiction is generally given a wider berth in altering verifiable events; although the more an audience is invested in the actual incident the more likely the outcry if a writer takes liberties with “the facts.” Time tends to decrease that investment and increase credulity. For the purposes of this definition, one might distinguish between fiction and nonfiction by focusing on the communal stress placed on authorial self-expression as opposed to fact. The outrage over Frey and LeRoy stemmed not so much from the text itself as from the perceived misrepresentation of the narrative, a misrepresentation that disgruntled readers by “preparing” them for a narrative experience ostensibly grounded in “reality,” but that in practice presented “facts” that were patently untrue. While Frey may create “facts” that correspond to some internal essence or psychological truth, the readers reject it as false, fictional. With nonfiction, most audiences expect facts to subordinate

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authorial creativity. A history book may be well-written—and even reveal an idiosyncratic vision—yet its utility will be called into question should its facts fail to correspond to documented “reality.” With fiction, however, more allowance is made for writers to manipulate “reality,” even to the point that in non-mimetic fiction physical laws may be defied or created. Fiction thus becomes a category of prose wherein an interpretive community recognizes that a narrative’s mimetic coherence and accuracy is coincidental to the author’s personal creative impulses. History. Many novelists and critics of the 1960s and 1970s agreed with Henry Miller’s 1954 assessment of “literature as a dead duck.” More specifically, fiction was seen by many, including novelist John Barth, as “exhausted” and unlikely to transcend the towering achievements of modernists such as Faulkner and Fitzgerald. Barth in particular lamented that “A good many current novelists write turn-of-thecentury-type novels, only in more or less mid-twentieth-century language and about contemporary people and topics” (Barth 1984, 66). Many, like Raymond Federman, who resisted such characterizations—or at least foresaw continued possibilities in the novel form—tended to laud the merits of what he called surfiction, in which “the primary purpose of fiction [is] to unmask its own fictionality, to expose the metaphor of its own fraudulence” (Federman 1981, 8). Patricia Waugh later referred to this principle as “metafiction,” and noted the paradox of both aiming for the “construction of a fictional illusion” and the desire for “laying bare . . . that illusion” (Waugh 1984, 6). While such techniques initially belonged to the province of the avant-garde—writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Ronald Sukenick, and Helmut Heissenbüttel—it quickly infiltrated the “mainstream” and manifested itself in broadly popular novels by the likes of E.L. Doctorow, John Fowles, Richard Brautigan, and many others. The postmodern concern with exposing “metanarratives” sustained a great number of mainstream novelists of the 1970s, although the phenomenon tended to be wedded with more traditional subject matter than the avant-garde leaned toward. Historical epics, genre fictions, and other archetypal narratives—treated with a high level of playful irony and self-consciousness— abounded and prompted some, bored by what they perceived as jaded decadence rather than experimentalism—to reiterate that the novel had lost its cachet. However, Jago Morrison aptly contends that “it seems extraordinary how misguided this ‘death of the novel’ thesis turned out to be” and argues that “contemporary fiction was to undergo a renaissance over the next twenty years, reestablishing itself as the preeminent literary form by the turn of the twenty-first century” (Morrison 2003, 4). Morrison further avers that the thesis itself stemmed from provincial reading habits and narrow critical concerns, limitations that were exploded by a diverse group of novelists who explored both rich thematic terrain and stylistic innovation (6). Indeed, a common criticism of the postmodern critique of “grand narratives” charged that the strategy occurred just as marginalized groups were wading into the flow of power, that all of a sudden the myth-making, paradigm-enforcing possibilities of narrative were presented as illusory after all. Rosemary Hennessey sums up dissatisfaction with such (non)arguments with her claim that most feminisms “raise the possibility that emancipatory movement requires normative grounds and closure” (Hennessey 1993, 3). Precisely at the moment when a significant segment mainstream fiction (albeit largely white and male) was contemplating the death of the author and the arch fictionality of its enterprise, a juggernaut of writers committed to the social power of the novel burst onto the scene. Some, like Toni Morrison, Rolando Hinojosa, and Edmund White, employed technically complex structures (many drawing from

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African and indigenous sources rather than from the avant-garde), but numerous writers, such as (early) Alice Walker, Victor Villaseñor, and Ernest J. Gaines, eagerly adopted realistic conventions and eschewed strategies designed to place screens between the readers and the content. Such writers attempted to combine the ability to entertain with efforts at social justice, and they often targeted audiences put off by the sometimes perplexing self-consciousness and thematic intricacies of writers such as Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, or William Burroughs. In a world clouded by racial, sexual, and economic disparity, many writers and readers equated the postmodern turn with self-indulgence or even irresponsibility. Mainstream fiction of the 1970s and 1980s also rejected the stylistic pyrotechnics of postmodernism by building on the “New Journalism” of writers such as Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Tom Wolfe. These writers and followers, such as Joyce Carol Oates and Joan Didion, examined “real” events through a fictionalized lens, sometimes even injecting themselves into the narrative. Other writers, including Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, and Tama Janowitz, avoiding self-consciousness and often judgment, examined the hollowness of modern materialist culture. Such novelists often used a “numb” style that depicted gross excess, violence, and betrayal as through a camera lens. Another class of socially realistic writers avoided the spare style of the “brat pack” writers and hearkened back to the full—and critical—style of Emile Zola or Theodore Dreiser. John Updike, John Irving, and others portrayed the malaise of the suburbs in an unapologetically detailed, exuberant way that mixed humor, sex, and middle-class ethos. Another trend, however, involved the mixture of fantasy and realism that had infused Latin American fiction since the appearance of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Known as magic (or magical) realism, this concept influenced a number of American writers, including Tim O’Brien, Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, and Paul Auster. Some mainstream writers, like Kurt Vonnegut, employed an amalgamation of science fiction and recognizable settings to critique modern America. In addition to the themes of lack of community and the maximalist approach to presenting American life in the novel, environmentalism also emerged, often linked with feminism and general cultural critique, in novels by writers such as Jane Smiley, Barbara Kingsolver, and Annie Proulx. Personal identity continued to constitute a major fictional theme, particularly with respect to race, where the intersections between history and the present were explored in books by writers such as Morrison, Meena Alexander, Julia Alvarez, and Louise Erdrich. Another trend was the rise of the graphic novel, which, building on the success of Art Spiegelman and Alan

BOWLING ALONE AND MAXIMALISM IN AMERICAN LIFE In the 1990s, a fin de siècle mood dominated American fiction, with authors such as Jeffrey Eugenides, Rick Moody, and Richard Russo looking back on the dissolution of American communal spirit and the rise of the “bowling alone” phenomenon noted in 2000 by sociologist Robert D. Putnam.The apocalyptic mood extended to novels set in the distant past as well, as writers such as Bobbie Ann Mason, Russell Banks, and T. Coraghessan Boyle considered the ways in which historical events reflect archetypal behavioral patterns still relevant for a millennial audience. David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Eugenides typified a movement toward “maximalism” that merged an avalanche of details with comic, digressive observations of American life (although the old hand at this form, Pynchon, continued to explore it).

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Moore in the mid-1980s, started to enter mainstream consciousness, as seen in the commercial viability of works by such artists as Daniel Clowes, Seth (Gregory Gallant), and Dave McKean. Anxiety about modern culture, particularly its speed and apparent vacuity, continued to manifest itself in many novels, such as those by Nicolson Baker, Richard Ford, and Bobbie Ann Mason. The events of 9/11 shattered the contemplative—even narcissistic—disposition of 1990s fiction and introduced stark political realities to the novels of the new century. Trends and Themes Commodification. Drawing on a theme that has been present in American literature at least since the late nineteenth century, numerous writers have presented characters caught in the whirlwind of materialism. However, whereas in earlier generations such designer labels, scrupulously detailed products (both real and imagined), and crass consumerism generally found themselves linked with a critical view of the United States, the current generation of writers does not necessarily draw such an unequivocal position. While some writers, of course, still equate materialism with moral bankruptcy; others view the capitalist landscape as an inevitable force of sorts, a neutral background that in and of itself does not determine moral worth. Writers such as Wallace and Boyle perhaps implicitly fault their characters (and by extension their country) for shallowness, but just as frequently “positive” characters use the same electronic gimcracks and shop at the same homogeneous malls as the “negative” ones. The difference is often not even one of quantity, but rather is more related to self-definition and whether the character can behave in an ethical way toward others. Detailed descriptions of consumption—often with sociological precision—offer more of a meta-narrative in which all characters, good and bad, operate. In contrast with these generic portraits are more negative ones proffered by writers such as Franzen and Mason. In such instances, the “neutrality” of conspicuous consumption is subverted; as such self-indulgence is often juxtaposed with characters (frequently in other countries) who cannot fathom such excess—and the indifference to it. Materialism in such venues acts as a soothing drug that allows individuals to ignore suffering on a global scale and concentrate instead on petty struggles. Diversity. No longer relegated solely to “ethnic” sections, multicultural fiction is decidedly mainstream, yet, both old hands (such as Alice Walker) and new (like Jhumpa Lahiri) demonstrate that race and ethnicity continue to unsettle the American landscape. Reexaminations of historical struggles and events, such as Jim Crow and the Harlem Renaissance, continue to attract novelists as audiences seek enlightenment on topics that serve as mere footnotes in “mainstream” history books. Such treatments seek to give a voice to subalterns marginalized by history. Historical research—often using alternative sources—is supplemented with imaginative renderings of characters, as the stories of these lost, faceless individuals are often viewed as equally important with the recoverable facts. Such books frequently investigate the economic and cultural forces at play in overt and institutionalized racism, and others present past events as allegories of the contemporary scene. Observers of current racial and ethnic topics often focus on the psychological effects of living in a culture that purports to be “colorblind” yet that in actuality is obsessed with difference. Glass ceilings, affirmative action, culture clashes, and everyday indignities are popular topics, as is the very notion of identity. While legal

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protection and “fair” rules ostensibly exist, historical inequalities and contemporary inequities (such as sentencing laws that disproportionally impact minorities) dispute the idea of a level playing field. Border cultures also constitute an emerging theme, as does the generation tension within members of the same race/ethnicity. Discrimination against immigrants (and perceived immigrants) is another popular theme. Environmentalism. With the ominous specters of global warming, peak oil, and suburban sprawl present in the headlines, environmental issues are appearing with an increased frequency in American fiction. Commitment to such issues, however, varies widely, with some authors, such as Barbara Kingsolver, exploring them as the primary theme, while others, like Mary Gaitskill, place them in the background as an ever-encroaching, but apparently unstoppable, threat that causes characters anxiety. For those who place the environment at the center of the narrative, a dominant concern is the impact of unchecked consumerism—ever spurred on by corporate profit-lust—on physical spaces. In such an equation, the individual functions both as potential environmental warrior/healer and as the source of the destruction. In the former case, characters might either aggressively pursue those entities that threaten ecological sustainability or simply follow a non-materialist path. In the latter formulation, authors chart individual complicity with irresponsible industries, as characters mindlessly consume products that they do not “need” and that have adverse ripple effects on the environment. In both scenarios, authors seek to rebut the notion that humans are “above” the environment, that their exceptionalism allows them to act with impunity. Rather, our relationship with the environment affects us in tangible physical and psychological ways. Those authors who are more causal in their allusions to the environment will generally focus on another source for their plotline; yet make significant references to the environment. An urban character, for example, might, in the course of pursuing a relationship, notice an ominous haze overhead or chance upon a conversation about global warming. Rarely, then, is the environment presented merely as a lush setting detached from its connection to humanity; instead, it is viewed as a reciprocal space that must be protected from human avarice. Gender Roles. The social construction of gender is a frequently explored topic in contemporary fiction. Despite, or perhaps because of, living in a “post-feminist” world, the issue of gender-based power continues to attract novelists. Many allied topics are explored by both male and female writers, including the social construction of gender (Eugenides), class differences (Sandra Cisneros), environment (Kingsolver), race (Morrison), and age (Anne Tyler). The unvarnished criticisms of faceless patriarchal targets are far less likely to occur than in decades past. Male characters are generally more nuanced—even sympathetic to some degree—and the female protagonists are sometimes less sure of how to proceed, partly because they possess similar impulses. The battle, then, frequently is an internal one in which the protagonist must come to terms with herself before she can challenge the institutionalized sexism and gender prejudice (frequently within the family) that complicate her life. Feminism is thus personalized and functions on the micro-level. True change, many novelists imply, occurs with a groundswell of personal behavior rather than with an a priori ideology. Individual women—sometimes aware of theoretical feminism, sometimes not—can more effectively impact their local environment, and thus the world, via their commitment to a specific cause such as reproductive rights, globalization, or pornography. Through superior moral conviction, such characters

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can puncture seemingly airtight “logical” arguments and expose them as sophist rationalizations. The feminine in this view is seen as a particular way of thinking, one that places ethical considerations above callous self-interest. Maximalism. A trend that started in the 1990s (and is best represented by Wallace’s 1996 Infinite Jest), Maximalism employs multiple, interlaced narratives, an ironic tone, and a style characterized by hyperallusivity and the detritus of modern life. Frequently focused on young, materially successful characters, fiction using this style juxtaposes a crush of detail with an almost allegorical narrative in which individual characters are generally far less realized than the environments(s) in which they operate. The prose equivalent of hypertext, Maximalist novels generally operate with a frenziedly digressive principle, although interlaced plotlines occasionally merge at the novel’s conclusion. Typically, employing urban settings, Maximalist fiction masquerades as a form of hyperrealism—no phenomenon of modern life is too big or small to be noticed and commented on at length—yet an element of postmodern fantasy pulses at its core. The world is recognizable, yet it often appears as though it is as distorted in a parallel dimension. Common events and objects warrant musings rendered in microscopic detail that is extraordinarily self-conscious. A kind of postmodern picaresque, invented, most argue, by Thomas Pynchon, Maximalist fiction scoffs at the minimalist restraint of Raymond Carver or Amy Hempel and revels in presenting mini-essays on every conceivable subject as it follows its legion of characters (perhaps more properly deemed caricatures) and plot twists. Such fiction frequently, but not always, refrains from explicit judgments about the culture it presents, a propensity that has prompted some commentators to label Maximalist fiction amoral. Nevertheless, the weight of its excesses rarely prevents Maximalist fiction from indeed presenting a critical picture of modern life—yet no viable solution seems forthcoming either. Technology. While novelists of the 1980s and 1990s grappled with the presence of the personal computer and the Internet, twentieth-century writers represent an even wider array of technologies, from cell phones and PDAs to video games and iPods. As in science fiction and cyberpunk (see entries in this volume), in “mainstream” fiction writers often depict technology as a negative presence designed not to aid characters but to stunt them. Slaves to the machines, such characters are frequently at a loss as to how to negotiate life and detach themselves from their electronic leashes. The pace of life as directed by (generally cryptic) machines has exceeded the ability to process the various stimuli, resulting in a psychological numbness and loss of control. The smallness of the human experience contrast with the apparently limitless (although soulless) possibilities of progress, and characters often feel powerless and incomplete. Writers, such as Walter Kirn, will often barrage readers with a multiplicity of details that bury characters and their emotions under fragments of half-digested technologies. Further, they will even discourage an intimate bond between reader and character by using so many characters that they appear little more than interchangeable parts, far less important than their contemporary milieu. The technological screen dominates, and humanity struggles to compete, as more and more “necessities” flood the market daily and encroach on both self-contemplation and interpersonal relationships. At the same time, the characters will frequently be reluctant to function without their technological crutches and often need a life-altering journey to a less technology-oriented environment, be it rural America or a third-world nation. Any salvation will be a personal one, played in a minor key, for the corporate powers behind the “desire” for more and more technology and speed appear faceless and inevitable.

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Terrorism. While terrorism was a staple in genre fiction prior to 9/11, the terrorist attacks in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., brought the topic a new urgency. The loss of control so evident in much contemporary fiction dovetails effectively with the fear and paranoia sparked by the 9/11 attacks and the wider “War on Terror” that indelibly marked the early twenty-first century. As with most themes, terrorism draws a number of fictive responses, ranging from confusion to indignation, and the topic itself serves both as a principal theme and a backdrop (sometimes merely there, sometimes functioning as a life-altering moment). While some novelists attempt to explore the conditions that breed terrorism, most American novelists, perhaps recognizing the limits of their understanding or the dearth of published insight into the terrorist psyche, focus on the effects of the terror, both the tangible destruction and death and the emotional and cultural shock left in its wake. Several authors have contrasted the “end of history” complacency endemic to the 1990s with the horrified astonishment that followed 9/11, while other writers explore America’s narcissistic materialism and its relation to global poverty as apparently inexplicable ideology clashes with scenes of western excess. Dragging their self-absorbed characters into a dialogue with history, such authors reveal that America has a long way to go. Undoubtedly, the best 9/11 novel will be written many years hence. Writers who have recently dealt directly or indirectly with terrorism include Jonathan Safran Foer, John Updike, Claire Messud, Jay McInerney, William Gibson, and Tom Robbins. See the Terrorism Fiction entry for further information. Violence. Coupled with the emergence of terrorism as a mainstream theme was the heightened presence of extreme violence in unlikely fictional spaces. Idyllic suburbs, cozy rural towns, nondescript tourist spots—these become the scenes for unimagined and life-altering brutality. Such violence decenters the reader, just as media depictions of spree killers, child abductions, and rapes disorient those who think themselves far removed from the tumult of the third world or the inner city. Violence renders quotidian concerns meaningless, and it places the survivors in precarious psychological states. Some novelists, such as Cormac McCarthy, explore violence’s potential to shape masculine identity, while others, such as Alice Sebold, investigate its ability to destroy the self. Violence also frequently functions as a metaphor of American life, with its emphasis on gross self-interest. Power relationships are often at the heart of fictional investigations of violence, among them gender, class, and race. Frequently, the violence occurs not at the hands of a random, fatal stranger but from a neighbor, a relative, or a friend. This subcurrent is perhaps even more difficult to understand than arbitrary violence, for it suggests that even within the confines of one’s home, where one is presumably protected, physical safety is in peril. Alcohol and drug abuse swirl around this type of violence, as do family history and patriarchal institutions. Survival is a corollary theme, with some characters managing by countering violence with more violence and others groping their way toward wholeness (while also experiencing difference, loss, anger, and anguish). Contexts and Issues E-books. Facing enormous competition from social networking sites (e.g., Facebook and MySpace), video games, YouTube, and other technology-based entertainment, contemporary fiction writers must, like television producers, present their materials in a variety of easily accessible formats.

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A number of dedicated e-readers have recently appeared on the market, bringing with them the possibility of an expanded market share, specifically the “millennial generation.” By recasting print novels into downloadable “content,” e-readers such as amazon.com’s Kindle, Jinke’s HanLin, and Sony’s PRS-500 can store hundreds of titles in a device as small as a paperback. Some devices also include wifi, which allows readers to download new books on the fly. Vendors such as ebooks.com offer a wide variety of titles, including contemporary fiction. The new generation of e-readers corrects previous problems such as excessive power use, blurry screens, and eyestrain. It remains to be seen whether such devices (or the podcasts discussed below) will have an effect on content. One might speculate, however, that interactive features could easily be embedded, as could formerly cost-prohibitive visuals. Such features might, for example, enhance Maximalist fiction by offering further information on the narrative’s plethora of details, or it might serve to reproduce documents pertaining to historical novels. Alternative endings, hyperlinked “cutups,” and other non-linear strategies could certainly be manipulated by willing authors. Novelist Walter Kirn even envisions a novel with feedback that functions as “a sort of floating workshop around the as-yet-unfinished book” (Kirn 2006). One easily sees writers such as David Foster Wallace and Jeffrey Eugenides being attracted to such possibilities. Film. Adaptations, certainly not a new trend, continue to abound in the twentyfirst century. Always a risky proposition, adaptations of well-known novels frequently spark heated reactions, often framed in terms of “betrayal.” Some recent adaptations of contemporary American novels include The Bee Season, The Namesake, and No Country for Old Men. Filmmakers have, surprisingly, largely left Maximalist fiction alone—although Franzen’s The Corrections is in preproduction. With their general focus on surfaces, interlaced narratives, and the young, such novels would appear ready-made for adaptation. Far more than the complex, interior-driven novels that are often selected (for example, The Human Stain), novels such as Drop City and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close would require less narrative innovation, as much of their verbal “clutter” could be captured silently. Frequently, the strongest adaptations are of lesser-known novels, where the spectator’s feelings of “faithlessness” are not usually at issue. Graphic novels offer a natural bridge between text and screen, and it is hardly coincidental that as graphic novels enter the mainstream significant number of adaptations have appeared (For example, V for Vendetta, Sin City, and The 300). Reverse adaptations also continue a dominant trend, although typically these will be linked to genre fiction, such as science fiction and action books, than with mainstream fiction. See the Film Adaptation entry for further information. The Oprah Effect. While her experiences with Jonathan Franzen and James Frey prompted her to focus much of her attention on “classic” fiction, Oprah Winfrey’s impact on novel sales has been phenomenal. Started in 1996, “Oprah’s Book Club” has selected fiction—most of it American—which Winfrey felt epitomized spiritual self-improvement. Accordingly, the books on the list range from Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Selection for the club has netted hundreds of thousands of sales, but it has also developed a reading community, as Oprah posts reading guides and other materials on her site. Beyond the wellpublicized boost from the lower echelons of sales to the top of the bestseller lists, economist Richard Butler determined that a selection by Oprah netted a long-term sales benefit, both in terms of time spent in the top 150 and in paperback sales,

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BLOGS, PUBLISHING, AND MARKETING ON THE WEB Despite increased competition from non-traditional media, especially the Internet; the public continues to buy print-based fiction. Recent data indicates that traditional publishers bring out more novels than ever before, a staggering 160,000 in 2005, although most sell in relatively paltry numbers (Turner 2006). In fact, some evidence suggests that the Internet may spur sales, especially of lesser-known quantities by allowing writers to network, post excerpts, blog, and the like.The Brautigan Library, founded in honor of Richard Brautigan and dedicated to “publishing” the works of those rejected by mainstream publishers, may be in storage (and no longer accepting submissions), but the Internet enables amateurs and professionals alike to share or sell their work with the public. Self-published fiction is by no means a new idea, but never before have self-published authors had the instantaneous ability to reach such a broad audience. Many “corporate” sites, such as amazon.com and books.google.com, allow readers to sample pages from books published on both large and small presses, and the former’s review section offers wary buyers the comfort of sampling the experiences of people who have already read the books.These reviews often have much in common with the more “underground” phenomena of blogs and fanboy sites, such as those found on blogcritics.com, goodreads.com, or myspace.com. Enterprising authors may share their progress with similar-minded “friends” who can double as consumers in tailormade niche markets. In this regard, music is far more advanced, as witnessed by the stunning success of Colbie Calliat. Further, a recent experiment by the band Radiohead, in which the group allowed consumers to purchase their music without a record company serving as middleman, will no doubt inspire “name” writers to follow suit. Stephen King and others have offered Internet-only content, and excising publishers from the loop seems a natural next move. Many enterprising amateur authors also offer podcasts of their work, although as of yet no fiction writer counterpart of Calliat has yet appeared. Several guidebooks have appeared, however, which suggest that it is only a matter of time before a traditional publisher lifts someone out of the ranks of the amateur and into the elite.

when compared with other bestselling books (Walch 2004). Although Franzen bristled about being included with authors he felt less serious than he, and Oprah took Frey to task for “lying” in his memoirs, publishers—and many authors—continue to covet Oprah’s endorsement. Although some suggest that consumers spurred by Oprah buy, but do not finish, her selections, the Club’s net effect on reading has been remarkable. Reception. Predictably, reception of the contemporary novel ranges widely—even wildly—with praise and damnation attending individuals, authors, novels, and genres. Critics of contemporary American fiction include Anis Shavini, who laments the stranglehold of MFA programs on the publishing scene, a phenomenon that Shavini sees as limiting the thematic palette to a narrow range of “bland, uniform, and unappetizing” subjects far removed from “the ordinary fabric of life” (Shavini 2004, 681). Shavini observes that this trend results in self-indulgence and dime store therapy. Another critic of contemporary American fiction, James Wood, further avers that such self-indulgence leads to bloated, unwieldy novels that sacrifice aesthetics for hip irony, that merely offer “props of the imagination, meaning’s toys” rather than the human source of vitality and meaning (Wood 2004, 169). Both observations hint that the innovations of the mid-1990s are beginning to calcify— as most experiments inevitably do. External forms, no matter how initially dynamic, eventually atrophy into clichés ripe for parody and counter-revolution. As in any

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era, rhetorical flash must be coupled with substance, and forms must be fluid enough to capture recognizable human emotion and behavior. Both Shavini and Wood represent those critics who feel that the contemporary American novel needs a thorough irrigation so that it may regain an emotional authenticity that they feel is lacking because of excessive attention to setting. Other critics, however, deny such generalizations and argue that the future of American fiction “is in splendid shape” (Williamson, 2002, 674), in that while a certain degree of “assembly line” prose inevitably appears, numerous writers have “rebelled against their teachers” in order to pursue personal voices and themes (667). Jeffrey F.L. Partridge further adds that the spacious “broad highway” of American literature offers a helpful counter-narrative to the monolithic literature of the past (Partridge 2001, 459). Walter Kirn suggest that form, too, will continue to evolve as novelists grapple with emergent technologies such as instant messaging, social networking, and text messaging. Modes that he feels function paradoxically as they reveal rich communal connections yet simultaneously function in isolation: too much happens each day, it happens all at once, and yet, in some ways, nothing happens at all. “A day that’s spent processing electronic signals like a sort of lonely arctic radar station (my day, your day, a lot of ours) is hard to dramatize” (Kirn 2006). He views novelists as up to the inherent challenges, and suggests that a balance between the type of reference-heavy background that troubles Wood and the humanity that Shivini seeks will materialize as the transition from older technologies to the newer portable technologies fades and the technologies themselves start to matter less than the stories they help to convey. These more sanguine critics recognize the pitfalls of being trapped within the surfaces of life, yet they also observe that every generation of writers has its growing pains. Indeed, one might, with Raymond Williams, note that contemporary literature always contains residual, dominant, and emergent forms (Williams 1977, 122). Thus, forms and themes that share more in common with the nineteenth-century novel (residual) mingle with mainstream concepts (dominant) and experiments that may or may not become dominant (emergent). Optimists such as Kirn feel that the more turgid, emotionless trends in fiction will die off as novelists adapt and seek the forms that best capture the individual and communal themes that still compel their readership. Selected Authors. In a field as crowded as the contemporary mainstream novel, an enormous amount of subjectivity comes into play when choosing which authors to discuss. In the following section, the focus is on those writers deemed “significant” by critical consensus, as determined by reviews, critical articles, and the like. In addition, some lesser-known writers have been included as examples of specific trends. One may find information about other writers considered “mainstream” in other entries in this volume, including African American Literature, Coming of Age Fiction, Historical Fiction, Magical Realism, Native American Literature, Regional Fiction, Urban Fiction, and many other categories. Julia Alvarez: Alvarez released two novels, including In the Name of Salome and Saving the World. In the Name of Salome follows Camilla as she tries to recapture the essence of her mother, a famous poet who died when her daughter was three. The novel examines the themes of exile, poetry, female relationships, political activism, and Latin American history, but it avoids the fantastic elements of magical realism. Alvarez employs a dual narrative structure, with the mother’s history told in chronological order and the daughter’s in reverse chronological order, a strategy that results

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in highlighting the connectedness between the two. Her novel Saving the World juxtaposes the stories of two women separated by time yet connected in spirit and idealism. Drawing on historical analogues—as is typical with Alvarez—the book parallels a real quest to eradicate small pox with a modern effort to eliminate AIDS. Class and gender issues are foregrounded, and the book employs a style that alternates between the present and the past. Russell Banks: Banks explores the recent past in his novel The Darling, a book set in Liberia, Ghana, and the United States and focused on the intersections of (privileged) idealism and race. Hannah, the novel’s white American protagonist, fully invests herself into improving conditions in Liberia, yet when the country descends into brutal violence, she departs (ironically attempting to save some chimpanzees from slaughter—even as humans are dying en masse) and thus confirms her outsider status, just as when she earlier flees from her connection with the Weather Underground. Banks’s prose is straightforward and earnest, sometimes to the point of being turgid. Martin Scorcese plans to film The Darling. Saul Bellow: Bellow rounded out his prodigious, Nobel Prize-winning career with Ravelstein (2000), a pseudo-memoir of his experiences with Allan Bloom. Bellow’s Ravelstein, a quasi-closeted homosexual, blends philosophical genius with conspicuous consumerism. Ravelstein and Chick (the Bellow character) hold riveting conversations on topics sublime and silly. Among its various themes, the ineffable quality of friendship, and the inability of language to convey it, is perhaps the most important. Bellow employs an episodic style that mimics a relaxed, digressive conversation, and his prose is direct and humorous. T.C. Boyle: The energetic Boyle published four novels between 2000 and 2006: A Friend of the Earth, Drop City, The Inner Circle, and Talk Talk. In the first book, Boyle presents a distressing view of the future, wherein environmental activism has clearly failed to stop the will of materialist excess. Most species have vanished, the climate is in tumult, and A Friend of the Earth satirizes the selfabsorption and self-righteousness of the environmental movement (circa the early 1990s) even as it underscores the accuracy of its jeremiads. Boyle alternates between the 1990s and his dystopian future, developing his theme in characteristic detail, yet never ignoring the human element. Drop City explores many of the same themes—particularly that of shallow idealism—although its focus is on a hippie commune, a place where smarmy platitudes mask a reality of selfish practice. Boyle comically contrasts this group hypocrisy with a truly self-reliant character, Sess, whose life at times is brutal. In The Inner Circle, Boyle’s satiric target is Alfred Kinsey (“Prok”), the infamous sex researcher. Boyle weaves the fictional memoir of one of Kinsey’s researchers in examining the subculture of the Kinsey Institute and its effects on human behavior. As in the previous works, this novel contrasts well-intended but naïve idealism with the more morally ambiguous reality (as, for example, when narrator John Milk must, for the cause, sleep with both Kinsey and his wife). Boyle’s plot is fairly thin: however, and Milk’s innocence at times strains credulity. Boyle takes on a more contemporary theme in Talk Talk, a book that examines the effect of identity theft on a deaf teacher. Dana and her boyfriend vow to track the thief, and issues of self-esteem, violence, and obsession pervade the narrative. Lacking Boyle’s trademark satiric humor, the novel’s thriller characteristics are somewhat undercut by Boyle’s style, which at times piles on details that detract from the action.

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Michael Chabon: Chabon, whose earlier novels had worked on a small but elegant scale, transformed his fiction mightily with the epic The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001. In his earlier fiction, Chabon earned a well-deserved reputation for lyricism and social realism. Retaining these qualities, Chabon expanded his canvas to the past and added fantasy elements as well. Exploring the early years of the comic industry, Chabon covers a breathtaking number of themes, including Jewish identity, cultural assimilation, capitalism, fidelity, homosexuality, censorship, and escapism. Emotionally mature, the book runs the gamut from the petty to the sublime and adroitly contrasts the experiences of the two protagonists, Sammy Clay and Josef Kavalier as they develop their character, “The Escapist.” While a large novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay does not belong in the same Maximalist category as Wallace or Pynchon, as the human element always outweighs the conflict between surfaces and shadows that make up much of those writers’ works. Chabon has been working on a screen adaptation of the novel. Along with Jonathan Franzen and other contemporary American writers, Chabon appeared on The Simpsons in 2006. Don DeLillo: DeLillo proffered two works between 2000 and 2006, The Body Artist and Cosmopolis. The first book, a novella in sharp contrast to the Maximalist Underworld, examines a much smaller milieu than is typically DeLillo’s wont. A fragment of a marriage is followed by a poignant study of loss, as Lauren Hartke comes to grips with the suicide of her husband and ultimately develops an act of performance art after “discovering” a strange man sleeping in her house. DeLillo allows both major actions to occur “off stage,” informing the reader with new accounts that relate the information. DeLillo’s style is claustrophobic and dark, concerned with the elasticity of time and mental survival. One senses that with another small novel, Cosmopolis, DeLillo is exploring new terrain; that he has exhausted the sweeping narratives that he presented in the 1990s. Here, DeLillo examines a single day in America before the tech bubble burst and before 9/11 altered the cultural and political landscape. Observing a myriad of cultural and historical details, DeLillo traces a billionaire as he makes his way, with postmodern self-consciousness— through New York before his apparent murder at the hands of a former, now homeless, employee. Spiritual emptiness, technological amorality, and cold ambition—these themes permeate the narrative. DeLillo here returns to his characteristic prose style, a hyperaware, sophisticated medley of lyricism and sub rosa tragedy. E.L. Doctorow: Doctorow offered two novels, City of God (2000) and The March (2005) in addition to two collections of stories and a book of nonfiction. Using his trademark staccato style, City of God whirls through the fictional and real world of Everett, a novelist with a penchant for history and liquor. The book also contains a plot wherein an Episcopalian priest befriends two rabbis and ultimately converts. The characters ponder the nature of God and course through timeless and time-bound philosophical and historical debates. Doctorow interweaves high and low culture and decenters his readers through radical shifts in perspective and tone. In The March, Doctorow leaves the twentieth century for the nineteenth and recreates Sherman’s march to the sea during the Civil War. Doctorow, however, sets his sights on the internal lives of his characters—both Union and Confederate, free and slave—rather than on well-known external events. In the process, Doctorow captures both the war milieu and the roots of many of the racial and political problems of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Doctorow ranges comfortably between high and low dialects, and maintains a brisk pace.

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David Eggers: Eggers released two novels between 2000 and 2006, You Shall Know Our Velocity and What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. You Shall Know Our Velocity follows a pair of men who travel across the globe in an effort to give away the remains of $80,000. The quest theme is in full force here, although the characters are only dimly aware of what they are seeking, and the journey itself proves rather mundane. Class issues—and American imperialism— form one of the book’s thematic pillars, and the power and arbitrariness that attend the charity seem to make the characters even guiltier than the money itself. Eggers’s prose is alternatively comic and plodding. He handles a much darker theme in What Is the What, a book that shares the life story of Valentino Achak Deng, who, after escaping the brutality of the Sudan, is ironically mugged in his Atlanta apartment. Based on a real incident (Deng is really the man’s name), the novel blurs the line between reality and fiction. An interesting twist is Eggers’s device of having Deng tell his story to a series of different listeners—none of whom care (even those who theoretically should) overly much about what he is saying, all of it horrific. A fictional memoir, Eggers avoids the pitfalls of Frey in that he may reconstruct conversations, invent narrative bridges, and the like with impunity yet remain emotionally faithful to Deng’s tribulations. Bret Easton Ellis: Ellis’s Lunar Park (2005) merges a fictionalized memoir (using, à la Henry Miller, a character bearing the author’s real name) with an exploration of post-9/11 terrorism and paranoia, as well as with a series of bizarre events (stalking, abduction, and hauntings). While Ellis draws heavily from his own past as a shock-author, he gives himself a fictional wife and son, and he completely fabricates the book’s latter stages. In perhaps an attempt at a metaphorical exorcism (or selfabsolution), the book contemplates the price of celebrity and self-indulgence for both the writer and world. Ellis the character seems trapped in the imagination of Ellis the writer—or is it the other way around? Ellis’s prose is as cuttingly ironic as ever. Louise Erdrich: A busy Erdrich penned four novels between 2000 and 2006: The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001), The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003), Four Souls (2004), and The Painted Drum (2005). The Last Report chronicles the life of a nun who passes as a priest after being banished from her convent. Set on an Ojibwe reservation, the novel investigates a diversity of topics, such as the power of faith, forbidden sexuality, deception, and sainthood. Narratologically complex, the novel combines a number of realistic and fantastic modes, and it merges both native and Catholic traditions. In The Master Butchers Singing Club, Erdrich depicts a German immigrant who settles in North Dakota following World War I. The title character’s voice brings solace to the troubled souls of the idiosyncratic town, and acts as an anchor amidst the sprawling, violent plot. Erdrich’s prose is both dense and lyrical. Four Souls, a much smaller novel, returns to characters familiar to readers of Tracks, most notably Fleur Pillager. Erdrich employs three narrators to tell of Fleur’s vengeance on John James Mauser, who took her land. The clash of native and capitalist cultures is foregrounded here, and the futility of revenge is a central theme. Tragi-comedy is the dominant mode, particularly when Fleur heals Mauser so that her vengeance will be more honorable. The Painted Drum relates the story of an Ojibwe artifact “liberated” from a New England farm. Using a combination of realism and myth, Erdich deftly and powerfully develops three interrelated stories that explain the genesis of the drum and its impact on the lives of those who have encountered it. The power of living tradition

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is on full display in this novel, as the drum is transformed from an art object back into a vital spiritual force. Jeffrey Eugenides: Eugenides won the Pulitzer Prize for his Maximalist opus Middlesex (2002), as novel that interweaves a contemporary tale of hermaphroditism with a historic one of Greek immigration. Raised as a girl, Calliope Stephanides undergoes sexual reassignment therapy, but bolts before surgery—and changes to a male identity, Cal. In the historical narrative, themes of incest, recreated identity, and assimilation appear, paralleling the experience of Cal/Calliope. Awash in contemporary and historical detail, the complex narrative offers both a bildungsroman and a family epic. Written in the vibrant, hyperaware prose style Eugenides developed in The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex is expansively lyrical and briskly paced. Richard Ford: Ford supplemented two story collections with one novel, The Lay of the Land (2006). The Lay of the Land returns to Ford’s most famous character, Frank Bascombe, as he contemplates life in post-election 2000. The presumed dead husband of Frank’s second wife has reappeared, sparking a separation, and Frank’s first wife, now a widow, intimates that she wants to reunite. Adding to Frank’s troubles is prostate cancer, for which he is undergoing treatments, and the emotional turbulence caused by two sons, one living and one dead. Frank’s Thanksgiving weekend is one of contemplation and, finally, violence. Like Updike in his Rabbit series, to which the Bascombe books are often compared, Ford combines his protagonist’s self-examination with a survey of the contemporary scene, and his oftcomic prose is packed with detail. Jonathan Franzen: Franzen’s Maximalist novel The Corrections (2001) examines the impact of materialist excess in the wake of the Clinton 1990s. Pondering themes such as globalism (and the impact of an insatiable United States on the world scene), disposable culture, image-driven mores, and corporate ravenousness, the novel also traces the very modern problems of the Lambert family, whose members suffer from a variety of physical and mental dysfunction. Franzen reveals how capitalism has infiltrated every aspect of American life, suggesting that many of the problems faced by the Lamberts are both directly and indirectly a result of an environment dedicated to shallow materialism, a place where “corrections” are superficial and practically designed to miss the mark. With a sharp, singular prose style, Franzen moves from overwrought earnestness to lampoon with ease. Franzen famously disparaged his inclusion in Oprah’s Book Club, a move lamented by his publishers and that prompted Winfrey to concentrate more on “classic” books. A film version of the National Book Award-winning novel is planned, although pre-production has been plagued with problems. Mary Gaitskill: Gaitskill’s Veronica (2005), which garnered a nomination for the National Book Award, offers a dark, yet at times poignant, examination of protagonist Alison’s rise as a model and long, sordid decline into a sick, middle-aged maid. The eponymous character serves less as a focal point than as a means of redemption for Alison, who recalls Veronica’s battles with AIDS and uses memories of her relationship to gain strength in her own struggle with hepatitis. Gaitskill employs the sometimes disorienting strategy of moving from Alison’s memories of the past to her “real-time” present, often without many narrative cues. Such a method, however, reinforces the impact of the past on Alison’s present situation. Gaitskill also uses a discordant lyricism in describing deeply disturbing sexual violence and other sordid materials, which highlight both Alison’s strange attraction to the seamy glamour and morally repugnant people of the modeling world and her precarious position

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there. Intriguingly, as she recalls the past, Alison moves from the concrete hostility of the present to the lush environs of nature, where, in a subtly ecofeminist moment, she experiences something like redemption. Gail Godwin: Godwin brought out two novels, Evenings at Five (2003) and Queen of the Underworld (2006), books that show her range. In the first small “novel,” Godwin recreates her own life with composer Robert Starer, who died in 2001. A testament to a loving relationship, the book examines the transformation from pleasant everyday life to tragic illness, death, and the mourning process. Godwin, while painting a touching portrait, does not engage in hagiography, and she shows Rudy’s grating side as well as his sweet one. In The Queen of the Underworld, Godwin is far removed from such an intimate setting, locating this narrative in the Cuban-Miami milieu of 1959. The book follows a young journalist as she absorbs a new culture and learns her trade. Full of eccentric grotesques, such as Madam Ginevra Brown, the novel is written in quirky, richly detailed prose. Rolando Hinojosa: Hinojosa released a single novel, We Happy Few (2006), during this entry’s chronological parameters. We Happy Few represents Hinojosa’s attempt at an academic novel, a setting seemingly far removed from the “Klail City” environs of his earlier efforts—yet some of his recurrent characters do appear in the novel. “Belken State” is in turmoil as its ailing president must be replaced, a process that finds Hinojosa shifting perspectives feverishly as he accounts for the various factions and interests in the petty world of academe. Added to the mix is the murder of a regent’s transvestite nephew. Hinojosa continues his adaptation of the traditional estampa form, and the book’s quick shifts perfectly echo its multicultural subject matter. John Irving: Irving added two titles to his impressive list of novels, The Fourth Hand (2001) and Until I Find You (2005). The Fourth Hand further reveals Irving’s mastery of bizarre, off-kilter humor, as it relates the tale of a stunningly handsome reporter who, after losing his hand to a lion while taping a story, receives a hand transplant from a man whose widow wants “visiting rights.” Wallingford, the reporter, sleeps with the widow and fathers her child. Wallingford, a rake with dubious morals, attempts to transform his life, with uneven results. Unlike many of Irving’s novels, this one is fairly confined to a limited cast, and the prose, while at times charming, is perhaps too earnest for the subject matter. Until I Find You relates the life of Jack Burns, an actor who has survived an unconventional education in an all-girls’ school, where he served as a sexual toy for the older students. The sexual abuse is presented matter-of-factly, and an older Jack eventually “misses” some of his abusers. Literally and figuratively questing for his missing father, Jack eventually finds him—predictably a far different man than that of Jack’s boyish romanticizations. The novel contains a host of eccentric characters, although the plot is largely secondary. The prose is abundantly detailed, perhaps repetitively so with respect to Jack’s sexual experiences. Gish Jen: Jen penned a single novel, The Love Wife (2004), during the 2000–2006 period. Jen leaves behind the Changs of her first two novels and portrays a complex American family, the Wongs, who consist of a second-generation Chinese father, a Caucasian mother, two adopted Asian daughters, and a biological son who physically favors his mother. Added to the mix is Lan, Carnegie’s relative from China, who exploits existing tensions between Janie (pejoratively labeled Blondie by her mother-in-law) and her daughters. Issues of assimilation, teen angst, racial insecurity, and family pervade this humorous, but ultimately not comic, novel.

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Relying heavily on dialogue, Jen shifts perspectives frequently, a phenomenon that grants her characters substantial depth. Barbara Kingsolver: Kingsolver, recently focused more on nonfiction, released Prodigal Summer in 2000. An ecofeminist novel set in Appalachia; Prodigal Summer develops a trio of narrative threads all connected by their characters love for the earth in spite of skepticism from their neighbors. Kingsolver emphasizes the variety and balance required for healthy ecosystems—human relationships included. Presenting an array of scientific information along with her plot, Kingsolver pointedly contrasts her three female characters’ concern for the environment with the ridicule of a community that seems ignorant of the ecological and economic havoc wreaked by unthinking environmental exploitation. She avoids unvarnished didacticism, however, and her characters are human rather than ideological cut-outs. The natural environment is, however, oddly pastoral at times, a realm lacking the brutal quality of nature. Kingsolver’s prose is lush, sometimes breathlessly so. Jhumpa Lahiri: Lahiri followed up her Pulitzer Prize-winning story collection with a novel, The Namesake (2003). The book depicts the Gangulis, a Bengali family whose immigrant parents inevitably clash with the American values of their children. Identity, especially that of Gogol, the Gangulis’s son, forms the novel’s thematic core, and Lahiri deftly portrays the marginalized world of the children of immigrants: not of the old world, yet not quite confident or accepted in their own. Lahiri’s prose is vibrant and detailed. A film of The Namesake appeared in 2007. Bobbie Ann Mason: In addition to two story collections, Mason produced one novel, An Atomic Romance (2005). Sixty years after Hiroshima, Mason’s novel explores the familiar terrain of nuclear danger through the eyes of Reed Futrell, a nuclear plant worker who has been unsettled by his girlfriend’s insistence that he undergo tests to determine whether his job is harming him. The relationship forms the book’s core, although environmental and genetic risks filter through the narrative, with Reed trying to get Julia to reconnect and Julia leaving for a trip to Chicago. Julia, politically engaged and skeptical, contrasts well with the trusting, unconcerned Reed, and the pair form a microcosm of American attitudes toward nuclear power. Mason’s prose is digressive, yet it is suited to the characters, particularly Reed. Cormac McCarthy: McCarthy released two novels, No Country for Old Men (2005), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road (2006). Using a spare style that deviates from much of his previous fiction, No Country for Old Men takes place in the same border environs of his famous trilogy. An extremely violent book, McCarthy’s Anton Chigurh is a psychopath of the first rank, a ruthless killer who spouts philosophy. Llewelyn Moss, a welder, stumbles across a blown drug deal and absconds several million dollars. He is pursued by Chigurh and protected by Sheriff Tom Bell. McCarthy employs a dual narrative style, interlacing a third-person perspective with Bell’s musings, and his somber prose serves the epic battle of good versus evil well. No Country for Old Men appeared as a film in 2007. In The Road, McCarthy further explores the impact of violence, but on a much wider scale: postapocalyptic desolation. A father and son (born shortly before the unnamed catastrophe that has wiped out most of the population) attempt to maintain a moral code as they scavenge for food and try to avoid the less ethically scrupulous survivors who resort to cannibalism. The father is dying, however, and wonders whether he should kill his young son, whose moral compass is a very real drawback

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in an anarchic world. As with his previous novel, The Road adopts a stately, economical prose style that is rich with stark figurative language. Toni Morrison: Morrison added to her Nobel Prize-winning résumé with one novel, Love (2003). In the short yet dense Love, Morrison explores not only the title emotion but an array of others as well, including Love’s opposite, Hate. Ranging decades before and after the death of the late Bill Cosey, an African American entrepreneur, Morrison investigates the relationships that surrounded him. As is typical with her late fiction, Morrison challenges her readers both thematically and linguistically, and Love tackles the American dream, institutionalized racism, the unpredictability of human emotions, and gender roles, among others topics, in an intricate, metaphor-rich prose style. As with Beloved, Love contains an intriguing spectral character, in this case the dynamic L., a cook whose commentary cuts through the book’s layers of deception and obfuscation. Joyce Carol Oates: Oates, ultra-prolific and talented as ever, produced eleven novels (four under various pen names), three novellas, and four short story collections (not to mention her work in drama and nonfiction!) in the first seven years of the twenty-first century. Of these, the most significant are Blonde (2000; short-listed for the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize) and The Falls (2004; Prix Femina Etranger winner). Blonde is an epic novel that explores the life of Marilyn Monroe. Oates’s meticulous research depicts the familiar outline of the actress’s life (and Oates comments that despite the novel’s heft she constrains herself to viewing only representative incidents from Monroe’s experience), but the book’s true strength is in its imagined recreation of Monroe’s interior life, replete with dreams, vulnerabilities, and myths. Oates also appropriates and alludes to numerous fairy tales, which juxtapose poignantly with the real-life tragedy. Written in a full, realistic prose style, Blonde attempts to portray the psyche behind the label. The Falls follows protagonist Ariah as she witnesses her husband fling himself over Niagara Falls on their honeymoon and then attempts to rebuild her life—including a marriage to a lawyer who becomes entangled in the Love Canal case and ultimately alienated from his family before his suspicious demise. Oates then jumps ahead sixteen years to depict the couple’s children as they unravel their parents’ history. Obsession, secrets, greed, environmental devastation, and redemption lie at the novel’s core, and Oates masterfully employs an intense prose style that never loses focus. Tim O’Brien: O’Brien’s July interlaces a depiction of a thirty-first reunion with flashbacks cataloguing the impact of the Vietnam War on the participants. Physical and emotional scars abound, and O’Brien’s use of nonlinear form allows him to blur the line between past and present. Indeed, for most of the characters, the past is not past at all, but rather is a constant presence. Both pro- and anti-war classmates are tracked by O’Brien’s prose, and he underscores that the wounds of the intergenerational conflict have not healed. The lives behind the ideologies, however, have decayed markedly, via cancer, drug use, divorce, and other life crises. O’Brien employs gallows humor, but the ethical core of the novel prevents it from descending into bitterness. Another O’Brien trait, magical realism, is present in several fantasy scenes. Cynthia Ozick: Ozick produced one novel, Heir to the Glimmering World (2004) in addition to her Collected Stories (2006). Heir to the Glimmering World unfolds the story of the Mitwissers, a Jewish family fleeing from the ever-encroaching antiSemitism of Hitler’s pre-war Germany. In New York City, Mitwisser, an intellectually circumscribed academic sponsored by an eccentric millionaire, hires the orphaned

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Rose Meadows as his assistant/nanny. Rose becomes fascinated with the esoteric world of research, and Ozick creates a plausible environment. Thematically, the book deals with an obscure Jewish sect, class conflict, faith, and identity. Ozick’s prose is economical yet descriptive, although her characterization falters with some of the lesser characters. Annie Proulx: Proulx, in addition to two story collections, released one novel, That Old Ace in the Hole (2002). In the book, Proulx catalogues a series of bizarrely named characters, but she chiefly follows Bob Dollar, an agent for the “Global Pork Rind Corporation” who is surveying potential locations for new hog farms. Proulx’s characters, especially Ace Crouch, generally oppose the farms and long for the ecological purity of the past—and they extol the past nearly to the point of driving Dollar to despair. More eco-comic than Kingsolver, Proulx nonetheless tackles the very real problem of introducing alien species into an ecosystem, not to mention the faceless greed of corporate agribusiness. Proulx’s prose is comically unique, occasionally to the point of absurdity with respect to similes, and it employs a picaresque format, with individual stories taking the narrative in numerous directions (her use of idiosyncratic names further connects the book to the picaresque tradition). Thomas Pynchon: After a nine-year silence, Pynchon offered the epic Against the Day in 2006, a prime example of Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction. Set during the progressive era, the novel offers both the extraordinary attention to detail and the Gnosticism that Pynchon is famous for. Deceptive in its surfaces—drawn from sources such as boy’s adventure novels, westerns, spy novels, and detective fiction—the book weaves a tangle of themes that will dominate the twentieth century, from labor disputes and technology-driven warfare to esoteric scientific debates and religious chicanery. As with all of Pynchon’s Maximalist novels—he did, of course, invent the genre—characterization is at a minimum, with the dozens of “major” characters and hundreds of minor ones cumulatively representing History rather than individual psychologies. Real historical events, such as the Ludlow Massacre, merge with cryptic fictional plots that suggest how the optimism of the fin de siècle era transformed into jaded pessimism where every utopian vision masks totalitarian longings. Comic irony abounds, yet it is a dark humor born of tragic possibility. Stylistically, the novel takes its cue from a variety of genres (such as those mentioned above), but it interlaces its narratives so that no single style dominates. Rather, the book presents a bricolage wherein individual moments are the equivalent of geologic layers, and readers must, with Joseph Frank, read spatially. Philip Roth: Roth maintained his steady pace with four novels, The Human Stain (2000), The Dying Animal (2001), The Plot against America (2004), and Everyman (2006), of which the first and third are the strongest. In The Human Stain, Roth continues the story of Nathan Zuckerman, although he is more of a narrator here than a protagonist per se. As in Bellow’s Ravelstein, Zuckerman must write an apologia that he has been putting off—in this case a defense of his a friend who retired after being accused of making racially insensitive remarks. The twist, however, is that Coleman Silk has only been “passing” as a Jew and is, in fact, of African ancestry. Roth uses this intriguing scenario to expose academic and political hypocrisy, as well as to explore the social construction of race, and he does so with a richly brocaded prose style. An adaptation of the novel appeared in 2003. The Plot against America portrays an America in which aviator (and Iron Cross-winning anti-Semite) Charles Lindbergh defeated FDR in the presidential election of 1940. A staunch isolationist,

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Lindbergh not only out-Chamberlains Chamberlain, but also endorses voluntary work camps for American Jews as part of the Office of American Absorption. As with some of his other texts, Roth uses his own family as characters, and he draws heavily on his childhood experiences in depicting America’s not-so-latent antiSemitism during the Depression and World War II. Roth’s style—realistic, nuanced, and idiomatic—clashes at times with the awkward dubiousness of some of his alternative history, especially towards the latter parts of the narrative. Richard Russo: Russo recently published both a collection of stories and a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Empire Falls (2001). Set in a fading mill town, Empire Falls tracks Miles Roby, manager of the Empire Grill, as he contemplates his wasted potential and lackluster life. Nevertheless, Russo utilizes the humorous insights that have marked his earlier works to steer the book clear of self-pity or melodrama. The book drifts back in time, tracing not only Roby’s life, but also that of his family and that of his employer, the Whitings. A 2005 HBO adaptation won a Golden Globe for best miniseries. Alice Sebold: Sebold followed up her debut memoir with The Lovely Bones (2002), a novel that depicts a rape/murder victim watching her family and friends from beyond the grave. Susie Salmon’s survivors respond to the horror in a variety of ways, some self-destructive, some inspirational, and Susie, ensconced in a tailormade heaven, uses each response to bolster her own understanding—and hope. In using a supernatural narrator, Sebold merges omniscience with intimacy without appearing gimmicky, and the novel’s prose is subtly detailed. The Lovely Bones is scheduled to appear as a film in 2009. Jane Smiley: Between 2000 and 2006, Smiley produced two novels, Horse Heaven (2000) and Good Faith (2003). In previous novels, such as 1000 Acres and Moo, Smiley revealed a tendency to invest everyday actions with, respectively, tragic and comic importance. In Horse Heaven, she experiments with anthropomorphism in examining the simultaneously rarified and mundane world of horseracing. Approaching magical realism far more than any of her previous books, the novel parallels the jaded lives of its human protagonists with the magical lives of its horses, creatures that Smiley portrays as having rich mental lives. Several characters, most significantly Rosalind Maybrick, undergo redemptive transformations, and some significant class contrasts are apparent (particularly between the owner-class and those who serve them and the horses). Stylistically, the novel interlaces a variety of settings and perspectives, and the tone is generally comic. The second novel, Good Faith, offers a far less appealing cast of characters, and it setting is far seamier, despite its physical charms. Examining the dubious ethics behind the real estate boom (and accompanying Savings and Loan scandal) of the early 1980s, Smiley’s novel offers both the detail that its author is known for and an ironic critique of oily hypocrisy. The American dream’s underbelly is clearly present here, but Smiley allows the small-town charm of her characters to present such ambition (and its concomitant petty Machiavellianism) to distract the readers from fully hating them. Smiley adds her characteristic didacticism (explaining financial intricacies not with the irony of a Wallace or Boyle, but with earnestness) to a first-person perspective and a compelling style. Amy Tan: Tan contributed two novels, The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001) and Saving Fish from Drowning (2005), between 2000 and 2006. In The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Tan juxtaposes the story of Ruth Young and that of her mother, LuLing. Obviously, Tan’s main focus is on mother-daughter relationships, but she also

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examines assimilation, secrecy, and Alzheimer’s. LuLing’s story also differentiates between bonesetters (healers) and bonesellers (charlatans), and it shows a China very much transitional in its attitudes toward women. Tan employs first-person narration for LuLing and third-person narration for Ruth, a strategy that contrasts the dramatic (LuLing) with the mundane (Ruth). Tan’s style, sensitive to the nuances of language, is detailed and warm. Anne Tyler: Tyler added three novels to her oeuvre, Back When We Were Grownups (2001), The Amateur Marriage (2004), and Digging to America (2006). The first, which in 2004 was adapted into a television movie, represents Rebecca Davitch, a 53-year-old widow who decides to recapture her potential self. Written in Tyler’s typically plain prose, the book shows a mid-life crisis in full flower, but it focuses on family dynamics as few authors are able. The Amateur Marriage investigates the birth and death of a thirty-year marriage, in the process exploring how divorce can both liberate and paralyze. Tyler selects episodes from the marriage to demonstrate the whole, and her powers of observation are on display. In Digging to America, Tyler compares two couples, one white-bread, one Iranian American, who adopt Korean daughters and meet annually for an “arrival party.” Thus, the question of multicultural American identity rises to the fore, and Tyler also examines how 9/11 alters perceptions of Muslim Americans. Weaving humorous anecdotes with serious insights, Tyler extends her range in this narrative. John Updike: The ever-prolific Updike produced four novels (Gertrude and Claudius, Seek My Face, Villages, and Terrorist) as well as a short story collection (Licks of Love) that contains Rabbit Remembered, a novella. In Gertrude and Claudius, a short (for Updike) novel, Updike refashions Shakespeare’s Hamlet, presenting Gertrude’s relationship with Claudius in a much more positive light. As in his earlier retelling of The Scarlet Letter, Updike reads against the grain of his source text, in this instance portraying Hamlet as a shallow narcissist. Replete with historical details, the novel portrays a sympathetic Gertrude whose husband is unaffectionate and scheming. In all, he presents a feminist revision common of the classic play. Updike’s next novel, Seek My Face presents an interview between an older female artist and a budding journalist. Updike employs flashbacks as Hope, the artist, recalls her Pollock-like first husband and Warhol-like second husband. Gradually, Hope and Kathryn, the journalist, bond, and Hope muses over the gender dynamics of the art scene, a milieu well captured by Updike, who writes quite frequently on art. In Villages, Updike returns to the theme that made him famous, New England ennui and its attendant sexual trysts. Framed by three villages inhabited by main character Owen Mackenzie, Villages traces a sexual history from virginal petting through connubial boredom and countless affairs—and back again to monogamy as AIDS appears on the horizon. Updike’s hyperrealism is on display, particularly in his sexual scenes, though these seldom reach the ecstatic heights of Couples. Terrorist is Updike’s response to 9/11, and it follows the radicalization of a young American Muslim, who, scorning his mother’s religious indifference, romanticizes the Egyptian father who abandoned him when he was a toddler. Ahmad is ultimately recruited to drive a bomb into the Lincoln Tunnel, but after prematurely ejaculating (with his pants on) because of the efforts of a prostitute who coincidentally happens to be a classmate whom he was secretly attracted to, it is unclear whether he will go through with it. Updike, however, portrays Ahmad’s diction and mannerisms in a stilted fashion that is hardly explained by his diligent study of the Koran. The centerpiece of Licks of Love, the novella Rabbit Remembered,

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depicts how Rabbit Angstrom’s family recalls the dead patriarch. Annabelle Byer, Rabbit’s illegitimate daughter, appears suddenly at Thanksgiving, with predictably fiery results, and the gathering demonstrates that life goes on without Harry—yet is unquestionably influenced by him. Rabbit’s wife, Janice, has married Harry’s nemesis Ronnie, who rails with gusto against Bill Clinton, and Nelson has transformed his life dramatically—so much so that he accepts Annabelle without hesitation. Stylistically, the book dovetails with the Rabbit tetralogy, and the book is larded with cultural references and social details. Alice Walker: Walker published The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2001), a collection of fictionalized memoirs, and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2005), a novel, in addition to her forays in poetry and nonfiction. In the first book, Walker gathers a series of stories—some of which parallel significant events in her life, while others are primarily fictional—that examine her archetypal subjects: race, sexuality, and love. Walker frequently employs humor, even when the subject might suggest a more somber note, and she offers love as a redemptive act. In Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, Walker follows a burned-out writer, Kate, known for her spirituality as she attempts to regain her passion and spiritual center. Haunted by a dream of a dry river, she lights out for the Colorado and Amazon Rivers in search of insight. At the same time, her lover, Yolo, undertakes his own quest. With some help from a local herb/drug, Kate regains her thirst for life. Walker’s prose varies from sharp mimesis to cloudy mysticism. David Foster Wallace: Wallace released Oblivion, his third collection of short stories, in 2004. While readers wait for a follow-up to his Maximalist opus Infinite Jest, Wallace’s stories offer a prelude of what is to come. Breezily ironic and focused on both modern shallowness and contemporary anxiety, stories such as “Mr. Squishy” and “Good Old Neon” eschew rigid plots in favor of alinear prose wherein large blocks of text bombard readers with details. Wallace probes such themes as the soulless cynicism of focus groups, the spiritual emptiness of material success, and the mindless cult of youth. One of Wallace’s primary strengths is his ability to echo other voices preternaturally, and this collection delivers, whether in the form of a now-grown sufferer of ADD/ADHD, a self-doubting yuppie, or a

NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS The National Book Awards are perhaps the most prestigious American book awards, currently awarding prizes in four categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and young people’s literature. Here are the most recent fiction winners. 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The Echo Maker by Richard Powers. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Europe Central by William T.Vollmann.Viking. The News from Paraguay by Lily Tuck. HarperCollins. The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Three Junes by Julia Glass. Pantheon. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus & Giroux In America by Susan Sontag. Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Source: National Book Foundation Web site. http://www.nationalbook.org/.

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fading journalist. Unlike Pynchon or Smith, Wallace is content to focus on a smaller circle of characters, yet he obsesses on minutia that portend larger cultural significance, as though by highlighting their very triviality he creeps closer to American Essence. Bibliography Alvarez, Julia. In the Name of Salome. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2000. ———. Saving the World. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2006. Banks, Russell. The Darling. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Barth, John. The Friday Book. New York: Perigee, 1984. Bellow, Saul. Ravelstein. New York: Viking, 2000. Boyle, T.C. Drop City. New York: Viking, 2003. ———. A Friend of the Earth. New York: Viking, 2000. ———. The Inner Circle. New York: Viking, 2004. ———. Talk Talk. New York: Viking, 2006. Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. New York: Random House, 2000. DeLillo, Don. Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner, 2003. Doctorow, E.L. City of God. New York: Random House, 2000. ———. The March. New York: Random House, 2005. Eggers, Dave. What is the What. San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2006. ———. You Shall Know Our Velocity. San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2002. Ellis, Bret Easton. Lunar Park. New York: Knopf, 2005. Erdrich, Louise. The Last Report on the Miracles of No Horse. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. ———. The Master Butchers Singing Club. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. ———. The Painted Drum. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Eugenides, Jeffery. Middlesex. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002. Ford, Richard. The Lay of the Land. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Franzen, Jonathan. The Corrections. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001. Hume, Kathryn. Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature. New York: Methuen, 1984. Federman, Raymond, ed. Surfiction: Fiction Today and Tomorrow. 2nd ed. Chicago: Swallow, 1981. Gaitskill, Mary. Veronica. New York: Pantheon, 2005. Godwin, Gail. The Queen of the Underworld. New York: Random House, 2006. Hennessey, Rosemary. Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse. New York: Routledge, 1993. Hinojosa, Rolando. We Happy Few. Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press, 2006. Hutcheon, Linda. The Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. Irving, John. Until I Find You. New York: Random House, 2005. Jen, Gish. The Love Wife. New York: Knopf, 2004. Kingsolver, Barbara. Prodigal Summer. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. Kirn, Walter, and Gary Shteyngart. “The Novel 2.0.” Slate. 10 Oct. 2006. http://www.slate.com/ id/2151004/entry/2151016/. Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. Mason, Betty Ann. An Atomic Romance. New York: Random House, 2005. McCarthy, Cormac. No Country for Old Men. New York: Knopf, 2005. ———. The Road. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Mellard, James M. The Exploded Form: The Modernist Novel in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980.

CONTEMPORARY MAINSTREAM AMERICAN FICTION Morrison, Jago. Contemporary Fiction. New York: Taylor and Francis, 2003. Morrison, Toni. Love. New York: Knopf, 2003. Oates, Joyce Carol. Blonde. New York: Ecco, 2000. ———. The Falls. New York: Ecco, 2004. O’ Brien, Tim. July, July. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Olney, James. Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Ozick, Cynthia. Heir to the Glimmering World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Partridge, Jeffery F. L. “‘Extreme Specialization’ and the Broad Highway: Approaching Contemporary American Fiction.” Studies in the Novel 33 (2001): 459–472. Proulx, Annie. That Old Ace in the Hole. New York: Scribner, 2002. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000. Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. New York: Penguin, 2006. Roth, Phillip. The Human Stain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. ———. The Plot against America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Russo, Richard. Empire Falls. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. Sebold, Alice. The Lovely Bones. Boston: Little, Brown, 2002. Shivani, Anis. “The Shrinking of American Fiction.” The Antioch Review 62 (2004): 680–690. Smiley, Jane. Good Faith. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. ———. Horse Heaven. New York: Knopf, 2000. Tan, Amy. The Bonesetter’s Daughter. New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 2001. Turner, Barry. “Another Turn of the Screw.” 17 Aug. 2006. Times Online http://www. timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-2315786,00.html. Tyler, Anne. The Amateur Marriage. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. ———. Digging to America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Updike, John. Gertrude and Claudius. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. ———. Seek My Face. New York: Knopf, 2002. Walch, Tad. “Y Study Shows Oprah’s Influence.” Deseret Morning News 19 Dec. 2004. http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,595113603,00.html. Wallace, David Foster. Oblivion. New York: Little, Brown, 2004. Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1984. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Williamson, Eric Miles. “The Future of American Fiction.” Southern Review 38 (2002): 666–674. Wood, James. The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel. New York: Picador, 2005.

Further Reading Annesley, James. Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture, and the Contemporary American Novel. London: Pluto, 1998; Bell, Bernard W. The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004; Dandridge, Rita B. Black Women’s Activism: Reading African American Women’s Historical Romances. New York: Peter Lang, 2004; Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006; Jacobs, Naomi. The Character of Truth: Historical Figures in Contemporary Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990; Millard, Kenneth. Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007; Myers, B.R. A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose. New York: Melville House, 2002; Nicol, Bran. Postmodernism and the

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CYBERPUNK Contemporary Novel: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003; Peck, Dale. Hatchet Jobs: Writings on Contemporary Fiction. New York: New Press, 2005; Smiley, Jane. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel. New York, Knopf, 2005.

JAMES M. DECKER

CYBERPUNK Definition. Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction and is characterized by two key features: the fictional portrayal of a computer-generated, alternate virtual world and the flaunting of a “punk” attitude toward society, technology, and the human body. This punk attitude is exhibited by the adolescent cyber-cowboys, eager to trade in life in the postapocalyptic urban zones for an adventure on the digital frontier envisaged behind the computer screen. Summarized by Bruce Sterling (1954–), the chief propagator of the genre, as a coinciding of “the realm of high tech, and the modern pop underground,” cyberpunk combines two aspects treated as mutually exclusive by most science fiction writers before the rise of cyberpunk in the early 1980s (Sterling 1986, xi). Cyberpunk’s characteristic style derives from the juxtaposition of dystopian urban space and utopian computer-generated space, thus contributing a new pattern to the pool of science fiction motifs. Though already proclaimed dead in 1988, shortly after it began, related forms continue to thrive in other narrative media, notably television, cinema, and computer and role-playing games. To qualify as cyberpunk, these works share at least some, if not all, of the following family resemblances in terms of style, physical setting, social milieu, and fictional characters, which will be elaborated upon based on Gibson’s Neuromancer. History. Cyberpunk emerged in the early 1980s and was already proclaimed dead toward the end of the decade. It has perhaps left a greater mark on “contemporary culture at large” than on science fiction literature (Landon 1992, 120). Though author and editor Gardner Dozois (1947–) does not claim to have coined the term himself and he reports that it was already in use at science fiction workshops and conventions when he employed it for the first time, he is generally credited with publicizing the name “cyberpunk” (Dozois 1984). Among that new generation of 1980s science fiction writers sharing a common aesthetic he includes Sterling, Gibson, Lewis Shiner (1950–), Cadigan, and Greg Bear (1951–). Yet, Shiner and Bear had only a marginal connection to the genre and quickly distanced themselves from it.

NAMING CYBERPUNK Several authors have coined their own name for these virtual reality environments and have chosen to develop different characteristics further.William Gibson (1948–), the main representative of the cyberpunk genre, is generally credited with having created the term cyberspace in his short story “Burning Chrome” (1986e), which prefigures the so-called Sprawl trilogy (1984–1988), consisting of the quintessential cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986b), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). Cyberspace is described by Gibson as “non-space of the mind” and “consensual hallucination” (Gibson 1984, 51), in other words as an abstraction of data or a specific space-time, which provides the “central metaphor” for cyberpunk fiction (Suvin 1989, 44).The matrix, the net, the grid, or the Metaverse are other labels used by key writers associated with the genre to be discussed in greater detail below.

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Michael Swanwick (1950–) attempts to provide a first chronology of cyberpunk rekindling Dozois’s polarization between humanists and cyberpunks in the process, a contrast that provoked many lively debates (Swanwick 1986, 50). He mentions Kim Stanley Robinson (1952–) as one representative of the humanists, who he regards as focusing more on character and the development of philosophical issues, concerns he perceives missing in cyberpunk fiction. Swanwick also excludes Bear, Rudy Rucker (1946–), and Lucius Shepard (1947–) from the inner circle of cyberpunk writers. This illustrates that cyberpunk did not understand itself as a school, movement, or even a coherent group of writers although marketing efforts were made to that effect. Gibson himself stated along with others that he perceived the label as the beginning of the end, as innovation degenerating into trite formula (Tatsumi 1987a, 14–15). The humanists, represented by John Kessel (1950–), further warned against the inherent danger of mannerism as well as criticizing cyberpunk’s flat characters, plot contrivances, and romantic imagery. Coincidentally a short story by Bruce Bethke (1955–) entitled “Cyberpunk” (1983) precedes Dozois’s use of the term in print, yet it is generally not included among the body of cyberpunk fiction collected in any of the genre-defining anthologies, Mirrorshades (1986), Burning Chrome (1986a), or Storming the Reality Studio (1991). Bethke’s story about teenage hackers who break into computer systems using their parent’s phone lines shares one element of cyberpunk fiction, the illegal invasion of data stored on a computer. The hackers manipulate school records, bank accounts, and flight-traffic control systems, but the story does not provide a coherent vision of the space inside the computer. The teen breaking and entering is less profit-oriented than motivated by rebellion and a general mistrust of authority. “True Names” (1981), a novella by Vernor Vinge (1944–), is another precursor of cyberpunk and anticipates its networked computer systems. It presents a world where computer hackers fight artificial intelligences for control over the world, never revealing their actual names by which they could be traced in the real world. The term cyberspace first appeared in Gibson’s 1981 short story “Burning Chrome” as the name for a retrofitted computer model with which Bobby accesses the matrix. Apparent Sensory Perception, a device to access another person’s feelings was first featured in “Fragments of a Hologram Rose,” first published in 1977, from which evolved simstim (short for “simulated stimuli”) in “Burning Chrome.” The latter also featured ICE, an acronym for intrusion countermeasure electronics, aggressive killer viruses protecting valuable information that the cyber cowboy has to defeat by risking his own life. Sterling often referred to “the Movement” as “a loose generational nexus of ambitious young writers” among whom he included Gibson, Rucker, Shiner, John Shirley (1953–), and himself, but not Cadigan, despite the fact that one of her short stories, “Rock On,” also appeared in the Mirrorshades anthology (Sterling 1986, xi). Sterling’s prefaces to the story collections Mirrorshades and Burning Chrome serve as the genre’s artistic manifestos and together with his columns in the fanzine Cheap Truth he undoubtedly was cyberpunk’s most ardent promoter. He announced the revolution by underlining the novelty in cyberpunk, which he saw as resulting from a combination of so-called “hard” and “soft” science fiction elements or a merging of an interest in avant-garde technology with other concerns previously associated with the New Wave, above all its focus on “inner space,” alternate realities, often induced by hallucinogenic drugs and rock ‘n roll (Sterling 1986, xv).

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The punk aesthetic is as much related to a rebellious attitude toward the genre’s elders as to a general interest in punk and rock music. According to Sterling, the punk heritage provided “shock value” and cyberpunk shared with punk a defiance of “cultural and aesthetic norms” (McCaffery 1991, 288). The deliberately crude, unrefined lyrics and the use of noise as sound functioned as a critique of the music industry. Cyberpunk displays a similar irreverence toward technology characterized by retrofitting and recycling used parts, thus defying their original design and intended use. When extended to prosthetics and implants, it results in a blurring of boundaries between natural and artificial as much as a subversion of good taste (Porush 1992, 256). Sterling added another important notion, which firmly established cyberpunk in the publishing landscape. By coining the term slipstream as a parody of mainstream he appealed to the creative tension between high-brow and low-brow, Literature and subculture and located the writers as a pop-culture avant-garde beyond what are sometimes perceived as the confining walls of the “SF ghetto” (Sterling 1989). The majority of the definitive cyberpunk short stories collected in Mirrorshades and Burning Chrome first appeared in Omni magazine, a publication combining short science fiction and science reporting. Other glossy life-style magazines, many of which are associated with California Bay Area alternative culture, like Mondo 2000, Whole Earth Review, boing-boing, and Wired, helped smooth the transition toward a digital subculture in its own right. They featured music and fiction reviews as well as articles on new electronic gadgets such as the first head-mounted virtual reality displays for private use. Many of these also pioneered online content and communities including contributions from writers associated with the cyberpunk field. The Internet was as much a part of cyberpunk’s fictional content as it was a part of the proliferation of the genre to a community of readers and fans beyond the traditional readership of science fiction. A photocopied fanzine like Cheap Truth to which some cyberpunk authors contributed using pseudonyms was now easily accessible online. Sterling’s “Catscan” columns from Science Fiction Eye magazine, instrumental in staging many cyberpunk debates, are still archived on the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link). Internet newsgroups, listserv mailers, and personal Web sites opened up new channels of dissemination to spread the hype. Cyberpunk in the mainstream media was often conflated with the meaning of hacker, highlighting the criminal aspects of stealing data (Elmer-Dewitt 1991, 43). Yet two years later Time magazine called it a “new subculture” and “the defining counterculture of the computer age” (Elmer-Dewitt 1993, 49). Hafner and Markoff’s Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (1991) and Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown (1992) tell of the efforts of law enforcement to control illicit data piracy but also of organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and their defense of freedom of information and the preservation of civil liberties. Criminal and libertarian discourse were thus closely intertwined, especially when hackers were described as “deviant social class,” “enemies of the state,” or “juvenile technodelinquents” but also celebrated as “popular folk heroes” and underdogs fighting against large corporations (Ross 1991b, 112, 116). From the vantage point of literary criticism, cyberpunk is frequently seen as related to other postmodern writing, for example Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 (1965) or Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1984); a case in point is the anthology Storming the Reality Studio (McCaffery 1991). In the introduction McCaffery classifies cyberpunk as “postmodern science fiction” while also distinguishing it from

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“mainstream postmodernism” (McCaffrey 1991, 1, 10). A conference held in June 1989, whose proceedings are collected in Fiction 2000 (Slusser and Shippey 1992), also generated more academic interest and established cyberpunk in the general field of contemporary literature. Trends and Themes Style. At its best, “cyberpunk is truly characterized only by its style” or “aesthetic cohesion” (Rabkin 1992, 275; Suvin 1991, 351). Though when reduced to mere formula or subcultural fashion, cyberpunk quickly exhausted its novelty value. Neuromancer’s narrative is rich in “surface detail” (Hollinger 1990, 37) and dominated by a dense, descriptive style with alternating story lines converging toward the resolution of the plot, the merging of two artificial intelligences, Neuromancer and Wintermute. Showing rather than telling helps create a fast-paced action-adventure story packed with dialogue reminiscent of the hard-boiled detective style in its use of metaphors interspersed with snippets of street lingo. The descriptions are saturated with Japanese and European brand names symbolizing technological progress. Concrete, rust and chrome, as well as neon-lit corporate logos prevail in the sprawling cities littered with the ruins of modernity, such as the decaying geodesic domes of an older version of the future imagined by another generation of writers. The joint “iconographies of science fiction and film noir” literally encapsulate a critique of modernity and a trashing of the earlier pulp tradition of science fiction to be elaborated on in the contexts and issues section (Bukatman 1993, 142; McHale 1992). The reflective sunglasses or mirrorshades, which almost gave the genre its label, are the genre’s most recognizable accessory. The reflective chrome surfaces hide the wearer’s eyes and disguise his or her emotions. Enhanced with electronics, they can also serve as miniaturized screens. This emphasis on reflective surfaces is often interpreted as symptomatic of postmodernity to which a lack of depth, affect, and historicity are ascribed (Jameson 1991; Sponsler 1992). Setting and Milieu. The framing narrative, set in the dark, urban noir atmosphere of Chiba City, Japan, is contrasted with Case, the protagonist’s adventures in the luminous geometries of cyberspace, thus “urban space and cyberspace become reciprocal metaphors” (Bukatman 1993, 145). Cyberspace, as well as the large conurbations from Boston to Atlanta, is dominated by multi-national enterprises beyond the confines of a nation state, too powerful to be controlled by mere government or law. Black market trade in human organs, drugs, computers, and information thrives in the back alleys where everyone and everything is for sale. References to Japanese culture like the larger-than-life corporations or zaibatsus and lethal shuriken weapons provide an exotic flavor to a technologically advanced yet also traditional society (Sato 2004). Drugs enhance and alter consciousness as do computers, which when networked form seemingly infinite seas of data and give rise to a potentially unlimited parallel universe in which to hunt for data. In cyberspace, everything is translated into digital bits and bytes before it can be exchanged or stolen: money, information, knowledge, human memories, and even entire personalities. From this digital Petri dish new life-forms such as artificial intelligences emerge like impossible-to-control digital genies out of a bottle. Fictional Characters. Case, the main character in Neuromancer, is the archetypical cowboy, hacker, and data pirate. Like all cyberpunk protagonists with the notable

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exception of those created by Pat Cadigan (1953–), he is a young Caucasian male, enhanced with sockets that allow him to plug into the computer and access cyberspace directly. He is a mercenary fighting neither for higher moral ground nor political ideals but only for profit, the thrill of simulated speed in cyberspace, or simply his survival. Only the fittest survive according to strictly Darwinian laws; those that make it are the most adept at manipulating computers and dodging killer virus programs. Woman warriors like Case’s sidekick Molly are often subsidiary fictional characters but not necessarily less charismatic. Whether as love object or sex symbol, surgically-enhanced warrior with retractable knife-blade implants or superior fighting machine, they often watch out for the young cyberpunks, a theme elaborated in Japanese cyberpunk manga and anime (Sato 2004). As a rule, the fictional characters often serve the mundane function of advancing the plot. They are not fully rounded characters and subordinate to the detailed portrayal of the fictional universe. However, there are many colorful new creatures emerging from the interstices of the cyber-world: ghosts, holograms or other hybrid creatures, which transcend the boundaries between natural and artificial life, human and machine. Context and Issues. With their emphasis on technology and concomitant social and cultural changes, cyberpunk and science fiction have been regarded as “quintessentially postmodern” (Sponsler 1992, 627; Bukatman 1992). However, on the whole, cyberpunk’s attitude toward technology can be characterized as ambivalent. Dystopian elements “[r]ather than a gleaming, utopian vision of progress” are portrayed, yet the subversive potential invested in the cyber cowboy and the anarchic hope invested in the subcultural fringe such as the Panther Moderns, a group of media terrorists in Neuromancer, are also symptomatic of a “nostalgia for human control” (Bukatman 1993, 140, 141). Utopian hope resides in the spaces “for new social interaction” (Bukatman 1993, 145), in the hope that the underdogs can topple the omnipresent corporations by subverting the system from within. Nonetheless, “cyberpunk is fundamentally ambivalent about the breakdown of the distinctions between human and machine, between personal consciousness and machine consciousness” and various contributors to the genre attribute different values to the new technologies (Csicsery-Ronay 1991, 191). Whereas Gibson’s vision of cyberspace results in the elated speed rush and contempt of the flesh or meat in favor of the “bodiless exultation” in cyberspace (Gibson 1984, 6), feminist critics have found this kind of disembodiment problematic. They perceive the penetration of cyberspace ultimately as an invasion of the female, the matrix as womb, if only metaphorically (Springer 1991, 306; Nixon 1992, 226; Stockton 1995, 591; Hicks 1996, 64). Before elaborating feminist departures and critiques, a closer look should be paid to Cadigan’s adaptation of the same themes to very different ends. Cadigan is one of the few writers associated with the genre to explore the psychological dimensions of cyberspace and the “human-machine interface [ . . . ] as potentially liberating” (Wolmark 1994, 121). All three of Cadigan’s Mindplayer novels, Mindplayers (1987), Synners (1991), and Fools (1992), share the same universe while exploring notions of franchised personalities that can be copied, merged, exchanged, erased, or stolen. Though Cadigan does not give virtual space, which is accessed by connecting to a computer system through the human optical nerve, a specific name, this mind-to-mind contact opens up many avenues for exploration.

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In Mindplayers the main character, Deadpan Allie, gives up a life of illegal mindplay to train as a licensed Pathosfinder and becomes an expert at observing and interpreting people’s mental projections in virtual space, which are all expressions of subconscious dreams and desires. She learns to remain emotionally detached in order to help others dream lucidly and to help them visualize their problems on their mind’s screen. Jerry Wirerammer, her friend and former partner in illegal mindplay, chooses a different career path. He engages in illegal bootlegging to exploit the opportunities of copying and cloning memories—a concrete example for the “plurality and fragmentation of the self” referred to by postmodern theorists (McHale 1992, 160). As Allie gains more control over mindplay and learns to maintain a sense of self, Jerry loses control and his identity becomes diluted to such an extent that the original one is entirely lost. The novel thus highlights the different uses of altered states of consciousness, inherently neither good nor bad. Mind-tomind contact always has a profound effect on everyone; memories leave traces and change people. Synners, Cadigan’s most cyberpunk novel, hinges on the phrase “change for the machines,” which turns into a “philosophical comment about the nature of the technologized human” (Balsamo 1996, 134). Originally meant as a request for change to buy soda from a machine, it becomes one of the main paradigms of the novel involving an entertainment industry conspiracy to promote brain implants for marketing music videos. Visual Mark is the original “synner” who synthesizes images to accompany rock music and who uploads his visual projections via his implanted sockets directly to the net. Since she is quite aware of the fact that there is no turning back, his girlfriend Gina tries to stop him before he escapes through a trap door into digital space. Once in the net, Visual Mark’s body merely sustains his mind so that when he suffers a stroke, it triggers the collapse of the entire computer network. Part of him can survive in a new synthesis with the virus program Art Fish but his human body dies. Transcendence comes at a price and immortality is only partial at best. Finally, the net is reconstructed from a self-sufficient, isolated computer operated by Sam, who uses an insulin pump to draw energy from her own body to operate it. The latter illustrates one aspect of cyborg history (short for cybernetic organism) and its roots in medical technology. Contact lenses, implants to improve hearing, artificial organs, or prosthetic legs can all be seen as representing examples of hybrid man-machine existence (Haraway 1991). The cyborg as an image of the posthuman determines its “iconic status for postmodern culture” (Christie 1991, 195), and it has enriched the critical discourses of feminism and cyberfeminism alike (Braidotti 1993; Plant 1997). Cyberfeminism takes Donna Haraway’s seminal essay “Manifesto for Cyborgs” originally published in 1985 as its point of departure. For Haraway, the cyborg functions as a visionary image that dislocates the boundary between human and machine. When placed in this context, Cadigan may be seen as belonging to a lineage of feminist science fiction writers from Joanna Russ (1937–) to Marge Piercy (1936–), especially Piercy’s He, She, and It (also published as Body of Glass) (1991), which shares some of the themes of cyberpunk fiction. Though cyberpunk as such, especially the male contributors to the genre, can at best be read as “covert feminist science fiction” (Gordon 197), science fiction as a publishing genre offered new ways for women writing science fiction to break into “the boys club” (Nixon 1992; Ross 1991a). Notoriously difficult to classify, Kathy Acker (1947–1997) in Empire of the Senseless (1988) even borrows entire phrases from Neuromancer subverting them toward her feminist agenda with a punk edge.

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Cadigan’s Fools, which concludes the Mindplayer trilogy, is the most complex and difficult to read book. It uses a theatre metaphor to orchestrate at least three main female personae: an actress, a police officer, and a memory junkie that has gone and bought one famous personality too many. Actor and role are inextricably linked as the actress takes on new roles as if they were costumes, as the police officer goes into deep under cover impersonating other personae, and as the memory junkie downloads new memories. It is impossible to determine which persona is the original identity, because all three women narrate in the first person singular and all three appear equally real. The plot structure is driven by the reader’s desire to locate the original identity, yet this desire for closure is ultimately frustrated. Despite the potential for role playing, this detail is not used to explore gender swapping, a phenomenon often observed in actual Internet chat rooms and online communities (Turkle 1997). Another dominant trend in reading cyberpunk, apart from its concern with the posthuman, focuses on its relation to postmodernity as reflecting a “world shaped by transnational corporate hegemony” (Rosenthal 1991, 81). It is interpreted as “the supreme literary expression if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself” (Jameson 1991, 417n) and as mirroring post-industrialist society (Olsen 1992, 142). The emphasis on consumer culture, on surface detail, and on the apparent depthlessness of the screen is read as symptomatic of virtual culture at the close of the millennium. Cyberspace is viewed as “extension (and implosion) of the urban topography” (Buktman 1989, 48). The notion of implosion or a “collapsed future” as opposed to adventures in outer space or the distant future (Csicsery-Ronay 1992a, 29), as well as the concepts of simulation and hyperreality (Porush 1992, 246) are adopted from Jean Baudrillard (1929–). Baudrillard is an influential poststructuralist French critic, who regards the logic of capitalism as based on a symbolic exchange as a result of which reality ultimately becomes indistinguishable from simulation. Whereas postmodernity refers to a new era beyond modernity, postmodernism highlights literary techniques such as bricolage or what Gibson calls “cultural mongrelization” (McCaffery 1991, 266), as well as intertextuality and a self-referential foregrounding of its own rules of construction. Thus cyberpunk’s self-conscious use of images and icons associated with the pulp history of science fiction, for example cyberpunk’s “architecture of broken dreams” epitomized in Gibson’s short story “The Gernsback Continuum” (1986d, 5), expresses its irreverence toward its own heritage. Cluttered with consumer items, trash and garbage, cyberpunk undermines notions of progress and revels in the “destruction of the icons and monuments of modernity” (Heuser 2003, 43). Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) is situated on the borderline to a new generation of cyberpunk writers or “postcyberpunks” (Person 1998), a term that lacks clear definition. Stephenson was neither affiliated with the other cyberpunk writers nor included in the genre-defining anthologies. Yet, according to the formal characteristics outlined at the beginning, he fits the cyberpunk category while also stretching its limits toward the mainstream and postmodern fiction. The main character, Hiro Protagonist, an allegorical hero-as-protagonist, helps to prevent the world’s infection with the vicious snow crash virus, which turns people into submissive and babbling followers of media mogul and religious missionary Bob L. Rife. Though he works in a dead-end job as a pizza delivery boy, Hiro is one of the founding fathers of the Metaverse and belongs to the hacker elite. He can

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write code and define the rules of his appearance and existence in the Metaverse. People entering the Metaverse design their own avatars or incarnations with which they interact in the virtual world, sometimes from scratch and sometimes from ready-made parts. This explains why Hiro is able to win a sword fight in the Metaverse, after all he defined and wrote the very rules of the game: “[I]f you need a tool, you just sit down and write it” (329), he explains, thus foregrounding the writing process, a typical feature of postmodern fiction. Stephenson goes even further and rewrites the history of mankind from the vantage point of information theory, according to which the Infocalypse of Babel accounts for the diversity of languages on earth. Genetic code, ancient myth, biblical stories, and even ideas are all broken down into informational ‘memes.’ In the process he offers the reader “the possibility of reflecting on [fictional] world making itself” (McHale 1992, 157). The Metaverse constitutes a comic book reality with different rules for dying and the disposal of bodies, a universe where “magic is possible” because it “is a fictional structure made out of code” that can incorporate other fictional worlds (Stephenson 1992, 197). This opens the door to further metafictional possibilities, for example the inclusion of other genres or plot scenarios not commonly associated with science fiction, such as fantasy or history. The holodeck in Star Trek: The Next Generation universe functions in a similar way, allowing for the incorporation of a spaghetti western (“A Fistful of Datas”) or Shakespeare’s Henry V (“The Defector”). Reception. Authors departing from a cyberpunk sensibility often show a continuing fascination with the hard-boiled but in more clearly pronounced form. Additionally, the experimentation with different forms of virtual worlds is still an important theme for science fiction written in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst century. British science fiction writers such as Kim Newman (1959–) and his The Night Mayor (1989), Jeff Noon (1957–), most notably his Vurt (1993), and Richard Morgan (1965–) with his Altered Carbon (2001) and its sequels are frequently mentioned as having developed cyberpunk further in that direction. Furthermore, the fascination with artificial intelligence and virtual reality can also be found in mainstream contemporary American writers such as Richard Powers (1957–), for example his Galatea 2.2 (1995) and Plowing the Dark (2000). Despite its short life-span as a subgenre of North American science fiction, cyberpunk made waves beyond its science fiction boundaries into mainstream literature, other media, and an emerging cyberculture. Its defining style, characteristic cluster of motifs and icons, as well as its aesthetic sensibility were imbued with new life as they were translated and adapted for computer games, graphic novels, movies, and role-playing games. Cyberpunk made a lasting impression on science fiction worldwide, as the large body of Japanese cyberpunk-inspired fiction demonstrates. Japanese manga, anime films, and TV-series are closely related to cyberpunk’s setting and milieu, for example Akira and Tetsuo, the Iron Man (both 1988), or the more recent Ghost in the Shell (1995). Finally, there is a continuing legacy of cyberpunk role-playing games, including the original Cyberpunk 2020 rule book as well as four editions of Shadowrun, whose first rule book was published in 1989. The latter represents an interesting new hybrid form combining the high-tech elements of cyberpunk science fiction with the detailed dragons, goblins, and ogres usually only populating fantasy literature. The role-playing game is still being widely played and it has inspired numerous novels based on the same universe.

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Selected Authors. Facetious critics have called cyberpunk a one-man genre consisting solely of Gibson. Though this is extreme, it illustrates the lack of consent about a coherent cyberpunk canon. Indeed, most critical attention has focused on Gibson and Cadigan. Other fiction within the force field of cyberpunk, as well as media adaptations derived from it, continues to show a keen interest in the combination of virtual reality with a low-life criminal underworld, most notable in the more pronounced expression of hard-boiled conventions (see, e.g. Kim Newman’s 1989 Night Mayor). By the late nineties, the core cyberpunk writers, including Shirley and Sterling, had moved into other genres and directions but a fascination with the exploration of virtual reality continues, especially in movies inspired by the genre. For want of a better term, the label postcyberpunk implies an opening up of genre conventions, a focus on ordinary life as a generation of young writers has grown up and become more mature. Perhaps they even accomplished the “fusion of the cyberpunk/humanist schism of the 1980s” (Person 1998, 12). Other authors are more or less closely associated with cyberpunk, either because they appeared on the same convention panels, or because their short stories were published in the same anthologies. The question of who truly belongs to the group and on which grounds remains unresolved, a choice which inevitably also depends on one’s definition of the genre. On the basis of formal criteria it makes more sense to look at which works best reflect the characteristic features mentioned at the beginning of this entry. Before the development of cyberpunk themes in other media are illustrated, the most important authors, other than Gibson and Cadigan, fitting the cyberpunk description are discussed in the following paragraphs. Sterling’s key role as promoter of the genre is supported by his translation of new scientific ideas and new forms of social organization into fiction. His juxtaposition of shapers and mechanists in the novel Schismatrix (1985b) and the short story collection Crystal Express (1989) creates a universe with two warring factions: one characterized by a belief in technological modification, prosthetics, and artificial organs; the other defined by a belief in genetic modification as extending and enhancing life. First published in 1981 his earlier novel, The Artificial Kid (1985a) starring the media combat artist that lends the book its name, in some ways anticipates cyberpunk. The Artificial Kid films, records, and then sells his edited adventures to the public as he explores the ecology of the planet Reverie. This interest in ecology with the added emphasis on global warming is taken up again in Sterling’s Heavy Weather (1994). His latest novel, The Zenith Angle (2004), is closer to a cyberthriller than science fiction and resumes his interest in computer security in a post-9/11 world.

NOTABLE CYBERPUNK AUTHORS Pat Cadigan William Gibson Rudy Rucker John Shirley Neal Stephenson Bruce Sterling Walter Jon Williams

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The cyberthriller theme is another strong tendency that can be seen as related to, if not derived from, cyberpunk (see, e.g. movies like Strange Days (1995) or The Net (1998)). Especially Strange Days explores identity issues and questions of real and fake memories. When memories can be downloaded, manipulated, and exchanged, characters often end up confused about what is real and what is imaginary. A theme for which Philip K. Dick was famous and which characterizes the movie Blade Runner (1982) based on Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The movie precedes cyberpunk, but shares its future noir sensibility (Bruno 1990). Its elliptic, witty dialogue is also favored by the hard-boiled detective style, as are the dark and rainy city scenes portrayed through steam rising from the gutters contrasted with the glow of neon signs. Shirley, an author often associated with the inner circle of cyberpunk writers and a musician in several punk bands, represents the most obvious connection to the genre’s punk roots. Shirley’s near-future setting in City Come A-Walkin’ (1980) illustrates his influence on the genre because it anticipates many of the cyberpunk icons such as the infinite reflection of the city in the silver mirrorshades of the protagonist. Shirley’s short story “Freezone” (1985) encapsulates the universe elaborated in his A Song Called Youth trilogy consisting of Eclipse (1987), Eclipse Penumbra (1988), and Eclipse Corona (1989). The short story is dominated by the contrast between Rick Rickenharp’s nostalgia for old-school, authentic rock and the artificial, electronic “minimono style.” Rudy Rucker also declared himself a cyberpunk and was invited to the 1985 cyberpunk panel in Texas, though his novels in the Ware-series, Software (1982), Wetware (1988), Freeware (1997), and Realware (2000), only marginally touch on cyberpunk motifs. More deeply informed by scientific thought and by Rucker’s reallife interest in mathematics and cellular automata, the series evolves from an emerging society of robots with artificial intelligence. Rucker also tried to coin his own label, transrealism, which he regards as “breaking down consensus reality” to explore strange new life-forms in other dimensions (Rucker 1991, 437). Walter Jon Williams (1953–) contributed the novel Hardwired (1986) to the nexus of cyberpunk works, a novel that bears some semblance to the cyberpunk sensibility. The main character, a modern-day cowboy who plugs into the electronic interface of his car, delivers contraband across the American continent while being randomly bombarded by a hostile satellite surveillance system. Another marginally related writer, Jack Womack (1956–), uses a satirical approach to urban life and centers his Ambient series, Ambient (1987), Terraplane (1988), Heathern (1990), Random Acts of Senseless Violence (1993), Elvissey (1993), and Going, Going, Gone (2000), around a pseudo-fascist corporate media-state, a near-future dystopia of capitalism derailed. Due to the lack of a cohesive vision of virtual reality, neither Williams nor Womack is at the core of the cyberpunk genre. The same can be said for Marc Laidlaw (see, e.g. his 1999 Dad’s Nuke) and Lewis Shiner (see, e.g. his 1984 Frontera). Both have occasionally been included in some anthologies and some panels, but on the level of content they do not share the dominant themes that define cyberpunk. The punk aspect of cyberpunk is also alluded to by the somewhat ironic label of “steampunk,” used to describe cyberpunk stories involving a technological focus but set in the past, such as Gibson and Sterling’s collaboration on The Difference Engine (1991) or DiFilippo’s Steampunk Trilogy (1995). The Difference Engine is an alternative history set in Victorian England and deals with a steam-powered computer

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invented by Charles Babbage. “Biopunk” entails a focus on “bioengineering” and “reconfigured humans” and represents another undercurrent emerging from within cyberpunk, although it is a label that has never been widely adopted (Mc Hale 1992, 161). Greg Bear’s Blood Music (1985), in which an out-of-control lab experiment results in organic matter greedily feeding on humans by sucking them down the drains, can be considered as a precursor to this branch of development. Both Gibson and Cadigan continued to explore other virtual worlds following their Sprawl and Mindplayer trilogies. Gibson’s Bridge trilogy, named after one of the trilogy’s locales, the San Franciso-Oakland Bay bridge, includes Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996), and All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999). After both San Francisco and Japan have been destroyed by earthquakes, the bridge offers refuge to a multi-cultural community living under the radar of the pervasive surveillance devices of corporate society. Virtual reality is no longer a space reserved for the elite but an “ecology of celebrity” (Gibson 1993, 2) filled with other popular media phenomena like the virtual idol or idoru that becomes an artificial intelligence in All Tomorrow’s Parties. The trilogy is as much concerned with media stardom as with the secret and mythological rebuilding of post-quake Japan. Cadigan continues to explore virtual reality combined with a detective fiction element in Tea From an Empty Cup (1998) and Dervish is Digital (2000). The plot revolves around detective Dore Konstantin, who is trying to find out how a murder that was committed in virtual reality could have resulted in the actual death of the person in real life. By putting on a hotsuit, Konstantin can enter virtual space as a different person, depending on how the suit was programmed. In the

CYBERPUNK IN MOVIES, TV, AND ONLINE Adaptations of cyberpunk fiction cover a wide range of different media but most are based on Gibson’s work. Neuromancer was adapted as a graphic novel and a computer adventure game. The short story “Burning Chrome” was even adapted for the stage. A movie version of “Johnny Mnemonic,” based on a script by Gibson, was released in 1995, and New Rose Hotel, also inspired by an early Gibson short story, was released straight to video in 1998. Yet in many ways the Matrix trilogy (1999–2003) is considered the visually most successful translation of cyberpunk into film.This is due to its convincing portrayal of the virtual space inside the computer enhanced by the “bullet time” super slow-motion effect created especially for the movie. Gibson also wrote Agrippa (1992), an experimental, highly ephemeral, autobiographical poem on computer disk, programmed to erase itself after one reading. But a lot more closely related to cyberpunk in style and theme are two episodes for The X-Files, “Kill Switch” (1998) and “First Person Shooter” (2000), which Gibson wrote together with Tom Maddox. In “Kill Switch” special agents Mulder and Scully chase the murderer of a Silicon Valley pioneer killed by a sentient artificial intelligence, which suddenly learned to steer weapons and satellite surveillance systems. In “First Person Shooter” the two FBI agents enter a virtual reality gaming laboratory in which a virtual character has run amok and suddenly started killing people. Especially the female special agent, Scully, makes fun of the exaggerated “voluptuous vixen” and virtual killer, who was scanned into the system by one of the game designers.As the game designer confesses this, she calls the virtual character her “goddess”—clearly an allusion to Haraway’s empowering image of the cyborg. Whereas Scully finds the appearance of the aberrant virtual character, Jade Blue Afterglow, reprehensible, Mulder simply considers entertainment.

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second volume, Dervish, who is a deadly jester able to hide in the pixels of the digital universe and able to materialize anywhere he likes, breaks all the rules of the cyberworld: he destroys virtual property, illegally trades weapons, steals online time, and stalks his ex-wife. The challenge for detective Konstantin is to find out where Dervish’s body is located in the outside world before she can have him arrested for his crimes. Bibliography Acker, Kathy. Empire of the Senseless. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1988. Balsamo, Anne. “Feminism for the Incurably Informed.” In Technologies of the Gendered Body. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996, 218–246. Barr, Marleen S. Future Females, the Next Generation. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. Benedikt, Michael, ed. Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000. Bethke, Bruce. “Cyberpunk.” Amazing Science Fiction Stories 57.4 (1983): 94–105. Bladerunner: The Director’s Cut. DVD. Directed by Ridley Scott. Warner, 1982. Braidotti, Rosi. “Cyberfeminism with a Difference.” In Feminisms. Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Bruno, Giuliana. “Ramble City.” In Alien Zone. Annette Kuhn, ed. London: Verso, 1990. Bukatman, Scott. “The Cybernetic (City) State.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 2 (1989): 43–63. ———. “Amidst these Fields of Data.” Critique 33.3 (1992):199–219. ———. Terminal Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Cadigan, Pat. Mindplayers. New York: Bantam Spectra, 1987. ———. Synners. New York: Bantam Spectra, 1991. ———. Fools. New York: Bantam Spectra, 1992. ———. Tea from an Empty Cup. London: HarperCollins, 1992. ———. Dervish is Digital. New York: Tor, 2000. Christie, John R.R. “A Tragedy for Cyborgs.” Configurations 1.1 (1991): 171–196. Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, Jr. “Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism.” In Storming the Reality Studio. Larry McCaffery, ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. ———. “Futuristic Flu, or, the Revenge of the Future.” In Fiction 2000. George Slusser and Tom Shippey, eds. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992a. ———. “The Sentimental Futurist.” Critique 23.3 (Spring 1992b): 221–240. Dozois, Gardner. “Science Fiction in the Eighties.” Washington Post, Dec. 30, 1984. Elmer-Dewitt, Philipp. “Cyberpunks and the Constitution.” Time, April 8 1991: 43. ———. “Cyberpunk.” Time, March 1, 1993: 48–50. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 1984. ———. Burning Chrome. New York: Ace, 1986a. ———. Count Zero. New York: Ace, 1986b. ———. “Johnny Mnemonic.” In Burning Chrome. New York: Ace, 1986c. ———. “The Gernsback Continuum.” In Burning Chrome. New York: Ace, 1986d. ———. “Burning Chrome.” In Burning Chrome. New York: Ace, 1986e. ———. Mona Lisa Overdrive. New York: Bantam Spectra, 1988. ———. Virtual Light. New York: Bantam Spectra, 1993. ———. Idoru. New York: Putnam, 1996. ———. All Tomorrow’s Parties. New York: Putnam, 1999. ———. Pattern Recognition. New York: Putnam, 2003. Gibson, William and Dennis Ashbaugh. The Agrippa Files. [cited January 20, 2007]. Available from http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu/UC Santa Barbara’s Transcription Project. Keving Begos, Jr. Publisher. Gibson, William and Bruce Sterling. The Difference Engine. New York: Bantam, 1991.

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CYBERPUNK Gibson, William, and Tom Maddox. “Kill Switch.” The X-Files, 1998, 45 mins. Fox, 15. ———. “First Person Shooter.” The X-Files, February 27 2000, 45 mins. Fox, DVD. Gordon, Joan. “Ying and Yang Duke it Out.” In Sorming the Reality Studio. Larry McCaffery, ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Hafner, Katie, and John Markoff. Cyberpunk. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991. Haraway, Donna. “Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991, 149–181. Originally published in Socialist Review 80 (1985): 65–108. Heuser, Sabine. Virtual Geographies: Cyberpunk at the Intersection of the Postmodern and Science Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003. Hicks, Heather. “Whatever It Is That She’s Since Become.” Contemporary Literature 37.1 (1996): 62–93. Hollinger, Veronica. “Cybernetic Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Postmodernism.” Mosaic 23.2 (1990): 29–44. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Johnny Mnemonic. DVD. Directed by Robert Longo. Sony, 1995. Kemp, Sandra, and Judith Squires, eds. Feminisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Kessel, John. “The Humanist Manifesto.” Science Fiction Eye 1.1 (1987): 52–56. Kuhn, Annette, ed. Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema. London: Verso, 1992. Landon, Brooks. The Aesthetics of Ambivalence. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. McCaffery, Larry, ed. Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodernism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. McHale, Brian. “Elements of a Poetics of Cyberpunk.” Critique 23.3 (1992): 140–175. Nixon, Nicola. “Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?” Science-Fiction Studies 19.2 (1992): 219–235. Olsen, Lance. “Cyberpunk and the crisis of postmodernity.” In Fiction 2000. George Slusser and Tom Shippey, eds. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Penley, Constance, and Andrew Ross, eds. Technoculture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Person, Lawrence. “Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto.” Nova Express 4.4 (1998): 11–12. Plant, Sadie. “Beyond the Screens: Film, Cyberpunk and Cyberfeminism.” In Feminisms. Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Porush, David. “Frothing the Synaptic Bath: What Puts the Punk in Cyberpunk.” In Fiction 2000. George Slusser and Tom Shippey, eds. Athens, GA: Georgia University Press, 1992. Rabkin, Eric S. “Undecidability and Oxymoronism.” In Fiction 2000. George Slusser and Tom Shippey, eds. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Rosenthal, Pam. “Jacked In: Fordism, Cyberpunk, Marxism.” Socialist Review 21.1 (1991): 79–105. Ross, Andrew. “Cyberpunk in Boystown.” In Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits. London: Verso, 1991a. ———. “Hacking Away at the Counterculture.” In Technoculture. Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, eds. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991b. Rucker, Rudy (von Bitter). Software. New York: Ace, 1982. ———. Transreal! Englewood, CO: WCS Books, 1991. Sato, Kumiko. “How Information Technology has (not) Changed Feminism and Japanism: Cyberpunk in the Japanese Context.” Comparative Literature Studies 41 (3), 2004, 335–355. Shiner, Lewis. Frontera. New York: Baen, 1984. Shirley, John. City Come A-walkin.’ New York: Dell, 1980.

CYBERPUNK ———. “Freezone.” In Mirrorshades. Bruce Sterling, ed. New York: Ace, 1986. ———. Eclipse. New York: Warner, 1987. ———. Eclipse Penumbra. New York: Warner, 1988. ———. Heatseeker. Los Angeles: Scream Press, 1989a. ———. “Beyond Cyberpunk: The New Science Fiction Underground.” Science Fiction Eye 1.5 (1989b): 30–43. ———. Eclipse Corona. New York: Warner, 1990. Slusser, George, and Tom Shippey, eds. Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Spinrad, Norman. “The Neuromantic Cyberpunks.” In Science Fiction in the Real World. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. Sponsler, Claire. “Cyberpunk and the Dilemmas of Postmodern Narrative.” Contemporary Literature 33.4 (1992): 625–644. Springer, Claudia. “The Pleasure of the Interface.” Screen 32.3 (1991): 303–323. Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash. New York: Bantam Spectra, 1992. Sterling, Bruce. The Artificial Kid. Harmondsworth: Penguin ROC, 1985a. ———. Schismatrix. New York: Viking, 1985b. ———. ed. 1986. Mirrorshades. New York: Ace. ———. Crystal express. New York: Ace, 1989. ———. “Catscan: Slipstream.” Science Fiction Eye 1.5 (1989): 77–80. ———. The Hacker Crackdown. New York: Bantam, 1993. Stockton, Sharon. “The Self Regained.” Contemporary Literature 35.4 (1995): 588–612. Suvin, Darko. “On Gibson and Cyberpunk SF.” In Storming the Reality Studio. Larry McCaffery, ed. Durham, NC: North Carolina University Press, 1991, 349–365. Originally published in Foundation 46 (Autumn 1989): 40–51. Swanwick, Michael. “A User’s Guide to the Postmoderns.” Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine 10.8 (1986): 22–53. Tatsumi, Takayuki. “An Interview with William Gibson.” Science Fiction Eye 1.1 (1987a): 6–17. ———. “The Japanese Reflection of Mirrorshades.” Science Fiction Eye 1.1 (1987b): 27–42. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Vinge, Vernor. True Names. New York: Baen, 1987. Wachowski, Any and Larry. Matrix. DVD. Warner: 1999. Williams, Walter Jon. Hardwired. New York: Tor, 1986. Wolmark, Jenny. Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism, and Postmodernism. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1994.

Further Reading Butler, Andrew M. Cyberpunk. Harpenden, England: Pocket Essentials, 2000; Cavallaro, Dani. Cyberpunk and Cyberculture. London: Athlone Press, 2000; Gillis, Stacy. The Matrix Trilogy: Cyberpunk Reloaded. London: Wallflower, 2005; Heuser, Sabine. Virtual Geographies: Cyberpunk at the Intersection of the Postmodern and Science Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003; McCaffery, Larry, ed. Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodernism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991; Tatsumi, Takayuki. Full Metal Apache: Transactions between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

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D DRAMATIC THEATRE Definition. Dramatic writing differs from other narrative forms, such as fiction, in ways that will be outlined below. We will make a distinction in this chapter between dramatic, meaning serious, and comedic writing. This will focus on serious dramatic literature. Gary Vena and Andrea Nouryeh in the preface to their book Drama and Performance: An Anthology (1996, vii) suggest the dramatic script is a “work of literary art whose structure differs considerably from other genres and must be evaluated accordingly.” When we think of dramatic writing, we understand it is different from other literary genres in that the action is done by each of the characters themselves, without a narrative or omniscient voice telling the readers about what these characters are doing. The characters, literally, speak for themselves. Jeffrey H. Huberman, James Ludwig and Brant L. Pope, in their The Theatrical Imagination (1997, 46), call this “The Action Factor,” meaning: “Drama is the imitation of human actions.” What is vital to action is conflict. Robert Cohen in his Theatre: Brief Version (2003, 6) writes this about action: “Action is not merely movement, of course: it is argument, struggle, persuasion, threats, seduction, sound, music, dance, speech, and passion. It comprises all forms of human energy, including language, spatial dynamics, light, color . . . It is live action, ordinarily unmediated by videotape or cinematic celluloid.” The story, if there is one, is unfolded by each character as it is done. For a work to be considered dramatic literature it must have characters who act. The dramatist creates a world through the characters’ language and other devices of the genre that will be discussed below. Context and Issues. From the beginning of Western theatre in ancient Greece, successful playwrights knew what they wrote needed to be acted out in order for the work to fully come to life. Vena and Nouryeh (1996, viii) continue: “So while other literary works reach their potential as words of art in the act of reading, either silently or aloud, dramas seem incomplete without the spectacle of production.”

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DRAMATIC LITERATURE OF THE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES Some dramatic literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is not interested in narrative. Many contemporary plays even toy with narrative and time structures. A dramatic work, therefore, may or may not be interested in story, but it must have characters whose actions are vital and necessary to enhance the meaning of the work.

Robert Edmund Jones, the twentieth-century director/set designer, in his The Dramatic Imagination (1990, 36), wrote: “The loveliest and most poignant of all stage pictures are those that are seen in the mind’s eye.” Dramatists must write for readers to be able to see and create in their mind’s eye. Vena and Nouryeh (1996, viii–ix) suggest that dramatic literature demands more from the reader’s imaginations than most other forms of literature. They say: We must see and understand what is explicitly said and done, as well as be alterted [sic] to what is implied and left unspoken. We need to be able to determine where the action is taking place, which characters are present even if they are not speaking, and what is happening from moment to moment . . . In essence, our role as readers is two-sided: that of spectator and director, capable of visualizing the play as if we were witnessing it or creating it on stage.

We get clues from the playwrights. The first clue is the dramatist personae, or cast list. The second is the stage directions that tell us time and place, perhaps some details about the characters, and perhaps what they are doing. Playwrights are able to tell us a lot about the characters through the language they use to write their stage directions. Take this example from master playwright Tennessee Williams (1911–1983), who in an early scene in his A Streetcar Named Desire (1951, 14–15) goes far in creating stage directions that allow the reader to experience Blanche’s emotional life: She continues to laugh. Blanche comes around the corner, carrying a valise. She looks at a slip of paper, then at the building, then again at the slip and again at the building. Her expression is one of shocked disbelief. Her appearance is incongruous to this setting. She is daintily dressed in a white suit with a fluffy bodice, necklace and earrings of pearl, white gloves and hat, looking as if she were arriving to a summer tea or cocktail party in the garden district. She is about five years older than Stella. Her delicate beauty must

THE WORLD OF THE DRAMATIST Vena and Nouryeh (1996, viii) state: Although plays tell stories like novels and other works of fiction, an altogether different process takes place using stage directions and dialogue to describe the environment or the characters that inhabit it. Even when theatrical conventions have called for an empty stage, as was the case in the Elizabethan drama, the words of the characters painted pictures for the audience.

DRAMATIC THEATRE avoid a strong light. There is something about her uncertain manner, as well as her white clothes, that suggests a moth.

Also through Williams’s stage directions, his readers can get a feel for the mood of the play, as shown in this excerpt, also from Streetcar: Lurid reflections appear on the wall around Blanche. The shadows are of a grotesque and menacing form. She catches her breath, crosses to the phone and jiggles the hook. Stanley goes into the bathroom and closes the door. (128)

Other playwrights utilize a more straight-forward approach to writing stage directions. For example, in Claire Boothe Luce’s (1903–1987) 1936 play, The Women, we can see the use of stage directions to paint a simple picture of each character: As curtain rises, JANE, a pretty and quite correct little Irish-American maid, is arranging the tea-table. Four women are playing bridge in a smoking-car cloud of smoke. They are: NANCY, who is sharp, but not acid, sleek but not smart, a worldly and yet virginal 35 . . . (5)

For post-modernism there hardly needs to be an interest in narrative, and so this style of writing allows for a lot of freedom in form. Even stage directions may be different, as we can see from this example of the structuralist play Double Gothic (1978) by Michael Kirby (1931–1997):

Scene

Character

Line

Seconds of darkness

A–1 HEROINE A “My suitcase!” B–1 HEROINE B “There’s a star.” (Now the people are handing something to someone else).

11 12

A-5

13

ANTAGONIST A/HELPER A

“Put them on.”

Drama and Performance: An Anthology, p. 1067.

One of the main qualifying characteristics of dramatic literature is that the story is revealed within an element of time. Playwrights may employ real time, when the time elapses as it would in a segment of real life. Fifteen minutes is fifteen minutes, for example. But more usual is what Vena and Nouryeh (1996, ix) call “psychological time,” which “depict[s] the crucial or pivotal moments from the characters’ lives to represent their journeys toward selfhood.” There are a variety of ways that playwrights structure their works. There are linear forms that move from beginning, middle and end, to plays that jump around in time. For example, Diana Son’s (born 1965) 1998 Stop/Kiss jumps backward and then forward in order to tell a story that is poignant, joyous and quite disturbingly sad. Exposition is used in dramatic literature. Exposition, according to Vena and Nouryeh (1996, x): “Establishes the background or circumstances in which we encounter our characters.” A prologue may be utilized in a form of a monologue, or long speech. Also, a prologue can be a short, separate scene outside the body of the play, which may be utilized to tell expository information like who the characters are and other details of the world of the play. During the English

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Renaissance, playwrights such as William Shakespeare (1564–1616) utilized the prologue quite often. In contemporary American dramatic literature it is rarely used. Exposition may be told in the beginning scenes of the play by characters in natural conversation. The denouement is the resolution where a restoration of order may occur, but it does not always have to. Very often in dramas the work may just end. Order is not restored, nothing is resolved, and the play simply ends. In contemporary drama there is no necessity for the work to finish with a clear resolution for it to be considered a play of quality. Distinctions of greatness can disregard this convention of tying up the loose ends. The last character’s speech can end and so with it, the work. Greatness is defined by other conventions such as: language, structure, depth of character, and timelessness of the themes. The dramatic playwright utilizes monologues (longer portions of speech that one character says to another character) and dialogue (speech spoken by people in conversation either in pairs or small or large groups). Soliloquies were often used in the Renaissance by playwrights such as William Shakespeare; however, they are more infrequent in modern and contemporary drama. A soliloquy differs from a monologue in that the speaker is alone on stage. In contemporary times, a speech is considered a “speech” or “monologue” and we no longer call a lone bit of text a soliloquy. Nouryeh and Vena (1996, xi) say this about text in dramatic literature: Language in the form of dialogue nourishes the playwright’s craft. The spoken lines illuminate the characters’ motives and behaviors. Vocabulary, dialectical patterns, and colloquialisms easily establish social status. Rhythms of speech determined by the interplay of articulation and pause reveal personality and convey the rational thoughts and irrational emotions of the speakers . . . Whether verse or prose, words control character development and themes.

The story, characterization, plot and conflict are all revealed by how the character speaks, just as much as what they actually say. Different playwrights may be known for how they handle speech, for instance: Tennessee Williams for his poetic realism and David Mamet (born 1947) for his terse gritty realism (not to mention numerous uses of foul language). The overwhelming difference for readers of dramatic literature is that they are being asked to imagine a world that exists in a specific time and place on the stage. The greatest of playwrights are aware that their words are only as powerful as what they spark to the reader’s imagination and collect in their mind’s eye. Therefore, it is very important that the voice of the character be specific to each character and that the playwright truthfully depicts the range of human experience. What makes a work dramatic versus comedic is that the play is a more serious work, in tone, than a comedic work. Comedies, simply put, are funny. Within the realm of the dramatic are plays that are darkly humorous or absurd, where readers may laugh out loud or chuckle silently to themselves. However, for our purposes, even if the reader chuckles during a reading, in order for it to be a drama (versus comedy): it must be sad, disturbing or tragic, with an overall sense of seriousness. According to Vena and Nouryeh (1999, 1199) a comedy is: “In the classical drama, a literary format that pays homage to the hero’s triumph over calamity; rooted in ritual much like tragedy, except that renewal and rebirth are celebrated.” So, though

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the two genres of drama and comedy both stem from ancient Greek tragedy, they are, since modern times, different in tone, situation, and outcome. Trends and Themes Early Roots/Classical Dramatic Literature. Dramatic literature certainly has its roots in ancient ritual and storytelling, but the beginnings of Western dramatic literature are firmly rooted in the plays of the ancient Greeks who wrote as early as 5th century B.C. Thirty-three plays from the dramatic writers Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.), Sophocles (496–406 B.C.) and Euripides (480–406 B.C.) are still in existence. Nearly a century after these great dramatic writers, Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), the ancient philosopher, wrote his Poetics (350 B.C.), which analyzed and defined the notions of literature, especially drama, and more specifically tragedy. The Poetics established criteria for critics, actors, writers, and historians throughout the ages to be able to uniformly judge dramatic literature. Playwrights do not have to adhere to Aristotelian demands, but most playwrights, throughout the ages, were and are, aware of Aristotelian criteria. This chapter focuses specifically on American dramatic literature written between 2000–2005; therefore it is important to concentrate on the history of American dramatic literature. Though there is an established connection between the ancient tradition that has a profound effect on European theatre history, we will start our discussion of American dramatic literary history in 19th century America. To fully understand American drama one would need to fully study classical, Western, and Eastern forms of theatre throughout a wide variety of periods and styles since they have all had a unique impact on the total variety of American dramatic literature. Dramatic Literature in Early North America. The earliest theatre in America was melodrama. Melodrama is best explained as plays with heightened emotion and complete polar opposite notions of good and evil. The hero always wins. The American melodrama is highlighted by two types: the frontier melodrama and the temperance melodrama and within this form, there are comedies and dramas. We will focus on the dramas. Early examples of the frontier type are: David Belasco’s (1853–1931) The Girl I Left Behind Me in 1893 and Frank Murdoch’s (1843–1872) more famous Davy Crockett (1872), which made villains of Native Americans and glorified frontier life. W.H. Smith (dates unknown) wrote the temperance melodrama: The Drunkard; or, the Fallen Saved (1844), which depicted overly tragic visions of the effects of alcohol on otherwise noble persons. Playwrights like Augustin Daly (1838–1899) who wrote the melodrama Under the Gaslight (c. 1869), which is still widely performed today, were interested in the Little Theatre Movement, bringing their plays to frontier and expanding cities, instead of waiting for audiences to come to them. This affected the plays being written during this time period. Plays of social and literary merit that allowed for a greater integrity in acting than the plays that had gone before them were of interest to these diverse and wider audiences. It was a precursor to the more sophisticated and complex realistic plays to occur in the later nineteenth century and into the twentieth and twenty-first. Another important early melodrama was written by the African American abolitionist writer William Wells Brown (1814–1884), whose The Escape; or, A Leap For Freedom (1858) was left unproduced until 1971 at Emerson College in Boston. The play shows the

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horrors of American slavery and has an unlikely hero who escapes enslavement. The Melodrama, like many of the American dramatic forms, came out of Europe, from France. Twentieth Century. We see that American dramatic literature is born from European artistic movements. American writers adopted these and other styles including: Melodrama from France and Germany; Realism and Naturalism from Russia, Norway and Sweden; anti-Realism from Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia and other European countries; Expressionism from Germany; and Absurdist forms from Ireland, France, Romania, and other European countries. It could be argued that there is not a wholly American dramatic style until we come to the 1960s with the Black Arts Movement, which will be discussed at greater length below. Reception. In the early twentieth century, prior to the birth of Realism in America, plays were much like the previous century’s melodramas, but with more and more sensational topics explored. It wasn’t until Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953) that America got its earliest playwright of international repute. In 1915 the Provincetown Players was founded in Massachusetts by O’Neill. Inspired by the European realistic playwrights: Anton Chekhov (1860–1904, Russian), Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906, Norwegian) and August Strindberg (1849–1912, Swedish), O’Neill went on to receive a 1936 Nobel Prize. He won Pulitzer Prizes for four of his plays: Beyond the Horizon (1920); Anna Christie (1922); Strange Interlude (1928); and Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1957). A list of O’Neill’s other plays include: the Expressionistic The Hairy Ape, the classical tragedy-inspired Mourning Becomes Electra, A Moon For the Misbegotten, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, The Iceman Cometh, All God’s Chillun Got Wings, and Desire Under the Elms. Because of O’Neill’s influence other playwrights began experiments with writing styles inspired by Europeans. A few of these early American playwrights include: Maxwell Anderson, (1888–1959) poet-dramatist who with his What Price Glory? (1926) was sharply critical of the First World War and also experimented with plays in verse, inspired by earlier Western periods and playwrights; Susan Glaspell (1876–1948) whose feminist Trifles (1916) is still important today; and, Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine (1923), which experimented with early silent film conventions making its way into dramatic literature and focused on the central character’s inner psychology. In the 1930s playwrights wrote about the working classes following the Depression. These plays were very much interested in social issues and in making change through the power of dramatic writing and their subsequent performances. These playwrights include Clifford Odets (1906–1963), who largely wrote for The Group Theatre (1931–1940) and was interested in Naturalistic and Realistic acting styles and was influenced by the Russian Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863–1938) and his Moscow Art Theatre (founded in 1897). Cheryl Crawford (1902–1986), one of the Group’s founders and producers, said during a videotaped interview that the Group was made up of New York actors wanting to do plays in their own unique voice. Odets provided them their dramatic voice with his plays: Awake and Sing!, Waiting for Lefty and Golden Boy. In Waiting for Lefty the audience raised their arms and shouted, along with the characters on stage, “Strike! Strike!” The play took New York by storm, showing the importance of having a theatre interested in the plights of the masses. Other writers of this period were: Lillian Hellman (1905–1984) who wrote the highly acclaimed: The Children’s Hour, Toys in the Attic and The Little Foxes, and Langston Hughes (1902–1967) whose play Don’t You Want to Be Free? was an Expressionistic voice of African Americans post-Depression who wanted to

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be able to bond with other workers and experience true societal freedoms. Hughes was an important Harlem Renaissance artist who wrote in a variety of literary genres. Of note: all these playwrights and others in the 1930s were examined under the House Un-American Activities Committee, challenged as Communists. For some, this was the end of their career. In the following period, 1945–1960, we see American Realism become most important as the dramatists look at life in American cities and in American homes. Arthur Miller (1915–2005) Pulitzer Prize winner for Death of a Salesman (1949) and author of many more plays through the subsequent decades, including: All My Sons, The Crucible, A View From the Bridge; Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) who wrote: Summer in Smoke, A Streetcar Named Desire (Pulitzer Prize in 1948), Night of the Iguana, and numerous other dramatic works that were also made into films that dealt largely with gritty stories of men stuck in hiding and abandoned desperate women who loved them. He wrote of the Old South from its gentility into its more modern grit as well as poetically looked at people suffering for their desires disallowed by American society, such as homosexuality and women’s longing for love and sensual pleasure. He wrote for Lee Strasberg (1901–1982), the artistic director of The Actors Studio (founded in 1947), which grew out of the collapse of The Group Theatre. The Studio was made up of a courageous and plucky group of actors, playwrights and directors (such as Elia Kazan, 1909–2003) who wanted an American theatre that showed all of the American torment of human experience, as Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre with writers such as Anton Chekhov, did for Russian life. Other writers of this juicy period include: William Inge (1913–1973), The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, Picnic and Bus Stop, and Lorraine Hansberry (1894–1965) for her groundbreaking A Raisin in the Sun, which allowed readers and audiences a glimpse into the personal and home life of an African American chauffeur. Glynne Wickham in his A History of the Theatre (1985, 236) suggests that this period is when the United States had become the “undisputed pace-setter of change and innovation in all areas of dramatic art.” The 1960s brought a theatre of dissent; a theatre that experimented with notions of what constituted drama, and largely, what is a play. Notable at this time for dramatic literary contributions, were the playwrights involved in the Black Arts Movement. Amiri Baraka (born 1934), formerly LeRoi Jones, was a recent Poet Laureate of New Jersey, and wrote important American plays such as: Dutchman, The Toilet, and The Slave. Sonia Sanchez (born 1934) wrote the lyrical and poignant Sister Son/ji. Adrienne Kennedy (born 1931) became known for her Funnyhouse of a Negro. Ed Bullins (born 1935) wrote In the Wine Time, The Corner and Clara’s Ole Man, to name just a few titles from his extensive list of plays. In the 1970s and 1980s the Off-Broadway theatre emerged, which allowed for more intimate and less commercial plays. Issues that weren’t fully explored on Broadway and larger commercial venues were able to be explored, such as: complex and sometimes taboo relationships in the plays of Sam Shepard (born 1943) who wrote True West and Lie of the Mind; and Mamet who wrote the testosteronefueled Glengarry Glenn Ross and Speed-the-Plow; feminist Wendy Wasserstein (1950–2006) winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play The Heidi Chronicles; AIDS and gay themes by writer Larry Kramer (born 1935) who wrote The Normal Heart, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and African American playwright August Wilson (1945–2005) whose strong influence on the American drama will be discussed further below.

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The 1990s was a time to explore the richness of what the preceding generations of American dramatists had uncovered in themes as well as in the styles of writing. In the twenty-first century we can look forward to new and young writers experimenting still further with structure and themes. Since 9/11, themes of violence and war and hate, have been explored by these playwrights in ways earlier generations did not dare try. Below we will examine some of these fresh writers, as well as the previous generations’ writers who are still forging ahead. Selected Authors Edward Albee (1928–). Albee won three Pulitzer Prizes for: A Delicate Balance (1967), Seascape (1975) and Three Tall Women (1994). He also authored the highly acclaimed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the film version of 1966. Though he is arguably one of America’s best writers, his work has received favorable and not so favorable critiques over the years. In an interview with David Richards (1994) for The New York Times following Albee’s third Pulitzer Prize, the playwright said: But there is not always a great relationship between popularity and excellence. If you know that, you can never be owned by public opinion or critical response. You just have to make the assumption you’re doing good work and go on doing it. Of course, there are the little dolls you stick pins in privately. (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage. html?res=9C01E0DD173DF930A25757C0A962958260)

In 2004 and 2005 Overlook Press published The Collected Plays of Edward Albee, Volume 1 (1958-65) and Volume 2 (1966-77). According to the author’s note in the preface (6), “The plays contained within these anthologies include some changes the author has made over the years. Although he may revisit these texts again one day, he considers them to be, at this point, the definitive versions for both reading and performance.” David Auburn (1969–). Auburn is the author of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize winning Proof, which is also the recipient of the Joseph Kesselring Prize, the Drama Desk Award, and the 2001 Tony Award for Best Play. It was made into a film in 2005 and starred Anthony Hopkins and Gwyneth Paltrow. The play is a sort of ghost play about whether or not a twenty-something daughter has inherited her mathematician father’s genius or insanity. Structurally the play should be noted for its non-linear use of time. It is not told in real time, though it has a realistic, slice of life feel to it, as though readers experience something that could happen in real life. Because of this experiment with time structure Cohen (2003) calls the play post-modern. Nilo Cruz (1960–). Cruz is the Cuban American dramatist of Anna in the Tropics, which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It is a poetic play about a cigar manufacturing family in 1929 Tampa. At that time the owners would hire a lector to read to the cigar rollers. When the machines came in, that was the end of that tradition. Ben Brantley (2003) writes in a New York Times review: Anna in the Tropics reaches for the artistic heavens—specifically, that corner of eternity occupied by the plays of Anton Chekhov, where yearning is an existential condition . . . Although Mr. Cruz’s tone is definitely Chekhovian in its sense of a gentle, pre-modern world on the brink of extinction, the Anna of the play’s title refers to a creation by another Russian writer: Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina . . . The resulting confrontations and collisions are rendered in some of the most densely lyrical language from an

DRAMATIC THEATRE American playwright since Maxwell Anderson. (http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/ theater/treview.html?html_title=&tols_title=ANNA%20IN%20THE%20 TROPICS%20(PLAY)&pdate=20031117&byline=By%20BEN%20BRANTLEY&id= 1077011429146)

Anna in the Tropics also won the notable American Theater Critics/Steinberg New Play Award at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Kentucky. Other plays by Cruz include: Betty and Gauguin, Dancing on Her Knees, A Park in Our House, Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams, A Bicycle Country, Night Train to Bolina, Two Sisters and a Piano, Beauty of the Father, and Lorca in a Green Dress. He has translated two plays by Federico García Lorca (1898–1936, Spanish): Doña Rosita and The House of Bernarda Alba. Tom Donaghy (1964–). In his plays people talk, but they do not listen. Perhaps the most successful of these plays is Northeast Local. All his plays have some sort of disengagement with characters not communicating—especially when dealing with their homosexuality. The theme of parents not wanting to acknowledge a gay son is something that floats throughout his plays. Brantley (2000) in a New York Times review says: Looking for sourness and disenchantment within the cute and eccentric is a specialty of Mr. Donaghy . . . Like many playwrights of his generation, including Nicky Silver [date of birth unknown] and David Greenspan [born 1956], he portrays fractured families that are not so much dysfunctional as beyond functioning at all. You can’t go home again in these fretful comedies because home, in its mythic sense, has ceased to exist. (http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?html_title=&tols_title= BEGINNING%20OF%20AUGUST,%20THE%20(BOOK)&pdate=20001012& byline=By%20BEN%20BRANTLEY&id=1077011429268)

Though Brantley calls them comedies, they are more absurd dramas, so that is why we place them in dramatic literature. Donaghy’s plays include: the one-act The Dadshuttle, which was made into a short film that the playwright directed; Northeast Local with compelling characters and a more accessible story; and Minutes From the Blue Route. The Beginning of August and Other Plays was published in 2000 by Grove Press. Eve Ensler (1953–). Ensler wrote The Vagina Monologues in 1996, which has impacted dramatic literature as well as women’s history. Ensler interviewed hundreds of women and talked with them about how they felt about their bodies, specifically their vaginas. This resulted in a dramatic work that is as fearless and daring as it is joyous, celebrating, entertaining, comedic and dramatic, and it has opened the possibility for people of all ages and genders to dialogue about this onceprevious taboo subject. In her 2004 The Good Body, published by Villard, a division of Random House, the writing was created in the same way but this time the focus is on the writer’s and other women’s thoughts and obsessions about their bellies. San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre (founded in 1965) Web site states that the playwright: Through her honest, insightful, and sometimes naughty portrayal of genuine experiences and real-life obsessions . . . strips the complicated issue of body politics down to its intimate essence, once again destroying pre-conceived notions about what women really think. This is new theater at its finest: The Good Body will move, inspire, entertain—and just might make you blush a bit in the process.

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Horton Foote (1916–). Horton Foote has received two Academy Awards and one Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Young Man From Atlanta. As Williams wrote solely about the South, Foote has focused on life in a fictional Texas town. His plays have been produced on Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, and at many regional theatres. His titles include: The Carpetbagger’s Children, Last of the Thortons, The Chase, The Trip to Bountiful, Lily Dale, The Widow Claire, The Death of Papa, Dividing the Estate, Talking Pictures, The Roads to Home, and many one-act plays. Brantley (2000), in his New York Times review of Last of the Thorntons, writes: In the plays of Horton Foote, the road to home is ultimately a road to nowhere. His chronicles of lives in the fictional hamlet of Harrison, Tex., [sic] are pervaded with a sense of rootlessness that hardly accords with the American ideal of small-town solidity. (http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?html_title=&tols_title= LAST%20OF%20THE%20THORNTONS,%20THE%20(PLAY)&pdate=20001204& byline=By%20BEN%20BRANTLEY&id=1077011432574)

He continues: “The Last of the Thorntons . . . is, in its way, as unrelenting an assessment of the human condition as Waiting for Godot [Samuel Beckett, Irish, 1948–1949].” And Michael Feingold (2001) writing for The Village Voice says: In his plays, the flat landscape seems to breed flat recitals of data that pass for dialogue, flat assertions that pass for conflict, flat terminations that pass for dramatic resolution. Yet in this stagy aridity, Foote can grow a wavery ambiguity resembling the empty husk of drama, like the silage fed to cattle in the arid air outside his Texas interiors. The nutritive grain the husk might have contained has inexplicably vanished; to ask where and how only deepens the mystery. Like objects viewed from a great distance on an open plain, Foote’s plays are never what they appear to be, but impossible to define as anything else. (http://www.villagevoice.com/theater/0051,sightlines,20993,11.html)

Brantley (2002) in a New York Times review says about The Carpetbagger’s Children: “Few dramatists today can replicate this kind of storytelling with the gentle mastery that Mr. Foote provides” (http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html? html_title=&tols_title=CARPETBAGGER’S%20CHILDREN,%20THE%20(PLAY)& pdate=20020326&byline=By%20BEN%20BRANTLEY&id=1077011432326). Charles Watson (2003, 1) writes in his biography about Foote: He is not a social protester like Arthur Miller, a constant experimenter with dramatic techniques like Eugene O’Neill, nor a psychological investigator like Tennessee Williams. Rather it is his sensitivity to the troubled men and women who live in Southeast Texas that gives his work unity.

His work is regarded as in the same vein as Anton Chekhov’s. Pamela Gien (c. 1957–). Gien’s play The Syringa Tree received an Obie for Best Play in 2001. It adds to the rich literary tradition of one-person shows. This play was adapted into a film directed by Larry Moss (dates unknown), the Los Angeles and New York City acting coach and teacher who authored the acting book The Intent to Live (2004). Ms. Gien grew up in a suburb of Johannesburg. From her seemingly personal piece, largely concerned with apartheid’s racism and violence, she creates a dozen or more roles spanning 20 years’ time. The main character is the little girl,

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ostensibly, herself. Bruce Weber (2000) in a New York Times review called Gien a “gifted writer [who] has an unyielding spine as a storyteller” (http://query.nytimes. com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E01E2DE133BF932A1575AC0A9669C8B63). Richard Greenberg (1958–). Greenberg is the 2003 Tony Award winner for Best Play for Take Me Out. His other twenty-four plays include: The Author’s Voice, The American Plan, Eastern Standard, Three Days of Rain, The Dazzle, and The Violet Hour. He, like Tony Kushner (born 1956) and the creator of the musical Rent, Jonathan Larson (1960–1996), is among the early group of dramatists writing about people living with HIV. Greenberg talks about being a gay playwright and suggests that he does not want to only write in any one theme or genre so that he is only known as a “gay playwright.” He states in an interview with Jim Provenzano (date of interview unknown): “All you ever do is write about what you don’t know, or who you aren’t. That’s the whole point, to go outside the lines of yourself.” Brantley (2006) in The New York Times, says of Greenberg’s work that: “existential enigmas and conundrums of faith . . . always pepper this playwright’s work” (http://theater2. nytimes.com/2006/04/20/theater/reviews/20rain.html?pagewanted=print). In addition to gay themes the playwright also deals with the question of time, how memories of the past influence the present and vice versa. Three Days of Rain depicts life for three riddled New Yorkers who struggle to find their identity. It explores how adult children wrestle with confusions with their parent’s struggles. Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre (founded in 1974) describes this play as one that: Evaluates the emotional desolation, the lack of answers and the negativity of the 1990s, and then spins backward to reveal the premises of a happier decade that progressively broke down into the defeated present.

On a different theme is The Violet Hour, a wonderfully biting play about literary figures, the future, and how to be on the artistic and commercial cutting edge. Faber and Faber, Inc. published the work in 2004. Charles Isherwood (2003, 3) of Variety puns that it is: “A chamber piece that muses on the elusive intersections between the past, the present and the future . . . Greenberg has concocted an ingenious timetravel story with a novel twist.” John Guare (1938–). Guare’s first major success was in 1968 with the one-act Muzeeka, which won an Obie Award. In 1971, he met great acclaim with House of Blue Leaves, a semi-autobiographical play that won him an Obie and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for the Best American Play of 1970–71. He also received four Tony Awards during its 1986 revival. Guare also authored Six Degrees of Separation (1990), which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Award and an Olivier Best Play Award. The playscript was made into a movie in 1993 starring Will Smith and Stockard Channing. In 2002 Guare wrote a play about Ulysses S. Grant called A Few Stout Individuals. Also in 2002, he wrote the book to the successful Broadway musical, Sweet Smell of Success, based on the 1957 film of the same name. In 2003 Guare won The PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Awards for Drama. Brantley (2002) comments about A Few Stout Individuals in a New York Times review: The evening’s dominant subject is the nature and purpose of memory. This in turn is weighed from the points of view of both Western and Eastern civilizations, of history and

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DRAMATIC THEATRE art, of mortality and immortality. The scope of reference matches the play’s ambitions, with allusions to everything from Pompeii to Edmund Wilson, all tossed into one crazy salad. Mr. Guare also returns happily to two of his favorite subjects: the circus of celebrity and the circus known as New York City. (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage. html?res=9D0CE2DB1739F930A25756C0A9649C8B63&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss)

Cohen (2003, 104) claims that Guare is “an eternal experimenter . . . always provocative, always challenging norms.” Stephen Adly Guirgis (c. 1972–). Guirgis’s plays are heavily character-driven and usually deal with religion, death and/or persecution. They include: The Last Days Of Judas Iscariot, set in a modern-day courtroom, which sets forth the question as to whether or not Judas could find redemption; Our Lady of 121st Street, which explores what happens when a dead alcoholic nun’s body turns up missing at her own funeral and probes the flaws of each of the complex and struggling characters; Jesus Hopped The A Train, about two prisoners in Riker’s Island; and In Arabia We’d All Be Kings. All four plays are published in an anthology by Faber and Faber in 2003. Guirgis is a member of New Dramatists, MCC Theater Playwrights’ Coalition, New River Dramatists, The Actors Studio Playwright/Directors Unit, as well as LABrynth Theatre, for which Philip Seymour Hoffman is a member; he has directed several of Guirgis’ plays. Brantley (2005) in a New York Times review says that Guirgis writes with: “a fierce and questing mind that refuses to settle for glib answers, a gift for identifying with life’s losers and an unforced eloquence that finds the poetry in lowdown street talk” (http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/ treview.html?res=9B06E0DB133DF930A35750C0A9639C8B63). A.R. Gurney (1930–). Gurney writes comedies and dramas that deal with academic life and critiques White Anglo-Protestant viewpoints. He also retells Biblical stories and ancient Greek dramas. His plays: The Dining Room, The Golden Age, What I Did Last Summer, The Cocktail Hour, Love Letters, and Another Antigone make Gurney one of America’s most successful playwrights. In 2001 and 2003, respectively, he wrote two new plays: Buffalo Gal and O Jerusalem. His awards include: the Drama Desk, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Lucille Lortel Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His collected play volumes are published with Smith and Kraus, Inc. Tony Kushner (1956–). Kushner, a gay Jewish socialist, perhaps best known for Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1991) for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, had two important publications in 2000 by TCG, Inc. The first was Homebody/Kabul and the second was Death & Taxes: Hydriotaphia & Other Plays. Angels was made into both a television miniseries in 2003 starring Al Pacino (born 1940) and Meryl Streep (born 1949) and other celebrated actors, as well as an opera by Peter Eötvös (born 1944, Hungarian), which debuted in 2006. Andrea Bernstein (1995) in a Mother Jones article, says Kushner is most concerned with “the moral responsibilities of people in politically repressive times” (http://www. motherjones.com/arts/qa/1995/07/bernstein.html). In that same article Kushner himself says: You have to have hope. It’s irresponsible to give false hope, which I think a lot of playwrights are guilty of. But I also think it’s irresponsible to simply be a nihilist, which quite a lot of playwrights, especially playwrights younger than me, have become guilty of. I don’t believe you would bother to write a play if you really had no hope.

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Neil LaBute (1963–). When people read a LaBute play, they may be surprised to learn that he attended Brigham Young University and was a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, since the themes of his plays address human darkness without preaching this as evil. Brantley (2001), in a New York Times review, said: “This is a writer, after all, who has built his reputation on presuming to know, like the Shadow, exactly what evil lurks in the hearts of men” (http://query.nytimes. com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9806E3DD163FF932A25753C1A9679C8B63). LaBute has achieved acclaim from critics for these dark portraits. In 2000 he wrote Bash: Latter-Day Plays, a trio of short plays that expose good Latter-day Saints doing bad things. This play resulted in his disfellowship (which is not as harsh as excommunication) from the LDS Church. He has since formally left the church. LaBute’s 2002 response to 9/11, The Mercy Seat, focuses on the main character, an employee of the World Trade Center, who was away when the planes hit because he was with his mistress. This character then considers using the tragedy as a way to leave his family. The Shape of Things (2001) was made into a film in 2003 and deals with such timeless questions as what art is, and brings with it a hip and contemporary psychopathic twist. It also deals with emotional intimacy and what people are willing to do for love. He is a vibrant playwright who offers shocking and surprising scripts that reach out to a contemporary audience. His other plays include: Fat Pig, Autobahn: A Short Play Cycle, and This is How it Goes: A Play. He is the author of several screenplays including: Nurse Betty, In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors. Warren Leight (c. 1957–). Warren Leight is a serio-comic writer whose autobiographical Side Man won the 1999 Tony Award for Best Play and his 2001 Glimmer, Glimmer and Shine, which is not a sequel to the Tony winner, also dealt with the world of jazz musicians and the difficulties presented for families involved with that life. Evan Yionoulis, the director of the two above-mentioned productions, wrote the Foreword in the Grove Press (2001, vii) publication of the latter-mentioned play, in which he said: I was attracted to the play’s exploration of how the choices of one generation impact the next and how the avoidance of excess doesn’t always lead to balance. It’s a piece about a broken family whose members are forced to confront one another again and for the first time. There is wonderful comic energy but also a great deal of heart.

Leight also authored musicals and is the Vice-President of the Writers Guild of America, East Council; and a member of the Dramatists Guild Council. Critics have likened Leight to O’Neill and the comic playwright Neil Simon (born 1927). Tracey Letts (1965–). Actor as well as playwright, Letts is a member of the esteemed Steppenwolf Theatre Company and is the author of Bug, which is set in a run-down Okie motel where Agnes, a divorced waitress with a penchant for cocaine, befriends Peter, a soft-spoken Gulf War veteran. They shack up while she hides from her violent ex-husband who is recently released from prison. They soon realize that the motel has a bug infestation problem, which they come to believe is part of a conspiracy against Peter and part of the side-effects of experiments conducted while he was at a veteran’s hospital. The play is funny, but also shocking, violent, and even repulsive. Brantley (2004) writes in The New York Times that the play is: “obscenely exciting.” Bug enjoyed critical acclaim during its Off-Broadway run. Man From Nebraska was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2004 and Letts’s early work

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Killer Joe is about homicidal trailer trash. Letts’s most recent play, August: Osage County has been called by many critics one of the best American plays in recent memory, is a black comedy about a highly disturbing family. It opened on Broadway in late 2007. Romulus Linney (1930–). Linney is a highly regarded dramatist who has created many adaptations for the stage. In addition to writing novels and short stories, Linney has won two Obie awards, (one for sustained excellence in playwriting), two National Critics Awards, three DramaLogue Awards, and numerous fellowships, including grants from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations. He has written: Lark, Klonksy and Schwartz, The Sorrows of Frederick, Holy Ghosts, Childe Byron, Heathen Valley, and most recently, an adaptation of Ernest L. Gaines’s novel A Lesson Before Dying, for which Linney said to interviewer Mary Flinn (2002) that he was a “very faithful adaptor.” Lesson was published in 2001 by Dramatists Play Service, Inc. In 2000, Smith and Krauss published Nine Adaptations for the American Stage, which include: Gint, Lesson and Lark. Linney is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and many other institutions for dramatists. He is the father of the popular actress Laura Linney. Kenneth Lonergan (1962–). Lonergan, author of 2002’s Lobby Hero, is probably better known to commercial audiences for his 2000 screenplay You Can Count On Me. Contemporary legend has it that Lonergan began writing the script for the film during a writer’s circle at New York’s Ensemble Studio Theatre (founded in 1969). This fact encourages young writers to also write in a workshop environment. Lobby Hero can be considered a comedy; however, the genre it sits in is more comfortably seriocomic, since Lonergan explores more serious themes of loneliness and missed connections with a clear dramatic weight. Other plays include: Waverly Gallery (nominated for a Pulitzer), a touching serio-comedy that seems quite personal, about a 50-year old adult child dealing with her ailing mother and her son whose relationship with his grandmother is very dear to him. Brantley (2001) in a New York Times review says this about Lonergan: Mr. Lonergan knows that the road to ruin is paved with intentions that are neither good nor bad but overwhelmingly mixed. His characters—whether addled by drugs (as in Youth), Alzheimer’s (Waverly) or everyday indecision—are a combustible brew of impulses that they can’t begin to sort out. (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html? res=9F04EFD8113AF937A25750C0A9679C8B63&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss)

David Mamet (1947–). Mamet was an actor and director before he reached success in 1976 with three Off-Off Broadway plays: The Duck Variations, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and American Buffalo, which was made into a film in 1996. His works are known for their clever, clipped, and sometimes vulgar speech and for his interest in high-octane masculinity. The way he writes has become signature and many playwrights try to copy his terse style. Other plays include: Glengarry Glen Ross (1984 Pulitzer Prize winner), about the underbelly of corporate greed, which was made into a film in 1992 starring Alec Baldwin, Al Pacino, and an all-star cast; Speed-the-Plow, about the ugliness of the entertainment business; and Oleana (film version in 1994) about what constitutes sexual harassment between a college professor soon to be tenured and a young female student. Comedic writer David Ives (born 1950) both spoofs and honors Mamet with his work Speed-the-Play. More

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recent plays include: Faustus, his adaptation of the Jacobean play, which appeared at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre (founded in 1967) and was published by Vintage Books, and Boston Marriage in 2002, which was also made into a film. Mamet has taught at the Yale Drama School and New York University. His awards are numerous and they include: Obie Awards in 1976 and1983; New York Drama Critics Circle Awards in 1977 and 1984; and the Tony Award in 1987. Mamet, with actor William H. Macy (born 1950), created the Atlantic Theater Company (founded in 1983) and the Atlantic Theatre’s actor training program where they believe that the story of the play and the intent of its playwright are essential to the creative process. He has also written books on acting, directing, writing, as well as the film and theatre businesses, which include: True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor (1999), Writing in Restaurants (1987) and Three Uses of the Knife (2002). Donald Margulies (1954–). Margulies is a writer who is interested in Jewish themes. In 1992, Margulies achieved notoriety with Sight Unseen, about a painter who leaves a London exhibition of his artwork to visit his former lover. He explores themes of: Anti-Semitism, art, and lost love. Sight Unseen won an Obie for Best New American Play. Some of his other plays include: Found a Peanut, The Loman Family Picnic, Pitching to the Star, Luna Park, What’s Wrong With This Picture?, The Model Apartment, and The God of Vengeance (Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 2004), an adaptation of the 1906 Yiddish melodrama written by Shalom Asch about a father who, though renting to a brothel on the first floor of his tenement building, desires that his daughter lives the American Jewish dream, marrying well to a rabbi. His daughter, however, is more preoccupied with her relationship with one of the prostitutes. The 2000 Pulitzer Prize winner Dinner With Friends exposes the vulnerability of contemporary middle-class marriages. It was made into a film in 2001, directed by Norman Jewison. Margulies was nominated for a Pulitzer for Collected Stories (1996), which played on Broadway with the legendary Uta Hagen as the Jewish writer toward the end of her career betrayed by her young disciple, and was made into a PBS Teleplay. He was elected to the Dramatists Guild Council in 1993 and received grants from: the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Terrence McNally (1939–). Early in his career, McNally was a protégé of the noted playwright Edward Albee. Later in his career, McNally became successful with Frankie and Johnny at the Claire de Lune (1987), starring Kathy Bates (born 1948) Off-Broadway and later starred Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer in the 1991 film version. The Broadway revival starred Edie Falco (born 1963) of the famed TV show The Sopranos and Stanley Tucci (born 1960). McNally is a groundbreaking writer in his fierce works that speak against homophobia. Plays of this category include: Lips Together, Teeth Apart; the collaboration with Kander and Ebb on the musical Kiss of the Spider Woman, for which he wrote the book; Love! Valour! Compassion!; and The Lisbon Traviata and Master Class, both about diva opera soprano Maria Callas. Master Class won the 1996 Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1997, McNally’s Corpus Christi was the focus of many church and religious right uprisings that tried to ban the play and several of its productions. The play reclaims the story of Jesus, creating a world where his disciples are homosexuals. The premiere performance at the Manhattan Theatre Club was cancelled due to death threats against board members, but Tony Kushner and other playwrights threatened to remove their plays if Corpus Christi was not produced. The board allowed the

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production to proceed. About 2,000 protesters picketed the opening, but the play continued and still continues to be produced. In addition to four Tony Awards, McNally also received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Grant, the Lucille Lortel Award, the Hull-Warriner Award, and a citation from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been a member of the Dramatists Guild Council since 1970 and has served as vice-president since 1981. Recent plays include: The Stendhal Syndrome: Full Frontal Nudity and Prelude & Liebestod (2004) where McNally explores art, lust and longing and Dedication or the Stuff of Dreams (2005), which suffered from terrible critical reviews in its New York production. Arthur Miller (1915–2005). Perhaps he could be considered the quintessential American playwright. His long body of work and recent death mark an era in dramatic literature made rich because of his contribution. Many of his plays are now considered American classics and they include: The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, After the Fall, All My Sons, and Death of a Salesman (1949 Pulitzer Prize in Drama winner). Resurrection Blues and Finishing the Picture are his last works, written in 2002 and 2004, respectively. Robert Cohen (2003, 99–100) says about Miller: “No other playwright in the current theatre has so aggressively called society to task for its failures nor so passionately told the audience to pay attention to the world around them.” Milly S. Barranger in Theatre: A Way of Seeing (2002, 90) calls Miller a “moralist and social dramatist.” Barranger continues: “His plays deal with the individual’s responsibility in the face of society’s emphasis on such false values as material success and personal happiness at any price.” Anne Nelson (dates unknown). Nelson, who never wrote a play before The Guys, was a former war correspondent who covered El Salvador in the early 1980s and currently is Adjunct Associate Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. The Guys is autobiographical, and it is about her dealings with a downtown New York fire chief following 9/11, who, following the disaster, she assisted in writing the all too numerous eulogies. The play enjoyed a successful run at the Flea Theatre, an Off-Off Broadway theatre in downtown New York City, where Sigourney Weaver and Bill Murray created the roles, and performed to local audiences, including groups of firefighters. It was published in 2002 by Random House. The result is a moving dramatic work that articulates the emotions and longings many people have faced since September 11. Lynn Nottage (1964–). Nottage has enjoyed recognition as an up and coming African American female playwright. Nottage’s collection of plays: Crumbs From The Table of Joy: And Other Plays was published by TCG, Inc. in 2004, and includes Crumbs from the Table of Joy, POOF!, Por’knockers; Mud, River, Stone; and Las Meninas. Jason Zinoman in a New York Times article (2004) calls Nottage: “An equal-opportunity satirist, Ms. Nottage sends up characters of several races” (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C01E2DC1630F930A25755C0A 9629C8B63). In 1999/2000 Nottage received a NEA/TCG grant for a residency at Philadelphia’s Freedom Theatre (founded in 1966) it is the oldest African American theatre. She was awarded: Playwriting Fellowships from Manhattan Theatre Club, New Dramatists and the New York Foundation for the Arts, where she is a member of their Artists Advisory Board. In addition, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. In 2003 Intimate Apparel, inspired by Nottage’s own grandmother, tells the

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story of an African American seamstress’s romantic troubles and entanglements and the world of the women around her who use her undergarments. The play was a contender for the Pulitzer Prize. Dael Orlandersmith (1959–). Orlandersmith is an actress, poet and playwright who is best known for her Obie Award winning Beauty’s Daughter (1995) and the 2002 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Drama, Yellowman, which, according to Annie Nakao in The San Francisco Chronicle (2004) is: “a lyrical and brutal examination of the complexities of internalized prejudice and its centuries-old roots in slavery.” In a September 1996 taping of the radio show “This American Life,” Orlandersmith performs When You Talk About Music in which she portrays a thirty-one-year-old male who meets a black woman at a mutual friend’s wedding and finds how much he misses musical expression. Other plays include: The Gimmick, which deals with art and race; Monster, about a violent family history that passes from one generation to another, with the narrator, a young women, using stories, poetry and a variety of characters to introduce and juxtapose situations. Her collection, Beauty’s Daughter, Monster, The Gimmick: Three Plays is published by Vintage Books (2000). Suzan-Lori Parks (1964–). Parks has enjoyed great critical acclaim as a young African American female. While attending Mount Holyoke College, Parks was a student of James Baldwin (1924–1987). He suggested she write plays; thankfully, she listened. Parks credits Mount Holyoke later in life for her success. She said in a newspaper interview that she was inspired by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein. In 2001, The Red Letter Plays were published by TCG books with: In the Blood and Fucking A. Topdog/Underdog was the winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Since 2000, she authored: 365 Plays/365 Days, for which she wrote a play a day for an entire year. Robert Cohen (2003, 114) writes: Writing about the black experience in America—slavery, lynchings, poverty, discrimination, minstrelsy, and racism are common themes—she rejects both realism and easy polemics, preferring a savagely comic irony and freshly minted language to diatribes or bald recountings.

Adam Rapp (1968–). Rapp was the recipient of the Herbert & Patricia Brodkin Scholarship, two Lincoln Center le Compte du Nouy Awards, a fellowship to the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, the 1999 Princess Grace Award for Playwrighting, a 2000 Suite Residency with Mabou Mines, a 2000 Roger L. Stevens Award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, and the 2001 Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights. Rapp’s prolific list of plays include these titles written between 2000–2005: Animals and Plants, Bingo with the Indians, Blackbird, Dreams of the Salthorse, Faster, Finer Noble Gases, Gompers, Mistral, Nocturne and Stone Cold Dead Serious. Bruce Weber in a New York Times review (2003) says of Rapp: He writes with an urgent, galloping imagination, as if his fingers on the keyboard can’t keep up with his racing brain. An eager experimenter, he needs a governor, or the selfediting impulse that generally comes with age—or at least a strict dramaturge . . . His overall subject is coming of age in the contemporary American heartland, an enterprise he views as fearful and portrays with pained sympathy. Generally set in Illinois (Mr. Rapp grew up in Joliet), but with a clear sense that the American landscape is full of places that are hopelessly distant from opportunity, his plays are full of horribly lost teenagers who are entirely unequipped for the assumption of citizenship. Casually

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John Patrick Shanley (1950–). Shanley grew up in the Bronx. In his personal biography that appears in the Playbill for his 2005 Pulitzer Prize winning Doubt, a parable, he writes: John Patrick Shanley is from the Bronx. He was thrown out of St. Helena’s kindergarten. He was banned from St. Anthony’s hot lunch program for life. He was expelled from Cardinal Spellman High School. He was placed on academic probation by New York University and instructed to appear before a tribunal if he wished to return. When asked why he had been treated in this way by all these institutions, he burst into tears and said he had no idea. Then he went in the United States Marine Corps. He did fine. He’s still doing okay.

Shanley’s list of plays include: (plays from the 1980s) Welcome to the Moon, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Savage In Limbo, The Dreamer Examines His Pillow, Italian American Reconciliation, Women of Manhattan, All For Charity; (plays from the 1990s) The Big Funk, Beggars in the House of Plenty, What Is This Everything?, Kissing Christine, Missing Marisa, Four Dogs and a Bone, The Wild Goose, Psychopathia Sexualis; and (plays from 2000) Where’s My Money?, Cellini, Dirty Story, Doubt, a parable, Sailor’s Song, and Defiance. Brantley writes in a New York Times review (2005): Doubt is an unusually quiet work for Mr. Shanley, a writer who made his name with rowdy portraits of bruising love affairs. But gentleness becomes this dramatist. Even as Doubt holds your conscious attention as an intelligently measured debate play, it sends off stealth charges that go deeper emotionally. (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/ fullpage.html?res=9801E4D8123CF932A35757C0A9639C8B63&sec=&spon=& pagewanted=all)

Sam Shepard (1943–). Shepard has made a great impact on New York’s off-offBroadway theatre scene and he has a long list of plays written in the 1970s and 1980s. He is also a film actor and director, and has appeared on the cover of Newsweek after marrying actress Jessica Lange, when they met on the set of their film Frances. In 1976 Shepard moved to San Francisco where he was the playwright in residence at the Magic Theatre, where much of his work received world premieres. The most notable of these works include: Buried Child (1979 Pulitzer Prize winner), Curse of the Starving Class, True West and A Lie of the Mind in 1985. In 1986 Fool for Love was made into a film by Robert Altman. Also, he went from Off-Off Broadway, to the larger spotlight of Broadway with his play A Lie of the Mind. Robert Cohen (2003, 105) says of Shepard’s plays, that they are: basically prose poems; the language is musical, and the subject matter, which is generally contemporary and American, suggests modern myth more than everyday reality. His plays, which invariably involve sex and violence, create arresting . . . images and tantalize the audience with moments of extreme surface realism that ultimately open into something more abstract.

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In 2002 Vintage Books published: The Late Henry Moss, Eyes for Consuela, When the World Was Green: Three Plays, and When the World Was Green with Joseph Chaiken (his profound mentor and collaborator). The God of Hell was published in 2005 by Vintage Books. Anna Deavere Smith (1950–). Smith does not shy away from controversy. She is celebrated for her one-woman dramatic works inspired by American current events. She writes these works from interviews with people directly or indirectly involved. As she performs them she takes on the gestures, voice, and emotional and psychological characteristics of as many as 40 men and women who make up her plays. She was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship (known as the “genius grant”) in 1996. Her non-fiction dramas include: the 1991 Fires in the Mirror, about the Crown Heights Riots, which followed a young African American child’s accidental death at the hands of a rabbi; the 1992 Twilight: Los Angeles, which dealt with the Los Angeles riots following the Rodney King verdict. In 2003 Anchor Books published her new works: House Arrest and Piano: Two Plays. Barranger (2002, 328) claims that Smith: “As a creator and performer . . . sets out to use the words of the voiceless and the powerful in society, creating a sophisticated and poetic dialogue about race relations in contemporary America.” Paula Vogel (1951–). Paula Vogel is a feminist author who won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in Drama as well as the Obie, the Lortel Best Play Award, the Best Off-Broadway Play from the Outer Critics Circle, the Best Play from the Drama Desk, and the Best Play from the New York Drama Critics Circle. The awards are for How I Learned to Drive, which is about a pedophile and the complex relationship he has with his teenage and then college-age relative by marriage. Uncle Peck, the pedophile, is not a wholly unlikable character, and that allows for a highly nuanced work. Barranger (2002, 81) says of Vogel: “Unlike most writers on political issues, she is not interested in persuading audiences to adopt political or moral positions but rather to understand that there are no easy answers.” Other plays are: Hot ‘N’ Throbbing, with a new publication dated 2000, published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.; Swan Song of Sir Henry, Meg, Apple-Brown Betty, Desdemona, A Play about a Handkerchief, Bertha in Blue, The Oldest Profession, And Baby Makes Seven, The Mineola Twins, and The Long Christmas Ride Home. Baltimore Waltz is another of her well-known plays, which is an autobiographical account of her brother who died of AIDS. Alvin Klein in his New York Times review (1993) says of the play: “it is a piece of original design, fresh imagination and extraordinary empathy that touches the heart” (http://query.nytimes. com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CEED71239F935A25756C0A965958260). August Wilson (1945–2005). In his life he wrote a decalogy of ten full-length plays. The plays are rich with deeply felt monologues that capture a variety of African American voices throughout a century. Each play represents a decade in twentieth century African American history. This cycle of plays include: Gem of the Ocean (2003) about the 1900s; Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1984) about the 1910s; Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1982) about the 1920s; The Piano Lesson (1986, Pulitzer Prize winner) about the 1930s, which was made into a movie in 1995; Seven Guitars (1995) about the 1940s; Fences (1985, Pulitzer Prize winner) about the 1950s; Two Trains Running (1990) about the 1950s; Jitney (1982) about the 1970s, first published in the United States by The Overlook Press in 2003; King Hedley II (2001) about the 1980s; and Radio Golf (2005) about the 1990s. His list of awards is long, they include: seven New York Drama Critics Circle Awards for Best Play, six Tony

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Award nominations for Best Play, two Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding New Play, the Tony Award for Best Play (Fences), the Literary Lion Award from the New York Public Library, the American Theatre Critics’ Association Award (Two Trains Running), the National Humanities Medal (1999), and The Freedom of Speech Award at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival (2004). Cohen (2003, 106) says of Wilson: “He glories, though not always uncritically, in black life, and is not at all interested in synthesizing races or glossing over cultural differences. A poet still, Wilson blends drama with profound observation and glorious, though disturbing, humanity.” Oscar Hijuelos, author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love and the forthcoming Twain and Stanley Enter Paradise was a friend of Wilson. He retells this story in a 2005 New York Times article about a time they spent together: He loved discussing literature: Ralph Ellison, Gabriel García Márquez, James M. Cain, Jorge Luis Borges and Tennessee Williams were but a few of the writers we talked about over the years. We tried to maintain a scholarly tone about such things, especially when our wives were around, but when it was just the two of us, our upbringings kicked in and our language was riddled with scatological turns of phrase. August’s sentences blossomed with such language, especially when we came to the history of slavery and the black man in this country. (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/09/opinion/ 09hijuelos.html)

Lanford Wilson (1937–). Wilson is a prolific writer whose plays include: (from the 1960s) Balm in Gilead, The Rimers of Eldrich, and The Gingham Dog; (from the 1970s) Lemon Sky, Serenading Louie, Hot L Baltimore, The Mound Builders, Fifth of July; (the 1980s) Talley’s Folly (Pulitzer Prize winner of 1980), A Tale Told, later revised and renamed Talley & Son, Angels Fall, Burn This; (the 1990s) Redwood Curtain, Sympathetic Magic; and the 2000 Book of Days, published by Grove Press. Cohen (2003, 103) calls Wilson’s work: “gentle, poetic, natural, and wise; increasingly his works focus on the larger social and philosophical contexts of contemporary life.” He was a founding member with notable director Marshall W. Mason (born 1940) of the famed Circle Repertory Company (1969–1996) in New York City, where many of his plays had their debut. Doug Wright (dates unknown). Wright is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for Best Play for I am My Own Wife in 2004. The play was created through exercises, research and interviews about the German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a survivor of both Nazism and Communism in East Germany. In a New York Times (2003) review Bruce Weber writes: “it is terrific enough to raise the highest expectations” (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE6D 71031F93BA15756C0A9659C8B63). In 2005 Faber and Faber, Inc. publish Quills and Other Plays: Interrogating the Nude about Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray and a very interesting exploration about art, novelty, and government; Watbanaland, which has political overtones of hunger, poverty, and American marriage; Quills about the Marquis de Sade, which is humorous but also darkly grotesque and poignant. The publication offers a colorful introduction entitled Willful Misbehavior, which provides an anecdote about a time in the writer’s young life where he decided he like the “forbidden” in art. His plays certainly explore the forbidden. Wright has said about his own work: No human appetite is too base, no idea so holy, no institution so revered that it should be spared art’s scrutiny. At its best, art can function in a society as its collective

DRAMATIC THEATRE conscience. And such a conscience is useless unless it can operate unchecked. Propaganda provides answers; art should stimulate questions. Dali, Duchamp and de Sade did more than churn out pages of prose or canvas after canvas. They each took center stage in their own time as agitators, while—at the same time—revolutionizing their respective crafts. I hope to follow their example. (http://www.mindspring.com/ ~horizonco/plays/quills/author.htm)

Mary Zimmerman (dates unknown). Zimmerman is a stage director and playwright most celebrated for her contemporary myths. She is a member of Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre Company (founded in 1989) and an artistic associate of The Goodman Theatre (founded in 1925). Much of her work is created while she works with her company of actors and designers; the company members will read source material together, while Zimmerman is responsible for weaving the dramatic text from their findings and collaborative engagement. Her play Metamorphoses, based on David R. Slavit’s translation of The Metamorphoses of Ovid, was published in 2002 by Northwestern University Press. Deborah Garwood (2003, 71) in “Myth as Public Dream: The Metamorphosis of Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses” in PAJ: Performing Art Journal, states: At the most accessible level, [Metamorphoses] provides abundant opportunities for the playwright to theatricalize myth as a hybrid of antiquity and twentieth-century culture. King Midas resembles a 1920s American industrialist millionaire. Erysichthon, though dressed in a toga, comes across as a greedy mogul unconcerned about the environment who pays dearly for incurring Ceres’ wrath. The tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, as told by Ovid and by Rilke’s poem, creates a poetic bridge between myth and modernism, artistic process and its inviolate root in the unconscious.

RECENT PULITZER PRIZES IN DRAMA 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007

The Piano Lesson by August Wilson Lost in Yonkers by Neil Simon The Kentucky Cycle by Robert Schenkkan Angels in America: Millennium Approaches by Tony Kushner Three Tall Women by Edward Albee The Young Man From Atlanta by Horton Foote Rent by the late Jonathan Larson (No Award) How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel Wit by Margaret Edson Dinner With Friends by Donald Margulies Proof by David Auburn Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz I Am My Own Wife by Doug Wright Doubt, a parable by John Patrick Shanley (No Award) Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire

Source: Pulitzer Prize Web site. http://www.pulitzer.org/

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Zimmerman received numerous awards, including the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 1998. Other works include: Journey to the West, The Secret In The Wings, The Odyssey, The Arabian Nights, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci and Eleven Rooms of Proust. She is the director and co-librettist of the 2002 opera Galileo Galilei with music by Philip Glass (born 1937) commissioned by the Goodman Theatre. Bibliography Albee, Edward. The Collected plays of Edward Albee. Woodstock, New York: Overlook Press, 2004. Auburn, David. Proof: A Play. New York: Faber & Faber, 2001. Barranger, Milly S. Theatre: A Way of Seeing. Belmont, California: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2002. Cohen, Robert. Theatre, Brief Version. 6th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill Custom Pub, 2003. Cruz, Nilo. Anna in the Tropics. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2003. Donaghy, Tom. The Beginning of August and Other Plays. New York: Grove Press, 2000. Ensler, Eve. The Good Body. New York: Villard, 2004. ———. The Vagina Monologues. New York: Villard, 2001. Foote, Horton. The Carpetbagger’s Children. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2002. ———. The Last of the Thorntons. Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 2000. Greenberg, Richard. Three Days of Rain. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1999. ———. The Violet Hour. New York: Faber & Faber, 2004. Guare, John. A Few Stout Individuals. New York: Grove Press, 2003. ———. Six Degrees of Separation. New York: Random House, 1990. Guirgis, Stephen Adly. Our Lady of 121st Street; Jesus Hopped the A Train; In Arabia We’d All Be Kings. New York: Faber & Faber, 2003. Gurney, A.R. Collected Plays, Volumes I and III. Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus, 1997; 2000. Kushner, Tony. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1993. LaBute, Neil. Bash: Latterday Plays. Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 2003. ———. The Mercy Seat. New York: Faber & Faber, 2003. ———. The Shape of Things. New York: Faber & Faber, 2001. Leight, Warren. Glimmer, Glimmer, and Shine. New York: Grove Press, 2001. Letts, Tracy. Bug. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2005. Linney, Romulus. Nine Adaptations for the American Stage. Hanover, NH: Smith and Kraus, 2000. ———. Six Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1993. Lonergan, Kenneth. Lobby Hero. New York: Grove Press, 2001. ———. The Waverly Gallery. New York: Grove Press, 2000. Mamet, David. Glenngary Glen Ross. New York: Grove Press, 1984. ———. Oleana. New York: Vintage, 1993. Margulies, Donald. Sight Unseen and Other Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995. McNally, Terrence. Corpus Christi. New York: Grove Press, 1998. ———. Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune. Garden City, NY: Fireside Theatre, 1987. Miller, Arthur. Collected Plays. New York: Viking, 1981. Nelson, Anne. The Guys. New York: Random House, 2002. Nottage, Lynn. Crumbs From the Table of Joy and Other Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2004. Orlandersmith, Dael. Beauty’s Daughter, Monster, The Gimmick: Three Plays. New York: Vintage, 2004. Parks, Suzan-Lori. The Red Letter Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2001.

DRAMATIC THEATRE Shanley, John Patrick. Doubt: A Parable. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2005. Shepard, Sam. Fool for Love and Other Plays. New York: Bantam, 1984. ———. A Lie of the Mind. New York: New American Library, 1987. ———. Seven Plays. New York: Bantam, 1981. Smith, Anna Deavere. Fires in the Mirror. New York: Anchor, 1993. ———. House Arrest and Piano: Two Plays. New York: Anchor, 2004. ———. Twilight: Los Angeles. New York: Anchor, 1994. Son, Diana. Stop/Kiss. Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1999. Vena, Gary, and Andrea Nouryeh, eds. Drama and Performance: An Anthology. New York: HarperCollins College Publishers, 1996. Vogel, Paula. How I Learned to Drive. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1997. Watson, C. S. Horton Foote: A Literary Biography. The Jack and Doris Smothers series in Texas history, life, and culture, no. 9. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Wickham, Glynne. A History of the Theatre. 2nd ed. Oxford: Phaidon, 1992. Wilson, August. Century Cycle. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2007. Wilson, Lanford. Collected Plays: 1965–1970. Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus, 1996. Wright, Doug. I Am My Own Wife. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2005. ———. Quills and Other Plays. New York: Faber & Faber, 2005. Zimmerman, Mary. Metamorphosis: A Play. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002.

Further Reading American Conservatory Theatre’s website: http://act-sf.org/goodbody/; Bernstein, Andrea. “Tony Kushner: ARTS:The award-winning author of Angels in America advises you to trust neither art nor artists.” Mother Jones: July/August 1995; Brantley, Ben. “A Fractious Family’s Decline, With Vintage Mustiness.” The New York Times: March 26, 2002; Brantley, Ben. “As a Nun Stands Firm, The Ground Shifts Below.” The New York Times: April 1, 2005; Brantley, Ben. “Bewildered Ringmaster In a Celebrity Circus.” The New York Times: May 13, 2002; Brantley, Ben. “Enough Said About Three Days of Rain. Let’s Talk Julia Roberts!” The New York Times: April 20, 2006; Brantley, Ben. “Judas Gets His Day in Court, but Satan Is on the Witness List.” The New York Times: March 3, 2005; Brantley, Ben. “Lonely People Aren’t Nice; Just Ask One.” The New York Times: October 12, 2000; Brantley, Ben. “Motel Tale: Down and Out (and Itchy and Scratchy) in Oklahoma.” The New York Times: March 1, 2004; Brantley, Ben. “The Poetry of Yearning, The Artistry of Seduction.” The New York Times: November 17, 2003; Brantley, Ben. “The Road to Ruin? Through the Lobby, Sir.” The New York Times: March 14, 2001; Brantley, Ben. “They Meet in a Gallery, God Looking On.” The New York Times: October 11, 2001; Brantley, Ben. “Wry Smiles Temper the Anguish of Old Age.” The New York Times: December 4, 2000; Garwood, Deborah. “Myth as Public Dream: The Metamorphosis of Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 25.1 (2003) 69–78; Feingold, Michael. “Sightlines: Francine Russo on Circus Oz; Michael Feingold on The Last of the Thorntons.” The Village Voice: December 27–January 2, 2001; Flinn, Mary. “Interview with Mary Flinn and Romulus Linney” [Online, Spring 2002, vol. 1, no. 1]. Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts. http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v1n1/features/linney_r_81502/linney_r_text.htm; From the Playwright http://www.mindspring.com/~horizonco/plays/quills/author.htm; Hijuelos, Oscar. “A Last Round With August Wilson.” The New York Times: October 9, 2005; Isherwood, Charles. “Future tense in delicate Violet.” Variety: November, 2003; Klein, Alvin. “At Yale Rep, The Baltimore Waltz.” The New York Times: May 16, 1993; Nakao, Annie. “Play explores corrosive prejudice within black community.” The San Francisco Chronicle: January 28, 2004; “OUTfield: An Interview with Playwright Richard Greenberg,” Jim Provenzano on-line at Temenos: http://www.temenos.net/articles/04-09-04.shtml; Ozols, Jennifer Barrett. “Eve Ensler Redefines the Meaning of Good Body.” Newsweek: November 12, 2004; Richards, David. “Critical Winds Shift for Albee, A Master of the Steady Course.” The New

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ROBIN REESE

DYSTOPIAN FICTION Definition. Dystopian literature describes an ideal society that has gone terribly wrong. Because dystopian literature was developed after the industrial revolution, advanced technology often plays an important role in the societies authors create. Typically, the imagined society was intended to feature a generally fair political system, but that system has instead created near-universal slavery. Conformity to this social system is enforced by a vigilant and brutal police force and a governmentcontrolled media that bombards citizens with propaganda. Sometimes the dystopian societies authors create are plagued by shortages of food, fuel, and other essentials, while other dystopias are marked by a material abundance that serves to give the government ever-greater control over the dependant populace. Because dystopian literature developed in response to utopian literature, fictional dystopias often resemble fictional utopias. The inhabitants of both types of imagined societies are required to follow schedules, share meals, live in communal housing, or otherwise limit their personal choices. Dystopian literature typically features a main character who is at first a satisfied— and sometimes prominent—citizen. Discomfort with the stifling regimentation of the totalitarian regime she or he lives under leads the protagonist to question the wisdom of the government. This questioning leads to violations of some of the many rules that govern daily life. Often, the protagonist will subsequently become involved with a resistance movement. The police typically then step in and force the protagonist to reform and commit to serving the interests of the state. Dystopian literature can also feature protagonists who are never aware that they live in a deeply flawed society. Authors create dystopian literature in order to make a comment about the society in which they themselves live. Sometimes authors create a dystopia as a warning about what their society may become. Under different circumstances, an author might create a dystopia to directly criticize the failings of the society in which he or she lives. Dystopian can also be used as an adjective to describe elements of otherwise non-dystopian texts that deal with an oppressive society or to describe political conditions that exist in the real world. This entry focuses on works of fiction that were deliberately created to depict a totalitarian society that governs through outright intimidation or the creation of false needs. History. Although John Stuart Mill is reported to have used the term dystopia in a speech to Britain’s parliament in 1868, the word was not directly associated with literary studies until Glenn Negley and Max J. Patrick made extensive use of the term in their 1952 book Quest for Utopia. Many scholars believe Jules Verne’s The Begum’s Fortune, published in 1879 as Les Cinq cents millions de la Begum, is the first novel to portray elements of a dystopian society, though it does not display all of the characteristics just discussed. Verne’s book tells the story of two men who inherit a fortune from a distant relative who had married into Indian royalty. The Frenchman Dr. Sarrasin uses his share of the money to create a vaguely Fourierist utopian colony in Oregon. The German Professor Schultze uses his share of the

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money to create a totalitarian city-state dedicated to arms production just a few kilometers away from Sarrasin’s colony. Schultze’s high-tech Steel City is a heavily fortified police state, and its workers’ lives are heavily regulated. But Verne’s tale does not focus on the political awakening of an inhabitant of Schultze’s city-state. Instead, Steel City eventually collapses because of Schultze’s own carelessness with one of the superweapons he develops. The first clearly articulated portrait of a dystopian society comes in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1920 novel We. Zamyatin experienced the Russian revolution and the birth of the Soviet Union, and this could very well explain his invention of the disaffected citizen of the seemingly omnipotent totality that became so common in later dystopian fiction. Zamyatin created The One State, an outwardly benevolent society governed by The Benefactor that gives its citizens numbers instead of names and regulates every moment of their lives by means of the Book of Hours. Taking both Plato’s description of the ideal society and Communist propaganda to their logical conclusion, Zamyatin creates a state that is ruled by reason and not passion. Even sexual intercourse is regulated by means of pink coupons. Of course, the state does not trust that its citizens will always be rational, so the Secret Police keeps them under surveillance. This is easy to do because everyone literally lives in glass houses. The novel is presented as the diary of D-503, a prominent mathematician and designer of the rocket ship Integral. Though he begins the diary as a means to praise The One State, when D-503 begins an affair with I-330, a member of the resistance movement who is interested in stealing the Integral, D-503 realizes that he has been afflicted with an imagination. At novel’s end, with the resistance fighting against the One State’s security forces, D-503 submits to an operation designed to remove his imagination and help him accept the happiness that The One State offers. Themes first developed in We were then taken up in two better known dystopias. In George Orwell’s 1984, published in 1948, readers meet Winston Smith, an insignificant bureaucrat in Oceania’s Ministry of Truth. Winston also keeps a diary and begins to question his society after he begins an affair with a woman named Julia. Eventually, Winston is tricked into believing that he has joined the resistance by party member O’Brien. Captured, tortured, and forced to renounce his love for Julia, at the end of the novel, Winston has learned to love Big Brother in the same way that the semi-lobotomized D-503 learned to love The Benefactor. Orwell’s unique contribution to the dystopian genre is his evocation of a totalitarian regime that has difficulty providing material comfort to its citizens and actively attempts to suppress its citizens’ sexual experiences. This is very different from the comfortable world of The One State, where every citizen has plenty to eat, new clothes regularly delivered, and the right to request sexual favors from every other citizen. Another descendant of We is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which was first published in 1932. Like Zamyatin’s One State, Huxley’s World State tries to give its citizens a happy existence through rationally planning their lives. The World State attempts to replace passion with reason by means of the Bokanovsky and Podsnap processes, scientific techniques that produce clones. Using state-produced clones to replace family-produced biological children helps do away with notions of private property and the sexual jealousy inherent in monogamy and creates a society where everyone is cared for by the state and where sexual play is encouraged. There is a rigid social structure, however, because the clones come in different grades. Alphas, the highest grade of clone, are destined to rule society, while Epsilons, the lowest of

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the grades, are fated to do society’s dirty work. Huxley’s innovation within the dystopian genre includes depicting the widespread use of a drug, Soma, to control emotional response and having the critique of the totalitarian society come from an outsider. Bernard Marx, a low-level bureaucrat in the Central London Hatchery, returns from the savage reservation in New Mexico with John, the biological son of the hatchery’s director. While this discovery forces the director to resign in disgrace, John quickly becomes a celebrity because of his parentage and because he has been raised in a traditional culture. This noble savage cannot tolerate the amoral World State, however, and eventually hangs himself. While Zamyatin’s and Orwell’s dystopias were primarily designed to critique political totalitarianism, Huxley’s was intended to critique the loss of traditional values that occurs in a technological society. American dystopian literature almost always strongly reflects the political and social questions facing the nation when the individual dystopian tales are written, though later works were also strongly influenced by themes developed by Zamyatin, Orwell, and Huxley. Initial dystopias were concerned with class struggles and the domination of government by corporate interests. Later dystopian fiction, while never abandoning these issues, modified the genre to address pressing concerns. In the 1930s, American dystopian fiction took on the rise of fascism, while in the 1950s it addressed the dangers that material abundance posed to democracy, and in the 1980s it speculatively depicted the consequences of the backlash against feminism by the religious right. The genre began in the United States with Populist political agitator and onetime Minnesota lieutenant governor Ignatius Donnelly’s 1890 novel Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century. Written in response to Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian novel, titled Looking Backwards, Caesar’s Column describes a working-class revolt that occurs in New York in 1988. Bellamy’s book predicted that technological advancement would lead to a worker’s paradise, but in 1890 many feared that class warfare would tear the country apart. In Donnelly’s tale, working-class radical Caesar Lomellini leads a rebellion against the oppressive elite of a technologically sophisticated New York City. The uprising is very violent— the column referred to in the novel’s title is a concrete monument filled with the bodies of those killed in the fighting. The wholesale destruction of the magnificent city fills Gabriel Weltstein, Donnelly’s main character, with such despair that he is forced to flee to a Christian socialist utopian community in Africa. The next significant fictional dystopia was Jack London’s 1908 novel The Iron Heel. Written during a time of increasing concern about the power of corporate monopolies, London’s novel is structured as the autobiography of socialist revolutionary Avis Everhard, who describes her battles with the Oligarchy, a combination of business interests that has run the Unites States for hundreds of years. London also includes commentary and footnotes written long after Avis’s death by a scholar named Anthony Meredith. Meredith lived after the Oligarchy had been defeated by a popular uprising. While Meredith is ultimately a hopeful character, his commentary demonstrates how futile Avis’s hopes were for a revolution that would free America from the power of the Oligarchy. Political unrest caused by the Great Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe led Sinclair Lewis to portray the demise of democracy in America in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here. Lewis’s tale focuses on Doremus Jessup, a moderate Republican and the editor of a small newspaper in Vermont. The editor grows more and more concerned as Buzz Windrip, who makes vague promises about ending the

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Depression and returning America to its fundamental values, is elected president and gradually becomes a dictator. Windrip was modeled on the corrupt but popular Louisiana governor Huey Long, who attempted to arouse populist sentiment by means of a campaign he called Share Our Wealth. Windrip’s campaign is assisted by Bishop Peter Paul Prang, who is modeled on the anti-Semitic and pro-fascist Father Charles Coughlin, who used his radio program to attack the policies of the Roosevelt administration. Over the course of the novel, Doremus is eventually imprisoned in a concentration camp and becomes a member of the resistance after fleeing to Canada. During the postwar abundance of the 1950s, dystopian fiction expressed the fear that technology would lull America into dystopia through addiction to unnecessary conveniences. In Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 novel Player Piano, American society has become an enormous automated factory surrounded by legions of underemployed consumers. Only a few people have meaningful jobs, and a graduate degree is required for any paying employment—all real estate agents, for example, have PhDs. Everyone else lives in public housing and performs menial tasks such as street sweeping. Even though the standard of living is high, most people are dissatisfied because they do not have a meaningful role to play in society. Vonnegut’s story focuses on Paul Proteus, head of industry in Illium, New York. Even though Paul is one of the very few people with an important job, and even though he is in line for a significant promotion, he becomes involved with the Ghost Shirt society, a resistance organization that takes its name from nineteenth-century Native American radicals who believed that if they wore “ghost shirts” they would be invulnerable to army bullets. The Ghost Shirt society channels very different class resentments than those found in Caesar’s Column and The Iron Heel. In those stories, the working class was starved and beaten, exhausted and angry. In Player Piano, they miss having something important to do. Although the Ghost Shirt rebellion fails, Vonnegut presents the uprising as a gesture of resistance that allows the working class to maintain its dignity. A darker variation on the theme of technological abundance leading to dystopian decadence and democratic decay is found in Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451. In the near-future society Bradbury envisions, firemen burn books to prevent people from reading and developing the intellectual capacity to question the system— they never put out fires because houses are fireproof. This is soft dystopia at its best: people have plenty of consumer goods and television to keep them docile and entertained. There is a strong police force that uses a mechanical hound to track and kill deviants, but most people are quite content. Guy Montag, a fireman, is initially happy with his life and with his job. After having a few conversations with the nonconformist Clarisse McClellan, after an old woman who had been hiding books in her house is killed by firemen, and after his wife Mildred tries to kill herself by overdosing on tranquilizers, Montag begins to question his society. He starts reading books surreptitiously and eventually hatches a plot with a former English professor named Faber to plant books in firemen’s homes. When Mildred turns him in, Beatty, the fire chief, forces Montag to burn down his own house. Montag then kills Beatty and is chased into the countryside by the mechanical hound. This is a fortunate move for Montag, however, because nuclear war destroys his city soon after he flees. The novel ends with Montag joining a group of people who live in the wilderness and attempt to keep the great books alive by memorizing them. Like Huxley, Bradbury uses his novel to question the impact that a consumerist, pleasureseeking society has on more traditional vales such as literacy.

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While fears of the downside of suburban affluence never entirely left American psyche, the 1960s and 1970s brought with them new concerns. For example, the emergence of feminism brought gender issues to the forefront of the cultural battle between conservatives and liberals. The environmental movement highlighted new concerns about the hazards of an affluent society. The latter movement began in earnest in 1962 with the publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring. Because Carson’s book employed dystopian imagery to depict the damage man-made chemicals could do to the environment, it encouraged other writers to imagine dystopia as polluted. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale combines both issues, exploring both fears of genetic damage caused by pollution and the backlash against feminism generated by the religious right. Atwood imagines the United States turning into the Republic of Gilead when fundamentalists foment a military coup against the federal government. Women are stripped of the right to vote and own property. Because pollution has greatly decreased fertility, members of the ruling elite often conceive children using fertile women known as handmaids. Because this is patterned after the relationship that Abraham had with his servant Hagar in the Old Testament, the handmaids live with the elite families in a form of polygamy. Atwood’s novel is presented as the diary of Offred, a woman who had been married to a divorced man. This made her a secondclass citizen in Gilead, but because she was fertile, she was given to a member of the ruling elite called the Commander. The Commander is not portrayed as a particularly evil person—he plays Scrabble with Offred and is reasonably kind to her—but her life in such an oppressive patriarchy is very difficult. Naturally, Gilead is a totalitarian nightmare even for its male inhabitants. Secret police known as the Eyes monitor citizens’ every move, and public executions are common. After the Commander fails to impregnate her, Offred begins an affair with Nick, the Commander’s chauffer. This affair is condoned by the Commander’s wife, Serena Joy, because children are very valuable in a society that is largely infertile. Eventually, at Nick’s urging, Offred leaves with a group of men who could be members of either the Eyes or the Mayday underground. Readers do not know if Offred is being taken away to be shot or to be placed in the underground femaleroad and taken to Canada. Atwood concludes The Handmaid’s Tale much like London concluded The Iron Heel: by having academics from a brighter future give commentary on the diary. Atwood uses a presentation given by a Professor Piexoto at an academic conference, held long after the Republic of Gilead fell, to explain some of the sociology of Gileadan society. Piexoto, however, has not been able to determine what happened to Offred. Trends and Themes. Many of the themes found in earlier dystopian writing are present in contemporary texts. The gender dystopia found in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is revisited in Cheryl Bernard’s Turning on the Girls, which satirically portrays a society where women are in charge, and in Patrick Califia’s short story “Dolly,” which introduces vigilante justice into a society similar to Gilead. The critique of affluent society first seen in Vonnegut and Bradbury has migrated away from the suburbs and toward various manifestations of an overstimulating entertainment industry. Corey Doctorow looks at a future world that has become a virtual Disneyland in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and Robert Coover’s The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Director’s Cut creates a dystopic America that is obsessed with pornographic movies. The United States is once again under the control of a falsely populist totalitarian government in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against

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America. And the corporate dystopia imagined by Donnelley and London finds updates in T.C. Boyle’s “Jubilation,” Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Lisa Lerner’s Just Like Beauty, and David Allen Cates’s X Out of Wonderland. Context and Issues. Three major trends in American society have made the themes found in contemporary dystopian novels similar to themes found in the earlier novels discussed. The first trend is the disagreement over moral and political values between conservatives and liberals that has come to be know as the “culture wars.” Often, the conservative position in the culture war is perceived as a backlash against progress by authors who respond by creating dystopian fiction that portrays the United States becoming a fascist Christian republic. The second trend has been the rapid advancement of entertainment technology. While the technological cocoon that the Internet, cell phones, and iPods have created makes authors like Vonnegut and Bradbury appear prophetic, our wired society has also encouraged contemporary writers to imagine technologies that create an even more disconnected and passive populace. Finally, Americans have long harbored a broad distrust of big government and big business. Contemporary authors have updated the fears that were first expressed in Caesar’s Column and The Iron Heel with discussions of what new technologies can do to enhance government and corporate power. Reception. It is difficult to accurately gauge the cultural impact of a work of fiction, especially one that has been in circulation for only a few years. Four criteria can be used to gain a broad idea of how a book has been received: (1) reviews give a good indication of the story’s perceived literary value, (2) film adaptations and (3) sales figures demonstrate the popularity of a novel or story, and (4) the genre is historically popular. For example, a poorly selling self-help book is even more insignificant because that genre tends to regularly produce best sellers. All of the novels and stories discussed in this chapter continues to receive favorable reviews in mainstream media outlets such as The New York Times. No plans by major studios to turn any of these works into films have been announced. There are many sources for sales data, but the rankings provided by Amazon.com are useful because they give a reasonable idea of how many people are currently purchasing a given novel. It is important to remember, however, that Amazon.com lists millions of books, and therefore sales figures must be seen in relative terms. By this measure, both Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, with an Amazon.com sales ranking during January 2007 in the 4,800s, and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, with a ranking in the 6,600s, promise to have cultural impact. Corey Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom ranked in the 34,000s, and T.C. Boyle’s Tooth and Claw, the collection of short stories in which “Jubilation” appears, ranked in the 35,000s, and they both also show some promise. The rest of the novels discussed have rankings above 100,000 but still make important contributions to the development of the genre. The relative popularity of some of the new dystopian literature can be explained in part by the popularity of the genre. While not at the forefront of American culture, dystopian literature does have a solid appeal. Several of the major dystopian novels discussed previously have impressive sales rankings. Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is in the top 600, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is in the top 500, Huxley’s Brave New World is in the top 400, and Orwell’s 1984 is in the top 300. Furthermore, many major dystopian novels have been made into films or television programs. Brave New World was on television in 1980 and 1998. Fahrenheit 451 was put on the silver screen in 1966, 1984 appeared in theatres in 1984, and The Handmaid’s Tale was

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made into a film in 1990. Soviet filmmakers even filmed an adaptation of The Iron Heel in 1919. Selected Authors. Dystopian fiction is not like romance or mystery, with typical authors writing many short stories and novels in the genre they have chosen as their specialty. Instead, most dystopias are unique creations, exploring themes that authors have addressed in other kinds of fiction. Margaret Atwood and other authors do return to the genre, but dystopian fiction is usually a small part of their body of work. Dystopian authors come from many different places in the literary profession. Some are established, mainstream authors, and others are newcomers working in less visible genres such as children’s literature. Cheryl Bernard has an interesting professional background that makes her uniquely qualified to create a dystopia. Although she has also published Moghul Buffet, a murder mystery, Barnard’s primary career is as a specialist in Middle Eastern political issues. She has a PhD in International Relations from the University of Vienna and is affiliated with the Rand Corporation, a think tank that has advised the U.S. government. Bernard brings this experience in comparative political analysis to her inverted dystopia Turning on the Girls. The novel turns The Handmaid’s Tale on its head and presents a society that implicitly asks if one woman’s paradise would be another man’s prison. Bernard’s near-future society depicts women in charge “of a fine, upstanding, democratic, justice-andequality-oriented, security-minded, peace-seeking social order” (6). Yet while women may think that a world with a restaurant chain called Balls that focuses its double entendres on the male anatomy is a far better place than this one, men may not like having to wear wristbands that could stun or kill them at the whim of a femaledominated security apparatus. Bernard’s novel tracks the adventures of Lisa, an employee of the 1984-like Ministry of Thought who has been assigned to create politically correct sexual fantasies for women, and Justin, a man detailed to work as her assistant in order to complete his reeducation process. As is typical of dystopian narrative, Lisa and Justin become involved with the resistance and a plot to overthrow the government—though they remain loyal and work as spies. The plot is discovered, the government increases its security forces and places new restrictions on men, and, as Winston Smith does in 1984, most of the male characters learn to love Big Sister. But Bernard’s extensive use of irony makes the novel a genuine satire on political correctness and its opponents. Bernard is writing for readers who would find her playful questioning of gender-based social engineering and its discontents a refreshing change from the earnest political paranoia of The Handmaid’s Tale. Gender dystopias that portray a world very similar to that of Atwood’s novel are still being written, however. Patrick Califia writes erotic fiction and criticism for the popular and scholarly gay press. In the short story “Dolly,” Califia begins by introducing readers to Ro, a butch lesbian who works for a company that programs lifesized robotic sex slaves. America is under a fundamentalist military dictatorship reminiscent of the Republic of Gilead, and naturally the sex dolls are supposed to provide submissive female partners for heterosexual men. In an act of private rebellion, Ro programs the dolls to switch their loyalty to any woman they interact with sexually. One of the dolls is sold to Jason, a soldier who has recently returned from a war. He is married to Charlene, who has been laid off from her job because the government mandates that returned soldier’s wives do not work. Charlene, who had an affair with a woman while Jason was away, quickly grows to hate her now very

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abusive husband. Because women cannot legally divorce their husbands, Charlene is stuck. Eventually, she finds Dolly, and the programming that Ro hid in the android’s hard drive kicks in. When Jason attempts to beat Charlene after discovering their affair, Dolly ties him to a bed, and Charlene and Dolly leave together. In many ways, “Dolly” is an edgy reframing of the issues raised in The Handmaid’s Tale for a gay, lesbian, and transgendered audience. Cory Doctorow is very active in promoting Internet technology and has written for technology magazines such as Wired and Popular Science as well as The New York Times. As part of his exploration of the impact of technology on society, Doctorow wrote the cautionary dystopia Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Some commentators have suggested that Disney World has become the ideal to which American society is tending. Doctorow tries to imagine a future that best exemplifies the world that Imagineers would create. Unsurprisingly, the novel presents a net-enabled update of Vonnegut’s Player Piano. Doctorow’s novel tells the story of Julius, a crowd-control specialist at Disney World, his girlfriend Lil, who maintains the robots in the Hall of Presidents, and their friend Dan. They live in a world without scarcity, where even the outcasts of society have access to all consumer goods. Largely speaking, it is a post-work society. People have heads-up displays implanted in their corneas, communication devices implanted in their cochleas, and continuous access to the Internet and telecommunications. When people die, a clone is prepared, and their existing memory is implanted into the clone’s memory. Consequently, people do not have to worry about death, and age has become meaningless. Most choose to have an apparent age in the twenties or thirties. Government is based on the will of the popular, and the world has adapted a reputation economy, with the most popular people getting the best goods and services. This new social order is known as the Bitchun Society. While this may sound good, Dan has become bored and longs for death. After serving as a missionary to the areas of the world that are not part of the Bitchun society and converting everyone he meets, he feels a lack of purpose and decides to commit suicide. He realizes that he is so unpopular, however, that no one would care if he died, so he goes to work at Disney World with Julius and Lil. Because of Disney World’s popularity, people who work there command a great deal of attention, and in a reputation economy, this is a very good thing. Dan teams up with Julius’s rival, Debra, and then has his friend assassinated—somewhat meaningless in a post-death environment but still not very nice. Debra wants to make the Disney experience completely virtual—dumping data directly into people’s minds while they sit in the Hall of Presidents or the Haunted Mansion. Julius, on the other hand, wants to keep the analog elements of the experience intact. Although Dan eventually confesses his self-destructive, nihilistic plot and drives Debra away from Disney World in disgrace, it is clear that Debra’s path is the way that the Bitchun society is headed. Dan decides to have himself cryogenically frozen and then unthawed when the universe implodes, while Julius leaves Disney World to live on a space station. This almost Jamesian renunciation suggests a critique of the lack of challenge that a Bitchun society would provide. Fahrenheit 451 depicts television turning people into amoral zombies, and Robert Coover’s The Adventures of Lucky Pierre updates this theme by injecting America’s contemporary fascination with pornography. Coover is a novelist and playwright whose experimental use of language has garnered him widespread recognition since

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the 1960s. His writing has taken up themes such as American political history in Public Burning and sports in Universal Baseball Association. To understand his dystopian novel, it is helpful to know that Coover is also the author of the screenplay for The Babysitter, an erotic film based on one of Coover’s short stories. The film was released directly to video even though it starred Alicia Silverstone, who was at that time at the height of her popularity. In Lucky Pierre, Coover creates Cinecity, a town where pornographic movies are the primary industry and where the mayor’s office is involved in making sure the industry stays viable. There are pornographic theatres on every corner, and people copulate in public. Lucky Pierre, the porn star at the center of Coover’s tale, regularly walks city streets with his erect penis on display. Cinecity is not a love-in, however, but is instead a place where perpetual sexual gratification masks despair, where “suicides rain into the snow . . . as though the heavens were taking a dump” (118) and where pedestrians are often run over and killed as they attempt to cross the streets. There are energy shortages and hackers who shut down major systems. Making underground movies is a crime, and the police frequently beat protesters who demonstrate for better access to screen time. Pornography is no longer erotica, but merely one more way for a dystopian society to control its population. Philip Roth is one of America’s most prominent contemporary writers. During his almost 50-year career, he has dealt with issues including Jewish identity in works such as Goodbye Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint and American politics in novels such as Our Gang. Believing, like Sinclair Lewis did, that America has always been in peril of becoming a totalitarian state, Roth creates a dystopian tragicomedy that focuses on issues of Jewish identity in the 1940s. In The Plot Against America, unlike Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, America stops short of becoming a fascist state. The totalitarian regime that almost takes control of the country is terrifying enough, however. In his novel, Roth traces the impact on Newark’s Jewish community of the hypothetical election of Charles Lindbergh as President of the United States in 1940. Lindbergh, a dupe of the Nazis since they kidnapped his child years earlier—in Roth’s version of history, the Lindbergh baby was a Nazi hostage, and the killing was staged—implements a plan to resettle urban Jews in rural America, isolating them in small towns and destroying Jewish neighborhoods. He also creates an Office of American Absorption that is designed to remove Jewish ethnic identity from Jewish children. Typically, Lindbergh also suppresses all dissenting voices and arranges to have Walter Winchell, a prominent critic, fired from his radio show. World War II starts with America having signed a peace treaty with Nazi Germany, and it appears that the Allies will be defeated. But then, Lindbergh disappears, and his vice president, Burton K. Wheeler, arrests Franklin D. Roosevelt and attempts to become a dictator. Anne Lindbergh saves the day, however, when she escapes from the mental hospital she has been imprisoned in and has Wheeler removed from office. FDR wins a special election in 1942, and America enters war on the correct side after the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor in 1942. Most of the political commentary in contemporary dystopia focuses on fears of corporate domination. Sometimes, as in T.C. Boyle’s satirical short story “Jubilation,” the domination is soft, and the dystopia created requires consumers to purchase shares in it. Boyle, who has written 19 books and numerous short stories, tells of the ultimate planned community, created by the Contash Corporation as an adjunct to their theme park. Boyle focuses on Jackson, a newly divorced man who has sold a

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medium-sized company to a larger one and is preparing for early retirement. He bribes his way into Jubilation, starts dating Vicki, an attractive single mother with attractive children, and seems to be well on the way to a pleasant if ready-made life. Unfortunately, Jubilation is not all it is supposed to be. The mosquitoes carry malaria, a redneck neighbor begins to rebuild a race car on his lawn, and there is a hurricane. The Contash Corporation has also forgotten to remove the alligators from the lake around which the town is built, and one of the alligators eventually eats Vicki’s son Ethan while Jackson is squiring her family around the lake in a rowboat. Jackson, ever an optimist, stays on after the hurricane and after Vicki’s departure. He begins dating a woman whose husband was killed in the hurricane and serving on Jubilation committees. Boyle’s satire strongly argues that dystopia can be desirable if it is a commodity provided by corporate America. Although she has written many novels, poems, and television scripts, Margaret Atwood’s intellectual reputation rests largely on her dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale. This stature has allowed her to write for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the liberal newsmagazine The Nation. In Oryx and Crake, her return to the dystopian genre, Atwood envisions a near-future dystopia that is a logical extension of trends in today’s society. Corporations house not only their offices, research facilities, and plants inside compounds protected by armed security guards, but also their employees. Everyone else lives in the pleeblands, vast urban wastelands. Global warming has begun to drown coastal cities and create food shortages. Atwood begins the story shortly after society has been almost entirely wiped out by a plague and tells the story of the catastrophe in a series of flashbacks that initially appear to be the personal reminiscences of Jimmy, a plague survivor. Jimmy has grown up in a compound run by a bioengineering firm that creates hybrid animals. While attending the compound’s school, he meets Glenn, a new kid, and begins an unlikely friendship. Jimmy is a “word person,” while Glenn is a scientific genius. As they go through high school together, Glenn develops an unusual interest in extinct animals and renames himself Crake. The two friends are parted by their careers, Jimmy going to an obscure college that specializes in the liberal arts and Crake attending the prestigious Watson-Crick institute. Jimmy takes a job writing advertising copy for a futuristic patent-medicine firm, while Crake takes a highpaying job with a biotech firm. Eventually, Crake recruits Jimmy to run the advertising campaign for BlyssPluss, a combination birth control/sexual enhancement product that Crake has designed. While working for Crake, Jimmy learns that his old friend has created a new race of humans via genetic engineering. They are docile, largely because the females go into estrus, and competition over lovers is therefore limited. They live for 30 years, and then their bodies shut down. Crake tells Jimmy that these new humanoids are for research purposes, but eventually Jimmy learns the truth. Crake has embedded a plague within BlyssPluss, and it soon spreads throughout the world. Crake has actually created replacements for humanity, reasoning that it is more moral to start over. Upon his friend’s request, Jimmy kills Crake, ensuring that the government will not be able to force Crake to reveal the antidote for the plague. The novel ends with Jimmy, who has become a minor deity to Jimmy’s new humans, debating whether to kill other plague survivors and keep Crake’s Garden of Eden going. Unlike the hopeful ending of The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake provides no future voice telling readers of an eventual resolution. If Atwood is somewhat optimistic about gender relations, she is in a much darker mood about corporate interference with nature.

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Not all environmental and anti-corporate dystopias present their arguments so grimly, however. Lisa Lerner’s eccentrically upbeat first novel Just Like Beauty uses a beauty pageant, a perennial target of satire, to provide a mirror of a monstrously dystopian society. Set in a generally recognizable near-future—people drive miniwagons, live in the suburbs, and shop in identity malls—and focusing on the coming of age of 14-year-old Edie and her relationship with her dysfunctional family, the novel in many ways is a typical young adult tale. Indeed, a major subplot involves Edie getting her first period. Yet Edie is maturing in a society that has become the nightmare that both feminists and anti-corporate activists have been warning against. The economy is controlled by the Just Like corporation, a manufacturer of synthetic alternatives to everything from pharmaceuticals to clothing to food. Consequently, the rivers and rain smell foul, California has auctioned its redwood forests to a partner of the Just Like conglomerate, and housecat-sized grasshoppers are multiplying and mutating as they drink Just Like insecticide. Teachers torture students for being late to class, gangs of boys armed with oxyacetylene torches terrorize attractive girls, and Edie and her peers are training to compete in the Feminine Woman of Conscience pageant, a droll satire of contemporary pageants that adds rabbit skinning, identifying chemical compounds, and sexually stimulating the Electric Polyrubber Man to evening gown and swimsuit competition. Consumerism keeps most of the citizens of Learner’s dystopia appeased, but there are two countercultural movements. The first is Happy Endings, a group that promotes suicide as a means to heal the earth’s problems. The second is the terrorist Lily Gates, who occupies herself with theatrical gestures such as blowing up Just Like Meat Planet fast food restaurants. As difficult as adolescence is, Edie must grow into adulthood under these trying circumstances. Further angst is added to her life by the crush she has on her neighbor and classmate Lana. Even though Edie is one of the favorites to win the Feminine Woman of Conscience, she has trouble seeing how she can fit in to her society. Having cleverly set up the social and interpersonal conflicts in Edie’s life, Lerner creates a problematic ending for her novel. At the pageant, Edie, who is poised to win, decides to pour insecticide around the stage and loose a plague of grasshoppers who are eagerly drawn to their favorite food. At that moment, a bomb-toting Lana reveals herself as Lily Gates, and the two girls ride off into the sunset in Lana’s father’s Triumph TR-3. Almost immediately, however, Edie decides to return home and patch things up with her family. This abrupt ending makes it seem like Edie has stopped worrying and learned to love Big Brother. Many proponents of the free market speak of it in utopian terms. In David Allen Cates’s X Out of Wonderland, however, contemporary American faith in deregulation is portrayed as creating a dystopia that thinks it is a utopia. Cates, the Director of Missoula Medical Aid, is also a travel writer whose work has appeared in magazines such as Outside, and he has written extensively on poverty in America. Cates combines his journalistic experience and his political advocacy to create a cautionary tale about free-market fundamentalism modeled on Voltaire’s Candide. Wonderland is a free-market paradise, at least according to the media and popular culture, which seem to be relying on the theories of the noted economist Dr. Fingerdoo for this information. The inhabitants of Wonderland, however, may see things differently. Cates explores the distance between free-market utopianism and the lived experiences of the contemporary middle class by telling the story of X, who hosts a

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call-in radio show for home handymen and women on NPR. Although the Wonderlandian economy seems to be providing X with the goods and services he needs and desires, this is not to last. He is let go from his job when his show is privatized and the hardware store chain that purchases it decides to bring in its own host. Shortly thereafter, X’s house is destroyed by a tornado, and his bankrupt insurance company is unable to make good on his claim. X’s sudden poverty is much worse than it otherwise might have been because right before the tornado destroyed his house, X met C, the love of his life. This begins X’s lifelong quest to reestablish himself financially and make a life with C. While the various episodes are by turn funny and gut-wrenching, Cates’s underlying theme is that the inherent instability of the free market makes it unable to create lasting human happiness. During the course of the novel, X peddles goods in an unregulated market with an unnamed woman in a pink lame dress until organized crime drives them out of business. He then works in a sweatshop making shoelaces, eventually rising to run the shoelace company with C, though a misunderstanding with the woman in pink lame drives X away from C. The star-crossed lovers eventually reunite, however, when C is dying of AIDS. X is also drafted into the Wonderlandian army to fight in a war designed to “keep the market free, a war against mean people who just plain ‘didn’t get it,’ economically or culture-wise, and weren’t good at making weapons, either” (137). He runs afoul of the Wonderlandian government and is accused of terrorism and imprisoned by Homeland Security. Through it all, however, he never loses faith in Dr. Fingerdoo and never bothers to question his assertions about the utopian nature of an unregulated market economy. Bibliography Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. New York: Doubleday, 2003. ———. The Handmaid’s Tale: A Novel. New York: Anchor, 1998. Bernard, Cheryl. Turning on the Girls. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001. Boyle, T.C. “Jubilation.” In Tooth and Claw. New York: Viking, 2005. Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Del Ray, 1987. Califia, Patrick. “Dolly.” In No Mercy. San Francisco: Alyson, 2000. Cates, David Allen. X Out of Wonderland: A Saga. New York: Random House, 2005. Coover, Robert. The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Director’s Cut. New York: Grove, 2002. Doctorow, Cory. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. New York: TOR, 2003. Donnelly, Ignatius. Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998. Learner, Lisa. Just Like Beauty. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002. Lewis, Sinclair. It Can’t Happen Here. New York: Signet, 2005. London, Jack. The Iron Heel. New York: Penguin, 2006. Orwell, George. 1984. New York: Signet, 1950. Roth, Philip. The Plot Against America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Verne, Jules. The Begum’s Fortune. Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2003. Vonnegut, Kurt. Player Piano. New York: Dial Press, 1999. Zamyatin, Yevgeney. We. New York: Eos, 1999.

Further Reading Barash, Nanelle. “Biology, Culture, and Persistent Literary Dystopias.” Chronicle of Higher Education 3 Dec. 2004: B10–B11; Beauchamp, Gorman. “Technology in the Dystopian Novel.” Modern Fiction Studies 32.1 (1986): 53–63; Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. New

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DYSTOPIAN FICTION York: Mariner, 2002; Culver, Stuart K. “Waiting for the End of the World: Catastrophe and the Populist Myth of History.” Configurations 3.3 (1995): 391–413; Gottlieb, Erika. Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of Terror and Trial. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2001; Hintz, Carrie, and Elaine Ostrey. Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults. New York: Routledge, 2003; Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder, CO: Westview-Perseus, 2000.

MARK T. DECKER

Books and Beyond

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Books and Beyond The Greenwood Encyclopedia of New American Reading

VOLUME 2:

E–M

Edited by

KENNETH WOMACK

GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Books and beyond : the Greenwood encyclopedia of new American reading / edited by Kenneth Womack. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978-0-313-33738-3 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0-313-33737-6 (v. 1 : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0-313-33740-6 (v. 2 : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0-313-33741-3 (v. 3 : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0313-33742-0 (v. 4 : alk. paper) 1. Books and reading—United States—Encyclopedias. 2. Reading interests—United States—Encyclopedias. 3. Popular literature—United States—Encyclopedias. 4. Fiction genres—Encyclopedias. 5. American literature—History and criticism. 6. English literature—History and criticism. I. Womack, Kenneth. Z1003.2B64 2008 028’.9097303—dc22 2008018703 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2008 by Kenneth Womack All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008018703 ISBN: 978–0–313–33738–3 (set) 978–0–313–33737–6 (vol. 1) 978–0–313–33740–6 (vol. 2) 978–0–313–33741–3 (vol. 3) 978–0–313–33742–0 (vol. 4) First published in 2008 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents Preface

ix

Introduction: Reading in America Today

xi

Entries Academic Fiction Adventure Fiction African American Literature Arab American Literature Arthurian Literature Asian American Literature Autobiography and Memoir Beat Poetry Biography Chick Lit Children’s Literature Christian Fiction Comedic Theatre Comic Books Coming of Age Fiction (Bildungsroman) Contemporary Mainstream American Fiction Cyberpunk Dramatic Theatre Dystopian Fiction Ecopoetry Erotic Literature

1 13 26 40 53 66 87 97 112 137 162 185 195 209 222 249 274 289 312 325 338

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CONTENTS

Fantasy Literature Film Adaptations of Books Flash Fiction GLBTQ Literature Graphic Novels Historical Fantasy Historical Fiction Historical Mysteries Historical Writing (Nonfiction) Holocaust Literature Humor Inspirational Literature (Nonfiction) Jewish American Literature Language Poetry Latino American Literature Legal Thrillers Literary Journalism Magical Realism Manga and Anime Military Literature Musical Theatre Mystery Fiction Native American Literature New Age Literature Occult/Supernatural Literature Parapsychology Philological Thrillers Poetry Regional Fiction Road Fiction Romance Novels Science Fiction Science Writing (Nonfiction) Sea Literature Self-Help Literature Series Fiction Space Opera Speculative Fiction Sports Literature Spy Fiction Suspense Fiction Sword and Sorcery Fiction

351 366 385 401 416 427 440 455 468 483 498 511 521 537 552 561 571 587 600 612 625 638 663 682 699 717 732 740 767 782 796 805 833 848 862 880 894 917 930 954 962 971

CONTENTS

Terrorism Fiction Time Travel Fiction Transrealist Fiction Travel Writing True Crime Literature Urban Fiction Utopian Literature Vampire Fiction Verse Novels Western Literature Young Adult Literature Zines

995 1012 1025 1034 1047 1065 1078 1091 1119 1131 1147 1163

Contemporary Authors by Genre

1177

Suggestions for Further Reading

1191

About the Editor and Contributors

1195

Index

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E ECOPOETRY Definition. Readers use the term ecopoetry to describe the most recent development in a longstanding tradition of nature-oriented poetry. Ecopoetry uses language to deepen a sense of nature’s presence in our lives, and these invocations of nature’s presence—celebratory of the biological fact that we are nature—suggest an ecological understanding of nature and its processes. As John Elder explains in the first book-length treatment of the intersections between poetry and ecology, Imagining the Earth (1985), the principles of ecology change one’s vision of nature as well as the form in which that vision is expressed. History. As early as 1980, Robert Bly suggested that poets have long imagined something like an ecological worldview. This poetic, cultural, and spiritual orientation to the world is organized around a sense of interrelatedness between the human and the more-than-human world. The erosion of this more holistic worldview appears in the more self-conscious nature writing of late eighteenth-century Romantic poets in Europe as well as the early nineteenth-century writers in America. The work of these writers expresses a troubled separation from nature, as well as a concern with the irreversible industrial, technological, and political events that were shaping new conditions for human life. “A poem concerned with a larger economy than the human one”—this is Jonathan Bate’s summary assessment of John Keats’s “To Autumn,” an ode that expresses a network of relations between inner and outer ecologies of mind. Bate’s Song of the Earth (2000) discusses the contexts and legacies of the Romantic tradition through the affinities between the imagination and the biosphere. Wordsworth is the source for the tradition of poems that no longer arise from an occasion but rather respond to a place. This response to place is most vividly expressed in the poems of two nineteenth-century American writers, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Their work undermines the religious discourses that determine the place of nature and its value in our lives. In his Walt Whitman and the Earth: A Study in Ecopoetics (2004), M. Jimmie Killingsworth turns to Whitman for “a more radical investigation into the

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possibilities and limits of human creativity” in order to better understand “how we use language to figure out our relationship to the earth” (4). His study of the intersections between environmental rhetoric and ecopoetics demonstrates how “Whitman’s poetry embodies the kinds of conflicted experience and language that continually crop up in the discourse of political ecology” (9–10). This “conflicted experience and language” recurs in nature poetry throughout the twentieth century. Reading William Wordsworth as an ecologically minded naturalist, John Elder traces changing attentiveness to nature and increasingly conflicted attitudes toward tradition from T.S. Eliot and Robinson Jeffers through the intricacies of nature’s processes in the poems of Gary Snyder, A.R. Ammons, Robert Pack, and Wendell Berry. The intellectual context for Guy Rotella’s 1991 Reading and Writing Nature is American nature poetry, from the Puritan poets Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor to Emerson and Dickinson. His study traces the broad epistemological and aesthetic implications of this early work in the poetry of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop. These four poets turn to nature to explore the possibilities and limits of language and meaning and to envision poetic forms that are, in Rotella’s reading, “at best conditional or ‘fictive’ consolations, not redemptive truths” (xi). Bernard W. Quetchenbach’s Back from the Far Field: American Nature Poetry in the Late Twentieth Century (2000) then extends Rotella’s study of American nature poetry into the postwar poetry of Robert Bly, Gary Snyder, and Wendell Berry that incorporates the public rhetoric of environmentalism. Other literary critics who reread modern poetry using the insights and general principles of ecology include Gyorgyi Voros, whose Notations of the Wild: The Poetry of Wallace Stevens (1997) describes six familiar aspects of Steven’s work that “readily lend themselves to an ecological reading” (83–86). Jane Frazier, in From Origin to Ecology: Nature and the Poetry of W.S. Merwin (1999), follows the development of Merwin’s ecological worldview. Frost, Stevens, and Moore are read together in Bonnie Costello’s Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry (2003) to demonstrate how landscape serves as both structure and meaning in the later generation of poets. Costello’s book, although not explicitly a study of ecopoetics, explores poetic responses to the modern world in Charles Wright, Amy Clampitt, A.R. Ammons, and John Ashbery as they create new representations of the landscape. “In Stevens’ work, as in Frost’s,” Costello explains, “the desire for the real, and for nature, must reckon always with the frame, with landscape” (15). Scott Bryson’s The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space, and Ecopoetry (2005) also turns to poems that “become models for how to approach the landscape surrounding us so that we view it as a meaningful place rather than abstract place” (12), with a focus on the poems of Wendell Berry, Joy Harjo, Mary Oliver, and W.S. Merwin. Trends and Themes. These critical discussions of the relationship between the human and the nonhuman world—between the language of poetry and the world that surrounds a poem—are a part of the historical development of an ecological perspective. Ernst Haeckel’s term oecologie suggested to his nineteenth-century contemporaries the potential to reimagine human affairs as a part of the larger economy of nature. As late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century ecologists studied biological entities as a part of an ecosystem, the discipline of ecology sought standing in the scientific community as a quantitative science. The science of ecology then diverged from the descriptive explanations of nature and the role of

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humans in the natural world and the spatial metaphors that defined the field. The science of ecology also moved from more general conceptions of ecological processes to more complex, unpredictable, and open natural systems, random events, disequilibrium, and flux. The concept of the ecosystem, however, offered an abstract but at the same time tangible way to conceive of (and study) the relationship between natural and human environments. Ecosystem ecology, more simply put, offered a new vision that would help people reidentify with the processes of the natural world. In his 1989 book The End of Nature, Bill McKibben reviews the underlying habits of mind that need to be rethought: “we tell time badly . . . our sense of scale is awry . . . [and] our moreis-better obsession with ‘positive’ numbers prevents us from seeing that we have ruptured our link with Nature” (13–14). This critique begins with the ecological imperatives of the environmental crisis. It envisions the necessity of developing ecological values within the political, social, and technological realms—encompassing scientific awareness, a reverence for the living world, and the responsibility of the continuing work of seeking to align social and community systems with the grander systems of life. These ecological precepts are at the center of Robert Dish’s The Ecological Conscience: Values for Survival (1970)—a collection of essays that includes Aldo Leopold, Barry Commoner, Paul Shepard, Lewis Mumford, Paul Goodman, and R. Buckminster Fuller, as well as an essay by “eco-poet” Gary Snyder, “Poetry and the Primitive: Notes on Poetry as an Ecological Survival Technique.” More recently, enthnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan has reiterated these ecological values in his Cross-Pollinations: The Marriage of Science and Poetry (2004). Nabhan provides a case study in mixing the practices of field science with indigenous poetic knowledge (of desert plants, in this case). He moves freely within and across scientific and poetic discourses to discover the possibilities for a more integrated (and more humane) understanding of the natural world. The development of an ecological perspective in the twentieth century is part of a national and international strain in literary modernism that changed the direction of poetry and art “as a necessary condition for changing the ways in which we think and act as human beings” (Joris and Rothenberg 1995, 2). These poets and artists work from the conviction “that poetry is a part of a struggle to save the wild places—in the world and in the mind.” They view “the poem as a wild thing and of poetry and the poet as endangered species” (12). Literary applications of the term ecology have, as these examples suggest, extended the scientific study of interrelationships to the process of the mind, giving rise to the now familiar phrases “ecology of mind” and “environmental imagination.”

Ecopoetry uses comparable metaphors for describing the relationship between poetic making and ecology. Snyder writes that the ecologist looks at “population dynamics, plant and animal succession, predator-prey relationships, competition and cooperation, feeding levels, food chains, whole ecosystems, and the flow of energy through ecosystems” (1968, 31).The kind of poem that might draw on these energies in an ecosystem, he goes on to suggest, would be much like developments in fiction that have moved beyond “stock figures and charming plots” to “the inner lives and psyches of our characters, all their obsessions, kinkiness, and secrets” (32).

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Context and Issues. Contemporary readers have defined the ecopoet’s inclination toward primary, lived experience and the world of the senses through phenomenology. J. Hillis Miller’s Six Poets of Reality (1965) first suggested to readers of American poetry the theoretical resources of phenomenology—specifically through the writings of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. But it was not until Charles Altieri’s study of American poetry in the 1960s that readers would begin to explore the relationship between poetry and ecology. Enlarging the Temple (1979) explores what Altieri calls radical presence, “the insistence that the moment immediately and intensively experienced can restore one to harmony with the world and provide ethical and psychological renewal” (78). Altieri offered a sophisticated reading of Snyder that appreciated the ecological system as central metaphor in his poetry. “Ecology deals not with ideas,” Altieri argues in his chapter on Snyder and Robert Duncan, “but with modes of action and with the unity of interrelationships in nature, and its verification is the fullness of the environment it creates” (135). Using this definition, he reads Snyder’s incorporation of the mind’s process into the natural pattern of relationships in the poems “A Walk” and “Six-Month Song in the Foothills” from the 1968 volume The Backcountry. “Six-Month Song in the Foothills,” for example, works from a deep sense of connection and responsibility to the earth that, in turn, “prepares a possible meditative mode where one can construct an imaginary space in which particular balances reveal a deeper unity” (137). “Grinding the falling axe/sharp for the summer/a swallow shooting out over/over the river, snow on the low hills/sharpening wedges for splitting” (Snyder 1968, 17). These lines suggest a complex spatial experience by balancing elements in the natural world as well as revealing a mind alive with the exchange of inner and outer life. Altieri raises significant questions regarding the philosophical adequacy of any poetics of presence in his subsequent discussion of W.S. Merwin’s struggles with presence and absence in The Lice (1968) and Denise Levertov’s attempts to use the aesthetics of presence in her poems in the late 1960s. “Considered as metaphysical or religious meditation,” Altieri says, “the poetry of the sixties seems to me highly sophisticated; it takes into account all the obvious secular objections to traditional religious thought and actually continues and extends the inquiries of philosophers as diverse as Heidegger, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein” (1979, 226). Frank O’Hara, Snyder, Robert Creeley, and Merwin all “give resonance and imaginative life to Heideggerean claims that poetry is the taking up of sites in which being, or the numinous familiar, discloses itself and testifies to the powers of the attentive mind” (225). However, this very success, Altieri insists, “makes it disappointing that the poetry fails so miserably in handling social and ethical issues.” What is missing is an acknowledgement of the gap between values found in meditating on nature and those values developed through reflection on public themes and problems (236). Leonard Scigaj argues that this gap is not tenable given the environmental crisis and the need to use language to understand nature’s process. “With its emphasis on referential context,” he insists, “environmental poetry must contain an activist dimension to foreground particular acts of environmental degradation and degraded planetary ecosystems” (1999, 21). Scigaj’s Sustainable Poetry (1999) seeks to reorient readers to the referential function of literature and the standpoint of environmentalism. His project, as he succinctly puts it, seeks to “critique poststructuralist language theory and provide an alternative” (xiii). He turns to the

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phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to elucidate the cultural value of writers such as A.R. Ammons, Wendell Berry, Denise Levertov, W.S. Merwin, Gary Snyder, and Adrienne Rich. These poets approach language as “a positive instrument that can promote authentic social and environmental relations between humans and their environment—relations that can lead to emancipatory change” (33). As Scigaj admonishes, “We need a sustainable poetry, a poetry that does not allow the degradation of ecosystems through inattention to the referential base of all language. We need a poetry that treats nature as a separate and equal other and includes respect for nature conceived as a series of ecosystems—dynamic and potentially self-regulating cyclic feedback systems” (5). Scigaj concludes that in the face of environmental crisis, we are no longer able to naturalize these ecosystems “into benign backdrops for human preoccupations” or to “reduce them to nonexistence by an obsessive focus on language” in our literary work. Jonathan Bate argues, to the contrary, that ecopoetics properly begins “not as a set of assumptions or proposals about particular environmental issues, but as a way of reflecting upon what it might mean to dwell upon the earth” (2000, 266). Killingsworth makes a similar distinction. “I use the term ecopoetics when my readings aim for a primarily phenomenological significance and ecocriticism when they take a sharply political turn, invoking issues on the current environmentalist agenda” (2004, 6). As the literary critic Jed Rasula points out, after all, the poet seeks not to “‘change the world’—a futile repetition of the Prometheus complex— but [to] change the mind that conceives, and accedes to, that composition of the real we acknowledge as the world” (2002, 62). Rasula’s This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry (2002) elaborates the ecological dynamics at play in the modern poetics of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan. Rasula has no interest in defining and arguing for the distinctiveness of a select group of poets with common ecological concerns. Rather his subject is poets who call on the imagination “as a resource of ecological understanding” and poetry “in a truly re-creational capacity, one that redefines ‘recreation’ as original participation” (3). For Rasula, ecopoetry begins with the inadequacy of the self and its anthropocentric preoccupations, and it goes on to envision language and poetry, in the words of Snyder, “as an ecological survival technique” (1969, 117). Reception. Any poet who writes with an environmental or ecological perspective is implicated in what Bate calls the “ontologically double” nature of the poetic. As Bate describes it, “The poetic is either (both?) a language (logos) that restores us to our home (oikos) or (and?) a melancholy recognizing that our only home (oikos) is language (logos)” (2000, 281). Angus Fletcher’s A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination (2004) affirms this “ontological doubleness” as the condition of any poetic use of language. John Clare, Walt Whitman, and John Ashberry elaborate “both the powers and the constraints operating upon poetry when it seeks to represent the world around us” (3). Fletcher’s argument addresses the question of what happens when the poet’s way of being in the world “is defined as an ecological surrounding” (5). To what degree is the environment poem, Fletcher asks, “designed to increase our knowledge, as distinct from our experience, and if the latter, must our increased knowledge be of a factual nature?” (135); is it possible, in the environment poem, to distinguish the widest possible definition of nature “from any locally confined notion of any singular environment, any singular ecosystem?” (136–137). And as ecological discourse continues to permeate human thinking about the natural world, how might poetry

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contribute not to representing the environment or “saving the earth,” but rather to seeing the future world as an ecosystem? As Fletcher explains, “Unlike most prose discourse, poetry expresses close personal involvements, and hence pertains to the way we humans respond, on our own, to environmental matters.” Fletcher elaborates the development of a more democratic and descriptive mode of poetry, the environment poem, that “introduces the experience of an outside that is developed for the reader inside the experience of the work . . . a surrounding that actually has more presence than any state of mind” (2004, 227). Rather than focus on the end of the poem as representing a place (the topographic), Fletcher privileges space (the chorographic). He recognizes the limits of defining space in terms of place or limiting the experience of an environment to a fixed and static state. The chorographic poetry of Clare, Whitman, and Ashberry “names the turbulent surface of the living ground on which or in which every thing is placed, even imprinted, while this sitting or placement remains always shaken and oscillating in the changes of the becoming” (269). The ecopoet, in this definition, uses description to undermine the more accessible comforts of place, “the nostalgia for home that place humanly implies.” As Fletcher concludes, the chorographic “questions topos or place, by showing turbulent movements within space.” Scott Bryson reads the ecopoet’s exploration of place and space as working toward “an increased awareness of the ecological interconnection between all the inhabitors of a particular place” and a “healthy space-consciousness . . . inherently humble” and grounded in “the inadequacies in human attempts to control, master, or even fully understand the world around them” (2005, 22). Bryson argues that the ecopoet offers a vision of the world with two interdependent if not paradoxical desires: “to create place, making a conscious and concerted effort to know the more-than-human world around us . . . and to value space, recognizing the extent to which that very world is unknowable” (8). While Fletcher’s work does not explicitly draw on the critical discourse of ecopoetics, his argument extends Bryson’s discussion of poets who seek to both create place and value space—“to know the world and to recognize its ultimate unknowability” (Bryson 2005, 8). In organizing his study around the idea that “environmental sensitivity demands its own new genre of poetry” (Fletcher 2004, 9), however, Fletcher argues that environment poems “are not about the environment, whether natural or social, they are environments” (103). The question of how a reader enters and becomes subject to the environment poem then becomes a matter of entertaining the possible powers of environmental and ecological identification with a symbolic or semiotic space. Selected Authors. The primary ecological imperative of poetry, in the words of Gary Snyder, “must be that we try to see whatever current crisis we are in as part of an older larger pattern” (2004, 10). The assimilated “compost of feeling and thinking” that gives rise to a poem is a source, for Snyder, deeper than the individual and more connected. Buddhist philosophy and Native American cultural perspectives and life ways provide additional sources for his distinctive bioregional poetics. Snyder conceives of poetry and scholarship as treating language and memory as part of the natural systems of exchange that inspire human song. He seeks to accomplish this through abandoning the fiction of the self to access a more primary source for understanding, through archaic practices and human values more closely associated with nature. From this point of view, poets have more to do than write poems “about” the environment or “speak for” nature, for their creative

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work arises out of and informs the complex exchanges between nature and human cultures. Ecology and biology have informed Snyder’s poetics since the 1960s. “As the evolutionary model dominated nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinking, henceforth the ecological model will dominate our model of how the world is—reciprocal and interactive rather than competitive” (130), Snyder proposes in his 1969 collection of journals and essays, Earth House Hold. In Snyder’s early poetry, reciprocity and interactivity play out in forms of consciousness and metaphor modeled on the continual exchanges of natural energy and form. His poetics incorporate the impulse to think about nature in language as he articulates a way of being within nature. At the same time that he has elegantly and successfully developed a distinctive poetry, Snyder has established himself as a preeminent spokesperson for living more responsibly on the earth. The poems in Turtle Island (1974) celebrate and affirm life at the same time they suggest a broader vision of living. Ecological succession is a central metaphor in the bioregional focus of the collection of poems Axe Handles (1983). As his work develops, moreover, Snyder continues to affirm the deep and intricate relationship between the ancient cultural traditions of art in China and Japan and the ecological worldview of the twentieth century. Snyder sees the world through the prism of language as well as through the impulse of most Chinese and Japanese poetry, of “seeing the world without any prism of language, and to bring that seeing into language” (1968, 143). Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996) is a book-length poem that Anthony Hunt calls “a fundamental wisdom text for the modern ecological movement” (272). The sequence of poems explores the present moment (for Snyder the 10,000 years or so of human experience in the Holocene) by moving across cultures and time. The poem explores the history of the North American landscape and its geological and geomorphic processes, while drawing on a long tradition of Chinese art that takes mountains and rivers as the central metaphors for organizing space. Mountains and Rivers Without End affirms Bate’s conclusion that Snyder is “the most ecologically self-conscious of twentieth century poets” (2000, 246). The ecological corollary to Snyder’s observation that nature will always exceed our attempts to define it is precisely the refusal to accept the idea that we are separate from nature. This reminder expresses a complex and highly developed program Snyder has called re-inhabitation, a part of what Snyder has called the practice of the wild. Snyder’s ecopoetry in this way suggests a broader role for itself, as a guide to the creation of an ecology of readers and writers. For “what we ultimately need most,” writes Snyder, “are human beings who love the world” (1968, 70). Wendell Berry’s agrarian aesthetic parallels Snyder’s bioregional poetics. Elder observes that “Berry identifies his life as a farmer and a poet with the cycle of decay and renewal in the soil. This is an analogy for the process of health in art and human life to which Gary Snyder returns” (1996, 52). Both are persuasive writers of nonfiction who are fiercely eloquent on the importance of place, the cultivation of regional economies, and the renewal of place-based, community values. Yet Berry’s Christian vision provides a distinctive path for developing a poetry that seeks to redress a radically diminished state of human affairs. His ecological vision casts man in the role of responsible and responsive steward of the land—in his case, the land of his farm in Port Royal, Kentucky. Such stewardship requires a rejection of a modern urban-industrial society organized around “a series of radical disconnections

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between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and community, community and the earth” (1991, 64). Berry explores the possibilities of restoring these broken connections in his first books of poetry. These poems speak directly to the contemporary origins of an increasingly indifferent and destructive attitude toward the natural world. The acute sense of loss and destruction of the human community and its relationship to the land in the twentieth century is as troubling a problem for Berry as the history of indifference to the land and the human community that have been a part of this irresponsible behavior. Much like William Carlos Williams in the 1920s, Berry sees the relationship to the land as inseparable from a more complex ecology that includes human history. “I am forever being crept up on and newly startled by the realization that my people established themselves here by killing or driving out the original possessors, by the awareness that people were once bought and sold here by my people, by the sense of the violence they have done to their own kind and to each other and to the earth, by the persistent failure to serve either the place or their community in it” (1969, 104). The problem lies in the failure to see the affinities between the wild and what he calls the domestic. “The wild and the domestic now often seem isolated values, estranged from one another. And yet these are not exclusive polarities like good and evil. There can be continuity between them, and there must be,” Berry insists in Long-Legged House (1964, 18). For Berry, the continuity between the wild and the domestic is sustained through daily labor. Such service, moreover, involves healing. From his first collection Broken Ground (1968) Berry seeks to reground his life in the soil of his native Kentucky. Too, he eschews the too-common sense that an understanding of place might be won at little cost. Rather, Berry’s poems urge the contemporary reader to see beyond the narrow vision of one individual’s relationship to the land and to accept the inherited fate of environmental restoration. As his speaker Nathan Coulter puts it in the poem “Where” from Farming: A Handbook, “the idea of making/my lifetime one of the several/it will take to bring back/the possibilities of this place/that used to be here” (93). In his fifth collection of essays, A Continuous Harmony (1972), he aligns farming with ecology rather than economy, an argument much like Snyder’s in the 1960s that economics, properly understood, would be a sub-branch of ecology. Berry goes on to say that ecology “may well find its proper disciplines in the arts, whose function is to refine and enliven perception, for ecological principles, however publicly approved, can be enacted only upon the basis of each man’s perception of his relation to the world” (100). In this, Berry calls attention to the necessity of discovering things as they are—rather than the impulse to create and impose human forms on the natural world. This vision of immersion in the more-than-human world has been difficult for poets to sustain given the heightened environmental and ecological concerns of the late twentieth century. Although Snyder and Berry’s work is deeply informed by science, A.R. Ammons has fulfilled Walt Whitman’s prophecy in Democratic Vistas of a future that would produce a poet “consistent with science.” Ammons begins with the scientific view that the planet is ancient and has preceded humans by billions of years. And he rejects the idea of permanence and embraces nature as an intricate, evolving, and adaptive system. The critic Helen Vendler celebrates Ammons’s use of scientific language as a distinctive contribution to modern poetry. Ammons is the first American poet, Vendler writes, “to use scientific language with manifest ease and accuracy, as a part of his natural vocabulary” (2005, 215).

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Ammons’s first book-length poem, Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965), is most explicit about his ecological interests: “ecology is my word: tag/me with that,” writes Ammons, “come in there: you will find yourself/in a firmless country:/centers & peripheries/in motion,/organic, interrelations!” (112). He puts this perspective more directly in his poem “Exotic”: “Science outstrips/other modes & reveals more of/the crux of the matter/than we can calmly/handle” (69). Ideas and terminology from science pervade The Collected Poems 1951–1971, especially the quatrains of “Extremes and Moderations” and the tercets of “Essay on Poetics” and “Hibernaculum.” The poem “Extremes and Moderations” explores the self-regulating laws of nature in what has been called Ammons’s most significant ecological testimony. Its primary interest is the precarious relationship between the natural and the artificial. On one level the poem is a romantic paean to those caught in the fixed and constricted environment of the city. However, the poem is more centrally concerned with the question of human purpose in the age of science and technology. The poem cautiously accepts human activity at the same time that it rejects outright the idea that human ingenuity and innovation can control nature. It registers a self-conscious environmental concern with the effects of human activity. Echoing Rachel Carson’s response to the excesses of human ambition and arrogance in Silent Spring (1962), Ammons takes umbrage at “the rampaging industrialists, the chemical devisors and manipulators,” intoxicated with “dollar lust”—the cause, he writes, of the loss of “common air” and “common rain’s/losing its heavenly clarity.” Ammons’s position is a natural consequence of his interest in physics, biology, physical chemistry, and meteorology, his love for the inexhaustible mysteries of the natural world, and his meditations on the philosophical and ethical implications of science. Ammons revives the romantic correspondence between nature and human perception through a lifelong study of the intricacies of observable phenomena and the networks of energy and material that make up the natural world. His praise for the quotidian, the overlooked and the useless, is therefore compensatory in the face of the dazzling ephemerality of human activity. His love of the particular thing, moreover, is enriched by his relentless exploration of transient forms. His broad and eclectic knowledge of science moves from the intercellular depths of biology to the interstellar heights of astronomy. And his meditative mind is drawn to the abstract philosophical implications of physical things and processes—infused with the multiple actions and energies of the natural world that exist beyond the narrow boundaries of the self. In his early essay “Literature and Ecology,” the critic William Rueckert writes that he knows of no other book of poems “so aware of the biosphere and what human beings have done to destroy it” as W.S. Merwin’s book The Lice (1967). “Reading this book of poems,” Rueckert writes, “requires one to unmake and remake one’s mind” (qtd. in Glotfelty and Fromm 1978, 117–118). The poems in The Lice hold human culture accountable to the delicate and sustaining web of life, as in the speaker’s haunting address to a gray whale in the poem “For a Coming Extinction.” Nevertheless, Merwin’s devotion to nature is shaped by a profound engagement with the contradictions of human culture—a concern with the contours of human desire and its at times unacceptable costs. In his more than 15 books of poetry and 4 books of prose, Merwin’s theme, especially as it is developed in the later phase of his work, is the postmodern problem of finding language that can offer an adequate and just account of the world. Merwin’s poems urge the reader to affirm a more capacious sympathy with the nonhuman

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world of nature. In The River Sound (1999), nature’s persistence appears as an antidote to human and ecological loss. “The Gardens of Versailles,” for example, addresses the human impulse to shape nature; the poem identifies the diminishment of the natural world as the result, moreover, of “form’s vast claim/to have been true forever as the law/of a universe in which nothing appears/to change” (8). However, the final lines of the poem intimate that despite this rage for order, the river goes on, as “the sound of water falling echoes in the dream/the dream of water in which the avenues/all of them are the river on its way.” Merwin accepts the difficult and conflicting struggles with language as he seeks to invent distinctive imaginative structures for understanding nature as well as the human place in a more-than-human world. The origin of a poem, Merwin writes in the “Preface” to The Second Four Books of Poems (1993), is “a passion for the momentary countenance of the unrepeatable world.” The destiny of a poem, it might follow, is to awaken in a reader a fuller recognition of the self within the all-too-fragile and quickly passing frame of our lives. For Merwin, as well as for Mary Oliver, the ecological poem might be said to arise out of what the biologist E.O. Wilson calls the innate “urge to affiliate with other forms of life” (1984, 1). As Vicki Graham elaborates, Oliver’s poems register a persistent belief “in the possibility of intimate contact with the non-linguistic world of nature and the confidence in the potential of language to represent that experience” (1994, 1). Despite the fact that language mediates our relationship to nature, Laird Christensen adds in a more recent overview of her ecopoetry, “Oliver clearly believes that poetry can call attention to the fact that we dwell in a world of presences” (2002, 140). However, in a 1995 review essay, the poet and critic Gyorgi Voros disparages Oliver’s work for its “peculiar lack of genuine engagement with the natural world,” a failure, Voros concludes, that makes Oliver’s poetry “ecologically unsound” (231, 238). Voros points to the passion for transcendence in Oliver that “impairs the poet’s powers of observation” (235). For Voros, the problem is that despite appearances, Oliver is not “content to perceive and honor this world in all its ordinariness”; rather, her adoration of the natural world betrays a “passion for transcendence” that “impairs the poet’s powers of observation” (235). In addition to the two-volume New and Selected Poems (1992), Oliver’s most recent collections of poetry include What Do We Know (2002), Owls and Other Fantasies (2003), Why I Wake Early (2004), Blue Iris (2004), and Thirst (2006). In these poems Oliver rejects the limits of the confessional strain in contemporary poetry (and the tendency to reproduce merely individually significant moments in a life). What Voros overlooks is that Oliver’s descriptions of individual experiences in nature are working toward an ecological understanding of the self and human agency. Oliver’s focus on dramatizing human experiences in nature works to reinforce or alter the way in which we experience the natural world. Her work does not dramatize the commonplace statements that nature is a previously harmonious realm undisturbed by human activity; that nature is a restorative space for human use to recuperate from the excesses of human culture; or that nature would simply reawaken us to a more harmonious or ecological way of being in the world. Oliver’s book-length poem The Leaf and the Cloud (2000) may best foreground the limits of what Voros calls “ecologically sound” poetry. One of commonplaces of normative ecology is that we are connected to everything else—a truism, but only in the most trivial sense, for bodily identification with the nonhuman world is, of course, what we already have. One contribution of The Leaf and the Cloud, as a

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book-length poem, is its generic departure from the aesthetics of presence that determine how poems think about the natural world. The Leaf and the Cloud is devoted to exploring what Charles Olson once called a poet’s “stance toward reality.” It is a poem preoccupied with the relationship between the work of the poet and the work of the world. And it is devoted to bringing the reader into its investigation. For instance, in the first of its seven sections, “Flare,” Oliver welcomes the reader “to the silly, comforting poem” (1). The immediate concern of the speaker is with what the poem is not. It is not “the sunrise,/which is a red rinse,/which is flaring all over the eastern sky”; nor is it the “trees, or the burrow burrowing into the earth.” The 12 numbered parts of section 1 move from Whitman-like questions of a reader (“Therefore, tell me:/what will engage you?”) to declarative instructions to the reader (“The poem is not the world./It isn’t even the first page of the world,” 5). Calling attention to the poem as a poem is of course nothing new. But the extended and discursive space of the long poem creates a place to record the daily work of the writer who takes as her subject the states of mind that arise in observing the daily unfolding of natural phenomena. In part 2 of the poem, “Work,” the poet’s work is set alongside what Oliver calls the “work of the world,” the “deliberate music” of the ears of corn swelling under their green leaves, the dark stone, the grouse’s fan-tail. The refrain throughout the sections of part 2—“this is the world”—calls attention to the plenitude of the surroundings and the poet’s surprise and amazement at finding out—most often what one does not know. Oliver then poses the inevitable questions that arise in any sustained inquiry into the music of what is happening. “Would it better to sit in silence?/to think everything, to feel everything, to say nothing?” (12), Oliver asks. After all, she responds, such is the impulse of the river and the stone. Her answer is instructive. She is not willing (or able) to accept the odd human preoccupation with the promise that to abandon cultural and anthropocentric frameworks—of language and symbolic representation, of ideas such as beauty, devotion, and respect—would somehow place one “closer” to the natural world. As she puts it, “the nature of man is not the nature of silence.” The nature of man, that is, is wild and civilized—utterly alive in the flesh and fiercely obliged to the anthropocentric devotions to beauty, curiosity, and respect. The Leaf and the Cloud enacts the process of building a response to nature through deliberate self-consciousness. The meaning that Oliver attaches to events or phenomena—whether more descriptive and empirical or more abstract and emblematic—comes from an ability to cultivate one’s self, to remain distinct and to live more fully in our language and its capacities to mediate between our conscious bodies and the environment that surrounds us and of which we are always already a part. The Leaf and the Cloud is in this way a summation, a generative moment in an evolving ecopoetics. Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, W.S. Merwin, A.R. Ammons, and Mary Oliver are representative of a more diverse group of twentieth-century poets whose work has been explicitly shaped by an ecological perspective. In Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry (1995), for instance, Terry Gifford highlights the ecological nature poetry of the British poets Patrick Kavanagh, Sorley MacLean, Seamus Heaney, and Ted Hughes. Environmental and ecological themes also shape the work of a number of other poets, including Adrienne Rich, Robert Pack, Louise Glück, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, Charles Wright, Ernesto Cardenal, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Simon J. Ortiz, Arthur Sze, Daphne Marlatt, Derek Walcott, and Margaret

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Atwood. This array of voices suggests the expanding focus of ecopoetics as well as its reach beyond the Anglo-American tradition. The tendency to canonize particular authors, and forms of writing about the natural world, according to Jamie M. Killingsworth, is in part a product of the desire to better understand our relationship to the more-than-human world. But, as he explains, “as we come to see ‘saving the earth’ as one metaphor among many—a metaphor conditioned perhaps by the historical experience of the cold war—our focus can broaden to include a greater diversity of writers” (2004, 11). The study of writers with a wider range of imaginative responses might thereby offer readers new ways of exploring the interdependencies of language, human experience, and the more-than-human world. If one accepts the idea that poetry is “the place where we save the earth,” in the words that bring Bate’s Song of the Earth to a close, then the term ecopoetry signals a preoccupation with the fate of the planet. While the narrow framework of human lives and the perspective gained through generations of human life register radical geomorphic changes (volcano eruptions, earthquakes, tidal waves, melting icecaps), the earth’s processes unfold across a timeline not apparent to the perceptions and actions of human beings. Ecopoetry recognizes these limitations at the same time that it models forms of attention and linguistic acts that might make a difference in human lives and the forms of responsibility that arise in the peculiar human capacity for ethical reflection about forms of life beyond our own. Bibliography Ammons, A.R. Collected Poems, 1951–1971. New York: Norton, 1972. ———. Tape for the Turn of the Year. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965. Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Berry, Wendell. The Broken Ground. New York: Harcourt, 1969. ———. A Continuous Harmony. New York: Harcourt, 1972. ———. Farming: A Handbook. Sand Diego: Harvest, 1970. ———. The Long-Legged House. New York: Harcourt, 1964. ———. Recollected Essays, 1965–1978. San Francisco: North Point, 1981. ———. Standing on Earth: Selected Essays. Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1991. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton, 1962. Christensen, Laird. “The Pragmatic Mysticism of Mary Oliver.” In Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction. J. Scott Bryson, ed. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002. 135–152. Frazier, Jane. From Origin to Ecology: Nature and the Poetry of W.S. Merwin. Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999. Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Walt Whitman and the Earth: A Study in Ecopoetics. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004. Merwin, W.S. The First Four Books of Poems: A Mask for Janus, The Dancing Bears, Green with Beasts and the Drunk in the Furnace. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2000. ———. The Lice. New York: Atheneum, 1967. ———. The River Sound. New York: Knopf, 1999. ———. The Second Four Books of Poems: The Moving Target, the Lice, the Carrier of Ladders, Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 1993. ———. Travels. New York: Knopf, 1993. Miller, J. Hillis. Six Poets of Reality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965. Oliver, Mary. The Leaf and the Cloud. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2000. ———. New and Selected Poems: Volume One. Boston: Beacon, 1992.

ECOPOETRY ———. New and Selected Poems: Volume Two. Boston: Beacon, 2005. Scigaj, Leonard. Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1999. Snyder, Gary. Axe Handles. San Francisco: North Point, 1983. ———. The Back Country. New York: New Directions, 1968. ———. Back on the Fire: Essays. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hold, 2007. ———. “Ecology, Literature, and the New World Disorder.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 11.1 (2004): 1–13. ———. Earth House Hold: Technical Notes and Queries to Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries. New York: New Directions, 1969. ———. Mountains and Rivers Without End. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1996. ———. No Nature: New and Selected Poems. New York: Pantheon, 1992. ———. Turtle Island. New York: New Directions, 1974. Wilson, E. O. Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Further Reading Altieri, Charles. Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry during the 1960s. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1979; Bryson, J. Scott, ed. Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002; Bryson, J. Scott, ed. The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space, and Ecopoetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005; Costello, Bonnie. Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003; Disch, Robert, ed. The Ecological Conscience: Values for Survival. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970; Elder, John. Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature. 2nd ed. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996; Fletcher, Angus. A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004; Gifford, Terry. Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995; Gilcrest, David W. Greening the Lyre: Environmental Poetics and Ethics. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002; Graham, Vickie. “‘Into the Body of Another’: Mary Oliver and the Poetics of Becoming Other.” Papers on Language and Literature 30.4 (1994): 352–372; Joris, Pierre, and Jerome Rothenberg, eds. Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, Volume One: From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995; Joris, Pierre, and Jerome Rothenberg, eds. Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, Volume Two: From Postwar to Millennium. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998; Nabhan, Gary Paul. Cross-Pollinations: The Marriage of Science and Poetry. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2004; Quetchenbach, Bernard W. Back from the Far Field: American Nature Poetry in the Late Twentieth Century. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000; Rasula, Jed. This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002; Rueckert, William. “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. 105–123; Vendler, Helen. “A.R. Ammons: Dwelling in the Flow of Shapes.” In The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988, 310–342; Vendler, Helen. “The Snow Poems and Garbage: Episodes in an Evolving Poetics.” In Complexities of Motion: New Essays on A.R. Ammons’s Long Poems. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999, 23–50; Voros, Gyorgyi. “Exquisite Environments.” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 21.1–2 (Winter 1995): 231–250; Voros, Gyorgyi. Notations of the Wild: Ecology in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997.

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EROTIC LITERATURE Definition. Erotic literature is composed of works in which sex, sexuality, and/or sexual desire has a dominant presence. Literature from almost every genre can be considered erotic literature, including drama, poetry, fiction, and memoirs. Scholars and governments have even classified erotic treatises and sex manuals as erotic literature. However, the inclusion of a sex scene is not the only criteria for erotic literature; instead erotic literature—through the exploration of desire and sexuality— interrogates or calls attention to important cultural, sociological, and philosophical concepts. Often these texts point to a perceived or real disconnect between the body and society, between the sexes, and even between children and adults. Erotic literature differs from pornography in that society views the former as socially acceptable. Both can also arouse the reader, but erotic literature seeks to engage the reader’s mind in an exploration of sexuality, while pornography seeks only to elicit a physical response. Erotic literature, especially erotica, can be pornographic, but pornography rarely (if ever) raises philosophical, cultural, or sociological questions for the reader. At times, the line between erotica and pornography blurs. The ostensible impetus behind their creation, that is, to arouse and titillate a reader, is similar, but erotica, as in erotic literature as a whole, usually manages to transcend the purely sexual. Erotica also moves across genre lines, intersecting with detective fiction, historical narratives, science fiction and—within the last 10 years—supernatural erotica. Thus, erotica functions like most literary modes in that it is not tied to any specific form or genre. History. Erotic literature has a rich and varied history that dates back to the ancient Greeks and the ancient civilizations of the Middle East and Asia. This history includes the many attempts of governments to censor many works now considered to be classics. Erotic prose written by the ancient Greeks dates back to the third century B.C.E., but it peaked during the second and third century CE during the Second Sophistic. According to Dominic Montserrat, the works emphasize “romance, seduction, sexuality, and the erotic development of individuals,” and the writers were the first to “make the sexual self a field of enquiry” (2006, 584). Moreover, the government did not consider some of this erotic prose, which included treatises, romantic narratives, and drama, as immoral. In fact, Montserrat notes that some of these works were “praised for their medical benefits, because they could stimulate impotent men” (584). Censure of works with erotic content stemmed from representations of excess and unbalanced behavior, and the Greek government did not target erotic texts. Trends and Themes. Ancient Greek verse, like prose, explores the erotic but incorporates two basic themes, requited and unrequited love. The Greek poets

In erotica, the narrative focuses on a concrete, explicit sexual act to interrogate notions of taboo in broader cultural context instead of the more abstract notions of sexuality and desire. As Patrick Califia-Rice notes, erotica is “one way to write sexual history—the slang, fashion, community institutions, music, controversies, mores, the signifiers and significance of sexual expression at various points in time and in several different sexual minority communities” (2001, 150). The preferred form is prose, primarily in the shape of short fiction or novels, and occasionally poetry.

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wrote on the latter with considerable frequency. Monica Cyrino explains that this unrequited desire is characterized by an “unfulfilled and perhaps even unfulfillable feeling of erotic desire, and is denoted by the absence of the beloved, the lack of satisfaction, and the impossibility of erotic realization;” in this type of verse, “the lover’s desire is difficult, painful, and ultimately devastating” (2006, 588). Poets did not hesitate to explore both heterosexual and homosexual love, as well as the effects of erotic desire on the mind and body. Aeschylus, in addition to his tragedies, wrote of the relationship between King Laius of Thebes and his love of the Chrysippus, a young boy, and Anacreon of Teos was so influential that the cult of Anacreonitic verse formed, which covered all poetry in praise of wine and women. Sappho also focused on both the deleterious and beneficial effects of eros on the mind and body. After the ancient Greeks, writers from Britain and France provide texts that have been perhaps most influential on both American erotic literature and erotica. The traditions and conventions established by the English and the French are apparent in the works of contemporary American authors. In the seventeenth century, England enjoyed an increase in literacy for both men and women. Paired with this rise in literacy was the increased availability in the number of poems, plays, and books designed to arouse sexual desire. The erotic literature of this time period is marked by a distinct escapist quality, and much was written to shock as well as to arouse. Literature relating to sexual freedom and divorce was quite popular. Other prevalent themes were women’s sexual voracity and prostitution. Although many of the writers during this time intended to titillate, their pieces often commented on the political, the religious, and the social. Although popular tastes dictated the types of erotica that writers were producing, the printing industry itself suffered under tight constraints beyond the control of the reading public. Due to the monopoly on printing rights instigated by James I in 1603, Stationers’ Company had a tight hold on the printing industry (Curth 2006, 413). According to Louise Hill Curth, Charles I aided in maintaining this monopoly by “establishing the most repressive system of press censorship since the reign of Elizabeth I” (412). The monopoly eventually collapsed in 1640, and independent printers flourished in London. The eighteenth century saw the rise of the erotic novel, as well as the emergence of pornography in England. A popular theme in the narratives of this time features the male examination of the female prostitutes’ life. Bradford K. Mudge explains that these “[w]hore dialogues,” such as John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, “combined lascivious passages with sex education, anti-ecclesiastical diatribes, and radical philosophy,” thus meeting the definition of erotic literature (2006, 416). With the movement of erotic poetry into periodicals, prose became the genre of choice for erotic literature, and Mudge contends that by 1789, “sexual obscenity and the novel were joined at the hip” (418). Just as erotic literature appeared in England, France saw a surge in the production of erotic texts. In 1635, literary production in France came under the auspices of the French government, which through the Académie Française made it clear that it expected French literature to conform to governmental sanctions. In this repressive atmosphere, erotic literature fell into the hands of a group of writers known as the libertines. These writers produced work that challenged the censors, sometimes by openly bypassing official publishing channels, and at other times through more oblique means. French erotic literature became a battleground where writers fought a sexually repressive regime by showing the hypocrisy government

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officials practiced, and officials destroyed works that illustrated the link between the political and the religious. Yet the execution of Claude Le Petit in 1662 also made it clear that blasphemous and obscene writing could have deadly consequences. As in eighteenth century England, the novel became a popular vehicle for erotic literature in France. The novel, as an experimental and radical form, allowed writers to challenge their readers in their exploration of the nuance of the erotic. Fairy tales are an unexpected hotbed of erotic literature, where allegorical elements allow writers to obliquely critique French society. Charles Perrault’s “Le Petit chaperone rouge” (“Little Red Riding Hood”) is a tale fraught with eroticism, and it serves as a warning to aristocratic young ladies to avoid the “wolves,” or rakes, of Louis XIV’s court. According to Paul Scott, however, the conventional representation of romantic love in fairy tales “accepts the dominant discourse of sexuality, with its implicit exaltation of patriarchy,” reinforcing rather than challenging the mores of the time (2006, 479). After 1740, French erotic literature flourished, thanks in part to the publication of the best-selling novel Histoire de D[om Bougre] and to the flowering of French Enlightenment philosophy. In fact, Natania Meeker notes the important role the “erotic and obscene” played within the “culture of the French Enlightenment, both as a form of literate entertainment and as a vehicle for the development and diffusion of new modes of thought” (2006, 481). She also argues that several of the most prominent philosophers, such as Julien Offray de La Mettrie and Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, delved into the erotic as well. In the eighteenth century two general categories of the novel—the libertine novel of seduction and the pornographic novel—proved the novel to be one of the most exciting genres of the period. Meeker explains that “[c]ritics have historically been reluctant to associate the frank obscenity of the latter with the elegant suggestiveness of the former, even though the two genres share an Epicurean focus on sensual and sensorial pleasure” (481). Also during this time, the “oriental tale” was highly successful as part of the general interest in the East. Despite a fair amount of exoticism, some of the writers took the change in setting as an opportunity to critique the “morals, fashions and rituals of the court of Louis XV” (Meeker 2006, 481). In its examination and critique of matters of social, political, and moral importance, French erotic literature became increasingly political in tenor in the years leading up to the Revolution. In fact, supporters of the revolution used satirical and scathing erotic literature as a tool against the aristocracy, often depicting them as amoral hedonists. These works were popular in France until long after the collapse of Louis XV’s regime. Censorship and American Erotic Literature. While sexual descriptions have become an integral part of American fiction, our Puritan roots and censorial past ensured that literary sex scenes—explicit or not—have come under careful scrutiny. The Americans were initially less puritanical than their English counterparts, enjoying Latin poetry, Shakespeare, and the more contemporary works of English novelist Henry Fielding (Tom Jones) and Scottish writer Tobias Smollett (Roderick Random) for much of the eighteenth century with relative impunity. According to Felice Lewis, early America had “almost no tradition of indigenous erotic fiction,” in part because American literature was “born in the early nineteenth century” at a time when the English writing model was quite sedate (1976, 12). The most popular pieces of American erotic writing were Benjamin Franklin’s “Advice to a Young Man on Choosing a Mistress” and “A Letter to the Royal Academy at Brussels,”

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but the manuscripts were available only in limited copies. Though neither was published in the United States by Franklin, the London-based Gentleman’s Magazine published “Advice to a Young man on Choosing a Mistress” in 1747 (Loth 1961, 115). Another American erotic work that managed to elude the censors was Mark Twain’s Conversation, as it was by the social fireside in the time of the Tudors, or 1601, and like Franklin’s letters, Twain’s text was not published in the United States in his lifetime. Written in 1876 between Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1601 critiques the “elevated reputation of Elizabethan society and its vulgar behavior” (Lee 2006, 1320). Though markedly scatological in nature, 1601 was available only in manuscript and private editions before 1996. Context and Issues. By the mid-nineteenth century, American writers were beginning to explore the erotic and its moral implications. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter was an instant success because it handled spiritual and moral issues from a uniquely American point of view. Lewis notes that the novel was originally charged with “perpetrating bad morals,” even though Hawthorne “could not have handled the material more carefully,” reiterating the sentiment that sexual urges lead to immorality and moral decay (1976, 15). However, because Hawthorne was well established in the New England literary community, his potentially risqué novel was not censored and passed into the realm of appropriate texts. In contrast to The Scarlet Letter, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass bursts with exuberant sensuality, especially the poems “Song of Myself,” “Children of Adam,” and “Calamus.” The first edition was maligned by some critics for being “exceedingly obscene,” and in the third edition, the publishers juxtaposed poems with “homosexual overtones.” Leaves of Grass was criticized and suppressed, but never censored, in part because it was “too abstruse to have wide appeal” (Lewis 1976, 15). These two important early American texts illustrate the already-forming relationship between text, audience size and type, and censorship. Lewis argues the aristocracy’s view “of the masses as children who are easily led astray” (16) drove nineteenth century censorship. In the United States, compulsory education and an increase in literacy created a new market for less than literary erotic literature. David Loth contends that, in order to satisfy these demands, American publishers imported erotic literature from England (1961, 120). John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Lady of Pleasure, also known as Fanny Hill, was one of the first erotic works to find its way to the United States, where it was banned in 1821—almost a century after similar censure in England— when Massachusetts judges convicted Holmes of obscene libel. Commonwealth vs. Holmes marked the first time a book and its publisher were prosecuted for lewdness. In 1821, Vermont established the first obscenity statute, followed by Connecticut in 1834 and Massachusetts in 1836 (Loth, 121). Even though obscenity laws had been on the books since 1821, they were rarely enforced on printed material before 1870, though plays were heavily censored throughout the 1800s. Lewis contends that the “anti-obscenity movement in both England and America begins with Lord Campbell’s Act” of 1857, which allowed authorities to seize books and prints that were “in their opinions obscene” (7). The first case tried under Lord Campbell’s Act proved more influential than the act itself. In 1868, a magistrate seized copies of Henry Scot’s pamphlet titled The Confessional Unmasked: Shewing the Depravity of the Roman Priesthood, the Iniquity of the Confessional and the Questions put to Females in Confession (7). Scot appealed and Benjamin Hicklin, the Recorder of London, “ruled in his [Scot’s] favor on the basis that his purpose was good, that he had no intention of corrupting public morals”—a

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decision that was soon overturned by Chief Justice Alexander Cockburn, who stated, “The test of obscenity is whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall” (Lewis, 7–8). Cockburn’s definition of obscenity would continue to be cited by American judges well into the twentieth century, providing an extremely broad, subjective definition of obscenity (8). Anthony Comstock and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV) were pivotal in the censorship movement. The NYSSV was an outgrowth of the Young Men’s Christian Association and was supported by wealthy, influential men (Biesel 1997, 76). Nicola Biesel argues that, while Comstock appealed to the wealthy by citing concern about “youthful corruption in terms of problems that could befall wealthy children,” he also appealed to the middle class’s concern for their children (76). He accomplished this by linking “the corruption of children by obscene materials to other issues already established as ‘social problems,’ such as prostitution, abortion, and juvenile delinquency” (76). Comstock and the NYSSV lobbied for a more restrictive law regarding the mailing of obscene items, and in March 1873, President Grant signed the Comstock Law. Comstock was reputed to have banned fictional work, sex manuals, newspaper and magazine articles deemed obscene, and contraceptive manuals. In general, he tended to attack works with little literary merit that were regarded as “unquestionably pornographic in his day,” but he also opposed the sale of classics like The Decameron and others (Lewis, 12). The increase in legal actions against “literature of repute” coincided with popularity of the European realistic-naturalistic fiction (Lewis, 12). Writers like Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Frank Norris fought against American publishers who were reluctant to publish potentially obscene works. Pulp novels, however, were thriving and increased in availability in the nineteenth century. According to Chris Packard, pulp Westerns produced before 1900 feature an often all-male world where “homoerotic affection holds a favored position,” and “affection for women destroys cowboy comunitas and produces children, and both are unwanted hindrances to those who wish to ride the range freely” (2005, 3). The cowboy, Packard argues, is a queer figure who “eschews lasting ties with women but embraces rock-solid bonds with same-sex partners; he practices same sex desires” (3). Westerns written after 1900 do not present male affection as freely because of the “modern invention of the ‘homosexual’ as a social pariah” (3). The same type of homoeroticism extends to other texts written before 1900, including Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Leatherstocking Tales, where the male partnerships are erotic yet unconsummated (4). Even though homoerotic relationships abound in the pulp Westerns of the 1800s, they were situated in the mythical West, and publishers and writers managed to avoid censors. Censorship reared its head in the middle of the twentieth century with the trials of an unexpurgated edition of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, and William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. The novels were eventually deemed not obscene because of their social value and literary merit, and the court rulings were based on precedents set in cases dealing with James Joyce’s Ulysses and Cleland’s Fanny Hill, which sanctioned writing about sex that did not intentionally appeal to prurient interests. Reception. There is a surprising paucity of scholarly criticism on erotica specifically, though there is a fair amount on erotic literature as a whole. Like the pulp

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Western, contemporary erotica is rarely censored, and scholars rarely, if ever, write on the themes and issues prevalent in the subgenre. This dearth can possibly be attributed to scholars’ dismissal of the genre as smut or to a reluctance to analyze sexually explicit texts. This reluctance on the part of the academy—though not unexpected—has not gone unnoticed by writers of erotica. In an America where “signifiers of sex are everywhere we turn,” Simon Sheppard points out that the shame is still with us (2001, 208). Califia-Rice writes that a simplistic discussion of writing erotica as simply smut omits the “lack of serious critical attention (because everyone ‘knows’ pornography requires no serious literary talent)” (2001, 145). To this day, contemporary novels containing explicit sexual content or those with homosexual themes are still seen as threat to children and society. Books written by Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, J.D. Salinger, and Lesléa Newman have all been challenged and charged as unacceptable and obscene, but because of their literary merit, they have not been banned. Selected Authors. Most contemporary American erotica written today is fiction. While there are still single-authored short story collections and novels being published, the vehicle of choice is the anthology. Such collections are popular because they allow editors to feature a cross section of stories centered on a particular theme. Anthologies are also one of the few outlets for emerging writers to get published, a role editors have taken over from print magazines. Since the mid- to late 1990s, specialized anthologies have exploded onto the market. These anthologies target specific, marginalized groups including (but not limited to) heterosexual women, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, women, African Americans, Latinos, and those in the sadomasochistic communities. Many anthologies target a combination of these groups. Such specificity can be credited to an increased demand from readers to see themselves represented in the fiction, as well as to publishers targeting specific audiences. General anthologies are popular as well, and they tend to include a sampling of erotica meant to appeal to a broad range of tastes. Notably, with the exception of some geographically specific anthologies, like Best American Erotica, many of the anthologies being published tend to have an international list of authors, and some, like editor Maxim Jakubowski’s Mammoth Book of Erotica, and Mammoth Book of New Erotica, originate in an international market. This inclusionary trend is a product of literary globalization. Another trend includes the overwhelming presence of first person narratives in erotica, which draw readers directly into the story, immersing them in the narrative. Coinciding with this international trend of specialization is the abundance of “best of” anthologies. Some, such as Best American Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, and Best Gay Erotica, are annual publications. However, a “best of” anthology generally allows for at least one sequel anthology if the initial volume is successful. These anthologies promise to deliver the best erotica taken from short story collections, novels and novellas, and online and print magazines. While few print magazines carry erotica exclusively, editors have taken the genre into cyberspace. Online magazines such as Nerve, Clean Sheets, Libido, and Scarlet Letters are flourishing. These peer-edited, free, online magazines allow the reader to peruse erotic fiction and poetry, rendering erotica more readily accessible. Gender and Sexual Minorities. Much of the erotica written in the last 10 years explores what mainstream society terms deviant sexuality, including sadomasochism, homosexuality, transgender sex, and a number of fetishes. According to Califia-Rice, “most subcultures rely on staying underground to survive. . . . Any

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work that celebrates a stigmatized way of being in the world cuts two ways. It is both celebratory and revealing, sometimes dangerously so” (2001, 152). Works dealing with sadomasochism do not hesitate to depict both the sadist’s and the masochist’s points of views. Likewise, homosexual erotica both challenges and upholds stereotypes about the gay and lesbian community, where hetero-normative sexual constructs still exist. Many authors, however, are writing stories that redefine sexuality as a place where men and women negotiate, manipulate, or accept traditional notions of gender and power. Male and female writers are also crossing gender lines, proving it is possible for a man to successfully write women’s, and even lesbian, erotica, and vice versa. Mary Gaitskill’s erotic story “A Romantic Weekend” focuses on the characters’ desires, and the sex act becomes almost inconsequential to their angst and disappointment with each other. Beth and her unnamed lover falsely present themselves as a sadist and a masochist, respectively. Beth desires to be a masochist, but she misconstrues what masochism requires of her. She tells her partner, “I won’t do anything I don’t want to do. You have to make me want it” (2000, 192). She wants to be forced, but she does not understand that the key tenets of sadomasochism are trust and surrender. Similarly, her lover wants to dominate her but is unable to overcome her refusal to surrender. The sex scene, although beautifully written, is terse in its rendering of sex while explicitly exploring the failure of desire. Gaitskill writes: She put her glass on the coffee table, crossed the floor and dropped to her knees between his legs. She threw her arms around his thighs. She nuzzled his groin with her nose. He tightened. She unzipped his pants. “Stop,” he said. “Wait.” She took his shoulders—she had a surprisingly strong grip—and pulled him to the carpet. . . . He felt assaulted and invaded. This was not what he had in mind, but to refuse would make him seem somehow less virile than she. Queasily, he stripped off her clothes and put their bodies in a more viable position. He fastened his teeth on her breast and bit her. She made a surprised noise and her body stiffened. He bit her again, harder. She screamed. He wanted to draw blood. Her screams were short and stifled. He could tell that she was trying to like being bitten, but that she did not. He gnawed her breast. She screamed sharply. They screwed. (189)

Rather than Beth yielding to her partner, she makes him yield to her will, leaving them both dissatisfied in the process. Her desire to be dominated “had been completely frustrated” (190). Gaitskill’s purpose here is not to titillate the reader or allow the reader to linger on the intimacy of the act. It is written to disconcert. This story does not be qualify as erotica—mainly because the story focuses on unfulfilled desire and its effect on the characters—but it challenges the easy suppositions about who should surrender. Patrick Califia-Rice’s short story “Gender Queer” tackles the complexity of transgender identity, specifically that of female-to-male transgender. Califia-Rice uses sex to talk about important issues because “people are reluctant to think about many of the issues surrounding sex and gender. Or there’s a knee-jerk reaction that reflects what ‘everybody knows’ to be true,” but he is also dedicated to questioning the “mores or policies they develop to socialize new members, regulate the conduct of insiders, and handle relationships with outsiders” (2001, 153). The main character, Carleton, is a female-to-male (FTM) transgender who leads a FTM support group. There we see oblique and explicit references to problems that

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plague the transgender community. The men in the support group grapple with finding a doctor to perform a mastectomy, as well as with social concerns about attracting the “perfect straight girl” who is unattainable pre-phalloplasty (2006, 80). In effect, once they have completed their transition, most of the FTM transmen will become heterosexual males. Carleton is the only bisexual in the group, and he gets no empathy from his support group concerning his anxiety about going to gay bars downtown. This lack of empathy points to a limited definition of masculinity and the expectation that identifying as male means identifying as a heterosexual male, excluding the full spectrum of masculinity. The story’s central conflict lies in Carleton’s relationship with “Moss,” a woman who verbally attacked Carleton at a lecture months before because, at the time, she was afraid of her own desire to be male. She wants to know what it would be like to be a man, to: stand there without these sandbags strapped to my chest, and feel my body straight and strong and free. I wanted to know how it felt to shave my face and walk out my front door whistling. To have the guy at the gas station call me sir and not have anybody give me a second look. (Califia-Rice 2005, 80)

For Moss, these are the characteristics of masculinity, the things that deserve envy, and she sees Carleton as the embodiment of these traits. It is Carleton who mitigates her fears and validates her desires, and it is he who names her Moss. At this point in the story, Moss’s gender pronoun switches from female to male. Carleton then offers to be her guide, because “[m]aking things easier for new guys was one of the ways Carleton exorcised the pain of his own coming out process” (82). He shows Moss how to bind his chest, applies facial hair, and even gives Moss a haircut. The pre-operation transformation is complete when Carleton gives Moss a “packer,” or a silicon mold of a flaccid penis. In the sex scene, Moss and Carleton must negotiate the disconnect between the male gender they claim and the physical reality of their bodies. Carleton is anxious about his body, making Moss promise that he’s “not going to think [Carleton is] a girl” once he is naked (85). Post coitus, Carleton reflects it is “good to be touched by someone who understood that you could be a guy and still have girl parts, but this intimate act reminded him again that his body was not perfectly and entirely male” (88–89). Califia-Rice’s interest in gender construction is indicative of a growing trend in erotica today. Marginalized groups are redefining for themselves how they are represented to and within the dominant culture. Erotica written by and for marginalized groups often presents a more nuanced representation, and these works are in conversation with the stereotype they are consciously working against. This is not to say that all writers of marginalized erotica scrupulously avoid stereotypes or attempt to complicate or react against it. Some writers seem content to write prose that present a marginalized group in a stereotypical fashion without bothering to delve into the politics of being that might surround that group. Within lesbian erotica, for example, writers are constantly imagining and reimagining the literary representation of lesbian relationships, including the traditional butch/femme, top/bottom power structures, femme/femme, butch/butch, as well as the interactions between “bois” and “grrls.” The re-appropriation and revision of how lesbians are represented is a reaction, in some ways, to the derivative,

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butch/femme (or femme/femme if the medium is visual), hetero-normative images in popular media. This type of revisionist play is not exclusive to lesbian erotica, and it points to a growing trend of writers unpacking the possibilities of representation. Some black erotica focuses on issues of family and stability. The unfortunately titled “Homecumming” by Cherysse Welcher-Calhoun presents a long-married African American couple that is happy to have a weekend alone. The story turns the stereotype of the black broken home on its head, describing a close-knit family where the father is present and both parents work in the corporate world. The female protagonist comes home from work and is responsible for cleaning the house and taking care of the kids. She occupies both spheres, but seems happy to do so. This type of representation is emblematic of the trend in African American erotica. This story is not particularly radical, but the normative representation of the black family seems in direct conversation with images of the black family. Sex-Positive Erotica. Patrick Califia-Rice, Susie Bright, Cecilia Tan, Bill Brent, and other erotica writers have written, and continue to write, in the spirit of sex-positive images that allow for power variations in any healthy sexual encounter. Sex-positive writer Carol Queen writes that one of the “crucial cultural functions of erotic literature,” specifically sex-positive work, is that it “always serves as a kind of protest literature exploring (and exploding) taboos, gender roles, and socially imposed notions of appropriate sexuality” (2001, 47). Sex-positive feminists and writers are at direct odds with the feminist anti-porn movement that gained prominence in the mid- to late 1970s as a result of and in reaction to the sexual revolution that heralded an increase in number of pornographic magazines and films. Anti-porn feminists criticize pornography for its representation of women as hyper-sexualized victims and blame the abundance of pornography for the rise in rape and domestic violence rates. According to Lori Saint-Martin, they condemn “both literary erotica and mainstream pornography, which they say deliver the same sexist message,” and while they call for women to “develop their own erotic imaginations,” they consider the task virtually impossible, given their “patriarchal conditioning” (2006, 456). As a result, the anti-porn feminists’ definition of a healthy relationship does not include any form of consensual sadomasochistic sexual relationship, or any sexual relationship in which the power dynamics are not equal. Members of the sex-positive movement embrace the many manifestations of human sexuality, including the practices of sexual minorities, and believe in sexual freedom for all people. They argue that to consider a woman’s engagement in, say, sadomasochistic activities as deviant, or to say it eroticizes power and violence does not take into consideration the consensual nature of such play. The sex-positive movement attracts activists from numerous spheres, including anti-censorship feminists, activists in the LGBT community, pornographers, writers of erotica, and sexual radicals. Anti-porn feminists view prostitution as yet another site of female subjugation, where women are reduced to objects, victims of male violence. In his introduction to Macho Sluts, Califia describes the prostitute as someone potentially beyond the control of men. Unlike housewives who put no price on their time, who have no “demarcation between business and pleasure”—thus leaving them with no space of their own—prostitutes get men to “part with some of their property instead of becoming property themselves. . . . The whore does not sell her body. She sells her time” (1988, 20). This revision of prostitution foregrounds the prostitute’s agency.

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Queen’s story “Best Whore in Hillsboro” takes the reader into the world of highclass prostitutes. Queen admits to “being a sort of Pollyanna of sex writing . . . so sex positive that there’s not enough for critics who like that cutting-edge style that wallows in taboo and shame, nouveau de Sade” (2001, 50). Instead of a sordid tale of prostitution and redemption, Queen presents a narrative that moves prostitution out of the margins and presents it as a normal job, a job people can like or hate. Indeed, the main character, Kitty, likes her job. She and fellow prostitute Corrina do not suffer poor working conditions, and they do not have a pimp; they prostitute themselves because they want to. The prostitutes in Queen’s story do not conform to stereotypical norms for their profession: Corrina attended law school, and Kitty was in the undergraduate honor society, Phi Beta Kappa. Kitty learned early “that most whores dress up, no down; signaling that your ass is for sale on the night streets of the Tenderloin is one thing, but slipping into the Fairmont to service an out-of-town CEO is quite another, and Kitty’s bought more conservative clothes since she began working than she’s ever owned in her life” (1999, 235). This is not the traditional representation of prostitutes, but then, it is Queen’s assertion that there are women who like sex work. Corrina is less than happy with her job for several reasons, the first being that she “got caught by the IRS a few years ago and she’s still paying off the heavy fines. Pimped by the government, the whores called it” (234). In addition to paying fines, she is jaded, preferring to dominate clients rather than have sex with them (235). The clients she and Kitty are servicing together are an affluent couple who have renewed her enthusiasm for her job. Instead of condemning prostitution, Queen critiques the institution of marriage. Kitty’s view of marriage is particularly cynical. She estimates that 98 percent of her clients are married, and that they do not “tell their wives where they go on those long lunch hours” (236). She is tired of men who “have” to call her because they “think their wives are too pure or too ‘frigid’” (236). According to Kitty, her profession is “weird” in that it helps shore “up the illusion that married life is a functional state” (236). It seems more “legitimate” to work for a married couple. Kitty is not oblivious to the class differences, and on meeting Tom and Pam, she realizes they are “creating the near-seamless illusion for Corrina and Kitty that they are all affectionate friends, in the same class, and enjoying the same life circumstances—that they are equals chatting about Christmas and sipping brandy” (237). Queen also plays on the reader’s expectation that Kitty and Corrina are paying Tom and Pam a visit at Tom’s request, but it’s really Pam, a former prostitute herself, who desires their company the most because she does not quite fit into the highclass society she has married into. She cannot be herself, and, if Kitty’s analysis is on target, being “herself” involves having an active sex life. This movement promotes sexual responsibility, well, and in “Best Whore in Hillsboro,” the characters are careful to use plenty of latex. With the AIDS epidemic and the increased spread of STDs, writers working within the sex positive movement are careful about depictions of unprotected sex. When Simon Sheppard co-edited the gay male anthology Rough Stuff, he and co-editor M. Christian decided not to accept works that “explicitly eroticized the unprotected aspect of the barebacking” (2001, 211)—i.e. the practice of unprotected, gay male sex—and in rejecting stories that sensationalized the dangerous aspects of this act instead of showing the real life repercussions, Sheppard and Christian demonstrate the careful considerations editors must make while still allowing for the creativity of their authors.

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IMPORTANT EDITORS IN EROTIC PUBLISHING In some respects, the editors of erotica anthologies are as influential in shaping modern erotica as the authors they include. Editors like Thomas S. Roche and Cecilia Tan both founded a space for genre erotica, while those like M. Christian and Susie Bright work to expand its the parameters. As the editor of the Noirotica series, Roche wanted the “chance to merge cutting-edge writing with crime-noir, and bring the erotic subtext up to the surface of a genre that was always playing with it” (Wharton 2000). Cecilia Tan’s publishing company, Circlet Press, routinely publishes sci-fi erotica, and she has edited several sci-fi erotica anthologies. M. Christian is the author of five books, including the Lambda-nominated Dirty Words, Speaking Parts, The Bachelor Machine, and The Bloody Marys. His fiction has appeared in more than 200 anthologies, including Best American Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, Best Transgendered Erotica, and Friction. Christian is the editor of over 20 anthologies, including S/M Erotica, Love Under Foot (with Greg Wharton), Bad Boys (with Paul Willis), The Burning Pen, Guilty Pleasures, and many others. Christian’s editorial eye is geared towards stories that are sexually titillating and mentally stimulating. Susie Bright is arguably one of the most important editors in erotica today. She has edited 18 anthologies and novels. Since 1993, she has been the editor of Best American Erotica, published by Simon and Schuster. Bright was also the founding editor of the first women’s anthology, Herotica, in 1988, and she edited the first three volumes. She co-edited On Our Backs, an influential magazine geared toward lesbians, from 1984 to 1991. As series editor of Best New Erotica, Bright has managed to expand the boundaries of erotica, including work from well-known writers like Mary Gaitskill, John Updike, and David Sedaris, as well as erotica industry standards like Peggy Munson, Carol Queen, and Skian McGuire. It is clear that Bright subscribes to the notion that erotica has a more important cultural function than glandular stimulation.

Bibliography Biesel, Nicola Kay. Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997. Bright, Susie, ed. Best American Erotica. New York, New York: Touchstone, 1993–2007. Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch. New York: Grove Press, 1990. Califia, Pat. Macho Sluts. Los Angeles, California: Alyson Publications, 1988; 20. Califia-Rice, Patrick. “Gender Queer.” In Best Gay Erotica 2006. Richard Lambonte, ed. San Francisco, California: Cleis Press, 2005; 76–90. ———. “An Insistent and Indelicate Muse.” In The Burning Pen. M. Christian, ed. Los Angeles, California: Alyson Publications, 2001; 145–154. Christian, M., series ed. Best S/M Erotica: Extreme Stories of Extreme Sex. Pahoa, Hawaii: Black Books, 2001–2006. Cleland, John. Fanny Hill: Or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1986. Curth, Louise Hill. “English: United Kingdom, Seventeenth Century.” In Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature. Gaetan Brulotte and John Phillips, eds. New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2006; 411–415. Cyrino, Monica. “Greek, Ancient: Verse.” In Encyclopedia or Erotic Literature. Gaetan Brulotte and John Phillips, eds. New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2006; 588–596. Gaitskill, Mary. “A Romantic Weekend.” In The Second Gates of Paradise. Alberto Manguel, ed. Toronto, Canada: Stoddart Publishing Co., 2000; 175–204. Jakubowski, Maxim, editor. Mammoth Book of Erotica. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2000.

EROTIC LITERATURE Lewis, Felice Flanery. Literature, Obscenity, and Law. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976. Loth, David. The Erotic in Literature. New York: Julian Messner, Inc., 1961. Meeker, Natania. “French: Eighteenth Century.” In Encyclopedia or Erotic Literature. Gaetan Brulotte and John Phillips, eds. New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2006; 481–488. Miller, Henry. Tropic of Cancer. New York: Grove Press, 1999. Montserrat, Dominic. “Greek, Ancient: Prose.” In Encyclopedia or Erotic Literature. Gaetan Brulotte and John Phillips, eds. New York, New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2006; 584–588. Mudge, Bradford K. “English: United Kingdom, Eighteenth Century.” In Encyclopedia or Erotic Literature. Gaetan Brulotte and John Phillips, eds. New York, New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2006; 415–420. Packard, Chris. Queer Cowboys. New York, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Queen, Carol. “Best Whore in Hillsboro.” In More Totally Herotica. Marcy Sheiner, ed. New York, New York: QPBC, 1999; 234–243. ———. “What Do Women Want? We Want to Be Big Slutty Fags, Among Other Things.” In The Burning Pen. M. Christian, ed. Los Angeles, CA: Alyson Publications, 2001; 44–50. Roche Thomas S., series ed. Noirotica. Pahoa, Haiwaii: Black Books, 1996–2001. Saint-Martin, Lori. “Feminism: Anti-Porn Movement and Pro-Porn Movement.” In Encyclopedia or Erotic Literature. Gaetan Brulotte and John Phillips, eds. New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2006; 455–460. Scott, Paul. “French: Seventeenth Century.” In Encyclopedia or Erotic Literature. Gaetan Brulotte and John Phillips, eds. New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2006; 476–480. Taormino, Tristan, ed. Best Lesbian Erotica. San Francisco, CA: Cleis Press, 1996–2007. Welcher-Calhoun, Cherysse. “Homecumming.” In Best Black Women’s Erotica. Blanche Richardson, ed. San Francisco, CA: Cleis Press, 2001; 28–40. Wharton, Greg. An Interview with Thomas S. Roche. [Online, 2000] Suspect Thoughts: A Journal of Subversive Writing <www.suspectthoughts.com/roche.htm> Whitman, Walt. Whitman: Poetry and Prose. Justin Kaplan, ed. New York: Library of America, 1996.

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F FANTASY LITERATURE Definition. Fantasy literature is a genre of literature that has produced much discussion in regard to definition. What is and is not considered fantasy is often reflective of the worldview of the critic, and the definition can habitually be too narrow or general to be considered agreeable. The word fantasy itself comes from the Greek phantasia, meaning “to make visible.” In its most agreed-upon definition, fantasy literature is the genre in which heroic or villainous characters narrate from a setting wholly imagined (i.e., secondary) or amalgamated with existent creations (i.e., those from existing mythological texts), geographically influenced by historical settings and often depicting environments in accordance to their nature (e.g., haunted forests are dark and diseased, while sacred groves are beautiful and potent), and chronologically set during (or having a strong connection with) the past. Stories often involve a conflict between the forces of good and evil in which a war is fought, a quest is embarked on, a life is chronicled, or order must be restored by central characters. Fantasy embodies the development of the past and the evolution of the future; it is an alternate reality, glimpsing into the impossible. Fantasy literature is sharply divided by its subgenres, constructing their own doctrine and considering themselves related only through superficial trappings. The following subgenres are among the largest in fantasy literature: High fantasy (also known as epic fantasy) is often written in an ancient or secondary world setting, richly detailed and exhibiting cultures similar to that of reality (such as medieval). Such fantasy tends to be written in an epic-like manner (often narrated over several novels), reminiscent of historical and mythological texts, so as to project a sense of grandeur and significance, and such works often reflect a great deal of research (much like historical fantasy). Research can extend to races, language, social customs, and industry. The goal of high fantasy is that of realism, so to depict the unnatural as being normal. Well-known works in this field include David A. Drake’s Lord of the Isles series (1997–), David Eddings’s Belgariad

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FANTASY COMPARED TO MAINSTREAM FICTION Famed author of fantasy literature Stephen R. Donaldson (best known for his Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever, series, 1977–), offers a unique school of thought: [Compare] fantasy to realistic, mainstream fiction. In realistic fiction, the characters are expressions of their world, whereas in fantasy the world is an expression of the characters. Even if you argue that realistic fiction is about the characters, and that the world they live in is just one tool to express them, it remains true that the details which make up their world come from a recognized body of reality—tables, chairs, jobs, stresses which we all acknowledge as being external and real, forceful on their own terms. In fantasy, however, the ultimate justification for all the external details arises from the characters themselves. The characters confer reality on their surroundings. (Donaldson 1986, 7)

series (1982–1984), Robin Hobb’s Farseer trilogy (1995–1997), and Tad Williams’s Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy (1988–1993). Low fantasy (also known as urban fantasy) primarily takes place in the real world, often relocating fantastical creatures and characters into a natural environment. While such stories can venture into secondary worlds, these are the lesser to the real world because the emphasis of this subgenre is to merge the elements of fantasy with the world of readers. Such fantasy is often dependent on existing mythologies (which it has a tendency to modernize) and visible to characters who believe or seek out the fantastical, which is mostly hidden from the natural world. Books by authors who have excelled in this genre include Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks (1987), Jonathan Carroll’s The Land of Laughs (1980), John Crowley’s Little, Big (1981), and Charles de Lint’s Moonheart (1984). At times, fairy tales are included in this subgenre, but they are usually set in the past and are often set in a secondary world, such as Wilhelm and Jakob Grimm’s three-volume Kinder-undHausmarchen (1812) and modern anthologies such as editor Jack Zipes’s Spells of Enchantment: The Wondrous Fairy Tales of Western Culture (1991). Sword and sorcery fiction (also known as heroic fantasy) is a subgenre named by author Fritz Reuter Leiber Jr. (1910–1992) to identify a type of fantasy he and fellow authors were writing predominantly in the later twentieth century, but that had originated in the 1920s with Robert E. Howard’s short story “The Shadow Kingdom” (1929). Sword and sorcery fiction is written in a secondary world setting, in which protagonists are often social or cultural outcasts who live outside the law and possess a love-hate relationship with civilization. Like adventure fiction, the subgenre is full of emotionally charged action and adventure that involves magic, monsters, and traditional maidens in distress; however, the latter trend has changed with the growth in warrior women, thanks in part to Jessica Amanda Salmonson (e.g., Tomoe Gozen, 1981; rev. The Disfavored Hero, 1999). Works that have excelled in this subgenre include Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series (recently collected in The First Book of Lankhmar, 2001, and The Second Book of Lankhmar, 2001); Charles R. Saunders’s Imaro series (Imaro, 1981, rev. 2006; Imaro: The Quest for Cush, 1984, rev. 2007; Imaro: The Trail of Bohu, 1985, rev. 2008); Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane series (Darkness Weaves, 1970, restored text 1978; Bloodstone, 1975, Dark Crusade, 1976, and short story collections Death

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Angel’s Shadow, 1973, and Night Winds, 1978); Richard L. Tierney’s Simon Magus series (short story collection Scroll of Thoth: Simon Magus and the Great Old Ones, 1997, and The Gardens of Lucullus, 2001, a collaborative novel with Glenn Rahman); and Darrell Schweitzer’s short story collection We Are All Legends (1981) and novels The Shattered Goddess (1982), The White Isle (1990), and The Mask of the Sorcerer (1995). This subgenre is not to be confused with dark fantasy, which merges fantastical elements with horror. Historical fantasy is a subgenre set exclusively in the past, often merging fiction with fact in a display of exhaustive research. Events in history are often retold in an alternative or contemporary manner (e.g., the reign of King Arthur in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Avalon series starting with Mists of Avalon, 1979, and the Trojan War in David Gemmell’s trilogy of Troy: Lord of the Silver Bow, 2005; Troy: Shield of Thunder, 2006; and Troy: Fall of Kings, 2007) in which familiar figures are changed and their characters are reinterpreted differently (such as the life of Jesus Christ in Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man, 1966, rev. 1969) and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, 2003). Dan Brown’s novels are a prime example of when fictional stories are appended to well-known historical events or figures so to explore a “secret history,” which has resulted in readers considering the works as nonfiction. Primarily, historical fantasy does not include supernatural beings and at times seeks to logically explain the elements of mythology (e.g., Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead, 1976). However, some authors of historical fantasy willingly incorporate the supernatural into their stories but are careful that these elements do not obscure the rich detail of historical events and characters (e.g., Robert E. Howard’s historical adventures such as “Marchers of Valhalla,” 1932, and “The Dark Man,” 1931, among others). Dark fantasy is a subgenre that can be divided into two types of story. The first is when elements of fantasy are used as the primary source of horror (as exampled in the short stories of Ray Bradbury, Christopher Golden, Joe R. Lansdale, Thomas Ligotti, Michael Mignola, and Clark Ashton Smith), while the second type is when sword and sorcery fiction is overtly embedded with elements of horror, to allow the development and exploration of darker themes. Often, in the latter type of dark fantasy, anti-heroes are the protagonists, and the plot includes more violence, sexuality, or psychological detail (as exampled in the series of Charles R. Gramlich’s Kainja, Les Daniels’s Don Sebastian de Villenueva, and Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane). It is important to note that public perception as to what constitutes fantasy literature can vary dramatically. Some critics have commented that the trappings of fantasy exist in more genres than most would initially suspect, as all fiction itself is fantasy to begin with, and that even the so-called realistic authors are presenting readers with their own particular, often odd or unusual, perception of reality. History. An overview of the development of fantasy literature is the grounds for much discussion, but it is relatively easy to determine a foundational work. Ancient mythology, primarily Sumerian epics such as The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 1500 B.C.E.) and Greco-Roman epics such as The Iliad (c. 750 B.C.E.), The Odyssey (c. 750 B.C.E.), and later The Argonautica (c. 250 B.C.E.), are often considered the first forms of fantasy literature because they are ripe with heroes, villains, quests, and supernatural beings (living creatures, deities, and the undead), and the once theological aspects of the stories are no longer considered relative (hence ruling out Jewish, Christian, and later Islamic sacred literature from being labeled early fantasy

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literature). For untold centuries both the oral tradition and the world’s dominant story modes (myths, epics, folktales, legends, and some pseudo-histories) have been fantastic. That fantasy literature can be redefined as modern mythology may not be as difficult to imagine as one may believe, for all literature comes beneath the banner of a unique mythos. In the United States, it is harder to determine a seminal work. Some commentators accredit the sacred texts of Native Americans with being the first forms of American fantasy literature (written down as early as the nineteenth century by ethnographers working with select tribes), but this opinion is uncommon because the theological belief of these deities and entities still exists. More common is the belief that Washington Irving’s stories of dark fantasy, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip van Winkle” (collected in The Sketch Book Of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., 1819–1820) are the first true American fantasies, followed by the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and L. Frank Baum, to name but a few American classics of the genre. During the early twentieth century, the growth of fantasy literature was tremendous. Pulp magazines such as Weird Tales: The Unique Magazine (1923–1954), Unknown (1939–1943), Fantastic Adventures (1939–1953), Famous Fantastic Mysteries (1939–1953), The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1949–), and Fantastic (1952–1980) supplied everyday Americans with fantasy literature and published thousands of authors. Several of these magazines have become best sellers. Even when some of these magazines died off because of either financial or production difficulties, small presses such as Arkham House republished many of these pulp magazine authors in handsome hardcover editions, including H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, and August Derleth. Slowly but surely, fantasy literature was recapturing the imagination of American readers again, and with the publication of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian series in the latter half of the twentieth century, book publishers (such as Sphere, Ace, Bantam, and Del Rey/Ballantine) matched a demand that went into the millions, also publishing the countless imitators and anthologies of fantasy that emerged soon after. Trends and Themes. Fantasy literature in the twenty-first century continues the same trends and themes that have existed in the genre for millennia, and unlike many other genres, in particular science fiction and horror, it is debatable as to whether one can consider national or international events as reflective of successful trends (or sales). For example, events such as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on America have resulted in new subgenres, and while critics have accredited this to changes in genres such as political thrillers, the theme of terrorism is not new

IMPORTANT FANTASY AUTHORS IN THE 2000s Since 2000, fantasy literature has shown no sign of stopping, with small presses mainly publishing short story collections and mass market publishers manufacturing countless fantasy novels.With the release of several cinematic adaptations of fantasy novels, the genre continues to generate new readers, profitable sales, and the opportunity for new authors such as Jeff Vandermeer, Elizabeth Hand, Jeffrey Ford, Jeffrey Thomas, Michael Cisco, Shelley Jackson, and Michael Chabon to emerge in a professional manner.

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and can hardly be seen as redefining an entire genre. Publishing phenomena like J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997–2007) and Dan Brown’s historical fantasy The Da Vinci Code (2003) are difficult to attribute to a particular event and could not fairly be considered a widespread trend. The only identifiable change in the themes of fantasy literature may be modernization for contemporary audiences (as seen in the works of Neil Gaiman, such as the Sandman series, 1987–1996, and American Gods, 2001) so to have the imagined world inherit more of the world’s sociological norms, a trend already witnessed in dark fantasy. Reaffirmation of the fantastical is an unusual theme in fantasy literature, particular low fantasy, in which the elements of fantasy are expressed in a manner that indicates they are a natural part of the real world and not imaginary; it is the belief and survival of fantasy in the work that becomes its very theme, such as J.M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan, or, The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up (1928). It is also possible to identify the growth of more mature and heavily researched work across all subgenres of fantasy literature, such as Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (2004) and Elizabeth Kostova’s historical fantasy The Historian (2005). The theme of the hero’s journey, which one may label as traditional, is among one the largest in fantasy literature. Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) is divided into three stages: Departure, Initiation, and Return. Departure begins with “The Call to Adventure” and is then followed by “Refusal to the Call,” “Supernatural Aid,” “Crossing the First Threshold,” and then “Belly of the Whale.” Initiation begins with “The Road of Trials” and is then followed by “Meeting the Goddess,” “Woman as Temptress,” “Atonement with the Father,” “Apotheosis,” and finally “The Ultimate Boon.” Finally, Return begins with “Refusal of the Return” and is then followed by “The Magic Flight,” “Rescue from Without,” “The Crossing of the Return Threshold,” “Master of the Two Worlds,” and finally “Freedom to Live.” The debate over whether most, if even all, fantasy adheres to this formula has long been a discussion among authors and critics of the genre. Campbell’s most successful influence was on George Lucas’s Star Wars saga (1977–2005), which is a merger of fantasy and science fiction. An alternative is the ongoing series in which short stories compose the main characters’ biography over a period of time. Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser sword and sorcery fiction (1939–1988) works are free of set archetypes such as Campbell’s, as they choose to explore the identity of their characters and often do not have an ending in sight (irrespective of what sequence in which they were written). In fantasy literature, particularly high fantasy, the ongoing battle between the forces of good and evil is a natural component of the plot. Michael Moorcock has made explicit use of this in his Multiverse series, in which an “Eternal Champion” (the best known incarnation being Elric, who first appeared in Elric of Melniboné, 1972) is directly involved in the battle between the forces of good and evil (which Moorcock retitles Law and Chaos). However this battle is described or presented, while existing in all subgenres of fantasy, it is most prominent in high fantasy because of its epic-like presence. An alternative to this is the restoration of order by a force of good, in a world already ruled by the forces of evil, as in the works of Roger Zelazny (the Chronicles of Amber series, 1970–1991). From this often emerges the theme of power and the responsibility that comes with it, also prominent in fantasy literature. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), Hobbit Frodo Baggins learns that he will be the one to possess Sauron’s One Ring and travel to the volcanoes of Mordor to destroy its evil forever.

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In Neil Gaiman’s Books of Magic (1991), novice magician Timothy Hunter learns that he will inherit great power, but it is yet undetermined whether he will use the power for the force of good or evil. Christian fiction, in which elements of fantasy are renowned, also details the battle between good and evil in which Satan (and his demons) battle against God (and his angels) in accordance with their natures as described in the Old and New Testament canons. Christian fantasists such as Karen Hancock (the Guardian-King series, 2003–2007) and Brock Thoene and Bodie Thoene (A.D. Chronicles series, 2003–) are authors who often depict Christian protagonists surviving in a world where the war between God and Satan is everpresent, but they depict this world allegorically (best exampled in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series, 1950–1956). The first three volumes of Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker series are also worth mentioning (Seventh Son, 1987; Red Prophet, 1988; Prentice Alvin, 1989), as the author’s devotion to Mormonism comes through in his writings. Humorous fantasy is a limited trend in fantasy literature, particularly works written primarily for a young audience. While mostly present in British fantasy literature, there are some notable American authors who merge comedy with fantasy. L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt wrote a series about the time-traveling Harold Shea, beginning in Incompleat Enchanter (1942); Poul Anderson’s novel Three Hearts and Three Lions (1961) is often referred to as a work of humor, as is Piers Anthony’s A Spell for Chameleon (1977). Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser sword and sorcery stories (1939–1988) also contained humorous moments, as did the dark fantasy stories of Robert Bloch. Fantasy works in which animals are protagonists follow a well-known theme and have existed as far bask as the fables of Aesop (c. 6 B.C.E.) and have remained a cornerstone within British fantasy, as seen in the works of Lewis Carroll, Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Grahame, and Richard Adams. Animals that talk come in two forms: humanoids who talk, eat, and dress like humans or animals that retain their nature but are able to speak the human language. Examples of American authors who have chosen to narrate their stories through animals include Joel Chandler Harris (Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, 1880), Fritz Leiber (The Green Millennium, 1953, and the Gummitch short stories in Gummitch & Friends, 1992), and Art Spiegelman (Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, 1992, a retelling of the Holocaust, belonging to the subgenre of historical fantasy). Contexts and Issues. In regard to the discussion of fantasy literature and how it reflects contemporary issues, in “Why Fantasy and Why Now?” Bakker comments that fantasy is “the primary literary response to what is often called the ‘contemporary crisis of meaning’ . . . [representing] a privileged locus from which one might understand what is going in [modern] culture.” Citing the aftermath of the Enlightenment as an indication of a return to fantasy (and one could argue religion), Bakker rightly decrees the following: Fantasy is the celebration of what we no longer are: individuals certain of our meaningfulness in a meaningful world. The wish-fulfillment that distinguishes fantasy from other genres is not to be the all-conquering hero, but to live in a meaningful world. The fact that such worlds are enchanted worlds, worlds steeped in magic, simply demonstrates the severity of our contemporary crisis. “Magic” is a degraded category in our society; if you believe in magic in this world, you are an irrational flake. And yet magic is all we have in our attempt to recover some vicarious sense of meaningfulness. If fantasy primarily

FANTASY LITERATURE looks back, primarily celebrates those values rendered irrelevant by post-industrial society, it is because our future only holds the promise of a more trenchant nihilism. One may have faith otherwise, but by definition such faith is not rational. Faith, remember, is belief without reasons. (Bakker 2002)

Themes are universal, as are the emotions we share. When reading fantasy literature, this is no different. It is composed of a variety of philosophical elements and structured in an inimitable manner that upholds a particular ideology, connecting it closer to the values and beliefs of the real world. For example, the appeal of a dragon may for one reader simply be the entertainment value derived from a sense of awe at an otherworldly and wondrous beast while for another it might embody and symbolize his or her dream to fly (either literally or metaphorically). The term escapism is often applied to fantasy literature, in that fantasy is seen as a means of escaping the realities of contemporary life. While the elements of horror or science fiction might be seen as either too confronting or too complex, the worlds of fantasy are often depicted as being far more favorable and welcoming because they are absent of the social and ecological problems of the real world. However, when establishing the weird tale canon, S.T. Joshi includes fantasy but is quick to discard “imaginary-world fantasy” and heroic fantasy; rather, he includes only fantastical elements unnatural to this world in the weird tale canon, for the former types of fantasy seem “to lack a certain metaphysical ramifications present in nearly all other types of weird fiction” (Joshi 1990, 9). This point of view is open to debate. As a genre, fantasy literature has faced being stereotyped by the works of a single subgenre (for example, all fantasy must include sorcerers, dragons, and knights, as in high fantasy). Formulaic writing is also inherent in some fantasy literature, again in high fantasy and also sword and sorcery fiction. Public perception of fantasy literature has shown people’s inability to differentiate its subgenres, and in some instances, it is seen as the same as science fiction. Others think of fantasy literature as being the same as children’s literature, reflective of how fantasy was depicted and presented in the earlier days of the older generation. Fantasy literature, particularly high fantasy, has often been charged with overwriting, whether in relation to exhausting the genre as a whole (as is often said of the subgenre of vampire fiction in horror), too much detail on inconsequential matter (sometimes considered as self-absorption of research), or the sheer length of a series that does not appear to have an ending in sight (such as Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, 1990–). Additionally, some authors have carelessly paid too much respect, admiration, and honor to the work of an earlier, often classic, author. Both J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard have been the cause of countless imitators, most of whom are mediocre in comparison to their source of inspiration. Tolkien’s imitators include authors such as Terry Brooks, David Eddings, Robert Jordan, and Dennis McKiernan, to name but a few, while Howard’s imitators, primarily located in sword and sorcery fiction, include Lin Carter, Gardener Fox, John Jakes, and Roy Thomas. Howard’s works, like H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories (resulting in the infamous “Cthulhu Mythos”), have resulted in dozens of pastiches in which established authors (such as L. Sprauge de Camp, Björn Nyberg, and Harry Turtledove) have continued the saga of well-known creations, in this case, Conan of Cimmeria. In stating this issue, paying homage in fantasy literature is not to be seen as a flaw or deemed unworthy of study. A prime example of successful homage is Lovecraft’s Dunsanian period of writing between the years 1919 and 1921,

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when the author’s writing reflected the works of Lord Dunsany (1878–1957). Dunsany is known for his mythological worlds and characters and has rightly been considered foundational to fantasy literature. Lovecraft was a great admirer of his work, writing several stories that were Dunsanian in nature, some of the wellknown works being “The Doom That Came to Sarnath,” “The Cats of Ulthar,” and “The White Ship.” Lovecraft never truly used a creation by Dunsany, only adopting the feeling and elements present within them. Another important issue is the lack of literary criticism devoted to the works of authors within fantasy literature. While classic authors of fantasy, often British, have produced volumes of critical studies, studies of the life and works of some American fantasy authors are not as abundant as they should or need to be. That several American fantasy authors have produced a large oeuvre of work and have won countless awards without receiving the serious critical recognition they deserve is an issue of concern (as witnessed in the next section). Reception. Fantasy literature has attracted incredible interest at the beginning of the twenty-first century as a result of cinematic adaptations. Historical fantasy has been predominant in the last decade, with Gladiator (2000), Troy (2004), Alexander (2004), Kingdom of Heaven (2005), the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy (2003–2007), and others proving to be financially successful. Film adaptations of recent fantasy literature such as Christopher Paolini’s Eragon (2005) and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997–2007) are watched either by young readers who have read the texts and desire to visually experience the story or by younger audiences who are compelled to read the texts after having seen the cinematic adaptation. Film adaptations of classic fantasy literature such J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series (1950–1956), while certainly watched by younger audiences, are predominately watched by an older generation who have read the texts before seeing the adaptations. It would not be unfair to comment that had these movies not been released, the output of fantasy literature in the last decade would have been less productive or, at the very least, less profitable. Critical studies are often limited to book-length examinations by actual fantasy authors such as Lin Carter’s Imaginary Worlds: The Art of Fantasy (1973), Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (1979, rev. 1992), and Michael Moorcock’s Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy (1987, rev. 2004) or are written by academics, such as Brian Attebery’s The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature (1980), editor Brian M. Thomsen’s The American Fantasy Tradition (2002), and David Sandner’s Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader (2004). They are published by either academic or small presses (spotlighting a subgenre or a single author). The number of magazines and journals dedicated to the serious study of fantasy literature has shrunk over the years, for only a few noteworthy titles exist today (such as Studies in Fantasy Literature; Wormwood: Writings about Fantasy, Supernatural and Decadent Literature; Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and the Genres of Myth and Fantasy Studies; Extrapolation; The Bulletin of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association; Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts; and The New York Review of Science Fiction, to name a few). Essays on fantasy literature are often found sporadically, either on the Internet (such as webzines, though few are peer reviewed) or in journals of nation-specific literature (such as Journal of Popular Culture and American Literature). As stated

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previously, despite the output of some fantasy authors, the critical study of their fiction is despondently dearth. Selected Authors. The following discussion of four major authors active in fantasy literature includes an analysis of each author’s works. The following American-born and raised authors are observed: James Blaylock (1950–), Tim Powers (1952–), Jessica Amanda Salmonson (1950–), and Darrell Schweitzer (1952–). Author James Blaylock writes both science fiction and fantasy, but it is the latter in which he excels and is most successful artistically. The books in Blaylock’s earliest trilogy, The Elfin Ship (1982), The Disappearing Dwarf (1983), and The Stone Giant (1989), are best read as children’s literature, merging with high fantasy but lacking a literary depth that would rank them alongside most contemporary authors of the subgenre. Far better is Land of Dreams (1987), a dark fantasy for young adults in which children uncover the border between reality and fantasy, resulting in an unsolved murder and the return of a sinister carnival. The Digging Leviathan (1984) is more humorous science fiction than fantasy, and while Homunculus (1986) and its sequel Lord Kelvin’s Machine (1992) are somewhat fantastical in their prose and conception, they are better labeled “steampunk,” a struggling subgenre within science fiction. It is not until The Last Coin (1988) that Blaylock successfully masters the use of fantastical elements in an original and rewarding manner. In a tale set in Southern California, innkeeper Andrew Vanbergen unwillingly becomes the force of good against the traveling Jules Pennyman, who is attempting to collect Judas Iscariot’s original 30 pieces of silver because by doing so he will achieve immortality. The Paper Grail (1991) is similar in that the Holy Grail is revealed to be an origami cup, which when folded in particular ways can achieve different types of magic. Set in northern California, this book features aging grail guardian Michael Graham, who leaves the Holy Grail to museum curator Howard Barton, beginning an adventurous story in which Barton, unaware of forthcoming dangers and hopelessly in love, must ensure that the holy artifact does not end up in the wrong hands. In All the Bells on Earth (1995), small-business owner Walt Stebbins accidentally receives a delivery in the mail, a deceased “Bluebird of Happiness” that makes all his dreams come true. However, the individual who was to receive the artifact, former friend and business partner Robert Argyle, is desperate to retrieve the artifact at all costs because it is the key to repossessing his soul (which he sold to a satanic clergyman decades ago). Blaylock’s next novels, Night Relics (1994), Winter Tides (1997), and The Rainy Season (1999), are all contemporary ghost stories, and although they share elements with stories in dark fantasy, they are best considered and studied as horror. To date there has been no critical study of Blaylock’s work, the closest being the author’s own Web site (http://www.sybertooth.com/blaylock/index.htm). Tim Powers is an author of fantasy literature, best known for his works of historical fantasy and occasional dark fantasy (though some of his novels could easily be classified as adventure fiction with supernatural elements). Powers’s novels are richly researched and are always multilayered with history, mythology, and the supernatural, and it is often difficult to summarize a novel because of the countless plots it contains. Epitaph in Rust (1976) is a science fantasy detailing the life of Brother Thomas, who flees his monastery and finds himself in a future Los Angeles where revolution is afire. The Drawing of the Dark (1979) is set in sixteenth-century Europe in which Irishman Brian Duffy, a mercenary, retires and becomes a bouncer at a Viennese inn, brewer of the legendary Herzwesten beer. Soon enough, the inn

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is visited by figures from Celtic and Norse mythology, and Duffy learns that he is a central figure in protecting western Europe from the encroaching Turkish Ottoman Empire. The Anubis Gates (1983), while possessing elements of science fiction, is also a fantasy novel. Scholar Brendan Doyle, who is living in the 1980s, is sent back to nineteenth-century London with a group of students, to work on a biography of (fictional) poet William Ashbless as well as to experience a lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. However, when Doyle is kidnapped by gypsies, who are led by a powerful sorcerer who desires to destroy the British Empire’s hold over Egypt, the story take a fantastical turn. The dark fantasy On Stranger Tides (1987) is a supernatural pirate story set in the eighteenth century in which Jack Shandy (formerly accountant John Chandagnac) seeks revenge on a family member who financially betrayed his father as well as engaging in battle against the legendary Blackbeard, who is not only a fierce warrior but also a practicing voodoo priest. The Stress of Her Regard (1989) is a dark fantasy, set in the early nineteenth century, and revolves around Doctor Michael Crawford, who, on the eve of his wedding, places his wedding ring on a town statue for safe keeping. The morning after, the statue has disappeared, and his bride is brutally murdered. Accused by the townspeople and unsure of his actions, he flees and finds solace in the company of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats, where it is revealed that the statue with his ring is, in fact, a vampire. Last Call (1992) is centered around tarot magic and card gambling, in which ex-professional card player Scott Crane battles against his father, the current incarnation of the Fisher King, in a game of life and death. Expiration Date (1995) is a supernatural fantasy in which 11-year-old Koot Hoomie Parganas becomes possessed by the ghost of Thomas Edison and must evade a horde of “ghost eaters” who wish to devour the power of Edison’s ghost. Earthquake Weather (1997) is the sequel to both Last Call and Expiration Date, in which the new Fisher King Scott Crane is killed and presided over by Koot, who will either resurrect the chaos awoken since the king’s death or will become the Fisher King himself and restore order. Declare (2000) is a supernatural spy thriller, with fantastical elements thrown in, surrounding recalled spy Andrew Hale. Hale must investigate Mount Ararat, where it is said Noah’s Ark resides, before the Russians, who are supernaturally protected during the Cold War. Three Days to Never (2006) is a more interesting novel (and like other novels contains elements of science fiction), detailing the life of Albert Einstein’s illegitimate daughter (who has superpowers) and her evasion of the Israeli Mossad and the mystical group the Vespers. It is soon revealed the Einstein successfully created and used a time machine, and it is the desire of these groups to possess the machine for their own diabolical use. Surprisingly, very little literary criticism has been devoted to the works of Tim Powers, the most notable being Arinn Dembo’s “Impassion’d Clay: On Tim Powers’ The Stress of Her Regard” (1991) and Fiona Kelleghan’s “Getting a Life: Haunted Spaces in Two Novels by Tim Powers” (1998), both in the New York Review of Science Fiction, and the largest unofficial Web site at http://www.theworksoftimpowers.com/. Jessica Amanda Salmonson is known as an author of both fantasy literature and horror, her books in the latter genre often including elements of dark fantasy, in addition to being a prolific editor and poet. Salmonson is of importance to the genre in that her best-known fantasy works, mostly being sword and sorcery fiction, were upon their publication both unique and original within a genre that is primarily patriarchal and at many times mediocre. Salmonson’s edited anthologies Amazons!

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(1979), Amazons II (1982), Heroic Visions (1983), and Heroic Visions II (1986) were groundbreaking in that they reestablished the warrior woman in fantasy literature in an era when stereotypes were still existent, and this was critically explored further in her exhaustive The Encyclopedia of Amazons: Women Warriors from Antiquity to the Present Era (1991) and the forthcoming Amazonia: Antiquity’s Bold Utopian Experiment. Equally enduring is Salmonson’s Tomoe Gozen trilogy (Tomoe Gozen, 1981, rev. The Disfavored Hero, 1999; The Golden Naginata, 1982; Thousand Shrine Warrior, 1984), which refreshingly relocated sword and sorcery fiction from a secondary world setting to a twelfth-century Japan in which the supernatural exists. Loosely based on the historical figure, Tomoe Gozen is a masterless female samurai who unwillingly killed her master Shojiro Shigeno as a result of being resurrected by his enemy, the magician Huan. From that point on, her journey is one of redemption and continues in the following novels, in which she must learn to live in a patriarchal world of revenge, betrayal, and obedience. The Swordswoman (1982) spotlights the life of Erin Wyler, who upon unleashing the power of a magical sword, begins a life full of trials and tribulation. Set in China, Ou Lu Khen and the Beautiful Madwoman (1985) is a dark fantasy set exclusively in the past and details the forbidden love of Ou Lu Khen for a beautiful woman who is favored by the gods. Faced with stigma, but overcome with love, Ou Lu Khen follows her, even if it means he too must succumb to madness. Anthony Shriek, His Doleful Adventures; or, Lovers of Another Realm (1992) introduces the character of Anthony Shriek, a college student who learns he is a demon from the Nightlands. A dark fantasy, the story explores Shriek’s psychological acceptance of his nature as well as his relationship with the enigmatic Emily, who is also a demon. Although Salmonson is currently writing horror stories, many can easily be classified as dark fantasy, as evidenced by the stories in her collections Mystic Women: Their Ancient Tales & Legends Recounted by a Woman Inmate of the Calcutta Insane Asylum (1991), The Goddess Under Siege (1992), and Wisewomen & Boggy-Boos: A Dictionary Of Lesbian Fairy Lore (1992). Particular stories worth citing are “Angel’s Exchange,” “Madame Enchantia and the Maze Dream,” “Mamishka and the Sorcerer,” “Eagle-Worm,” and “The View from Mount Futuba.” To date there has been no critical study of Salmonson’s work, the closest being an analytical interview titled “Jessica Amanda Salmonson: Storyteller” for Jitterbug Fantasia (2004) and the author’s own Web site at http://www.violetbooks.com/. Darrell Schweitzer is an author, editor, and critic of fantasy literature, writing in the subgenres of low fantasy, dark fantasy, and sword and sorcery fiction. Former editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (1977–1982) and Amazing Stories (1982–1986) and current coeditor of the modern incarnation of Weird Tales: The Unique Magazine (1988–) with George Scithers, Schweitzer is among one of the most important assets to the genre and continues to contribute invaluable works. While The Shattered Goddess (1982) is a science fantasy set in the future, it does involve the deception of a witch who replaces her son with the heir to the throne. The royal-blooded child grows up as a sorcerer, and when he learns of his true origins, he must make a decision that will affect the entire world. Tom O’Bedlam’s Night Out, and Other Strange Excursions (1985) is a collection of whimsical short stories about the legendary figure from English folklore and his amusing exploits. The White Isle (1988) is a dark fantasy novella focusing on the attempts by Prince Evnos from the Island of Iankoros to retrieve his beloved bride from the God of Death and is rich in its poetic language and description of an unscrupulous deity.

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The Mask of the Sorcerer (1995) is in many ways high fantasy, being an episodic novel set in an alternative Egypt about the travails of the Sekenre (an immortal sorcerer trapped in the body of a child) and his desire to again become a powerful sorcerer, like his father Vashtem, even if it means traveling to the Land of the Dead. Sekenre: The Book of the Sorcerer (2004), the former’s sequel of sorts, is a collection of short stories exploring the trails and tribulations of the emerging sorcerer, written in first person. We Are All Legends (1981) is a collection of short stories involving a wandering crusader called Sir Julian the Apostate, who, because of bedding a witch, is cursed by God and traveling the lands of Europe in search of redemption and a means to reverse his unsavory fate. Schweitzer’s works are an amusing exploration of religion by an increasingly popular author and are among the better sword and sorcery fiction of the era. Transients: And Other Disquieting Stories (1993) and Necromancies and Netherworlds: Uncanny Stories (1999) with Jason van Hollander are both collections of dark fantasy stories, some with a humorous edge and others that are clearly horror. Schweitzer is the editor of important anthologies of literary criticism, such as Exploring Fantasy Worlds: Essays on Fantastic Literature (1985), Discovering Classic Fantasy Fiction: Essays on the Antecedents of Fantastic Literature (1996), and The Neil Gaiman Reader (2006) and is the sole author of the book-length studies Pathways to Elfland: The Writings of Lord Dunsany (1989) and Windows of the Imagination (1998). Schweitzer has received very little critical study, despite his popularity and volume of work. Steve Behrends’s “Holy Fire: Darrell Schweitzer’s Imaginative Fiction,” in Studies in Weird Fiction (1989), and the analytical interview “The Sorcery of Storytelling: The ‘Imaginary Worlds’ of Darrell Schweitzer” for Black Gate Magazine (Fultz 2006) are all that currently exist. Bibliography Anderson, Poul. Three Hearts and Three Lions. London: Victor Gollancz, 2003. Anthony, Piers. A Spell for Chameleon. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine, 1977. Attebery, Brian. The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Bakker, Scott R. “Why Fantasy and Why Now?” August 2002. http://www.sffworld.com/ authors/b/bakker_scott/articles/whyfantasyandwhynow.html. Behrends, Steve. “Holy Fire: Darrell Schweitzer’s Imaginative Fiction.” Studies in Weird Fiction 5 (1989): 3–11. Berlyne, John. The Works of Tim Powers. http://www.theworksoftimpowers.com. Blaylock, James. All the Bells on Earth. New York: Ace Books, 1995. ———. The Disappearing Dwarf. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine, 1983. ———. The Elfin Ship. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine, 1982. ———. Land of Dreams. New York: Arbor House, 1987. ———. The Last Coin. New York: Ace Books, 1988. ———. The Paper Grail. New York: Ace Books, 1991. ———. The Stone Giant. New York: Ace Books, 1989. Bradley, Marion Zimmer. Mists of Avalon. New York: Ballantine, 1985. Brennan, Kristen. “Jessica Amanda Salmonson: Storyteller.” Interview. Jitterbug Fantasia Summer 2004. http://www.spookybug.com/violet/index.html. Brown, Dan. The Da Vinci Code. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Bull, Emma. War for the Oaks. New York: Ace Books, 1987. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972.

FANTASY LITERATURE Card, Orson Scott. Prentice Alvin. New York: Tor, 1989 [Alvin Maker 3]. ———. Red Prophet. Alvin Maker series. New York: Tor, 1988 [Alvin Maker 2]. ———. Seventh Son. New York: Tor, 1987 [Alvin Maker 1]. Carroll, Jonathan. The Land of Laughs. New York: Viking Press, 1980. Carter, Lin. Imaginary Worlds: The Art of Fantasy. New York: Ballantine, 1973. Clarke, Susanna. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. Crichton, Michael. Eaters of the Dead. New York: Ballantine, 1976. Crowley, John. Little, Big. Westminster, MD: Bantam Books, 1981. de Camp, L. Sprague, and Fletcher Pratt. Incomplete Enchanter. London: Sphere, 1979. de Lint, Charles. Moonheart. New York: Ace Books, 1984. Dembo, Arinn. “Impassion’d Clay: On Tim Powers’ The Stress of Her Regard.” New York Review of Science Fiction 37 (1991): 1, 3–7. Donaldson, Stephen R. Epic Fantasy in the Modern World: A Few Observations by Stephen R. Donaldson. Kent, OH: Kent State University Libraries, 1986. ———. Fatal Revenant. The Last Chronicles. New York: Putnam, 2007. ———. The Illearth War. The First Chronicles. Orlando, FL: Holt, 1977. ———. Lord Foul’s Bane. The First Chronicles. Orlando, FL: Holt, 1977. ———. The One Tree. The Second Chronicles. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine, 1982. ———. The Power That Preserves. The First Chronicles. Orlando, FL: Holt, 1977. ———. The Runes of the Earth. The Last Chronicles. New York: Putnam, 2004. ———. White Gold Wielder. The Second Chronicles. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine, 1983. ———. The Wounded Land. The Second Chronicles. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine, 1980. Drake, David. A. The Fortress of Glass. New York: Tor Books, 2006. ———. Goddess of the Ice Realm. New York: Tor Books, 2003. ———. Lord of the Isles. New York: Tor Books, 1997. ———. Master of the Cauldron. New York: Tor Books, 2004. ———. Mistress of the Catacombs. New York: Tor Books, 2001. ———. Queen of Demons. New York: Tor Books, 1998. ———. Servant of the Dragon. New York: Tor Books, 1999. Eddings, David. Castle of Wizardry. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine, 1984. ———. Enchanters’ End Game. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine, 1984. ———. Magician’s Gambit. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine, 1983. ———. Pawn of Prophecy. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine, 1982. ———. Queen of Sorcery. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine, 1982. Fultz, John R. “The Sorcery of Storytelling: The ‘Imaginary Worlds’ of Darrell Schweitzer.” Interview. Black Gate: Adventures in Fantasy Literature 2006. http://www.blackgate.com/articles/schweitzer.htm. Gaiman, Neil. American Gods. London: Headline Book, 2001. ———. Books of Magic. New York: Detective Comics, 1991. Gemmell, David. Troy: Fall of Kings. New York: Putnam, 2007. ———. Troy: Lord of the Silver Bow. New York: Ballantine, 2005. ———. Troy: Shield of Thunder. London: Transworld, 2006. Hancock, Karen. The Light of Eidon. Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House, 2003. ———. Return of the Guardian-King. Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House, 2007. ———. Shadow Over Kiriath. Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House, 2005. ———. The Shadow Within. Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House, 2004. Harris, Joel Chandler. Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings. New York: Penguin, 1982. Hobb, Robin. Assassin’s Apprentice. New York: Bantam Books, 1995. ———. Assassin’s Quest. New York: Bantam Books, 1997. ———. Royal Assassin. New York: Bantam Books, 1996. Irving, Washington. The Sketch Book Of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. New York: Modern Library, 2001. James P. Blaylock Fantasy and Steampunk Author. http://www.sybertooth.com/ blaylock/index.htm.

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FANTASY LITERATURE Joshi, S.T. The Weird Tale. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Kelleghan, Fiona. “Getting a Life: Haunted Spaces in Two Novels by Tim Powers.” New York Review of Science Fiction 115 (1998): 13–17. Kostova, Elizabeth. The Historian. New York: Little, Brown, 2005. Le Guin, Ursula K. The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Leiber, Fritz. The First Book of Lankhmar. London: Victor Gollancz, 2001. ———. The Green Millennium. New York: Ace, 1969. ———. Gummitch & Friends. New Hampshire: Donald M. Grant, 1992. ———. The Second Book of Lankhmar. London: Victor Gollancz, 2001. Lewis, C.S. The Horse and His Boy. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994. ———. The Last Battle. Zondervan, 1994. ———. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994. ———. The Magician’s Nephew. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994. ———. Prince Caspian. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994. ———. The Silver Chair. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994. ———. The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader.” Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994. Moorcock, Michael. Behold the Man. London: Mayflower Books, 1973. ———. Elric of Melniboné. London: Victor Gollancz, 2001. ———. Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy. Austin, TX: MonkeyBrain Books, 2004. Paolini, Christopher. Eragon. New York: Knopf, 2005. Powers, Tim. The Anubis Gates. London: Victor Gollancz, 2005. ———. Declare. Scranton, PA: William Morrow, 2001. ———. The Drawing of the Dark. London: Victor Gollancz, 2002. ———. Earthquake Weather. New York: Tor, 1997. ———. Expiration Date. New York: Tor, 1996. ———. Last Call. New York: Avon Books, 1993. ———. On Stranger Tides. New York: Putnam Berkley, 1988. ———. The Stress of Her Regard. New York: Ace Books, 1991. ———. Three Days to Never. Scranton, PA: William Morrow, 2006. Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. ———. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. London: Bloomsbury, 2000. ———. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. London: Bloomsbury, 2006. ———. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. London: Bloomsbury, 2003. ———. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. ———. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. London: Bloomsbury, 1999. Salmonson, Jessica Amanda, ed. Amazons! New York: DAW, 1979. ———, ed. Amazons II. New York: DAW, 1982. ———. Anthony Shriek, His Doleful Adventures or, Lovers of Another Realm. New York: Dell, 1992. ———. The Disfavored Hero. Boulder Creek, CA: Pacific Warriors, 1999. ———. The Encyclopedia of Amazons: Women Warriors from Antiquity to the Present Era. New York: Paragon House, 1991. ———. The Golden Naginata. New York: Ace Books, 1982. ———, ed. Heroic Visions. New York: Ace Books, 1983. ———, ed. Heroic Visions II. New York: Ace Books, 1986. ———. Ou Lu Khen and the Beautiful Madwoman. New York: Ace Books, 1985. ———. The Swordswoman. New York: Tor, 1982. ———. Thousand Shrine Warrior. New York: Ace Books, 1984. ———. Violet Books Antiquarian Supernatural Literature, Fantasy & Mysterious Literatures, Vintage Westerns, Swashbucklers, & Juveniles. http://www.violetbooks.com Sandner, David. Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004.

FANTASY LITERATURE Saunders, Charles R. Imaro. Newberg, OR: Night Shade Books, 2006. ———. Imaro: The Quest for Cush. Newberg, OR: Night Shade Books, 2007. Schweitzer, Darrell. Discovering Classic Fantasy Fiction: Essays on the Antecedents of Fantastic Literature. Philadelphia, PA: Wildside Press, 1996. ———. Exploring Fantasy Worlds: Essays on Fantastic Literature. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1985. ———. The Mask of the Sorcerer. Doylestown, PA: Wildside Press, 2003. ———. The Neil Gaiman Reader, Doylestown, PA: Wildside Press, 2006. ———. Pathways to Elfland: The Writings of Lord Dunsany. Philadelphia: Owlswick Press, 1989. ———. Sekenre: The Book of the Sorcerer. Doylestown, PA: Wildside Press, 2004. ———. The Shattered Goddess. Philadelphia, PA: Wildside Press, 1982. ———. Tom O’Bedlam’s Night Out, and Other Strange Excursions. Buffalo, NY: W. Paul Ganley, 1985. ———. We Are All Legends. Philadelphia, PA: Wildside Press, 1981. ———. The White Isle. Philadelphia: Owlswick Press, 1988. ———. Windows of the Imagination. Philadelphia, PA: Wildside Press, 1998. Spiegelman, Art. Fifth Seal. Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House, 2006. ———. First Light. Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House, 2003. ———. Fourth Dawn. Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House, 2005. ———. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Scholastic, 1992. ———. Second Touch. Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House, 2004. ———. Third Watch. Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House, 2004. Thomsen, Brian M., ed. The American Fantasy Tradition. New York: Tor Books, 2002. Tierney, Richard L. Scroll of Thoth: Simon Magus and the Great Old Ones. Canada: Chaosium, 1997. Tierney, Richard L., and Glenn Rahman. The Gardens of Lucullus. Minneapolis, MN: Sidecar Preservation Society, 2001. Tolkien, J.R.R. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. ———. Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. ———. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Wagner, Karl Edward. Bloodstone. New York: Warner Books, 1975. ———. Dark Crusade. New York: Warner Books, 1976. ———. Darkness Weaves. New York: Warner Books, 1978. ———. Death Angel’s Shadow. New York: Warner Books, 1973. ———. Night Winds. New York: Warner Books, 1978. Williams, Tad. The Dragonbone Chair. New York: DAW, 1988. ———. To Green Angel Tower. New York: DAW, 1993. ———. Stone of Farewell. New York: DAW, 1990. Zipes, Jack, ed. Spells of Enchantment: The Wondrous Fairy Tales of Western Culture. New York: Viking Press, 1991.

Further Reading Anderson, Douglas A. The 100 Best Writers of Fantasy & Horror. New York: Cold Spring Press, 2006; Austin, Alec. “Quality in Epic Fantasy.” Strange Horizons, June 2002. http://www.strangehorizons.com/2002/20020624/epic_fantasy.shtml; Langford, Michele K., ed. Contours of the Fantastic. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990; Morse, Donald E., ed. The Fantastic in World Literature and the Arts. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987.

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FILM ADAPTATIONS OF BOOKS Definition. At its most basic, film adaptation is a translation of a literary text into a cinematic one; though film adaptation can be defined very broadly, as well as more specifically. In fact, one can generalize that many films, despite their lack of any conventional literary source, are innately adaptations of some aspect of human experience. Even horror films can, with their seemingly unrealistic ghouls and monsters, metaphorically depict the fears and anxieties embedded in the human psyche. However, generalizations aside, most scholars agree that a film is considered an adaptation when its primary intention is to reinterpret a novel, short story, or other traditional literary genre. As Dudley Andrew suggests, “the broader notion of the process of adaptation has much in common with interpretation theory, for in a strong sense adaptation is the appropriation of a meaning from a prior text,” and subsequently, an interpretation of that previous text (1980, 29). In most cases, film adaptation is a transfer of meaning from one system of signs into another that occurs via a practice of filmic translation. The “distinct feature” of adaptation, Andrew remarks, is “the matching of a cinematic sign system to a prior achievement in some other system” (qtd. in McFarlane 1996, 21). Indeed, much of the material available that takes film adaptation as its primary subject borrows heavily from a variety of established theorists and critics, including Christian Metz, W.J.T. Mitchell, and Roland Barthes, whose work on semiotics has had an immense influence on scholarly discussion of film adaptations as interpretative signs of preceding texts. Like the novels and stories that films strive to simulate, adaptations are intricately constructed narratives that possess plot, setting, characters, and manner of discourse. The definition of a narrative, as Andrew Horton and Stuart McDougal indicate, is “a perceptual activity that organizes data into a special pattern which represents and explains experience” (1998, 2). Film adaptations fit squarely into this definition because they most certainly involve an extensive degree of “perceptual activity,” and they also exhibit a wide range of human encounters and emotions. Just as reading a novel provides the reader with an opportunity for making meaning, viewing a film adaptation allows a similar experience for the filmgoer. “Like reading,” Peter Reynolds asserts, “spectating involves a complex interaction between the spectator and the performance in which what has been encoded by the author(s) is decoded by the spectator” (1993, 3). Both versions of narrative—the conventional text as well as its cinematic counterpart—are encoded with meaning that is then decoded by the reader or viewer. However, this meaning-making process is uniquely amended during the viewing of a film adaptation, given that many viewers who are already familiar with the source text are inevitably forced to decode a narrative that they have already seemingly decoded. Yet the film adaptation is, in itself, a new narrative that must be re(de)coded by the viewer. This narratological rereading is utterly exclusive to film adaptations. Because not all film adaptations are completely loyal to their textual antecedents, some can be seen as critiques, rewritings, or alternate readings of their source texts. A film adaptation of a nineteenth-century novel that utilizes contemporary dress, discourse, and setting is an example of a rewrite or alternate reading of the novel in question. Though the general plot and characters are the same as the novel, the updated costumes and so on make the adaptation explicitly different from its original. Indeed, adaptations can be both very similar to and extensively distinctive from their predecessors. Kamilla Elliott, in her 2003 publication Rethinking the

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Novel/Film Debate, devises a number of categories into which many adaptations can fit, implying that film adaptations, both overtly and covertly, address, interpret, and imitate their source texts in diverse ways. The psychic film adaptation is essentially a “passing of the spirit of the text” into film (Stam 2005, 49, n. 48). In Elliott’s words, “the form changes; the spirit remains constant” (138). Of course, the spirit of any text is generally the spirit of the author, manifested in authorial intent. How does the author want us to feel about his or her work? What are we supposed to get out of the text or film? In many cases, an accomplished film director or screenwriter can alter the content of a text while still remaining true to its supposed essence or theme. The ventriloquist model, unlike the psychic one, writes Elliott, “pays no lip service to authorial spirit: rather, it blatantly empties out the novel’s signs and fills them with filmic spirits” (143). In a ventriloquist adaptation, the intent of the original author becomes secondary to that of the text’s appointed cinematic author. Most notably, ventriloquist renderings often add to the original text in some way, so that the end result is often heavily altered from its source. The film adaptation, in essence, takes on its own voice, apart from that of the novel. The genetic concept of adaptation, Elliott’s third category, refers to the transfer of “an underlying ‘deep’ narrative structure [between literature and film] akin to genetic structure” (2003, 150). Elliott insinuates that a film adaptation, as an offspring of some mother-text, will naturally possess many analogous traits to its textual “mother,” yet will exist as an innately different entity. The “de(re)composing” concept of adaptation is arguably Elliott’s most complex and abstract category. In this model, “the novel and film decompose, merge, and form a new composition at ‘underground’ levels of reading. The adaptation is a composite of textual and filmic signs merging in audience consciousness together with other cultural narratives and often leads to confusion as to which is novel and which is film” (157). Any audience disorientation ultimately arises from the total inclusion of any number of accepted “texts” into a specific cultural imagination. For instance, a certain story, so ingrained into popular culture, may be without a designated origin. Thus, the story or content of the adaptation is confusedly understood as “original” when it certainly is not. Elliott’s fourth type of film adaptation, the “incarnational,” literally occurs when “word becomes flesh.” In many cases, according to Elliott (161), “the word is only a partial expression of a more total representation that requires incarnation for its fulfillment,” in which case the production of the film becomes an act of completion. The adapted film realizes its source text in a visual and audible manner, creating a genuine sensorium in which the reader, now viewer, can revel. The internal, imaginative world of reading a novel simply cannot compare with the definitive phenomenological experience of seeing the words incarnated into a pseudo-realistic product. The sixth and final category is that of the “trumping” model of adaptation in which “the film shows its superior capacities to tell the story” (Stam 2000, 49, n. 48). The trumping concept addresses the possibility that the film adaptation can be better than its forerunner. As Elliott notes, “adaptations frequently condemn novels of prior centuries as representationally immature, their values antiquated, irrelevant, and inexplicable to contemporary audiences, and their accounts of history, psychology, and politics inaccurate” (174). Contemporary updates of classic novels and dramas have been very popular in Hollywood for several years, though many of these modernized versions retain the historically accurate mode of discourse. Traditionally, critics and viewers have held the view that the source text is almost always

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better than its adaptation. However, as Robert Stam postulates, “The clichéd response that ‘I thought the book was better’ really means that our experience, our phantasy of the book was better than the director’s” (15). Elliott believes that adaptations have the ability to be conceived of as superior texts though they are conventionally not, in part because the word still triumphs over the image in contemporary thought, although this sentiment is beginning to change in light of the publication of landmark works on the word–image wars, such as W.J.T. Mitchell’s Iconology (1987). It is conclusively difficult to discern which is better, book or film, primarily because a film adaptation is automatically different from its source text. Not only does the medium differ, but often the authorial intent and overall content change as well. In the end, however, most directors and screenwriters strive for what Stam calls “equivalency,” the ability to find “equivalents in a new medium for the novelist’s style or techniques” (18). The decision as to whether the film adaptation is better than its progenitor appears to be mostly subjective given that “everyone who sees films based on novels feels able to comment, at levels ranging from the gossipy to the erudite on the nature and success of the adaptation involved” (McFarlane 1996, 3). Most critics and scholars would agree that every viewer, despite his or her familiarity with the source text, can make a judgment on the achievement of any film adaptation, even from a general perspective. Subfields of Film Adaptation. The term film adaptation can often apply to a variety of subfields that, in many respects, are adaptations, though perhaps not principally. Most notably, the remake and the biopic are types of adaptations that may not be conventionally considered as adaptations, even though at their core they possess many of the same intentions. Remakes are generally updated versions of previous films or, as in recent years, filmic interpretations of celebrated television shows such as Jay Chandrasekhar’s 2005 remake of The Dukes of Hazard and Nora Ephron’s Bewitched (also 2005). Remakes have, indeed, become such popular fodder for Hollywood studios in the last few years that many critics have called the craze an epidemic. Like other kinds of adaptations, remakes strive to transform an existing text into something new. In fact, “more obviously than other forms of art,” writes Leo Braudy, “the remake—like its close kin . . . the sequel—is a species of interpretation” (1998, 327). The remake reinterprets a source text just like any other adaptation and necessarily seeks to add to the spirit of that preceding text. The biopic is yet another subfield of film adaptation. Simply put, a biopic is a filmic adaptation of a person’s life. Biopics are often much more conventional than one may initially think, as many of these adaptations pull material from published sources such as biographies or memoirs. Both Julie Taymor’s Frida (2002) and Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (2001) are adaptations of acclaimed biographical studies on the films’ respective subjects. “The bio-pic,” Neil Sinyard observes, “is an awkward hybrid that falls somewhere between fiction and documentary” because one can adapt a biography very rigidly, sticking closely to accepted sources, or he or she can capture what Sinyard calls the “spirit” of a person’s life, abandoning certain details about the subject that may not enhance the cinematic portrayal of that particular “spirit” (1986, 143–4). Biopics have also proliferated over the last few decades, which calls to attention the voyeuristic nature of contemporary American society: as viewers of these biopics, we are literally peeking into the subject’s personal and professional life. History. Film adaptations have been in consistent production since the birth of the American film industry. In fact, according to the American Film Institute’s Web

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site, the oldest surviving reel in American archives is a silent film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard III (1912). However, American production companies began adapting popular American literature even before 1912. Early American filmmaker Gene Gauntier adapted Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous novel The Scarlet Letter for the screen as early as 1907 and 1908, respectively (Internet Movie Database). “As soon as cinema began to see itself as a narrative entertainment,” McFarlane notes, “the idea of remaking the novel—that already established repository of narrative fiction—for source material got underway, and the process has continued more or less unabated [since]” (1996, 6–7). Many American film adaptations are considered “classic,” exemplary examples of American filmmaking at its best. At least 17 of the American Film Institute’s “100 Greatest American Movies of All Time” are film adaptations, including such genuinely American classics as The Godfather (1972), Gone with the Wind (1939), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), and The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Indeed, as Barbara Tepa Lupack asserts, film, “from its very beginnings, has turned to literature for inspiration and persisted in the practice of translating books into film” (1994, 1). The bulk of early film adaptations produced in the United States pulled their content from traditional literary works such as established nineteenthcentury novels, but as the twentieth century wore on, directors and screenwriters began to turn their attentions toward contemporary popular fiction for ideas as well. Hence came the explosion of what were initially (and still are) considered “cult classics” in the 1970s and beyond: Francis Ford Coppola’s version of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1972), Milos Forman’s 1975 adaptation of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Stanley Kubrick’s take on Stephen King’s The Shining (1980). Trends and Themes. Around the turn of the millennium, as technological advancements in filmmaking equipment reached a zenith, films began to reflect a major shift in American culture that had been occurring for several decades: a shift from a very

BOOKS MADE INTO MOVIES WIN AWARDS Adaptations generally fare well in prestigious award circles. Linda Seger speculates that “eighty-five percent of all Academy Award-winning Best Pictures are adaptations, forty-five percent of all television movies-of-the-week are adaptations, yet seventy percent of all Emmy Award winners come from these films, and eighty-three percent of all miniseries are adaptations, out of which ninety-five percent of Emmy award winners are drawn” (1992, xi). Though Seger’s book, The Art of Adaptation, was published in 1992, the staggering statistics therein have not changed. In 2003 alone, Academy Award nominees in the top six categories (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor/Actress, Best Supporting Actor/Supporting Actress) came from 13 films, of which 9 were adaptations (6 of those were American). The trend to award films adapted from literature continues to hold true, as more and more filmmakers are looking to contemporary novels, plays, and short stories for inspiration. “Today’s adaptations,” Lupack agrees, “are not restricted to literary classics, and embrace many genres” (1994, 5). Even graphic novels are fair game for adaptations, as the popularity of Sam Mendes’s Road to Perdition (2002) and Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World (2001) certainly indicates. Adaptations have yet to become unpopular or irrelevant in American culture, and with more film adaptations made each year, this rich cultural tradition continues through its appreciation by both filmmakers and filmgoers.

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A third filmic trend of recent years involves the securing of production rights for literary works at very early stages of publication and distribution. Popular novels such as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003, 2006) and Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada (2003, 2006) are instantly deemed “filmable,” and studios clamor for the rights to produce adaptations. Film adaptations are no longer simply cinematic versions of classic literary works, and directors, always after the best story, often seek out very contemporary sources from which to film adaptations.

linear view of history and human experience to a view of the world as multilayered, interdisciplinary, and seemingly ambiguous. The ability to reinsert oneself into the historical record through film was first glimpsed by moviegoers in Forrest Gump (1994). Director Robert Zemeckis could place a fictional character (originally created by novelist Winston Groom) in a variety of actual historical milieus to the surprise of many viewers. Forrest Gump (played by Tom Hanks, who, incidentally, captured the 1995 Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal) could now shake hands with Richard Nixon and sit rigidly next to John Lennon during one of his famous interviews with Dick Cavett because of the technological sophistication of computer-generated graphics. Film adaptations became more accurate as a result of this astonishing hi-tech revolution. Another major trend in film adaptation that has sprung up in the last several years is the increased production of remakes. As mentioned previously, remakes have become so rampant that many film critics argue that Hollywood has simply run out of original material for its films. Of course, whether this is the case or not, remakes have become very popular over the past decade. In many ways, this turn to “remaking” our culture can be seen in other media arenas as well. Reality television, the popular genre that exploded with the premieres of Survivor and Big Brother, has certainly altered the way that we perceive and understand our immediate realities, a change that has inevitably affected the film industry. We are constantly remaking the terms of “reality”; the millennial remake culture and, specifically, the propagation of cinematic updates certainly confirm this. Context and Issues. One of the most pressing issues for filmmakers is the fidelity of the adaptation to its source text. “The skeleton of the original can, more or less thoroughly, become the skeleton of a film. More difficult,” Andrew concurs, “is the fidelity to the spirit, to the original’s tone, values, imagery, and rhythm, for finding equivalents in film for these intangible aspects” (1980, 12). If Andrew is correct, then it would be nearly impossible for any adaptation to be completely accurate because the change in medium, the passing of information from one semiotic system into another, would effectively alter the resulting “spirit.” Though the filmic outcome indubitably depends on the source work for its shell, it transforms the static text into a lifelike phantasmagoria of the senses. Adaptations borrow from their predecessors but should be viewed as intersections between word and image rather than true translations of one into the other. “The differences between the novel and film extend from formal considerations to their conditions of production—which themselves have quite distinct meanings attached to them” (Cartmell and Whelehan 1999, 6). Many adaptations, because of issues such as these, are expected to possess some value as stand-alone filmic productions. A film adaptation can still be considered “good” even if it is not totally loyal to its source. Critics of adaptation fidelity

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ultimately depend on “a notion of the text as having and rendering up to the (intelligent) reader a single, correct ‘meaning’ which the filmmaker has either adhered to or in some sense violated or tampered with” (McFarlane 1996, 8). For any film adaptation to be absolutely true to its subject, it would have to assume that only a single universal meaning is applicable to that subject, a presumption that seems highly implausible. If every adaptable text has only one meaning, then it would be unreasonable for multiple adaptations to be made. Yet filmmakers consistently return to certain texts in order to portray the multiplicities of their respective spirits. Arguments over film adaptations “arise not only because of disputes concerning the fidelity of adaptations, but also because there is little or no argument on what the adapter’s role with respect to the original should be” (Reynolds 1993, 9). How should a filmmaker approach a source text? Without fixed meanings, these texts can be handled in a variety of ways, hence the existence of multiple adaptations of the same text. As McFarlane attests, “discussion of adaptation has been bedeviled by the fidelity issue, no doubt ascribable in part to the novel’s coming first, in part to the ingrained sense of literature’s greater respectability in traditional critical circles” (8); however, there are many other angles from which the topic can be approached. Reception. Various theories of film adaptation have been posed by numerous scholars throughout the twentieth century. Many of these theories rely on previous schools of thought, especially the works of structuralist and poststructuralist theorists and semioticians. For example, one expert on film adaptation, Robert Stam, borrows both from Roland Barthes and from the narrative theorist Gerard Genette. In Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation, Stam describes how Genette’s multifarious theories of textuality are applicable to film adaptations. He writes, While all of Genette’s categories [“intertextuality,” “paratextuality,” “metatextuality,” and “architextuality”] are suggestive, Genette’s fifth type, “hypertextuality,” is perhaps the type most clearly relevant to adaptation. “Hypertextuality,” [sic] refers to the relation between one text, which Genette calls “hypertext,” to an anterior text or “hypotext,” which the former transforms, modifies, elaborates, or extends. Filmic adaptations, in this sense, are hypertexts derived from pre-existing hypotexts that have been transformed by operations of selection, amplification, concretization, and actualization. (2005, 31)

Stam’s use of Genette’s theories is just one of the ways that critics have theorized film adaptations. Other critics, apart from philosophizing about the loyalty of any adaptation to its source, also focus on the ways in which adaptations can be both repressive and liberating (Reynolds 1993, 11). In an adaptation, the new author is free to make something that has never been seen yet that is bound to original materials from which it cannot be severed. This situation appears to be the ultimate paradox of film adaptation. Though adaptations strive to be unique, the viewer will always be plagued by his or her ideas about the source text. Another difficulty of transcribing an already established story into film is the transmutation of novelistic linearity into filmic spatiality. Though both novels and films are regularly bound by specific chronologies, film has the ability to transcend time by utilizing space more freely. Films, in a sense, take up (viewing) space and are less devoted to issues of time than the traditional novel. They explode on-screen and envelop the audience in a display

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of visual and oral splendor. “The movie theatre,” David Denby (2006) observes, “is a public space that encourages private pleasures: as we watch, everything we are— our senses, our past, our unconscious—reaches out to the screen. The experience is the opposite of escape; it is more like absolute engagement.” Novels, on the other hand, though they do occupy the recesses of human imagination, hardly engage space. As Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (1999) point out, criticism on film adaptation has, since its inception, taken on one of five major theoretical guises: an all-around disdain for adaptations as lowly copies of more superior originals; a narratological approach that examines adaptations, as well as their source texts, as belonging to a narrative system, be it textual or filmic; a film-adaptation-as-nostalgia approach that considers adaptations to be nods to a bygone era; a method of viewing adaptations as an extension of the human inclination toward voyeurism in the cinema; and finally, the “textuality” method, preferred by Stam and others, that contemplates film adaptations in light of recent discussions in critical theory and textual studies. Each approach to film adaptation, despite the inherent differences among them, attempts to analyze the relationship between the initial text and its filmic successor. In nearly every article and book devoted to the subject, attention is focused solely on adaptations of novels, an exception being Horton and McDougal’s work on remakes as adaptations, as well as Mireia Aragay’s edited volume Books in Motion (2006). Nevertheless, very few critics have ventured to investigate the multiplicity of genres from which film adaptations collect their material. The remainder of this article takes into account film adaptations that stem from a variety of genres. Selected Film Adaptations Ghost World (2001). Graphic novels are only beginning to be taken seriously by critics and scholars in the academic sphere, so naturally film adaptations (read: serious and respected film adaptations) of this innately multimedia genre could not have been possible at any other historical moment. Though film adaptations of comic books have been successful in the past (e.g., Superman and the many incarnations of Batman), the narratological sophistication of the graphic novel has, up until recently, placed the genre in limbo: stuck between the popular cultural aspects of a comic book and the conventional narrative structures and complexities of the novel form. Zwigoff’s adaptation of Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World effectively altered the status of graphic novels, allowing them to be deemed adaptable material. Director Zwigoff is famous for using the comic world as hardware for his films, having produced Crumb (1994), a keen documentary on the legendary Robert Crumb, creator of veritably poignant and bawdy comics that became popular during the late 1960s. In Ghost World, Zwigoff turns to the content of the comics themselves, adapting Clowes’s cult favorite into a bright, yet existential film that follows the daily proceedings of a cynical teenager lost amid a sea of superficiality. As Roger Ebert (2001) notes, Enid, the 18-year old protagonist (played by Thora Birch), “is so smart, so advanced, and so ironically doubled back upon herself, that most of the people she meets don’t get the message. She is second-level satire in a one-level world, and so instead of realizing, for example, that she is mocking the 1970s punk look, stupid video store clerks merely think she’s 25 years out of style.” The fact that people simply do not “get” Enid’s agenda mirrors the customary

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reception of comics and graphic novels, narrative types that, for a certain period of time, academics bluntly disregarded because they missed the alacrity and authenticity of the dual genres’ exposition of real human situations and emotions. In essence, the realness of the genres was below academic critique because the twentieth century was so utterly bogged down with theories that embraced unreality and ambiguity. Ghost World’s appeal has been quickly realized by a number of other directors since its release. In 2002 Sam Mendes and David Self adapted Road to Perdition to the screen with the ever-popular Tom Hanks as the film’s redemptive central character. The story, originated in graphic novel form by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner, follows the seedy employment of family man Michael Sullivan (played by Hanks), whose son (Tyler Hoechlin), after glimpsing one of his father’s “jobs,” tags along with him as he seeks revenge for a slew of personal and professional mishaps. The darkly envisioned cinematography, made possible by the late Conrad L. Hall, snatched an Academy Award. Indeed, the look of the film captures the crepuscular mien of the original graphic novel, which was composed in black and white. Mendes and Hall successfully translated the dinginess of the graphic novel to a filmic composition that is as inky as its predecessor. American Splendor (2003) is a double adaptation of sorts that is not only a biopic but also a more conventional adaptation of Harvey Pekar’s series of similarly named comics and graphic novels. Shari Springer Berlman and Robert Pulcini direct this film that highlights the near failure of comic artist Harvey Pekar (played by Paul Giamatti), who, in conjunction with Crumb and others, launched a noteworthy chain of comics about an autobiographical everyman. Pekar’s character, also called Harvey, encounters a number of realistic, yet sardonically humorous people and situations and struggles to persevere through an increasingly dismal world. Berlman and Pulcini juxtapose straightforward cinematic fiction with live-action comic sequences and impromptu interviews with the real Harvey Pekar, his family, and close friends. The doubleness of this piece can be found in at least two combinations: the film is an adaptation of comics that are adaptations of an actual person’s life, and also, the film adapts the life along with the material comics. Other contemporary adaptations will embrace this multilayered approach. Two other, more recent adaptations of graphic novels, Sin City (2005) and Art School Confidential (2006), continue the tradition of well-adapted pictorial genres to the screen. Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez utilize techniques borrowed from film noir in order to capture the grimy landscape and shady society of Miller’s classic graphic novel series. Zwigoff’s Art School Confidential (another Clowes work), like Ghost World, is adapted in a more direct manner, though it satisfactorily portrays the vividness of Clowes’s style. Each adaptation of a graphic novel is another step toward an acceptance of the genre into mainstream American culture. Whether this transformation is favorable to loyal fans is of little consequence, as the graphic novel and its historical bedfellow, the comic, are swept into the folds of popular literature. Adaptation (2002). Although Adaptation is an adaptation of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, it also stands as a commentary on the nature of film adaptation in an increasingly commercialized Hollywood. Written by Charlie Kaufman and his pseudo-brother Donald and directed by Spike Jonze, Adaptation follows the efforts of “Charlie Kaufman” to adapt Orlean’s Orchid Thief into an acceptable Hollywood film. However, Charlie must contend with the difficulties of adapting a seemingly plotless tome about the beauty and wonder of orchids—the enigmatic

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flowers that have, themselves, adapted magnificently into a variety of different species—into another profitable studio blockbuster. “I don’t want to cram in sex or guns or car chases [into the adaptation]. You know? Or characters learning profound life lessons” (Kaufman and Kaufman 2002, 5). Charlie also must, amid his adaptational woes, learn to adapt to adulthood and to the demands of being a successful Hollywood screenwriter. In the end, despite Charlie’s hopes of protecting his screenplay from the claws of contemporary filmic predictability, Adaptation quickly transmogrifies into a plot-driven narrative brimming with sex, drugs, and monstrous explosions. Charlie and Donald (both played by Nicolas Cage), in an attempt to hunt down Susan Orlean (played by Meryl Streep) and to gather the “true” story behind The Orchid Thief, end up in a mysterious chase in a swamp where Donald meets his untimely fate. Just like the story of the orchid thief, the final moments of the film declare its purpose as another “study in shape-shifting,” given that the process of adaptation is ultimately about the alteration of forms (Orlean 2002, vii). In Orlean’s own words, Adaptation “is about orchids, about how they adapt to their environment, sometimes resulting in the strangest and most marvelous forms, proving that the answer to everything might indeed be adaptation” (ix). At its core, Charlie’s adaptation, as a person and screenwriter, is also our adaptation: the adaptation of The Orchid Thief, given to us by the writers and directors, as well as our adaptation as viewers who, unfortunately for Charlie, do indeed learn “a profound life lesson.” Karen Diehl asserts that Adaptation, along with a group of other films that draw attention to their authorial intentions, “add[s] narratives to that of [its] source literary text that relocate film and literature as cultural practices determined and shaped by a specific context. These added narratives variously include the narrativization of the process of writing, the process of reading, and the process of adapting to the screen itself” (2005, 103). Chicago (2002). Unlike many adaptations that stem from grandiloquent novels, Chicago is a flashy adaptation of the lauded Broadway musical, expertly choreographed by the legendary Bob Fosse in 1975. The musical version of Chicago is itself an adaptation of a play from the 1920s by Maurine Dallas Watkins. The famous Broadway duo John Kander and Fred Ebb added music and lyrics to Watkins’s drama about a flapper-wannabe named Roxie Hart (played by Renée Zellweger in

ADAPTATION IS AN ADAPTATION The film Adaptation does not rely wholly on Susan Orlean’s story, but rather makes up certain storylines, with the help of many foreseeable popular plot twists that are, in turn, added to the adaptation.This dynamic exposes the meta-commentary about authorship that is instinctive to the film.“Reader and spectator alike,” Diehl writes,“are thus persuaded not to believe in what they read or see, but to accept it as fictitious,” just as the mechanism of film adaptation is, itself, a fictitious enterprise (2005, 102). The culminating events in Adaptation are certainly not conceivable, and their utter implausibility, in fact, brandishes the sheer impossibility of accurately adapting any piece of literature in an industry that is obsessed with profit to the exclusion of literary and cinematic nuance. Hence, viewers are left with only the “illusion of a dialogue with a literary author” (100). Adaptation successfully reveals the flaws of film adaptation using its own medium.

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the 2002 update) who dreams of becoming a successful actress and singer like her idol Velma Kelly (played by Catherine Zeta-Jones). However, things go awry when Miss Hart lands in prison after killing her lover. There she meets her idol, convicted of a similar charge, and learns that scandal and celebrity are powerful tools in the media-laden society of what Roger Ebert (2002) calls a “Front Page era.” Marshall’s 2002 adaptation is a brilliant filmic remake of the original musical that, in some respects, trumps the original in terms of staging and effects. Film, as opposed to staged theatre, possesses a much greater level of flexibility; films can be edited, and special effects can be added after their completion. A live musical, on the other hand, cannot be halted midway so that a scene can be performed again. Additionally, because the stage is the only real setting for the action, a musical is aesthetically limited. Films, however, can have multiple sets and numerous filming locations, lending greater versatility to the story. Chicago is an example of how increased filmic flaccidity can bring forth subtle aspects of a source text that are often underplayed onstage. The film’s Jazz Age heroine, Hart, has obviously been affected by the nascent celebrity system of early twentieth-century America in which—because of the rise of Vaudeville, radio, and other cultural phenomenon—many citizens, now lost amid the brightness of the modern era, turned to celebrities of all sorts in order to seek out their own personal identity. Marshall’s film splendidly portrays this harsh aspect of past Americana by staging the musical numbers “more or less within Roxie’s imagination” (Ebert 2002). Thus the director accomplishes two tasks: he brings out a psychocultural feature of the original that may have been softened because of difficulties in theatrical staging, and he creates a seamless drama that does not annoy audiences with constant musical interruptions. In essence, Marshall finds a perfect cinematic balance between the inceptive musical, with its grand song-anddance routines, and the filmic adaptation that strives to remain a unified dramatic narrative. As Ebert explains, “Chicago is a musical that might have seemed unfilmable . . . because it was assumed it had to be transformed into more conventional terms” and forced into a Hollywood formula. Like Adaptation, Chicago overcomes formulaic dispositions about what a film adaptation should be and masterfully “adapts” the standards of filmmaking as it adapts its source material. Frida (2002). Director Julie Taymor brings the tumultuous life and art of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo to the screen in this moving biopic. Taymor captures Kahlo’s life most acutely by utilizing the source of the artist’s passion: her art. Not only does Taymor engage the viewer in the sometimes unfortunate details of Kahlo’s marriage and other painful life experiences, but she also animates a number of Kahlo’s original paintings, canvases that sway back and forth between seething criticisms of bourgeois values and heart-wrenching self-portraits. Kahlo, who became permanently disabled as a result of a bus accident in her youth, channeled her pain and frustration into her unique paintings. Like the vibrant pictures for which Kahlo is renowned, Taymor’s film embraces the hues and tones of revolutionary Mexico. This film ultimately succeeds as a biopic because Taymor mixes biography and artistry into a delectable fusion of filmic brilliance. “Biopics of artists,” writes Ebert (2002) in his review of the film, “are always difficult, because the connections between life and art always seem too easy and facile. The best ones lead us back to the work itself and inspire us to sympathize with its maker.” Indeed, biopics are different from other adaptations because they often tackle a subject that involves living people. In the case of Frida, Taymor referenced an established biography on

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Kahlo’s life by Hayden Herrera in which most of the “characters” are deceased. However, biopics such as Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind, an adaptation of the life of John Nash, a Nobel Prize-winning mathematician who struggles with schizophrenia, employ a subject who is still living. Issues such as these can present problems for the directors, screenwriters, and producers of these projects who are regularly forced to consult with the subject or with his or her family members. The approval of these individuals sometimes inhibits the filmmakers from illuminating the life in full. For instance, when director Christine Jeffs and writer John Browlow wished to adapt the life of Sylvia Plath, they were obliged to confer with Plath’s daughter, Frieda Hughes, who bluntly “refused to allow any of her mother’s poems to be used in the script and . . . vowed never to see the film” (Milmo 2004). Biopics certainly have their detractors, and in fact, the process of adapting a person’s life into a filmic narrative is rather arduous. In many respects, makers of the biopic must struggle to present their subjects as more than simply images. In a culture that thrives on the continuous elevation of celebrities to idol-like statuses and the incessant circulation of images in the media and elsewhere, it is easy for adapters to fall into the trap of turning their subject into just another metonymy for the actual human life. Rather, the biopic should be an arena in which the filmmaker may topple cultural assumptions about the person in question by seeking to tell the “true” story. The biopic grapples with the same sorts of complexities as does any other adaptation, including matters of fidelity. Does the biopic faithfully render the person’s life? Or does the biopic act as an extension or representation of the person’s life, artistically removed from actual events? The answers to these questions are extremely pertinent to the overall understanding of biopic production. Other films in recent years have highlighted the lives and works of famous artists. Julian Schnabel’s 1996 adaptation of the life of New York graffiti artist Basquiat, titled Basquiat, depicts the street artist’s discovery by Andy Warhol (played by David Bowie) and his subsequent popularity. Schnabel, a close friend of the late Basquiat, poignantly captures the instant celebritization of Warhol’s protégé and the destructiveness that ensues as a result. As with many misunderstood artists who are thrust reluctantly into the blaring lights of celebrity, Basquiat is unable to overcome his difficulties in the face of stardom and dies of a drug overdose at age 28. Following in the footsteps of Basquiat, Pollock (2000) similarly illustrates the life and art of a struggling artist who finds himself coping with the ramifications, personally and professionally, of iconoclasm in twentieth-century American culture. Jackson Pollock, leader of the artistic movement known as Abstract Expressionism, is veritably portrayed by director and leading actor Ed Harris as the sensitive artiste and brash cultural ingénue who exploded onto the New York art scene with his controversial abstract “string” paintings. The film also shows the artist’s tempestuous marriage to fellow painter Lee Krasner as well as his numerous extramarital affairs and battles with alcoholism. As with Frida, Pollock gives the art its own story, though one that acutely parallels the artist’s life. The Hours (2002). The Hours dwells within a category of multilayered adaptations that have distinct textual lineages. Similar to Chicago, Stephen Daldry’s and David Hare’s adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel is not a singular transformation of novel into film but rather an adaptation of a novel that is, itself, an adaptation of another novel and a biography (in Chicago, the historical trajectory extends even further). The celebrated modern British novel from

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which Cunningham and his adapters draw their inspiration is Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, a stunning exploration of the relevance of the seemingly mundane, quotidian exploits of a middle-class, middle-aged woman. The novel also examines how the veil of memory often impedes our ability to glimpse what closely surrounds us in the present. Cunningham borrows these thematic elements for his tale about the interconnected lives of three women: Laura Brown (played by Julianne Moore), a young wife and mother grappling with domestic dissatisfaction in postwar suburban America; Virginia Woolf (played by Nicole Kidman), the eminent British novelist who also struggles with an edgy domestic situation, worsened by mental instability, as she begins a new novel, Mrs. Dalloway; and Clarissa Vaughn (Cunningham’s contemporary Dalloway, played by Meryl Streep), a well-to-do twenty-first-century New Yorker who, like the protagonist of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, is hosting a party of old friends and colleagues at her apartment for which she is frantically preparing. Scholar Karen Diehl describes the film, and its source text, as interconnecting “strands” of narrative in which one story is dependent on another for its existence (2005, 94–5). Though each of these strands appears to be separate at first, as the film progresses, the viewer is soon clued in to how the three narratives intertwine. We learn that Clarissa’s party—for which she has to buy the flowers herself, just like the original Mrs. Dalloway—is, in fact, being thrown for her longtime friend Richard Brown (played by Ed Harris), who has recently won a prestigious award for his own novel. We also learn that Laura Brown, from another strand of the story, is Richard’s mother. And of course, in a gesture of mastery, the author Virginia Woolf has, from her historical viewpoint, inaugurated all of these events with the composition and publication of Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf’s own biography prompts her to write Mrs. Dalloway, the book read by the depressed Laura Brown and eventually by her son as well, who, for as long as he can remember, has called Clarissa Vaughn his very own “Mrs. Dalloway.” The stories unite in both direct and indirect ways. Daldry manages this adaptation by using basically three different casts to tell three distinct, yet associated narratives. The characters in this film are generally molded into two opposing groups—victims and survivors—though each can fit into either of the categories at assorted moments in the film. All of the characters fall victim to an author, be it Woolf, Cunningham, or screenwriter Hare, who determines their fate onscreen. They also fall victim to the respective societies and cultures in which they live. Woolf’s mental illness and eventual suicide stemmed from multiple factors, not the least of which was her inability to overcome the instances of sexual abuse that she experienced as a child. Laura Brown finds it difficult to withstand the pressures of being a wife and mother in postwar America, and Clarissa Vaughn attempts to please everyone but herself. Additionally, Woolf certainly becomes a victim after her suicide, as does Richard Brown when, like the shell-shocked Septimus Warren-Smith in Mrs. Dalloway, he jumps to his death from a second-story window. Laura Brown nearly commits suicide but decides to live instead, thus cementing her status as a survivor. Clarissa Vaughn also survives, appropriately mirroring the outcome of her predetermined fictional equivalent. Those who survive, incidentally, also learn to adapt, much like the characters in Adaptation. Everything Is Illuminated (2005). Everything Is Illuminated is a fascinating adaptation of a seemingly unadaptable postmodern novel about the lasting effects of the Holocaust on two distant families—unadaptable because, as Stephanie Zacharek

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(2005) notes, the book is made up of “the sort of prose whose wordy digressions and repetitiveness are part of its style (and part of its challenge).” Though based only loosely on its source text, the film manages to convey the same emotional firmament as its predecessor. The novel, written by Jonathan Safran Foer and published in 2002, traces the story of a young Jewish American (also named “Jonathan Safran Foer” and played by Elijah Wood) who travels to Ukraine in order to find information about his family’s roots, specifically the whereabouts of the mysterious Augustine, the woman who supposedly saved his grandfather from the Nazi invasion. As with The Hours (the originally published version), Everything Is Illuminated is composed of more than one story that is combined into a single narrative: the recounting of the search by Alexander Perchov (played by Eugene Hutz), Foer’s guide and translator throughout his journey, and also Foer’s literary reinterpretation of those events in a more historical context. The stories are connected by a series of letters between the two men that are also included in the novel. Schreiber’s adaptation does not attempt to film all of these stories but instead chooses Alex’s point of view. The film is separated into chapters, conceivably determined by Alex as he “writes” his account of the journey with Foer. Jonathan is known as “The Collector” by his family, and by the Perchovs in due time, because wherever he travels, he carries a stock of Ziploc bags in which he collects fragments of the people and experiences with which he comes into contact. In one scene, Jonathan pilfers a container of hand soap from a train’s restroom, acting as if his slightly kleptomaniacal act is completely normal. It becomes obvious, however, that his itinerant collecting has a more than superficial purpose. In one of the film’s final moments, Jonathan swipes a heap of Ukrainian dust that he eventually takes back to America, after the mystery is solved, and throws onto his grandfather’s grave. Jonathan’s penchant for collecting can also be understood as a metaphor for the nature of adaptation. When the viewer first glimpses Jonathan clandestinely gathering objects, the method seems random or even quirky. As the film advances, however, we begin to comprehend its true intention. By amassing as large of a collection as he can, Jonathan somehow, at least tangibly, recreates the past and thus reconnects with it. In the end, the collection no longer resembles a piecemeal cluster of various objects but rather a unified material landscape of memory. Similarly, a film adaptation, especially one such as Everything Is Illuminated, appears to be a loose assemblage of the “best of” moments from a novel, story, or play. In most cases, because of time and budget constraints, directors, producers, screenwriters, and other industry personnel are forced to make an acceptable adaptation out of these presumably random parts. Everything Is Illuminated is a keen example of when a director’s “collection” of narrative pieces becomes a clearly distinguished whole. The core of the film can be found in a few of its final lines, that “everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us, on the inside, looking out.” Though the search for the past illumines the present, the past always remains with us. Film adaptations often disappoint audiences for this very reason; they are beleaguered by the past, that is, by the literary source that stays with them as they watch the adaptation. In order for adaptations to garner success, the spectators are obligated to separate the film from its original and to consider them as two divergent narratives that are to be held at different standards. “It must be tiresome [for filmgoers],” Slate reviewer David Edelstein (2005) avers,

FILM ADAPTATIONS OF BOOKS to read yet another review trumpeting the news that a movie is not as good as the book on which it’s based, and that the medium rarely does justice to narrative loop-de-loops or to characters’ labyrinthine inner lives. After all, film and literature are different media, a movie ought to be judged on its own merits.

The film version of Everything Is Illuminated is a markedly reduced adaptation of Foer’s novel and must inevitably be judged on its own terms, despite its apparent disloyalty to its source. Brokeback Mountain (2005). Perhaps one of the most controversial Hollywood films since the turn of the millennium, Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain is an adaptation by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana of E. Annie Proulx’s short story of the same name. The story first appeared in The New Yorker on October 13, 1997, and was subsequently included in Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Proulx’s Pulitzer Prize–winning collection. Jenny Shank of New West (2005) writes that “when [Proulx] was first approached about turning ‘Brokeback Mountain’ into a screenplay, she ‘was terrified because this wasn’t my idea of a story that could be made into a film. It’s the sort of thing that Hollywood has been avoiding for a hundred years.’” The tale of two Wyoming ranch hands (played by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal) who fall in love during a summer assignment on Brokeback Mountain shocked the Hollywood establishment and many filmgoers because of its blatant inclusion of homosexuality, a topic that the film industry has, indeed, avoided since its beginnings. The filmic treatment of the story is subtle yet breathtaking, and the gay element of the story, so hyped by the media, is subtle as well. One walks away from the film believing that he or she has seen simply a love story, not necessarily a homosexual love story. This type of spotlighting is hardly relevant, as the film ultimately transcended any media controversy that may have surrounded its release. Proulx has said that she “may be the first writer in America to have a piece of writing make its way to the screen whole and entire” (2005, www.annieproulx. com). In fact, in adapting the piece, McMurtry and Ossana began by transcribing the entire story into a screenplay format. However, “when we first scripted only what was contained in the short story,” McMurtry remembers, “those pages only comprised about one-third of the final script for Brokeback—about 35 pages of script. The shooting script was 110 pages long; the other 75 pages were added by us” (qtd. in Shank 2005). That the screenplay contains the story in its entirety is a rare feat for Hollywood film adaptations. Generally, screenwriters are compelled to cut and paste moments of the novel, story, or other source text into the screenplay in order to form a unified film that is also marketable to a wide-ranging audience. To adapt a work completely, covering every event and nuance therein, would result in an extremely lengthy and costly production. “Generally in adaptation, say it’s a novel, for example,” Ossana attests, you really have to cut away and decide what you’re going to keep and what you’re going to retain. As a general rule, very often you can make a very good movie out of a not-so-good book because you can cut away and then you add things in. It’s harder, sometimes, to make a good film out of good prose fiction because the beauty of it is in the actual prose rather than the action. In this particular story, there would be a single sentence and we could take that sentence and write an entire scene about it. It would spark our imaginations and we would just take it and run. (qtd. in Anderson 2005)

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In this case, it was necessary for the screenwriters to heavily augment and expand the original story, simply because of its scantiness. Brokeback Mountain is an example of a truly incarnational film adaptation, in which the adapters transform the words into a fleshed-out cinematic body. War of the Worlds (2005). Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds is the apogean mise-en-abyme of contemporary film adaptations. Its hypertextual chain extends backward expansively, connected by a series of historical nodes. This expensive adaptation, transformed for the screen by Josh Friedman and David Koepp, is a remake of the 1953 film, directed by Byron Haskin. Haskin’s film was, itself, an adaptation of Orson Welles’s eerie 1938 radio program, an adaptation of H.G. Wells’s lauded 1898 novel. The history of this story certainly runs deep. Wells’s earlier novel, a work of science fiction, describes an invasion of Earth (nineteenth-century England) by alien creatures from Mars who are equipped with chemical weapons. In one of its endings, the novel finds its narrator and the rest of humanity starting anew after the Martians are destroyed by some viral illness. But Wells apparently provided his readers with an alternate ending in which the Martians triumph over human civilization. The novel has been viewed both as an indictment of British colonial rule and as a treatise in favor of various scientific theories popular during Wells’s lifetime, particularly Darwin’s philosophy on evolution. In the 1930s, burgeoning film director Orson Welles staged a Halloween radio performance of Wells’s novel that frightened a number of listeners who believed that aliens were actually attacking the planet. The radio play, written by Harold Koch, was a modern retelling of the original, presented as a series of news broadcasts. Though a disclaimer had been communicated at the beginning of the act, those tuning in after the opening credits were naturally shocked by what they understood to be an impending attack. A public outcry arose following the broadcast, partially because of the heightened anxiety of citizens preparing for another world war. The 1953 film, written for the screen by Barré Lyndon, again updates Wells’s material for its contemporary film-going audiences and, like Welles’s radio version, transplants the action from England to the United States. Spielberg’s 2005 version takes its cue from its predecessors, refurbishing the plot and setting for present-day viewers. The protagonist Ray Ferrier, a working class man from New Jersey, is, at the start of the film, estranged from his wife and family. By the close of the film, Ray (played by Tom Cruise) becomes a proverbial working-class hero, saving his daughter Rachel (played by Dakota Fanning) from the alien invaders and surviving the worldwide destruction. Different from previous adaptations, Spielberg’s War utilizes sophisticated special effects, marks of the current trend in twenty-first century science fiction filmmaking to adopt technologically advanced production techniques, similarly seen in the first three episodes of Star Wars, appearing in 1999, 2002, and 2005, respectively. Though David Edelstein of Slate (2005) argues that “this War of the Worlds does not bear much resemblance to H.G. Wells’ novel, or to the Orson Welles ’30s radio play,” other critics see Spielberg’s adaptation as doing the same things, culturally and politically, as its forbears. Both Wells’s original novel and Welles’s radio adaptation reflect a specific national or international mood. The novel echoed debates over colonial rule as well as scientific evolution, whereas the radio play emulated a sense of interwar distress that plagued the United States in the 1930s. “At one point [in Spielberg’s film],” reviewer Stephanie Zacharek (2005) alleges, “the camera scans a wall covered with fliers of missing

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loved ones (presumably humans who have been abducted or just plain disintegrated by the marauding aliens). [This gesture is] as direct a reference to post-9/11 New York City as you could make.” Spielberg’s overt cinematic allusion indubitably refers to the current state of affairs in the United States. The very basic themes of his remake mimic the general feelings of terror that Americans now experience on a daily basis in a world wrought with terrorism. Are Spielberg’s alien invaders metaphors for the world terrorists who leave devastation in their wake? Several critics of this film seem to agree with this proposition. The Devil Wears Prada (2006). The Devil Wears Prada is director David Frankel’s and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna’s adaptation of Lauren Weisberger’s roman à clef about a recent college graduate who travels to New York City to become a paid intern at an influential fashion magazine. In the film, Andy Sachs (played by Anne Hathaway) has come to the Big Apple from the Midwest in order to procure a much-coveted position at Runway, a Vogue-style publication headed by the notoriously strict Miranda Priestly (played by Meryl Streep). The novel, an extension of the chick lit phenomenon—a genre of fiction that combines contemporary postfeminist musings on love and relationships with the world of high-style fashion—differs from the film in a number of ways. Adapters chose to give Andy Midwestern roots, rather than Eastern ones, and many of the characters found in the original novel are lost in the film version. Brosh McKenna took several liberties with the screenplay in order to maintain the novel’s casual and comical tone, as well as to create a “happy ending” for Andy and her live-in boyfriend Nate (played by Adrian Grenier). Additionally, the screenwriter chose to downplay two major cultural themes of the novel. In the original, both Andy and Miranda are Jewish Americans, but Miranda changes her name and disguises her heritage more so than Andy. Critics view Weisberger’s inclusion of these details in the novel as an important, if brief, examination of Jewish assimilation in the American twentyfirst century. Similarly, filmmakers chose to exclude various details about the sexuality of Andy’s coworkers, especially that of Nigel, who in the novel is very openly homosexual. Several conclusions can be drawn as to the director’s and screenwriter’s reasoning for disallowing these more serious thematic elements from entering into the final film. As a buoyant comedy-drama, The Devil Wears Prada would appear inconsistent if, all of a sudden, a more formidable thematic undercurrent was launched into the previously jocund plot. Adapters are responsible for making choices about the content of adaptations based on several criteria, and marketability is most certainly at the top of that list. The inclusion of these issues, though assuredly elevating the film to an exceedingly more critical cinematic echelon, would have necessarily been a mistake. Both the film and the novel are strong examples of a trend in popular entertainment in which young working females and their interpersonal relationships are presented in a humorous or even satiric light. Weisberger’s novel stems from her experience as an intern at Vogue, a situation that is masked thinly by her fictional account. Indeed, the film reflects an even more widespread drift in twenty-first-century cinema toward lighthearted adaptations of very contemporary novels and stories. The Devil Wears Prada was first published in 2003 and was in the hands of producers almost immediately. However, the final draft of the screenplay was not concluded until 2005, when Brosh McKenna signed onto the project. The film’s success at the box office, making over $100 million domestically, will further the production of film adaptations within the chick lit genre.

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Fast Food Nation (2006). Eric Schlosser’s 2001 book, Fast Food Nation, is a scathing account of the not-so-healthy practices of the American fast-food industry. According to Schlosser, the influx of fast food into American society “has helped to transform not only the American diet, but also our landscape, economy, workforce, and popular culture” (3). The book also exposes how the fast-mood market, as well as its sibling the meat-packing industry, exploits its workers and, like other profitseeking corporate bodies, rarely considers its ultimately negative effects on global culture. Schlosser’s treatise, though a work of nonfiction, has often been compared to the realist novels of the early twentieth century, most specifically to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Richard Linklater’s 2006 adaptation of Schlosser’s documentary-style book is a fictionalized story featuring an ensemble cast in which members of the fast-food industry relay the consequences of their line of employment on public health, the environment, and society as a whole. As Stephanie Zacharek recognizes, “it can’t be easy to wrest a work of investigative journalism into narrative form, to take facts, figures and arguments and work them into a structure actors can easily inhabit.” The fictionalization of a nonfiction book certainly risks the possibility of turning convincing evidence into mindless filmic plotlines; however, Linklater’s movie, complete with clips of bovine slaughtering, resolves to maintain the disturbing facts embedded in Schlosser’s premiere volume. In Zacharek’s words, the “slaughterhouse climax is bluntly effective; I walked out of the movie feeling wobbly and a little faint.” Todd McCarthy (2006) agrees with Zacharek’s sentiments: Making a shaped, involving film from Schlosser’s intensively researched, highly popular exposé of the junk food juggernaut in the United States repped a considerable challenge, and the author and Linklater have made eminently reasonable decisions about where to train their focus.

Critics concede that Linklater’s film accomplished its proposed goal: to promote awareness of the methods and practices of the fast-food agglomerate through the lens of fiction. Adapting fact into fabrication has become an increasingly trendy cultural anomaly. Bennett Miller’s Capote (2005), starring Academy Award–winner Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the literary artist Truman Capote, is essentially an adaptation of a factual search for the material that eventually formed the framework for Capote’s 1965 “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood. The film relates events not only from Capote’s life but also from the novel, the plot of which follows the story of two murderers on death row responsible for killing an innocent Kansas family. Capote fictionalizes the murderers and their crimes simply by placing them in his novel. The film picks up where the novel leaves off, continuing to fictionalize those occurrences and adding to them by narrativizing Capote’s life during that period. Indeed, the narrative structure of film naturally transforms any work into a kind of fiction given that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, fiction is authentically defined as “the act of fashioning or imitating.” Capote effortlessly mimics and refashions a legitimate literary historical moment. Perhaps in this light, all film adaptations are, themselves, forms of fiction, each existing as a cinematic imitation of a source text. Some are very loyal to their origins, choosing to represent aspects of the novel, story, or biography rather realistically, while others are merely shells of their predecessors. In either case, the end result is a manufactured cinematic

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narrative that generates from a desire to represent a specific text in a heterogeneous medium. Filmography Adaptation. Directed by Spike Jonze. Columbia Pictures, 2002. American Splendor. Directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. FineLine Features, 2003. Art School Confidential. Directed by Terry Zwigoff. United Artists, 2006. Brokeback Mountain. Directed by Ang Lee. Focus Features, 2005. Capote. Directed by Bennett Miller. United Artists, 2005. Chicago. Directed by Rob Marshall. Miramax Films, 2002. Crumb. Directed by Terry Zwigoff. Superior Pictures, 1994. The Devil Wears Prada. Directed by David Frankel. 20th Century Fox, 2006. Everything Is Illuminated. Directed by Live Schreiber. Warner Independent Pictures, 2005. Fast Food Nation. Directed by Richard Linklater. BBC Films, 2006. Frida. Directed by Julie Taymor. Miramax Films, 2002. Ghost World. Directed by Terry Zwigoff. United Artists, 2001. The Hours. Directed by Stephen Daldry. Miramax Films, 2002. Road to Perdition. Directed by Sam Mendes. 20th Century Fox, 2002. Sin City. Directed by Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez. Dimension Films, 2005. War of the Worlds. Directed by Stephen Spielberg. Dreamworks SKG, 2005.

Bibliography American Film Institute. http://www.afi.com. Anderson, Matt. “Adapting Brokeback Mountain: From Page to Screen.” Movie Habit. 2005. http://www.moviehabit.com. Andrew, Dudley. “The Well-Worn Muse: Adaptation in Film History and Theory.” In Narrative Strategies. Sydney M. Conger and Janice R. Welsh, eds. Macomb: Western Illinois University, 1980, 9–19. Braudy, Leo. Afterword. In Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes. Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal, eds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998, 327–335. Cartmell, Deborah, and Imelda Whelehan, eds. Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text. London: Routledge, 1999. Clowes, Daniel. Art School Confidential. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2005. ———. Ghost World. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1998. Collins, Max Allan, and Richard Payner. Road to Perdition. New York: Pocket Books, 2002. Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998. Denby, David. “Big Pictures: Hollywood Looks for a Future.” The New Yorker. December 2006. http://www.newyorker.com. Diehl, Karen. “Once Upon an Adaptation: Traces of the Authorial on Film.” In Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship. Mireia Aragay, ed. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. Ebert, Roger. “Chicago.” Chicago Sun-Times. December 2002. http://rogerebert. suntimes.com. ———. “Frida.” Chicago Sun-Times. November 2002. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com. ———. “Ghost World.” Chicago Sun-Times. August 2001. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com. Edelstein, David. “Adapt This: Everything Is Illuminated and Thumbsucker Are Lost in Translation.” Slate. September 2005. http://www.slate.com. ———. “They Came From Below: Stephen Spielberg’s War of the Worlds.” Slate. June 2005. http://www.slate.com. Elliott, Kamilla. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

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FILM ADAPTATIONS OF BOOKS Foer, Jonathan Safran. Everything Is Illuminated. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Herrera, Hayden. Frida. New York: Harper & Row, 1983. Horton, Andrew, and Stuart Y. McDougal, eds. Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb.com. Kaufman, Charlie, and Donald Kaufman. Adaptation. The Shooting Script. New York: Newmarket Press, 2002. Lupack, Barbara Tepa. Take Two: Adapting the Contemporary American Novel to Film. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press, 1994. McCarthy, Todd. “Fast Food Nation.” Variety. May 2006. http://www.variety.com. McFarlane, Brian. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Film Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Milmo, Cahal. “Stop Digging Up Mother’s Troubled Past, Says Plath’s Daughter.” The Independent. November 2004. http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk. Nasar, Sylvia. A Beautiful Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998. Orlean, Susan. Foreword. Adaptation. The Shooting Script. New York: Newmarket Press, 2002. ———. The Orchid Thief. New York: Random House, 1998. Oxford English Dictionary. http://www.oed.com. Pekar, Harvey, et al. American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003. Proulx, E. Annie. Brokeback Mountain. New York: Scribner, 2005. ———. “Brokeback Mountain FAQ.” Annie Proulx Online. December 2005. http://www.annieproulx.com. Reynolds, Peter, ed. Novel Images: Literature in Performance. London: Routledge, 1993. Seger, Linda. The Art of Adaptation: Turning Fact and Fiction Into Film. New York: Henry Holt, 1992. Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005. Shank, Jenny. “Pulitzer Prize Winner Says the West’s ‘Got Balls’: Proulx, McMurtry, and Ossana Discuss Adapting ‘Brokeback Mountain.’” New West. November 2005. http://www.newwest.net. Sinyard, Neil. Filming Literature: The Art of Screen Adaptation. London: Croom Helm, 1986. Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” In Film Adaptation. James Naremore, ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Stam, Robert, and Alessandra Raengo, eds. Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. Weisberger, Lauren. The Devil Wears Prada. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Zacharek, Stephanie. “Everything Is Illuminated.” Salon, September 2005. http://dir.salon.com/ story/ent/movies/review/2005/09/16/everything_is_illuminated/index.html. ———. “Fast Food Nation.” Salon, November 2006. http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/ review/2006/11/17/fast_food/index.html. ———. “War of the Worlds.” Salon, June 2005. http://dir.salon.com/story/ent/movies/ review/2005/06/29/war/index.html.

Further Reading Aragay, Mireia, ed. Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006; Cartmell, Deborah, and Imelda Whelehan, eds. Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text. London: Routledge, 1999; Chatman, Seymour. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990; Conger, Sydny M., and Janice R. Welsh. Narrative Strategies. Macomb: Western Illinois University, 1980; Desmond, John, and Peter Hawkes. Adaptation: Studying Film and Literature. Columbus, OH: McGraw-Hill, 2005; Elliott, Kamilla. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cam-

FLASH FICTION bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; Giddings, Robert, Keith Selby, and Chris Wensley. Screening the Novel. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990; Horton, Andrew, and Stuart Y. McDougal, eds. Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998; Lupack, Barbara Tepa. Take Two: Adapting the Contemporary American Novel to Film. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press, 1994; McFarlane, Brian. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Film Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996; Naremore, James. Film Adaptation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000; Reynolds, Peter, ed. Novel Images: Literature in Performance. London: Routledge, 1993; Seger, Linda. The Art of Adaptation: Turning Fact and Fiction Into Film. New York: Henry Holt, 1992; Sinyard, Neil. Filming Literature: The Art of Screen Adaptation. London: Croom Helm, 1986; Stam, Robert. Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005; Stam, Robert, and Alessandra Raengo, eds. Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005; Stam and Raengo. A Companion to Literature and Film. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004; Zatlin, Phyllis. Theatrical Translation and Film Adaptation: A Practitioner’s View. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2005.

AMY MALLORY-KANI

FLASH FICTION Definition. Many editors and writers today define flash fiction as a story ranging from a few words to not usually over 1,500 to 2,000 words (but more often less than 1,000 words). A traditional short story ranges from 3,000 to 20,000 words, so flash fiction is considerably shorter. However, while length can help identify flash fiction, it is of little use in actually defining it. The amorphous and protean quality of flash fiction allows for the constant changing of shapes as these stories draw and invent from various genres and traditions to create stand-alone stories that often work on their own terms. Countless writers are involved in writing flash fiction in various ways. Many are involved in following the form’s long tradition, and many others are reinventing the form as they continue to experiment with the boundaries and methods of fiction. These shortest of stories are not always diversions for the moment but are often stories that are profound and memorable—as good fiction of longer lengths can be. Charles Baxter notes in the introduction to Sudden Fiction International: 60 Short Short Stories (1989), “this form is not about to be summarized by any one person’s ideas about it . . . the stories are on so many various thresholds: they are between poetry and fiction, the story and the sketch, prophecy and reminiscence, the personal and the crowd . . . as a form, they are open, and exist in a state of potential” (25).

FLUSH FICTION? Flash fiction often travels by several interesting names, depending on what publishers, editors, readers, or writers prefer to call such stories. Some of these names include fictions, shortshorts, sudden fiction (the preceding three usually representing the upper length limits), micro, zip, miniaturist, minimalist, minute, postcard, fast, furious, quick, snap, and skinny fiction. They are also sometimes called palm-of-the hand stories, drabbles, smoke-long stories, and in some cases, prose poetry and American haibun.These small stories have also been called “flush fiction” to emphasize the important single-sitting ideal Edgar Allan Poe recommended for short stories.

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Some names for flash fiction are chosen to stress brevity, suggesting that such stories can be read or even written in a flash. Other names are chosen to emphasize the way in which the stories affect and enlighten readers. And still other names are chosen for the way in which they cause readers to perform the act of reading, many times forcing them to slow down and read such pieces as slowly and carefully as they would read good poetry. Even though this type of writing travels by several names, flash fiction has become the most popular label, likely because of its snappy poetic consonance, which makes it easy to hold in memory, and because of its distance from the older, less descriptive term “short-shorts.” More and more writers, editors, and readers use “flash fiction” to refer to very short stories. Some current flash fiction continues to follows the writing strategy of O. Henry by displaying a trick or twist ending. Other flash fiction borrows strategies from the longer short story, and such pieces will often have a traditional beginning, middle, and end. Still other flash fiction pieces tend more toward prose poetry or toward the experimental, and the results are hybrid pieces that push the boundaries of what fiction typically does. While some flash fiction pieces are to be read quickly as simple entertainment, other types are similar to lyric poetry—condensed, thickly layered, evoking a full range of emotions, and making demands on reader attention and imagination. Many poetically compressed pieces depend on implication, suggestion, voice, or situation for their effects and often devote less attention to traditional fiction concepts such as plot or character development. Characters in some flash fiction pieces are nameless, and instead of having names, characters display an archetypal relationship identification (such as “mother” or “father”). Those pieces without character names often give the impression that the stories are “everyman” or “everywoman” stories. Gitte Mose points out, “Through their testing and tentative art of storytelling, these writers of short-shorts are able to show the world as fickle and immense, a world we cannot fathom but perhaps approach when it is captured at the ‘roots’ of a kind of fiction that is probing and challenging the capabilities of language.” Writers of short-shorts assume “that the world is full of possibilities, that it can be examined and told by imposing their artistic form on some small corners of chaos” (2004, 93). Some of the more unusual types of flash fiction include plotless stories; monologues; language, tone, or mood pieces; list stories (such as using biographical material or a course syllabus to tell a story); the use of unusual second-person point of view or address; and the use of one, two, or three long sentences covering two or three pages. More and more writers use flash fiction to “reveal the hidden, to accentuate the subtle, to highlight the seemingly insignificant, or, as William Blake said in another context, ‘to see a world in a grain of sand’” (Fuller and Casto 2001, 30). To do this, protean flash fiction puts many old and new and experimental writing strategies to work. History. The idea of flash fiction has been around as long as people have been telling stories around campfires and as long as writers have been writing. Brief, potent, and suggestive short-short stories abound in ancient literature and continue to be a strong presence in today’s stories. These short stand-alone stories were once generally known as short-shorts, and a history of flash fiction will of necessity parallel a history of short-shorts. But when several popular anthologies were published in the mid-1980s and 1990s, the study of what these brief stories are and what they

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can do began in earnest. Along with these studies came the search for and use of new and interesting names. However, until recently most flash fiction has managed to slip beneath literary radar. The name flash fiction likely came into widespread acceptance and use with the publication of Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories, edited by James Thomas, Denise Thomas, and Tom Hazuka (1992). As the memorable and snappy title spread, especially across the Internet, “flash fiction” became for many a generic catchall name for very short stories (along with “sudden fiction” and other descriptive and memorable names—see this chapter’s sidebar). Some of the early writers of short-shorts who are major influences on present-day flash fiction include O. Henry (1862–1910), master of the surprise ending; Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), acclaimed for his prose poems; Guy de Maupassant (1850–1910), known for stories from everyday life that often reveal hidden aspects of people; Hector Hugh Munro (Saki) (1870–1916), praised for short-short sardonic and macabre stories; and Ambrose Bierce (1842–1910), acclaimed for his brief stories of the supernatural. In his dedication for his series of prose poems in Paris Spleen (1869) Baudelaire says, “We can cut wherever we please, I my dreaming, you your manuscript, the reader his reading; for I do not keep the reader’s restive mind hanging in suspense on the threads of an interminable and superfluous plot. . . . Chop it into numerous pieces and you will see that each one can get along alone” (ix). Some of Baudelaire’s pieces are less than a half page long while others run two or three pages in length. That flash fiction can also “get along alone” is one of its main characteristics—each small story, like each of Baudelaire’s pieces, is complete in itself. According to Mildred I. Reid and Delmar E. Bordeaux, editors of Writers: Try Short Shorts! (1947), prior to 1926, short-shorts were published daily in McClure’s Newspaper Syndicate. Then in 1926 Colliers Weekly, who claimed the one-page stories they published were the “greatest innovation in short story publication since O. Henry,” ran such stories in 20 issues, and the short-short quickly became a popular form. Some of the authors for Colliers were Rupert Hughes, Zona Gale, Sophie Kerr, and Octavus Roy Cohen. Cosmopolitan magazine soon followed suit and engaged W. Somerset Maugham and A.J. Cronin to write short-shorts for their pages as well (13). As of 1947, from the “slicks to the pulps,” over two hundred magazines and newspapers were publishing short-short stories as regular features. The stories also began appearing on radio where they found other eager audiences (25). Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), known for his deceptively simple and spare prose style and for his withholding of information so readers can draw necessary conclusions, is another major influence on modern flash fiction. Some of his flashlength stories include “Hills Like White Elephants,” “A Very Short Story,” “Cat in the Rain,” “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” “Ten Indians,” “A Simple Enquiry,” and “A Canary For One.” Other early writers whose work is a strong influence on modern flash fiction include Fredrick Brown and Richard Brautigan. The horror stories collected in Fredrick Brown’s popular Nightmares and Geezenstacks (1961) are all flash-fiction length. Richard Brautigan’s only story collection, Revenge of the Lawn (1971), influenced interest in stories that blurred genre boundaries. Many of Brautigan’s stories are less than a half page long.

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Through the years there have been several other acclaimed authors associated with flash fiction–length stories—far too many to explore in the confines of this chapter. Instead this chapter’s focus is on some of the major and influential anthologies that have been published. Not all authors in the anthologies are included here, but the names mentioned show the diversity of writers engaged in writing extremely short fiction. Robert Coover and Kent Dixon edited the Stone Wall Book of Short Fictions (1973), a work made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The stories range from the straightforward to the highly experimental. Authors include Joyce Carol Oates, Donald Barthelme, Elie Wiesel, Kent Dixon, Robert Kelly, Richard Brautigan, Robert Coover, Russell Edson, Jorge Luis Borges, Rikki, W.S. Merwin, and others. Coover, serving as guest coeditor along with editor Elliott Anderson, collected and featured 87 “Minute Stories” in the Winter 1976 issue of TriQuarterly. Some of the stories are as brief as an average paragraph, while others are a page long, and others run two or three pages. The authors include W.S. Merwin, Alain RobbGrillet, Angela Carter, Russell Edson, Michael Benedikt, Jorge Luis Borges, Andrei Codrescu, Annie Dillard, Kent Dixon, Robert Kelly, Richard Brautigan, and others. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander published Microcosmic Tales: 100 Wondrous Science Fiction Short-Short Stories (1980). All the stories are 2,000 words or fewer with many less than two pages long. Some of the authors are Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, Harlan Ellison, Mack Reynolds, Alice Laurance, Robert Silverberg, A.E. van Vogt, Fredric Brown, Harry Harrison, Larry Niven, Joanna Russ, Lester del Rey, and Fritz Leiber. Irving Howe and Ilana Wiener Howe edited Short-Shorts: Anthology of the Shortest Stories (1982), which includes masterpieces from around the world. The average length for the stories is 1,500 words. Some of the authors are Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Luigi Pirandello, Sherwood Anderson, Katherine Anne Porter, Isaac Babel, William Carlos Williams, Doris Lessing, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Grace Paley, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Augusto Monterroso, Heinrich Boll, and Luisa Valenzuela. 100 Great Fantasy Short Short Stories (1984) was edited by Isaac Asimov, Terry Carr, and Martin H. Greenberg. The stories are 2,000 words or fewer, and many are as short as a half page. Authors include Roger Zelazny, H.P. Lovecraft, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Harlan Ellison, Damon Knight, Bruce Boston, Jane Yolen, Steve Rasnic Tem, Lawrence C. Connolly, Mack Reynolds, Fredric Brown, Barry Malzberg, Edgar Pangborn, Jack Dann, Gene Wolfe, Andre Maurois, and others. A serious search for a new name for such short stories came with the publication of Sudden Fiction: American Short-Shorts (1986), edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas. The anthology contains good debate and discussion on this type of writing, and the stories featured range from one to five pages long. The editors describe the stories as “highly compressed, highly charged, insidious, protean, sudden, alarming, tantalizing, these short-shorts confer form on small corners of chaos” (xvi). The authors include Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, John Cheever, Roy Blount, Jr., John Updike, Gordon Lish, Mary Robison, Langston Hughes, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Ray Bradbury, Tennessee Williams, Pamela Painter, Mark Strand, Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Edson, Stuart Dybek, James B. Hall, Russell Banks, Ron Carlson, Lydia Davis, Jayne Anne Phillips, Bernard Malamud, and others.

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4 Minute Fictions: 50 Short-Short Stories from the North American Review (1987) was edited by Robley Wilson Jr. The North American Review is the oldest magazine in the United States and has been published since 1815. Wilson includes a brief introduction to the 50 stories that range from 200 to 2,000 words and says, “What’s important is that these are excellent pieces of fiction wrought within a limited frame of space and of time. Each works in its own way, on its own terms.” He says that like the work in the anthology, “fiction covers everything, is eclectic, clings to no armature of critical fashion” (iii). Among the authors are Barry Lopez, Raymond Carver, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Stephen Dixon, Stuart Dybek, Thomas Farber, Edward Hirsch, Thaisa Frank, Edward Hirsch, W.P. Kinsella, Pamela Painter, and Allen Woodman. Sudden Fiction International: 60 Short-Short Stories (1989), edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas, also includes with the various stories an excellent and useful afterword section where various writers, editors, and theorists comment on such things as the popularity of this type of fiction and the characteristics of very short stories. The anthology features notable writers from around the world such as Margaret Atwood, Yasunary Kawabata, Jamaica Kincaid, Colette, R.K. Narayan, Heinrich Boll, Jorge Luis Borges, Slawomir Mrozek, Doris Lessing, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Peter Handke, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Brautigan, David Brooks, Krisnan Varma, Isak Dinesen, Panos Ioannides, Hernan Lara Zavala, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Talat Abbasi, Denis Hirson, Jeanette Winterson, Luisa Valenzuela, Italo Calvino, Ron Carlson, Edla Van Steen, Isaac Babel, Feng Jicai, Nadine Gordimer, Fernando Sorrentino, Daniel Boulanger, Bessie Head, Donald Barthelme, Clarice Lispector, Julio Ortega, Bai Xiao-Yi, and Paul Theroux. Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories (1992), edited by James Thomas, Denise Thomas, and Tom Hazuka, includes stories 250 to 750 words in length. The editors set out to answer the question “How short can a story be and still truly be a story?” They decide such stories are “short stage presentations or musical pieces that play to the full range of human sensibilities—some evoke mood while other provoke the intellect, some introduce us to people we’re interested to meet while others tell us of unusual but understandable phenomena in this world, and some of them do several or all of these things, the things good fiction of any length does” (12). Stories included are by Francine Prose, Raymond Carver, Lon Otto, Bret Lott, Russell Edson, Luisa Valenzuela, Pamela Painter, Don Shea, Carolyn Forche, Richard Brautigan, Jamaica Kincaid, Bruce Holland Rogers, Heinrich Boll, Julio Cortazar, John Updike, Tim O’Brien, Mark Strand, Gordon Lish, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Ronald Wallace, and others. Allen Kornblum’s Coffee House Press published a series flash fiction collections by individual authors in the early 1990s as part of their Coffee To Go: Short-Short Story series. Author collections include Jessica Treat’s A Robber in the House (1993), Kenneth Koch’s Hotel Lambosa and Other Stories (1993), and Barry Silesky’s One Thing That Can Save Us (1994). Sudden Fiction (Continued) (1996) was edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas. The editors point out, The spirit of experimentation continues to be most alive these days in the shorter forms. No longer relegated to special sections, they are scattered as regular fare throughout the pages of an even larger number of magazines, including the largercirculation magazines. But one thing remains constant: each story revels in its own

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This collection’s authors include Margaret Atwood, Alice Walker, Robin Hemley, Molly Giles, Don DeLillo, Charles Baxter, Milos Macourek, Ursula Hegi, Ron Carlson, Bret Lott, Robert Olen Butler, Andrei Codrescu, Allen Woodman, Pagan Kennedy, Richard Plant, Madison Smartt Bell, and Bruce Holland Rogers. Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Really Short Stories (1996), edited by Jerome Judson, features a decade of winners and finalists from the annual World’s Best Short Short Story Contest, which had been running since 1986. It also includes other writers who took up the challenge of writing such short stories, and all of the stories presented are 300 words or fewer. Stern says, “These short short stories represent work by writers who have found ways to play upon a very small field, and yet to invent their own imaginative and resonant worlds” (19). Writers include Molly Giles, Roberta Allen, Pamela Painter, Kim Addonizio, Virgil Suarez, Fred Chappell, Ron Wallace, Stuart Dybek, Russell Edson, Ron Carlson, Ursula Hegi, Amy Hempel, Antonya Nelson, and Padgett Powell. Horrors! 365 Scary Stories (1998), edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg, presents readers a story a day for one year’s reading. The anthology won the Horror Writer’s Association Best Anthology Award and includes over 300 writers whose work on average is less than three pages long. The stories are by Lawrence C. Connolly, Michael Arnzen, Linda J. Dunn, Paula Guran, Brian McNaughton, Adam Niswander, Steve Resnic Tem, Tim Waggoner, William Marden, Brian Hodge, Phyllis Eisenstein, Brian A. Hopkins, Hugh B. Cave, Lisa Morton, Bruce Boston, and others. Trends and Themes. Short-short stories have undergone various changes through the years. Early popular short-short stories often adhered to the strategies begun by O. Henry and Guy de Maupassant, with use of a surprise or trick ending. Many writers and editors today still stick with this tried-and-true formula. But flash fiction also takes on many other methods of telling a story. As boundaries continued to be pushed and genre lines became blurrier, the results were new and inventive ways of telling stories—less predictable stories that refuse to remain within any strict formulations about them. This trend continued as short-short stories evolved into today’s concept of very short fiction, which includes models and strategies from older short-shorts and which takes stories into new, interesting, and inventive directions. Following are some of the directions flash-fiction type stories have taken. Reid and Bordeaux say that by 1947 short-shorts “began dealing with every variety of emotion” and became committed to “presenting the beauties, the frailties, and the striking nuances of complex human nature” (14). They describe this type of story as “a dramatic narrative whose primary aim is to arouse in its readers a shock of astonishment or surprise” (19). The commonality shared by stories of the time was “dramatic form, or plot,” which helps the story “achieve its intended effect.” They claim that in the short-short story, “it is not the solution, but the astonishing nature of the solution which is depended upon for the chief effect” (17). In these stories the author “presents a character, or a group of characters acting in and through a crisis” (19). Reid and Bordeaux also say the majority of legitimate short-short stories of the time consisted of eight types: the complication short-short, the character short-short, the decision short-short, the alienation or reconciliation short-short, the psychological

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short-short, the dilemma short-short, the parallel-action short-short, and the identity short-short. Whereas stories up until at least 1947 emphasized plot and crisis as essential to the short-short story, Irving Howe and Ilana Wiener Howe (1983) give plot a much less central position of importance and point out that in the stories they collected, character seems to “lose its significance, seems in fact to drop out of sight.” Instead, such stories depict “human figures in a momentary flash,” in fleeting profile, in “archetypal climaxes which define their mode of existence.” In short-shorts, “situation tends to replace character, representative condition to replace individuality” (x). The average length for stories in the Howes’ anthology is 1,500 words (with some stories as long as 2,500 words). The editors say that while a traditional short story has a simple plot “resembling a chain with two or three links,” in the short-short “there’s only one link.” In successful short-short stories “everything depends on intensity, one sweeping blow of perception” (xi). Such stories, like lyric poetry, strive for “a rapid unity of impression, an experience rendered in its wink of immediacy.” Writers “stake everything on a stroke of inventiveness” (xii). The four variations in the short-shorts they feature include one thrust of incident, life rolled up, snap-shot or single frame, and like a fable (xiii–xiv). Mark Mills in Crafting the Very Short Story: An Anthology of 100 Masterpieces (2004) says that the primary stylistic features of the stories in the anthology are voice, point of view, and setting. “Character,” says Mills, is “only glanced at and plot is a slim shadow of the larger and more important structure” (xv). Such stories “illuminate the human condition by dramatizing universal aspects of human nature,” and the results are stories that are “ostensibly simple in appearance, yet complex and precise in detail.” The writers, Mills says, “deftly employ the tools of fiction to maximize each story’s power while minimizing length” (xiv). The pace of this succinct genre is “swift yet unhurried,” and its “uncommon voice [is] supplemented by inventive design” (xv). In Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories (1986), Stephen Minot says short-shorts are rooted in at least five different traditions: the true experience story (“vivid, intense, dramatic” and which seems highly personal), the anecdote (which includes jokes, parables, and fables), the speculative story (often without plot where “character and even plot become subservient to theme”), dream stories (where “mood is stressed more than theme” and “tone is everything”), and poetic stories (rich in auditory effects and where “imagery is more highly valued than narrative structure”) (235–237). As Minot points out, flash pieces often seem highly personal and true. Some flash fiction pieces are read as true stories, and some true stories are read as fictional accounts—one will often pass as the other. This blurring of genre boundaries continues in the publication of three popular anthologies of what can be viewed as flash memoirs or flash creative nonfiction—all related to flash fiction in technique. Judith Kitchen and Mary Paumier Jones edited In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction (1996). The anthology includes work by Stuart Dybek, Maxine Kumin, Terry Tempest Williams, Tobias Wolff, Tim O’Brien, Michael Ondaatje, Joy Harjo, Rita Dove, Lee Gutkind, Charles Simic, Denise Levertov, Andrei Codrescu, Gretel Ehrlich, Donald Hall, Barry Lopez, Diane Ackerman, Albert Goldbarth, Naomi Shihab Nye, and others. The editors point out that such work is similar to flash fiction, but in these stories “the people, the places, the events are real.” And like flash fiction, the pieces are complete in themselves (25).

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Kitchen and Jones also edited In Brief: Short Takes on the Personal (1999). The editors note that these short-shorts “employ many techniques of fiction—narrative, dialogue, descriptive imagery, point of view, interior voice,” but they do so “to make something of the facts” (19). Included are pieces by Anne Carson, Frank McCourt, Albert Goldbarth, Pattiann Rogers, Bernard Cooper, Edwidge Danticat, Andre Dubus, Charles Baxter, Jamaica Kincaid, Mary Oliver, William Heyen, Robert Shapard, Stuart Dybek, and others. In 2005 Judith Kitchen edited Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction, and the anthology includes work by Salman Rushdie, Amy Tan, Stephen Dunn, Ron Carlson, Hayden Carruth, Stuart Dybek, Dinty W. Moore, Terry Tempest Williams, Albert Goldbarth, Naomi Shihab Nye, and many others. Another trend is the creation of author collections of flash fiction. Many acclaimed authors have created and published short story collections that include their shortest pieces (either exclusively or along with longer stories). Some of those writers are Raymond Carver, Barry Yourgrau, Yasunari Kawabata, Amy Hempel, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Bruce Holland Rogers, to name just a few. But another developing trend is the creation of the flash-fiction style novel. Among these unusual novels are Italo Calvino’s literary classic Invisible Cities (1974), Richard Currey’s Fatal Light (1988), and Peter Marcus’s Good, Brother (2006). Roberta Allen notes that Allen Lightman’s Einstein’s Dream and her own novella, The Daughter, are composed of linking short-shorts. She also notes that Sandra Cisneros’s novel, The House on Mango Street, makes use of the form as well (1997, 5). All the structures and strategies of past flash fiction are still viable for writers and publishers today. And today’s writers can continue to push the boundaries of what fiction can do. Context and Issues. Charles Baxter calls very short stories “tunes for the end of time, for those in an information age who are sick of data” (1986, 226). Baxter also says, “The novel is spatially, like an estate; the very short story is like an efficiency on the twenty-third floor. As it happens, more people these days live in efficiencies than on estates. The result may be that we will start to see a shift in the imperial self of the traditional novel to the we and the they of communal stories. . . it is as if we ourselves are living in tighter psychic spaces” (1989, 21). Today’s readers have less time available for serious or even pleasurable reading. In many homes both partners have full-time jobs, and families often engage in hectic lifestyles. For convenience people often replace lengthy novels with films and replace short stories with half-hour television shows. People are also bombarded with information from every direction: from radio, 24-hour television newscasts, news tracks in newscasts, split-screen television news, daily newspapers, cell phones, e-mails, fax machines, pagers, beepers, text messages, billboards, telemarketing, junk mail, and more. As Charles Baxter (2001) points out, a type of “data nausea” can be the result of such an overwhelming amount of information coming from every direction. Dinty W. Moore, who also teaches flash fiction and serves as editor for Brevity online (for short-short creative nonfiction), is often asked to defend such brief writing. He says in Sudden Stories: The Mammoth Book of Miniscule Fiction (2003), “People today consume information at a much-accelerated rate. Some of the information they consume is shallow and of little value, certainly, but some is incredibly sophisticated. The best examples of short short fiction fall into the latter category . . . though brief, they are incredibly sophisticated, stuffed to the gills” (16).

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Flash fiction fits well with busy lifestyles because it can be read in the small breaks that life provides, such as while waiting for a doctor’s appointment, while riding on a subway or bus or as a passenger in a car, while waiting at the barber shop or at the hair salon, while relaxing in the bathtub—any time a few minutes of freedom present themselves. Readers still seek stories that provide a bit of escapism or that provide insights into modern-day people and what it can mean to be human. Readers also still require good literature to help them make some sense of their lives. Flash fiction can satisfy these desires, and these small stories fit well with a rushed and hectic manner of living where there is little time available for prolonged reading. Recent advances in electronic technology have given flash fiction an even greater boost in readership. Now readers can read flash fiction on the Internet and via e-mail, cell phones, and mobile devices, as well as hear it over podcasts, depending on what electronic devices are available to the reader and the publisher. Through flash fiction and electronic availability, readers can get the benefits of reading good literature without the time commitment longer works require. Publishing economics enters into this equation as well. Printing costs are expensive, but publishers can give their readers good flash fiction pieces and can publish more stories in each print issue. Because of the high cost of printing and the difficulty of finding funding, many publishers are discontinuing their print publications and are turning instead to Internet publishing. Reception. After years of mostly escaping literary radar, flash fiction has come into its own. Today it is regularly featured in newspapers, magazines, literary journals, anthologies, and collections. It is an especially popular form of fiction for Internet publications. In addition to being published in these ways, flash fiction has also been published on coffee cans, coffee mugs, public transportation, t-shirts, and beer mats and has even been sold in vending machines. Currently this type of writing is taught and studied in high school and university courses, taught and studied online, and explored in numberless in-person workshops. As of 1989, Shapard and Thomas’s Sudden Fiction International: 60 ShortShort Stories anthology was used in courses at over 200 colleges and universities (1989, 15). A further indication of flash fiction’s popularity and reception is the publication of general “how to” books on the subject. Roberta Allen published Fast Fiction: Creating Fiction in Five Minutes (1997), which guides writers in crafting such stories, in turning five-minute writing sessions into short-short fiction. The book contains exercises and a good overview of modern-day flash fiction. Allen describes such stories as “intense fictions that use language with power and precision” and as a type of story “that gets quickly to the core and reveals the essence of a situation or moment in a very few words” (40). Other general how-to books include Harvey Stanbrough’s Writing Realistic Dialogue & Flash Fiction: A Thorough Primer for Writers of Fiction & Essays (2004), which focuses mainly on dialogue and flash fiction of 100 words or fewer, and Michael Wilson’s Flash Writing: How to Write, Revise and Publish Stories Less Than 1000 Words Long (2004). Popular writing magazines such as Writer’s Digest, Poets & Writers, and The Writer have also run several feature-length articles on writing flash fiction. Flash fiction is now receiving more attention from scholars as well. The Art of Brevity: Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis (2004), edited by Per

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Winther, Jakob Lothe, and Hans H. Skei, brings together American and Nordic scholars for a close critical look at short-short fiction. Some of the contributors of articles include Charles E. May, Mary Rohrberger, Susan Lohafer, John Gerlach, Hans H. Skei, Andrew K. Kennedy, Per Winther, Stuart Sillars, Gitte Mose, Jakob Lothe, W.H. New, Gerd Bjorhovde, Laura Castor, Jan Nordby Gretlund, Sandra Lee Kleppe, Axel Nissen, and Hans B. Lofgren. Derek White, editor of Sleepingfish, which is almost exclusively devoted to flash fiction, and publisher at Calamari Press, says that with the exception of one poetry collection, all the collections published through Calamari Press have been literary flash fiction collections (see online catalog at http://calamaripress.com/ Catalog.htm). These collections have also been widely reviewed in American Book Review, NY Press, Bookslut, and elsewhere (personal e-mail communication, December 24, 2006). Other Recent Directions. Oprah Winfrey’s O Magazine published several flash fictions, 300 words and fewer, in its First Ever Summer Reading Issue (“Flash Fictions” 2006). The high-circulation magazine brought flash fiction before the eyes of millions of readers. A description of the stories says, “They’re short (and we mean short), intense (imagine a novel crossed with a haiku), and mesmerizing (whether they’re illuminating a single moment or a whole life). The result: eight little beauties that leave a wake of wonder and wondering” (168). The authors of the flash fiction stories are A.M. Holmes, Antonya Nelson, Anna Deavere Smith, Dawn Raffel, Mark Leyner, Stuart Dybek, John Edgar Wideman, and Amy Hempel. Some of the shortest pieces of all appeared in “Very Short Stories” in the November 2006 issue of Wired magazine, another publication with a large circulation. The editors invited writers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror to submit stories just six words in length. The resulting collection includes work by such renowned writers as Margaret Atwood, Arthur C. Clark, Ursula Le Guin, Ben Bova, and Orson Scott Card and even a story by actor William Shatner (and several other writers). Esquire (February 2007) sent out 250 napkins to various well-known writers across the United States, asking them to write a short-short story on them. Nearly 100 writers responded, and the magazine published some of the resulting stories in their print magazine. Those not published in the print version were published in their online version. The writers who created the napkin stories included Madison Smartt Bell, Aimee Bender, Tony Epril, Sheila Heti, Michael Mejia, Rick Moody, Ethan Paquin, Jim Ruland, Erika Kraus, Ron Carlson, and many others. The Internet has given flash fiction an even bigger boost in writer and reader popularity by bringing it before a larger reading public than ever possible before. Currently there are countless online publications featuring flash fiction and hundreds that feature flash fiction exclusively. There are also countless online critique workshops and dozens of online flash fiction courses. The stories published on the Internet run the gamut from sheer entertainment to literary, thought-provoking stories. The Internet has also helped spread the various newer names for this type of writing. Some Internet editors also make use of advances in technology to turn flash fiction into multimedia events. Some incorporate music and art into the online presentations. Such productions range from amateur work to highly professional. With the arrival of recent technology, flash fiction is often read on Internet radio as well. In 2003 podcasts began broadcasting on the Internet. Podcasts are media files that use video images, audio, or both and that make use of syndication feeds for playback

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on personal computers and mobile devices. Many podcasters use flash fiction in their broadcasts. Short-short pieces have always been popular on the radio and were a regular staple in the 1930s and 1940s. But now such pieces often travel on the radio under the many newer names for flash fiction. National Public Radio features flash fiction as part of its regular offering. In January 2007, Symphony Space on Broadway in New York City arranged an evening with the stories in Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories from America and Beyond (2007). Actors read the stories, and they were taped before an audience. The stories later aired on National Public Radio’s “Selected Shorts” (Personal e-mail communication with Robert Shapard, December 28, 2006). Flash fiction has also made its way into film. Several of Raymond Carver’s short-short stories were made into a film titled Short Cuts (1993), directed by Robert Altman. The film depicts the way lives intersect among 22 Los Angeles characters and features actors Andie MacDowell, Tom Waits, Mathew Modine, Lily Tomlin, Tim Robbins, Jack Lemmon, Julianne Moore, and Anne Archer. A film reviewer for Time Out London wrote, “The marvelous performances bear witness to Altman’s iconoclastic good sense, with Tomlin, Waits, Modine, Robbins, MacDowell and the rest lending the film’s mostly white, middle-class milieu an authenticity seldom found in American cinema. But the real star is Altman, whose fluid, clean camera style, free-and-easy editing, and effortless organisation of a complex narrative are quite simply the mark of a master.” The film also won the Golden Globe Award in 1994 and was nominated for a Special Achievement Award. Barry Yourgrau’s short-short collection The Sadness of Sex (1995) was turned into a comedy of modern romance and starred the author himself. The film was composed of 15 short acts showing the many phases of a love affair. Different types of camerawork and various types of music were used to distinguish one story from another (Brennan 2007). Michael Arnzen’s flash fiction collection 100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories (2005) was a finalist for the 2005 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection. Some individual stories in the collection also received honorable mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Because of 100 Jolts’s popularity, it was reissued in hardcover in 2007. Further, 16 stories from 100 Jolts have also been released in an audio version titled Audiovile. In 2006 about half of the stories in 100 Jolts were adapted to film in Jim Minton’s Exquisite Corpse: An International Collaboration of Dark Cinema, an experiment in horror cinema that is an international collaboration of directors, multimedia artists, and animators. The other half of the stories in the film were adapted from Arnzen’s poems (personal e-mail communication, January 13, 2007). Lawrence C. Connolly’s flash fiction, “Echoes,” was published in over a dozen publications worldwide. It was also twice adapted to film. The first, a film festival production, was filmed in Hollywood by Steve Muscarella. The second adaptation was directed by Rodney Altman and won Best Achievement in Cinematography at the Fusion Film Festival in New York City in March 2004 (personal e-mail communication, January 15, 2007). Peter Marcus, author of short-short collections The Singing Fish (2005) and Good, Brother (2006; a reissue of a book that was published through a different press in 2001), saw a short film based on the title story of Good, Brother that

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premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival in 2002 (personal e-mail communication, January 22, 2007). Selected Authors. There are countless writers involved in writing flash fiction, and the number grows every day. The stories take on a myriad of subjects, themes, strategies, and methods. Following is a brief overview of some of the influential anthologies published since the year 2000, along with the names of some of the authors engaged in writing flash fiction. Not all authors for each anthology are included, but those mentioned give a glimpse of the variety of writers of flash fiction. Dinty W. Moore edited Sudden Stories: The Mammoth Book of Miniscule Fiction (2003). The anthology of stories 350 words or fewer also includes some thoughts on flash or sudden fiction by the writers themselves. The authors are Molly Giles, Michael Arnzen, Josip Novakovich, Robin Hemley, Allen Woodman, Aimee Bender, Denise Duhamel, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Ron Wallace, William Heyen, Virgil Suarez, Jim Heynen, Gail Galloway Adams, Mark Budman, and several others. Mark Mills’s textbook Crafting the Very Short Story: An Anthology of 100 Masterpieces (2003) looks at the work of various distinguished authors and includes essays on the short-short written either by scholars or by the writers themselves. The textbook also includes brief writing instructions. Some of the acclaimed writers in this culturally diverse textbook are Sherwood Anderson, Amiri Baraka, Giovanni Boccaccio, Bertolt Brecht, Charles Bukowski, Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, Raymond Carter, Colette, Sandra Cisneros, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, E.M. Forster, Eduardo Galeno, Graham Greene, James Joyce, Langston Hughes, Shirley Jackson, Pam Houston, Ursula K. Le Guin, Clarice Lispector, Thomas Mann, W. Somerset Maugham, Herman Melville, Alice Munro, Vladimir Nobakov, Anais Nin, Joyce Carol Oates, Frank O’Connor, Dorothy Parker, Petronius, Jayne Anne Phillips, Marcel Proust, Mary Robison, John Steinbeck, James Thurber, Paul Theroux, Jean Toomer, John Updike, Luisa Valenzuela, Voltaire, Alice Walker, Eudora Welty, Dorothy West, Tennessee Williams, Oscar Wilde, Tobias Wolff, Virginia Woolf, and others. James Thomas and Robert Shapard coedited Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories (2006). The anthology includes all new stories that, for the editors, represent the best flash fiction from America in the twenty-first century. Some of the authors are Don Shea, Paul Theroux, Carolyn Forche, Ron Carlson, Robert Coover, Utahna Faith, Barbara Jacksha, Lydia Davis, Lon Otto, Dave Eggers, Donald Hall, Grace Paley, Jim Heynen, John Updike, Mark Budman, Amy Hempel, James Tate, Bruce Holland Rogers, and Pamela Painter. The editors say that the stories, 750 words or fewer, “depend for their success not on their length but on their depth, clarity of vision, and human significance.” A good flash fiction “should move the reader emotionally or intellectually” (2006, 11–13). Peter Connors edited PP/FF: An Anthology (2006), which bridges flash fiction and prose poetry. Connors says the anthology “is prose poetry and flash fiction balanced on a makeshift teeter-totter that never lands. Sometimes it is more prose poetry, sometimes more flash fiction, but it is always in motion between the two.” Connors says it is “a symbol of a vital and important literary form that is constantly in flux, appropriating, moving and growing” (9). Included are stories by Jessica Treat, Stuart Dybek, Daryl Scroggins, Peter Markus, Mark Tursi, G.C. Waldrep, Brian Clements, Anthony Tognazzini, Lydia Davis, Harold Jaffe, Derek White, Ethan Paquin, Kim Addonizio, and others.

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Robert Shapard and James Thomas also coedited New Sudden Fiction: ShortShort Stories from America and Beyond (2007). These stories came from both print publications and Internet publications, and the editors consider the stories to be some of the best sudden fiction of the twenty-first century. The editors also point out that none of these new works end with an ironic twist (in the style of O. Henry) but instead are “suddenly just there, surprising, unpredictable, hilarious, serious, moving, in only a few pages” (14). Authors include Tobias Wollf, Robert Olen Butler, Sam Shepard, Aimee Bender, Nadine Gordimer, Joyce Carol Oates, Robin Hemley, Ron Carlson, Ursula Hegi, Steve Almond, Elizabeth Berg, Sherrie Flick, Ian Frazier, Barry Gifford, and others. An anthology titled You Have Time for This: Contemporary Short-Short Stories was published by Ooligan Press in 2007. This anthology of flash fiction under 500 words was coedited by Mark Budman, editor of Vestal Review, an online publication that specializes in flash fiction only, and Tom Hazuka. Among the authors are Aimee Bender, Bruce Holland Rogers, Steve Almond, Deb Unferth, Katharine Weber, and Pamela Painter (personal communication with Mark Budman, May 6, 2007). Bibliography Allen, Roberta. Fast Fiction: Creating Fiction in Five Minutes. Cincinnati: Story Press, 1997. Asimov, Isaac, Terry Carr, and Martin H. Greenberg, eds. 100 Great Fantasy Short Short Stories. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984. Asimov, Isaac, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander, eds. Microcosmic Tales: 100 Wondrous Science Fiction Short-Short Stories. New York: Daw Books, 1992. Baudelaire, Charles. Paris Spleen. Trans. Louise Varese. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1970. Originally published in 1869. Baxter, Charles. Introduction. Sudden Fiction International: 60 Short Short Stories. Robert Shapard and James Thomas, eds. New York: Norton, 1989. ———. “Shame and Forgetting in the Information Age.” 2001. http://www.giarts. org/library_additional/library_additional_show.htm?doc_id=494628. ———. “The Tradition.” Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories. Robert Shapard and James Thomas, eds. Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 1986. 229. Brautigan, Richard. Revenge of the Lawn/The Abortion/So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away. Omnibus Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995. Brennan, Sandra. “All Movie Guide.” New York Times, May 12, 2007. http://movies2. nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=135640. Brown, Fredric. Nightmares and Geezenstacks. New York: Bantam, 1961. Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Trans. William Weaver. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1974. Connors, Peter, ed. PP/FF: An Anthology. Buffalo: Starcherone Books, 2006. Coover, Robert, and Kent Dixon, eds. The Stone Wall Book of Short Fictions. Iowa City: Stone Wall Press, 1973. Currey, Richard. Fatal Light. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988. Dziemianowicz, Stefan, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg. Horrors! 365 Scary Stories. New York: Metro Books, 1998. Esquire. “The Napkin Project.” February 2007. http://www.esquire.com/fiction/ napkin-fiction/napkinproject. “Flash Fictions.” O: The Oprah Magazine. July 2006. Fuller, Geoff, and Pamelyn Casto. “A Short Course in Short-Short Fiction.” Writer’s Digest, February 2001. Hemingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. The Finca Vigia Edition. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.

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FLASH FICTION Howe, Irving, and Ilana Wiener Howe, eds. Short Shorts: An Anthology of the Shortest Stories Toronto: Bantam Books, 1983. Kitchen, Judith. Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction. New York: Norton, 2005. Kitchen, Judith, and Mary Paumier Jones, eds. In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction. New York: Norton, 1996. ———, eds. In Brief: Short Takes on the Personal. New York: Norton, 1999. Mills, Mark, ed. Crafting the Very Short Story: An Anthology of 100 Masterpieces. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003. Minot, Stephen. “The Tradition.” Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories. Robert Shapard and James Thomas, eds. Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 1986. 235–237. “Minute Stories.” TriQuarterly 35 (Winter 1976). Edited by Elliot Anderson and guest coedited by Robert Coover. Moore, Dinty W., ed. Sudden Stories: The Mammoth Book of Miniscule Fiction. Du Bois, PA: Mammoth Press, 2003. Mose, Gitte. “Danish Short Shorts in the 1990s and the Jena-Romantic Fragments.” In The Art of Brevity: Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis. Per Winther, Jakob Lothe, and Hans H. Skei, eds. Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2004. Reid, Mildred I., and Delmar E. Bordeaux, eds. Writers Try Short Shorts: All Known Types with Examples. Rockford, IL: Bellevue Books, 1947. Shapard, Robert, and James Thomas, eds. New Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories from America and Beyond. New York: Norton, 2007. ———, eds. Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1986. ———, eds. Sudden Fiction (Continued): 60 New Short-Short Stories. New York: Norton, 1996. ———, eds. Sudden Fiction International: 60 Short Short Stories. New York: Norton, 1989. Sleepingfish. http://www.sleepingfish.net. Stern, Jerome, ed. Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Really Short Stories. New York: Norton, 1996. Thomas, James, and Robert Shapard, eds. Flash Fiction Forward: 70 Very Short Stories. New York: Norton, 2006. Thomas, James, Denise Thomas, and Tom Hazuka, eds. Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories. New York: Norton, 1992. “Time Out Film Guide 13: Short Cuts.” Time Out London. http://www.timeout.com/ film/74563.html. “Very Short Stories.” Wired. November 2006. Wilson, Michael. Flash Writing: How to Write, Revise and Publish Stories Less Than 1000 Words Long. College Station, TX: Virtualbookworm.com, 2004. Wilson, Robley, Jr., ed. 4 Minute Fictions: 50 Short-Short Stories from The North American Review. Flagstaff, AZ: Word Beat Press, 1987. Winther, Per, Jakob Lothe, and Hans H. Skei, eds. The Art of Brevity: Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004.

Further Reading Casto, Pamelyn. “Flashes on the Meridian: Dazzled by Flash Fiction.” Writing World. http://www.writing-world.com/fiction/casto.shtml; Casto, Pamelyn, and Geoff Fuller. “Give Your Tales a Twist.” Guide to Writing Fiction Today: Writers Yearbook. A Writer’s Digest publication, December 2002; Davis, Lydia. Almost No Memory. New York: Picador, 2001; Davis, Lydia. Samuel Johnson Is Indignant. New York: Picador, 2004; Fuller, Geoff, and Pamelyn Casto. “Simple Complexity: A Course in Short-Short Fiction.” Start Writing Now:

FLASH FICTION Your Introduction to the Writing Life: Writer’s Yearbook. A Writer’s Digest publication, January 2002; Fuller, Geoff, and Pamelyn Casto. “Put the Flash into Fiction.” Guide to Writing Fiction Today: Writer’s Yearbook. A Writer’s Digest publication, Winter 2002; Hempel, Amy. Reasons to Live. New York: Harper Perennial, 1985; Kawabata, Yasunari. Palm-of-the-Hand Stories. Translated from the Japanese by Lane Dunlop and J. Martin Holman. New York: North Point Press, 1988; Koch, Kenneth. Hotel Lambosa and Other Stories. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1993; Phillips, Jayne Anne. Black Tickets. New York: Vintage Contemporary Series, 2001; Rogers, Bruce Holland. The Keyhole Opera. Wilsonville, OR: Wheatland Press, 2005; Silesky, Barry. One Thing That Can Save Us. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1994; Treat, Jessica. A Robber in the House. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1993; Yourgrau, Barry. A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1999.

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G GLBTQ LITERATURE Definition. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (GLBTQ) literature is a challenging category to define and then contain. For the purposes of this chapter, GLBTQ literature encompasses both those works of fiction written by GLBTQ persons as well as those with themes involving GLBTQ persons. However, the term GLBTQ literature in itself is hard to define. For example, the Lambda Literary Foundation, the “country’s leading organization for LGBT literature” (Lambda Literary Foundation 2006), offers awards in 24 separate categories, with 19 of them potentially or positively linked to fiction. Therefore, because authoring a chapter on GLBTQ literature is quite a daunting task, not all GLBTQ authors who should be represented here can be. History. Prior to the Victorian era, there was no description for GLBTQ persons, so all GLBTQ writings prior to this period have been labeled as such after the fact. During the Victorian era, scientists began using the term homosexual to label those with same-sex attractions as mentally ill (Forrest, Biddle, and Clift 2006). However, with the negative implications of mental illness tied to this term, the terms gay and lesbian soon become more popular for those with same-sex attractions. Following World War II, the homophile movement lobbied politely for social acceptability for GLBTQ persons (Matzner 2004). This continued until 1969, when the Stonewall Riots led to organized activism. The term gay was widely adopted as an antonym to straight, which then implied respectable sexual behavior. The term gay was utilized by both men and women with same-sex attractions throughout this period, but starting with the feminist movement of the 1970s, lesbian became more popular for women and the term gay became more associated with men (Rich 1980). The groups splintered until the mid-1980s, when the AIDS crisis shifted the focus to solidarity, and bisexuals and transgendered individuals were eventually included. This is how the now-popular acronym of GLBTQ came to exist.

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WHAT IS QUEER THEORY? The Q became commonly attached to GLBTQ with the advent of the queer identity movement (Beemyn and Eliason 1996).This movement was formed around two main premises. First, on the activist front, it was a reclaimed word, one which the GLBTQ community (and its allies) used to revoke its power (Jagose 1996). Second, it became attached to the academic field of queer theory, which called for a broader definition of persons with same-sex attractions than those offered by the rigid GLBTQ categories.The term queer, however, is still one fraught with controversy, for some find it to be an insult, while others find it empowering.

Trends and Themes. Much of the GLBTQ literature prior to Stonewall accepted the negative societal attitudes towards GLBTQ persons, or homophobia, as it existed at the time, and the literature of this period was often limited in printing and difficult to access for those not in urban areas. The homophile movement encouraged a lack of publicity of sexuality by GLBTQ persons, instead insisting that GLBTQ persons conform as much as possible. The works of E.M. Forster (1879–1970) personify much of this period, for his early work reflects much of his own sexual frustration, while throughout his life a shift is seen as his works begin to more openly fight oppression and social injustice. While many focus on Maurice (1971), often cited as the “first modern homosexual novel” (Fone 1998, 351), published posthumously and cementing his role as a GLBTQ author, much of his earlier works still deserve consideration for their reflection of the restraint required of GLBTQ authors in the early twentieth century. These earlier works include Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), and A Passage to India (1924). Christopher Isherwood (1904–1986) followed a similar path to Forster, coming to terms with his homosexuality throughout his life and eventually becoming very active in the GLBTQ rights movement. Born in England, he spent time in Berlin in the 1930s, a period of great artistic output, seeking escape from the repression in England. Prior to this escape, he authored All the Conspirators (1928), featuring repressed homosexual characters. During his exploratory period in Berlin, he authored The Memorial (1933), which portrays homosexual life through the impact of the loss of the protagonist’s best friend during World War II. In 1939, Isherwood emigrated to America with his partner W.H. Auden (with whom he engaged in a nonromantic sexual relationship), and there he authored A Single Man (1964), his masterpiece reflecting Isherwood’s growing concern with gay oppression. The works of Jean Genet (1910–1986) begin to shift this dialogue from assimilation and portrayals of the “tragic queer” (Woods 1998, 275) to questions of power and identity. Genet is one of the first authors to positively discuss transgendered persons, hence reflecting the French intellectual tradition of deconstructing a topic in order to celebrate it (Fone 1998). Genet’s first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers (1942), a prison novel (which formed the basis for the majority of his works), was written while he was in prison and graphically and explicitly portrays male prostitution and masturbation. The Thief’s Journal (1948) portrays the men Genet loves, and The Miracle of the Rose (1951) shows the development of a gay man from “feminized” to “masculine.” However, Genet’s obsession with prison

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and the subversive side of gay life has often left his works open to criticism, for the revolution he felt he was beginning by personifying gay prison life has often been portrayed as a reinscription of the deviance of homosexuality. James Baldwin’s (1924–1987) Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), a critical piece in the development of African American literature, also tells of the protagonist’s sexual evolution. The original manuscript for the book was supposedly much more homosexually oriented, but this draft was rejected and major revisions ensued, tamping down GLBTQ themes. Giovanni’s Room (1956) dealt much more explicitly with homosexuality, particularly notions of internalized homophobia. Both Another Country (1962) and Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968) offer its protagonists redemptive roles as gay men, once again setting the stage for the upcoming Stonewall Riots of 1969. Gore Vidal (b. 1925) unabashedly portrayed GLBTQ persons in his works, and “asserts that gay men are not women in disguise nor, indeed, even very special, and sets out to prove that effeminacy and homosexuality do not need to occupy the same conceptual space in novels” (Fone 998, 690). In The City and the Pillar (1948), the first coming-out novel emerges. It is in Vidal’s work that GLBTQ issues are brought into a normalizing discourse, a critical step between previous views of the traumatized GLBTQ person and the impending Stonewall Riots. However, in the original printing, the editor changed the ending to include a violent death that was not part of the original manuscript, therefore perpetuating the myth of the “tragic queer,” which Vidal recanted when he republished the novel in its original version, entitling it The City and the Pillar Revised (1968). Pushing the envelope even further (and again setting the stage for the Stonewall Riots of 1969), Vidal published Myra Breckinridge (1968), which concerns a transsexual undergoing sexual reassignment surgery. This very abridged overview of twentieth century pre-Stonewall GLBTQ literature is by no means exhaustive, and it is used here to portray the shift from an acceptance of repression to a need for the normalization of GLBTQ persons. Many other critical works, themes, and activities can be included here, including Oscar Wilde’s symbolic status as a pervert, thanks to his sentencing as a sodomite; Herman Melville’s homosexual texts of the late nineteenth century, including Redburn (1849), White-Jacket (1850), Moby Dick (1851), and Billy Budd (written 1891, published posthumously 1924); Henry James’ ambivalent relationship with homosexuality at the turn of the century; Gertrude Stein’s many novels, including Q.E.D. (1903), Fernhurst (1904), Three Lives (1909), Tender Buttons (1912), The Making of Americans (1925), and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933); Virginia Woolf’s portrayals of women’s passionate friendships; Jean Cocteau’s homoerotic avant-garde texts; Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936), which disturbs the compulsory heterosexuality imposed by the field of sexology; Mary Renault’s initial portrayals of lesbianism and her switch to gay novels; Carson McCullers, the sexually ambiguous author of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940); Ann Bannon’s lesbian pulp fiction novels of the 1950s; Marguerite Yourcenar’s lesbian lifestyle, not reflected in her writings except through gay men; and Truman Capote’s development of a homosexual writing style in the 1950s and 1960s. With the Stonewall Riots of 1969, the concept of coming out as a gay person emerged. With this, the development of a political agenda developed in much GLBTQ literature. In the 1970s, the influence of feminism on lesbian literature cannot be understated. As feminism grew and changed, in the 1980s, literature reflected the splintering as distinct categories of people began to emerge, dissatisfied with the

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portrayal of GLBTQ persons as solely white and middle class. Fiction by GLBTQ people of color began to emerge during this period. However, with the AIDS crisis affecting gay men in the 1980s, this splintering lessened, and the literature began to reflect the entire GLBTQ spectrum. As GLBTQ becomes more common as a unified group and term, queer literature challenges the rigidity of this alphabet soup. Rita Mae Brown (b. 1944) published the critical feminist lesbian novel Rubyfruit Jungle in 1973. The novel “espouses a doctrine of radical individualism” (Kattelman 2002) that challenges the homophobia of the pre-Stonewall era. Brown continues her career as a novelist to this day, publishing works such as Sudden Death (1983), inspired by her real-life lesbian relationship with tennis star Martina Navratilova; Southern Discomfort (1982); and High Hearts (1986); Bingo (1988); as well as a series of mystery novels, including Wish You Were Here (1990), Rest in Pieces (1992), and Venus Envy (1993). Katherine V. Forrest (b. 1939) struggled with the internalized homophobia she learned during the pre-Stonewall years, and it was only in her forties that she began writing. Curious Wine (1983), a lesbian romance, established Forrest’s place in the lesbian fiction genre. However, it was the publication of Amateur City (1984) that marked her as a writer of lesbian mysteries, a developing subgenre of lesbian fiction. She continues to work in this vein today, publishing works such as The Beverly Malibu (1989), Murder by Tradition (1991), and Liberty Square (1996). Simultaneously, she contributed to the establishment of another lesbian subgenre—lesbian science fiction—with the publication of Daughters of a Coral Dawn (1984) and An Emergence of Green (1986). Jeannette Winterson (b. 1959) began her career with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), which challenges the homophobia of Christian fundamentalism by interweaving Old Testament references into the coming-out narrative so present in the 1970s. Her work continues with The Passion (1987), which has characters who are not easily identifiably by sexual orientation, androgyny, and bisexuality, which can be viewed as a portal to the changes occurring in GLBTQ literature that was becoming more inclusive of transgendered people, bisexuality, and queer theory. Sexing the Cherry (1989) further asserts Winterson’s influence in the world of queerness with its disregard for boundaries such as geography, gender, and even time. Her most recent work, Written on the Body (1992), also dealing with a protagonist with gender ambiguity, continues her themes of the transience of socially constructed norms. Michael Cunningham (b. 1952) published his pivotal piece At Home at the End of the World in 1990, when gay authors were often writing about the impact of AIDS, with Cunningham’s piece being no exception. He weaves a tale laden with alternative families in numerous configurations, which is indicative of the postmodern bent of queer theory emerging in the 1990s. Cunningham continues to write complex novels that challenge societal norms, most recently recognized in The Hours (1999). Again, the post-Stonewall authors listed above are by no means an exhaustive group, but rather a reflection of some of the general themes emerging during this period. Some additional works critical to this time include Isabel Miller’s historical lesbian romance Patience and Sarah (1971); Andrew Holleran’s portrayals of gay life in Dancer from the Dance (1978) and Nights in Aruba (1983); Paula Monette’s moving novels of AIDS, Afterlife (1990) and Halfway Home (1991); Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1992); David B. Feinberg’s examination of the AIDS

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crisis and gay men, including Eight-sixed (1986) and Spontaneous Combustion (1991); Randall Kenan’s exploration of Southern Black gay men in A Visitation of Spirits (1989); and Karin Kallmaker’s lesbian romance and erotica. Contexts and Issues. In the twenty-first century, GLBTQ issues have become a matter of civil rights. These include issues surrounding religion, marriage and adoption, medical and legal rights, transgender rights, and identity politics. This is direct result of the AIDS activism of the 1980s and 1990s, which required GLBTQ persons to work together to fight for rights in the public health crisis (rather than fight separatist battles for lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered persons, as in the past). A landmark moment in civil rights occurred in 2003, when the U.S Supreme Court declared laws against sodomy unconstitutional. In the case of Lawrence v. Texas, “two gay men say the state of Texas deprived them of privacy rights and equal protection under law when they were arrested in 1998 for having sex” (Lawrence and Garner v. State of Texas 2006). This was granted on the grounds of privacy and equal protection rights, and was pivotal in legitimizing the rights of GLBTQ persons. Religion has often made headlines when connected with GLBTQ persons. Until recently, issues such as civil rights, same-sex marriage, and protections under the law for GLBTQ persons were often not even discussed in a religious context. Religious texts, particularly the Bible, are often used as the basis for opposition to GLBTQ rights. Recently, some religious groups have come forward in support of GLBTQ rights, often with much controversy. Reform Judaism and the United Church of Christ are accepting of GLBTQ persons. Certain segments of Christianity, including Unitarian Universalists, as well as some Presbyterians and Anglicans, are also supportive. However, the Anglican Church is almost evenly split amongst traditionalists, who view homosexuality as incompatible with scripture, and others viewing same-sex relationships as viable. Along with religion comes the issues of gay marriage and same-sex parenting. Full marriage rights for same-sex partners would entail equality with heterosexuals in relation to “finances, health care, children, [and] divorce” (Arthur 2004). However, just a few states offering these rights would not help the majority of GLBTQ persons, for the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) of 1996 allows states not to recognize same-sex marriages sanctioned as viable in other states; and it also does not allow the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages at all. As of the 2006 elections, one state allowed same-sex marriage, five recognized same-sex unions, 12 states banned recognition of any same-sex union, 26 states amended their constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage, and 20 states enacted their own DOMAs (Defense of Marriage Act 2007). The DOMA has done more harm for the civil rights of GLBTQ persons than almost any other government initiative for, in the public’s eye, it has combined issues of religious marriage with civil marriage. Some religions have begun to offer same-sex unions, although it is always the decision of each religious group whether to grant this privilege. For GLBTQ persons wishing to adopt, the process varies from state to state. Florida, Utah, Mississippi, and Arkansas specifically do not allow same-sex adoptions. Other states make it challenging for same-sex couples to adopt, particularly as home visits by social workers (who may or may not be in favor of same-sex adoption) are often a mandatory part of the adoption process. Another challenge is states not recognizing same-sex couples as legal parents. However, certain states, such as

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New Jersey, New York, and Washington, D.C. recognize joint adoptions. The Lawrence v. Texas ruling mentioned previously gives credence to same-sex relationships, and is helping more GLBTQ persons adopt (Arthur 2006). Transgender rights came to the forefront of the GLBTQ rights movement in response to the public health crisis of the AIDS epidemic, when GLBTQ persons came together and formed an inclusive community united by health care inequalities. A series of influential transgender rights groups developed throughout the 1990s, including Transgender Nation, Transsexual Menace, It’s Time America, and GenderPAC. The release of the Academy Award winning film Boys Don’t Cry (2000), showing the violence transgendered persons often face, opened the public’s eyes to the problem. Although acknowledgment of the transgender community has been achieved through activism, the road to full equality is still quite long (Meyerowitz 2002). Queer has emerged, for some, as a unifying term for LGBT (and all its variations), whereas others in the LGBT community take offense to the term. With the traditional definition of queer meaning “different,” those using the term see this as a reclamation of the power of the word, but those in opposition view it as an inappropriate word with which to be associated. The term queer, when used by those activists who embrace it, acknowledges the fluidity of sexual orientation and gender identity and is therefore the preferred term for the complex issues of these areas. The debate over the usage of the term queer continues (Queercore 1992). As these issues continue into the twenty-first century, the civil rights issues of GLBTQ persons are at the forefront. While GLBTQ persons continue to live productive lives in society, and in some cases gain acceptance by their family, friends, and community, there are still great legislative battles to be fought. All of the issues in some way return to the need for recognition of GLBTQ persons as people with rights. Many of these issues are overtly or covertly portrayed in GLBTQ literature. Reception. Since Stonewall, there has been an increase in the publishing and distribution of GLBTQ-themed texts. As GLBTQ issues are discussed more openly, younger generations are coming out sooner, and new youth markets for GLBTQ materials are emerging. As online booksellers such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble overtake the marketplace, however, the gay bookstore, a source of pride during so much of the immediate post-Stonewall era, is becoming a thing of the past, and the Internet is taking its place. Internet book clubs with GLBTQ themes, such as InsightOut, are developing to keep pace with the technological demands of GLBTQ persons. Technology is allowing GLBTQ persons from around the world, regardless of proximity to a GLBTQ cultural center, to access resources and materials, while it also separates these communities by changing the need for cultural centers (like gay bookstores). With the battle for a cure for AIDS raging for over 25 years, activism has decreased in this arena in the GLBTQ community, as new generations of young GLBTQ persons did not witness the horrendous personal impact AIDS had on the GLBTQ community in the 1980s. As a reflection of this, “the number of books dealing primarily with AIDS is down compared to 2,000, which had fewer AIDS titles than the year before. AIDS is more likely to be treated as an incidental fact, not a focus” (Hix 2001) in GLBTQ literature. In contrast, publications regarding transgendered persons and those identifying as queer are becoming more easily available to a mainstream audience.

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GLBTQ literary criticism has not always been openly embraced by the larger literary criticism community. It is a newer strand of English that evolved from its relationship to other fields, such as Women’s Studies, History, and Philosophy. Indeed, queer criticism is connected, historically and methodologically, to feminism, cultural materialism, psychoanalytical criticism, and post-colonial studies. Although such approaches are not interchangeable, they share a common scepticism about literary tradition, and they continue to evolve through a process of collective influence. Indeed, it is largely because of their rise that the very notion of unitary disciplines . . . has come into question. (Quinn, 1997)

Literary criticism is not always a field open to non-traditional forms and readings, and the interdisciplinarity of the development of GLBTQ literature, plus its inbred questioning of literary “traditions,” has led some to view GLBTQ literary criticism as unimportant. However, the field continues forward, often portrayed as a disruptive form of reading. Much of the criticism of GLBTQ literature comes from questions of identity and community. In stressing the commonalities of this community, there is a denial of personal identities. Although the term queer has attempted to fill this void, by being placed on the end of the GLBTQ alphabet chain, it is simply reinscribing the communal identity it tries to deny. In addition, it is becoming more challenging to label a person as GLBTQ as it becomes more common to label an act as GLBTQ. The recent phenomena of men on the DL, or down low, which signifies men who identify as heterosexual but engage in homosexual sexual acts; the lesbian-identified woman who wishes to engage in sexual acts with men; a man who engages in exclusively homosexual acts but does not define himself as gay; a former lesbian-identified woman who is now in an exclusively heterosexual relationship and identifies as straight; a male-to-female (MtF) transgendered person who is involved with a male partner and identifies as gay; and any queer person, all push the boundaries of GLBTQ. By determining a single category to identify lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgendered persons, and queers, the literature of this grouping reflects some serious disparities in what GLBTQ “means” (Summers 1993). In addition, another criticism of GLBTQ literature centers around identifying works that belong in the canon. Should a work written by a non-GLBTQ person, but which has GLBTQ themes and characters, be incorporated? How about when a GLBTQ-identified author writes a book with no inherent GLBTQ content? It is uncertain how to acknowledge this potential disparity. However, it is the gradual recognition of GLBTQ literature as an emerging field that allows us to ask these types of questions. The emergence of the growing body of GLBTQ literature, and its wider acceptance, is visible in mainstream works that have been adapted for film. There has always been an independent film market featuring GLBTQ themes adapted from literature, with a blossoming in film production occurring post-Stonewall. Some early adaptations of GLBTQ novels include A Florida Enchantment (1914), based on the 1891 novel of Fergus Redmond and Archibald Gunter; Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), based on a 1941 novel by Carson McCullers; Cruising (1980), novel by Gerald Walker; The Hotel New Hampshire (1984), based on John Irving’s 1981 novel; Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989), adapted from Hubert Selby, Jr.’s novel (1964); Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), from Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes

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at the Whistle Stop Café (1987); Love and Death on Long Island (1997), based on Gilbert Adair’s 1990 novel; and The Object of My Affection (1998), based on Stephen McCauley’s 1987 novel. Since 2000, there have been some critical film adaptations of LGBT-themed works, many of which garnered international attention and awards. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (2002), based on his 1998 novel, earned a Best Actress award for Nicole Kidman, as well as nominations for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and others. The piece features Meryl Streep as a lesbian book editor caring for her friend who is dying from AIDS. However, the entire piece focuses on three generations of women who may be lesbian or bisexual. Cunningham himself states, “were such characters born at later times in different circumstances they would come out as lesbians” (2007). The Wonder Boys (2000), based on Michael Chabon’s 1995 novel of the same name, was a critically acclaimed film success. James Kirkwood Jr.’s 1970 cult classic P.S. Your Cat is Dead, a farce involving homosexuality, bisexuality, and bondage, was made into an independent film in 2002. Under the Tuscan Sun (2003) chronicles the adventures of two women—one lesbian, one heterosexual—on a gay tour of Italy after both have suffered heartbreak. It is based on Frances Mayes’s 1996 novel. Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World (1998), a celebration of love in all its forms, was adapted to the screen in 2004. 2005’s Brokeback Mountain, based on Annie Proulx’s short story, opened the general public’s eyes to the fluidity of sexuality and the challenges of labels. It won 71 awards and had 52 nominations (Awards for Brokeback Mountain 2007). Much debate ensued over the sexual orientation of the main characters, as to whether they were gay, bisexual, or heterosexual. Some claimed the main characters to be heterosexual men with a deep friendship, which included a sexual component, whereas others embraced the epitome of queerness and sexual ambiguity. A criticism from the GLBTQ community about the film is that neither of the lead actors is GLBTQ identified, although others claims this to be irrelevant, as GLBTQ actors play heterosexuals in film frequently. The Catholic Church praised the film’s acting but not its content (White 2005). A limited number of movie theatres refused to show the film. When Brokeback Mountain lost its bid for Best Picture, some complained that this was due to homophobic judges. By far, this film brought the most discussion around the definitions of sexual orientation than any other. Authors and Their Works. We now turn to contemporary American texts (all of which have published since 2000, with the majority of writers publishing quite extensively pre-2000 as well) to exemplify the questions of identity and civil rights for GLBTQ persons in the twenty-first century. “One of the most prominent and highly acclaimed figures of contemporary gay literature, Edmund White works in many distinct categories of fiction and nonfiction” (Woodland 2004). His career reads like a map of post-Stonewall literature. His first novel, Forgetting Elena (1973), was published when he was quite young, and features no GLBTQ content. His second novel, Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978), “the mysterious and lush lament of a young man for his older love” (Zebrun 2004, 28), explores gay themes openly. In 1982, White authored A Boy’s Own Story, “widely recognized as a coming-of-age classic, with a hero who holds his own alongside Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield” (Ehrhardt 2006). “The honesty White brought to the narration of gay life made him part of a new wave of gay writers who no longer used euphemisms or tragic language

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to describe their same-sex desires and experiences” (Lee 2006). In this piece, White traces “the quest for self-identity against the expectations of family and friends” (Ehrhardt 2006). This semiautobiographical novel also led to another, The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988). The Beautiful Room Is Empty traces the narrator’s experiments with desire and romance as he moves through an exclusive prep school, sessions with a psychotherapist, and witnesses the Stonewall riots. The narrator’s swings between joyful acceptance and critical self-loathing reflect the emerging national gay consciousness. The events of these novels mirror the shape of White’s own early life: growing up in Cincinnati, dealing with a demanding father, and attending the exclusive Cranbrook Academy (Ehrhardt 2006). This led to the final work in his semiautobiographical trilogy, The Farewell Symphony (1998). White also authored Caracole (1985), set in the nineteenth century and exploring the sexuality of two lovers, male and female. In 1988, White published, with Adam Mars-Jones, an anthology of stories dealing with the impact of AIDS, The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis. “As White and Mars-Jones shape it, the greatest challenge posed by the AIDS crisis is the spiritual one: What sustains the soul that is bereft of family, enduring slow death” (Arena 1988)? White’s next highly acclaimed work The Married Man (2000), in the words of White, is about two people who are really very marginal to gay life—one because he’s bisexual and the other because he’s too old—and who are very involved in a relationship with each other that isn’t primarily sexual but is very much a love story, I didn’t need to worry about “doing justice” to gay life. I’m only doing justice to a love story. (White 2000, 26)

In The Married Man, White incorporates bisexuality into his work. This piece is an homage to White’s lover Hubert, who passed away from AIDS, similar to the character of Julien, who also has AIDS. The story of the couple’s last trip together had been told previously in White’s 1994 memoir as well as in The Farewell Symphony. This beautiful yet unsettling novel recalls “loving a self-absorbed, childlike and ultimately enigmatic bisexual man” (Bahr 2000). White continues to be a prolific writer. Throughout his career, he has also written highly influential non-fiction (including 1977’s The Joy of Gay Sex), biography, memoir, and anthologies (including the highly acclaimed Fresh Men (2004)). Since the publication of The Married Man in 2000, he has also published A Fine Excess (2000), a contemporary literature anthology; Fanny (2003), a fictional work; Arts and Letters (2004), a work of nonfiction; My Lives (2006), a memoir; Terre Haute (2006), a play based on Timothy McVeigh; and Hotel de Dream, his latest fictional work, due in fall 2007. Allan Gurganus’s four novels range in publication dates from 1989 to 2001. His two most influential pieces are The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1989), “a comic epic about the history of the South, and Plays Well With Others (1997), about the New York Art scene in the 1980s, just as AIDS was emerging” (Kaczorowski 2005). Gurganus’s first break as an author came in 1974 when The New Yorker accepted his short story “Minor Heroism” (which was submitted by his mentor without Gurganus’s knowledge), the first “story the magazine had ever published that featured a gay character” (Kaczorowski 2005).

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The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is the story of the South as told by Lucy, a 99-year-old woman in a nursing home. Gay themes emerge throughout the over 700-page piece, particularly in reference to Lucy’s husband, Will, and his relationship to a boyhood friend killed in war, Ned. The piece had appeal to a wide audience, particularly when adapted to television and, less successfully, to stage. White People (1991) is a wide-ranging collection of short stories told in first-person voices. Several stories deal with same-sex desire, both openly and covertly. Plays Well With Others was Gurganus’s first novel with openly gay characters, in which the young gay protagonist moves to New York from the rural South to pursue a writing career and finds himself swept up in the burgeoning AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s. “Gurganus has explained in interviews that the impetus for writing the novel was to celebrate, and commemorate, the ‘complicated love we have for friends when we’re in our twenties . . . when everybody is a sexual object in one form or another’” (Kaczorowki 2005). As Hartley, the protagonist, notes after a particularly joyous sexual romp in the bathhouses, “The prigs won’t tell you how sweet and rollicking the peasant dance was. Before such accurate lightning struck us” (as quoted in Freeman 1998, 48), portraying both the joy of the sexual freedom gay men felt in the early 1980s and the impending doom of the AIDS crisis beginning to emerge in the community. The piece accurately reflects the insights of Charles Krause (1998) about his own move to New York City as a young writer in 1980: “And the best part was, there was nothing to be afraid of. In 1980, the clap and crabs were the worst things you could get, and a trip to the clinic or a dousing with Rid could fix you up in no time. No one had yet heard of AIDS. (48)

Plays Well With Others has been critically acclaimed as one of the most important works of AIDS-related fiction. It reflects the innocence of a pre-Stonewall era, and the immigration many young GLBTQ persons were making to urban centers, only to find themselves embroiled in a battle over public health, and dying as a result. Gurganus has often been praised for his simple and Mark Twain-esque writing style, which, it is often speculated, is why his first novel had such mass market appeal. Gurganus recognized this appeal and felt, since Plays Well With Others was published after Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, he had the ability to bring mass market interest to gay-themed work (Gurganus 1998). This heralded a change in tone in Gurganus’s work: Minority fiction usually begins as coded lingo known only to the initiated. To communicate with those beyond the ghetto is seen as mutinous. But after years of in-jokes, of bashing most straight people, we’ve sobered, noticing a bigger world parenthesizing the Castro and the West Village. (Gurganus 1998)

Gurganus questioned why it was acceptable for GLBTQ persons to come hear his readings in “straight” bookstores, but heterosexuals would not venture into gay bookstores. He chastised his GLBTQ readers that “we do need tellers and askers in this land named ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’” (Gurganus 1998). In 2001, Gurganus published The Practical Heart, a series of four novellas. He feels the novella is “the perfect genre of our time: a novel with attention deficit disorder” (Jeffreys 2001, 43). The novellas include the title story about a woman who

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may have sat for a painting by John Singer Sargent; “Preservation News,” a newsletter formatted story about a conservationist dying of AIDS; “Saint Monster,” in which a boy places Bibles in motel rooms while his mother carries on a torrid affair at home; and “He’s One, Too,” the story of a man arrested for making sexual advances to a young boy in a bathroom, as told through the point of view of his neighbor who idolized the man as a young boy himself (Jeffreys 2001). More so than any of his earlier works, The Practical Heart reaches “across risky barriers of race, sexuality, and class” (Miller 2001). As can be seen through Gurganus’s work, he has moved from covert to overt expression of GLBTQ content in his works, reflecting the societal changes occurring (and demanded) through the AIDS crisis. Gurganus’s personal role as a caregiver for many friends dying of AIDS becomes more apparent in each of his works. In his own words, In the long run I think my value as a writer and my career will be immeasurably enhanced because I think I can treat gay and straight people fairly. I’m not a gay writer in the sense that I’ve never written about straight people. I find pathos in both camps (as quoted in Jeffreys 2001, 43–44).

Gurganus is currently at work on a sequel to his first novel. David Ebershoff published his first novel, The Danish Girl, in 2000. This piece of historical fiction, which occurs in early twentieth century Denmark, Paris, and Dresden, is loosely based on the story of the first known transsexual operation. Throughout the piece, we meet Einar and his wife, Greta. As Einar struggles with his own need to cross-dress and, eventually, live his life as Lili, we also witness Greta’s transformation as she, too, struggles to fulfill Einar’s needs. The novel is as much Greta’s history as it is Einar’s: a record of her rebellion from the confines of her wealthy class and family, of her previous marriage to a young man who died of tuberculosis, and of her need to become as singular and unique as possible. Not that Einar’s own curious life isn’t brilliantly laid out. . . . Einar emerges inventively, elegantly: The author is uncommonly seductive in presenting the Danish man’s passage from an ordinary life into his new life as the extremely pretty—and sexually stimulating—Lili. We are allowed to enter the thoughts and feelings of a man living in a far less information-drenched time than our own, as he begins and then follows through his exploration of what is, after all, a truly deviant psycho-sexuality. (Picano 2000, 60)

Indeed, although The Danish Girl handles gender identity issues head on, it also probes into what forms a marriage and a relationship. Greta’s “wonder, sorrow, and acceptance lift what could have been a melodrama into a poignant meditation on change and the meaning of loyalty” (Blue 2000, 15). The Danish Girl reflects the modern GLBTQ theme of flexibility and changeability, and it analyzes what becomes of such dynamics when others are involved. It is being adapted for film as of this writing. Ebershoff’s first collection of short stories, The Rose City, consists of seven short stories that offer “fascinating glimpses into the hearts and minds of extraordinarily ordinary men” (Woelz 2002, 40). “Trespass,” one of the stories, revisits the comingout story, often abandoned after the 1990s, through the eyes of an adolescent boy watching a neighbor’s house when he learns his neighbor is gay; and “Regime” “takes us into the mind of an adolescent anorexic who wants desperately to remain

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pure, a ‘special boy’ unsullied by hunger” (Wolez 2002, 40). In both stories, Ebershoff looks unflinchingly at the psychological and sexual impacts of coming out on adolescents, sometimes in a manner which is quite disturbing. Sarah Waters’s first novel, Tipping the Velvet (1998), is historical fiction set in Victorian England, where Nan, a female, explores her life as a gender-bending male prostitute, eventually to be taken in by a wealthy patron and later discarded. Tipping the Velvet proves a rollicking reading adventure, not simply because of its Victorian (though not vanilla) flavoring, but also because it offers a fictional rendering of such late twentieth-century lesbian issues as the sex wars, outing, gender performance, and grassroots coalition organizing. (Breen 2002)

The lesbian aspect of the novel is not by any means covert but openly embraced, as is the gender-violating performance of Nan. So Tipping the Velvet is a special kind of fiction—one that tries to imagine what the largely undocumented lives of lesbians of that era might have been like. Waters not only imagines what the underground lesbian scene might have been like, she even imagines the slang that might have been part of this scene. (Poubelle 2006, 8)

Tipping the Velvet’s 2002 BBC adaptation for television also helped bring Waters serious public attention. After Tipping the Velvet, Waters next pens Affinity (1999), also set in Victorian England. This novel has been compared to “not only Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, and even Wilkie Collins’s sensationalist novel The Woman in White, but also Terry Castle’s 1993 study of lesbian representation, The Apparitional Lesbian” (Breen 2002). The heroine, Margaret, attempts to make sense of her own desires for women as she does charitable work in women’s prisons. Similar to Cunningham’s portrayal of Virginia Woolf in The Hours, Margaret has attempted suicide due to her desire for a different kind of life, one in which she is not proprietary to men. Nineteenth-century-style novels have been under a cloud since the invention of the remote control, but stepping into Tipping the Velvet and Affinity is like entering the Best of the BBC. In both novels, Waters guides the reader through the late 1800s London milieu like she grew up there. Better even than Charles Dickens, she summons the era’s attitudes and ambiance, projecting them onto the screen of the reader’s mind with Dolby wrap-around sound such that you feel you’re vacationing on all points between Chelsea and the East End. Not many contemporary writers make novels as sumptuous as a symphony. And what an era Sarah Waters renders! The fact that both novels are richly embroidered period pieces doesn’t limit their audience appeal. Waters spellbinds readers with insights into 1870s dance halls and 1880s women’s prisons that the History Channel would never provide—notably lesbians set in a historical point of view we’re not likely to find on the telly. And how Sarah Waters writes of lesbians! Not simply as characters, but highlighting the context of an overbearing heterosexual environment that necessitates closets; boldfacing the sexism that puts such a stranglehold on all women. (Allegra 2001)

Fingersmith (2002), Waters’s third novel, is yet another tale of Victorian entrapment. In this novel, a pickpocket works with a criminal to defraud a lonely heiress

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of her fortune. An interesting twist is used in Fingersmith in that the narrator is changed partway through, and different levels of deceit are revealed. Fingersmith was made into a serial for BBC in 2005. In her latest novel, The Night Watch (2006), Waters moves from Victorian England to GLBTQ themes in World War II–era London. She weaves a tale full of sexual “deviance”—from GLBTQ-themed sexual encounters to heterosexual adultery. Waters’ latest book reads in reverse chronological order, sometimes causing intentional confusion about relationships or situations, but always in a manner that builds suspense. Although very different from her previous pieces, The Night Watch has been called “a splendidly written, engaging novel, by a writer who gets better with every effort” (DeCresenczo 2006). Although the focus of this chapter has been general GLBTQ literature, it is important to recognize the works of some influential authors in specific categories of literature. In the GLBTQ science fiction arena, Jim Grimsley is winning notice for his works, particularly 2000’s Kirith Kirin and 2004’s The Ordinary. John Morgan Wilson contributes to gay men’s mysteries with his Benjamin Justice series (Simple Justice (1996), Revision of Justice (1997), Justice at Risk (1999), The Limits of Justice (2000), Blind Eye (2003), Moth and Flame (2004), and Rhapsody in Blood (2006)). Steve Kluger is making waves with his gay romance novels, including Almost Like Being in Love (2004), Last Days of Summer (1999), Changing Pitches (1998), Yank (1992), and the upcoming The Year We Grew Up (2007). Finally, Tristan Taormino’s enormous contributions as an author and editor in erotica cannot be underplayed, including Hot Lesbian Erotica (2005), True Lust (2002), the Best Lesbian Erotica series (annually since 1996), and Ritual Sex (1996), which have won her many awards. Bibliography Allegra, Donna. “Embroidering Life.” Lesbian Review of Books 7 (2001). Arena, Joe. “The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis.” Washington Monthly (1988). Arthur, Mikaila Mariel Lemonik. Adoption. [Online, March 2006]. GLBTQ: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture website <www.GLBTQ.com/social-sciences/adoption.html>. ———. Domestic Partnerships. [Online, May 2005]. GLBTQ: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture website <www.GLBTQ.com/ social-sciences/domestic_partnerships.html>. “Awards for Brokeback Mountain.” [Online, 2007]. Internet Movie Database website <www.imdb.org>. Bahr, David. “French Lessons.” Advocate 814 (2000): 137. Beemyn, Brett and Mickey Eliason, eds. Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Anthology. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Bergman, David. Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Blue, Daniel. “Changing Places.” Lambda Book Report 8 (2000): 15–16. Bredbeck, Gregory W. “Literary Theory: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer.” GLBTQ. . Breen, Margaret Soenser. Sarah Waters. [Online, December 2002]. GLBTQ: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture website <www.GLBTQ.com/social-sciences/waters_s.html>. Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

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GLBTQ LITERATURE Creech, James. Closet Writing, Gay Reading. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998. Decarnin, Camilla, Eric Garber, and Lyn Paleo, eds. Worlds Apart: An Anthology of Lesbian and Gay Science Fiction and Fantasy. Boston: Alyson, 1986. DeCrecenszo, Teresa. “The Night Watch.” Lesbian News 31 (2006): 33. Defense of Marriage Act. [Online, January 2007]. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia website <en.wikipedia.org>. Doty, Alexander. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Ebershoff, David. The Danish Girl. New York: Viking, 2000. ———. The Rose City. New York: Viking, 2000. Ehrhardt, Michael. “A Man’s Own Story.” The Gay and Lesbian Review 13 (2006): 27–29. Fone, Byrne R.S., ed. The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature: Readings from Western Antiquity to the Present Day. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Forrest, Simon, Grant Biddle, and Stephen Clift. Talking about Homosexuality in Secondary School. 3rd ed. West Sussex, England: AVERT, 2006. Freeman, Chris. “Bla, bla, blah. But heartfelt.” The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review 5 (1998): 48–49. Garber, Eric, and Lyn Paleo, eds. Uranian Worlds: A Guide to Alternative Sexuality in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. 2nd ed. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990. Gurganus, Allan. “Dispatch from the Front.” Advocate 750/751 (1998). ———. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. New York: Knopf, 1989. ———. Plays Well With Others. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. ———. The Practical Heart. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. Hinds, Hilary. “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: Reaching Audiences Other Lesbian Texts Cannot Reach.” New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Readings. Sally Munt, ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992; 153–172. Hix, Charles. “A New Generation Has Arrived.” Publishers Weekly 248 (2001): 19. Jagose, Annemarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Jay, Karla, and Joanne Glasgow, eds. Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions. New York: New York University Press, 1990. Jeffreys, Joe E. “What a Novelist Believes.” The Gay and Lesbian Review 8 (2001): 43–44. Kaczorowki, Craig. “Allan Gurganus.” [Online, June 2005]. GLBTQ: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture website <www.GLBTQ.com/ social-sciences/gurganus_a.html>. Krause, Charles. “Every Good Boy Does Fine.” Lambda Book Report 6 (1998): 48. “Lawrence and Garner v. State of Texas.” [Online, April 2006]. Sodomy laws website <www.sodomylaws.org>. Lambda Literary Foundation. 2006. . Lee, Ryan. “Edmund White’s ‘Changing Lives.’” Houston Voice: 13. Macedo, Stephan, and Iris Marion Young, eds. Child, Family, State. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Matzner, Andrew. “Stonewall Riots.” [Online, October 2006]. LGBTQ: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer culture website . Meyerowitz, Joanne. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Miller, Tim. “Heart Specialist.” Advocate 847 (2001). Picano, Eelice. “The Art of Gender Bending.” Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide 7 (2000): 60–61. Poubelle, Blanche. “Tom Foolery.” The Guide 26 (2006): 8. Proulx, E. Annie. Brokeback Mountain. New York: Scribner, 2005.

GLBTQ LITERATURE “Queercore.” i-D magazine 110 (1992). Quinn, Vincent. “Literary Criticism.” Lesbian and Gay Studies (1997): 39–52. Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience.” Signs 5 (1980): 631–660. Stone, Martha E. “Sketches from Memory.” Gay and Lesbian Worldwide Review I7 (2000): 53. Summers, Claude J. “Gay Voices, Gay Genealogies.” American Literary History 5 (1993): 147–158. ———. Gay Fictions: Wilde to Stonewall. New York: Continuum, 1990. The Hours. [Online, January 2007]. Wikipedia website <en.wikipedia.org>. Waters, Sarah. Affinity. London: Penguin, 2002. ———. Fingersmith. London: Riverhead, 2002. ———. The Night Watch. London: Riverhead, 2006. ———. Tipping the Velvet. London: Riverhead, 1999. White, Hilary. “US Bishops’ Organization Gives Glowing Review of Homosexual-Sex Propoganda Film.” [Online, December 2005]. LifeSite website <www.lifesite.net>. White, Edmund. “‘I See My Life as a Novel as I’m Leading It.’” Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide 7 (2000): 26–31. ———. The Beautiful Room is Empty. New York: Knopf, 1998. ———. The Married Man. New York: Knopf, 2000. Woelz, Karl. “Tales of the Unnoticed.” The Gay and Lesbian Review 8 (2002): 40. Woodland, Randall. “Edmund White.” [Online, December 2004]. GLBTQ: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture website <www.GLBTQ. com/literature/white_e.html>. Woods, Gregory. A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Zebrun, Gary. “Edmund White, Outcast Survivor.” The Gay and Lesbian Review 11 (2004): 28–30. Zimmerman, Bonnie. The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction 1969–1989. Boston: Beacon, 1990.

Further Reading Beemyn, Brett, and Eliason, Mickey, eds. Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Anthology. New York: New York University Press, 1996; Bergman, David. Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991; Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993; Creech, James. Closet Writing, Gay Reading. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993; Decarnin, Camilla, Eric Garber, and Lyn Paleo, eds. Worlds Apart: An Anthology of Lesbian and Gay Science Fiction and Fantasy. Boston: Alyson, 1986; Doty, Alexander. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992; Garber, Eric, and Lyn Paleo, eds. Uranian Worlds: A Guide to Alternative Sexuality in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. 2nd ed. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990; Hinds, Hilary. “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: Reaching Audiences Other Lesbian Texts Cannot Reach.” New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Readings. Sally Munt, ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. 153–172; Jay, Karla and Joanne Glasgow, eds. Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions. New York: New York University Press, 1990; Meyerowitz, Joanne. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002; Quinn, Vincent. “Literary Criticism.” Lesbian and Gay Studies (1997): 39–52; Summers, Claude J. Gay Fictions: Wilde to Stonewall. New York: Continuum, 1990; Woods, Gregory. A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998; Zimmerman, Bonnie. The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction 1969–1989. Boston: Beacon, 1990.

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GRAPHIC NOVELS Definition. Graphic novels are often considered a subgenre of comic books. The definition of the term graphic novel is determined by the way the piece of work under consideration was originally produced. A graphic novel may consist of a collection of comic strips that has been published as a volume of work. A graphic novel might also be a collection of short stories that deal with the same subject matter or that are created by the same author. One overriding factor in defining a graphic novel is its length. Graphic novels are longer, more complex, and ambitious stories, which are shown through the graphic visual elements as well as told by text that supports the visual. A graphic novel is a “novel in comic form” (Kaplan 2006, 14). A present trend in the industry involves previously published works, such as publication of Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl in graphic novel form as Artemis Fowl: The Graphic Novel. Such adaptations further complicate any attempt at stabilizing a set definition for graphic novels. The graphic novel must also be considered a format, rather than a genre. To define a format, we must first consider its development. It is commonly but wrongly believed that the term graphic novel was invented by Will Eisner in 1978 when Eisner’s A Contract with God was first published. The term actually had been coined in a Comic Amateur Press Alliance’s Newsletter, Capa-Alpha #2, in 1964 by Richard Kyle. The term first appeared on the title page of George Metzger’s Beyond Time and Again in 1976, which was published by none other than Richard Kyle. Eisner’s usage of the term in connection with the recognition A Contract with God received from critics and fans alike popularized the term. “Graphic novel” appeared on the front cover, and because of the seriousness of the content, this signaled a new direction for future authors. Will Eisner (2008) has been quoted as saying, “It was intended as a departure from the standard, what we call ‘comic book format.’ I sat down and tried to do a book that would physically look like a ‘legitimate’ book and at the same time write about a subject matter that would never have been addressed in comic form, which is man’s relationship with God.” History. The history of the graphic novel begins with the history of the comic book. There is no separation from comic book history because the graphic novel is an offshoot of comics in general. With the popularized usage of the term in 1978 with Eisner’s A Contract with God, the graphic novel began to develop and expand uses of various genres within comic formats. The time and space of a graphic novel allowed for the deeper development of plotlines and social commentary. Early on, authors of comic books were

TRENDS AND THEMES Origin of Graphic Novel Will Eisner maintained that his use of the term graphic novel was independent of other influences. He used the term in order to ensure publication of the book. Eisner said,“[The phrase] ‘graphic novel’ was kind of accidental . . . a little voice inside me said, ‘Hey stupid, don’t tell him it’s a comic or he’ll hang up on you.’ So I said, ‘It’s a graphic novel’” (Olson 2005, 7). The term was “permanently cemented into the lexicon” when the book was eventually published by Baronet Books, who was responsible for the inclusion of the phrase “A Graphic Novel” on the cover of A Contract with God.

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not allowed to explore deep psychological issues. Art Spiegelman notes, “Cartoonists were actually expected to keep a lid on their psyches and personal histories, or at least disguise and sublimate them into diverting entertainments” (1995, 4). The freedom from social barriers in the late 1960s and early 1970s also marked a freedom of exploration for cartoonists. The underground comics movement established a genre in which taboos could be broken and psychological breaks could be explored. Because these comics were intended for adult audiences, with low print runs and high cover prices, the publishers were able to sidestep the Comic Code Authority, which was established in 1955 to censor anything that might possibly corrupt younger readers. Context and Issues Confessional Autobiography. Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets The Holy Virgin Mary was the first comic to explore the darker recesses of memory and autobiography. Spiegelman praises Green’s work, noting, “What the Bronte sisters did for Gothic romance, what Tolkien did for sword-and-sorcery, Justin Green did for confessional autobiographical comix” (1995, 4). “Confessional autobiographical” graphic novels were not always factual graphic novels. Neil Gaiman’s Violent Cases is clearly designed to give the reader ambiguity regarding the elements of truth in memory and recall. Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan is a mix of both autobiographical aspects and purely fictional elements; in Ware’s dedication to his mother, he clarifies that the mother in his book bears no resemblance to his real mother. This fusion of fact and fiction is called “autobifictionalography” by cartoonist Lynda Barry. Whether these stories are true or fabricated is unimportant; these stories ring emotionally true to both the creator and the consumer. Craig Thompson’s Blankets recalls his repressive upbringing and his sexual revolution to that upbringing. Representing the Historical. Art Spiegelman’s Maus consists of a mix of the autobiographical and the historical. Maus tells the story of Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, and his mother, Anja. Maus was originally written as a three-page strip for a 1972 comics anthology called Funny Aminals [sic]. Spiegelman’s first idea was to write about race relations, with mice being African Americans and cats representing white supremacists. He abandoned this idea because he felt the story would be lacking in authenticity. Instead he chose to display the bedtime stories his father told his as a child—the story of his parents’ life in Poland as the Nazis took over and of his parents’ life in Auschwitz. There are two tales told in Maus. Both tales are equally important but for very different reasons. There is the story of Vladek Spiegelman, Art’s father, who is successful both in business and in love. In this past story, it is clear that Vladek marries Art’s mother Anja for her money; he comments that they learned to love each other. The Nazis invade, and Vladek’s world comes to an end. It is replaced with fear and hiding, the death of their young son Richu, and finally, Auschwitz. Through Vladek’s story, the reader is provided with an excuse to pardon the twisted, bitter man who appears in the second story, told simultaneously with the first story. The second story is also the story of Vladek, but it is the story of Art as well. This tale details the relationship of the Auschwitz survivor and widower Vladek with his adult son Art. The relationship is fraught with misunderstandings and

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Art’s depression and angst as he comes to terms with the history of his father (and his mother, who committed suicide) as his father “bleeds history,” the subtitle of the second book. The biographic and autobiographic aspects of this graphic novel are clearly seen in both visual and textual ways. Art remains in mouse character through the entire piece, even when referring to himself and the difficulties he is experiencing in dealing with his father. When Art experiences writer’s block early in the second book, he depicts himself as a mouse in present-day clothing surrounded by the corpses of Jews/mice from concentration camps. This visual experience combines the past and the present as well as juxtaposes the shared Holocaust history with the personal history of Art and his father. The attacks on September 11, 2001, caused Spiegelman to return to the graphic novel, and in 2004 Pantheon published Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers. Spiegelman had spent the previous 10 years away from graphic novels and comics, choosing instead to work for The New Yorker. During this 10-year period (1992–2002), Spiegelman wrote a number of essays and produced 21 covers, including on September 24, 2001, the first cover after the attacks. Both personal and political, Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers focuses on generational relationships, echoing previous themes seen in his earlier work; this time it is Spiegelman the father who needs to rescue his daughter from her school at the foot of the Twin Towers after the attacks. The cover of In the Shadow of No Towers reiterates the cover Spiegelman produced for The New Yorker. The covers are black, as are the towers illustrated on the page. The book itself consists of a personal catharsis for Spiegelman. In the 10 pages displayed as broad sheets of newspaper, Spiegelman expresses his fears and anger about how September 11 was handled and about the political situation in which Americans now find themselves. Spiegelman wrote in his introduction to In the Shadow of No Towers, I hadn’t anticipated that the hijackings of September 11 would themselves be hijacked by the Bush cabal that reduced it all to a war recruitment poster . . . . When the government began to move into full dystopian Big Brother mode and hurtle America into a colonialist adventure in Iraq—while doing very little to make America genuinely safer beyond confiscating nail clippers at airports—all the rage I’d suppressed after the 2000 election, all the paranoia I’d barely managed to squelch immediately after 9/11, returned with a vengeance.

The anger and outrage provide a springboard for Spiegelman’s political attacks while including homage to famous comics Spiegelman grew up with, such as Yellow Kid, Katzenjammer Kids, and Krazy Kat. Spiegelman refers to his own book Maus, and in one example, Art says that the smoke in Manhattan smelled just like Vladek said the smoke in the concentration camps smelled. He even draws himself as he did in Maus. Not near the critical success of Maus, In The Shower of No Towers represents an interesting bookend in Spiegelman’s work. Selected Authors. The American comic book industry today includes many successful writers and artists such as Geoff Johns, Jim Lee, Alex Ross, Jessica Abel, Devin Grayson, Gail Simone (the previous three being among a growing number of women creators), and particularly Brian Michael Bendis. Yet some of today’s most influential writers are native to England and Scotland, such as Warren Ellis and

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Mark Millar. Bendis, Ellis, and Millar are known particularly for their carefully developed characters and storylines, dynamic dialogue, and attention to and commentary on political and global issues and for vastly redefining and reenvisioning American superheroes. Brian Michael Bendis (b. 1967). Following art school, well-known comic book writer and occasional artist Brian Michael Bendis emerged in the comic book world in the 1990s with independent, creator-owned series and later began working with Image Comics, where he developed Torso, about the hunt for the Cleveland Torso Murderer. Well known for his dialogue style and story arc pace, Bendis’s transition from crime and noir stories to superhero noir stories began in 2000 when Marvel asked him to revitalize Spider-Man for their Ultimate line. Bendis embraced the opportunity and was largely successful in revamping the popular superhero and appeased even hard-core fans. In Ultimate Spider-Man Bendis brought Peter Parker into the new century and created a story about a kid who gets powers during modern times as opposed to the Peter Parker of 1962. Instead of getting bitten by a radioactive spider as in the original, Bendis’s Parker gets bitten by Osborn Industries’ genetically engineered spider that has been subject to drug tests. Rather than working at the Daily Bugle print newspaper office, the new Parker is employed at the eBugle, an online newspaper. Parker’s Aunt May and Uncle Ben are younger than in previous iterations, and his love interest, Mary Jane, has more intellectual interests than her 1960s predecessor. Bendis’s Spider-Man remains a human being underneath the costume and has more problems than powers. Spider-Man is strong, but he can also be hurt physically and emotionally, just like anyone else, and Parker has everyday tasks and problems like the rest of us: laundry, money worries, and deadlines at work. Bendis’s leisurely pace allows readers to better know Spider-Man and his supporting cast, rendering more depth of character, a major point of praise for Bendis’s reworking of this title. Ultimate Spider-Man was generally well received by old and new fans alike. A best seller its first month in publication and later a successful feature film, it still faced criticism from some fans, but most fans were pleased Bendis did not mess with the essentials of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s original character. In fact, many argue Bendis improved on the original by creating a more enriched Spider-Man mythos through his fleshed-out characters and dialogue. Bendis contributed another groundbreaking title to the American comic book scene with Alias. In 2001 Alias was the debut title in Marvel’s new “MAX Comics,” a mature-themed line aimed at adult readers, often depicting scenes of sex and violence. Bendis was prepared to tone down the sex and violence when he pitched Alias to Marvel, but instead they decided to bypass the irrelevant Comics Code Authority and released their own rating system, one demonstration of Bendis’s influence on today’s comic book industry. Blending crime and superhero genres, Alias focuses on Jessica Jones, a former superheroine turned private investigator. Through Jessica Jones and the MAX Comics line, Bendis was able to explore typically taboo aspects of superheroes’ lives, such as their moral principles, decisions, and humanity. Jones, a selfdeclared failed superheroine, is self-destructive and has quite an inferiority complex because of her lack of acceptance within the superhero loop. When a routine missing persons case not only reveals but even video records the secret identity of Captain Marvel, Jones finds herself in a dilemma, calling into question Jones’s

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principles and the power dynamics of her former and current relationship to the superhero world. She is faced not only with outing one of the most well-known heroes, but also with the decision to render him powerless by exposing his true identity. In essence, Jessica realizes absolute power can inflict powerlessness and loss of will on others, and she wrestles over which side of this power dynamic she belongs on. Readers experience her struggle through her self-destructive behavior, including excessive drinking, foul-mouthed blowups, and promiscuity. Moral and ethical decisions are not typically fleshed out for comic book characters, especially superheroes, but Bendis shows readers explicitly how Jessica battles her dilemma and her self-worth through her reckless actions, ultimately rendering her more human and relatable. Alias illustrates Bendis’s knack for creating natural, engaging dialogue and for altering the Marvel universe to influence the comic book industry one character at a time. Within the first two months on the stands, Alias sold out despite its graphic scenes of violent or sexual nature inappropriate for younger audiences. Warren Ellis (b. 1968). British writer Warren Ellis has played a prominent role in today’s American comic books as a prolific creator displaying breadth and diversity of subjects, genres, and forms. He is known for his approachable and consistent Internet presence through various comics and culture message boards, forums, and blogs he hosts online, creating a strong connection with his fans. A writer of comic books since 1994, when he began working for Marvel, Ellis has been key in redefining and ushering the superhero into the twenty-first century. Ellis’s work often displays grim worldviews and frequently explores various futures rather than pasts while also addressing current issues around popular culture, technology, gender roles, global politics, and human rights. In 1999 Ellis and artist Bryan Hitch collaborated on one of his most highlighted titles, The Authority, featuring a team of superheroes striving to change the world for the better rather than merely maintain the status quo. Critics and readers alike responded positively to Ellis’s treatment of the superhero in The Authority. Ellis avoided stereotypical superpowers and personalities by developing human characters who happen to have superpowers and who display a sense of humor regarding their overblown celebrity status, demonstrating their ability to deconstruct their roles within society and explicitly recognize and comment on the importance of world peace and human rights over their own notoriety. Rather than traditional powers such as flying or superhuman strength, Ellis’s Authority heroes display more advanced and unique powers. Jack Hawskmoor, “King of the Cities,” demonstrates superhuman agility and strength and has the capability to “read” and control urban environments through telepathy, allowing him to link into and control any city through such means as the animation and possession of architecture and infrastructure. Meanwhile, Angie Spica distilled numerous intelligent technological devices into nine pints of liquid machinery to replace her blood and became “The Engineer,” with nanotechnology flowing through her body and offering infinite mechanical abilities, such as tapping into technological infrastructures or creating weapons. The Authority was also groundbreaking in its positive portrayal of a homosexual couple on the team. Apollo and Midnighter at first glance seem to be stereotypical muscle-ridden, masculine heroes yet are romantic partners in a caring, monogamous relationship. While homosexual characters are not new to comic books, positive and

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prominent portrayals of homosexual characters are. Ellis’s readers see the tender, intimate side of their relationship several times without being distracted from the main plot. Ellis illustrates a healthy rather than dysfunctional homosexual relationship between essential characters when typically homosexual comic book characters are portrayed in poor light or end up being killed off. Apollo and Midnighter’s groundbreaking relationship in The Authority generally garnered positive responses from readers. There was some controversy regarding a panel illustrating a kiss between the two men, and Ellis was asked to alter it to show Apollo kissing Midnighter on the cheek instead. Readers responded indignantly to DC Comics editors, questioning why a series regularly depicting murder, genocide, and events of mass destruction should warrant censoring an innocuous kiss between a homosexual couple. Aside from pushing the boundaries of the superhero and gender roles, The Authority also speaks volumes to current world issues such as global politics and human rights. At the turn of the millennium, the team encounters global political and economic superpowers such as Europe and Japan, as well as terrorist-prone and vulnerable cities such as London, Los Angeles, and New York. Fighting to protect inhabitants of planet Earth, the team fights colonization by other planets and protects human rights by punishing those committing genocide and political corruption in their nations. Ellis’s more recent collaboration with artist Ben Templesmith on Fell is another series widely recognized for its dense storytelling and experimentation with comic book forms and models of production. In Fell, Detective Richard Fell has been transferred “from over the bridge” to Snowtown, a resident-described “feral city” that is run-down, decayed, and plagued with poverty and crime. An illustration of Ellis’s grim worldview, Snowtown offers an anonymous depiction of a mixture of many existing urban contexts and problems, and Templesmith’s gloomy colors and gritty illustrations enhance that feeling. Detective Fell goes about his work trying to make sense of this city whose desperate citizens have given up on it yet spray paint the city’s tag everywhere as a form of protective magic, in hopes the city will not destroy what has already been labeled its own. Fell goes about solving unique and bizarre crimes in each issue, but citizens question his practices. Because crime is such a prevalent part of daily life in Snowtown, they do not understand Fell’s motivations for solving crimes that will just occur again the very next day—or hour, for that matter. It seems as if Fell wants to change Snowtown for the better rather than maintain the status quo, sentiments Ellis’s characters in The Authority also exhibit. Aside from the dense and meaningful stories, Ellis’s experimentation with the form of Fell is perhaps the comic’s greatest contribution to modern American comic books. Creator-owned, Fell was conceived by Ellis and designed to be accessible to readers financially and contextually. With the comic priced at $1.99 per issue (well under the usual price of today’s comics, between $2.50 and $3.99), readers could enter a comic shop with pocket change and leave with a self-contained story in one issue rather than longer story arcs requiring the purchase of multiple issues. Undertaking a comic sticking to this price point meant both Ellis and artist Templesmith remained uncompensated until issues were printed and actually sold. Ellis’s low-cost model required compressed stories with shorter page counts but was supplemented with “back material,” including unfinished artwork, author

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notes expanding on the story, and reader responses. Still in production, Fell has been positively received by readers and critics alike for both its form and its content and has garnered several comic book award nominations. Readers have shown gratitude to Ellis and Image Comics for developing a low-cost pricing model and appreciate Ellis’s full use of the shorter page count through carefully developed, dense, and full storylines in each issue. Mark Millar (b. 1969). Scottish comic book writer Mark Millar began writing comics as a college student. Initially his work was submitted to and published by British comic book presses, like the popular Saviour, which Trident Comics published in the early 1990s. DC Comics brought Millar into the mainstream American comics scene, where he immediately established a high profile by taking over Warren Ellis’s The Authority in 2000. However, scheduling, artist, and censorship problems with editors and competing lucrative offers from publishers caused Millar to move to Marvel in 2001, where he began working on their Ultimate line of comics. Marvel’s Ultimate line aimed to increase readership by revamping popular Marvel Universe characters to make them accessible and attractive to new readers. Millar played a seminal role in rewriting the Marvel character histories through his work on Ultimate X-Men, Ultimate Fantastic Four, and most notably The Ultimates. In the Ultimate Marvel Universe, the Ultimates (known as the Avengers in previous Marvel Universes) are a team of superheroes banded together to fend off supervillains and other superhuman threats. Millar’s task was not to merely provide a face-lift to these Marvel Universe characters, but to start from scratch and rebuild them anew. The Ultimates included core members from the Avengers, including Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Wasp, Giant Man, and The Hulk, with a handful of others. The Ultimates team is funded by the U.S. military through S.H.I.E.L.D. (Strategic Hazard Intervention, Espionage and Logistics Directorate), a counterterrorism intelligence unit directed by Nick Fury, former U.S. Army hero and spy. Fury, with the backing of the U.S. government, hopes to reinvigorate the super-soldier program that originally spawned Captain America and also recruits the Ultimates to fight against increasingly threatening global meta-human and mutant activity. Emergent themes in Millar’s The Ultimates series reflect current global and domestic issues such as homeland security, colonization and genocide, and the United States’ motives and involvement with the Middle East. Early on, the Ultimates face protecting homeland security and the challenge of controlling their own member, the Hulk, as he rampages New York City while going after his ex-girlfriend’s date in a jealous rage, killing over 800 civilians. Millar carefully develops his characters before moving on to his next story arc where the Ultimates protect the Earth from colonization and possible extinction, reflecting current genocide crimes and the imperialistic global climate. Millar wanted his superheroes to be working and fighting relevant and meaningful battles rather than chasing down supervillains, and this is apparent in the sequel, The Ultimates 2, where the team begins to face potential involvement in U.S. foreign relations in the Middle East. Pressured by the White House to work with European Union super-soldiers, members of the Ultimates begin to question their role in helping the United States push for increasing global power and control of oil resources. Climatically, the group faces off against the Liberators, a superhero force made up of recruits from enemy nations in the series, including Iran, North Korea, China, Russia, and Syria, reflecting the recent threat of attacks on American land. Battling the Liberator’s invasion

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on U.S. soil, the Ultimates organize a counteroffensive and successfully defeat the invaders one-by-one. Throughout the larger obstacles facing the Ultimates, Millar weaves subplots and themes allowing for character development, such as Janet (the Wasp) and Hank Pym’s (Giant Man) marital issues, Bruce Banner’s (the Hulk) internal struggles over his abilities as a research scientist trying to reformulate the super-soldier serum, and Steve Rogers’s (Captain America) adjustments to living in the modern world after being resurrected from a World War II incident in 1945. The rich subplots also reveal tensions within the group. Some members distrust Bruce Banner because of his volatility and perceived lack of mental stability, while Hank Pym is jealous of the attention Steve Rogers has been paying his wife, Janet. Other tensions relate to the goals and mission of their team. Thor, in particular, feels they should not be used as a tool for the United States to establish its power with preemptive strikes, and he is quite vocal about his opinions, causing some to question his loyalty to the group. Meanwhile, their celebrity status causes other tensions. Some team members share snide remarks regarding Tony Stark’s (Iron Man) numerous television news talkshow appearances and romantic trysts with leading ladies of Hollywood or demonstrate jealousy about Captain America’s potential movie deal. Readers familiar with the Marvel Universe were likely skeptical about Millar’s ability to successfully rewrite decades-old mythology without alienating fans and characters or destroying the continuity of the existing Marvel Universe, but responses to The Ultimates were mostly favorable, especially among reviewers and critics. Some hard-core fans blasted Millar and his work on various comic book message boards and blogs, but the soaring sales figures spoke to the success of Millar’s undertaking. Millar’s exploration of American domestic issues continued in his much anticipated seven-part Civil War series published by Marvel Comics in 2006 and 2007. Considered a “Marvel Comics Event,” the storyline included superheroes fighting against one another in an ideological battle that could forever change the Marvel Universe. The basis of the conflict regarded the Superhuman Registration Act, a law passed by the U.S. government requiring all superhumans to register their powers and identities with the government or be persecuted by S.H.I.E.L.D. (the governmentfunded superhuman counterterrorism and intelligence unit), registered superhumans, and nongovernment enforcers such as civilian supporters. Reaction to the policy among superheroes was mixed, creating a divide between former allies, with the pro-registration camp led by Iron Man and the anti-registration camp led by Captain America. Millar uses this conflict as a basis to explore many current domestic issues facing the United States, such as the immigration reform debate, the politically and ideologically divided climate of the nation, and the erosion of civil liberties. The Superhuman Registration Act and the superhumans’ reactions to it reflect some of the debates surrounding the United States’ immigration reform issue. Some heroes feel they should not have to register with the government because they already positively contribute to society by capturing supervillains or protecting the public. On the other hand, the pro-registration camp recognizes the value of standardized training for superhumans and feels the registration process would allow for more legitimacy and respect from the American public. Millar’s political allegory continues with the divided superhero community replicating the currently divided political ideologies of the American public under the

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current administration. The philosophical war the superheroes are experiencing brings up issues of government oversight and involvement in the private lives of its citizens, including the erosion of civil liberties. The anti-registration camp feels being forced to work for the government renders them lackeys of the government and takes their freedom to perform their work as they choose. They also feel their civil liberties are threatened because if they register and reveal their true identities, their privacy and safety are at risk, and they will be subject to heavy surveillance by registration enforcers or S.H.I.E.L.D. whether they register or not. Millar’s Civil War was highly anticipated, and sales soared, though reader response remained mixed, as is normal with a major comic book event such as this. Millar’s undertaking changed the Marvel Universe in a big way, and readers will continue to learn to what extent the future Marvel storylines involving Civil War characters will develop from the outcome of the war. Even Civil War’s numerous “crossovers” or “tie-ins” (stories that combine two or more otherwise separated characters, stories, settings, or universes that meet and interact with each other) demonstrated the degree to which this conflict altered and influenced the mythology of the Marvel Universe. While crossovers and tie-ins are normal in the comic book industry, Millar’s Civil War spawned over 100 comic book issues under 20-plus titles, demonstrating the impact of Civil War on the Marvel Universe and the comic book industry. Numerous new titles were also developed from the plotlines in Civil War that illustrate and unfold the results of the war in the entire Marvel Universe. Women in Today’s Comic Book Industry. Because of the prominent number of males in the field, some criticize the comic book industry for remaining a “boys club,” yet female editors, writers, and artists are becoming more common and gaining more recognition for their work in the medium. American writer Devin Grayson’s (b. 1971) Batman: Gothic Knights emerged in 2000, making her the first woman to have a regular ongoing writing assignment on the Batman title, and she has garnered distinction and recognition among the industry and from fans. Grayson’s Batman marked a new direction in that she brought a concern for relationships to the character, something her male contemporaries did not display as well in their stories. Nominated in 1999 and 2000 for the Comics Buyer’s Guide Award for Favorite Writer, Grayson is still an active comic book writer today. In 2005 she wrapped up a five-year run on Nightwing and wrote the creator-owned Matador for DC Comics’ Wildstorm imprint, and in 2006 published DC Universe: Inheritance, a novel about fathers and sons starring Batman, Nightwing, Green Arrow, Arsenal, Aquaman, and Tempest. Jessica Abel (b. 1969) is another American comic book writer and artist gaining recognition; her work leans more toward the independent or alternative genre of comic books. In the early 1990s, Abel self-published her embellished hand-bound comic book Artbabe, which was eventually picked up by Fantagraphics for publication. Abel delved into longer comic books in 2000 when she started La Perdida, originally a five-part series and later reissued as a single volume in 2005. Receiving positive critical response, La Perdida featured a Mexican American woman, Carla, venturing into Mexico City in search of her identity after being raised by only her white American mother. Abel’s work often includes the experiences of Generation X characters and demonstrates careful attention to communicating her characters’ gestures and facial expressions. Recently Abel has worked on Carmina, a prose novel for teens; Life Sucks, a new graphic novel; and a textbook about making comics.

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Gail Simone is yet another prominent woman writer in today’s comic book industry. Simone first entered mainstream comics with her work on Deadpool (later relaunched as Agent X) in 2002 but had previously been noticed by comic book fans through her Women in Refrigerators Web site cataloging the many instances in which female comic book characters were victimized in plot devices for male protagonists. Simone took over DC Comics’ Birds of Prey, featuring an all-female cast of characters. Her work on this title has garnered credit for her balance of suspenseful action, thoughtful character development, and humor. Simone also contributed to DC Comics’ 2006 “Infinite Crisis” event through the Villains United series, in which she revitalized the Catwoman character. She has remained active in the online comic book community through her “You’ll All Be Sorry” weekly column on the Comic Book Resources Web site and through Bloodstains on the Looking Glass, her blog. She continues to write and recently has worked on a series for Gen 13 as well as Welcome to Tranquility, a creator-owned project for Wildstorm. Bibliography Abel, Jessica. Artbabe [Issues 1–5]. Self-published, 1992–1996. ———. Artbabe [Vol. 2, Issues 1–4]. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics, 1997–1999. ———. Carmina. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. ———. Life Sucks. New York: First Second, 2007. ———. La Perdida. New York: Pantheon Books, 2006. Batman. Directed by Tim Burton. Warner Home Video, 1989. Batman and Robin. Directed by Joel Schumacher. Warner Home Video, 1997. Alien. Directed by Ridley Scott. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 1984. Bendis, Brian Michael. Alias. New York: Marvel Comics, 2002. ———. Torso. Orange, CA: Image Comics, 2001. ———. Ultimate Spider-Man: Power and Responsibility [Vol. 1]. New York: Marvel Comics, 2001. ———. Ultimate Spider-Man: Learning Curve [Vol. 2]. New York: Marvel Comics, 2001. Benton, Mike. The Comic Book in America: An Illustrated History. Dallas, TX: Taylor Publications, 1989. Eisner, Will. 2008. http://www.time.com/time/columnist/arnold/article/0,9565,542579,00.html. Ellis, Warren. The Authority: Relentless [Vol. 1]. LaJolla, CA: Wildstorm/DC Comics, 2000. ———. The Authority: Under New Management [Vol. 2]. LaJolla, CA: Wildstorm/DC Comics, 2000. ———. Fell [Issues 1, 2, 4, 5]. Orange, CA: Image Comics, 2006. Gaiman, Neil. The Sandman [Issues 1–75]. New York: Vertigo, 1989–1996. Grayson, Devin. Batman: Gothic Knights [Issues 1–32]. New York: DC Comics, 2000–2002. ———. DC Universe: Inheritance. New York: Warner Books, 2006. ———. Matador [Issues 1–6]. LaJolla, CA: Wildstorm/DC Comics, 2005. ———. Nightwing [Issues 53, 71–100, 108–117]. New York: DC Comics, 2000–2005. Jones, Gerard. Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book. New York: Basic Books, 2004. Justice League Unlimited. 2001–2007. Created by Gardner Fox. Warner Brothers Entertainment. Kaplan, Arie. Masters of the Comic Book Universe Revealed!: Will Eisner, Stan Lee, Neil Gaiman, and More. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2006. McFarlane, Todd. Spawn [Issues 1–73]. Orange, CA: Image Comics, 1992–1998. Millar, Mark. Civil War [Issues 1–3, 5, 6]. New York: Marvel Comics, 2006–2007. ———. Saviour [Issues 1–5]. Leicester, UK: Trident Comics, 1990. ———. Ultimate Fantastic Four [Issues 1–6]. New York: Marvel Comics, 2003–2004. ———. Ultimate X-Men [Issues 1–12, 15–33]. New York: Marvel Comics, 2000–2003.

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GRAPHIC NOVELS ———. The Ultimates, Vol. 1: Superhuman. New York: Marvel Comics, 2002. ———. The Ultimates, Vol. 2: Homeland Security. New York: Marvel Comics, 2004. ———. The Ultimates 2: Gods and Monsters [Vol. 1]. New York: Marvel Comics, 2005. Miller, Frank. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns [Issues 1–4]. New York: DC Comics, 1986. ———. Daredevil [Issues 168–191]. New York: Marvel Comics, 1981–1983. ———. Sin City [Issues 1–13]. Dark Horse Comics, 1991–1992. Olson, Stephen P. Neil Gaiman. New York: Rosen, 2005. Raiders of the Lost Ark. Directed by Steven Spielberg, produced by George Lucas. Paramount Home Video, 1981. Simone, Gail. Agent X [Issues 1–15]. New York: Marvel Comics, 2002–2003. ———. Birds of Prey [Issues 56–102]. New York: DC Comics, 2003–2007. ———. Bloodstains on the Looking Glass [Online January 2007]. http://happystains. blogspot.com ———. Deadpool [Issues 65–69]. New York: Marvel Comics, 2002. ———. Gen 13 [Vol. 4] [Issues 1–4]. LaJolla, CA: Wildstorm/DC Comics, 2006–2007. ———. Villains United [Issues 1–6]. New York: DC Comics, 2005. ———. Welcome to Tranquility [Issues 1–6]. LaJolla, CA: Wildstorm/DC Comics, 2006–2007. ———. Women in Refrigerators. Accessed January 2007 at http://www.unheardtaunts.com/wir. ———. “You’ll All Be Sorry” [Weekly column]. http://www.comicbookresources.com/columns Smallville. Created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar. Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2001–2007. Spiegelman, Art. “Foreword: Symptoms of Disorder, Signs of Genius.” In Justin Green’s Binky Brown Sampler, by Justin Green. San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1995. 4–7. ———. In the Shadow of No Towers. Self-published, 2004. ———. Maus. New York: Pantheon, 1991. Star Trek. Directed by Robert Wise. Paramount Home Video, 1980. Superman. Directed by Richard Donner. Warner Home Video, 1978. Ware, Chris. Acme Novelty Library. New York: Pantheon, 2005. Wertham, Fredric. Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Rinehart, 1954.

Further Reading Benton, Mike. The Comic Book in America: An Illustrated History. Dallas, TX: Taylor Publications, 1989; Klock, Geoff. How to Read Superhero Comics and Why. New York: Continuum, 2002; McCloud, Scott. Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form. New York: Perennial, 2000; McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994; Wright, Bradford. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

TAMMY MIELKE

H HISTORICAL FANTASY Definition. To the extent that inner and outer are separable, history forms the surface of the past: chronology, geography, economics, sociology, technology, and politics. In contrast, fantasy conveys the internal past—the emotions and the dreams hidden beneath them. Whereas historical fiction stays closer to the surface (by avoiding the supernatural) and high fantasy has a generic, medieval setting in some invented country, historical fantasy depicts reality comprehensively, combining actual history with dreamlike depths. As such, it makes unusually great demands both on the research time and creativity of its authors and on the erudition and imagination of its readers. It uses a factual and fantastic past to address the authors’ present (the time of composition) in preparation for their future. Consider, for instance, Neil Gaiman’s historical fantasy series for Vertigo comic books, ending with a conversation between William Shakespeare and the Sandman (1996). Not only was Gaiman’s career changing from comic books to other projects, but his close connection to America was also drawing him there; Gaiman therefore named that episode after Shakespeare’s comedy The Tempest, a drama often deemed to be that playwright’s farewell to his art and also Shakespeare’s response to the New World. In the Sandman series, this episode culminates parallels between the two authors, such as Gaiman’s attributing the same complaint to both his daughter Holly and Shakespeare’s daughter Judith: each writer’s existence consists of either composing lies or stealing them from previous books (Kwitney 2003, 61). At the end of the series, Gaiman has Shakespeare himself express this as a regret, adding that it has kept him from ever truly living. Given Gaiman’s situation (ending his most famous series), this problem might sound autobiographical entirely, except that it comes through the mouth of Shakespeare and is itself indebted to Jorge Luis Borges’s parable Everything and Nothing, where Shakespeare says it to God (Borges 1962, 248–249). Through this intertwining of personal and literary allusions with the exploits of the supernatural Sandman, Gaiman suggests that his portrait of personal remorse on concluding the series belongs to some larger pattern—the nature of writing historical fantasy. This genre inevitably borrows from the past, sometimes staying

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close to sources but otherwise sidestepping the ordinary version of reality in order to reassess its norms, often controversially. The context of this episode was Gaiman’s struggle for comic books’ First Amendment rights, which brought him America’s Comic Book Legal Defense Fund’s Defender of Liberty Award the next year (1997). History. Because the very nature of historical fantasy concerns the past, it often involves rewriting ancient epics and legends—for example, Stephan Grundy’s Gilgamesh (2000), which re-imagines the heterosexual descriptions of the ancient epic with bisexual ones. Why do old sources seem so outmoded as to require rewriting? Predating science, ancient epics presented myths as fact rather than fiction and thus were not designed to be historical fantasy per se. For instance, when around 1300 B.C.E. the exorcist priest Sin-Leqi-Unninni produced the best-preserved version of the Gilgamesh legend, he added an appendix in which a dead character appears as a ghost, appropriate to the editor’s professional concern with such beings. In doing this, he violated the sequence of the narrative, which itself is patched together from previous accounts with so little care for consistency that he could not decide whether the central character should be spelled “Gilgamesh” or “Bilgamesh” (Maier 1984, 1–50). In other words, like Grundy’s, his Gilgamesh is a magical version of the past reshaped for his own needs, but unlike current historical fantasists, he did not live in an age that distinguished skillfully between history and fantasy. That distinction became a shade clearer during the Protestant Reformation in Europe and America (sixteenth to seventeenth centuries C.E.), with its contrasting what it called “scripture” (the Protestant section of the Bible) to “apocrypha” (the rest of the Catholic Bible, deemed historically inaccurate by Protestants). The emphasis of the time, however, was in purifying faith rather than in writing historical scholarship per se. From that period, Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590–1596) recognizes that it is not literally true, but an allegory of Spenser’s own Elizabethan Britain, set in the legendary Arthurian period. His concern, though, is denouncing vice rather than portraying historical detail. Shying from such preaching, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt parodied it in their The Incomplete Enchanter (1940)—a humor already nascent in the Faerie Queene becomes more playful and detailed after book one, as if evolving toward modern historical fantasy. Perhaps coincidentally, at approximately the same time as Spenser but in China, the Journey to the West (Hsi Yu Chi, attributed to Wu Ch’eng-en) turns a historical event (Hsuan Tsang’s bringing Buddhist scriptures from India) into an enormous amalgam of legends, humor, and allegory, comparable to Spenser’s. Admittedly, the Hsi Yu Chi has inspired some American historical fantasy (e.g., Mark Salzman’s The Laughing Sutra, 1991, and Gerald Vizenor’s Griever: An American Monkey King in China, 1987), but the primary influence on American historical fantasy has not been from the East or even from the West in general but has been specifically British. This dependence has been both a way for America to reimagine its roots and a way for American writers to learn a genre pioneered by English fascination with the past. From such British Gothic historical fantasies as William Beckford’s Vathek (French 1782; English 1786) or Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) later comes American Gothicism, for example, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” (1842). All of these use history as an excuse for eroticism (to the extent that Beckford first had to publish in France), yet ultimately they denounce the old, adopting and adapting the model of confessional literature. This dissatisfaction with the past was not confined to the Gothic. Despite substituting humor for the frissons of Beckford, Lewis, and Poe, Mark Twain’s (Samuel Langhorne Clemens’s) historical fantasy A Connecticut Yankee

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in King Arthur’s Court (1889), for instance, makes even more explicit the superiority of the present over the past, while implicitly criticizing even his age as not sufficiently modernized. Enough appreciation of the past for a richer historical fantasy again comes from England: Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), composed after globetrotting, including years in the United States, evidences a new perspective on his British heritage. Kipling’s own childhood was divided between an idyllic, multicultural Indian period with his art-historian father and a hellish British period with an anti-artistic evangelical. Puck of Pook’s Hill exorcizes that trauma by imagining an alternative: the multiculturalism and tolerance of his India brought home to England in a way that would make it more like the United States. By way of artifacts, comparable to those in the museum in which Kipling’s father was curator, a fairy introduces children to previous local cultures, pagan included. As Donald Mackenzie remarks in a preface to Puck of Pook’s Hill, the artifacts embody Victorian fact-based history, what he calls the “archaeological imagination” (Mackenzie 1993, xiv)—a past that remains visible, unlike the invisible realm of merely oral legends. Puck of Pook’s Hill inspired many children’s books designed to teach history through fantasy. Because of a need to redefine national identity during and directly after the chaos wrought by World War II, that period was particularly open to these. For instance, Alison Uttley’s A Traveler in Time (1939) and Phillippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958) tour history via a temporal slip. One notable series from the period was Mary Norton’s The Magic Bed-Knob (1943) and Bonfires and Broomsticks (1947), later collected together as Bedknob and Broomstick (1957) and made eventually into a Disney movie (1971). The books (with far more historical connection than the film) reflect the war period’s mood of precarious hope via an incompetent witch who just barely manages to take a family of children to more promising times (e.g., the seventeenth century). Equally notable, beginning in 1954 with Half Magic, Edward Eager’s tales of magic series (Knight’s Castle, 1956; Magic by the Lake, 1957; and The Time Garden, 1958) fit Britain’s slow recovery from the wartime economy by giving children only “half magic”; nonetheless, it reaffirms British tradition. By the early 1960s, a Cold War paranoia underlay the “wolves series” by Conrad Aiken’s daughter Joan Aiken. Beginning with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962), the series tells of continental werewolves invading eighteenth-century England. This was a period when America was following the patriotic British trend, though in a less distinguished way—for example, Carley Dawson’s now-out-of-print colonial magic series (Mr. Wicker’s Window, 1952; The Sign of the Seven Seas, 1954; and Dragon Run, 1955). With a depiction of racial relations that today seems embarrassingly conservative, these show a twentieth-century magician’s apprentice time-traveling to help save eighteenth-century America from foreign influences. These series are relatively conventional compared to a trend in historical fantasy that came to the United States first via the works of Jorge Luis Borges. A translator of Kipling into Spanish, Borges began his highly metaphysical version of the genre in 1935 with his Universal History of Infamy (Historia universal de la infamia). Particularly in the 1940s, his short stories often juxtaposed historical settings with some temporal paradox, for example, a subjective year sandwiched within an objective instant, or a labyrinth of time, or the same work changing its meaning over the centuries, or immortals devolving into troglodytes. His essay “A New Refutation of Time” (“Nueva refutación del tiempo,” 1952) explains this fascination with temporal paradox as a futile desire to nullify time and thus deny death, despite his recognizing himself as being

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composed of time (Borges 1962, 234). Learning from Borges the complex interweaving of fantasy and history but remaining political, a magical realism movement developed in Latin American from the 1960s onward. Among its first masterpieces was Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad, 1967), which interconnects the story of a village with the history of the world and mixes verisimilitude with fantasies, freeing the unconscious as part of an agenda of liberating the repressed and oppressed. As an influence on historical fantasy in the United States, this engagé yet speculative metaphysical current blended eventually with the more staid British one—the latter represented particularly by the American fad for J.R.R. Tolkien’s high fantasy Lord of the Rings, written 1937–1949, published 1953–1954. The American blending started in the late 1960s, when Tolkien’s combat between clearly defined good and evil no longer matched the more complex moral questions raised by the Vietnam War and the youth revolution, which had affinities with the liberalism of magic realism. Typical of the period in America were Roger Zelazny’s Amber books, commencing with Nine Princes in Amber (1970), and Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, starting with Interview with the Vampire (1976). Both form larger-than-life anatomies of dysfunctional societies and their histories, with the protagonist poised between traditional action and metaphysical rumination. Anne Rice recovered from the alcoholic despair flowing from her daughter’s demise by writing Interview with the Vampire (1976), in which a girl survives death as a monster among the undead—Rice’s imagining something worse than the loss of her daughter and thus reconciling herself to it. Whereas Rice had become morbid and nocturnal in her alcoholic phase, the vampire society offered an exaggerated version of that condition that helped her recognize and move beyond her addiction. The scenes with that society, however, exist in their own lyrical sense of time, like Borges’s “A Secret Miracle” (“El Milagro secreto,” 1945). During the 1970s, American blending of the British conservative and the Hispanic liberal currents remained tentative; in contrast, during the 1980s, America dominated the genre. After almost a decade of silence, in 1985 Anne Rice produced a radically new, second Vampire volume, The Vampire L’Estat. Pervaded by the whining of its protagonist, Louis (i.e., by remnants of Rice’s own depression), Interview had peered at the dark places of the psyche myopically. The more mature second volume retold and expanded the previous adventure from the perspective of L’Estat, wolf-killer, actor, and existentialist. Viewed through Louis’s eyes, the first volume’s character L’Estat was a pathetic parasite. The retelling and its sequels made him a multimillionaire playboy, whose exuberance testified that an extended lifetime need not decrease humanity’s energy, even in an absurd universe. Like The Vampire L’Estat, many other historical fantasies of the 1980s in America culminated themes developed in the 1970s. Although feminist Arthurian literature had been published throughout that decade (e.g., in Britain, Vera Chapman’s The Green Knight, 1975; The King’s Damosel, 1976; King Arthur’s Daughter, 1976), the year 1982 brought Marion Zimmer Bradley’s enormously popular American tome The Mists of Avalon, about the women of Camelot. Its very length and amount of historical detail granted it opulence and verisimilitude. Within her own science fiction Darkover series, Bradley had pioneered the use of bisexual personae in formulaic adventure plots. Set, however, on another planet in a distant future with the characters part-alien, Darkover was a heavily disguised comment on human nature. Slightly bolder, The Mists of Avalon posits that here on earth, in one of the founding Anglo myths, Camelot did not fall because of

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Lancelot’s adultery with Guinevere. Instead, Bradley’s King Arthur forms a threesome with them, in which the only sexual tension comes from the two men’s being more interested in one another than in the woman. For Bradley, the major cause of Camelot’s decline is Christian intolerance. Such a liberal rewriting of legends had been extremely rare in historical fiction, but the fantasy elements in The Mists of Avalon gave just enough distancing so that readers of the 1980s found it tolerable. By the 1980s the British begin to follow the American lead, an example being the bisexuality of Peter Vansittart’s Parsifal, where the Arthurian grail knight falls in love with both the goddess-like Kundry and Sir Gawain. Historical romance, previously one of the most traditional genres, thus found fantasy as a means of expanding its scope. The Vampire Chronicles eroticized blood-sucking between bisexuals whose very mode of being Rice described as a magical sensuous and sensual ecstasy. Comparably provocative, Judith Tarr’s Hound and Falcon trilogy (The Isle of Glass, 1985; The Golden Horn, 1985; and The Hounds of God, 1987) reflects 1980s sexual liberalism with a relatively sympathetic homosexual character (King Richard the Lionhearted) and a denunciation of Roman Catholic celibacy. Despite being a monk, the protagonist is also an elf who resembles a pretty, lusty boy and who nonetheless keeps his monastic vows for longer than a human being could live. Eventually, he falls in love with a shape-shifting elf, who spends long periods as a dog at his feet, from where she sends him tempting thoughts telepathically. R.A. Macavoy’s Damiano series (Damiano, 1983; Damiano’s Flute, 1984; and Raphael, 1984) also contains a human/canine, the protagonist’s talking dog. The two end up playing naked together in heaven where the dog has acquired a human soul and form. Another of the themes in the Damiano series as well as in many other historical fantasies of the period is conflict between Christianity and wizardry. Katherine Kurz’s Deryny series (1970–2002), despite her MA in Medieval English history, cast that enmity in another world, where the religion was just different enough from Christianity so that Christian readers might not be offended. By bringing it into our world, Tarr, Bradley, and Macavoy removed the disguise, using Christian history to indict that faith. Tarr’s Hound and Falcon trilogy delivered a passionate denunciation of the Fourth Crusade, much of which was spent with Christians killing one another, when Europeans attacked Constantinople, capital of Eastern Christendom. Although Tarr’s and Macavoy’s satires of Christianity seem to come from outside that faith, Rice’s years of researching Church history for her books has been radically ambivalent, compounding Roman Catholic devotion and existential atheism in shifting combinations ranging from blasphemy to piety. In the 1980s, Orson Scott Card’s first three volumes of his Alvin Maker series (Seventh Son, 1987; Red Prophet, 1988; and Prentice Alvin, 1989,) ridiculed various Christian denominations, but did so from his perspective as a dedicated member of the Church of Latter Days Saints. The primary model for Alvin’s life was Joseph Smith, though in miracle-working powers, Alvin resembles Jesus. Despite satirizing some organized religions and excusing the practice of magic, the series is very Christian in its presentation of each person’s spiritual gift (or, in frontier parlance, “knack”). What was new for historical fantasy in the Alvin Maker series was Card’s large-scale interweaving of American frontier superstitions of the uneducated with actual history. This makes it (among other things) magical realism, even to its sympathy for the oppressed. The series is a monumental redoing of American history, so that the Native Americans retain a large territory, slavery is combated by

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magic, and the early American dream of founding a New Jerusalem is almost achieved. Although some other books during the 1980s, such as Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale (1982), a magical history of New York, or S.P. Somtow’s Moon Dance (1989), a history of werewolves on a Native American reservation, play with portions of American history, the Alvin Maker series constitutes one of the grandest revisions. The 1980s achieved so much in historical fantasy that its authors tended to extend their series thereafter, not always with much new. In fantasy literature, the great development of the 1990s and early twenty-first century was again British: the worldwide fad of Harry Potter, beginning with Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s [or, in American editions, Sorcerer’s] Stone (1997). That series, however, ridicules history (the class so dull that only hyper-intellectual Hermione Granger stays awake in it). One source of most characters’ antipathy to the past may be its having been traumatic for them, as in Harry’s literal scar, Ron’s spider phobia, the effects of Lucius’s bullying on his son Draco, Sirius’s dreadful childhood memories, young Lupin’s being bitten by a werewolf, the abandonment of Tom Riddle, and the commission of Neville’s parents to an asylum. In book three (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, 1999), Lupin gives the children a charm to combat their phobias, by reimagining and deriding the feared person or animal. One exception to the unpopularity of history at Hogwarts is Kennilworthy Whisp’s Quidditch through the Ages (published by Rowling in 2001 as part of Comic Relief) because it substitutes sports for the agonizing struggles of real history. In it, Rowling demonstrates through her parodies that she is a real student of history, but that is not quite the same as infusing her series with actual events and dates. Spurred by the popularity of Harry Potter, publishers promoted what seemed to them like it; thus, the resulting boom in fantasy literature did little to nurture the historical variety. Trends and Themes. The chief legacy of Harry Potter has been an emphasis on children’s literature, often in very extended series. Before Rowling, the only wellknown heptalogy (seven-volume work) was C.S. Lewis’s Narnia; today, more and more fantasies stretch themselves into vast sagas. Whereas the 1980s somewhat matured fantasy, the 1990s and early twenty-first century inspired more young people and adults to read children’s books, which were admittedly becoming quite long, challenging, and complex but which were exempted by their primary audience from such subjects as explicit sexuality. Rather, the principal Harry Potter–like theme has been magical education, as in Patricia Wrede’s Mairelon series (Mairelon the Magician, 1991; and Magician’s Ward, 1997), where a nineteenth-century street waif rises to a position in the magical community. Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty (2005) and Rebel Angels (2005) have a 16-year-old psychic from India secretly learning to master her powers in a Victorian girl’s school designed to teach propriety. Advertised as “Harry Potter for adults,” Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (2004) has also become a best seller in the United States. It presents magical education with enough real history to have taken her 10 years of research and enough invented history to fill notes that often occupy as much space as the main text. The book’s central theme is a history simultaneously copious and parsimonious, analogous to modern Britain, preserving a rich past without quite managing prosperity. For Jonathan Strange, that situation occurs both with his miser father and with his mentor, Mr. Norrell, owner of most books on magic ever written yet reluctant to loan Strange any of them.

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Whereas magical education and hyperrealism are trends particularly associated with the early twenty-first century, the themes of historical fantasy continue to be very traditional (usually more than one per volume): (1) the preternaturally old, (2) time slips (i.e., time travel by magic), (3) reincarnation, (4) old magical objects, and (5) secret histories. If there is any change in these themes, the difference is in an ever-increasing simplification of them to resemble popular formulae.

Even further in magical education from Harry Potter is Philip Pullman’s His Dark Material series (Northern Lights [British edition] or The Golden Compass [American edition], 1995; The Subtle Knife, 1997; The Amber Spyglass, 2000). In this nineteenth-century-like England, each person’s unconscious is imaged as an accompanying animal, which, according to Pullman’s Web site, “is that part of you that helps you grow towards wisdom.” In other words, the means of education is fantastic (a metaphor depicted as literal), but the result is ordinary. Not recognizing that such depiction is the norm in fantasy—historical or otherwise—Pullman has tended to deny that the series is “fantasy.” Comparably, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis tended to deny that their Christian allegories were “allegories.” Such a denial simply meant that, for their period, they were infusing the fantasy with more verisimilitude, as, with even higher standards, Pullman is doing now. Such an increasing emphasis on real details is a trend in every kind of fantasy and leads to expanding research in the historical variety. For centuries, miraculously long-lived beings entered historical fantasy so that the author could philosophize on the human condition and give congruity to a vast stretch of time, as in George Sylvester Viereck’s and Paul Eldridge’s My First Two Thousand Years: The Autobiography of the Wandering Jew (1928). Now, more common is Karen Marie Moning’s historical fantasy/romance Kiss of the Highlander (2001), where an American tourist awakens a handsome Scottish laird after his 500year slumber and then takes him back to his century via a time slip (and not for philosophizing). Today, immortals commonly come in teams competing with one another to fit the adventure formula, as in Mercedes Lackey and Roberta Gellis’s This Scepter’d Isle (2004), where elves fight over who will be the heir to Henry VIII. Last century, reincarnation was an uncommon idea in the West, requiring slow explanation, as in Rider Haggard’s She (1887), but lately it not only is common in Western popular culture but also is reintroduced by Asian historical fantasy, such as Rumiko Takahashi’s typical manga Inu-Yasha (2003–), where a teenage reincarnation of an ancient priestess takes a time slip to antiquity to team with an immortal demon in battles with other immortals. An archaeology of magical objects goes back at least to Puck of Pook’s Hill but now is likely to come redolent of Indiana Jones, as with Alex Archer’s Rogue Angel series (Destiny, 2006; Solomon’s, 2006) and Kate Mosse’s Labyrinth (2006). Alternatively, a magical object can link romances spread through centuries, as in Shana Abe’s The Last Mermaid (2004). Traditionally, an author of a secret history had to remain mysterious about whether presumably skeptical readers should take supernatural events seriously, for example, Paul Féval’s The Vampire Countess (1856). Today, conspiracy theories belong to genres of both factual and fictional literature; thus, in Archer’s Destiny (2006) a field reporter for the cable series Chasing History’s Monsters encounters the kind of religious conspiracy that has

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become a cliché, particularly since Dan Brown’s extraordinarily popular historical fiction, The Da Vinci Code (2004). Context and Issues. Particularly in the United States and Britain, the legacy of twenty-first-century terrorist attacks and wars in the Middle East has been a traumatized public, like Rowling’s wizards under attack by Voldemort’s death-eater terrorists. In direct response to the falling World Trade Towers, the historian Don LoCicero wrote If Animals Could Speak: A 21st Century Fable Inspired by 9/11/2001 (2004). With the help of an actor pursued as a terrorist by the misguided American government, talking farm animals defend their home against developers. Comparably, though for older readers, Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon’s comic book Pride of Baghdad (2006) transforms the real escape of four zoo lions during the 2003 American-Iraqi war into a vehicle for discussing whether liberation can be forced on people or whether they must cooperate. The male lion’s having two wives mirrors one Near Eastern tradition, while the lions’ conversations with a tortoise occasion a long perspective on war in the region. More commonly, however, authors have simply skewed their material slightly to reflect recent East–West relations, as with Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Arthur trilogy (The Seeing Stone, 2001; At the Crossing Places, 2004; and King of the Middle March, 2006). Advertised for the Harry Potter market, the books likewise form a coming-of-age series—the first volume written before September 11, 2001. In it, the twelfth-century, teenage protagonist receives from Merlin a magic stone, which permits the boy to watch the adventures of his namesake King Arthur as a model while the lad traverses the “crossing place” of adolescence. In subsequent volumes, however, the disastrous Fourth Crusade looms more prominently, so that the protagonist must consider a question very prominent after 9/11: why Muslims and Christians fight one another. Similarly, Elizabeth Kostova spent 10 years researching her best seller The Historian (2005), linked to even earlier memories of European jaunting with her raconteur father. Nonetheless, the finished version begins with a note remarking, “The glimpses of religious and territorial conflict between an Islamic East and a Judeo-Christian West will be painfully familiar to a modern reader” (xvi). Whereas this theme was common in the 1980s, it then usually occasioned a neo-pagan attack on Christianity. Probably because of 9/11, Crossley-Holland and Kostova handle the topic more evenly and gingerly, neither East nor West wholly to blame. With rich historical detail, Kostova portrays present (associated with the West) and past (associated with the East) as symbols for conscious and unconscious states of mind. Their relationship is either loving or sadomasochistic (i.e., based on either equality or dominance). Dracula, who learned evil from both East and West, personifies such sadomasochistic dominance, particularly in his lust for impaling and vampirism. This is to say he personifies a Western (conscious) mind fighting against the Eastern (unconscious), which seduces him into imitating it; he thus exemplifies self-division. All of the major characters are historians, whose potentially pure love for the past risks deterioration into a perversion. The way to escape this fall is a willingness to change and mature (contrasted with the seemingly immutable Dracula, given that his warping occurred before the narrative began). As Kostova reveals in an interview appended to the novel, she deliberately begins the book in the voice of a sheltered 16-year-old, so that her maturing (and that of the older but reclusive other voices) comes “through exposure to evil” (3). As a repository of foul memories, history therefore holds the place it has since 9/11: a guide away from childish naivety and thus, potentially, a teacher of mature love.

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The Australian author of children’s books Gillian Rubinstein (writing as Lian Hearn) addresses an equally disturbing 9/11 question: what if one is raised by terrorists? In her Otori series (Across the Nightingale Floor, 2002; Grass for his Pillow, 2003; Brilliance of the Moon, 2004; Cry of the Heron, 2006), young Takeo, despite his moral qualms, is expected to use such magical powers as invisibility for the profession of the “Tribe,” a ninja-like group of spies and assassins. Rubinstein’s pseudonym, Hearn, recalls the late-nineteenth-century essayist Lafcadio Hearn, whose works did much to introduce Japanese culture to America, but in a mannered, not entirely authentic manner. Consequently, her choice of the name is inherently apologetic, a recognition that Western appropriation of the East is controversial. Indeed, Near Eastern terrorists have presented themselves as defenders of Asia against various forms of appropriation. Reception. Although “historical fantasy” is a marketing category briefly glossed in such works as Brian Stableford’s Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature (2005), it is not a genre that has received much scholarly attention as such. Perhaps because major authors tend to wander in and out of its boundaries, it tends to be clumped with genres tangential to it: historical fiction, high fantasy, horror, or romance novels. This, however, does not mean that it is either rare or unrewarded. Like those genres that border it, historical fantasy books often have screen versions, such as Interview with the Vampire (1994), a large-budget production that offers a somewhat moralistic simplification of the far-more amoral book. Rubinstein has received millions from Universal for the film rights to her Otori series. According to Borys Kit (The Reporter, September 12, 2006), Peter Jackson has optioned Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, which begins with His Majesty’s Dragon (2006), about a corps of talking dragons during the Napoleonic wars. Naturally, many of the cinematic adaptations of historical fantasy are made for television, such as the 2001 miniseries of The Mists of Avalon on TNT. Typical of historical fantasies adapted into films, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s comic book series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2000) was simplified significantly to become the 2003 movie of the same name. The original abounds in jokes about the lives of Moore and O’Neill, both shown in nineteenth-century garb on the back cover, the latter as an unconscious drunk. Stereotypically, the movie begins with the League run by a gallant Alan Quartermain. In humorous contrast to its title, the original series begins with the League run by its one woman member, whereas its Quartermain is almost completely incapacitated by opium addiction. In other words, the balance between conservative and liberal, though common in written historical fantasy, tends to tip toward the conservative in cinematic adaptations. Selected Authors. Aside from those formulaic writers not worth treating anywhere, the authors of historical fantasy tend to be as original as erudite and move from genre to genre, and thus many are found in other sections of this encyclopedia as well. Although obviously there is not room to treat all historical fantasists here, six may stand as representatives of the various types: Orson Scott Card, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Anne Rice, Diana Paxson, and Judith Tarr. A major figure with a largely American focus, Orson Scott Card has through his Alvin Maker series provided a major rethinking of Joseph Smith’s nineteenth century, a world of angels and other supernatural forces, where Card can play out the tensions between his conservative politics and his imaginative empathy with people of all sorts. One of the primary voices in the series is the real British poet William Blake, an extreme liberal (if not radical) and thus a challenge for Card to integrate

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into his conservative worldview, which he does with his own version of Blake as an American. In addition to the Alvin Maker series, Card has also contributed to historical fantasy through his Enchantment (1999), a retelling of Sleeping Beauty in a relatively realistic, tenth-century Russian setting. A modern, American Jewish graduate student finds himself in the middle ages, when Christianity and paganism warred. Naturally, Card is more sympathetic to the Christian side than are neopagan authors, but he also includes virtuous Jewish characters, just as his Alvin Maker series evidences religious sympathy for Native Americans (perhaps because the Book of Mormon alleges their descent from various peoples mentioned in the Bible). Critical studies of Card include Michael Collings’s In the Image of God: Theme, Characterization, and Landscape in the Fiction of Orson Scott Card (1990), Collings’s Storyteller: The Official Orson Scott Card Bibliography and Guide (2001), and Edith Tyson’s Orson Scott Card: Writer of the Terrible Choice (2003). Often compared to C.S. Lewis as a Christian apologist and to Stephen King as a depicter of gritty reality, Card has been a teacher of creative writing whose own How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (1990) is also useful as a guide to his work. Although Stephen King writes primarily within the horror genre, his most important work to date, the seven-volume Dark Tower series, takes places in multiple universes, including ours. The real-world setting includes so many historical allusions that Robin Furth’s concordance to the series devotes four pages of continuous type just to listing those allusions in volumes 5 through 7 (Furth 2005, vol. 2, 433–436). This large real history interweaves with the vast history of other worlds and characters from several of King’s best-known novels. In its final form, the series is King’s attempt to pull his life together after a hit-and-run accident almost destroyed it. Based on a long interview with King when he was just beginning his Dark Tower series, Douglas Winter’s Stephen King: The Art of Darkness (1986) offers a meticulous, uncontroversial presentation of facts up to that time. For discussion of the later part of King’s career, see Furth’s Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: A Concordance (2003–2005) and Michael Collings’s Stephen King Is Richard Bachman (2007). Although Card, King, and Gaiman all depict the graphically repugnant and teach comparable morals, Gaiman—a secularized Jewish, British American—is even more of an outsider than the others and perhaps thus less prone to stereotypes. For King, the unconscious, imaged usually as some horror working its way throughout history, tends to be a place of barely repressed violence and guilt. For Card, the unconscious can connect one to either the diabolical or the divine. For Gaiman, conscious and unconscious form a continuum, shading one into another, frightening and beautiful at once. His Sandman series was his training in historical fantasy, which has since assumed various forms, notably the subterranean London detritus of Neverwhere (1998), the melting pot of mythologies in American Gods (2002) and Anansi Boys (2006), and the fairy-tale, nineteenth-century ambience of Stardust (2001). Studies of his work include Stephen Rauch’s Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman” and Joseph Campbell: In Search of the Modern Myth (2003) and Joe Sanders’s The Sandman Papers: An Exploration of the Sandman Mythology (2006). Even further from traditional morality than Gaiman (despite her loudly announced return to Christianity), Anne Rice’s books are the antithesis of King’s tendency to frighten people into principles. For her supernaturals, evil is an unavoidable and therefore forgivable sadomasochism, often with blasphemous associations, as when the pharaoh usually considered the villain of Exodus is treated as a hero (in The Mummy or Ramses the Damned, 1991), when Lestat drinks blood

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flowing from the crucified Christ (in Memnoch the Devil, 1997), or when the young Jesus finds himself miraculously murdering his playmates at the opening of Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (2005). Lushly described and often well researched, exotic historical settings are her ways of evoking erotic aspects of the unconscious. Written in close cooperation with Rice, three particularly useful books on her are Katherine Ramsland’s Prism of the Night: A Biography of Anne Rice (1994), The Vampire Companion (1995), and The Witches’ Companion (1996), treating the Mayfair witches, whose saga interweaves with the Vampire Chronicles. Diana Paxson deserves mention as one of the most prominent voices of neopaganism in historical fantasy. Whereas Paxson’s friend Marion Zimmer Bradley was a priest of a Pre-Nicene Catholic Church (which presented a common ground between Christianity and paganism), Paxson has been more closely connected to Norse pagan traditions, as with her how-to book Taking Up the Runes: A Complete Guide to Using Runes in Spells, Rituals, Divination, and Magic (2005). Perhaps best known for her postapocalyptic Westria series of high fantasy, she is also prolific in historical fantasy, with series on the Nibelungen and Arthurian legends, the latter close enough to Mists of Avalon so that she collaborated with Bradley in writing the prequel to it, Priestess of Avalon (2001), which Paxson finished after Bradley’s death in 1999. Since then, Paxson has continued the series. According to a 1989 interview with Raymond H. Thompson, Paxson saw her Arthuriana as more historically accurate than Bradley’s, in that Paxson has been researching tirelessly since her graduate-school days in order to combine high verisimilitude with occult theories. For further information on her life and writings, see the Gale Reference Team’s online biography of her, and for Paxson’s cultural context, see Eric Davis’s and Michael Rauner’s The Visionary State: A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape (2006). To date, Judith Tarr has found time amid her output in other genres (some under such pseudonyms as Caitlin Brennan) for 13 historical fantasies. The quality of her writing ranges from excellent to formulaic, and she is better at characterization than plotting. At her best, however, she has helped to shape the genre, by finding new ways to reconcile fantasy with history. Her Hound and Falcon series demonstrated how invented, magical characters could be interpolated into famous events as alleged advisors to the great. Her Norman series (beginning with Rite of Conquest, 2004) showed how to make the famous themselves wizards—what she does to William the Conqueror and his wife Matilda. According to Tarr’s Web site, her primary interest seems to be raising Lipizzans, with prolific authorship paying the bills. In a posting on Amazon.com, she has explained that she writes under various names because bookstores stock fewer and fewer of her works, given that their sales are average rather than outstanding. Thomson Gale has a biography of her, and she is mentioned from time to time in such journals as Mythlore (e.g., Kondratiev 1989, 53, 57). At her less spectacular, however, her situation resembles that of those countless historical fantasists who rewrite the past prolifically without astronomical remuneration. Bibliography Abé, Shana. The Last Mermaid. New York: Bantam, 2004. Aiken, Joan. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962. Archer, Alex. Destiny. Pahrump, NV: Golden Eagle, 2006. ———. Solomon’s Jar. Pahrump, NV: Golden Eagle, 2006.

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HISTORICAL FANTASY Beckford, William. Vathek. Dublin: Nonsuch, 2006. Originally published 1786. Borges, Jorge Louis. Historia universal de la infamia. Buenos Aires: Emece Editores, 2005. Originally published 1935. ———. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, eds. New York: New Directions, 1962. Bryson, Bernarda. Gilgamesh. New York: Henry Holt, 1967. Card, Orson Scott. Alvin Journeyman. New York: Tor, 1995 [Alvin Maker 4]. ———. Crystal City. New York: Tor, 2003 [Alvin Maker 6]. ———. Enchantment. New York: Del Rey, 1999. ———. Heartfire. New York: Tor, 1998 [Alvin Maker 5]. ———. How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. Cincinnati, OH: Writers’ Digest, 1990. ———. Prentice Alvin. New York: Tor, 1989 [Alvin Maker 3]. ———. Red Prophet. New York: Tor, 1988 [Alvin Maker 2]. ———. Seventh Son. New York: Tor, 1987 [Alvin Maker 1]. Chapman, Vera. Arthur’s Daughter. New York: Avon, 1978. ———. The Green Knight. New York: Avon, 1975. ———. The King’s Damosel. London: Avon, 1978. Clarke, Susanna. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. Collings, Michael. In the Image of God: Theme, Characterization, and Landscape in the Fiction of Orson Scott Card. Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1990. ———. Stephen King Is Richard Bachman. Hiram, GA: Overlook Connections, 2007. Davis, Eric, and Michael Rauner. The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape. San Francisco: Chronicle, 2006. Dawson, Carley. Dragon Run. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1955. ———. Mr. Wicker’s Window. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1952. ———. Sign of the Seven Seas. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1954. Eager, Edward. Half Magic. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954. ———. Knight’s Castle. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956. ———. Magic by the Lake. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1957. ———. The Time Garden. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1999. Originally published 1958. Féval, Paul. The Vampire Countess. Translated by Brian Stableford. Sherman Oaks, CA: Black Coat Press, 2003. Frost, Lauri. Elements of His Dark Material. New York: Fell, 2006. Furth, Robin. Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: A Concordance. 2 Vols. New York: Scribner, 2003–2005. Gaiman, Neil, Michal Zull, Jon J. Muth, and Charles Vess. The Wake. Sandman, Book 10. New York: Vertigo, 1999. Gale Reference Team. “Tarr, Judith (1955–).” Contemporary Authors Online. December 2007. http://www.amazon.com/Biography-Judith-1955-Contemporary-Authors/ dp/B0007SFN98/sr=8-26/qid=1168054089/ref=sr_1_26/002-3699287-7913633?ie= UTF8&s=books. ———. “Paxson, Diana Lucile (1943–).” Contemporary Authors Online. December 2007. http://www.amazon.com/Biography-Paxson-Diana-Contemporary-Authors/ dp/B0007SHLB6/sr=1-8/qid=1166315377/ref=sr_1_8/104-6733110-3468700?ie= UTF8&s=books. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. Cien años de soledad. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1967. Grundy, Stephan. Gilgamesh. New York: William Morrow, 2000. Haggard, Rider. She. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Originally published 1887. Helprin, Mark. Winter’s Tale. New York: Harvest, 1982. King, Stephen. The Dark Tower. New Hampshire: Donald M. Grant/Scribner, 2004 [Dark Tower VII]. ———. The Drawing of the Three. New York: Plume-Penguin, 1989 [Dark Tower 2].

HISTORICAL FANTASY ———. The Gunslinger. New York: Plume-Penguin, 2003, rev. ed. Originally published 1987 [Dark Tower I]. ———. Song of Susannah. New Hampshire: Donald M. Grant/ Scribner, 2004 [Dark Tower 6]. ———. The Waste-Lands. New York: Plume Penguin, 1993 [Dark Tower 3]. ———. Wizard and Glass. New York: Plume-Penguin, 1997 [Dark Tower 4]. ———. Wolves of the Calla. New Hampshire: Donald M. Grant/Scribner, 2003 [Dark Tower 5]. Kit, Borys. “Lord of Fantasy: Jackson Eyeing ‘Temeraire.’” Hollywood Reporter, September 2006. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id= 1003120747. Kondratiev, Alexei. “Tales Newly Told: A Column on Current Fantasy.” Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and the Genres of Myth and Fantasy Studies 16.1 (1989): 53, 57. Kostova, Elizabeth. The Historian. New York: Little, Brown, 2005. Kwitney, Alisa. The Sandman: King of Dreams. San Francisco: Chronicle, 2003. Lackey, Mercedes, and Roberta Gellis. This Scepter’d Isle. New York: Baen, 2004. Lewis, Matthew. The Monk. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Originally published 1796. Macavoy, R.A. Damiano. New York: Bantam, 1983. ———. Damiano’s Flute. New York: Bantam, 1984. ———. Raphael. New York: Bantam, 1984. Mackenzie, Donald. “Introduction.” Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies, by Rudyard Kipling. Donald Mackenzie, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Maier, John. “Introduction.” Gilgamesh. Translated from the Sin-leqi-unninni version by John Gardner and John Maier, with the assistance of Richard A. Henshaw. New York: Vintage Books, 1984. Moning, Karen Marie. Beyond the Highland Mist. New York: Dell, 1999. ———. Kiss of the Highlander. New York: Dell, 2001. Norton, Mary. Bedknob and Broomstick: A Combined Edition of “The Magic Bed-Knob” and “Bonfires and Broomsticks.” New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1957. Pearce, Phillippa. Tom’s Midnight Garden. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pratt, Fletcher, and L. Sprague de Camp. The Incomplete Enchanter. New York: Prime, 1940; HarperCollins, 1958. Pullman, Philip. “About the Writing.” Philip Pullman’s Web site. Retrieved December 2006 from http://www.philip-pullman.com/about_the_writing.asp. ———. The Amber Spyglass. New York: Scholastic, 2000 [His Dark Materials 3]. ———. The Golden Compass. New York: Scholastic, 1995 [His Dark Materials 1]. ———. The Subtle Knife. New York: Scholastic, 1997 [His Dark Materials 2]. Ramsland, Katherine. Prism of the Night: A Biography of Anne Rice. New York: Plume, 1994, rev. ed. ———. The Vampire Companion. New York: Ballantine, 1995. ———. The Witches’ Companion. New York: Ballantine, 1996. Rauch, Stephen. Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman” and Joseph Campbell: In Search of the Modern Myth. Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2003. Rice, Anne. Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. New York: Fawcett, 2006. ———. Complete Vampire Chronicles (Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire L’Estat, The Queen of the Damned, The Tale of the Body Thief). New York: Ballantine, 1993. ———. The Anne Rice Collection: The Mayfair Witches—3 Titles—Witching Hour—Lasher— Taltos. New York: Ballantine, 2001. ———. Memnoch the Devil. New York: Ballantine, 1997 [Vampire Chronicles 5]. ———. The Mummy. New York: Ballantine, 1991. Rowling, J.K. (writing as Kennilworthy Whisp). Quidditch through the Ages. New York: Scholastic, 2001. Saltzman, Mark. The Laughing Sutra. New York: Vintage, 1991.

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HISTORICAL FICTION Sanders, Joe. The Sandman Papers: An Exploration of the Sandman Mythology. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics, 2006. Somtow, S.P. Moon Dance. New York: Tor, 1989. Spenser, Edmund. The Fairie Queene. New York: Penguin, 1979. Originally published 1590–1609. Stableford, Brian. Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature. New York: Scarecrow, 2005. Takahashi, Rumiko. Inu-Yasha. Vol. 1. San Francisco: Viz Media, 2003. Tarr, Judith. The Golden Horn. New York: Bluejay, 1985. ———. The Hounds of God. New York: Bluejay, 1986. ———. The Isle of Glass. New York: Bluejay, 1985. ———. Judith Tarr’s Brand New Shiny Home Page. Accessed February 2006 at http://www.sff.net/people/judith-tarr. ———. Posting on Amazon.com. Retrieved December 2006 from http://www.amazon.com/ Rite-Conquest-Judith-Tarr/dp/B000BTH508/sr=1-1/qid=1167168206/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/ 002-3699287-7913633?ie=UTF8&s=books. ———. Rite of Conquest. New York: Bluejay, 2004. Thompson, Raymond H. “Interview with Diana Paxson.” Interviews with Authors of Modern Arthurian Literature. July 1989. http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/intrvws/ paxson.htm. Twain, Mark. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Originally published 1886. Tyson, Edith. Orson Scott Card: Writer of the Terrible Choice. Scarecrow Studies in Young Adult Literature, 10. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2003. Uttley, Alison. A Traveler in Time. London: Faber and Faber, 1939. Vansittart, Peter. Parsifal: A Novel. London: Peter Owen, 1988. Vaughan, Brian K., and Niko Henrichon. Pride of Baghdad. New York: Vertigo, 2006. Viereck, George Sylvester, and Paul Eldridge. My First Two Thousand Years: The Autobiography of the Wandering Jew. New York: Sheridan House, 2001. Originally published 1928. Vizenor, Gerald. Griever: An American Monkey in China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Wrede, Patricia. Magician’s Ward. New York: Tor, 1997. ———. Mairelon the Magician. New York: Tor, 1991. Wu, Ch’eng-en [attributed]. Journey to the West. 4 vols. Translated by Anthony Yu. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952–1983. Zelazny, Roger. Nine Princes in Amber. New York: Avon, 1970.

JAMES WHITLARK

HISTORICAL FICTION Definition. Historical fiction is fiction that is set, completely or in large part, in the past. The past in question must be historical from the author’s point of view—that is, a novel written during the 1930s about the Great Depression is not historical; one written in the twenty-first century is. There is no universal agreement on how far in the past a novel’s setting must be to be considered historical, but common usage of the term suggests a gap of several decades. The Historical Novel Society, for instance, defines historical fiction as being at least 50 years in the past and specifies that the work be done from research, not from the memory of the author. The term historical fiction is most often used for works where the historical setting is crucial to the action, not simply incidental. Some historical fiction is concerned with famous people and events, and many works incorporate real historical figures as characters. Other works focus on more ordinary people and purely fictional characters. Most writers of historical fiction try to portray history accurately,

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As fiction closely related to reality, historical fiction is sometimes associated with documentary fiction and the nonfiction novel. As narrative about the past, historical fiction shares characteristics with historical nonfiction, biography, and autobiography and memoir. And because almost any genre can be set in the past, historical fiction overlaps with many other kinds of fiction: romance novels, science fiction, time travel fiction, mystery fiction, thrillers, western literature, adventure fiction, Christian fiction, and fantasy literature. Historical fiction is a thriving area in children’s and young adult literature and a small but growing subset of graphic novels.

incorporating factual information about known people and events and creating fictional characters who live plausibly in the era they inhabit. Still, historical fiction, like all fiction, requires invention. Writers of historical fiction frequently extrapolate from what is known, invent inner lives and daily details for historical figures, imaginatively fill in gaps in the historical record, and illuminate what might have been. Some historical fiction intentionally alters or plays with history. Postmodern historical fiction questions the notions of historical truth and linear narrative. Alternate histories present a counterfactual world: what might have happened if some event in history had been different. Another form of historical fiction closely related to science fiction is the time-slip or time travel fiction, in which characters—by accident or design—find themselves transported to another historical time. Other historical novels revise or reimagine previous literary works—altering endings, creating sequels, or inventing lives for previously minor characters. Historical fiction often connects the present and past or links historical periods, sometimes by including multiple times in different threads of the narrative. Historical novels frequently suggest ideas about the importance of the past, the effect of the past on the present, and the nature of history itself. History. The first wildly successful and popular historical novels read by Americans were written by the British writer Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), whose 1814 novel Waverly inspired generations of readers and historical novelists. Year after year, Scott’s historical romances were among the best-selling books in the United States. By the 1820s and 1830s, with Scott’s great popularity, a proliferation of American historical societies, and talk swirling of American literary independence, it is not surprising that there was demand to “let us have our own Waverly” (Hart 1950, 79). One of the first novelists to apply was James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), whose book The Spy (1821) was set during the American Revolution. Cooper followed with a series of five historical frontier novels, entitled The Leatherstocking Tales featuring Natty Bumppo—The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841)—and did indeed join Scott on the best-seller lists. Cooper’s historical themes—the American fight for independence, the rugged outdoorsman in the wilderness, and the encounter of settlers with Native Americans— also preoccupied other historical novelists of the early nineteenth century. According to James Hart, in the 1820s “almost a third of the novels written by Americans dealt with the colonial period or the Revolution” (1950, 80). Among the novels exploring contact between colonists and Native Americans were Hope Leslie (1827) by Catherine Maria Sedgwick (1789–1867) and Hobomok (1824) by Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880). Some of the most popular historical novels of the 1830s were

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the American Revolution novel Horse-Shoe Robinson (1835) by John Pendleton Kennedy (1795–1870); The Yemassee (1835) by William Gilmore Simms (1806–1870), an account of Native American wars in colonial South Carolina; The Green Mountain Boys (1839) by Daniel Pierce Thompson (1795–1868), a novel of colonial Vermont and the American Revolution; and the wilderness romance Nick of the Woods (1837) by Robert Montgomery Bird (1806–1854). Some of the most respected authors of the middle and late nineteenth century wrote historical novels. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s (1804–1864) The Scarlet Letter (1850) is set two centuries in the past, examining Puritan society and the relationship of the past to the present. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), while most famous for her contemporary work Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), also wrote an historical novel set in the eighteenth century, The Minister’s Wooing (1859). Herman Melville (1819–1891), author of Moby-Dick (1851), wrote an historical novel about an American Revolution hero, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855). Mark Twain’s (1835–1910) best-known book, Huckleberry Finn (1884), is a prime example of a work that challenges the definition of historical fiction. While the setting is within Twain’s lifetime, the novel is set several decades in the past during a very different historical time, and the historical setting is integral to the plot and meaning of the novel. Twain’s novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), is an early example of both time slip and alternate history fiction, as the protagonist, a contemporary man, mysteriously finds himself in sixth-century England and immediately begins changing history. And a lesser-known work by Twain, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), is a forerunner of a popular contemporary trend: a novel presented as memoir or biography—in this case a fictional “translation” of a nonexistent account by Joan of Arc’s secretary. The most popular historical novel of the late nineteenth century was Ben-Hur (1880), written by Lew Wallace (1807–1905), a politician and former Union Army general. Set in Palestine and Rome during the time of Christ, the book became one of the great best sellers in American history and a cultural phenomenon: “an edition was issued under the sponsorship of the Holy See and another was put out in a printing of a million copies by Sears, Roebuck. Probably no other American novel has had either of these distinctions; certainly none has had both” (Hart 1950, 164). The Civil War inspired a new generation of historical fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Civil War fiction has been one of the predominant forms of American historical fiction ever since. The Red Badge of Courage (1895) by Stephen Crane (1871–1900) presents the war from the point of view of a new recruit seeing battles and death for the first time. The early twentieth century saw Civil War and Reconstruction novels by a wide range of writers, including Thomas Dixon (1864–1946), Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945), and William Faulkner (1897–1962). Regional historical fiction was also popular around the turn of the century, especially novels of the Old South and of the West. Owen Wister’s (1860–1938) The Virginian (1901) became a best seller and set the model for many western historical novels to come, and throughout the first third of the century, Zane Grey (1872–1939) published one western after another, remaining almost continuously on the best-seller lists. In the first half of the twentieth century, historical fiction was both popular and critically acclaimed. Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) published The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), the story of the community affected by a bridge disaster in eighteenth-century Peru. The most popular book of 1928, The Bridge of San Luis

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Rey won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Anthony Adverse, the sprawling picaresque tale of a hero wandering through Europe, was published by Hervey Allen (1889–1949) in 1933. Margaret Mitchell (1900–1949) created even more of a cultural phenomenon with her Civil War saga Gone with the Wind (1936), which became one of the all-time best sellers and won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Kathleen Winsor (1919–2003) also created a sensation with her 1944 historical romance of Restoration England, Forever Amber, which was widely popular in spite of, or perhaps because of, its racy reputation. In the second half of the twentieth century, several novelists achieved popular success with wide-ranging historical epics or family sagas. James Michener (1907–1997) published many best-selling historical novels, often covering hundreds or even thousands of years and usually focused on a particular place. Hawaii (1958); The Source (1965), spanning 12,000 years of Middle East history; Centennial (1974), on the history of Colorado; Chesapeake (1978); The Covenant (1980), covering 15 centuries in South Africa; Poland (1983); Texas (1985); Alaska (1988); Caribbean (1989); and Mexico (1992) all follow this approach. Howard Fast (1914–2003) wrote several novels about the American Revolution, including Citizen Tom Paine (1943), and was the author of Spartacus (1950), the novel about a Roman slave rebellion that became the basis of the acclaimed 1960 film. Fast also completed a six-volume saga titled The Immigrants, which follows one family through most of the twentieth century. John Jakes (1932–) has published several series of historical novels, frequently centered on a particular family. The Kent Family Chronicles, eight novels published from 1974 to 1980, trace one family’s adventures from the American Revolution through the nineteenth century. The North and South trilogy—North and South (1982), Love and War (1984), and Heaven and Hell (1987)—follows two families through several generations, culminating with the Civil War and Reconstruction. Among his many other books, Jakes has also published a two-volume saga of an immigrant family, Homeland (1993) and American Dreams (1998); California Gold (1989), set in the late nineteenth century; and Charleston (2002), a work spanning several generations in South Carolina. Gore Vidal (1925–), a significant late twentieth-century writer, is best known as an historical novelist for his seven-volume American Chronicles series, beginning with Washington D.C. (1967), which covers 1937 to 1952. Vidal followed with Burr (1973), presenting an alternate view of the founding fathers; 1876 (1976); Lincoln (1984); Empire (1987) and Hollywood (1990), both set in the early twentieth century; and The Golden Age (2000), completing the narrative from 1939 to the present. Among his many other novels, Vidal has written two historical novels set in the ancient world, Julian (1964) and Creation (1981), and a time-travel historical novel, The Smithsonian Institution (1998), based in 1939. The authors of African American literature figures prominently in late twentieth-century historical fiction. As Keith Byerman notes, “while there has been an interest in historical narrative as long as blacks have been writing fiction, this is the first generation to make it the dominant mode” (2005, 1). Jubilee (1966) by Margaret Walker (1915–1998) was one of the first and best novels to tell the story of slavery and emancipation from a female point of view. Alice Walker (1944–) focused on the lives and voices of black women in the early twentieth century in her Pulitzer Prize–winning The Color Purple (1982). Portraying two historical women, one black and one white, Dessa Rose (1986), by Sherley Anne Williams (1944–1999), is frequently seen as a response to The Confessions of Nat Turner (1968) by William Styron (1925–2006).

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David Bradley (1950–) based The Chaneysville Incident (1981), winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, on a historian’s quest to document a tragedy. In his 1982 novel, Oxherding Tale, Charles Johnson (1948–) combines new versions of slave narrative and picaresque adventure; in his 1990 novel Middle Passage, he uses a similar melding of genres to tell the story of a stowaway on an 1830 slave ship; in Dreamer (1998), Johnson imagines a double for Martin Luther King Jr. All three novels mix fact and fiction, storytelling and philosophy. Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison (1931–) has written several historical novels, including Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1998). Beloved, set after the Civil War but entwined with prewar memories and the nature of memory itself, won the Pulitzer Prize; in 2006 the New York Times named it the best novel of the last 25 years. Several novelists associated with the late twentieth century’s postmodern movement have written historical novels that challenge the notion of a firm boundary— or perhaps any boundary at all—between fact and fiction. Postmodern writers express skepticism about the possibility of stable knowledge or representation, frequently using techniques such as self-referentiality, unconventional narrative structure, and mixtures of genres, pastiche, and parody. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) by John Barth (1930–) is a metafictional mock epic of the founding of Maryland, a work purportedly written by Ebenezer Cook—the name of a real poet who did write a poem called “The Sot-Weed Factor.” In Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Thomas Pynchon (1937–) uses the historical moment of World War II to build a complex allusive narrative that has challenged a generation of readers. His 1997 novel Mason & Dixon is a saga dense with allusions, anachronism, and complexity, as the two surveyors journey through eighteenth-century America. In Against the Day (2006), Pynchon turns to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, again marshalling a wide array of characters, ideas, and moments. Among Don DeLillo’s (1936–) many novels, two stand out for their use of history and interweaving of fact and fiction: Libra (1988), an alternate version of President Kennedy’s assassination, centered on Lee Harvey Oswald, and Underworld (1997), a novel of the Cold War, baseball, and the threat of nuclear war. In his essay “False Documents,” E.L. Doctorow (1931–) contends that “there is no fiction or non-fiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative” (1983, 26). Whether considered postmodern or not, much historical fiction of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries blends fact and fiction, interweaves multiple narratives, and challenges conventional notions of time, memory, and truth. Trends and Themes (Since 2000). In the twenty-first century, while historical fiction has covered a wide range of focuses and approaches, certain trends are notable. Historical fiction is frequently set in periods of tumult, such as wars and disasters, or in a time period one or two generations before the author’s life. Many recent historical novels are set during the Civil War or World War II, with a smaller number set in the American Revolution and World War I. Jeff Shaara (1952–) covers the span of the American Revolutionary period from 1770 to its conclusion in two best-selling novels, Rise to Rebellion (2001) and The Glorious Cause (2002). Former President Jimmy Carter (1924–) published an historical novel, The Hornet’s Nest (2003), focusing on the American Revolution in 1770s Georgia, and Robert Morgan (1944–) sets Brave Enemies (2003), with its runaway cross-dressing heroine, in North Carolina in the same era.

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In three Civil War novels—The Black Flower (1997), The Year of Jubilo (2000), and The Judas Field (2006)—Howard Bahr (1946–) describes the experience of ordinary soldiers in Mississippi and Tennessee. Also focusing on the South is James Lee Burke (1936–) in his Louisiana novel White Doves at Morning (2002). Charles Frazier uses the Odyssey as his model for portraying a soldier’s journey home in Cold Mountain (1997), a phenomenal best seller and winner of the National Book Award. In the Fall (2000) by Jeffrey Lent, The Night Inspector (1999) by Frederick Busch (1941–2006), and Paradise Alley (2002) by Kevin Baker (1958–) all focus on the war’s effect on ordinary people. The Pulitzer Prize winner March (2005) by Geraldine Brooks (1955–) and the PEN/Faulkner winner The March (2005) by E.L. Doctorow each follow one famous person, the fictional Mr. March of Little Women and the historical General Sherman, respectively. Jeff Shaara’s Gods and Generals (1996) and The Last Full Measure (1998) paint a broad, action-filled picture of the war before and after Gettysburg—together with The Killer Angels (1974) by Shaara’s father Michael Shaara (1928–88), these novels form a Civil War trilogy. Two notable World War I novels are Jeff Shaara’s To the Last Man: A Novel of the First World War (2004) and John Rolfe Gardiner’s epistolary tale of an American doctor, Somewhere in France (1999). Many more recent historical novels have focused on World War II, either the war itself or its effects on the home front. A World Away (1998) by Stewart O’Nan (1961–), the alternate history The Plot Against America (2004) by Philip Roth (1933–), and Gore Vidal’s The Golden Age are all set in the United States, depicting the war’s effects on families as well as its effects on national politics. When the Emperor Was Divine (2002) by Julie Otsuka (1962–) follows the lives of a family in a Japanese American internment camp. Novels by Leslie Epstein (1938–), including Pandaemonium (1997) and The Eighth Wonder of the World (2006), mix fictional and real characters, Hollywood and the Holocaust, architecture and Mussolini. Centered on the fighting of the war itself are Europe Central (2005) by William T. Vollmann, winner of the National Book Award; Cryptonomicon (1999) by Neal Stephenson (1959–); and the more conventional narrative The Rising Tide: A Novel of World War II (2006) by Jeff Shaara. These works illuminate the idea that “by choosing a setting half a century or so before the present, the creative writer can capture the elusive relationship between the individual and society at a moment when a particular fragment of the past is slipping over the horizon from memory into history” (Morris-Suzuki 2005, 44–45). In addition to World War II, this time frame now includes the civil rights movement. Two notable recent novels are the aforementioned Dreamer by Johnson and Four Spirits (2003) by Sena Jeter Naslund (1942–), a novel of the Birmingham church bombing in 1963. In addition to common time periods, contemporary historical novels share several common approaches to storytelling. These approaches include the following: centering the narrative on one historical person, sometimes in the form of a journal, letters, or pseudo-memoir; creating a mix of real and fictional characters; using multiple threads, storylines, or time periods; mixing or crossing boundaries between different genres; and creating alternate history or literature. A large number of twenty-first century historical novels center on one historical figure and sometimes take the form of a purported memoir, biography, or autobiography. The range of figures is a microcosm of the topics and themes of recent historical fiction. Some are American presidents or national figures, as in Abe (2000) by Richard Slotkin (1942–); Scandalmonger (2000), about Alexander Hamilton and

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Thomas Jefferson, by William Safire (1929–); and Lucy (2003) by Ellen Feldman, a novel about Lucy Mercer’s affair with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Novels about American civil rights leaders include Cloudsplitter (1998) by Russell Banks (1940–), about John Brown; Johnson’s Dreamer (1998), about Martin Luther King; and Strivers Row (2006) by Kevin Baker about Malcolm Little, later Malcolm X. Several novels involve other world leaders, including two first-person novels about Marie Antoinette, Sena Jeter Naslund’s Abundance (2006) and Kathryn Davis’s (1946–) Versailles (2002); Karen Essex’s Kleopatra (2001); Brooks Hansen’s (1965–) The Monsters of St. Helena (2003) about Napoleon writing his memoirs; and Lily Tuck’s The News from Paraguay (2004), on the dictator Francisco Lopez. Norman Mailer’s (1923–) novel The Castle in the Forest (2007) follows this pattern with a twist, telling Adolf Hitler’s story from the point of view of the devil. Novels centered on a scholar, scientist, or doctor include two by T. Coraghessan Boyle (1948–)—The Road to Wellville (1993) about Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of corn flakes, and The Inner Circle (2004) about sex researcher Alfred Kinsey— as well as Freud’s “Megalomania” (2000) by Israel Rosenfield (1939–). Writers, musicians, and artists featured in historical fiction include Virginia Woolf in The Hours (1998) by Michael Cunningham (1952–); Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in The Book of Salt (2003) by Monique Truong (1968–); composer Gustav Mahler in The Artist’s Wife (2001) by Max Phillips, narrated by Alma Mahler; composer Robert Schumann in Longing (2000), a fictional biography, by J.D. Landis; and the architect of Paris in Hausmann, or The Distinction (2001) by Paul LaFarge (1970–). Whether featuring actual historical figures or purely fictional characters, many recent novels are told in the form of letters, journals, or memoir, including, for example, the Pulitzer Prize winner Gilead (2004) by Marilynne Robinson (1943–) and One Last Look (2003) by Susanna Moore (1947–). Many novels, such as Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons (2006), combine fictional characters with historical figures. Other important trends include using multiple points of view, as in Master of the Crossroads (2000) by Madison Smartt Bell (1957–); multiple narratives, generations, and locations as in The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001) by Amy Tan (1952–); and multiple genres, such as the mix of historical fiction and science fiction in Specimen Days (2005) by Michael Cunningham. Ivan Doig’s (1939–) works, such as Prairie Nocturne (2003) and The Whistling Season (2006), belong to both western literature and historical fiction. Diana Gabaldon’s (1952–) Outlander series mixes historical fiction, romance novel, and science fiction, defying genre classification. One intriguing and genre-mixing branch of historical fiction is alternate (or alternative) history, “the branch of literature that concerns itself with history’s turning out differently than what we know to be true” (Hellekson 2001, 1). One of the earliest American novels that can be considered alternate history is Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Alternate history is related to science fiction in its consideration of other worlds that in some sense reflect our own; some critics, in fact, consider it a branch of science fiction, and some of its well-known practitioners are classified as science fiction authors, including Philip Dick (1928–82), Harry Turtledove (1949–), Orson Scott Card (1951–), and Connie Willis (1945–). A prominent recent example of alternate history is Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, in which Charles Lindbergh is elected president in 1940. Other recent novels that change or invent history are Don DeLillo’s Libra, Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, Charles Johnson’s Dreamer, William Safire’s Scandalmonger, and Michael Chabon’s (1963–) The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (2007).

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Even more than other forms of historical fiction, alternate history examines not just historical events but the significance of history itself. According to Karen Hellekson, “alternate history as a genre speculates about such topics as the nature of time and linearity, the past’s link to the present, the present’s link to the future, and the role of individuals in the history-making process” (2001, 4). Still there is debate over whether alternate histories are really historical fiction because they assume facts contrary to historical knowledge, and they are sometimes set in the present or in an altered future. Another form of historical fiction often categorized as science fiction is the time-slip or time travel fiction, in which characters find themselves transported to another historical time. Examples of time-slip historical fiction include Kindred (1979) by Octavia Butler (1947–2006), Timeline (1999) by Michael Crichton (1942–), and The Doomsday Book (1992), To Say Nothing of the Dog (1997), and Lincoln’s Dreams (1988) by Connie Willis (1945–). Other historical novels reinvent, revise, borrow characters from, or pay homage to a previous literary work. Recent examples include The Hours by Michael Cunningham, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway; Ahab’s Wife (1999) by Sena Jeter Naslund, an exploration of the world left behind in Moby-Dick; and March by Geraldine Brooks, a Civil War novel that focused on the father from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Context and Issues. Contemporary historical fiction, not surprisingly, reflects many problems and concerns of the twenty-first century, including war, disaster, disease, discrimination, and scandals in politics and business. Many historical novels involve the popular contemporary topics of science, technology, and invention. Others center on the world of entertainment and sports. Historical fiction also reflects growing cultural diversity in authors and subjects as well as concern with issues of gender and sexuality. Twenty-first century America is living in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, in the midst of the Iraq war, and in the third decade of the AIDS struggle. One of the first historical novels to include September 11 is Forever (2003) by Pete Hamill (1935–), a New York City epic that begins in 1740. Other novels that confront disaster and disease are In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden (2001) by Kathleen Cambor (1948–) on the Johnstown flood of 1889; The Gates of the Alamo (2000) by Stephen Harrigan (1948–); The Great Fire (2003) by the Australian American writer Shirley Hazzard (1931–); Year of Wonders (2001), a novel of the bubonic plague by another Australian American, Geraldine Brooks; A Prayer for the Dying (1999) by O’Nan; and Sheri Holman’s The Dress Lodger (2000), set in London during a cholera epidemic. As Americans continue to wrestle with discrimination and debate topics such as affirmative action, slavery has continued to be a compelling theme in historical novels, including Banks’s Cloudsplitter; Bell’s Haitian trilogy; the Pulitzer Prize winner The Known World (2003) by Edward P. Jones (1951–); Property (2003) by Valerie Martin; and Walk through Darkness (2002) by David Anthony Durham (1969–). Durham is also the author of Gabriel’s Story (2001), set in the aftermath of slavery as settlers move west. Political sexual scandals—a topic that led to the impeachment trial of President Clinton in 1999—are featured in Feldman’s Lucy and Safire’s Scandalmonger. Business scandals and mysteries—also much in the news—are at the center of David Liss’s (1966–) novels set in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: A Conspiracy of Paper (2000), The Coffee Trader (2003), and A Spectacle of Corruption (2004).

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As the pace of scientific and technological innovation accelerates, writers of historical fiction focus on the discoveries and inventions of the past. Andrea Barrett (1954–) examines scientific exploration and conflicts in the National Book Award winner Ship Fever and Other Stories (1996), The Voyage of the Narwhal (1998), and Servants of the Map (2002). Scientific and mathematical conflicts and rivalries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are crucial to the novels of Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver (2003), The Confusion (2004), and The System of the World (2004), and code-making and breaking is at the heart of Cryptonomicon (1999). Emily Barton (1969–) and Thomas Kelly (1961–) have each created novels that look back on invention and building: a harness inventor in Barton’s The Testament of Yves Gundron (2000), the dream of building a bridge to Manhattan in Barton’s Brookland (2006), and the construction of the Empire State Building in Kelly’s Empire Rising (2005). Many recent historical novels have focused on the entertainment world, often mixing entertainment with politics, war, or scandals—perhaps not surprising in an era when baseball players testify before Congress and political leaders make documentary films. DeLillo’s Underworld uses the story of a renowned baseball to frame a postmodern narrative about the Cold War; Chabon creates comic book artists who battle Nazism in the Pulitzer Prize winner The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000); Glen David Gold (1964–) follows the aftermath of President Harding’s participation in a magic show in Carter Beats the Devil (2001); Susan Sontag (1933–2004) depicts a Polish actress who forms a utopian community in California in In America (2000), winner of the National Book Award. Charley Rosen tackles basketball and discrimination in The House of Moses All-Stars (1997) and basketball and scandal in Barney Polan’s Game (1998), while Darin Strauss (1970–) interweaves boxing, entertainment, and impersonation in The Real McCoy (2002). As the United States has become more diverse, so have the authors of historical fiction. Over the last several decades, African American authors, including the Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, have been prominent in historical fiction. Edward P. Jones, Jewell Parker Rhodes (1954–), and David Anthony Durham are just a few of the African American authors who have published historical novels in the twenty-first century. Asian American writers of historical fiction include Ha Jin (1956–), Otsuka, Tan, and Truong. Hispanic American writers include Julia Alvarez (1950–), author of In the Name of Salome (2000), and Sandra Cisneros (1954–), author of Caramelo (2002). Contemporary issues of gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, and family are reflected in several recent historical works. Interest runs high in the life and work of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, as evidenced by the 2004 film and by Boyle’s historical novel titled The Inner Circle. Transgender issues are reflected in David Ebershoff’s (1969–) The Danish Girl (2000), an account of the transgendered artist who underwent the first sex change operation in 1931, and in Jeffrey Eugenides’s (1960–) Middlesex (2002), the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel depicting the history and life of an intersexed protagonist. Reception (and Adaptation). Historical fiction has been a popular American literary genre since the early nineteenth century. While every generation witnesses declarations that the historical novel is pedestrian, obsolete, or even dead, historical novels have continued to thrive, among both literary authors and mass-market publishers. Some writers, readers, and critics avoid the term “historical fiction,” claiming, in effect, that a work is not an historical novel, but rather a novel about

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history. As Sarah Johnson has noted of late twentieth-century historical fiction, “Historical fiction was everywhere, but nowhere. It had become the genre that dared not speak its name” (2005, 3). Many reviews of historical novels omit the term entirely, characterizing the work as a novel about memory, about the meaning of the past, about time, but not as historical. Nevertheless, authors continue to write historical novels, many are very popular, and a significant number receive critical acclaim. One measure of the acclaim received by writers of historical fiction is the number of major prizes won by their books, and there is good evidence that we are in the midst of an historical fiction renaissance. In the 10 years from 1997 to 2006, historical novels (or novels about history) won 6 of the 10 Pulitzer Prizes for fiction; indeed, two of the three 2006 finalists, the coincidentally named The March by E.L. Doctorow and March by Geraldine Brooks, were historical. (Even the third finalist was set a few decades in the past.) Over the same period, both the National Book Award for fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction were awarded to historical novels at least half of the time. In the twenty-first century, historical fiction is intertwined with a range of print, film, broadcast, and electronic media. As Tessa Morris-Suzuki notes, “As the media of historical expression multiply, so they increasingly interact with one another. Historical novels are made into films and TV mini-series; historical dramas on television generate accompanying museum displays; Internet web sites are developed to accompany historical documentaries” (2005, 16). Historical novels are frequently adapted into other media, particularly film and television. At the same time, historical novels compete with original films, documentaries, graphic novels, Web sites, and even games. Film is especially well suited for historical narrative, sharing with the novel “the ability to reconstruct the past in ways that engage the empathy of the audience” (Morris-Suzuki 2005, 127). Historical novels have been popular material for film adaptations of books from the early days of Hollywood. Ben-Hur, which inspired a Broadway stage version in 1899, has been adapted on film four times (so far), beginning with an unauthorized silent version in 1907 and including the Academy Award-winning 1959 version. The D.W. Griffith silent classic Birth of a Nation (1915), “a film whose brilliance of cinematic technique is exceeded only by the grotesqueness of its racist message” (Morris-Suzuki, 127) was based on Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905). Owen Wister’s The Virginian was first adapted as a silent film in 1914 by Cecil B. DeMille; it has since been readapted as a film in 1923, 1929 (with Gary Cooper), and 1946 and in 2000 as a television movie. Most of the blockbuster historical novels of the early twentieth century have been adapted at least once into equally successful films. Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey has been made into films in 1929, 1944, and 2004. The 1936 film version of Anthony Adverse won four Academy Awards and was nominated for Best Picture. The film version of Gone with the Wind, based on Mitchell’s novel, won 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Forever Amber, the literary sensation of the 1940s, also became a popular 1947 film. The multigenerational sagas published during the late twentieth century were especially well suited to the development of a new form of television programming: the miniseries. Alex Haley’s (1921–92) historical novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976) was transformed into a 1977 miniseries—critically acclaimed and one

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of the highest-rated programs ever. Byerman notes that by “creating a saga of a black family with a heroic ancestor, Alex Haley brought African American experience within the framework of mass culture” (2005, 16). Michener’s Centennial was produced as a popular television miniseries that aired in 1978 and 1979. The television miniseries The Bastard (1978) was based on the first volume in Jakes’s Kent Family Chronicles, and each book in Jakes’s North and South trilogy became a television miniseries, in 1985, 1986, and 1994, respectively. The later twentieth century also saw a resurgence of successful films based on American historical novels, including Ragtime in 1981, The Color Purple in 1982, Gettysburg in 1993 (based on Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels), The Road to Wellville in 1994, and Beloved in 1998. In the twenty-first century, interest in historical feature films—adaptations of historical novels, original features, and documentaries—continues. Recent adaptations of historical novels include The Hours (2002), nominated for an Academy Award for best picture; Cold Mountain (2003), based on the Frazier novel; and Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), based on the 1997 Arthur Golden (1956–) novel. These adaptations fit into a larger trend of historically based films ranging from the Academy Award–winning Titanic (1997) to the documentary miniseries Band of Brothers (2001), based on Stephen Ambrose’s nonfiction book. Selected Authors. Among the many fine writers of historical fiction in the twenty-first century, several merit particular attention for their accomplishments in the field and their ongoing work. Kevin Baker (1958–) is the author of four well-received historical novels, two since the turn of the century. His first, Sometimes You See It Coming (1993), is

THE GRAPHIC HISTORICAL NOVEL AND MEMOIR The graphic novel is a vibrant and growing form of popular literature, blending text and art. While most people are familiar with superhero comics, historical topics have been treated since at least the mid-twentieth century, beginning with short vignettes of heroes in history and developing, by the late twentieth century, into full-fledged graphic novels, documentaries, and memoirs. “Comic books are a very important medium of historical communication in many parts of the world, and, despite growing competition from electronic media, continue to play a vital role in shaping popular images of the past. The comic also reaches audiences who may seldom read academic history texts or historical novels” (Morris-Suzuki 2005, 204). In the late twentieth century, some of the most acclaimed historical graphic novels were Maus (1986) by Art Spiegelman (1948–), the Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust narrative; Kings in Disguise by James Vance (1953–) and Dan Burr (1951–), set amid riots in 1932 Detroit; Stuck Rubber Baby (1995) by Howard Cruse (1944–), exploring the 1960s civil rights movements for African Americans and gay people; The Jew of New York (1999) by Ben Katchor (1951–), set in 1830; and 300 (1999) by Frank Miller (1957–), an account of the Battle of Thermopylae in ancient Greece. Noteworthy twenty-first century historical graphic novels include both fiction and memoir: Berlin: City of Stones (2000) by Jason Lutes (1967–), set in Weimar Berlin; The Golem’s Mighty Swing (2002) by James Sturm (1965–), about a Jewish barnstorming baseball team in the 1920s; The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (2002) by Kim Deitch (1944–), about an animator in the 1930s; Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories (2003) by Gilbert Hernandez (1957–), a multigenerational saga set in Latin America; Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) by Alison Bechdel (1960–), on growing up gay in the 1960s and 1970s; and We Are on Our Own (2006) by Miriam Katin (1942–), an autobiographically based account of a woman hiding with her daughter in Nazi-occupied Hungary.

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steeped in baseball history, with many of the characters based on real players. In Dreamland (1999), Baker combines fictional characters and historical figures in a panorama of life and corruption in early twentieth-century New York City. Delving further into the city’s past, Baker sets Paradise Alley during New York City’s 1863 draft riots, as Irish residents violently protested a war they feared would lead to the loss of their jobs to freed slaves. Further exploring the themes of race and violence, Strivers Row (2006) is set in 1943 Harlem and features as a character the young Malcolm Little who would become Malcolm X. Baker creates vivid characters, entertaining stories, and themes—race, immigration, violence, corruption—that resonate in the twenty-first century. Critics—sometimes comparing his work to Doctorow’s— praise his novels for their intelligence, imagination, and historical detail. Andrea Barrett (1954–) has combined her expertise in biology and history to create several works of historical fiction related to science and exploration. After writing several novels centered on contemporary families, Barrett’s first historical work was Ship Fever and Other Stories (1996), a collection of short fiction revolving around nineteenth-century science and medicine. Continuing that focus, The Voyage of the Narwhal (1998), narrated by a cousin of Charles Darwin, tells the story of a fictional expedition to the Arctic from 1845 to 1847. Another collection of short fiction, Servants of the Map (2002), ranges widely through history and geography and features the reappearance of several characters, and relatives of characters, from the previous works. Barrett’s scientific historical fiction has been widely acclaimed, including a National Book Award for Ship Fever. According to Michiko Kakutani (2002), she writes “as persuasively about the mysteries of science as she does about the mysteries of the human heart.” Barrett has spoken about the need for thorough research, noting that the writer, like the explorer, does not know at the outset what the final route will be: “I could never know beforehand what might be useful, or where the things I found might lead me” (Barrett 2001, 508). Madison Smartt Bell (1957–), before turning to historical fiction, had established a reputation as a talented novelist portraying complex relationships and characters in contemporary, often urban, settings. His breakthrough as a novelist, and as a writer of historical fiction, came with All Souls’ Rising (1995), a rich, complex, violent work about the slave rebellion in Haiti that began in 1791. One historical figure in that novel, the leader Touissaint L’Ouverture, becomes the central character in the book that continues the story, Master of the Crossroads (2000). Bell completes the trilogy with The Stone That the Builder Refused (2004), following the revolution to its inevitable conclusion. Bell’s work has been praised for thorough research, rich detail, and his use of multiple voices and perspectives; included in the rich detail is horrifying violence, too much for some readers. Bell has criticized minimalist fiction and has been praised by John Vernon (1995) for being “refreshingly ambitious and maximalist,” meaning not just that his work is big, but that it is detailed, vivid, and complex. T. Coraghessan Boyle (1948–) is the author of a wide range of novels and short fiction, including five historical novels; he has said, “Moving back and forth keeps me alive” (Ermelino 2006, 25). Boyle’s first novel, Water Music (1981), involves two explorers, one historical and one fictional, at the turn of the nineteenth century. World’s End (1988), winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, follows three families through multiple time frames from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. His next three historical novels all feature a mixture of historical figures and

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invented characters. The Road to Wellville (1993) satirizes contemporary health and self-improvement crazes with a fictionalized version of the early twentieth-century sanitarium run by Dr. John Kellogg, inventor of Corn Flakes. Another novel set in the early twentieth century, Riven Rock (1998), is based on a real married couple, Stanley McCormick, son of the inventor, and Katherine Dexter, a women’s rights activist. The Inner Circle (2004) tells the story of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey’s research and relationships from the perspective of one of his assistants. While critics differ on whether his characters are fully realized, Boyle is universally praised for his invention, humor, and deft use of language. He has been one of the most significant writers of twenty-first century historical fiction. E.L. Doctorow (1931–) has been one of the most prolific, influential, and controversial historical novelists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Doctorow first showed his affinity for history in the western Welcome to Hard Times (1960) and his variation on the Rosenberg executions, The Book of Daniel (1971). But it was Ragtime, the best-selling novel of 1975, that solidified both his popular reputation and his influence. Ragtime broke new ground in the postmodern historical novel by interweaving multiple plots and featuring a mix of fictional and historical characters—including Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Henry Ford. Doctorow, always concerned with economic and political issues, followed Ragtime with three novels set during the Great Depression: Loon Lake (1980); World’s Fair (1985), winner of the National Book Award; and Billy Bathgate (1989), winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Several of Doctorow’s works are set in and around New York City, including Billy Bathgate and The Waterworks (1994), a sort of gothic nineteenth-century mystery. In his widely acclaimed The March (2005), winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, Doctorow applies his creative imagination and interweaving of narratives to an iconic American episode, General Sherman’s march through Georgia during the Civil War. Doctorow has been both praised and criticized for his postmodern approach to historical fiction, an approach that blurs the distinction between fact and fiction. According to Doctorow, “History is a kind of fiction in which we live and hope to survive, and fiction is a kind of speculative history, perhaps a superhistory, by which the available data for the composition is seen to be greater and more various in its sources than the historian supposes” (1983, 25). Where the historical record is incomplete, Doctorow imaginatively fills in the gaps in ways that challenge the reader’s assumptions. David Anthony Durham (1969–) is an African American writer whose three historical novels have won him wide acclaim. His first published novel, Gabriel’s Story (2001), is set in the period after the Civil War as his teenage protagonist makes his way west, eventually joining a group of cowboys. Set before the Civil War, Walk through Darkness (2002) also traces a journey, this time of a fugitive slave and the man hired to pursue him. Durham’s third novel, Pride of Carthage (2005), tells the story of Hannibal’s march on Rome in the Second Punic War. Durham’s novels have all been well received, with critics praising his perceptiveness and imagination and noting his ability to range from quiet reflection to dramatic storytelling. Janet Maslin (2002) writes, “Durham ultimately combines history and morality with a dynamic intelligence.” Durham’s works raise complex issues. As he stated in an interview with the Historical Novels Review, “the best works of historical fiction—

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Toni Morrison’s Beloved, for example—are not so much about providing answers as they are about asking questions.” Thomas Mallon (1951–) is the author of five historical novels and a critic and theorist of historical fiction. Mallon is known for the depth of his research and the breadth of his subjects, which have taken him across centuries and from earth to space. His first historical novel, Aurora 7 (1991), is an account of Scott Carpenter’s space mission interwoven with the tale of a missing boy. The next two novels, Henry and Clara (1994), a narrative of the couple who witnessed Lincoln’s assassination, and Dewey Defeats Truman (1997), both connect political and personal worlds. Two Moons (2000) is a nineteenth-century romance set at the United States Naval Observatory, while Bandbox (2004) turns to a magazine rivalry in 1920s New York City. Mallon is widely praised for his storytelling ability and historical accuracy; as Jay Parini notes about Dewey Defeats Truman, he “always uses his research cleverly, and the novel effortlessly summons the feel of a bygone era” (1997, 13). In “Writing Historical Fiction,” Mallon stresses, “Getting things to look right is the historical novelist’s paramount task” (2001, 288). Mallon sees the twenty-first century as the age of historical fiction; as technology brings us closer together, perhaps uncomfortably so, Mallon writes in “The Historical Novelist’s Burden of Truth,” the “past is the only place to which we can get away, and if I had one prediction for the millennium it would be that all of us, including novelists, shall be spending a lot of time—more than ever before—looking backward” (2001, 295). Robert Morgan (1944–) has published five historical novels, all set in his native state of North Carolina. Known primarily as a poet for the first two decades of his career, Morgan began writing historical fiction with The Hinterlands: A Mountain Tale in Three Parts (1994), a story of pioneer life over three generations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He followed with The Truest Pleasure (1998), the story of a nineteenth-century marriage, and Gap Creek (1999), the novel about turn-of-the-century farming life that greatly expanded Morgan’s popularity when it was selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club. This Rock (2001), set in the 1920s, is a sequel to The Truest Pleasure, focusing on the next generation of the Powell family. With Brave Enemies (2003), Morgan returns to the eighteenth century with a creative narrative about a husband and wife who find themselves on opposite sides of the American Revolution. Morgan has been praised for his storytelling ability, his attention to detail, and his particular skill in creating the voices of strong women. While ranging widely in time, he has concentrated on evoking a sense of place and a respect for rural life. In his essay “Writing the Mountains,” Morgan notes that the focus of his writing “has been on one particular place, not even a county, just a community, part of the Green River valley in Western North Carolina. And really not even the whole community, but about a square mile of land on the banks of Green River bought by my great-great-grandfather Daniel Pace in 1840.” In the same essay, he notes that “the more we study a place, the longer we know a place, the more mysterious it becomes.” Morgan’s historical fiction is based on that sense of mystery connecting place, family, and the past. Bibliography Barrett, Andrea. “Four Voyages.” Michigan Quarterly Review 40.3 (2001): 507–517. Boyle, T.C. The Inner Circle. New York: Viking, 2004. Brooks, Geraldine. March. New York: Viking, 2005.

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HISTORICAL FICTION Byerman, Keith. Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998. Doctorow, E.L. Billy Bathgate. New York: Random House, 1998. ———. “False Documents.” In E.L. Doctorow, Essays and Conversations. Richard Trenner, ed. Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1983. ———. Ragtime. New York: Random House, 1975. Durham, David Anthony. Gabriel’s Story. New York: Doubleday, 2001. Ermelino, Louisa. “According to Boyle.” Publishers Weekly 253.25 (2006): 24–25. Frazier, Charles. Cold Mountain. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1997. Hart, James D. The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950. Hellekson, Karen. The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001. Historical Novels Review. Interview with David Durham. Retrieved January 2007 from the David Durham Web site, http://www.fantasybookspot.com/node/1763. Historical Novel Society Web site. Accessed January 2007 at http://www.historicalnovel society.org. DeLillo, Don. Libra. New York: Viking, 1988. Johnson, Charles. Dreamer. New York: Scribner, 1998. Johnson, Sarah L. Historical Fiction: A Guide to the Genre. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2005. Kakutani, Michiko. “Scientists Plumb Life’s Mysteries with Minds and Hearts.” New York Times 11 January 2002. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res= 9B0CEFDE1139F932A25752C0A9649C8B63&fta=y. Mallon, Thomas. Dewey Defeats Truman. New York: Pantheon, 1997. ———. “The Historical Novelist’s Burden of Truth.” In Fact 291–295. ———. In Fact: Essays on Writers and Writing. New York: Pantheon, 2001. ———. “Writing Historical Fiction.” In Fact 279–290. Maslin, Janet. “A Fugitive Slave’s Quest for Freedom and Family.” New York Times 16 May 2002. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F03E4DC1039F935A25756C0A9649 C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all. Morgan, Robert. “Writing the Mountains.” Retrieved March 2008 from Robert Morgan Web site, http://www.robert-morgan.com/default.aspx?c=10. Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. The Past within Us: Media, Memory, History. New York: Verso, 2005. Parini, Jay. “Everything Up to Date in 1948.” New York Times Book Review 2 February 1997: 13. Pynchon, Thomas. Mason & Dixon. New York: Henry Holt, 1997. Roth, Phillip. The Plot Against America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Safire, William. Scandalmonger. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Vernon, John. “The Black Face of Freedom.” New York Times 29 October 1995. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE3DB1F3FF93AA15753C1A96 3958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1.

Further Reading Carnes, Mark C., ed. Novel History. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001; Hellekson, Karen. The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001; HistFiction.net, accessed January 2007 at http://www.histfiction.net; Historical Novel Society Web site, accessed January 2007 at http://www.historicalnovelsociety.org; Johnson, Sarah L. Historical Fiction: A Guide to the Genre. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2005; Lukács, George. The Historical Novel. Trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Originally published 1937; Madden, David, and Peggy Bach, eds. Classics of Civil

HISTORICAL MYSTERIES War Fiction. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991; Mallon, Thomas. In Fact: Essays on Writers and Writing. New York: Pantheon, 2001; Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. The Past within Us: Media, Memory, History. New York: Verso, 2005; Simmons, Philip E. Deep Surfaces: Mass Culture & History in Postmodern American Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997.

CAROLYN KYLER

HISTORICAL MYSTERIES Definition. Historical Mysteries are stories featuring a crime that occurred and was investigated in the past. The point at which the “past” begins, to distinguish it from “contemporary,” is rather fluid. When the Crime Writers Association established the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger award in 1999 for the year’s best historical mystery, it defined the category as “any period up to the 1960s.” Mike Ashley in his volume The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits (1993) defined it as a time before the author’s birth, whereas Michael Burgess and Jill H. Vassilakos in Murder in Retrospect (2005) defined it as taking place at least fifty years before the story’s composition. If there is any common ground between these definitions, it would seem to be not later than the early 1950s. Hovering on the border of the historical mystery are those stories set in the present day that seek to solve an historical crime, the best known being The Daughter of Time (1952) by Josephine Tey, and, more recently, The Wench is Dead (1989) an Inspector Morse novel by Colin Dexter. Though they appeal to the same readership, strictly speaking they are not historical mysteries because of the contemporary element and are not covered in this chapter. There are also those that start in the present day but through some device, such as a time-slip, the protagonist ends up in the past. John Dickson Carr used this approach in several novels, including The Devil in Velvet (1951) and Fire, Burn (1957), where present-day characters move back in time and become involved in solving a mystery. The crime and investigation are both set in the past, therefore these technically qualify. History. The historical mystery as a distinct publishing niche emerged following the popularity of the Brother Cadfael books by Edith Pargeter (1913–1995) writing as Ellis Peters. These books are set in England and Wales in the twelfth century during the civil war between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda and take place primarily at the Abbey in Shrewsbury. Pargeter had already earned a reputation as an author of both detective novels and historical novels. In 1976, she was musing over an actual historical event in which the Brothers at Shrewsbury ventured into North Wales in 1137 to collect the relics of Saint Winifred and bring them to the Abbey. Pargeter realized this would provide an excellent way to conceal a body and so wrote A Morbid Taste for Bones (1977). This introduced Brother Cadfael as the world-wise monk who had previously served as a soldier in the Crusades but had now settled at the Abbey as its herbalist. Pargeter had not intended to start a series but a couple of years later another idea occurred to her relating to the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1138 and One Corpse Too Many (1979) became the second Cadfael book. Their popularity led Pargeter to produce one or two books a year for the rest of her life, resulting in twenty novels and three short stories. With their appearance in paperback in 1984, a new commercial genre was created. There had been historical mysteries before Cadfael but they were neither enough nor of sufficient prominence to create a distinct category. There had, for example, been many Sherlock Holmes pastiches written after Conan Doyle’s death in 1930, and most of these stories were set in the period 1890–1920 and

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qualify as historical mysteries, but they are usually regarded as a category in their own right. The existing genres of historical and crime fiction, although both popular in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, remained separate. There were occasional items involving crimes set in periods earlier than the story’s composition, such as Barnaby Rudge (1841) by Charles Dickens (1812–1870) or The Other Side of the Door (1909) by Lucia Chamberlain (1882–1978), but there is minimal detection in either book. The usual starting place for the historical mystery is the Uncle Abner stories by Melville Davisson Post (1871–1930), which began with “The Broken Stirrup Leather” (1911). These are set in the hills of Virginia at the start of the nineteenth century and feature Uncle Abner, a god-fearing elder of the community who roots out wrong-doers by a combination of psychological awareness and skilful deduction. Early stories were collected as Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries (1918) with later stories uncollected until The Methods of Uncle Abner (1974). At the same time British writer Jeffery Farnol (1878–1952), who had established a reputation for his Regency adventures, introduced the character of Bow Street detective Jasper Shrig in An Amateur Gentleman (1913). Low key at first, Shrig moved center stage with The Loring Mystery (1925). Of special interest is Murder by Nail (1942), in which Shrig becomes obsessed by a case that happened seventy years earlier, making it a historical within a historical. One writer who was fascinated with real-life historical mysteries was American lecturer Lillian de la Torre (1902–1993). She used several as the basis for stories featuring Dr Samuel Johnson, with Boswell serving as his Dr. Watson. The series started in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in November 1943, and the first collection appeared as Dr. Sam: Johnson, Detector (1946). Four more volumes followed up to The Exploits of Dr. Sam: Johnson (1987). De la Torre is the real grand dame of the historical detective story and yet is woefully neglected. Another Grand-Dame, Agatha Christie (1890–1976), turned her hand only once to the historical mystery—surprising for someone who, through her husband, became so involved in archaeology. Death Comes at the End (1945) is set in ancient Egypt, though it is perhaps otherwise a little too like St. Mary Mead. Rather more unusual are the Judge Dee stories by Robert Van Gulik (1910–1967). He was the Dutch ambassador to Japan and became fascinated with the real-life stories about Dee, a seventh-century Chinese magistrate. He translated an ancient collection as Dee Goong An, which he had privately printed in 1949, and then created new stories about Dee, some based on real events, starting with The Chinese Bell Murders (1956). Sixteen more books followed. The floodgates really opened with the success of the Brother Cadfael novels, but Pargeter was not alone in producing such works at that time. Peter Lovesey (1936–) established his reputation with a series featuring Victorian detective Sergeant Cribb, starting with Wobble to Death (1970). Lovesey also developed a series based around the life of the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII) starting with Bertie and the Tinman (1987). Barbara Mertz (1927–), writing as Elizabeth Peters, launched her first Amelia Peabody archaeological detective novel set in the late Victorian period with Crocodile on the Sandbank (1975). Jeremy Potter (1922–1997) wrote several novels re-evaluating noted historical mysteries, including A Trail of Blood (1970) about the Princes in the Tower, and Death in the Forest (1977) about the death of William II. But if there was

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one single work that established the historical mystery beyond doubt, it was The Name of the Rose (1980) by Umberto Eco (1932–). This atmospheric novel, set in a monastery in Italy and involving bizarre deaths, ciphers, and ancient manuscripts, became an international bestseller, and with it the new genre was confirmed. Trends and Themes. Because the Brother Cadfael books and The Name of the Rose were set in the Middle Ages, the first flurry of interest from publishers was for more medieval mysteries. It was not long before most periods were being covered, but three stood out as the most popular, the Victorian and Elizabethan periods and ancient Rome; more recently, ancient Egypt and the early twentieth century have also emerged. The oldest setting used is almost certainly Pleistocene France some 37,000 years ago, in Hyenas (1998) by Sandy Dengler (1939–). It has also become common to use real historical characters, often as the investigator. Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins appear in a series of books by William J. Palmer (1943–); Benjamin Franklin is in a series by Robert Lee Hall (1941–); Jane Austen in a series by Stephanie Barron (1963–); and Dashiell Hammett is not only in Hammett (1975) by Joe Gores (1931–) but also in a series along with Raymond Chandler and Erle Stanley Gardner by William F. Nolan (1928–). Selected Authors. With over five hundred authors active in this area in recent years, coverage here can only be selective. The authors discussed here are those who have produced significant work over the last decade and whose work is of both literary merit and historical interest. They are discussed in order of the time periods covered by their work. Ancient Egypt. Two authors have established themselves as the primary writers of mysteries set in ancient Egypt: Lauren Haney (Betty Winkelman, 1936–) and Lynda S. Robinson (1951–). Robinson’s series is set in the fourteenth century B.C.E., at the time of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun. It features Lord Meren, the Pharaoh’s Chief Investigator, and concentrates on court life and intrigue. Robinson’s research is impeccable and she has the advantage of depicting one of the best known of Egypt’s pharaohs at a time when the ruling house was in turmoil following the heretical reign of Akhenaten. The series is so far six books from Murder in the Place of Anubis (1994) to Slayer of Gods (2001). Haney’s series is set a century earlier, at the time of the 18th Dynasty Pharaoh, Queen Hatshepsut. It features Lieutenant Bak, Head of the Medjay Police who administers a chain of forts along the Nile, many miles south of Egypt’s capital. The series began with The Right Hand of Amon (1997) and has continued through eight books so far to A Path of Shadows (2003). Bak invariably is given charge of a project that leads to the discovery not only of a murder but also potentially empire-threatening plots. Paul Doherty (1946–) has also written a series set at the time of Hatshepsut, whom he calls Hatusu. These series feature Lord Amerotke, the Chief Judge in Thebes, who works alongside the Queen to strengthen the kingdom. This series has reached seven volumes from The Mask of Ra (1998) to The Poisoner of Ptah (2007) and is notable for its attention to detail. Both Doherty and Haney delight in the minutiae of everyday life, making ancient Egypt more accessible, but whereas Doherty and Robinson explore the lives of royalty and court officials, Haney follows the lives of the common people. Ancient Greece. Despite the popularity of ancient Greek history and mythology, it has not featured prominently in historical mysteries, though as far back as 1978 Canadian writer Margaret Doody (1939–) produced a one-off novel Aristotle Detective. The great philosopher plays the role of an “armchair” detective helping another save his cousin who has been accused of murder. The book was critically

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well received at the time but then vanished almost without trace until an Italian translation in 1999 revived interest. Since then Doody has completed further novels, Aristotle and Poetic Justice (2002), Aristotle and the Secrets of Life (2003), Poison in Athens (2004) and Mysteries of Eleusis (2005). Aristotle’s friend, Stephanos, does most of the legwork with Aristotle serving as the focal point to explore Greek beliefs and customs. Although Doody brings considerable academic knowledge to the series, using it, for example, to explore her theories about the origin of the novel, it is also relatively light-hearted. Paul Doherty has also set two series in ancient Greece, or more accurately Macedonia, at the time of Alexander the Great. The first two books appeared under the alias Anna Apostolou, A Murder in Macedon (1997) and A Murder in Thebes (1998), and featured twin detectives, Jewish by birth. Raised at the court of Alexander and serving as clerks they are taken into Alexander’s confidence after the death of his father, whose murder they must solve. The idea of the twin detectives was clever but Doherty dropped that series for another featuring a physician, Telamon, also at the court of Alexander, who accompanies him on his conquests. The series began with The House of Death (2001) and continued through The Godless Man (2002) and The Gates of Hell (2003). Although as colourful as the original two books, the new series lacks that spark of ingenuity. Ancient Rome. Rome has been a setting for a number of series, including those by Rosemary Rowe, David Wishart, John Maddox Roberts, and Marilyn Todd, but two authors dominate the market, Lindsey Davis (1949–) and Steven Saylor (1956–). Davis rapidly earned an enviable but justified reputation with her novels featuring the “informer” Marcus Didius Falco. The first, The Silver Pigs (1989) starts in 70 C.E. during the reign of the Emperor Vespasian and takes place, for the most part, in Britain, but thereafter the novels take Falco to many parts of the Empire. The Times called her books “models of the genre.” The series appeals on several levels. Davis succeeds in recreating Rome in a seemingly effortless way, the places, particularly the seedier sides of Rome, coming alive through comments by the characters rather than by detailed description. All the characters are well drawn, especially Falco and his wife Helena, the real power behind the man. Most noticeable, though, is the humor. Falco is a typical lovable rogue, with all the panache of a Chandleresque private eye transplanted to the ancient world. He is streetwise, quick witted, and able to fend for himself. He is also fallible, and in her portrayal of cases Davis is realistic and not averse to leaving some crimes unsolved. Falco, though, makes steady progress, even rising to the rank of Procurator in One Virgin Too Many (2000). Her books won Davis the CWA’s Dagger in the Library award in 1995 as the author who has given most pleasure to readers, and Two for the Lions (1999) won the inaugural Ellis Peters Historical Dagger. Recent novels include Ode to a Banker (2000), A Body in the Bathhouse (2001), The Jupiter Myth (2002), The Accusers (2003), Scandal Takes a Holiday (2004), See Delphi and Die (2005), and Saturnalia (2007). Saylor’s novels are set over a century earlier during the days of Cicero and Julius Caesar. They feature Gordianus the Finder, who is from a more privileged family than Falco, though like Falco he is married with children. In the first book, Roman Blood (1991), Gordianus helps Cicero solve a case the orator is defending, and thereafter Gordianus has Cicero’s patronage, at least for as long as Cicero remained in favor with the Republic. Most of the novels are set against major historical events, such as the slave rebellion of Spartacus (Arms of Nemesis, 1992) or

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Catilina’s revolt (Catilina’s Riddle, 1993). The novels from A Murder on the Appian Way (1996) take place against the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, and thereafter the paths of Gordianus and Caesar cross several times. The most recent novels have been A Mist of Prophecies (2002) and The Judgment of Caesar (2004) plus two collections of short stories set in Gordianus’s early days. Both Davis and Saylor are thorough in their depiction of Roman life, and whereas Davis’s work has the advantage in humor and character, Saylor’s series is more realistic in its action and atmosphere. Medieval Period. The medieval period, especially the years from the Norman Conquest to the death of Richard III (1066–1483) has been the one most plundered by writers, in the wake of the popularity of the Brother Cadfael books. One of the earliest, and still the most prolific, authors was Paul Doherty, who originally produced a one-off novel, Death of a King (1985), about an investigation into the death of Edward II and then launched into what would be the first of his many series with Satan in St. Mary’s (1986) featuring Sir Hugh Corbett, who conducts investigations on behalf of King Edward I. This remains Doherty’s longest running series, with the fifteenth title, The Waxman Murders, published in 2006, and one of his best realized, chiefly because the period is the one in which Doherty is most expert—his doctorate was on the reign of Edward II. Other authors whose series cover this period include Edward Marston, Sharan Newman, Sharon Penman, Bernard Knight, Ian Morson, Candace Robb, Susanna Gregory (Liz Cruwys, 1958–), Michael Jecks (1960–), and Margaret Frazer. The works of these authors, although showing individualistic traits, are broadly in a similar mood to the Cadfael books. Their market overlaps, so much so that Jecks, Knight, Morson, and Gregory have teamed up with Philip Gooden as “The Medieval Murderers” and have produced a couple of books where the storyline is connected by a common theme. Each author contributes a self-contained chapter set in a specific time period. Susanna Gregory’s primary historical series features Matthew Bartholomew, a teacher of medicine at Michaelhouse, part of the fledgling University of Cambridge in the mid-fourteenth century. The first book, A Plague on Both Your Houses (1996), is set at the time when the Black Death is ravaging Europe and threatening Cambridge, though Bartholomew has other deaths on his mind. The series has reached twelve books with The Tarnished Chalice (2006), though in time-span they have covered only eight years. Gregory has written two other series. Under the alias Simon Beaufort, she created the Crusader Knight Sir Geoffrey Mappestone. In Murder in the Holy City (1998) he has to solve a series of murders in Jerusalem in the year 1100. The second book, A Head for Poisoning (1999), brought Mappestone back to England, and thereafter he finds himself serving as an agent for King Henry II in various trouble spots around Henry’s empire. Gregory’s books are known for her meticulous attention to historical detail and frequently contain notes on historical sources relative to the plot. All of Gregory’s series have in common a turbulent society coming to terms with significant changes that have disrupted the social order, be it the Black Death, the aftermath of the Norman Conquest, or, in her latest series featuring Sir Thomas Chaloner, the years after the execution of Charles I and the Restoration of Charles II. Gregory explores how the truth is often the first victim in such difficult times. Michael Jecks has concentrated on only one series, known generally as the West Country mysteries, starting with The Last Templar in 1995. The twenty-second

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volume, The Malice of Unnatural Death, appeared in 2006. The books are set chiefly in Devon and Cornwall, and primarily around Dartmoor. They feature Simon Puttock, the bailiff of Lydford Castle—Lydford was then the main administrative center for Devon and Dartmoor—and Sir Baldwin Furnshill, a former Templar knight now dispossessed of his lands, who has become the Keeper of the King’s Peace in Crediton. The stories are sequential, starting in 1316. Jecks has firmly embedded the series in the historical climate, with the background of the weak reign of Edward II and the consequent civil unrest, but what makes the series of special interest is Jecks’s use of the local laws and rights relating to Dartmoor and the stannaries. Jecks’s detailed research allows one to step straight into the past, and Jecks writes with a pace and enthusiasm that injects life and action into the characters. Tudor and Elizabethan. As with other periods, two authors dominate the Elizabethan scene. Valerie Anand (1937–) is a British author of historical fiction who uses the alias Fiona Buckley for a series set in Elizabethan England. Her lead character is Ursula Blanchard, widowed with a young child and shunned by the court. She is an illegitimate child of Henry VIII and thus Queen Elizabeth’s half-sister. In the first novel, The Robsart Mystery (1997; U.S. as To Shield the Queen) Blanchard becomes involved in the historical scandal of the death of Amy Robsart. As a consequence of her actions the Queen believes she can trust Ursula, who becomes one of the Queen’s spies. The novels are set in the 1560s against the background of Elizabeth’s tenuous hold on the throne and the threat from Mary, Queen of Scots. All of the books tie in to real historical events. Other recent titles include Queen’s Ransom (2000), To Ruin a Queen (2000), Queen of Ambition (2002), A Pawn for a Queen (2002), The Fugitive Queen (2003), and The Siren Queen (2004). Under her own name, Patricia Finney (1958–) has written both a series of historical mystery stories for younger readers and a trilogy that might be defined as Elizabethan thrillers and that caused Ruth Rendell to dub her “The Le Carré of the 16th Century.” The trilogy is Firedrake’s Eye (1992), Unicorn’s Blood (1998), and Gloriana’s Torch (2003), featuring the escapades of Elizabeth I’s loyal courtier Simon Ames and his dubious friend, the soldier David Becket. In the first volume they thwart a plot to assassinate Elizabeth, whereas the second book sees them trying to thwart another plot, this time to murder Mary, Queen of Scots. By the third book Ames has been captured while spying for the Queen in Spain, and Becket, who is head of the Queen’s Ordnance, has to rescue him while also infiltrating the Spanish fleet. The books are a mixture of historical drama and spy thriller and Finney succeeds admirably in capturing the spirit of the age and distilling that essence that distinguished the Elizabethan age. This mood carries across into her historical mystery series written under the alias P.F. Chisholm, which began with A Famine of Horses (1994). It features the historical character of Sir Robert Carey, who was a cousin of Elizabeth I. He was a loyal servant to the Queen, renowned not only for his enforcement of the law but also for his understanding and interpretation of legal matters. He served both as a soldier and in various roles in governing the Scottish borders before becoming Lord Warden of the Marches in 1596. Drawing upon Carey’s own memoirs, Finney has produced a series that works both as historical mysteries and as authentic recreations of life around Elizabeth’s domain. The series has continued with A Season of Knives (1995), A Surfeit of Guns (1996), and A Plague of Angels (1998), with more planned. Finney has also contributed to a series for young readers (aged 9 to 12) that purports to be the accounts related by 13-year-old Lady

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Grace Cavendish, Elizabeth’s favorite Maid of Honor, who becomes involved in various court intrigues and mysteries. The series began with Assassin (2004), in which she investigates the murder of one of her own suitors, and continued with Betrayal (2004) and Conspiracy (2005). Jan Burchett and Sara Vogler continued the series with Deception (2005), Exile (2005), and Gold (2006), with Finney contributing the sixth book, Feud (2005). The series introduces younger readers to the historical mystery and helps them appreciate the political intrigue of the Elizabethan age. Victorian/Edwardian Age. The Victorian period, especially the gaslight era, is synonymous with Sherlock Holmes, and so many Holmesian pastiches have been produced that they restricted the market for anything else. That dam was eventually breached by Anne Perry (1938–), who over the last twenty years has become the undisputed master of the Victorian detective story. In recent years she has become remarkably prolific, developing several series, but her major Victorian work falls into two series of equal merit. The first features Thomas Pitt, an Inspector (later Superintendent) with the Bow Street Police, and has currently reached 24 volumes. At the start in The Cater Street Hangman (1979), set in 1881, he is investigating a series of murders that brings him into contact with the upper-class Ellison family. Pitt himself is middle class, his family having suffered from strife, and Perry uses the class system with its blinkered attitudes toward the murders, to highlight Victorian prejudices and social divides. To the Ellison household, crime emanates from the lower classes, and it is only when the truth comes closer to home that they are forced to recognize the undercurrents of Victorian society. At the end of the first book Pitt proposes to Charlotte Ellison, whose role was key to Pitt solving the case, and he is reluctantly admitted into the Ellison family. Charlotte Pitt plays an important part in all of the novels, her understanding of Victorian society helping open doors for an otherwise often restricted and bewildered Pitt. The books have explored many of the problems that Victorian society tried to ignore, including illegitimacy (Callander Square, 1980), male prostitution (Bluegate Fields, 1984), homosexuality (Belgrave Square, 1992), and pornography (Half Moon Street, 2000). In The Whitechapel Conspiracy (2001), which draws upon the Jack the Ripper murders, Pitt falls foul of a clique of influential men known as the Inner Circle and as a consequence is fired as Superintendent at Bow Street and is forced to work in the newly created Special Branch, pursuing anarchists. This allowed Perry to expand Pitt’s world into one of espionage and political intrigue, with the Inner Circle forever thwarting his plans. Recent titles are Southampton Row (2002), Seven Dials (2003), and Long Spoon Lane (2005). Perry’s other main series is set in the 1850s and 1860s and features William Monk and Hester Latterly. Monk is a police inspector who has an accident in the first novel, The Face of a Stranger (1990), and loses his memory. It is only gradually that he recalls flashes of his past, but with Hester’s help he starts to rebuild his life. Monk finds it difficult to continue in his role as a policeman, and in Dangerous Mourning (1991) he is dismissed and becomes a private investigator. The Monk series is bleaker than the Pitt books, as Monk struggles to recover his identity while investigating crimes that frequently place him in situations reminiscent of his former life. This works especially well in Death of a Stranger (2002) where Monk’s investigations into possible corruption in a railway company bring him head on with his past. His investigations occasionally take him outside England, including America at the start of the Civil War in Slaves of Obsession (2000). Monk and Latterly are married in The Twisted Root (1999), and Hester subsequently opens a clinic catering to the health of London’s prostitutes. In The Shifting Tide (2004) Monk

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becomes involved with London’s River Police and enters their employ in Dark Assassin (2006), providing further potential for the series. Whereas the Pitt series explores the relationship between crime and the upper crust of society, the Monk books look into the darker corners of all strands of society. In recent years the Victorian setting, not solely in Britain, has provided an opportunity to explore factors that contributed to the modern world. Caleb Carr (1955–) is both a novelist and a military historian, and the majority of his books have been nonfiction, unrelated to his few fictional outings. The Alienist (1994), which was on the New York Times bestseller list for many months, is set in New York in 1896 where there has been a series of violent murders of young boy prostitutes. Theodore Roosevelt, then the Police Commissioner, gathers together a team of experts to help solve the crime. The team is headed by Dr. Laszlo Kreisler, a criminal psychologist, here called an “alienist.” The story is narrated by another of the team, reporter John Moore, who recalls the events years later. By introducing criminal profiling at such a period, Carr is able to analyze not just the psychology of the criminal but the psychology of a city that could produce such a killer. Carr had planned a series of books each narrated by a different member of the team but so far only one has appeared, The Angel of Darkness (1997), which looks again at child abuse and killings. The first novel stands out as one of the most profound of recent historical crime novels, almost on a par with The Name of the Rose. The work of Matthew Pearl (1976–) has been likened to that of Carr’s. He has written two literary mysteries, which he regards as “intellectual thrillers,” drawing upon his profound knowledge of both Dante and American nineteenth-century literature. The Dante Club (2003) depicts a serial killer on the loose in Boston in 1865. His methods of murder resemble those inflicted upon sinners as described in Dante’s Inferno. This comes to the attention of the Dante Club, a group of literati that includes Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and James Thomas Fields, who formed the Club out of their interest in Dante and their desire to protect his work. Their deep understanding of Dante helps them gain an insight into the criminal’s mind. The Dante Club, which went on to become a major bestseller, has been compared to Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, though the similarities are chiefly in the descriptions of nineteenth-century American city life and the exploration of a criminal’s motivation. Pearl draws his inspiration from the aftermath of the American Civil War and its impact upon a generation. Pearl’s second novel, The Poe Shadow (2006), is another atmospheric study, this time into the facts behind the death of Edgar Allan Poe. In both volumes Pearl brings considerable literary knowledge and analysis to the detective genre. Boris Akunun (Grigory Chkhartishvili, 1956–) is a Russian author and translator whose novels about the detective Erast Fandorin, set at the end of the nineteenth century in Imperial Russia, have become international bestsellers. Fandorin is at the outset a young police detective but in later novels becomes a private investigator. He is intelligent but vain and his rakish style of dress more than once saves his life. The novels are a mixture of styles assembled in a rather cavalier fashion intended as much to amuse as entertain and aimed at a broad readership who want both popular and literary escapism. Each book has followed a different crime sub-genre. The first volume, Azazel (1998; translated as The Winter Queen, 2003), set in 1876, in which a young Fandorin, only recently recruited to the police force, finds himself involved with a group of anarchists, is written like a Ruritanian adventure with Fandorin described as “our hero.” The Turkish Gambit (1998; translated 2005) is

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a spy thriller, whereas Leviathan (1998; translated as Murder on the Leviathan, 2004), set on a cruise ship, is imitation Agatha Christie. The books abound with literary references and Akunin clearly enjoys creating each new style. He has identified sixteen different sub-genres and plans sixteen books in the Fandorin cycle, eleven of which have so far appeared in Russia with five translated into English. When The Winter Queen was translated, the New York Times (13 July 2003) likened Akunin to Alexander Pushkin. He has a broad cosmopolitan style that succeeds in depicting Tsarist Russia’s place in the world in such a way as to highlight parallels with present-day Russia. Akunin, who has also written a trilogy set in Russia in the 1890s about a nun, Pelagiya, who, like Cadfael, has a talent for solving mysteries, has demonstrated that having fun with old stereotypes recast in new packages can prove successful. The dawn of the twentieth century was a time of change but one that still clung to the past. These conflicts are evident in several series taking place between 1900 and 1914. Gillian Linscott (1944–) has written several historical mysteries, but she is best known for her series about British suffragette Nell Bray in the years before the First World War. When the series starts, in Sister Beneath the Sheet (1991), Bray has just been released from prison after throwing a brick through a window at 10 Downing Street, and she soon finds herself embroiled in a possible murder investigation. The series follows the suffragette movement over the next decade. Absent Friends (1999), which takes place after women have received the vote, has Bray standing as a parliamentary candidate. The volume won Linscott both the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger and the Herodotus Award as that year’s best historical mystery. Recent books in the series, set in earlier years, include The Perfect Daughter (2000), Dead Man Riding (2002), and Blood on the Wood (2004). Linscott’s creation of the period is both intelligent and forceful but is written with a wry sense of humor sufficient to deflate Edwardian pomposity and provide the reader with an understanding of the prejudices of the age. The United States was also witnessing changes at this time. David Fulmer (1950–), already known as a jazz critic and journalist, caused a stir with his first novel, Chasing the Devil’s Tail (2001). Set in New Orleans in 1907 it features Valentine St. Cyr, a Creole former police detective who is employed by Tom Anderson, the unofficial mayor of the Storyville district, to investigate the murder of prostitutes. The book is far more than a detective story because Fulmer recreates the atmosphere of Storyville with the emergence of “jass” and the early days of formative musicians Jelly Roll Morton and “King” Buddy Bolden. The book won Fulmer the Shamus Award as that year’s Best First Private Eye Novel and was nominated for the Los Angeles Times book award and the Barry Award. The next two books in the series are Jass (2005), which won the Georgia Author of the Year award, and Rampart Street (2006), both of which add depth to the setting—the “palpable ambience” as Booklist described it. Fulmer also wrote The Dying Crapshooter’s Blues (2007) set in his native Atlanta in the 1920s amidst racial and social division when a mixed-race thief determines to get to the bottom of a racial shooting. In all of his books Fulmer treats the past with respect and allows us to pass cautiously through the portals. Michael Pearce (1933–) was raised in what was then the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, which has given him an understanding of the culture, mores, and attitudes of the various nationalities embroiled in the region. He has used this to considerable effect

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in his series of books featuring Gareth Owen, the Mamur Zapt, or Head of the Secret Police in Egypt in the years before and during the First World War. The series began with The Mamur Zapt and the Return of the Carpet (1988) and has currently reached fifteen volumes with The Mamur Zapt and the Point in the Market (2005). Throughout each book the Mamur Zapt often serves as an observer, only becoming involved when he has to, though also manipulating events behind the scenes when he can. As a consequence the reader feels they are being taken into his confidence, seeing events as a secret witness, a mood strengthened by Pearce’s lean style, which speaks directly to the reader. He is also frequently very humorous, with a wry observation on attempts by various factions to gain the upper hand. Pearce’s books have become timely in the light of the current relationship between the West and the Arab world, and his commentary provides a shrewd insight into diplomacy. Pearce has written two other historical series in similar style. There were only two volumes about Dmitri Kameron, a Russo-Scottish lawyer living in Tsarist Russia in the 1890s (Dmitri and the Milk-Drinkers, 1997, and Dmitri and the One-Legged Lady, 1999). With A Dead Man in Trieste (2004), set in 1910, Pearce began a new series featuring the exploits of Sandor Seymour, a British Special Branch officer whose expertise takes him to various European embassies and consulates, describing a world inexorably spiralling toward war. The series allows Pearce a broader canvas than the Mamur Zapt books, though he brings to it the same humor and perception. Read from the advantage of a further century of conflict it is easy to see how the same mistakes continue to be made and lessons remain unlearned. Twentieth Century. The First World War destroyed the old order and brought the twentieth century of age. There are several profound series that use the experiences and aftermath of the Great War to good effect. Rennie Airth (1935–) scored a critical success with River of Darkness (1999), which was short-listed for several major awards. It was a dark, brooding novel set in the aftermath of World War I. Inspector Madden, already psychologically scarred by the harrowing experiences in the War has also lost his wife and daughter in the flu epidemic. He investigates the slaughter of a family in a quiet Surrey village. Airth succeeds in blending the traditional country-house mystery with the concept of psychological profiling, producing a powerful but rather solemn evocation of post-war Britain blighted by tragedy. It was five years before Airth completed the second book, The Blood-Dimmed Tide, set a decade later in 1932. Madden is retired, living on a farm in Surrey, but gets drawn into the murder of a young, local girl. Madden’s insight links this crime to others and a picture emerges of dark deeds in a Britain gripped by the Depression and coping with the rise of Nazism. A third and final volume is planned. Ploughing similar territory was Charles Todd, the pen name for American motherand-son writing team, Carolyn and David Watjen. Their series features Inspector Rutledge, a detective who is nearly killed during the War and suffers from shell shock, haunted by the voice of a companion who was killed alongside him. Originally a highly intuitive detective, he now fears his inner voice, uncertain how to react. The crimes that Rutledge investigates, starting with A Test of Wills (1996), bring him into contact with others scarred by the War, both physically and spiritually. The books atmospherically depict a shell-shocked post-War Britain, and Rutledge’s determination to seek justice for the murder victims is seen as part of a wider justice for all the dead, a mood especially poignant in A Long Shadow (2006). The series reached nine volumes with A False Mirror (2007).

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The immediate post-War period soon gave way to the Roaring Twenties. British writer and former teacher Barbara Cleverly has rapidly risen to the front rank of historical mystery writers with her series set in colonial India in the early 1920s. It features Scotland Yard detective Joe Sandilands who has been seconded to the Bengal Police and becomes involved in a connected series of murders at a local army regiment. Cleverly brings India alive not only with considerable local color and an atmosphere of a lost world but also with believable characters and an intriguing plot. The book won the author the Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger and was listed by the New York Times as one of the year’s best books. Cleverly continued to develop both the characters and the local atmosphere in Ragtime in Simla (2003); The Damascened Blade (2004), which won the CWA’s Ellis Peters Historical Dagger Award; and The Palace Tiger (2004). With the fifth book, The Bee’s Kiss (2005), she brought Sandilands back to England at the time of social unrest and the General Strike, whereas in Tug of War (2006) he is in France in an unusual case of trying to identify a shell-shocked soldier. Cleverly’s books are all ingeniously plotted and move at a relentless pace. Max Allan Collins (1948–) is a prolific writer of hardboiled crime fiction who has turned his talents to writing a number of novels set in the first half of the twentieth century. He is perhaps best known for his graphic novel Road to Perdition (1998), set in the heart of organized crime in America in 1930 and made into the critically acclaimed film in 2002. Collins is noted for his historical gangster series featuring Nate Heller, a Chicago ex-cop turned private detective and a friend of Eliot Ness. In the early novels, Collins recreated the real-life gangsters of the period, including Al Capone in True Detective (1983) and John Dillinger in True Crime (1984). Later novels explored the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby in Stolen Away (1991), the murder of Sir Harry Oakes in 1943 in Carnal Hours (1994), and, in Angel in Black (2001), the still unsolved murder of Hollywood starlet Elizabeth Short in 1947 (also the subject of James Ellroy’s first best-seller, The Black Dahlia, 1987). Chicago Confidential (2002), set at the dawn of the McCarthy era, has Heller trying to protect himself from both the FBI and organized crime, because of his knowledge of “where the bodies are buried.” Most of the novels in this series have been nominated for the Shamus Award presented by the Private Eye Writers of America with True Detective and Stolen Away winning. Collins is known for his gritty realism, presenting the past as it was, violent, corrupt, and dangerous. Neither is Heller any shining knight, frequently protecting his own interests. Collins is immensely prolific, despite the detailed research he undertakes. His other major historical mystery work is the Disaster series. In each novel a well known author becomes involved in solving a crime that happened during a major disaster. For The Titanic Murders (1999) Collins uses the fact that Jacques Futrelle, the author of the “Thinking Machine” stories, was on the Titanic and has him investigate two murders before he goes down with the ship. In The Hindenberg Murders (2000), Leslie Charteris, creator of The Saint, is directly involved in the fate of the eponymous airship. Edgar Rice Burroughs turns detective in The Pearl Harbor Murders (2001), S.S. Van Dine in The Lusitania Murders (2002), Agatha Christie in The London Blitz Murder (2004), and Orson Welles in The War of the Worlds Murder (2005). Although these are obvious gimmick novels and lack the violent realism of the Heller series, they are still as faithful to the facts as a work of fiction can be and are highly entertaining. J. Kingston

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Pierce, writing in January Magazine, said of Collins that he is “certainly today’s foremost expert at concocting credible criminal scenarios within the turbulent timeline of history” (April 1999). The shift in mood from the 1920s to the 1930s and that uneasy transition between the wars is captured in David Roberts’s series featuring Lord Corinth and Verity Browne. Corinth and his brother, the Duke of Mersham, are in positions of influence, working behind the scenes to stave off a second world war. The series, which began with Sweet Poison (2001), explores the rise of fascism and Communism throughout Europe, including Britain, and explores events related to the Spanish Civil War. In The Hollow Crown (2002), Roberts covers the abdication crisis of Edward VIII in 1936. The seventh book, The Quality of Mercy (2006), takes place against the backdrop of Hitler’s invasion of Austria. The books not only present intriguing murder mysteries but also set them within the ever increasing atmosphere of dread that presaged the Second World War, an intriguing contrast with the attitude prior to the First World War depicted in Michael Pearce’s books. The 1940s and 1950s may seem recent, but even these periods can be seen in a new perspective. The modern master of the near contemporary historical whodunit is Andrew Taylor (1951–), whose books, especially the Roth trilogy, bridge the gap between the historical and the present. The Roth trilogy works in reverse, each book taking us further back in time to understand the source of later criminal action. The third book, The Office of the Dead (2000), which won the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger and which is set in the 1950s, reveals the key events that became the root of subsequent evil. Taylor’s primary series is set in the decade after the Second World War in the fictional town of Lydmouth on the Anglo-Welsh border, near the Forest of Dean. It began with An Air That Kills (1994) with the eighth volume, Naked to the Hangman, appearing in 2006. Although the books are told through various viewpoints, the chief protagonists are both strangers to the area, Detective Inspector Thornhill, who had served in the War, and journalist Jill Francis. Their growing relationship forms the backbone to the series in

WHY ARE HISTORICAL MYSTERIES SO POPULAR? The reasons for the popularity of historical mysteries have yet to be fully assessed. Although they bring together two existing popular genres, the books remain primarily crime novels. They may alienate devotees of both genres because they are genuine hybrids, but there is no denying their popularity. Nickianne Moody in her paper “Everyday Life in the Medieval Whodunnit” saw part of the appeal as relating to the cyclical nature of British experience, in effect “what goes around come around,” revealing that the problems we experience today have much in common with those of past generations, though they may have been dealt with entirely differently. Moody also believed, at least in regard to Ellis Peters’s books, that there was an appeal to a romanticized past, and this is true of many historical mysteries. It is not so much that the murders are glamorized but that there is huge potential for selecting favorite periods of history and populating them with popular characters.The more successful of the novels are those that can capture the mood of the past but relate it to the present. Jean Mason writing in The Mystery Reader (25 March 2001) believed that the appeal of historical mysteries resided in the ability of the author to recreate the past and to create a “police procedural” that fit the time.

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which the crimes are implanted in the social fabric. Taylor’s intent was to explore a social and moral climate near to us in time and yet strangely different, a world in the process of reluctant change. The books are steeped in the atmosphere of the age from which the characters and stories condense and there is a strong impression that what ought to be the present is becoming the past before our eyes. Taylor’s work thus stands at the portals of the historical mystery, like sands in an hourglass, ushering the reader into the past. There is thus a challenge to authors to create a believable scenario where someone may investigate a crime in the past in accordance with the laws, procedures, and social climate of the day, and the degree to which they succeed adds to the pleasure of the story beyond a basic historical premise. The end result tells us much about how crime was viewed and dealt with at different times, and it may be reassuring to learn just how civilized, or otherwise, different cultures and ages have been. Bibliography Airth, Rennie. River of Darkness. New York: Viking, 1999. Akunin, Boris. The Winter Queen. Trans. Andrew Bromfield. New York: Random House, 2003. Anand, Valerie. The Robsart Mystery. New York: Orion, 1997. Ashley, Mike. The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits. London: Constable and New York: Carroll & Graf, 1993. Burgess, Michael, and Jill H. Vassilakos. Murder in Retrospect. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2005. Carr, Caleb. The Alienist. New York: Random House, 1994. Chisholm, P.F. A Famine of Horses. New York: Walker and Co., 1995. Collins, Max Allan, and Richard Payner. Road to Perdition. New York: Pocket Books, 2002. Davis, Lindsey. The Silver Pigs. New York: Crown, 1989. de la Torre, Lillian. The Exploits of Dr. Sam Johnson. New York: International Polygonics, 1987. Dexter, Colin. The Wench is Dead. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990. Doherty, Paul. Death of a King. New York: St. Martin’s, 1985. ———. The Mask of Ra. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. ———. The Poisoner of Ptah. London: Headline, 2007. Doody, Margaret. Aristotle Detective. New York: Harper and Row, 1978. Finney, Patricia. Firedrake’s Eye. New York: Picador, 1992. ———. Gloriana’s Torch. New York: St. Martin’s, 2003. ———. Unicorn’s Blood. New York: Picador, 1998. Fulmer, David. Chasing the Devil’s Tail. Scottsdale, AZ: Poisoned Pen Press, 2001. Gregory, Susanna. A Plague on Both Your Houses. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996. Haney, Lauren. The Right Hand of Amon. New York: Avon Books, 1997. Jecks, Michael. The Last Templar. New York: Avon Books, 1995. Linscott, Gillian. Sister Beneath the Sheet. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991. Lovesey, Peter. Bertie and the Tinman. New York: Mysterious Press, 1987. Moody, Nickianne. “Everyday Life in the Medieval Whodunnit: The Popularity of Ellis Peters in the 1980s.” Paper produced for Media & Cultural Studies, Liverpool University, 1996. Pearl, Matthew. The Dante Club. New York: Random House, 2003. Perry, Anne. The Cater Street Hangman. New York: St. Martin’s, 1979. Pierce, J. Kingston. “A Case to Remember.” January Magazine. 1999. http://januarymagazine. com/crfiction/titanic.html.

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HISTORICAL WRITING (NONFICTION) Robinson, Lynda S. Murder in the Place of Anubis. New York: Walker, 1994. ———. Slayer of Gods. New York: Mysterious Press, 2001. Saylor, Steven. Roman Blood. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991. Taylor, Andrew. The Office of the Dead. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000. Todd, Charles. A Test of Wills. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996.

Further Reading Browne, Ray Broadus, and Kreiser, Lawrence A., eds. The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction. Bowling Green University, Popular Press, 2001; Johnsen, Rosemary Erickson. Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006; Onotade, Ayo, “Courts, Knights and Treachery,” Crime Spree Magazine #6, 2005, at .

Websites Bishop, Alan J. “Criminal History,” Crime Thru Time, Heli, Richard M. “The Detective and the Toga,” Roman Mysteries, Hurt, N.S. “Historical Mystery Fiction,” Swank, Kris. “The Sybil and Sleuth,” Ancient Greek Mysteries, .

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HISTORICAL WRITING (NONFICTION) Definition. From Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) to James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2006), many famous works of fiction have first presented themselves as fact. Consequently the claim to be nonfiction may be controversial, particularly in a very skeptical, postmodern age. That claim, nonetheless, is inherent to historical writing, which is real, although not necessarily an entirely objective account of data. In partial contrast to autobiography and memoir, and biography, centered on a single life, collective history needs some shaping purpose to focus the material—a purpose that drives the historian yet can be shared by the reader. Consider, for instance, the historian Aby Warburg. After admission to an asylum, he managed to restore his sanity through a “cultural-historical” study of Pueblo Indian myths and rituals for the way they helped their society to represent and thus control primal fears; this then taught him to do the same for his own fears (Mali 2003, 134). His case exemplifies one common function of history writing: historians may begin with a trauma that is both personal and collective—in Warburg’s case, paranoia occasioned by World War I. The historian then seeks a solution from the past—sometimes a very different past, as with Warburg’s countering the lack of collective, therapeutic ritual in modern Europe with its presence in early America. History. Although oral histories may have existed from the beginning of humanity— and written ones from the origin of writing—Herodotus (c. 484–c. 424 B.C.E.) was one of the first to engage in a large-scale form of what he called “demonstration of research” (apodexis histories) (Hughes-Warrington 157). From this phrase near the beginning of his Histories, our word “history” may derive. Writing during the Peloponnesian War, but about the earlier Persian one, his stated purpose was to show the source of people’s coming into conflict (Herodotus 1). Greek by culture but Asian by birth, Herodotus was fascinated with the war between Persia and Greece, which mirrored the tensions within his own origins. Despite admitting that all of the tales he recounted were not equally credible, he did not rudely label

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legends as lies but, as if with a reconciling purpose, used them to introduce readers to diverse cultures. He set a paradigm for this, which continues to be appreciated in such books as François Hartog’s The Mirror of Herodotus (1988), Aubrey de Selincourt’s The World of Herodotus (2001), and Carolyn Dewald and John Marincola’s The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus (2006). This tolerant laxity contrasts with the next great Greek historian, Thucydides (460–400 B.C.E.), who was careful to maintain the appearance of credibility. If one judges by the mines he owned in Thrace and by his father’s Thracian name (Olorus), his ancestors may have been from that land, but he was for much of his life Athenian, engaged in its politics and strategies during the Peloponnesian War, which was the subject of his history (Hughes-Warrington 319). His appearance of objectivity therein is itself an important technique for arguing the reader into his conclusions, such as his decision after the Athenians exiled him that their expansionism was largely to blame for the war. Thucydides provided the pattern for history as a record of conscious policies, unlike Herodotus’s fascination with legends that function as a people’s collective dreams, set in some antique, unverifiable time. Although the dominant pattern of historiography in the nineteenth century, Thucydides’s ostensible objectivity now seems outdated to such revisionists as Marshall Sahlins in his Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa (2004) Another pioneer, the Roman historian Livy (c. 64 B.C.E.–c. 12 C.E.) was the author of a 142-book history of Rome; only 35 volumes of it remain along with ancient summaries of the rest. His original intention was for it to span from the founding of that city to the murder of Cicero (42 B.C.E.), but according to the elder Pliny, Livy extended beyond that because “his restless spirit thrived on hard work” (Pliny 1958, 16). Although earlier historians, Herodotus among them, had discussed how a country’s moral degeneration may lead to its political decline, Livy added to this the notion that degeneration sprang from foreign ideas (Hughes-Warrington 205). As T.J. Luce and P.A. Stadter have demonstrated, Livy’s hunger for order caused him to reorganize his sources with a major event at the beginning, middle, and end of each book and the treatment of intervening material being extended or compacted to make the book completely fill a papyrus scroll (Luce 1977, 6; Stadter 2007, 287–307). Naturally, foreign influences, against which he wrote obsessively, could not be excluded, and the attempt to do so may even have decreased Rome’s ability to grow and adapt. During the final wars and the ensuing chaos, European history writing largely halted. It returned in the hands of such monks as Bede (c. 673–735), who spent his life in a monastery from the age of seven. Typical of medieval historiography, he credits miracles and shapes the material in a religiously edifying manner— history writing as defense of the pious order as compared to Livy’s of the moral and political. Outside Europe, of course, events continued to be recorded, particularly in China, which had a long tradition of annals, some of which turned into subjects for state examinations. Like the Western tradition from Herodotus to Bede, Chinese history was a way to exemplify moral norms. For the West, the historical classic was the Bible, which became a model; for instance, Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur (1485) likens the immoral anarchy before Arthur’s coming to that throughout the Book of Judges and patterns Merlin’s vision of dragons on that in the Vulgate’s Book of Esther. This is to say that during and before) the Middle Ages, history was largely normative, affirming traditional patterns and showing the disasters that resulted from the breach of them.

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However, as early as the fourteenth century Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) was using history to question traditional norms in much the manner of Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527), both of them to further their political agendas. Thereafter, conservative and revisionist versions of the past warred against one another, at first to establish one norm or another. With the nineteenth century came an amplified professionalism through the example of Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), who, in History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations (1824), used it to make his argument for the unity of Europe seem an objective reflection of the people’s origins. Such professionalism, with its careful assessment of sources, limning of causation, and focus on political and military leadership, constituted a conscious history: the deliberate choices made by officials and the lives of everyone else repressed from public awareness. It presents the slow, linear skeleton of verifiable events while refraining from fleshing them with speculative details. In the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, however, a growing number of historians have emphasized instead the sensuous and sensual texture of common lives and emotions as well as the popularly held myths and metaphors that gave them meaning. The change has occurred gradually. A founder of the famous journal Annales d’Histoire Economique et Sociale (1929), Marc Bloch (1886–1944), for example, began his career in reaction against the Dreyfus Affair (the French government’s complicity with anti-Semitism).To undermine the prestige and power of rulers, he showed medieval governments advancing human freedom through confusion and weakness rather than intent. Today, though, Bloc’s version of the Middle Ages sounds very old-fashioned in its assumption of politics as the shaper of life (albeit sometimes accidentally). Since then history has uncovered a far more diverse, self-contradictory, visionary Middle Ages, such as in Carolly Erickson’s The Medieval Vision: Essays in History and Perception (1976), where she demonstrates that those desiring a return to medieval simplicity, uniformity, and order have missed that period’s true interest, its expression of the unconscious—although staying within the facts, she, nonetheless, evokes a world almost as strange as historical fantasy. Trends and Themes. The increased desire to make history psychologically appealing often brings at least some deviation from dull linearity, as with Michael Brown’s The Wars of Scotland, 1214–1371, which interrupts the flow of text with magazinelike boxes, singling out stimulating remarks. In other books, advances in printing make possible lavish illustrations, such as Douglas Brinkley’s National Geographic Visual History of the World (2005) with timelines on each page and color-coded sidebars, so that readers may flip at random. A step beyond this are such tomes as Felipe Fernandez-Arnesto’s two volume The World: A History with interactive CD-Roms (2006) or Jane Bingham’s The Usborne Internet-Linked Encyclopedia of World History (2001). Availability of illustration not only embellishes traditional historical subjects but inspires ones built around pictures, for example, Jack Larkin’s Where We Lived (2006). By combining photographs from the Historic American Buildings Survey with travelers’ diary entries, he recreates the experience of the past. Project director for “Back to Our Roots,” Larkin makes material remains fulfill a common function of myth, a sense of restored origin. Finally, Larry Gonick’s The Cartoon History of the Modern World (2006) and similar books allow for a commingling of fact and fantasy, where the two remain sufficiently separable so that a careful reader can learn history from the former and be amused by the latter without necessarily confusing the two.

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Some history books share much with cinema (the most popular amalgam of picture and condensation).This connection is occasionally literal, such as the flood of film histories, for example, Robert A. Rosenstone’s History on Film/Film on History (2006) or Robert Niemi’s History in the Media: Film and Television (2006). So far, though, the more common tendency is to share with the popular media sensational topics, especially sex. Such histories focus on erotic situations (e.g., Antonia Fraser’s Love and Louis XIV:The Women in the Life of the Sun King, 2006) or embrace a broader scope as with Stephen Chippenham’s Histories of Sexuality (2004), Kim Phillips’s Sexualities in History (2001), and Elizabeth Reis’s American Sexual Histories (2001).

One of the fascinations of pictures comes from their suggesting understanding at a glance, an effect also of condensation, a process like dreams, which tell whole stories in moments of Rapid-Eye-Movement sleep. Working as well (or badly) as other labor-saving devices, literary condensation (or the promise of it) has become a publishing staple, such as E.H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World (2005), Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything (2005), and Ken Wilber’s new age A Brief History of Everything (1996). Gombrich’s title perhaps best exemplifies this tendency because the book was first published in German in 1936 as World History from the Beginning to the Present (Weltgeschichte von der Urzeit bis zur Gegenwart) and then in 1985 as A Short World History for Young Readers (Eine kurze Weltgeschichte für junge Leser). The earliest title presupposes readers desirous of much for their money, the second is a concession to the short attention span of children, and the third suggests that everyone may share this trait. Given the vogue of promised condensation, when David Harvey decided to employ such a jawbreaker as “neoliberalism” in a title, he felt obliged to soften it by calling the book A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005). After the success of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (1988) came The Illustrated Brief History of Time (1996) and then A Briefer History of Time (2005). To the extent that technological developments affect the trend, these are also chronicled, for example, in Joan Meyerowitz’s How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (2002). Ranging from Marilyn Yalom’s History of the Breast (1998) to David Friedman’s A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis (2001), every part of the subject is exposed repeatedly and treated directly, indirectly, or even by its absence, as with Gary Taylor’s Castration: An Abbreviated History of Western Manhood (2000) or Piotr O. Scholtz’s and John A. Broadwin’s Eunuchs and Castrati: A Cultural History (2000)—both probably stemming from a curiosity whetted by the movie Farinelli (1994). Freudian analysts began with a historiography that Richard H. Armstrong titled A Compulsion for Antiquity (2005) and continue to publish that the past is an expression of subconscious sexual impulses. In such books as Robert B. Clarke’s An Order Outside Time: A Jungian View of the Higher Self from Egypt to Christ (2005), Jungian psychologists chronicle spiritual history. Although relatively oldfashioned ecclesiastical histories (the conscious side of religion) continue to be published, newer publications examine trancelike, spiritual experiences that contradict orthodoxy. For years, there was one voluminous tome on that subject, Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness (1911), but its examples, largely from the lives of the saints, were

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only a mild challenge to the Christian church because Underhill was a devout Anglo-Catholic. However, the poet and former college professor Nicholas Hagger has been publishing one massive compendium on the history of mysticism after another, among them The Light of Civilization: How the Vision of God has Inspired All the Great Civilizations (2006). What is remarkable, however, is their unparalleled mix of real scholarship and amateurish reliance on very questionable sources. Even the latter constitute a quarry of information about new-age groups. Admittedly, there has been a tradition of idiosyncratic religious historiography among some British poets since Robert Graves’s The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1948). Nicholas Hagger’s accomplishment, however, is to be one of the first to publish the kind of unselective information accumulation that the Internet has made available, which is many students’ experience of history—a flood of data that once (for both good and ill) was prevented by academic prejudices and standards. The twenty-first century, of course, also issues more restrained and limited treatments of his subject (e.g., Roy Anker’s Catching Light: Looking for God in the Movies, 2004; or Eva Parinou’s The Light of the Gods: The Role of Light in Archaic and Classical Greek Cult, 2000). Hagger, though, is one of the most conspicuous examples of writers whose very personal spiritual search expresses itself through historical research; other examples are Layne Redmond’s When the Drummers Were Women: A Spiritual History of Rhythm (1997) or Nevil Drury’s The History of Magic in the Modern Age: A Quest for Personal Transformation (2000). As Amy Hollywood has demonstrated in her Sensible Ecstasy (2002), during the latter twentieth century, many French intellectuals, even atheists, wrote sympathetically about past mystics, especially if they were women, because the intellectuals favored the emergence of the repressed and suppressed (including feminism). Twenty-first-century feminism is not only exhuming women’s history but also giving voice to the emotions and spiritualities once dismissed by academic historians. Bonnie Smith’s The Gender of History (1998), for instance, recovers a time when women historians, condemned as amateurs, were dealing conspicuously with the emotional and spiritual traumas that underlie history being the realm of the dead. In addition to pursuing the theoretical issues of a feminist historiography, as in Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai’s Women’s Words (1991) and Sue Morgan’s The Feminist History Reader (2006), feminist historians have been rethinking religious traditions, for example, Luise Schottroff, Barbara Rumscheidt, and Martin Rumscheidt’s Lydia’s Impatient Sisters: A Feminist Social History of Early Christianity and Rita Gross’s Buddhism After Patriarchy; A Feminist History, Analysis and Reconstruction of Buddhism (1995). Other formerly suppressed voices finding their histories include sexual and racial minorities. African American history is epic celebrated in such major works as Taylor Branch’s three-volume chronicle of the King years: Parting the Waters (1988); Pillar of Fire (1998); and At Canaan’s Edge: American in the King Years, 1965–1968 (2004). Also notable are African American contributions to world culture, as with Leland’s Hip: The History (2004). Particularly since Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1988; rev. ed. 2006) and Chancellor Williams’s Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D. (1971), black history has challenged traditional versions of the past and served as a model for recollections of other suppressed minorities, for example, Melissa Wender’s Lamentations as History: Narratives by Koreans

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in Japan, 1965–2000 (2005). At least since Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979), the Occident’s projection of its own unconscious on Asia has been a recognized problem, studied, for instance, in Robert Markley’s The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730 (2006). Ruth MacKay’s “Lazy, Improvident People”: Myth and Reality in the Writing of Spanish History (2006) exemplifies a related kind of book, the defense of a slandered nation; the diasporas of so many states’ citizens almost guarantees that they will form minority groups somewhere with reason to question the dominant group’s version of history. Comparably, twenty-first century historians are likely to focus on people outside the dominant culture, including the feral children of Michael Newton’s Savage Girls and Wild Boys (2002), the loafers in Tom Lutz’s Doing Nothing (2006), or even the obnoxious in Mark Caldwell’s A Short History of Rudeness (2000). Of course, this trend encompasses recollections of the American counterculture in Robert Stone’s Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, (2007), and Marc Fisher’s Something in the Air: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution That Shaped a Generation (2007) as well as a much longer span of pleasure seeking in Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Streets (2007). Given the success of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (2003 and 2006), books on sea rovers proliferated in time for the films and their CD and television re-release, for example, Gail Sellinger’s and W. Thomas Smith’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Pirates (2006) and John Matthews’s Pirates (2006). Typical of much American history writing, Hampton Sides’s Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (2006) stresses the wilds and their inhabitants in the United States adventure. This chronicling of what and whomever lies beyond the pales of propriety, civilization, and conscious control already constitutes a history of the unconscious’s imagery. Histories of the unconscious itself may include such post-Freudian research as is summarized in Frank Tallis’s Hidden Minds: A History of the Unconscious (2002) and Guy Claxton’s Wayward Mind: An Intimate History of the Unconscious (2006). Given the growing prominence of “dissociation” and the continuing importance of myth in psychological theory, the subject also includes Robert Rieber’s The Bifurcation of the Self: The History and Theory of Dissociation and Its Disorders (2006) and Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth (2002). The idea of the unconscious explicitly figures in Jenni Hellwarth’s The Reproductive Unconscious in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (2002), Lesslie Hossfeld’s Narrative, Political Unconscious and Racial Violence in Wilmington, North Carolina (2004), and Elizabeth Ezra’s The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France (2000). One of the most prominent ways that authors serve a public desire for representations of the unconscious, however, is to take a metaphor for it and build a history around it associatively. Consider, for instance, Victoria Finlay’s Color: A Natural History of the Palette (2002), which commences with images of her tumbling somewhat like Alice in Wonderland, but through a “paintbox,” into the imagination, which is inhabited by a “rainbow serpent” (ix). She writes “I dreamed of a mountain with veins of blue, inhabited by men with wild eyes and black turbans, and when I woke up I knew that one day I would go there” (281). Her journey for pigments brings her to the Afghanistan of her dream and to Australia, where she contemplates how sacred ochres lead the aborigines into dreamtime: “Dreamtime—a dream in the sense that it is not set in the past, but in a kind of parallel present universe, rather like the one we operate in while we are asleep” (35–36). As for

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Hagger, light represents a reality both internal and transpersonal, so for Finlay do the colors of light. What makes her book much more popular than Hagger’s, however, is that she manages to integrate her subject as symbol with its very physical manifestations. Comparable books treat the histories of specific colors, such as the synthesizing of royal purple: Simon Garfield’s Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color that Changed the World (2000). They easily focus on light solidified—some shiny object as with Eric Wilson’s The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination (2003) or Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History (2002), which begins with a mysterious, luminous, icelike saline mass that the author bought. Given, for instance, Chinese use of gardens as spiritual microcosms of the world, Tom Turner’s Garden History: Philosophy and Design 2000 B.C.–2000 AD (2005) belongs here as well. Related to these single fetish books are ones that bring together many treasures from the past and the search for them, as in Frank Pope’s Dragon Sea: A True Tale of Treasure, Archeology, and Greed off the Coast of Vietnam (2007) and in Josh Bernstein’s Digging for the Truth: One Man’s Epic Adventure Exploring the World’s Greatest Archaeological Mysteries (2006). They follow the very gradual shift in history writing from finished record to search in progress—a search as much internal as external. Context and Issues. The approach of the year 2000 inspired apocalyptic speculations, which did not entirely disappear when the first few years of the twenty-first century brought September 11, 2001, a variety of wars, including the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and natural disasters, notably a 2004 tsunami in the Pacific and a 2005 inundating hurricane in New Orleans. Perhaps coincidentally, books on past disasters that might have seemed like academic exercises began to sound like precursors of the present, for example, Willam Wayne Farris’s Japan’s Medieval Population: Famine, Fertility, and Warfare in a Transformative Age (2006). Naturally, people wondered what might be done. The biologist Jared Diamond had written two, very fatalistic, previous books, with humans as chimpanzees controlled by their environments: the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1999) and The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (1992). His twenty-first-century book was Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2004)—still portraying history as a response to weather and geography but with a greater recognition that people could adapt to adverse conditions. In order to adapt, however, people had to decide what had happened, beginning with 9/11, and publishers were very obliging in this regard: Mitchell Fink’s Never Forget: An Oral History of September 11, 2001 (2002), Damon DiMarco’s Tower Stories: An Oral History of 9/11 (2007), Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006), and so on. The larger questions about the Middle East reaped a comparable harvest: F.E. Peters’s The Monotheists: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Conflict and Competition (2005), Andrew Wheatcroft’s Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam (2004), Bernard Lewis’s The Middle East: 2000 years of History from the Rise of Christianity to the Present Day (1996; rev. ed. 2000), Michael Oren’s Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present (2007), and so on. Such books as American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America (Hedges, 2007) have argued that government measures to defend America against terrorism have helped a larger conservative agenda. A few books themselves became foci of

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“BASED ON A TRUE STORY” At a time when fictions like to advertise themselves as “based on a true story,” history constitutes a very marketable commodity.A revelation about organized crime, such as Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy (1985), is very likely to be filmed—in this case, becoming Goodfellas (1990). Sports are another photogenic activity, as with Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit (2001) adapted into a major movie (2003). Mark Bowden’s military thriller Blackhawk Down (2000) evoked the moment by moment panic of combat in Mogadishu so powerfully that it easily flowed into Ridley Scott’s riveting cinema of it (2001). George Jonas’s Vengeance:The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team (1984) first inspired the 1986 TV movie Sword of Gideon and then Steven Spielberg’s Munich (2005).

controversy—somewhat the case with Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (2006), accused of being pro-Arab, and more obviously with Bob Woodward’s State of Denial (2006), which played a part in President Bush’s declining popularity. The title of Woodward’s book well captures the mood of the time with its suggestion that the real situation was being politically suppressed and/or psychologically repressed by those in power. In more questionable books, extreme speculations flourished about the United States causing the attack on the twin towers. These theories were opposed in Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up to the Facts by the Editors of Popular Mechanics with an “Introduction” by John McCain (2006). Reception. When one includes the “History Channel” on American cable television, historiography seems very much alive. Consequently, Francis Fukuyama caused a stir in 1992 when he expanded his 1989 article “The End of History? After the Battle of Jena” into the book The End of History and the Last Man. He was writing about Immanuel Kant’s notion that, in large terms, historical writing narrates the long development from prehistory to modern liberal democracy, so that readers can see the goal of history and participate in it (Fukuyama 1992, 57). George W. Hegel concluded that with Napoleon’s victory over the Prussian monarchy in 1806, the idea of liberty had materialized, so that further history writing was pointless. This, of course, ignores the value of limited historiography, designed to help a specific society become more democratic, but it raises interesting questions about “Universal History.” At the end of his book, Fukuyama wonders if we are in the age of (what the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called) “the Last Man,” who contents himself with creature comforts because there is no longer any great purpose to be achieved. The basic problem with Fukuyama’s premises is that they come from Kant and Hegel, who assumed “history” meant (as it did in their day) a chronological account of changing political structures. The history writing of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, however, has not been limited to the external shape of events but has suggested the internal: how impulses, impressions, and intuitions contribute. Because of Hegel’s influence on Marx, communism was a fossil preserving the old history to inspire the struggle toward utopia. After the fall of communism, though, the function of history has tended to be an enlargement of awareness and (whether or not this leads to structured political and economic changes) its goal is achieved as reading history opens the minds of the readers to greater complexity. The continuing struggle, of course, is that such complexity is

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initially frightening. Consequently, histories are most widely received if they include elements of the familiar—the degree of reassurance needed, of course, being related both to the fearsomeness of each age described and each age in which the describing occurs. Selected Authors. During an economic boom, when the government was lavishly funding social and educational projects, the “New Left” of the 1960s was attracted to Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955), which viewed the past as a record of unnecessary repression and championed unconscious impulses. The “New New Left” of the 1970s and 1980s reveled in such philosophical historiography as Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison, French 1975; English 1977)—a strident condemnation of enforcing norms. Naturally, even then there was a growing neo-conservative movement in reaction against the proposed anarchy. Near the ominous year 2000, the most prominent interpreters of history tended to be far from the radicalism of Marcuse or Foucault. This is not to say that history writing went back entirely to the old mode, but it often mixed the new impressionistic approach with a relatively conservative nostalgia, as with Thomas Cahill, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Eric Larson, and Thomas Friedman. Author of Jesus’ Little Instruction Book (1994), Thomas Cahill is publishing a multi-volume “Hinges of History” series, mostly Christian apologetic. Back in 1936, C.S. Lewis argued in his Allegory of Love that Christianity had raised the status of women through courtly love, which he traced to Christian roots (thereby, perhaps, underplaying the importance of Arab sources). Cahill’s Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe (2006) functions in a similar way, focusing almost exclusively on possible Christian influences. Even though many patriarchal cultures have had idealized images of the feminine (e.g., Kuanyin in China or the goddesses of Greece), Cahill presumes that the Catholic version of these led to feminism. Even though alchemy flourished in China with no connection to the transubstantiation allegedly occurring in the Christian mass, Cahill presumes such a connection instrumental in Western alchemy and that alchemy was the source of science. Another way feminism and science might be explained is quite the opposite: the breakdown in Christian orthodoxy that allowed people to deviate from tradition. Cahill’s other “Hinges of History” also emphasize the possible contributions of Christian tradition. Although the copying of manuscripts in Irish monasteries during the Dark Ages has been a given in many studies of world history, Cahill titles the first volume in this series How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe (1995). Obviously, the Greco-Roman civilization therein preserved was not the only one in the world, and the preservation of its books owes at least as much to the Byzantines and Arabs as to the Irish, but How the Irish Saved Civilization spent over two years on the New York Times bestseller list. Winner of a Christopher award, Cahill’s next book The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (1998) makes what Christians call the “Old Testament” the foundation of civilization. The third volume, Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (1999) interprets Jesus as the shaper of civilization. The fourth volume, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003) comes closest to diverging from Christian apologetic, but functions to introduce Greek culture as a component of early Christianity and thence an influence today.

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Although lacking that kind of tunnel vision, the erudite, multi-cultural Felipe Fernandez-Armesto is in his own way even more conservative. He grew up as part of a Hispanic minority in Britain, and his The Spanish Armada: The Experience of War in 1588 (1988) mocks the Britains’ notion that their victory over Spain showed the superiority of liberty over despotism. A Roman Catholic, his Reformations: A Radical Interpretation of Christianity and the World, 1500–2000 (written with Derek Wilson, 1997) argues that the Protestant Reformation was not a major event but merely one of many reform movements. In this and as a refrain through many of his works, he argues that, given history as a whole, change is a relatively rare aberration, likely to go away (see his Internet interview, “Back to the “Future”). His So You Think You’re Human? (2005) portrays people as a species of chimpanzee. With nostalgia for the jungle, his 2001 Civilizations considers civilization to be a mistake. In an age when postmodernism makes many historians skeptical about the existence of objective truth, he not only believes in it but has written Truth (2001) to defend the comforting idea that history can be objective truth. The former Wall Street Journal reporter Erik Larson began with standard liberal notions but has been following an ever darker skepticism about progress, which is taking him in the direction of Fernandez-Armesto. Larson’s reporting career led him to write Naked Consumer: How Our Private Lives Become Public Commodities (1993) in reaction against the rise of invasive technologies. With Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun (1994), he was, of course, advocating gun control to preserve us from a murdering sixteen-year-old with an M–11/9. His swerve from liberal reportage was Isaac’s Storm: The Drowning of Galveston, 8 September 1900 (2001). The villain is no standard target of liberals, such as prying censors or gun manufacturers, but nature aided by a meteorologist’s naïve trust in an imperfect technology. The swerve from liberalism continues in The Devil in the White City (2006). Larson contrasts the World’s Fair—embodying the age’s optimism about technology—with a serial killer, employing his own technology for homicide. In Thunderstruck (2006), Larson again contrasts an image of technological progress, Guglielmo Marcone, inventor of the wireless, with a murderer, this time H.H. Crippen. Repeatedly, Larson makes the point that public acceptance of the new technology was spurred by the hunt for Crippen, so that homicide and problematic advance become conflated, as with his previous book. Both volumes are rather like the movie Forbidden Planet, where progress runs up against monsters from the unconscious. Although initially a fairly liberal reporter, Thomas Friedman’s long support for the Iraq war and for capitalist expansion aligned him with President Bush’s neoconservative government. Eventually, Friedman condemned the war, but by then so did a number of conservatives. Winner of three Pulitzer Prizes for reporting, he brought first-hand experience to his From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989), in some ways a moderate and conciliatory survey of the Middle East, but sufficiently appreciative of force so that the book’s prestige may have helped to steer America in that direction. His angry reaction to 9/11, Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11 (2002) was distinctly hawkish. His encomiums to the Internet, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999) and The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (2005) recognize some dangers of globalization but focus more on the boons to the privileged than on the banes to those not in a position to profit.

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THE PULITZER PRIZES FOR HISTORY Recent Pulitzer Prizes for history writing have included these: 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000

The Race Beat:The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff (Alfred A. Knopf) Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky (Oxford University Press) Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer (Oxford University Press) A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration by Steven Hahn (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943 by Rick Atkinson (Henry Holt and Company) The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Founding Brothers:The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis (Alfred A. Knopf) Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 by David M. Kennedy (Oxford University Press)

Source: Pulitzer Prize Web site. http://www.pulitzer.org/

Like other such great popularizers of history, such as Barbara Tuchman with her A Distant Mirror (1978), Cahill, Fernandez-Armesto, Larson, and Friedman have helped bridge past and present. In a world of rapid, seemingly chaotic change, Cahill has given modern Christian readers a sense of some design, working throughout the centuries to unfold their values, and Fernandez-Armesto has presented such a great span of time and space that the disturbing changes almost seem to disappear. Larson has dramatized the current disenchantment with technology, projecting it backward a hundred years, and Friedman has produced the opposite, but also reassuring, A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, where he manages to be nostalgic for traditional communities, which he hopes to preserve, yet also optimistic about a global one to come. Bibliography Anker, Roy. Catching Light: Looking For God in The Movies. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdman’s, 2004. Armstrong, Karen. A Short History of Myth. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005. Armstrong, Richard H. A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2005. Bernal, Martin. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985, Volume 1. Piscataway, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1988, Rev. Ed. 2006. Bernstein, Josh. Digging for the Truth: One Man’s Epic Adventure Exploring the World’s Greatest Archaeological Mysteries. New York: Gotham, 2006. Bingham, Jane. The Usborne Internet-Linked Encyclopedia of World History. Tulsa, OK: Usborne, 2001. Bowden, Mark. Blackhawk Down: An American War Story. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Inquirer, 1997. Branch, Taylor. At Canaan’s Edge: American in the King Years, 1965–1968. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007. ———. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.

HISTORICAL WRITING (NONFICTION) ———. Pillar of Fire: American in the King Years, 1963–1965. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998. Brinkley, Douglas. National Geographic Visual History of the World. New York: National Geographic, 2005. Brown, Michael. The Wars of Scotland, 1214–1371. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Bryson, Bill. A Short History of Nearly Everything. New York: Broadway, 2005. Cahill, Thomas. Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus. New York: Random House, 1999. ———. The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels. New York: Anchor Books, 1998. ———. How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe. New York: Doubleday, 1995. ———. Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe. New York: Nan A. Talese, 2006. ———. Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Caldwell, Mark. A Short History of Rudeness: Manners, Morals, and Misbehavior in Modern America. New York: Picador, 2000. Carter, Jimmy. Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006. Chippenham, Stephen Garton. Histories of Sexuality. Wiltshire: Routledge, 2004. Clarke, Rohert B. An Order Outside Time: A Jungian View of the Higher Self from Egypt to Christ. London: Hampton Roads, 2005. Claxton, Guy. Wayward Mind: An Intimate History of the Unconscious. New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 2006. Dewald, Carolyn, and John Marincola. The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking, 2004. ———. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: Norton, 1999. ———. The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal. New York: Harper, 1992. DiMarco, Damon. Tower Stories: An Oral History of 9/11. 1. Santa Monica: Santa Monica Press, 2007. Drury, Nevill. The History of Magic in the Modern Ages: A Quest for Personal Transformation. London: Carroll and Graff, 2000. Ehrenreich, Barbara. Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. New York: Metropolitan, 2007. Erickson, Carolly. The Medieval Vision: Essays in History and Perception. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Ezra, Elizbeth. The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2000. Farris, William Wayne. Japan’s Medieval Population: Famine, Fertility, and Warfare in a Transformative Age. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006. Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe. “Back to the Future.” [Online, January 1999] BBC News. . ———. The Spanish Armada: The Experience of War in 1588. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. ———. Reformations: A Radical Interpretation of Christianity and the World, 1500–2000. New York: Scribner, 1997. ———. Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2001. ———. So You Think You’re Human? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ———. Civilizations. Elgin Illinois: Pan, 2001.

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HISTORICAL WRITING (NONFICTION) ______. The World: A History, Volume 1, From 1000 to 1800. New York: Prentice Hall, 2006. ______.The World: A History, Since 1300, Volume Two. New York: Prentice Hall, 2006 [Bk & CD-ROM edition]. Fink, Mitchell. Never Forget: An Oral History of September 11, 2001. New York: Regan, 2002. Finlay, Victoria. Color: A Natural History of the Palette. New York: Ballantine Books, 2002. Fisher, Marc. Something in the Air: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution That Shaped a Generation. New York: Random House, 2007. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin, 1977. Fraser, Antonia. Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King. New York: Doubleday, 2006. Friedman, David. A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis. New York: Free Press, 2001. Friedman, Thomas. From Beirut to Jerusalem. New York: Anchor, 1990. ———. The Lexus and the Olive Tree. New York: Anchor, 1999. ———. Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002. ______. The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005. Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History? After the Battle of Jena.” The National Interest 16 (1989): 3–18. ______. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992. Garfield, Simon. Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World. London: Faber & Faber, 2000. Gluck, Sherna Berger, and Daphne Patai. Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History. London: Routledge, 1991. Gombrich, E.H. A Little History of the World. Translated by Caroline Mustill. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Gonick, Larry. The Cartoon History of the Modern World Part 1: From Columbus to the U.S. Constitution. West Link, Ireland: Collins, 2006. Graves, Robert. The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. London: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1948. Gross, Rita. Buddhism After Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis and Reconstruction of Buddhism. Albany: SUNY Press, 1995. Hagger, Nicholas. The Light of Civilization: How the Vision of God has Inspired All the Great Civilizations. New York: O Books, 2006. Hartog, François. The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History. The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics, 5. Berkeley: University of California, 1988. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Hawking, David. A Brief History of Time. New York: Bantam, 1988. ______. The Illustrated Brief History of Time. New York: Bantam, 1996. Hawking, Stephen, and Leonard Miodinow. A Briefer History of Time. New York: Bantam, 2005. Hedges, Chris. American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America. New York: Free Press, 2007. Herodotus: The Histories. 4 vols, trans. A. D. Godley, Loeb Classical Series. London: W. Heinemann, 1926. Online at . Hellenbrand, Laura. Seabiscuit: An American Legend. New York: Ballantine, 2001. Hellwarth, Jenni. The Reproductive Unconscious in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. Studies in Medieval History and Culture, V. 13. London: Routledge, 2002. Hollywood, Amy. Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2002.

HISTORICAL WRITING (NONFICTION) Hossfeld, Leslie. Narrative, Political Unconscious and Racial Violence in Wilmington, North Carolina. Studies in American Popular History and Culture. London: Routledge, 2004. Hughes-Warrington, Marnie. Fifty Key Thinkers in History. London: Routledge, 2000. Jonas, George. Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter Terrorist Team. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984. Kurlansky, Mark. Salt: A World History. New York: Penguin, 2002. Larkin, Jack. Where We Lived: Discovering the Places We Once Called Home. Washington: Taunton, 2006. Larson, Eric. The Devil in the White City. New York: Bantam, 2006. ———. Isaac’s Storm: The Drowning of Galveston, 8 September 1900. Darby, Pennsylvania: Diane, 2001. ______. Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun. New York: Vintage, 1994. ______. Thunderstruck. Phoenix, Arizona: Crown, 2006. Leland, John. Hip: The History. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Lewis, Bernard. The Middle East. New York: Weidenfeld, 1996; rev. ed. 2000. Lewis, C.S. The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936. Lutz, Tom. Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America. London: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2006. MacKay, Ruth. “Lazy, Improvident People”: Myth and Reality in the Writing of Spanish History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Mali, Joseph. Mythistory: The Making of a Modern Historiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955. Markley, Robert. The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Matthews, John. Pirates. Boston: Athenaeum, 2006. Meyerowitz, Joanne. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002. Morgan, Sue. The Feminist History Reader. London: Routledge, 2006. Newton, Michael. Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children. London: Faber & Faber, 2002. Niemi, Robert. History in the Meida: Film and Television. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2006. Oren, Michael B. Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present. New York: Norton, 2007. Parsinau, Eva. The Light of the Gods: The Role of Light in Archaic and Classical Greek Cult. London: Duckworth, 2000. Peters, F.E. The Monotheists: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Conflict and Competition. Two Vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Phillips, Kim. Sexualities in History. London: Routledge, 2001. Pliny, the elder. Natural History. Translated by H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library. Vol. 1. London: Heinemann, 1958. Pileggi, Nicholas. Wiseguy. New York: Pocket, 1984. Pope, Frank. Dragon Sea: A True Tale of Treasure, Archeology, and Greed off the Coast of Vietnam. New York: Harcourt, 2007. Popular Mechanics Editors with “Introduction” by John McCain. Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up to the Facts. New York: Hears, 2006. Redmond, Layne. When the Drummers Were Women: A Spiritual History of Rhythm. New York: Three Rivers, 1997. Reis, Elizabeth. American Sexual Histories. Blackwell Readers in American Sociala and Cultural History. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.

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HISTORICAL WRITING (NONFICTION) Rieber, Robert. The Bifurcation of the Self: The History and Theory of Dissociation and Its Disorders. New York: Springer, 2006. Rosenston, Robert A. History on Film/Film on History. New York: Longman, 2006. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. Sahlins, Marshall. Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Schottroff, Luise, Barbara Rumscheidt, and Martin Rumscheid. Lydia’s Impatient Sisters: A Feminist Social History of Early Christianity. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995. Selincourt, Aubrey de. The World of Herodotus. New York: Phoenix, 2001. Scholz, Piotr O. Eunuchs and Castrati: A Cultural History. Translated by John A. Broadwin. Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2001. Sellinger, Gail, Jr., and W. Thomas Smith. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Pirates. New York: Alpha, 2006. Sides, Hampton. Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West. New York: Doubleday, 2006. Stadter, P.A. “The Structure of Livy’s History,” Historia, 21.2 (1972): 287–307. Stone, Robert. Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties. Hopewell, New Jersey: Ecco, 2007. Tallis, Frank. Hidden Minds: A History of the Unconscious. New York: Arcade, 2002. Taylor, Gary. Castration: An Abbreviated History of Western Manhood. London: Routledge, 2000. Turner, Tom. Garden History: Philosophy and Design 2000 BC–2000 AD. Abingdon: Spon, 2005. Tuchman, Barbara. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978. Wender, Melissa. Lamentation as History: Narratives by Koreans in Japan, 1965–2000. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Wheatcroft, Andrew. Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam. New York: Random House, 2004. Wilbur, Ken. A Brief History of Everything. Boston: Shambhala, 1996. Williams, Chancellor. The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D. Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt, 1971. Wilson, Eric G. The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination. New York: Macmillan, 2003. Woodward, Bob. State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006. Wright, Lawrence. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. New York: Knopf, 2006. Yalom, Mailyn. History of the Breast. New York: Ballantine, 1998.

Further Reading Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Studies in Environment and History). London: Cambridge University Press, 1986; Gaddis, Lewis, John. The Cold War: A New History. New York: Penguin, 2006; Harrison, Thomas. Divinity and History: The Religion of Herodotus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; Kelley, Donald R. Frontiers of History: Historical Inquiry in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 2006; Lee, Nancy, Lonnie Schlein and Mitchell Levitas, eds. A Nation Challenged: A Visual History of 9/11 and Its Aftermath. New York: The New York Times, 2002; Luce, T.J. Livy: the Composition of his History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977; Rabasa, Angel M., Cheryl Bernard, Peter Chalk, C. Christine Fair, Theodore Karasik, Rollie Lal, Ian Lesser, and David Thaler. The Muslim World after 9/11. Santa Monica: Rand, 2004; Ranke, Leopold von. History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations, 1494–1514. Translated by

HOLOCAUST LITERATURE G.R. Dennis. Houston: Kessinger, 2004; Ricks, Thomas E. Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. New York: Penguin, 2006; Selincourt, Aubrey de. The History. New York: Longman, 2006.

JAMES WHITLARK

HOLOCAUST LITERATURE Definition. The Holocaust was a series of events between 1933 and 1945 that included the attempted genocide of the Jewish people by the Nazi forces of Germany. More than six million Jews were murdered in this period, a large proportion in specially designed concentration camps (Kremer 2003, xxi). In his seminal anthology of Holocaust literature, Art from the Ashes (1995), Lawrence Langer remarks that “we may never know what the Holocaust was for those who endured it, but we do know what has been said about it and . . . the varied ways writers have chosen to say it” (Langer 1995, 3). Thus, Langer distinguishes between the Holocaust as an event—which we can never know—and the Holocaust as a theme for literature, which, as he puts it, changes “the route by which we approach it” (Langer 1995, 3). Yet what does it mean to transform the deaths of millions into a literary theme for a work of fiction? If this is a worrying question for those of us who have no experience of the Holocaust, we can barely imagine how troubling a question it might be for the survivors of the camps, who display both an overwhelming necessity to turn their experiences into words and, at the same time, apprehend that words may be incommensurate with the task. The Holocaust memoirist Elie Wiesel (1928–) expressed suspicion of the genre when he remarked that “a novel about Treblinka is either not a novel or not about Treblinka” (Wiesel 1990, 7). Wiesel is suggesting that works about the Holocaust can only be factual and, therefore, that fiction cannot be about the Holocaust. Yet there is such a genre as Holocaust literature. Novels by survivors, their descendents, and others are read, reviewed, and taught on a regular basis. Further, one might venture a straightforward definition of Holocaust literature as simply literature “about the Holocaust” (Eaglestone 2004, 102). This is not quite as clear as it first appears, however, because much late twentieth-century American fiction has been concerned with the Holocaust even when the Holocaust has not been its explicit theme. For example, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) is thematically “about the Holocaust,” even though not overtly concerned with Nazis and European Jews (Sammon 1996, 16–17). A similar observation might be made, for example, of Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer (1966), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1984). Indeed, “one might even be tempted to ask what it means when a novel or poem

CAN THE HOLOCAUST BE RESPONDED TO CREATIVELY? The philosopher Theodor Adorno famously proposed that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (Langer 1975, 1).The same might be said of fiction. How can one derive aesthetic pleasure from contemporary novels after this supreme manifestation of human wickedness? Adorno was particularly suspicious of Holocaust literature precisely because it might provide readers with such aesthetic pleasure. He wrote,“The so-called artistic rendering of the naked bodily pain of those who were beaten down by rifle butts contains, however distantly, the possibility that pleasure can be squeezed from it” (Adorno 1993, 88).

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written after 1945 in Europe or America did not engage with the issue” (Eaglestone 2004, 106). For the sake of clarity, we will confine ourselves in this essay to a discussion of canonical Holocaust literature written by survivors to bear witness to the experience of the events and to recent American novels concerned with the Holocaust and its aftermath in the United States. Trends and Themes Auschwitz defies imagination and perception; it submits only to memory. . . . Between the dead and the rest of us there exists an abyss that no talent can comprehend. I write to denounce writing. I tell of the impossibility one stumbles upon in trying to tell the tale. (Wiesel 1983, 1)

According to Elie Wiesel, if Holocaust literature must be attempted it should be written solely by witnesses of the events. Only those who submit to “memory” can be trusted “to tell the tale” of the disaster. Yet even survivor-writers are confronted with “the impossibility” of conveying their ghastly experiences in the necropolis of the Nazi death camps. Thus, Wiesel recommends silence: “As the ancients said: ‘Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know’” (Wiesel 1967, 152). Throughout the 1960s, the critic George Steiner was similarly recommending “only silence or the Kadish for the unnumbered dead” (Steiner 1967, 168). Despite such objections, Holocaust literature was written. To trace its development, one must look first to European novelists, including Wiesel. Other important authors to consider are Primo Levi (1919–1987) and Charlotte Delbo (1913–1985). We now turn to the principal texts by these influential writers. Elie Wiesel’s Night (1958). Elie Wiesel was born in the Transylvanian town of Sighet in 1928. When he was fifteen years old, he was deported with his family to Auschwitz. At the end of the war, his parents and younger sister were dead. In 1963 he moved to New York and assumed American citizenship. Since 1976 he has taught at Boston University, and in 1986 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Night, Wiesel’s account of his time in Auschwitz and deportation to Buchenwald, was published in French in 1958 and English in 1960. The original version of this novelistic memoir, written in Yiddish, was titled And the World Remained Silent (1956). Given the importance of silence in all of Wiesel’s writings, this title is significant. Indeed, Night is concerned with at least four types of silence: the mystery of God’s silence in the face of evil, the muteness of the dead, the inadequacy of language in relation to the events of the Holocaust, and the proper awed stance of the reader in the face of Holocaust testimony. Firstly, there is the mystery of God’s silence in the face of evil. This question is theological and concerns theodicy, or whether one can have faith in omnipotent divine providence that, by definition, oversees suffering in the world. The question of theodicy, or of God’s silence, is not new. Indeed, it goes back to the biblical Book of Job and the issue of Job’s suffering. Much of Wiesel’s writing after Night approaches such theological issues as a way of indirectly asking the question: Where was God during the Holocaust? Wiesel moves in Night, and subsequent books such as Dawn (1961) and The Jews of Silence (1966), from the immediate terrors that he experienced to a larger cosmic drama; he moves, in other words, from stunned realism to theology: in the absence of divine justice or compassion, silence is the only possible response to this mysterious absence of God. In a key passage from Night (which has

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been published elsewhere as a poem (Schiff 1995, 42)), Wiesel moves from the death of children in the first night of the camp to the death of God inside him: Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never. (Wiesel 1981, 45)

Wiesel’s second kind of silence is the muteness or silence of the dead. In his essay “A Plea for the Dead” (1967), Wiesel remarks: I cannot believe that an entire generation of fathers and sons could vanish into the abyss without creating, by their very disappearance, a mystery which exceeds and overwhelms us . . . All the words in all the mouths of the philosophers and psychologists are not worth the silent tears of that child and his mother. (Wiesel 1967, 143)

Thus, he urges readers to respect the silence of the dead and not to try to speak for them. The essay is an exhortation to “learn to be silent” (Wiesel 1967, 152). In these terms, no writer can speak for the dead. The third kind of silence derives from the sense that language and our systems of representation cannot do justice to the enormity of the Holocaust. Wiesel, in his essays and criticism, writes of the sheer inadequacy of language to depict the events of the Holocaust. In other words, Wiesel names the enormity of the Holocaust as something that is unnameable, and he calls for silence as the only possible response to these events. He epigrammatically states: “I write to denounce writing.” This goes some way to explaining why Wiesel’s writing also incorporates the idea of silence. The final kind of silence is the awed response of the reader in response to these events. For the reader of Holocaust memoirs, silence is supposed to equal a kind of muteness in response to the sacredness of the dead. Gillian Rose, in Mourning Becomes the Law (1996), has controversially characterized such sanctification of the Holocaust as “Holocaust piety” (Rose 1996, 43). For Primo Levi, too, the Holocaust takes on something of the sacred in If This Is a Man. Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man (1958). If This Is a Man was only accepted by a small, short-lived publishing house, De Silvo, in 1947, after being rejected by several major publishers, and so it made little impact until it was republished by Einaudi in 1958 (Kremer 2003, 750). It is now universally acknowledged to be one of the essential Holocaust memoirs. Following a biblical theme, Levi describes Auschwitz inmates’ stories as “simple and incomprehensible like the stories in the Bible” and asks, “But are they not themselves stories of a new Bible?” (Levi 1987, 72). Yet in almost every other way, Levi’s novelistic memoir differs from Wiesel’s Night. The American Holocaust novelist Cynthia Ozick is not alone in admiring Levi for his “lucid calm,” “magisterial equanimity,” and “unaroused detachment” (Ozick 1989, 46). Certainly Levi attempts to frame the narrative of his 11 months in Auschwitz-Birkenau within the language of reason. In If This Is a Man he writes as a “European” and a secular Jew rather than a religious Jew whose faith has been shaken to its foundations (Levi 1987, 125, 136). Further, Levi writes as a scientist. He was a twenty-four-year-old chemistry graduate of Turin University, Italy, when he was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. Indeed,

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he survived mainly due to his chemistry skills being exploited in a rubber factory at the sub-camp of Monowitz-Buna. Thus, it is unsurprising on one level that Levi writes the following of the concentration camp: “We would like to consider that the Lager was pre-eminently a gigantic biological and social experiment” (Levi 1987, 93) [my italics]. However, it is surprising to encounter such apparently dispassionate “equanimity” from a former inmate of the world’s most infamous death camp. In the Afterword to If This Is a Man, Levi attempts to justify the calm tone of his narrative: I have deliberately assumed the calm, sober language of the witness, neither the lamenting tones of the victim nor the irate voice of someone who seeks revenge. I thought my account would be all the more credible . . . the more it appeared objective . . . only in this way does a witness in matters of justice perform his task, which is preparing the ground for the judge. The judges are my readers. (Levi 1987: 382)

Here, Levi deploys the rhetoric of law and reason. However, we may ask whether Levi’s horrendous experiences can be contained and recounted in this objective narrative voice. How far can a survivor write about himself, as it were, from the outside? What makes If This Is a Man especially interesting are the points in Levi’s memoir when the language of law and reason proves no longer adequate to the task of narrating his experiences. Levi’s memoir relies heavily on poetry. Indeed, the passionate poem that precedes the prose of If This Is a Man reveals the author to be far from objective and detached. The last eight lines of Levi’s poem read: I commend these words to you. Carve them in your hearts At home, in the street, Going to bed, rising; Repeat them to your children, Or may your house fall apart, May illness impede you, May your children turn their faces from you.

What then of Levi the scientific investigator and the language of law and reason? What then of Levi’s humane restraint? References to the Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (1307–21) which pepper the text, serve a similar function in foregrounding poetry, passion, and a sense of rupture in Western culture. If This Is a Man also features nonscientific anger and frustration. When a religious Jew, Kuhn, thanks “God because he has not been chosen” for the “gas chamber,” the narrator is outraged: Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber the day after tomorrow and knows it . . . Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again? If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer. (Levi 1987, 135–136)

Again, Levi’s frustration is evident when he speaks of the inadequacy of language: “for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this

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offence, this demolition of man” (Levi 1987, 32). Further, an impersonal, scientific explanation of his experience fails to do justice to the horrendously isolated individuals whom Levi encounters in the camp: He told me his story, and today I have forgotten it, but it was certainly a sorrowful, cruel and moving story; because so are all our stories, hundreds of thousands of stories, all different and all full of a tragic disturbing necessity. (Levi 1987, 71–72)

One of the key problems confronting Levi is how to square such “tragic” experience with the collective Western vision of a scientific and rational culture. Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After (1946–1971). Charlotte Delbo’s trilogy Auschwitz and After consists of three volumes published between 1946 and 1971: None of Us Will Return (1946), Useless Knowledge (1970), and The Measure of Our Days (1971). They detail the experiences of Delbo and her French Resistance comrades both during and after their traumatic incarceration in Auschwitz. Unlike Wiesel and Levi, Delbo was a non-Jewish political prisoner. Therefore, her time at Auschwitz was not subject to the same degree of lethal threat. Indeed, measures of everyday existence continued to exist side-by-side with the extremities of the concentration camp world for Delbo, as for other political prisoners. It is this relationship between the everyday—for example, domesticity, friendship and romance—and the extreme—traumatic, unrepresentable horror—in Delbo’s trilogy that makes it so powerful. Further, such juxtapositions anticipate novels by the American children of survivors such as Thane Rosenbaum (1960–) and Melvin Jules Bukiet (1953–), the so-called “second generation” of Holocaust survivors. (“The ‘second generation’ is a term used by clinical psychologists and therapists for the children of Holocaust survivors who have in various ways been affected by the after-effects of their parents’ experience” (Sicher 2005, 133).) (See later.) Delbo’s project is not simply to document her time in Auschwitz. Her texts also bear witness to what Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub have called a “crisis in truth” (Felman and Laub 1992, 5–6). According to Felman and Laub, testimonial Holocaust “texts do not simply report facts but . . . encounter—and make us encounter—strangeness” (Felman and Laub 1992, 7). Delbo leads us into such an encounter with strangeness, but her texts also present a version of documentary realism in their reportage of everyday events. Indeed, Delbo’s testimony manages to perform a double function. It reveals how the radically strange world of Auschwitz has marked similarities with our everyday world; and, at the same time, it demonstrates that the familiar categories and frameworks of everyday life need to be estranged through a text that forces us to recognize that a complete witnessing by readers of the experiences of the Holocaust is impossible. Both functions correspond to an attempt to narrate the everyday nature of an event in Auschwitz in its historical context and in its extremity as traumatic experience. Delbo manages such a double task precisely by her recourse to literature, a place where historical facts can interact with intense personal memories. For example, Delbo disrupts her testimony of everyday reality in Auschwitz by introducing excessive objects such as teddy bears (Delbo 1995, 162–166) and love letters (Delbo 1995, 155–161). Her fragmented narratives are haunted by such unintegrated details. Indeed, details such as the teddy bear transform her personal testimony into a collective project. Holocaust literature becomes a recording of

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trauma in which the ruins of civilian life are assembled in order to disrupt any neat separation between the individual and history; then and now. “The Teddy Bear” episode begins, innocuously enough, with the description of a Christmas spent in the laboratory of Raisko, a satellite camp of Auschwitz. Though melancholy, this episode seems to represent one of those “moments of reprieve” (Levi 1981) during which privileged prisoners are almost able to obtain an experience of normality in the camps. The festivities reach their climax with the exchange of token gifts, one of which is a small teddy bear for a little girl. This most innocent of presents turns out to have a ghastly origin which, recounted by the narrator, shatters the apparent normality of the scene: I stared at the teddy bear. It was a terrifying sight. One morning, as we passed near the railway station on our way to the fields, our column was stopped by the arrival of a Jewish convoy. People were stepping down from the cattle cars, lining up on the platform in response to the shouted orders of the SS. Women and children first. In the front row, a little girl held her mother by the hand. She had kept her doll tightly squeezed against her body. This is how a doll, a teddy bear, arrives in Auschwitz. In the arms of a little girl who will leave her toy with her clothing, carefully folded, at the entrance to “the showers.” A prisoner from the “heaven commando,” as they called those who worked in the crematoria, had found it among the objects piled up in the showers’ antechamber and exchanged it for a couple of onions. (Delbo 1995, 166)

This short anecdote establishes a chain of contamination in the camps, connecting the murder of a Jewish girl with the celebration of a Christian holiday, the crematoria and machinery of death to the commerce of the concentration camp. The same process that facilitates Nazi genocide is shown here to enhance an ordinary celebration at the privileged end of the camp hierarchy. In its circulation from one little girl to another, the teddy bear is the bearer of a double heritage. Yet it is by no means clear that the Christmas party has been spoiled by the teddy’s origins. Only the narrator knows about the bear’s original owner—a fact that ensures the chain of evidence leading from murder to celebration will survive. Still, the party goes on despite the murder of the teddy bear’s previous owner. From the narrator’s chance witness comes this testimony that in turn contaminates the receiver—ultimately, the reader—with useless knowledge. Delbo’s elucidation of the teddy bear’s progress from arrival to circulation in the camp economy is typical of her use of metonymy. As a poet, she uses the teddy bear to represent something larger: the toy stands for the child who owned it and was murdered. Thus, Delbo reveals the relationship between the everyday world of work and play and the death factory reality of the concentration camp (Rothberg 2000, 152–153). Contexts and Issues. Since the late 1950s, many American novelists have dealt thematically with the Holocaust. Survivor experience has been conveyed, for example, in Philip Roth’s “Eli the Fanatic” (1959) and The Ghost Writer (1979); Edward Wallant’s The Pawnbroker (1961); Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies, A Love Story (1966); Saul Bellow’s Mr Sammler’s Planet (1972); William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice (1979); Cynthia Ozick’s Cannibal Galaxy (1983), The Messiah of Stockholm (1985), and The Shawl (1989); Louis Begley’s Wartime Lies (1991); Melvin Jules Bukiet’s Stories of an Imaginary Childhood (1992) and After (1996); Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces (1996); Thane Rosenbaum’s Elijah Visible (1996), Second

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Hand Smoke (1999), and The Golems of Gotham (2002); Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated (2002); and Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) and The Final Solution (2005). Between 1978 and 1991, Art Spiegelman drew a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1992). At least since the 1990s, these literary works have shared the perspective of “postmemory.” According to the critic Marianne Hirsch, who coined the term, postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated. (Hirsch 1997, 22)

We turn now to contemporary American texts that exemplify this phenomenon of “postmemory” Holocaust literature. Selected Authors Art Spiegelman (1948–). Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale shows just how “postmemory should reflect back on memory, revealing it as equally constructed, equally mediated by the processes of narration and imagination . . . Post-memory is anything but absent or evacuated: It is as full and as empty as memory itself” (Young 2000, 15). Indeed, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale is not so much about the Holocaust as about the survivor’s story and the artist-son’s recovery of it. In Spiegelman’s own words: “Maus is not what happened in the past, but rather what the son understands of the father’s story . . . It is an autobiographical history of my relationship with my father, a survivor of the death camps, cast with cartoon animals” (Young 2000, 15). As the Holocaust survivor Vladek recalls what happened to him at the hands of the Nazis, so his son Artie recalls what happened to him at the hands of his father and his father’s Holocaust narratives. Much as his father related his experiences to Artie in all their painful immediacy, so Artie tells his experiences of interviews with his father and the painful father-son relationship they reveal. Artie’s relationship with Vladek is intimately connected to a past that continues to overwhelm both of them. Thus, Spiegelman’s subtitle—A Survivor’s Tale—may well refer as much to Artie as to his father. In this, it is typical of second-generation American Holocaust literature. Maus is analyzed in several academic studies, most notably Michael Rothberg’s Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000) and James E. Young’s At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust (2000). Young stresses the surprising appropriateness of the graphic novel form to this genre, a “comixture” of words and images [which] generates a triangulation of meaning—a kind of three-dimensional narrative—in the movement among words, images, and the reader’s eye (Young 2000, 18). Similarly, Rothberg praises Maus for encouraging “everyone interested in the Holocaust to reflect on how we approach the events of the genocide and how we represent them to ourselves and to others” (Rothberg 2000, 2). Anne Michaels (1958–). Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces (1996) concerns the aftermath of the Holocaust. This Canadian novel explores precisely the ways that one remembers an event not experienced. The critic Henri Raczymow has characterized such recall as “memory shot through with holes” or absent memory (Raczymow 1994, 98). Michaels is interested less in the clarity and authenticity of testimony

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than her protagonists’ complex relationship to the traumatic past, and its fragmentary traces in the lives of those born too late to remember the Shoah (Hebrew for the Holocaust, literally meaning “catastrophe”). The novel is divided into two parts, the first of which concerns a Polish Jewish child (Jakob) who is brought to Greece by an archaeologist (Athos) and so survives the Holocaust. Jakob is haunted by the deaths he did not witness of his parents and sister (Bella). He becomes a poet in order to assert love and a faith in language after the Nazi violence visited upon his family. Part II shifts to Ben, the son of Holocaust survivors, who displays many of the problems experienced by second-generation children. After Jakob and his wife (Michaela) die, Ben travels to Greece in search of Jakob’s memoirs. When he finds a note indicating that Michaela was pregnant at her death, Ben takes on the mantle of surrogate child. Thus, the theme of reconciliation through language and love is reasserted. At the same time, the novel resists any comforting resolution of the past. “No act of violence is ever resolved,” Michaels writes. “When the one who can forgive can no longer speak, there is only silence” (Michaels 1997, 161). Fugitive Pieces has provoked much debate about the role of lyricism in portraying the Holocaust. Some reviewers have praised its project of bringing beauty into the equation of post-Holocaust survival. Robert Eaglestone notes the novel’s “fugue”-like quality and the exploration of “postmemory through recurring tropes and themes of . . . love, and music” (Eaglestone 2004, 117). By contrast, critics such as Adrienne Kertzer question Michaels’s aestheticization of the Shoah in a skeptical stance reminiscent of Adorno’s warning about squeezing “pleasure” from the “bodily pain of those who were beaten down by rifle butts” (Adorno 1993, 88). Melvin Jules Bukiet (1953–). Melvin Jules Bukiet draws on Jewish literary antecedents, including Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991), Bruno Schulz (1892–1942), and Isaac Babel (1894–1940), to create a phantasmagorical world in his collection Stories of an Imaginary Childhood (1992). Here, he reinvents a Jewish childhood between the wars in Proszowice, a Polish shtetl (Yiddish for “village”) unaware of the forthcoming Churban (another Hebrew term for the Holocaust, literally meaning “destruction”). Allusively, these stories alert the reader to the fate of the unnamed narrator. Seemingly innocuous descriptions evoke the Holocaust. For example the opening story, “The Virtuoso,” introduces an “iron-maiden-shaped box” that holds a violin but resembles an instrument of torture; melodies which “flew like a fireplace cinder to the winds;” and a failed musician’s reflection that “burning was too cruel a fate for the creator of beauty” (Bukiet 1992, 3, 6, 11). In “The Quilt and the Bicycle,” the 12-year-old narrator’s quilt displays key metonymical signs of the Shoah: “a yellow star and menorahs and bunnies and trains” (Bukiet 1992, 45). Thus, readers are reminded of the Jewish children forced to wear yellow Stars of David before being taken by train to their deaths in concentration camps. Such children were dehumanized by the Nazis, with anti-Semitism preparing the ground for such dehumanization. Here the narrator notes, “I was treated as the creature I had heard called ‘Jew’” (Bukiet 1992, 55). Further, Bukiet’s text yokes together Christianity and chimneys to subtly suggest that the common denominator in the Church and Auschwitz was anti-Semitism: “I passed the church spire and the Proszoworks smokestack; I forgot where I was going” (Bukiet 1992, 90–91). Following the success of Stories of an Imaginary Childhood, which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, Bukiet went on to write the Holocaust-related While the Messiah Tarries (1995), After (1996), and Signs and Wonders (1999).

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While the Messiah Tarries is mainly relevant for the light it sheds on those who record and archive Holocaust testimony. In “The Library of Moloch,” for instance, Bukiet suggests that his American protagonist, Dr. Arthur Ricardo, approaches Holocaust survivors in order to “preserve their suffering, to remit immortality in return for the chronicle of their woe” (Bukiet 1995, 185). Although this may be an ethical ambition, one of Ricardo’s interviewees implies that an unacknowledged victim-envy taints such American labors. After is a picaresque comedy that opens with Isaac Kaufman’s liberation from Aspenfeld, a sub-camp of Buchenwald. In tone, it could not differ more from the somber melancholia found, for example, in Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl or Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet. At times the dialogue is zanily reminiscent of a Marx Brothers sketch: “‘I like a girl with spirit.’ ‘I like a man who likes a girl with spirit.’ ‘I like spirits’”(Bukiet 1996, 124); whereas the comedic narrative recalls Mel Brooks’s satirical movie about Nazism, The Producers (1968): Then the War travelled east and Spain was forgotten in the twentieth-century totalitarian extravaganza, a roadshow complete with posters, banners, songs, salutes, and armies. Madrid was the introductory act; and Berlin was the main event. (Bukiet 1996: 130)

This is clearly the opposite of “Holocaust piety.” Rather than fixing its attention on the horrific and incomprehensible past, After sets its sights firmly on the future and the American Dream of creating oneself “anew” through enterprise and hard work (Bukiet 1996, 83). Only in this case, Isaac and his friends—principally, a forger, Marcus Morgenstern, and a devout scholar, Fishl—display such American virtues by making money on the black market. Still, After raises important issues. Notably, it asks what values can be redeemed in the aftermath of the Holocaust amidst anarchic free enterprise and amoral commercialism (“Screw the pain. Think of the money” (Bukiet 1996: 102).). In a sense, it reframes Primo Levi’s question of what constitutes humanity (If This Is a Man) in a post-Holocaust American context. What is morality and who is a Jew after the Holocaust? To some extent, a hopeful riposte is offered in Isaac’s mercy toward the son of a Nazi. Isaac decides not to kill the boy, so that he can leave Aspenfeld with “a perfect emptiness . . . create himself anew” (Bukiet 1996, 83). By eschewing ruthless murder, Isaac suggests a humane alternative to nihilism. Bukiet presents the Holocaust less directly in Signs and Wonders. This novel concerns a messianic sect that sweeps Germany on the eve of the new millennium. Considering themselves “New Jews,” the so-called Alefites victimize “old Jews” in an eerie echo of Kristallnacht (“the night of broken glass” on 9–10 November 1938, when much Jewish property was destroyed by German Nazis): The message was redemption. Absolved of all sins, the New Jews no longer had to mortify their own flesh. Instead, they struck outward, and the old Jews, that stubborn, stiffnecked people who refused to accede to the right world order, were the first to feel the sting of the lash of salvation. . . . Windows were smashed and fires were lit elsewhere in the city, wherever a store front had the gall or ill-fate to bear a Jewish surname. (Bukiet 1999, 263)

This is satire of the type found in After, though it appears to offer a bleaker vision of violence persisting beyond the Holocaust into the twenty-first century.

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Critical responses to Bukiet’s work have tended to be favorable. For example, in “Dares, Double-Dares, and the Jewish-American Writer,” Sanford Pinsker praises Bukiet’s “tone of deliberately disconcerting humor” (Pinsker 1997, 285). He maintains that Bukiet’s outrageous narratives serve to “re-humanize Holocaust survivors by allowing them to make jokes, make love, and, yes, connive for money just like other human beings” (Pinsker 1997, 285). However, other critics have found fault in the humor. Deborah H. Sussman, for instance, remarks of After that Bukiet fails to achieve “perfect pitch and perfect balance . . . to sustain the tension on the tightrope between hilarity and utter despair” (Sussman 1996). Thane Rosenbaum (1960–). Thane Rosenbaum has written a trilogy of critically acclaimed Holocaust literature: the short story collection Elijah Visible (1996) and the novels Second Hand Smoke (1999) and The Golems of Gotham (2002). The first of these won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for the best work of Jewish-American fiction, whereas Second Hand Smoke was a National Book Award Finalist. Like Spiegelman and Bukiet, Rosenbaum is a second-generation Holocaust writer: his mother was imprisoned in Maidanek and his father survived Bergen-Belsen. The stories in Elijah Visible are linked by their protagonist Adam Posner. Depicted in Miami, New York, and Atlantic City, Adam comes to represent a composite second-generation survivor in America. The collection opens with “Cattle Car Complex,” where a New York lawyer gets trapped inside an elevator. Adam’s psychological kinship with the Holocaust—“the legacy that flowed through his veins” (Rosenbaum 1996, 5)—leads him to imagine that he is in a cattle car on the train journey to a concentration camp. However, Adam is not a Holocaust survivor. Like other second generation writers, he is burdened by imagination of his parents’ horrors rather than memories of them. The fact that Adam cannot know the details of the Holocaust generally, and his parents’ experiences specifically, leads to a nebulous terror accompanying a failure of inter-generational understanding. Such failure is depicted, for example, in “The Pants in the Family,” where Adam recalls “an impenetrable secret—my parents speaking in code, changing the passwords repeatedly” (Rosenbaum 1996, 48). Only when his father makes some effort to explain the “silence” surrounding the Holocaust in their home is Adam able to make a connection with him (Rosenbaum 1996, 51). Connecting with the generation of Holocaust survivors is also a central theme of the title story. In “Elijah Visible,” Adam and his cousins receive a letter from Artur, a survivor cousin in Antwerp. Artur wants to meet his American relatives in order to recount their family’s history in Europe. Although Elijah does not arrive in this story—an arrival which in Judaism would presage the coming of the Messiah—by the conclusion Artur is “on his way” to offer peace and reconciliation to the second generation (Rosenbaum 1996, 103). As its title suggests, Second Hand Smoke explores the Holocaust legacy that survivors pass down to their children. The novel relates the life of Duncan Katz, a Nazi hunter for the Operation of Special Investigations, and the son of survivors. As a boy, he is deprived of parental love. Second Hand Smoke opens with the lines: “He was a child of trauma. Not of love, or happiness, or exceptional wealth. Just trauma. And nightmare too” (Rosenbaum 1999, 1). Rather than despair or melancholy, Duncan feels rage. His mother, Mila, encourages his belligerence. After the vulnerability she and her husband Yankee (nee Herschel) experienced in Europe, “what his mother really wanted was not a son, but a comic-book superhero” (Rosenbaum 1999, 32). (Michael Chabon also addresses the theme of a Jewish

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comic-book “Superman” in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Chabon 2000, 585). See later.) In order to calm his rage and find restored faith in a changed but viable Jewish continuity, Duncan visits his Zen-master brother Isaac in Warsaw. Isaac offers Duncan the vision to be “kind” to himself and connect without anger to “the murdered ones” of the Shoah (Rosenbaum 1999, 215). Surprisingly perhaps, Second Hand Smoke is also a very funny novel. It affirms post-Holocaust optimism through transgressive comedy. At one stage, Duncan and Isaac appear to be locked overnight in Birkenau by neo-Nazis, although this episode may be dreamt by Duncan. Isaac remarks, “I think what you’re talking about is what they call gallows humor, but gallows and gas chambers don’t make me laugh. After Auschwitz, nothing is funny” (Rosenbaum 1999, 209). Demonstrating the contrary, Second Hand Smoke asserts survival in the same breath as comedy. In this, it resembles Roberto Benigni’s Academy Award-winning concentration camp comedy Life is Beautiful (1997). The Golems of Gotham (2002) concludes Rosenbaum’s Holocaust trilogy by graphically detailing how the second generation is haunted by the Shoah: “the Holocaust is . . . not in the past” (Rosenbaum 2002, 42). Decades earlier, Philip Roth had imagined the survival of Anne Frank in The Ghost Writer (1979) and suggested in Reading Myself and Others (1975) that the Holocaust haunted “most reflective American Jews” (Roth 1975, 130). Rosenbaum rhetorically wonders whether “all writers of atrocity are essentially ghostwriters” (Rosenbaum 2002, 61). In The Golems of Gotham, such metaphorical haunting becomes literal as the ghosts of six Holocaust literature writers—Primo Levi, Jerzy Kosinski (1933–1991), Paul Celan (1920–1970), Jean Améry (1912–1978), Tadeusz Borowski (1922–1951), and Piotr Rawicz (1919–1982)—are summoned as golems to contemporary New York by Ariel, the granddaughter of survivors. Like her father’s parents, who also return as golems, all six writers committed suicide after surviving the Shoah. Once in New York, the golems attack anything associated with the Holocaust, including tattoos, trains, and showers. As a result, Gotham becomes “suffused with warmth and connection” (Rosenbaum 2002, 103). Ironically perhaps, the golems also express their horror at the humor of Life is Beautiful—“a movie made by an Italian clown in which Auschwitz was depicted as no more threatening than a circus”—and the “good-guy-triumphs-over-bad-guy sanctimony” of Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust movie Schindler’s List (1993) (Rosenbaum 2002, 292–293). Unlike this funny and frequently sanctimonious novel, such movies apparently trivialize the Shoah. Critical reception of Rosenbaum’s novels has been enthusiastic. Reviewing Second Hand Smoke in the New York Times Book Review, Richard Lourie remarked: The overheated atmosphere of the novel reminds one of Isaac Babel’s Tales of Odessa . . . and the film Life is Beautiful. But in a style very much his own Rosenbaum depicts the painful comedy of being a regular American kid raised to be an angel of retribution (Lourie 1999, 7).

Sanford Pinsker, the reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, lauded Second Hand Smoke as “superb, if deeply disturbing, writing” (Pinsker 1999). Academic studies of American Holocaust writers by Alan Berger (Children of Job: American Second-

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Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust (1997)) and Andrew Furman (Contemporary Jewish-American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: The Return of the Exiled (2000)) have also praised Rosenbaum’s contribution to this genre. Jonathan Safran Foer (1977–). Like The Golems of Gotham, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated (2002) might be described as a postmodern novel insofar as it foregrounds the process of writing rather than the events of the Holocaust. Moreover, it concerns the grandchildren of survivors and bystanders, and is thus also a third-generation Holocaust novel (Eaglestone 2004, 128). One strand of the narrative features the story of Trachimbrod, a shtetl on the Ukrainian-Polish border. The author of these sections is introduced as “Jonathan Safran Foer,” a young American-Jewish writer who is visiting the Ukraine to explore the history and remnants of the community that his grandfather escaped. The story begins in 1791 and continues until 1942 when “1204 Trachimbroders [are] killed at the Hand of German Fascism” (Foer 2002, 189). Foer’s postmodern style focuses on dreams and quirky, marginal moments, mixing comedy, satire, and tragedy. The second strand of the novel is narrated by Alexander Perchov, son of the Ukrainian owner of “Heritage Touring,” which is taking “Foer” in search of Trachimbrod. Alex speaks a self-conscious English of endearing solecisms that foregrounds the postmodern constructedness of this text; for example I undertaked to input the things you counselled me to, and I fatigued the thesaurus you presented me, as you counselled me to, when my words appeared too petite, or not befitting. (Foer 2002: 23)

Together “Foer,” Alex, and his grandfather drive to a house that is all that remains of Trachimbrod. Here the “illumination” occurs, when the grandfather’s involvement in the massacre at Trachimbrod is revealed. Threatened with execution, he betrayed his Jewish best friend to the Nazis. Both these strands form part of an epistolary novel, with monthly letters from Alex to “Jonathan” commenting on the “heritage tour” and the Ukrainian-Jewish past. Foer appears to offer some form of reconciliation, so far as this is possible, between the grandchildren of survivors and bystanders. He optimistically suggests that they share “the same story . . . I am Alex and you are you, and that I am you and you are me? Do you not comprehend that we can bring each other safety and peace? (Foer 2002, 214). Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Francine Prose characterized “this wonderful first novel” as “endearing, accomplished and (to quote Alex one last time) definitely premium.” The “assured, hilarious prose,” she continued, manages to carry “themes so weighty that any one of them would be enough to give considerable heft to an ordinary novel” (Prose 2002, 8). Henry Hitchings, the reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, was similarly impressed. He noted The opening chapters of Jonathan Safran Foer’s fictional debut are so vibrant and playful that they succeed in calling to mind not only Philip Roth and Isaac Bashevis Singer, but also James Joyce, Laurence Sterne and Milan Kundera (Hitchings 2002, 21).

However, Hitchings also found Foer’s “authorial prestidigitation” occasionally “irritating” and bearing some marks of “a flashy apprentice piece” (Hitchings 2002, 21).

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In 2005, Everything is Illuminated became a film directed by Liev Schreiber, starring Eugene Hutz as Alex and Elijah Wood as “Jonathan Safran Foer.” Michael Chabon (1963–). Both The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) and The Final Solution (2005) are Holocaust novels with a difference. The former relates the lives of two comic-book artists, one of whom, Josef Kavalier, is a refugee from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. The latter concerns a mute young refugee from Nazi Germany, his parrot, and a plot in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes detective stories. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It begins in 1939 as Josef escapes Prague by hiding in the coffin that holds the clay of the golem, Rabbi Loew’s seventeenth-century superhero created to protect the Jewish ghetto of the city. Much as the golem becomes the means for Josef’s literal escape to America, comic-books subsequently facilitate his imaginary escape from the European past. Josef and his American cousin Sam are clearly based on Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, the Jewish creators of Superman. As Sam remarks What, they’re all Jewish superheroes. Superman, you don’t think he’s Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself. (Chabon 2000, 585)

Yet fantasy figures of power cannot save Josef’s family from murder at the hands of Nazis. Kavalier and Clay’s comic-book hero “The Escapist” frees no European Jews from Auschwitz. Near the end of the novel, Josef is working on a comic book that resembles Spiegelman’s Maus insofar as it offers a narrative response to the Holocaust in a traditionally unserious medium. Ultimately, his 2,256-page graphic novel The Golem (like Rosenbaum’s The Golems of Gotham) signifies “a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation” (Chabon 2000, 582). Perhaps like all art, Josef’s story is “the voicing of a vain wish, when you got down to it, to escape” (Chabon 2000, 582). The title of The Final Solution calls to mind the Nazi decision at the Wannsee Conference to exterminate all the Jews (Roseman 2003) as well as a Sherlock Holmes short story called “The Final Problem” (Doyle 1984, 469–480). Startlingly, Chabon has produced a homage to Sherlock Holmes that alludes to the Holocaust. The Final Solution is set in 1944, when a mute German-Jewish boy, Linus Steinman, arrives in Sussex with a talking parrot, Bruno. He is taken into care by a retired Sherlock Holmes, referred to only as the “old man.” The parrot, meanwhile, repeats a list of numbers. When it is stolen, the “old man” sets off for London to solve the mystery of the numbers and the theft. However, this particular mystery has no “final solution.” Though the numbers may “represent numbered Swiss bank accounts,” this is by no means certain (Chabon 2005, 125). Consequently, the “old man” revises his faith in “final” solutions and comes to “perhaps, conclude” that meaning dwelled solely in the mind of the analyst. That it was the insoluble problems—the false leads and the cold cases—that reflected the true nature of things. That all the significance and pattern had no more intricate sense than the chatter of an African grey parrot. (Chabon 2005, 125)

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This is the opposite of Nazi ideology, and rounds off a novella written in the “spirit of play and of experimentation” that is central to both “storytelling” and freedom (Chabon 2005, 8). Critics have generally been impressed by Chabon’s Holocaust novels. Several have lauded Kavalier & Clay for its “big historical relevance without strain” (Maslin 2000) and even judged it a candidate for the title of “Great American Novel.” On the other hand, a Commentary review by John Podhoretz criticized Chabon’s use of the golem as “a symbol of the murdered European diaspora,” and the inappropriate mysticism suggested by such a symbol (Podhoretz 2001). The Final Solution has also won plaudits. Sam Thompson, writing in The Guardian, had the following remarks: The novella gives us the delights of suspense and resolution, puzzle and solution, but the vast crime that hovers behind the story is a mystery too great for even Holmes to make sense of. (Thompson 2005)

Andrew Lewis Conn, the reviewer for The Village Voice, was enthusiastic: At once an ingenious, fully imagined work, an expert piece of literary ventriloquism, and a mash note to the beloved boys’ tales of Chabon’s youth, The Final Solution is a major minor work that will come to be seen as a hinge piece in the development of Chabon’s art. (Conn 2004)

However, Marco Roth in the Times Literary Supplement was uncomfortable with the “grandiosity and poor taste” of the title and concluded that The Final Solution was little more than “a lightweight caprice” (Roth 2005, 22). Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. Commitment. In Notes to Literature, II. Rolf Tiedemann, ed., translated by Shierry Weber Nicholson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Berger, Alan. Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997. Bukiet, Melvin Jules. Stories of an Imaginary Childhood. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992. ———. While the Messiah Tarries. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995. ———. After. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. ———. Signs and Wonders. New York: Picador, 1999. Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. London: Fourth Estate, 2000. ———. The Final Solution. London: HarperCollins, 2005. Conn, Andrew Lewis. What Up [sic], Holmes? The Village Voice, 9 November 2004. Delbo, Charlotte. Auschwitz and After. London: Yale University Press, 1995. DeLillo, Don. White Noise. London: Picador, 1985. Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? London: Orion, 1968. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Penguin Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. Eaglestone, Robert. The Holocaust and the Postmodern. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. London: Routledge, 1992. Foer, Jonathan Safran. Everything is Illuminated. London: Penguin, 2003.

HOLOCAUST LITERATURE Furman, Andrew. Contemporary Jewish-American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: The Return of the Exiled. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photographs, Narrative and Postmemory. London: Harvard University Press, 1997. Hitchings, Henry. Elliptical Ideolects. Times Literary Supplement, 14 June 2002. Kertzer, Adrienne. Fugitive Pieces: Listening as a Holocaust Survivor’s Child. English Studies in Canada 26, 22 (22) (2000): 193–217. Kremer, Lillian, ed. Holocaust Literature. New York: Routledge, 2003. Langer, Lawrence. The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975. ———, ed. Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Levi, Primo. Moments of Reprieve. London: Abacus, 1981. ———. If This is a Man/ The Truce. London: Abacus, 1987. Lourie, Richard. Rev. of Second Hand Smoke, by Thane Rosenbaum. New York Time Book Review 1999. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/11/reviews/990411.11louriet. html?_r=1&oref=slogin Malamud, Bernard. The Fixer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. Maslin, Janet. A Life and Death Story Set in Comic Book Land. New York Times, 21 September 2000. Michaels, Anne. Fugitive Pieces. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. Ozick, Cynthia. Primo Levi’s Suicide Note. In Metaphor and Memory. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. Pinsker, Sanford. Dares, Double-Dares, and the Jewish-American Writer. Prairie Schooner 71 (1) (1997): 278–285. ———. Review of Second Hand Smoke. Wall Street Journal: W10, 9 April 1999. Podhoretz, John. Escapists. Commentary 111 (6) (2001): 68–72. Prose, Francine. Back in the Totally Awesome U.S.S.R. New York Times Book Review, 14 April 2002. Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. 1973. New York: Penguin, 1987. Raczymow, Henri. Memory Shot through with Holes. Yale French Studies 85 (1994): 98–105. Rose, Gillian. Mourning Becomes the Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Rosenbaum, Thane. Elijah Visible. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996. ———. Second Hand Smoke. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999. ———. The Golems of Gotham. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. Roth, Marco. Pass the Aspergillum. Times Literary Supplement, 28 January 2005: 22. Roth, Philip. Reading Myself and Others. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1975. ———. The Ghost Writer. London: Jonathan Cape, 1979. Rothberg, Michael. Traumatic Realism. London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Sammon, Paul M. Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner. London: Orion, 1996. Schiff, Hilda, ed. Holocaust Poetry. London: HarperCollins, 1995. Sicher, Efraim. The Holocaust Novel. London: Routledge, 2005. Steiner, George. Language and Silence: Essays 1958–1966. London: Faber, 1967. Sussman, Deborah H. From Horror to Humor: Review of After. Washington Post C2, 21 Nov. 1996. Thompson, Sam. Lost in the Broken World. The Guardian, 26 Feb. 2005. Wiesel, Elie. A Plea for the Dead. In Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. ———. Night. London: Penguin, 1981. ———. Does the Holocaust Lie Beyond the Reach of Art? New York Times, 17 April 1983: sec 2, p. 1. ———. The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration. In Dimensions of the Holocaust. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990.

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Further Reading Berger, Alan. Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997; Budick, Emily Miller. The Holocaust in the Jewish American Literary Imagination. In The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature, edited by Michael P. Kramer and Hana Wirth-Nesher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; Eaglestone, Robert. The Holocaust and the Postmodern. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; LaCapra, Dominic. Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994; Langer, Lawrence. The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975; Langer, Lawrence. Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995; Langer, Lawrence. Preempting the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998; Rothberg, Michael. Traumatic Realism. London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000; Schiff, Hilda, ed. Holocaust Poetry. London: HarperCollins, 1995; Sicher, Efraim. The Holocaust Novel. London: Routledge, 2005; Vice, Sue. Holocaust Fiction. London: Routledge, 2000; Wollaston, Isabel. A War Against Memory? London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1996; Young, James E. At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. London: Yale University Press, 2000.

PETER LAWSON

HUMOR Definition. Defining humor has proven slippery over the centuries, but that difficulty has not stopped philosophers, scholars, and critics from trying, in a long line from Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) to Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) to more current thinkers. A simple dictionary definition—“the quality of being amusing or comic”—might suffice as a beginning, but even such a simple definition depends on two other slippery terms: “amusing” and “comic.” The dictionary further complicates matters by referring not to a quality one can perceive, but to a “state of mind; mood; disposition” (“Humor” 1982). Add the equally slippery term “literary” to the mix, and one quickly sees the trouble that lies in definition. A common sense definition might call literary humor writing intended to amuse or to provoke laughter, writing focused on the comic as opposed to the serious. Such a loose definition embraces a multitude of forms, from slapstick to light verse to satire. In the end, “humor” is as variable as each individual because all people do not laugh at the same things; what Bill finds humorous might mortally offend Mary, and vice versa. Three main theories of humor, or more properly, theories of laughter, have emerged over time: the superiority theory, the relief theory, and the incongruity theory. Each attempts to explain why we laugh and thus explain what we perceive as humorous and why. The superiority theory, associated most closely with Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who used ideas dating back to Plato (427–347 B.C.E.) and Aristotle, states that we find humor in the perception that we are superior to others. As Hobbes writes, “the passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly” (qtd. in Morreal 1987, 20). Such a theory explains why we laugh at a person slipping on a banana peel or why we

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laugh at ourselves when we think back to some stupid act we performed in the past. But as many have shown, such a theory cannot account for all humorous situations, as Hobbes claimed. The relief theory takes two general forms, the first from Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), who saw laughter as a release of nervous energy, release that occurs after we build up energy because of the tension of a situation or joke and then release the energy when we recognize that the situation is comic rather than serious—thus bringing about relief. To return to the slipping on a banana peel example, we build up nervous tension as we think the person is in dire trouble, and then we release that energy when we recognize that the person is not in any real danger. Freud used Spencer’s ideas to postulate a second, more psychological, form of relief: psychic relief. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), Freud saw laughter arising from a release of repressed desires, emotions, and thoughts. In this way, Freud saw jokes (and other forms of humor) as ways to reveal the unconscious, just as he had done earlier for dreams. Like the superiority theory, the relief theory can explain much humor, but certainly not all. The last theory, the incongruity theory, can again be traced back to Aristotle but is most associated with Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). In its simplest form, we may say that laughter arises from our sudden perception of a mismatch between what we expect in our usually ordered world and the incongruity we perceive when that order is overturned. In Kant’s terms, “Laughter is an affectation arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing” (qtd. in Morreal 1987, 47). The incongruity theory proves more satisfactory than the other theories in explaining most humor: it explains the banana peel situation, as well as jokes, riddles, and puns. We laugh at a joke because it sets up an expectation, based on our past experience, and then suddenly reverses that expectation with an incongruous and well-timed punch line (hence the importance of “sudden recognition of incongruity” in the definition). Although the incongruity theory does not explain all laughter, it does explain much humor and can serve as a good way for us to distinguish and identify literary humor. Actually, all three theories, taken together, are useful in helping us define and understand literary humor. These theories from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries are being supplemented by more recent scientific research into the brain and cognitive function, and the twenty-first century will surely bring greater understanding of what causes laughter and thus help explain what we perceive as humorous. But to turn to a much older definition, Horace’s ideas about art can be used in formulating a definition of literary humor. The purpose of art, Horace (65–8 B.C.E.) wrote in “The Art of Poetry,” is “to delight and instruct” (Richter 2007, 91), and thinking of literary humor in these terms will be helpful. Surely literary humor delights, but it can also, to varying extents, instruct. For example, Mark Twain (1835–1910) claimed in a letter that his humor will last because, as he says, he has “always preached” (Twain 1906, 202). Actually, much of his humor is intended merely “to delight,” but his “preaching,” or “instructing,” truly is one of the reasons he has endured. American literary humor certainly contains much of both, one of the reasons it has always been so important, and one of the reasons it remains so.

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Literary humor can be found in all the major literary genres: fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction. Satire and parody are important characteristics of much literary humor, with examples in all the previously mentioned genres. History. American literary humor can be traced back to the beginnings of European settlement in the New World, and even before that if we look to the oral tradition of Native American trickster tales, which used humor to delight and instruct. Among the English settlers, John Smith (1580–1631) used humor, consciously or unconsciously, to recount his adventures and to advertise the New World; Thomas Morton (c. 1579–1647) used humor as a weapon against his Puritan tormentors; William Byrd (1674–1744) used humor in both his public and secret histories of the dividing line between Virginia and North Carolina. But a convenient starting point for a history of American humor would be Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), most notably Poor Richard’s Almanac, which first appeared in 1773. Franklin’s creation of comic personas such as Silence Dogood and Poor Richard put a particularly American stamp on a long line of English humor, and his aphorisms used humor to define American characteristics, humor whose delight helps deliver the moral, capitalistic instruction that was to help found the new country. Franklin’s “Rules by Which a Great Empire May be Reduced to a Small One” (1773) is one of the first examples of humorous political satire, an important kind of American literature that continues today. Humor was an essential ingredient in the work of Washington Irving (1783–1859), the first American literary artist to be fully recognized by the English literati. The popularity of his Knickerbocker Tales and The Sketch Book (1819–20) owed as much to their humor as to their borrowing from a European folktale tradition. We can see the beginnings of the American short story in such comic tales as “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” From the start, American literature was founded on a firm bed of humor. The canonical writers of the American Renaissance, although more noted for their serious, philosophical ideas, often employed humor at the heart of their works. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) and Herman Melville (1819–1891) are comic writers despite their darker themes; Edgar Allan Poe’s (1809–1849) humor shines through in some of his most macabre tales; and Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), with a Yankee persona of dour stoicism, was an inveterate punster and wit. But much of American humor in the nineteenth century appeared in newspapers and periodicals, and much of it was regionally localized. In New England, Down East humor produced such characters as Jack Downing, Sam Slick, Widow Bedott, and Mrs. Partington in tales and sketches that used dialect and local color to comment satirically on Jacksonian democracy, the Mexican War, and other political matters, but even more importantly they served to cement for the American consciousness a vision of New England. In what were then the frontier regions of the young country, Southwestern humor also used dialect and local color, less for overt political commentary and more for an exploration of the comic possibilities inherent in the clash between the educated and the untutored. The chief Southwestern humorists were Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (1790–1870), Georgia Scenes (1835); Joseph G. Baldwin (1815–1863), The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (1853); Johnson J. Hooper (1815–1863), Some Adventures of Simon Suggs (1845); Thomas Bangs Thorpe (1815–1878), “The Big Bear of Arkansas” (1854); and George Washington Harris (1814–1869), Sut Lovingood (1867). Common in many of these tales and sketches

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is the use of a frame narrative, with an educated, genteel narrator introducing an uneducated narrator who recounts his story in often raw vernacular language. The stories of the Southwestern humorists capture for us a part of the nation in the midst of transformation, with rollicking and often violent humor that greatly influenced Mark Twain later in the century and William Faulkner (1897–1962) in the next. After the Civil War, the Literary Comedians were the most important American humorists. Also called the “Phunny Phellows” for their use of comic misspelling, the Literary Comedians included Petrolem V. Nasby (1833–1888), Orpheus C. Kerr (1836–1901), Josh Billings (1818–1885), Artemus Ward (1834–1867), and Mark Twain. Almost always under pseudonyms, they wrote newspaper and magazine sketches, published books, and traveled the country giving lectures. They were a nineteenth-century version of standup comedians, although their strong tie to printed humor made them different from what we think of today as standup comedy. Another important development in the post-Civil War era was local color, an attempt in various regions of the country to capture local speech and manners, almost always through humor. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) and Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909) in New England, Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908) in the south, and Bret Harte (1836–1902) and Mark Twain in the west are examples of writers who used humor to capture and preserve for the nation pockets of local national life that were undergoing rapid change. The local colorists were influential in the rise of American literary realism, the dominant literary movement of the second half of the nineteenth century. In many ways, Mark Twain was the culmination of the historical trends of nineteenth-century American humor. An heir of the Southwestern tradition and a “member” of the Literary Comedians and the local colorists, he burst on the national scene with “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” in 1865, and then solidified his fame with a bestseller that lampooned travel books and helped change travel for Americans, The Innocents Abroad (1869). Twain used humor in nearly everything he wrote, but he also used humor as a device and a weapon to tackle serious issues such as racism, hypocrisy, and colonialism. Even as he claimed for himself an iconic position as America’s beloved cracker-barrel philosopher and humorist, he increasingly turned his sardonic wit to the darker side of human behavior. His stature grew even more after his death in 1910, with his masterpiece Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) outgrowing its boy-book status to become recognized as one of the great works of American (and world) literature. Mark Twain has long claimed the title of America’s greatest comic writer and indeed used his humor to be counted among the great writers of any kind. In the twentieth century, humor became increasingly urban as the population shifted to cities. Newspaper columns and magazines were the major sites for humor. Finley Peter Dunne (1867–1936), George Eugene Field (1850–1895), Damon Runyon (1884–1946), H.L. Mencken (1880–1956), Will Rogers (1879–1935), and Ring Lardner (1885–1933) were first known to a national reading audience from their newspaper columns. But perhaps the central event for American humor in the first half of the century was the founding of The New Yorker in 1925. The writers associated with the Algonquin Roundtable—Dorothy Parker (1893–1967), George S. Kaufman (1889–1961), Robert Benchley (1889–1945), and Alexander Woolcott (1887–1943)—were soon all writing for the new sophisticated humor magazine, as well as S.J. Perelman (1904–1979) and James Thurber (1894–1961). The fiction,

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BLACK HUMOR In the post–World War II era, the most important trend in American humor was what has been labeled (or mis-labeled) “black humor.” Referring not to race but to a bleak existentialist, post-apocalyptic vision, black humor describes an impulse to laugh at that which should more properly invoke tears or horror. As Brom Weber notes, “Black humor disturbs because it is not necessarily nor always light-hearted funny, amusing, laughter-arousing. Furthermore, black humor seems to have little respect for the values and patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior that have kept Anglo-American culture stable and effective, have provided a basis of equilibrium for society and the individual” (Weber 1973, 362). A list of so-called “black humorists” shows how loose the term is: John Barth (1930–), Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922–2007),Thomas Berger (1924–), Joseph Heller (1923–1999),Thomas Pynchon (1937–), J.P. Donleavy (1926–), Ken Kesey (1935–2001), William Gaddis (1922–1998),Terry Southern (1924–1995), and Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977).

short sketches, and above all the cartoons of The New Yorker were a driving force in American humor until well after World War II. Humor was also central to the important novelists of the first half of the century. F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and John Steinbeck (1902–1968), although certainly not considered “humorists,” nonetheless all possessed great comic gifts. William Faulkner is clearly an heir of the Southwestern humor that pervaded his region in the previous century, with humor an integral part of his best work, including The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and The Hamlet (1940). Southern writers such as Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) and Eudora Welty (1909-2001) effectively used humor, often combined with a sense of the grotesque and with what has been called “Southern gothic,” in their short stories and novels. Just as black humor was a response to the political realities of the postwar world, other dominant developments in humorous fiction arose from the new world order that began in 1945. In response to political movements involving ethnicity, race, and gender, numerous comic writers explored their group identities and emerged as major voices. After the war, Jewish writers gained a national readership far beyond what they had ever achieved before in America, and the most notable—Saul Bellow (1915–2005), Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Bernard Malamud (1914–1986), and Philip Roth (1933–)—all used humor as a central element in their work to explore the Jewish experience in a predominantly Christian culture. The Civil Rights Movement opened white society to African Americans, and African American writers Ralph Ellison (1913–1994), James Baldwin (1924–1987), Ishmael Reed (1938–), Alice Walker (1944–), Toni Morrison (1931–), Rita Mae Brown (1944–), and Toni Cade Bambara (1939–1995) used humor as an artistic and political tool, the emergence of what could properly be called “black humor.” Similarly, from the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s emerged many female comic writers: Judith Viorst (1931–), Nora Ephron (1941–), Gail Parent (1940–), Erica Jong (1942–), and Fran Lebowitz (1950–), to name only a few. The rise of various ethnic and subgroup literatures—Asian American, Latino American, Native American, and gay—also brought forth writers who used humor to explore the conflicts within their groups and with the dominant culture. In Cracking Up, Paul Lewis poses

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several conflicted comic scenarios that help us understand recent developments in humor: The paradox of American humor since 1980 appears in just such moments of conflict or perplexity: during years in which the country has been drawn together in ever larger audiences via new technologies of communication, the jokes we’ve told and our responses to them suggest that we are deeply divided. We think about humor in contradictory ways. Split into subgroups, we are delighted and outraged by the comic treatment of different ideas. (Lewis 2006, 2)

In the first half of the twentieth century, pioneering humor scholars such as Constance Rourke and Walter Blair posited unifying concepts like “the American comic spirit”; as we move into the twenty-first century, we had best make that “spirit” plural. The groupings in this survey are somewhat arbitrary, and they omit perhaps the greatest comic novel of the twentieth century, J.D. Salinger’s (1919–) The Catcher in the Rye (1951). They also focus almost exclusively on fiction, overlooking the rich comic history of American poetry, drama, and nonfiction. The sheer breadth of the field makes cogent and comprehensive summary nearly impossible, but that breadth is testimony to the enduring richness of the comic imagination in America. The comic spirit lies deep in the heart of the American experience, a nation that has always joked about itself, a nation that has produced a long line of artists who use humor not just to delight, but also to instruct; when the ideals of a nation do not match up with its practices, as is so often the case, the weapon of choice, more often than lofty speeches, is the pomposity-deflating joke, the hypocrisy-exposing satire. In an introduction to a study of American humor, Nancy A. Walker makes this concluding point: While the concept of a single “national character” has been wisely abandoned, it is nonetheless true that certain widely shared values, such as the freedoms put forth in the Bill of Rights, stand in contrast to our many differences, and this leads to a final conclusion about American humor: the paradox that while humor declares nothing to be sacred, Americans have used it to press for those ideals of equality, opportunity, and freedom that often seem to gleam elusively in the distance. (Walker 1998, 64)

Or as Mark Twain wrote near the end of his career, “Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand” (Twain 1900, 166). Context and Issues. The year 2000 (or more properly by the calendar, 2001) ushered in a new millennium, which in itself would be an auspicious marker, a cusp in time sure to bring recognition and reflection. But the events of September 11, 2001, overshadow and color contemporary times as markedly as the events of December 7, 1941, marked an earlier era. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon stopped humor for a time, just as the planes all over America were grounded until the threat was understood. A comic mainstay like The David Letterman Show became for a time a solemn gathering of stunned witnesses; Saturday Night Live began its first show after the attacks with a permission-granting request from then-New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani: “It’s time to be funny again.” Although respectfully silent for a time, American humor resurged in the troubled aftermath of 9/11, with humor taking a stronger political edge than it had for many years. The contested Bush presidency, decided not by American voters but by a 5-4 vote of

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the Supreme Court, presided over a deeply divided nation, and humor has proven to be both a weapon and comfort in troubled times. As the war in Iraq moved from an apparently swift victory to a protracted quagmire, world events and America’s unpopularity in the world have been reflected and sharpened in the nation’s literary humor of the first decade of a new century. In the contest for American minds that has followed 9/11, humor has been used by both sides to make their arguments. Some who support Bush’s version of a war on terror have often used ridicule to make their points. Those who oppose Bush’s handling of the war and its aftermath have used polemic, but they have also effectively used humor as a weapon. The rise of sharpened political humor has mirrored the split in American politics and society. The other strains that have dominated American humor in the last years of the twentieth century have also remained: racial, ethnic, and gender humor, as well as the continuing presence of post-modernism, a humor that calls attention to itself as humor. Perhaps above all else, the persistence of humor in a troubled and divided time, rather than merely reflecting contemporary issues, also shows something about the human spirit. As humans, we need to laugh, to be amused, even if that laughter is something bitter and sardonic. In its own way, as it has done in other dark passages of history, American humor has helped us survive. Trends and Themes. Literary humor has always been used, as Horace said of art in general, to delight and instruct; in most eras, humor focuses more on amusement than teaching. But events since 2000 have caused a shift in American humor: although the commitment to amusement remains strong, much recent humor has taken on a more didactic and politically engaged edge. The most important trend in American literary humor since 2000 has been the resurgence of political humor. In many ways, humor had become, by the end of the twentieth century, largely disengaged from the events of the world. The black humor of the 1950s and 1960s, which rebelled against the horrors of the Holocaust and impending nuclear disaster, had given way to a humor that more often turned on its own existence, a postmodern, cynical, detached humor about humor. The stunning political events of the new millennium partially recalled humor to its didactic uses, although the comic force can never be wholly contained within the serious. Although the world situation caused this general shift in both fictional and non-fictional humor, many of the trends of the last quarter century continued, including the changes in ethnic, gender, and sexual orientation issues. In perhaps a counter-trend, a turning in toward the self and the world, the memoir has become increasingly important in the American literary scene, with humor playing a central role in some of the most popular recent autobiographical works. Finally, humor for the sake of amusement (or even escapism) has remained strong, partly perhaps in reaction to the serious turn of our age but mainly because that has always been the case with the comic spirit. Reception. Serious critical study of American humor began in the 1930s, with pioneering scholars Constance Rourke (1885–1941) and Walter Blair (1900–1992). Rourke’s American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931) laid the groundwork analysis of American humor, followed later in the decade by Blair’s Native American Humor (1937). Both Rourke and Blair argued that America’s humor tradition was evidence of a “national comic spirit”—although their studies excluded many Americans, focusing almost exclusively on the work of white males.

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As the literary canon was opened to include works by women, African Americans, and other ethnicities and nationalities, humor studies began to address works that had been forgotten or ignored. One highly influential study was Nancy Walker, The Tradition of Women’s Humor in America (1984), which helped reclaim women’s status in the humor tradition. Pioneering studies of African American humor include Roger Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle (1964) and William Schecter, The History of Negro Humor in America (1970). Those interested in keeping up with developing trends in American humor should consult the annual overview article “Year’s Work in American Humor Studies” by Judith Yaross Lee in the academic journal Studies in American Humor. Selected Authors. A good place to begin a survey of humorous literature since 2000 is Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000). Set in 1998, the novel captures the moment in America when the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal broke, not by focusing on the president’s misdeeds but on a classics professor resigning from his job for saying the word “spooks” in class. Ironies abound in this comic tale that ultimately turns tragic: the professor intends no racism with his use of the term, not even knowing that the missing students he is referring to are black, and the professor, it turns out, is himself black, having spent most of his life passing as Jewish. The novel is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman and is the eighth of Roth’s Zuckerman novels. The Human Stain shows academe (and America) confronted with issues of multiculturalism, sexism, classism, and political correctness, issues that dominated American culture in the 1990s and continued into the new century. The Human Stain completes a recent trilogy of Zuckerman novels, the first two works being American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998). Roth’s burst of creativity late in a career that has already been monumental cements his position as one of the great comic writers of the last half century. Thomas Berger (1924–) is best known for his comic novel Little Big Man (1964), but like Roth, he continues to publish into the new century. His novel Adventures of the Artificial Woman (2004), an updating of the Pygmalion myth, contains witty, dark comedy. Another novelist with a large body of comic work, John Irving (1942–), published The Fourth Hand in 2001. Like Irving’s best and most-read novels, The World According to Garp (1978) and The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), The Fourth Hand revolves around macabre, grotesque events: a man’s loss of his left hand and his subsequent hand transplant. The novel was widely praised for its satire of TV news. Jane Smiley’s (1949–) Good Faith (2003), further establishes her status as the most important and prolific comic woman novelist. Smiley won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction with A Thousand Acres (1991), and her novel Moo (1995) is a comic parody of academia. In Good Faith, she examines the real estate boom of the 1980s, with an ethical small-town real estate agent lured into a Faustian bargain of quick riches and sleazy dealings. In Ten Days in the Hills (2007), she uses Boccaccio’s Decameron as a literary subtext, with a group of Hollywood actors and executives telling stories (many of them luridly sexual) in the Hollywood Hills. The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center are imaginatively prefigured by Don DeLillo (1936–) in Cosmopolis (2003). DeLillo has used dark, disturbing humor in important works such as White Noise (1985) and Underworld (1997); in Cosmopolis, he traces one day in 2000, a limousine ride that moves from the comic to the apocalyptic. His novel catches the end of one era—the self-indulgent 1990s—from the perspective of post-9/11 America.

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The most direct literary influence of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush presidency, and the Iraq war has been an increase in political humor, particularly from those opposed to Bush and his policies. Al Franken (1951–) had a big bestseller with Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot (1996), success continued with Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them (2003), a scathingly humorous attack on George Bush, Dick Cheney, and conservative media commentators Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter, among others. His most recent book is The Truth: With Jokes (2005). Franken is now running for the U.S. Senate in his native Minnesota, a state that could move from electing a pro wrestler as governor to a Saturday Night Live writer/comedian as senator. Television has also given a comedy/satiric political pulpit to Bill Maher (1956–) and Jon Stewart (1956–), both of whom have published books of political humor and commentary since 2000. Maher, who lost a television job for comments he made about the 9/11 hijackers in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, a time when any remarks about the events were closely scrutinized, published When You Ride Alone, You Ride With Bin Laden (2002), a wry updating of World War II propaganda posters, and then Keep the Statue of Liberty Closed: The New Rules (2004) and New Rules: Polite Musings from a Timid Observer (2005). Jon Stewart’s America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction (2004), a mock high school history textbook, was a number one bestseller, following on the heels of his Comedy Central spoof news program, The Daily Show, from which many people, especially the young, now get their main dose of news. Stephen Colbert, a Daily Show alumnus, whose own show, The Colbert Report, is also a popular satiric look at the news, had his own bestseller in 2007 and 2008: I Am America and So Can You, a compendium of goof-ball tips on how to be more patriotic. Humor has become one of the main ways many people try to make sense of an increasingly crazy world. Comedian George Carlin (1937–) also had a big bestseller with When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? (2004), a collection of his characteristic observations on religion, politics, and other contemporary topics. The political right has its own humorists, notably P.J. O’Rourke (1947–), who made his mark with books in the 1980s and 1990s, such as Republican Party Reptile (1987), Parliament of Whores (1991), and Give War a Chance (1992). The CEO of the Sofa (2001) skewers corporate ethics scandals of the late 1990s and the young new century. He examines America at war with the sardonically titled Peace Kills: America’s Fun New Imperialism (2004). More recently, he has trained his satiric skills on capitalism with The Wealth of Nations (2007). Christopher Buckley (1952–), son of noted conservative spokesman and writer William F. Buckley, has had great success with several satirical political novels. His Thank You For Smoking (1994) looks satirically at the tobacco lobby and was made into an acclaimed film in 2006. In No Way to Treat a First Lady (2002), Buckley recounts the murder trial of a first lady who kills her husband, with blazing satire of the Lewinsky scandal and its treatment in the media. Post-9/11 he turned his attention to the Middle East with Florence of Arabia (2004), in which a female State Department worker crusades for women’s rights in a fictional Muslim country. His most recent work is Boomsday (2007), a comic novel about, of all things, social security reform. Perhaps the prevailing literary trend of the new century is the memoir, especially autobiographical accounts of childhood abuse and substance addiction. Despite such somber themes, the memoir has become an important trend among humorous writers. Most notable and successful is David Sedaris (1956–), whose autobiographical humorous essays explore his family life, his Greek background, his North

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Carolina upbringing, his homosexuality, and his childhood speech impediments, among many other topics. Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000) and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004) collect his essays from magazines and public radio. Bill Bryson (1951–), a travel writer who often employs humor in his work, including the science book A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003), nostalgically and comically remembers his 1950s childhood in The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (2006). Completing a trilogy, Frank McCourt’s (1930–) Teacher Man (2005) employs the same bittersweet Irish humor as in his earlier Angela’s Ashes (1996) and ’Tis (1999). The novelist Pat Conroy (1945–) effectively uses humor to tell the story of his basketball career at The Citadel in the 1960s, My Losing Season (2002). Humor remains a mainstay among younger novelists, promising that the new century, no matter how bleak its start, will continue the long tradition of American humor. Some notable recent novels include Indecision (2005) by Benjamin Kunkel (1972–), in which a 28-year-old man tries to banish his indecision with an experimental pill; All Is Vanity (2002) by Christina Schwarz, a humorous novel about aspiring novelists; John Henry Days (2001) by Colson Whitehead (1969–), an African American writer whose novel concerns the unveiling of a postage stamp and the folk hero of the title; You Suck: A Love Story (2007) by Christopher Moore (1957–), who uses goth-horror-humor in a postmodern Dracula love story; and The Locklear Letters (2003) by Michael Kun (1962–), whose epistolary novel about a software salesman writing letters to Heather Locklear has been called by several on-line book reviewers for sites such as Amazon.com “the funniest novel ever written.” Such praise for a very funny and clever novel is hyperbole, of course, but the sentiment attests to the vitality and endurance of the comic spirit as we move our way into a new millennium. Bibliography Abrahams, Roger. Deep Down in the Jungle. Hatboro, PA: Folklore Associates, 1964. Berger, Thomas. Adventures of the Artificial Woman. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004. Blair, Walter. Native American Humor. New York: American Book Company, 1937. Bryson, Bill. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. New York: Random House, 2006. ———. A Short History of Nearly Everything. New York: Random House, 2003. Buckley, Christopher. No Way to Treat a First Lady. New York: Random House, 2002. ———. Florence of Arabia. New York: Random House, 2004. ———. Boomsday. New York: Twelve, 2007. Carlin, George. When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? New York: Hyperion, 2004. Colbert, Stephen. I Am America and So Can You. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2007. Conroy, Pat. My Losing Season. New York: Doubleday, 2002. DeLillo, Don. Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner, 2003. Franken, Al. Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. New York: Dutton Books, 2003. ———. The Truth (With Jokes). New York: Dutton Books, 2005. Franklin, Benjamin. “Rules by Which a Great Empire May be Reduced to a Small One.” London, 1773. Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. 1905. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1960. Horace. “The Art of Poetry.” David H. Richter, ed. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. 3rd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007. “Humor.” The American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition. Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin, 1982.

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HUMOR Irving, John. The Fourth Hand. New York: Random House, 2001. Kun, Michael. The Locklear Letters. New York: MacAdam/Cage, 2003. Kunkel, Benjamin. Indecision. New York: Random House, 2005. Lewis, Paul. Cracking Up: American Humor in a Time of Conflict. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Maher, Bill. When You Ride Alone, You Ride With Bin Laden. New York: Ingram Publishing Services, 2002. ———. Keep the Statue of Liberty Closed: The New Rules. New York: New Millennium, 2004. ———. New Rules: Polite Musings From a Timid Observer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005. McCourt, Frank. Teacher Man. New York: Scribner, 2005. Moore, Christopher. You Suck: A Love Story. New York: William Morrow, 2007. Morreal, John, ed. The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987. O’Rourke, P.J. The CEO of the Sofa. New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2001. ———. Peace Kills: America’s Fun New Imperialism. New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2004. ———. The Wealth of Nations. New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2007. Roth, Philip. The Human Stain. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Rourke, Constance. American Humor: A Study of the National Character. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1931. Schecter, William. The History of Negro Humor in America. New York: Fleet Press Corporation, 1970. Schwarz, Christina. All is Vanity. New York: Doubleday, 2002. Sedaris, David. Me Talk Pretty One Day. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2000. Smiley, Jane. Good Faith. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. ———. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 2004. ———. Ten Days in the Hills. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. Stewart, Jon. America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction. New York: Warner Books, 2004. Twain, Mark. “The Chronicle of Young Satan.” The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts. 1900. William M. Gibson, ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969; 35–174. Twain, Mark. Mark Twain in Eruption. 1906. Bernard DeVoto, ed. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1922, Walker, Nancy A. The Tradition of Women’s Humor in America. Huntington Beach, CA: American Studies Publishing, 1984. ———, ed. What’s So Funny?: Humor in American Culture. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, Inc, 1998. Weber, Brom. “The Mode of ‘Black Humor.’” The Comic Imagination in American Literature. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1973. Whitehead, Colson. John Henry Days. New York: Anchor Books, 2001.

Further Reading Blair, Walter, and Hamlin Hill. America’s Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978; Cohen, Sarah Blacher. Comic Relief: Humor in Contemporary American Literature. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1978; Michelson, Bruce. Literary Wit. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000; Mintz, Lawrence E. Humor in America: A Research Guide to Genres and Topics. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1988; Morreal, John. Taking Laughter Seriously. Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1983; Morris, Linda A., ed. American Women Humorists: Critical Essays. New

HUMOR York: Garland, 1994; Oring, Elliott. Engaging Humor. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003; Sloane, David E.E., ed. New Directions in American Humor. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 1998; Wallace, Ronald. God Be With the Clown. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1984.

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I INSPIRATIONAL LITERATURE (NONFICTION) Definition. Inspirational literature is a large genre that consists of easily understood rhetoric and personal stories designed to appeal to the emotions and spirituality of the reader. This type of literature attempts to uplift readers and encourages them to be hopeful and optimistic about their lives. The inspirational genre does not use complicated philosophies or in-depth doctrine, relying instead on anecdotal stories and simple instructions to accomplish its goals. Because inspirational literature tends to emphasize spiritual topics, the genre is dominated by evangelical Christian authors and readers. The pastor of the evangelical Saddleback Church, Rick Warren (1954–), is the author of The Purpose Driven Life (2002), which has recently sold over 25 million copies, making it the biggest selling hardcover book in American history (Financial Times 2006) and a New York Times bestseller. Joel Osteen (1963–) and Max Lucado (1955–) join Warren as evangelical authors whose writings currently dominate the inspirational literature market. Even the secular inspirational series Chicken Soup for the Soul aims at the evangelical reading base with entries such as Chicken Soup for the Christian Soul (1997) and Chicken Soup for the Christian Soul II (2006). Philip Yancey conveys the spirit and intent of inspirational literature in the introduction to What’s so Amazing about Grace (1997), saying, “I will rely more on stories than on syllogisms. In sum, I would far rather convey grace than explain it” (Yancey 1997, 16). Joel Osteen’s introduction to his book Daily Readings from Your Best Life Now (2005) likewise claims that inspirational passages are “not meant to be an exhaustive treatment of a particular passage of Scripture; instead, it is intended to inspire ardent love and worship of God” (Osteen 2005, vi). Therein is the essence of inspirational literature: convey easy concepts with stories in order to inspire rather than explain difficult ones with dogma. History Types of Inspirational Literature. Both past and current authors have chosen three main ways of writing within the genre. A staple of inspirational literature is true and

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personal stories that are used in an attempt to relate to the audience. These stories are collected in book form and often appeal to a particular kind of readership. Entries are short and several can be read in one sitting. The second type of writing found in the genre is more of an instructional type of writing that uses short chapters and simple language in order to present guidance to the readership. Instead of organization based on individual stories, these books often base chapters on specific simple points, with personal stories woven in at various points. The third major type of inspirational literature corresponds a particular entry with a specific date. The goal of these collections is to provide a brief, uplifting selection to be read in order on a specific set of days. These entries are often a combination of true, personal stories and moralizing prose that attempts to encourage the reader into a specific action or state of mind. Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life is meant to be read on forty consecutive days because, according to Warren, “Studies have shown that something doesn’t become a habit until you have done it . . . every day for six weeks” (Philippine Daily Inquirer 2006). True Inspirational Stories. Inspirational collections based on the short true story format generally have some characteristics in common. Often, the stories are written recordings of stories people have told orally. These collections tend to organize the stories topically, and they tend to include many different contributors. Usually, these books leave the readers to their own thoughts on the story and tend to leave moralizing out of the prose of the story itself. In the Chicken Soup series, the original book, Chicken Soup for the Soul, is organized into sections such as “On Love” or “Overcoming Obstacles,” with each short story in each section designed to encourage the reader about that particular topic. For instance, the section “On Learning” contains a four-page story told by Sister Helen P. Mrosla about a student she taught in elementary and high school and the lesson she learned from her student (Canfield 1993, 125–28). Thus, contributors are matched with topics in which they have some experience or degree of authority. Expanding on this principle of organization, later books in the series focus on a particular niche and employ contributors specialized in that field. Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover’s Soul contains entries by veterinarians such as George Baker, D.V.M.; the president of The Squirrel Lover’s Club, Gregg Bassett; and various other pet owners and enthusiasts. Even these books are divided into sections, and many of the books, whether written for general or niche audiences, typically start with “On Love” as the first section. Many other books of inspirational literature follow this pattern. Apples and Chalkdust (1998) is compiled by Vicki Caruana, a professional teacher and curriculum

CHICKEN SOUP FOR EVERYONE Perhaps the most popular example of book collections of inspirational true life stories is the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. Originally written and compiled by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, this series boasts over one hundred books.The series attempts to appeal to audiences of all kinds, from the general Chicken Soup for the Soul (1993) and A 2nd Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul (1995) to Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover’s Soul (1998) and Chicken Soup for the College Soul (1999).

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designer. Each story is introduced by a quotation of a famous person. The stories are very short and designed to provide encouragement to primary and secondary educators by sharing true stories from other teachers. God’s Little Devotional Book for Couples aims at “sharing ‘moments of the soul’ with a spouse” (1995, 9) and includes stories from the lives of other married couples. Evangelist Joel Osteen recently published Daily Readings from Your Best Life Now (2005) using a similar template. Each entry is introduced by a Bible verse that corresponds to it, and many of the entries contain brief personal references or stories from Osteen’s life. Osteen, however, goes on to provide the moral or the point he wants the reader to glean from his experiences. Also, unlike many other collections of the genre that use this template, Osteen is the exclusive author for this particular book. Inspirational Instructionals. Although this second type of inspirational literature may include true stories to illustrate different points, it relies on a book format with basic chapters and non-fiction prose that is intended to persuade the reader toward a certain action or particular way of thinking. The amount of literature that falls into this category is vast and is dominated to a great degree by authors who are evangelical pastors. These books attempt to tackle a specific subject audiences may struggle with. Max Lucado’s It’s Not about Me begins with the premise that “trying to make life ‘all about us’ pushes happiness further out of reach” (Lucado 2004, xiii), and he attempts to inspire the reader to move “from me-focus to God-focus by pondering him” (9). John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart (2001) attempts to provide a different view of a man’s soul and challenges the emasculation of males in today’s culture. Philip Yancey’s What’s so Amazing about Grace (1997) focuses on the Christian concept of grace. Anne Graham Lotz’s Just Give Me Jesus (2000) focuses on the role of Jesus in inspiring people. She writes, “[W]e would be desperate for the simplicity and the purity, the freedom and the fulfillment, of ‘life in his name’” (Lotz 2000, x). Such is the nature of inspirational books designed to promote feelings of well-being and encouragement about specific topics and situations. Calendar Readings. The third major type of inspirational literature resembles the first in structure, but uses both personal stories and instructional prose to inspire the reader. The entries are short and meant to be read in one sitting, and like Osteen the authors have a specific purpose for each entry, which they reveal to the reader. What makes this third type unique is that the readings are set up to correspond with particular days, either general numbered days or specific calendar days of the year. The two seminal publications of inspirational literature represent the two subtypes of this category of the genre. My Utmost for His Highest (1992) is a compilation of lessons given by Oswald Chambers (1874–1917). Originally published in 1935, the book has enjoyed an amazing run, with several reprints, including an updated 2006 edition. Each entry is one page long and corresponds with a specific date on the calendar. The format is very similar to the format of the true inspirational stories. Each entry starts with a Bible verse and includes the date it should be read (i.e., January 1). However, the entries are instructional in nature rather than contemporary true personal stories. The other seminal work is Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life. Warren’s book is meant to be read one chapter per day on any forty consecutive days. Like Chambers’ book, each entry begins with a Bible verse but also adds a quote from a famous person that relates to the topic of the chapter. Also like My Utmost for His Highest,

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Warren’s book relies mostly on instructional prose, only occasionally inserting true stories, such as his conversation with Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, on the topic of writing out physical contracts to God (Warren 2002, 106). Many other works of inspirational literature follow the template laid out by Chambers. Charles Stanley’s On Holy Ground (1999), Norman Vincent Peale’s Positive Living Day by Day (2003), and Dennis and Barbara Rainey’s Moments Together for Couples (1995) have page-long readings for a specific calendar day. Selwyn Hughes and Thomas Kinkade’s Every Day Light (1997), like Warren, have ordered readings for general, nonspecific days. Besides this unique feature of calendar readings, these works are not compilations of various authors; rather, the same author typically writes all of the entries. Also, instructions or advice replaces the true stories found in other works in the inspirational genre. Other Forms of Inspirational Literature. Another form in which inspirational literature frequently comes is periodical publications. These publications have the same traits as other forms of the genre: personal true stories, instruction or advice on a particular topic, dates with entries to read. One such magazine is Guideposts, which includes true stories about a variety of people and issues. Often, celebrities are featured on the cover and provide stories from their own lives. Other magazines such as Our Daily Bread, Homelife, Journey, and Stand Firm provide inspiration to different readerships and on different topics. The utilitarian nature of inspirational literature allows it to show up in many other forms of literature as well. Inspirational stories are frequently included in literature falling outside the genre. For example, financial advisor and radio talk-show host Dave Ramsey (1960–) inserts inspirational literature into his best-selling The Total Money Makeover (2003). The book contains over thirty true stories strategically placed to illustrate Ramsey’s financial plans and to encourage the readers to put them into practice by revealing how other people with similar struggles have done so successfully. These stories help readers identify with the material. Local print advertisement papers, such as Harvest Weekly from Sylvester, Georgia, also often contain columns that are inspirational literature. A particular issue from December 2006 included a column titled “Switch Seats” that tells a true story about a company that makes spiritually themed t-shirts. The purpose, in this case, is to encourage Harvest Weekly readers to follow God, a theme often found in the genre. Trends and Themes. Although the formats used for inspirational literature have changed little since Oswald Chambers’s seminal My Utmost for His Highest, content has clearly shifted. Contemporary inspirational writers tend toward simplistic writing, refer to looser translations of the Bible, such as The Message, when it is used, and eliminate exclusive or judgmental doctrine from their work. Current writers want to make their inspirational message universal. Besides the major shift in content, other trends have emerged to prominent places within the genre. Many authors have large followings and thus a built-in audience for their work. Many recent works of inspirational literature have quickly risen to best-selling prominence. There is a current movement of sophisticated marketing of the books and the concepts they teach. Technology has also become an important tool that has impacted the genre by providing an additional outlet by which authors of inspirational texts can reach massive audiences and achieve notoriety quickly. Contemporary Content. Chambers’s work did not shy away from complex thoughts, taking on sanctification (Chambers 1992, 15), personal responsibility (Chambers

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1992, 74), and self-denial, with entries that read, “Sorrow removes a great deal of a person’s shallowness. . . . But if a person has not been through the fires of sorrow, he is apt to be contemptuous, having no respect or time for you” (Chambers 1992, 177). The current trend in the literature, however, is away from difficult concepts and toward attempts to eliminate personal challenges. Osteen, who wrote the New York Times bestselling book Your Best Life Now (2004), provides a stark counterpoint to Chambers. Osteen’s devotional topics include entries such as “Having a Positive Vision,” which persuades people to visualize success (Osteen 2005, 7–10), and “God is a Giver” (Osteen 2005: 253–5). Sanctification is not a concept that shows up. Rick Warren has been described by The Wall Street Journal in similar fashion: “His sermons rarely linger on self-denial and fighting sin, instead focusing on healing modern American angst, such as troubled marriages and stress” (Sataline 2006). Like Chambers, the literature is representative of what the author preaches from the pulpit. The Purpose Driven Life is made of the same substance as Warren’s sermons. A section in the book for thinking about life’s purpose reads, “Life is all about love” for a “point to ponder,” and, “Honestly, are relationships my first priority?” for a “question to consider” (Warren 2002: 161). Warren attributes his book’s success to its universal appeal and simplicity. “It deals with a universal subject. Everybody’s interested in ‘What am I here for?’ . . . I intentionally made it extremely simple to read” (Philippine Daily Inquirer 2006). He sums up the biggest trend in content succinctly: “It’s a universal question; it’s not a religious question” (Philippine Daily Inquirer 2006). Warren has also ventured into political and economic territory by teaching others to apply his principles in those areas as well as the area of spirituality. Max Lucado is one of the few major inspirational writers who, to some extent, does not fit completely into this current trend. Like Warren and Osteen, he frequently quotes Bible verses from The Message translation. Also like other writers in his field, he uses simple language and short, catchy sentences: “Lesser orbs, that’s us. Appreciated. Valued. Loved dearly. But central? Essential? Pivotal? Nope. Sorry . . . Our comfort is not God’s priority” (Lucado 2004, 5). However, in this passage, selfdenial and discomfort are prevalent themes. Even the title of this recent book, It’s not about Me (2004), brings to mind Oswald Chambers and sets Lucado apart from the current positivism found in so much contemporary inspirational literature. Context and Issues Popularity and Influence. Of Americans surveyed in a recent Gallup poll, 91.8 percent said they believed in God or a higher power (Grossman 2006), and over 50 million are evangelicals (Sataline 2006). Much of the current inspirational literature plays on that belief. Current authors also tend to have large built-in audiences for their work. Many authors are already pastors of churches with thousands of members and the ability to network. Warren’s Saddleback Church has 100,000 registrants (Philippine Daily Inquirer 2006). Osteen preaches multiple sermons in a weekend to crowds as large as 16,000 per service (St. Petersburg Times 2006). Lucado is also the pastor of a large church. Even authors who are not pastors already have large followings when their inspirational books are published. Canfield had a strong reputation as a “success coach” (www.jackcanfield.com) well before the first Chicken Soup for the Soul book was published. Often, these authors

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become celebrities, thus fueling the popularity of their works. Osteen was featured on “Barbara Walter’s Presents: The 10 Most Fascinating People of 2006,” the first pastor to be featured on that show (Christian Newswire 2006). Warren has speaking engagements all over the world, including a tour of Asia and even a visit to Syria. Jack Canfield has appeared on more than 1,000 radio and television shows, including Oprah, 20/20, Larry King Live (who has also hosted Warren and Osteen), and others (www.jackcanfield.com). The best gauge of the popularity and influence of these writers is the sale of their works. Currently, sales are record setting. Canfield’s Chicken Soup for the Soul franchise has sold over 100 million books, and he holds the Guinness world record for having seven books on The New York Times bestseller list simultaneously (www.jackcanfield.com). Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life, with 25 million copies sold, is the best selling hardcover book in American history and has been translated into 56 languages (Philippine Daily Inquirer 2006). Max Lucado has sold over 33 million copies of 20 different inspirational books (www.christnotes.org), and Osteen’s Your Best Life Now has been a New York Times bestseller. Guideposts, the popular inspirational magazine, has over 2.3 million paid subscribers and a 71% renewal rate (www.guidepostsmedia.com). Marketing and Technology. Perhaps the most interesting trend in contemporary inspirational literature is how well and how hard the literature is marketed and how cutting edge technological trends are incorporated into the marketing. Rick Warren, whose trendy book currently dominates the genre, has been a lead innovator in this area. Warren has created a marketing campaign called “Forty Days of Purpose,” based around The Purpose Driven Life and the forty consecutive days recommend for the reading of it. Through this campaign, Warren has trained 400,000 pastors and priests around the world (Sataline 2006). He is attempting to tap into the Roman Catholic market as well, compiling a Catholic workbook for The Purpose Driven Life with American priests (Philippine Daily Inquirer 2006). What Warren has done more effectively than any of his predecessors in the inspirational genre is, through training of pastors, get his book into many churches as the curriculum from which sermons and Sunday school lessons are drawn. Often, church leaders adopt “a strategic plan built around Warren’s five fundamental purposes: worship, fellowship, discipleship, ministry, and evangelism” (Sataline 2006). Warren has also created acronyms to market new programs based on his inspirational text. One such acronym is P.E.A.C.E., which stands for partner with or plant a congregation, equip servant leaders, assist the poor, care for the sick, and educate the next generation (Lawton 2006). While Warren works to bring attention back to The Purpose Driven Life, other authors capitalize on their publishing success by marketing support material or new material based on the same formula. Joel Osteen published Daily Readings from Your Best Life Now as a companion to his bestseller Your Best Life Now. Canfield and Hanson used the same formula and almost the same title to market 100 new variations of Chicken Soup for the Soul after the first one’s initial success. Technology has also become a big part of the marketing scheme. Warren’s church does pod casting, and a social networking site based on The Purpose Driven Life has popped up (Christian Newswire 2006). Many inspirational authors, including most of the major ones, have Web sites, and some e-mail inspirational texts to those who have signed up. Guideposts has such a site with thoughts and devotionals updated daily at www.guidepostsmag.com/.

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Reception. Inspirational literature is not prominently studied in an academic setting, and because of this lack of interest, academic criticism of the field in general and works in particular is muted. However, contemporary culture does have many people critical of the content, rather than literary quality, of these works. Despite the widespread popularity and bestseller status of many inspirational books, critics of the works in the evangelically dominated genre have been harsh. The contemporary content, with its simplistic ideas and unwillingness to tackle divisive topics, has drawn especially heated criticism. Joel Osteen is criticized as a “cotton-candy preacher who specializes in Christianity lite” (Day 2006). Rick Warren is accused of encouraging simplistic Bible teaching, and The Purpose Driven Life is described as “a slogan-filled view of faith” (Lawton 2006). This kind of criticism of these two leaders of the genre is typical of the reaction many inspirational authors receive. Ole Anthony, president of Trinity Foundation in Dallas, says Osteen’s popularity is “a testimony of the spiritual infantilism of American culture. . . . He’s qualified to be an excellent spiritual kindergarten teacher” (Day 2006). A contributing factor is Osteen’s lack of an academic background: he never went to seminary. As the most popular contemporary writer of inspirational literature, Warren receives the harshest criticism, as well as blame, for dividing evangelical churches with The Purpose Driven Life curriculum. Churches such as Iuka Baptist in Mississippi have split because of dissent over the curriculum’s management tactics, such as writing mission statements to increase membership and viewing the church as a market (Sataline 2006). Selected Authors. The major contemporary authors and works in the inspirational genre are Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen’s Chicken Soup for the Soul series, Joel Osteen’s Your Best Life Now, Max Lucado, the Guideposts inspirational monthly magazine, and Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life. Jack Canfield’s Web site, www.jackcanfield.com, claims he “fostered the emergence of inspirational anthologies as a genre.” Both Canfield and Hansen have extensive backgrounds as motivational speakers and make presentations in areas such as sales strategies and personal success. Certainly, the popularity of the Chicken Soup for the Soul “anthologies” has made it a major force within the inspirational genre. The first book was published in 1993, and over 100 entries later, the Chicken Soup books have sold over 100 million copies. Each book contains 101 true stories. Although the first few books were marketed for a general audience (Chicken Soup for the Soul and A 2nd Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul), the more recent trend has been to publish books marketed toward a particular subsection of inspirational literature readers, as well as spin series off of the main anthologies. Recent books geared toward specific audiences include Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneur’s Soul, Breast Cancer Survivor’s Soul, and Dieter’s Soul among others. Currently, the series also publishes cookbooks and a healthy living series spin-off. Still, the mainstay of the collection is the general Chicken Soup books, with its “6th bowl” published in 1999. Joel Osteen’s Your Best Life Now has been a New York Times number one bestseller, and as a pastor, Osteen represents part of the large inspirational segment that is evangelical Christian. Osteen has capitalized off of the success of Your Best Life Now with a second book, Daily Readings from Your Best Life Now, a calendar, audio compact discs, and a journal. Osteen is also representative of the genre’s distance from academia: he has no advanced degrees in higher education or seminary

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training. He is currently the pastor at Lakewood Church, which draws 42,000 people to weekly services. Max Lucado, like Osteen, is an evangelical pastor of Oak Hills Church. However, Lucado is one of the most prolific writers of the contemporary inspirational genre. According to his Web site, “In 1994, he became the only author to have eleven of his twelve books in print simultaneously appear on paperback, hardcover, and children’s CBA (Christian Book Association) bestseller lists.” Also, he “set a new industry record by concurrently placing nine different world publishing titles on the CBA hardcover bestseller list in both March and April 1997” (www.maxlucado.com). As of February 2007, Lucado’s Cure for the Common Life was ranked second on the CBA inspirational bestseller list. He has published 21 inspirational titles to date. Guideposts is a magazine of “true stories of hope and inspiration.” Published monthly, the magazine often features true stories from celebrities, such as model Niki Taylor (May 2006) and country singer Martina McBride (November 2006). Guideposts was founded in 1945 by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, who wrote The Power of Positive Living, a forerunner of much of the contemporary inspirational literature. The magazine’s mission is to help “people from all walks of life achieve their maximum personal and spiritual potential” (www.dailyguideposts.com). Guideposts even featured inspirational literature heavyweight Rick Warren on the cover of its October 2006 magazine. Perhaps the most prominent, recognizable, and influential contemporary inspirational writer is Rick Warren. His bestselling The Purpose Driven Life has garnered the most popularity and drawn the most criticism. Like Osteen and Lucado, Warren is an evangelical pastor. His Saddleback Church is one of the biggest churches in the United States, and he has trained hundreds of thousands of clergy around the world with his Purpose Driven curriculum. Also like Osteen, Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life has become something of a franchise, with journals, additional readings, and audio compact discs based on the material for sale. In fact, The Purpose Driven Life is itself a spin-off of Warren’s The Purpose Driven Church (1995). Originally, this book was written for pastors and contains a fivepart growth strategy. The Purpose Driven Life illustrates the philosophical simplicity of much of the inspirational genre in a section titled “The Reason for Everything.” Warren writes, “Wherever you are reading this, I invite you to bow your head and quietly whisper the prayer that will change your eternity: ‘Jesus, I believe in you and I receive you.’ Go ahead. If you sincerely meant that prayer, congratulations! Welcome to the family of God” (Warren 2002, 74). Bibliography Canfield, Jack, and Mark Victor Hansen, eds. Chicken Soup for the Soul. Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, Inc., 1993. Caruana, Vicki. Apples and Chalkdust. Tulsa, OK: Honor, 1998. Chambers, Oswald. My Utmost for His Highest. Grand Rapids, MI: Discovery House, 1992. Day, Sherri. “God’s Cheerleader.” St. Petersburg Times 26 Nov. 2006. Eldredge, John. Wild at Heart. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2001. God’s Little Devotional Book for Couples. Tulsa, OK: Honor, 1995. Grinnan, Edward, ed. Guideposts. (2006) http://www.guidepostsmag.com/. Grossman, Cathy Lynn. “View of God Can Predict Values, Politics.” USA Today 12 Sept. 2006.

INSPIRATIONAL LITERATURE (NONFICTION) Hughes, Selwyn, and Thomas Kinkade. Every Day Light. Nashville, TN: Broadman, 1997. “Joel Olsteen to be Featured on Barbara Walters’ ‘10 Most Fascinating People.’” Christian Newswire 4 Dec. 2006. Lawton, Kim. “Purpose Driven Pastor Rick Warren Goes Global.” Religion News Service 8 Sept. 2006. Lotz, Annie Graham. Just Give Me Jesus. Nashville, TN: Word Publishing, 2000. Lucado, Max. Come Thirsty. Nashville, TN: Word Publishing, 2004. ———. It’s not about Me. Nashville, TN: Integrity, 2004. Osteen, Joel. Daily Readings from Your Best Life Now. New York: Warner Faith, 2005. ———. Your Best Life Now. New York: Faith Words, 2004. Peale, Norman Vincent. Positive Living Day by Day. Nashville, TN: Ideals, 2003. Sataline, Suzanne. “Strategy for Church Growth Splits Congregation.” The Wall Street Journal 5 Sept. 2006. Stanley, Charles. On Holy Ground. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1999. “The Purpose Driven Rick Warren.” Philippine Daily Inquirer 30 July 2006. Warren, Rick. The Purpose Driven Life. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002. Yancey, Philip. What’s so Amazing about Grace? Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1997.

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J JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE Definition. The Jewish American literary genre first developed in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries as a literature that was linked inextricably to a particular place, time, and social state—primarily the impoverished urban immigrant communities of Chicago and New York’s Lower East Side. Of course, this is not at all surprising considering the fact that Jews, since the inception of their history, have consistently written with a very acute awareness of place, of where they were physically at a given point in time. This awareness defines both their collective and individual identities and the place of such identities in a world of non-Jews. Even in the biblical era, writing by Jews sought to define their existence in very concrete terms, and in the context of their surrounding environment, as destabilized as it might be. Throughout history, Jews have had a way of not only making themselves at home wherever they are, but also of redefining themselves according to that geographical place in a manner that perhaps challenges the traditional belief that Jews are a diasporic community of people whose roots are in a Jewish homeland. In an examination of the evolution of literature by Jews and American Jews, it seems that this tendency has not changed. Place often defines the people, and if it doesn’t, at the very least it forces them into a constant examination of both collective and individual identities. In a landmark book entitled New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora (2005), David Shneer and Caryn Aviv argue provocatively that the new generation of Jews has liberated itself from older and more traditional ideologies and is instead committed to creating homes and communities wherever they live. Jewish unity, they implicitly argue, is grounded not in the shared (and, in their opinion, all but obsolete) longing for a Jewish homeland, but in the common search for new identities. Shneer and Aviv find, further, that in this contemporary era, the focus shifts from Jewish unity to Jewish diversity. The point being that Jews and various manifestations of Jewish life are thriving in all sorts of places—a global community of multiple networks comprised by a diversity of Jewish languages, cultures, and concerns that

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are each distinctively Jewish in their own ways. Contemporary Jews, they argue, particularly the younger generation, are deeply concerned with Jewish culture and its various expressions, but they are also less religious than their parents and grandparents, and still less interested in Israel and the Holocaust as markers of their Jewish identity. History. The notion that Israel and an image of Jewish life that perceives the state as the primary homeland need not remain a defining facet of Jewish identity for those Jews who live outside of the state is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the diversity of Jewish American literary expressions of the past decade. Jewish American writing began as the first manifestation of immigrant writing in the United States, and later transitioned into what we might call the literature of assimilated Jews in the middle and later part of the twentieth century. The writing of the last decade is unique in that a single unifying characteristic is lacking from the body of work as a whole. The most recent writing of American Jews depicts a diverse community of people who are at home in America. These are people whose concerns about Judaism or Jewishness—although it should be noted that a number of the more recent American Jewish writers, Paul Auster for instance, seem not to be overly concerned with this at all—have more to do with what it means to be an American who also happens to be a Jew. Sometimes—as in the case of writers like Shalom Auslander (Beware of God, 2005), Pearl Abraham (The Romance Reader, 1996), Tova Mirvis (The Ladies Auxiliary, 2000), and even Allegra Goodman (Kaaterskill Falls, 1998)—this means responding directly to Jewish rituals and traditions, whether through critiquing, rejecting, or redefining them. It is interesting to note, however, that the books that follow in many of these writers’ repertoires often move completely away from such concerns. Judaism and Jewish community, for example, which dominate the concerns of the religious enclave in Goodman’s Kaaterskill Falls, could not be farther from the minds of the characters in Goodman’s Intuition (Goodman 2006), who are comprised primarily of postdoctoral researchers in a scientific laboratory. The characters remain deeply complex and brilliantly developed, but it is as if they inhabit a world not accustomed to the religious concerns of her previous novel. In other instances, it manifests itself in a critique of the tendency of an older generation of Jews to see their identity as connected primarily to the events of the Holocaust. As in Tova Reich’s provocative My Holocaust, which satirizes the way in which the Holocaust has become not just a marker of Jewish identity, but a commodity or industry to be exploited. Reich’s novel attacks not just the abuse and misuse of the Holocaust, but also the tendency of a previous generation of Jews to define themselves in the shadow of the Holocaust. Indeed, a number of Jewish American writers—including Jonathan Safran Foer and even Art Spiegelman, the creator of the infamous graphic narrative Holocaust memoir entitled Maus—have shifted their focus from the Holocaust as a Jewish tragedy, to the events of 9/11 as an American tragedy. This, of course, is not to say that the Holocaust is not addressed in contemporary Jewish American literature—quite the contrary. Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution (2004), Cynthia Ozick’s Heir to the Glimmering World (2005), and E.L. Doctorow’s City of God (2000), for example, do not address the events of the Holocaust directly, but depict a world over which its dark shadow looms largely, haunting us from the margins and backdrops of the stories. We have now seen the Jewish American literary tradition progress in three main waves: immigrant writing (Gold, Henry Roth, Yezierska, Cahan), assimilationist

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literature (Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, E.L. Doctorow, Nathaniel West, Norman Mailer), and the literature of the past two decades, which often returns to the cultural and religious themes of the Jewish tradition (Allegra Goodman, Tova Mirvis, Steve Stern, Nathan Englander, Pearl Abraham), sometimes dealing simultaneously with complex issues of gender and sexual orientation. The 1980s saw the emergence of many new Jewish American voices, and on the heels of these new voices followed an increased interest in Orthodox Judaism and Hasidism, feminism, post-Holocaust issues, and Jewishness as an ethnic manifestation. The product of these new and revived curiosities is a multiplicity of Jewish American voices that together represent a complex contemporary Jewish American literary identity—one that flirts with memory and history while exploring both the sacred and secular as equally important veins of a new Jewish American literary canon. At the same time, some of the most significant writers of the Jewish American literary field (and, arguably, of the American literary canon in general) continue to forge novelistic expressions of American concerns and multi-cultural identities. Philip Roth, for example, has published five novels since 2000, including The Human Stain (2000), which deals with American racism and the feasibility of passing in American culture; and The Plot Against America, which is set in 1940s America and creates an alternate American history that includes the election of Charles Lindbergh to the American presidency—what follows in this chilling historical revision is the rise of anti-Semitism in America. Over the past decade we have also begun to see the emergence of a fourth wave of Jewish American writing. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union there has been a substantial influx of Russian-Jewish immigrants. Many of these immigrants and their children have begun to write fiction, and they write with new, compelling voices, sometimes evocative of the prose of famed modern Russian-Jewish writer Isaac Babel, carefully revealing the interior life of the Jewish underworld. In other instances, these post-Soviet voices are sharp with the cynical wit and insight possessed only by those who have experienced both the scarcity of Soviet life and the excess of American life. Writers in this wave include Gary Shteyngart (The Russian Debutante’s Handbook [2002] and Absurdistan [2006]), Lara Vapnyar (There Are Jews in My House, 2003), David Bezmozgis (Natasha, 2004), Anya Ulinich (Petropolis, 2007), Sana Krasikov (One More Year, 2008), and even Jonathan Safran-Foer, among others. Trends and Themes. In his now infamous introduction to Jewish American Stories (1977), Irving Howe insisted upon the imminent demise of the Jewish American literary canon, a genre that would certainly dissipate with the passing of its major voices—Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth—and the scattering of Jewish distinctiveness among the milieu of mainstream American culture. In Howe’s assessment of the Jewish American literary world, which according to his estimation had already moved past its high point once it climaxed with Bellow, the key figures were those writers upon whom the mark of immigrant life and the distinctive experience of Jewishness was ineradicably placed. Indeed, what we now know as Jewish American literature began as the efforts of Jewish (primarily Russian and Polish) immigrants and their children to grapple with the pervasive feelings of alienation and conflict that characterized their experience in the new world. Works such as Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1925), Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money (1930), and Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934)—all written by immigrants or

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children of immigrants—focused on the trials and tribulations of immigrant life in New York’s Lower East Side or Chicago. They provided the starting point for a literary genre that would continue to flourish and evolve over the next century and beyond. Such writers had barely shaken the shtetl mud from the soles of their feet when they found themselves plagued not by the pogroms and raging Cossacks from which they and their traditions had narrowly escaped, but by the insular world of tenement life that was colored by greed, poverty, and even ethnic persecution. (Shtetl is Yiddish. A shtetl was typically a small village with a predominately Jewish population in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe. The notion of shtetl culture is often used as a metaphor for the traditional way of life of 19th-century Eastern European Jews. Shtetl communities were characterized by their adherence to Orthodox Judaism, and members of the community lived under constant threat of pogroms— large-scale, violent anti-Semitic rioting thought by many historians to be advocated by Tsarist Russian secret police in many cases. The events of the Holocaust culminated in the disappearance of most shtetls, through both extermination and mass exodus to the United States and eventually the State of Israel.) One need look no farther than little David Schearl of Roth’s Call it Sleep for a vivid account of the difficulties faced by immigrants and their young children, eager to escape the tell-tale Yiddishisms of their family lives, but unable to hide them from the leering (or, so it seemed) faces of other—primarily Irish and Italian—immigrant communities who were faced with some of the same struggles as Jewish immigrants, namely, how best to assimilate quickly into mainstream American culture. It is as if Roth means to say that, as immigrant Jews, we are not free from threat and persecution here in America—it may not be the Cossacks and pogroms, but the threat is just as real as it was in the Eastern European communities from which we came; we have not yet escaped such terrors. To be sure, as part of the first wave of Jewish American writing, the work of such writers is characterized by the influence of the immigrant world, a world dominated by shtetl sensibilities, Yiddish accents, and a certain tentativeness when it came to the perception of America as the land of opportunity. In many respects, however, the immigrant communities of Roth’s, Cahan’s, Gold’s, and Yezierska’s worlds were much different from the European shtetls from which they had fled. The new immigrant living conditions forcibly pushed immigrants into living nearly on top of one another, in such close proximity that it was virtually impossible to have a life of one’s own—this compared to the Russian and Polish shtetls, where people lived apart from one another and enjoyed a certain level of privacy and autonomy. Such, however, was the life of the new American Jew—destined to live, at least during this period, confined by language, unfamiliar customs, cultural idiosyncrasies, and the difficulty of finding suitable jobs and a dignified manner of living. They were, like many other immigrant communities, set apart from the American society to which they could only dream of belonging. Clearly, the work of Cahan, Roth, Gold, and Yezierska depicts a portrait of Jewish life that is quite different from the earlier depictions of writers such as Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Babel, whose sensibilities were generated through imaginative depictions of European shtetls and the perpetual threat of pogroms. The modern Jewish immigrant writers relate to us the stories of a people who have truly immigrated, and who find themselves in the squalor and impoverishment of the “land of opportunity.” Life in the “New World,” of course, was clearly not as glorious and rewarding as the first Jewish American writers had hoped it would be. In fact, the new surroundings delivered many new hardships and a great deal of suffering for hopeful

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European Jewish families who tried to create fresh lives in America, hoping to leave their suffering in Europe behind them. Perhaps it was this disappointment that compelled many Jewish American writers to look toward Socialist philosophies and leftist impulses as a means of escaping from the impoverishment—an impulse that would characterize the work many Jewish American writers, beginning with those of the turn-of-the-century period and progressing into the work of more contemporary writers like E.L. Doctorow (see, for example, The Book of Daniel). It is a sense of uneasiness that dominates the Jewish American literature between 1900 and 1945, and much of this can be attributed to language. This era of literature acts as a bridge between the Yiddish literature of the late-nineteenth century and the literature of the second wave of Jewish American writing—primarily the work of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and even Bernard Malamud and Cynthia Ozick, whose characters personified the new American Jew who was better educated and had a better grasp of the English language. The literature generated by American Jews in the first half of the twentieth century is in effect a literature of transformation, for in it we witness the often difficult transition from Yiddish to English, as characterized especially by Nobel prize-winning novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer, one of very few Yiddish writers whose work was translated into English. But, it is a transformation that will not be fully developed for at least another twenty years or so. Yiddish is depicted as the language of kings in Call It Sleep, for instance. Set against the backdrop of the fragmented, halting, and frequently mispronounced English of the little immigrant street urchins, the Yiddish that is spoken in the homes of Jewish immigrants takes on a regal, almost Shakespearean quality. For, Yiddish was life—it was the gateway to knowledge of just about everything. And for this reason, Abraham Cahan, the founder and editor of the Daily Yiddish Forward, is a particularly important figure in this era of Jewish American literature. The Forward was the only means by which the immigrant Jews learned about the world around them—the crux of knowledge for Jewish immigrants at the turn of the century. This, of course, is not directly evident in the works of writers like Yezierska, Gold, and Roth, but the fact that Yiddish figures so largely into the experience of the immigrant world reinforces its significance. These writers may have written in English, which sets them apart from an earlier generation of Jewish writers such as Singer, Aleichem, Chaim Grade, and I.L. Peretz, but Yezierska and Roth clearly imagined in Yiddish, creating an alliance between parallel communities, separated by an ocean, but conjoined by similar problems—one foot in Europe, and one foot in America. Context and Issues. All in all, Jewish American writers from 1900 to 1945 introduced a literary genre that was entirely their own—infused with new voices, dialects, and rhythms that allowed it to be viewed as the first form of multi-ethnic literature in the United States, arriving earlier than most to the identity politics party that would surface much later in the century within English departments and literary circles. Moving up in the twentieth century, Chaim Potok introduced a new form of the Jewish—though not immigrant—community in The Chosen (1967). This novel begins during World War II and ends with the founding of Israel, and it is important to note that, at this time, most writers were not focused on religion or on maintaining the homogeneity of a Jewish community. Instead, the focus of American Jews seemed fixed on the goal of assimilation. But with Potok, we get an undiluted look at the Jewish Orthodox community—an unfiltered view of Lee Avenue of Williamsburg, essentially a shtetl-like community of ultra-Orthodox Jews

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and Modern Orthodox Jews (as it still is today), neither of whom aspire to assimilate or blend in too closely with mainstream American community. Nearly thirty-five years after Roth introduced us to the world of the Jewish American immigrant community, Potok retains the concept of an insular Jewish community, but doesn’t extract from it the religious impulses. One contrast, however, resides in the fact that while earlier Jewish writers conveyed a sense of longing to escape from the immigrant community and move up in American society, Potok depicts a group of American Jews who actually want to live in a close, tightly knit Jewish community, set apart from mainstream American culture and all of its influences—a depiction that would remain remarkably rare in Jewish American literature. Yet, at the same time, these Jews are beset by the same problems experienced by secular Americans, Jewish and Gentile: the relationships between fathers and sons and whether or not to continue to embrace the ways of their fathers. The Chosen’s Danny, for example, a great Talmudic genius, doesn’t follow his father, but falls in love with Freud—in Freud’s very early stages of popularity—who is the embodiment of the new secular world, and goes to graduate school to study rather than a rabbinic school. What Yezierska, Roth, Potok, and others all have in common is the shtetl-like community—totally transported and re-positioned in America. Yet, unlike Yezierska and Roth, who, in their socialist and leftist leanings become nearly anti-religious, Potok presents us with the image of a group of people who, essentially, say no to assimilation. They metaphorically proclaim, “We don’t have to give up the Torah, the Talmud, and Ultra-Orthodoxy in order to be American.” This really is a critical point because early Jewish American fiction, by definition, was laced with Yiddishisms and Jewish cultural quirks, but implicit in the literature was a tacit understanding that they wanted to be as American as possible—and we see this beginning with the earliest Jewish American writers and culminating in the mid to late-twentieth century writers like Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth. But, an aggressive impulse toward assimilation does not seem to be a problem in Potok’s Williamsburg shtetl; rather, the issue becomes a divisiveness that exists between religious groups: the Hasidic Jews and the Modern Orthodox Jews. In contrast to the early twentieth-century immigrant community, so religiously entrenched are the Jews of this new community that the issue shifts from being at odds with American culture, to being at odds with the other religious Jews who live just on the other side of Lee Avenue. The Hasidic Jews see the Modern Orthodox Jews as disgraceful, but the genius of this lies in the way in which Potok chooses to open The Chosen—with a baseball game, one in which all the boys, both Hasidic and Orthodox, play together a very American game. The irony, of course, lies in the fact that Potok depicts a religious community, eager to retain and embrace its religious identity in a way that challenges the impulse of most Jews and Jewish writers in America during this time to blend in with mainstream American culture. Even Saul Bellow’s first novel, Dangling Man (1944), addressed not the issues one imagines would grace the pages of a first novel from a child of immigrants, but the issues that colored the minds and concerns of most Americans during this time, regardless of ethnic or religious descent: war and the draft. Bellow’s work, though it often contained Jewish characters and concerns, would continue to focus primarily on the shared issues of mid-twentieth-century mainstream Americans. Bernard Malamud’s The Natural (1952), of course, utilizes the setting of the baseball field to explore, not the nuances and complexities of religious

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life in America, but the challenges of isolation and dashed dreams for—true to the American individualist impulse—one man. This very same baseball setting, both the game and the field, will later be used by Ehud Havazelet (Like Never Before, 1998) to explore the tension between an older, more religious generation, and a younger, secular generation. Regardless, work by Jewish American writers including Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, Nathanael West, Joseph Heller, and later Norman Mailer would continue to haunt the mid-twentieth-century era with its striking absence of Jewish characters or concerns, rituals or traditions. Reception. Though Howe believed staunchly that the era that hailed Jewish American literature, a force with which to be reckoned was drawing to a close, evidence of a newly revived Jewish American literary canon suggests that not only is Jewish American literature alive and well, but also that it is larger than the confines of Howe’s imagination could bear. It is perhaps even bigger—in terms of sheer breadth and the variety of its range— than it was during the advent of writers such as Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud. Although much of this has to do with the multiplicity of Jewish voices that have burst onto the literary scene in the past twenty years—from feminist writers, to those writing about neo-orthodoxy and Hasidic communities, to gay writers, and to post-Holocaust voices—one strong element of this literary persistence has to do with the newest generation of Russian Jews who have immigrated to the United States. Once again, the shtetl-like communities—though not impoverished and miserable anymore—play a central role in the fiction of Jewish American literature. The storytelling of this new generation of Jewish American writers is infused with both the memories of prior immigrant experiences and the experiences of new ones, and yet it is simultaneously innovative in its tendency to reconcile—or at least draw our attention to—disparate parts of the Jewish American identity. In an essay called “Against Logic,” that was part of a 1997 issue of Tikkun devoted to the explosion of new Jewish American literary voices, novelist Rebecca Goldstein (Mazel, 1995; The Mind-Body Problem, 1992) ponders the persistence of a collective Jewish literary imagination despite generations of assimilation into mainstream American culture. She writes: Yet here I am . . . dreaming Jewish dreams. Deep down in the regions of psyche where fiction is born, regions supremely indifferent to criteria of rationality, being Jewish seems to matter to me quite a lot; and in this way my own small and personal story might be offered up as a metaphor for the very re-awakening in Jewish American letters . . . For here we all of us are, after several generations that have tried their damnedest to shrug off the accidents of our shared precedents; here we all are, having sufficiently assimilated the culture at large to be able to inhabit, should we so choose, the inner worlds of characters to whom Jewishness is nothingness; here we all are, against logic, dreaming Jewish dreams. (Goldstein 1997, 43)

Yet, perhaps this logic-defying phenomenon has as much to do with a shared history, as it does with the ability of American Jews to thrive in and adapt to the places in which they find themselves, rather than lament the loss of a shared Jewish homeland. The ghettos may be far behind them, but they are not long forgotten—they continue to appear, albeit in newer and less miserable forms; Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach is a prime example of this new phenomenon of Jewish Russian immigrant communities. Moreover, Henry Roth’s attempt to reconcile the vulgarity of the English spoken by little immigrant street urchins with the Yiddish of an almost Shakespearean quality spoken in the home is mirrored by new sets of cultural

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discrepancies in the newest wave of Jewish immigrant literature. It turns out that, in terms of part of his prediction, Howe was right; he just didn’t know exactly how right he was. Much like the Jewish people and the collective history that is so much a part of the burden that compels them to satisfy, even fulfill, the literary imagination, their literature tracks the experiences of its people. Selected Authors. The novelist who, in many ways, both reinforces and transcends many of these boundaries is Philip Roth; an examination of Jewish American literature would not be complete without an extended discussion of his work. Philip Roth’s work is particularly interesting and unarguably important to the Jewish American literary genre as a whole in that it spans two different waves of Jewish American writing (In an article published in The Nation in 2001, it was suggested by Morris Dickstein that The Ghost Writer actually launches and propels us into the next wave of Jewish American writing.) and offers readers a lasting glimpse into the making of the so-called American Jew. Through the trajectory of Roth’s novels, we have the rare opportunity to observe the continually evolving identity of the American Jewish male. However, because Roth so obviously, and purposely, plays with both real and fictional depictions of the Jewish American identity (and perhaps his own evolving identity), frequently melting and molding them into undistinguishable personae, we are often unable to identify concretely what is Roth’s own perception of the Jewish American identity that he seems continually to mock through morphing representations of it. A man whose closest friends are “sheer playfulness and deadly seriousness,” through his explorations of Jewish, particularly male identities, Roth both entertains and educates his readers. Nevertheless, the ever-transforming protagonist of Roth’s work is typically seen in the context of—and habitually in opposition to—the Jewish family and community. Two of Roth’s earliest constructions of personae designed to explore the complexities of Jewish and Jewish American identity include Goodbye, Columbus (1959) and Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). In both of these seminal works, the protagonist is utterly self-conscious, narcissistic, and consumed by sexual neuroses. Clearly this description is more characteristic of Alexander Portnoy than it is of Neil Klugman, who is, after all, supposed to be an Orthodox Jew, but in Neil we see the beginnings of Alexander Portnoy, even if only tentatively. In the ten-year period between the constructions of Neil Klugman and Alexander Portnoy, there was ample time for the faltering Neil to evolve into the notoriously obsessive and sexually perverted Portnoy. Through both characters, Roth begins to unleash his literary voice—an ironic one that contains a real sense of the inner city, stickball-playing boy turned misogynistic assimilated American, consumed by his own narcissism and inferiority complexes. Albeit at different levels, both Neil and Portnoy emerge as somehow suspended between Jewishness and an assimilated American identity—both seem at once within reach and just out of grasp. Just as Portnoy seems unable to fit himself solidly into one identity or another, he is also unable to achieve sexual satisfaction and fulfillment, and his readers are sure to find him either compulsively masturbating or simulating sex with a piece of liver. Whereas Neil Klugman is fixated on Brenda Patimkin, a Jewish girl from a wealthy and assimilated family, Portnoy finds pleasure in taking out his anger and psychological confusion on unwitting shiksas. Moreover, Neil’s conflicts, of course, are mostly external—with family and community—while Portnoy’s conflicts involve everyone around him, including himself. Perhaps Portnoy is Portnoy’s own most worthy adversary.

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Although they share some similar characteristics, Portnoy is in many cases the polar opposite of Neil. While Portnoy is clearly a much more aggressively liberated individual—an intelligent, high powered government official who seems to be on a mission to copulate with every woman possible—Neil cannot quite get past the allure of Brenda Patimkin, and all that her wealthy, assimilated family represents. Roth’s depiction of Neil’s fascination with the wealthy Patimkins, Jews who could afford to keep a separate refrigerator for only fruit, provides a kind of anti-thesis to Henry Roth’s immigrant world. We cannot quite tell if Neil admires or is repelled by the Patimkins’ ability to become successful and to pass. Similarly, while many of Portnoy’s hang-ups stem from his relationship with his obsessive mother, Neil’s mother is not present in the story. Though both Neil and Portnoy are engaged in a battle with their Jewishness and their ambivalent connection to both their biblical and recent Jewish American past, it manifests itself in much different forms. One cannot help but see in Portnoy the implicit comparison to the good yeshiva boy—deemed the productive, prize-winning student as depicted by Isaac Babel in “Story of my Dovecote,” as well as by other Jewish writers, American and European, in the ultimate trajectory of Jewish literature—who would probably never lower himself to attempting to copulate with a piece of liver or even a shiksa for that matter. Portnoy, however, though he is prone to frequent Yiddishisms, is anything but the stereotypically good Jewish boy. He is the epitome of someone who knows no boundaries, someone who has spun out of control, who is eternally engaged in a battle against himself. Tellingly, Portnoy recalls that in school he chanted, along with [his] teacher “I am the Captain of my fate, I am the Master of my soul,” and meanwhile within my own body, an anarchic insurrection had been launched by one of my privates—which I was helpless to put down! (Roth 1969, 38)

His sexual neuroses, ambiguities, and dissatisfactions become a metaphor for the ways in which he deals with his Jewish identity. We see, also, his inability to function sexually even when he is in Israel, at what should be the height of his exploration of his Jewish identity. As shocking, even disturbing, as some of his characterizations of Jewish identity might be, Roth was very much a man of his day—something that is reflected in not just the early novels, but many of his middle and later works as well. His protagonists are typically unusual characters who are living in the sexual politics of the era, bringing hedonism and bachelorhood to the forefront of Jewish American fiction. In a sense, Philip Roth did for literature what Woody Allen did for film—neurotic, sexually obsessed, self-referential, and imbued with a ferocious sense of artistic entitlement. In The Breast (1972), The Professor of Desire (1977), and The Dying Animal (2001), for instance, we are introduced to David Kepesh, a fully assimilated, graduate school educated Jewish man, who is perhaps a milder, more mature version of Portnoy, living in a state of what he terms “emancipated manhood.” The radical individualism of America lays claim to each of Roth’s fictional characters, but despite their predisposition toward success, these self-conscious overachievers rarely make for a flattering picture of the American Jew. Instead, they become perhaps pivotal examples of the consequences of too much assimilation, some have argued. As Jewish American identities, they are both alluring and revolting to American Jews living in the real world.

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It would be an understatement to suggest that Roth’s work abounds in contradictions, and it often seems meant to inspire confusion, especially when it comes to deciphering which are the fictional impulses and which ideas spring directly from autobiographical instances. Critics who have attempted to make such distinctions have often been attacked for taking his work as autobiographical, yet he clearly insists on drawing repeatedly from the commonly known facts of his life in forming many of his protagonists. In keeping with this idea, many of Roth’s later works deal specifically with writers and the act of writing—in some cases becoming quite metafictional, as elements of the writer are infused into the text—and The Ghost Writer begins this new focus in his work. One of the most interesting aspects of this novel is that it pays homage to two other writers with whom Roth was consistently identified: Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow. The character of I.E. Lonoff, who the Zuckerman character seems to emulate, is a stand in for Malamud, while the Abravanel character represents Bellow, even down to the multiple marriages. Nathan Zuckerman, the young character who has just published a very controversial set of stories, of course, is clearly indicative of Roth himself when he was that age. While The Ghost Writer seems to be a transitional piece in both Roth’s fiction and the wave of Jewish American literature in general, as Roth’s work progresses his protagonists become less self-conscious and less self-referential. The Nathan Zuckerman of The Ghost Writer is still the same character—still embarrassing to the Jewish community; he has assimilated a bit too well—but the later depictions of Zuckerman are less humiliating, though he is still well assimilated into mainstream American culture. In later works, Roth’s emphases are broader and more diverse, ranging from friendly, even loving, father-son relationships (Patrimony) to political issues (The Counterlife). Morris Dickstein suggests that this phase in Roth’s writing reflects the vengeful return of the Jewishness “that once seemed to be disappearing.” “In this phase,” he asserts, “the inevitability of assimilation gives way to the work of memory.” Character construction becomes, it seems, less of a burden—less a reflection of a disjointed self and fractured identity. Similarly, rather than depicting Zuckerman as a protagonist, Roth begins to employ Zuckerman as a narrator, the lens through which other people’s stories are told—as in The Human Stain (2000) and American Pastoral (1997). Since the 1990s, Roth’s fiction has often fused autobiographical components with retrospective dramatizations of postwar American life. A sense of frustration with social and political developments in the United States since the 1940s, and with the perpetual collapse of the American dream, is apparent in the American trilogy and his most recent novel Exit Ghost (2007), though it was evident in much earlier works that flaunted political and social satire. But as important as Philip Roth is to the Jewish American literary field and to American literature as a whole, neither his voice nor his concerns reflect those of the majority of Jewish American writers. Of course, it is impossible to conceive of mid to late-twentieth-century Jewish American writing without invoking the name of Cynthia Ozick, who continues to be a major writer in the field, but whose work, though generated in the same time period as Philip Roth’s, addresses entirely different concerns. She has characterized her work as being focused primarily on issues that are “centrally Jewish”—that is, Judaism and the history of liturgical issues, in addition to the notion of idolatry. Individual distinctiveness, it seems, is as much a hallmark of Jewish American literature as it is of the Jewish religion and ritual that the literature confronts, embraces, challenges, or repels. And while Roth seems, over the the duration of the twentieth century, to have dealt with his own issues regarding

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Jewish identity in America, a growing number of Jewish American writers are grappling with these issues in new ways. Margot Singer’s literary debut, The Pale of Settlement (2007), amounts to a sustained negotiation on the role of Israel in Jewish American identity today. The linked stories follow Susan from her home in New York across borders into Israel, Germany, and beyond. The transnational focus decenters Israel as the signifier of her Jewish identity and allows for complex dynamics to take shape. The stories are fragmented both geographically and historically, jumping between Palestine pre-1948, Israel in both the present and tumultuous past, and her home in New York where Susan is firmly rooted. The complex influence of Israel as the Jewish homeland is not lost on Susan, but the idea that it supersedes her American or global sensibility is lost. The relationship with history remains important but in the past as it is realized in the stories Susan’s mother tells her. The places her mother talked about had vanished into a pink blotch that spread across the top of the map that pulled down over the blackboard in Susan’s classroom like a window shade. Vilna, Lwow, Bessarabia, Belarus. The Pale of Settlement. You couldn’t go to those parts of the world any longer. They were gone. (Singer 2007, 188)

There is a clear sense that return is not possible. The only places in the world that are closed off to Susan are these locations of historical significance to the way Jewish identity has been formulated in the past. Now, she feels part of a networked and interconnected culture that does not rely on a sense of home being the ancient center. The idea is clearly demarcated in the inaccessibility of historical locales. Susan “has the feeling that she could live anywhere in the world, even though New York is the place she’s always been” (Singer 2007, 200). The Diaspora is part of history, not the present. It plays a role in defining her cosmopolitan nature but does not pull her toward a homeland or a particular version of what is means to be Jewish in today’s global culture. As much as place has played a major role in defining Jewish American identity, the role of the Holocaust in tying American Jews to Israel throughout the twentieth century cannot be underestimated. Tova Reich takes issue with that role in My Holocaust (2007) and confronts the ethics of relying on a historical trauma for contemporary identity. Her primary concern is the commodification of the event and the subsequent foreclosure of meaning for those generations to follow. She clearly delineates how the contemporary generation is supposed to be that of “continuity,” the “designated Kaddish,” or the “living memorial candle” (Reich 2007, 19). This third generation is intended to carry-on the memory of the Holocaust in exactly the way previous generations have done, reaping the political and financial benefits of doing so. Tova Reich resists such a direct connection and problematizes how prior generations have created a cultural industry that defines the historical trauma. She takes issue with the idea that previous generations should define what the Holocaust means to Jews of the future. She satirizes the way Auschwitz has become a tourist attraction and how the Holocaust Museum on the Washington Mall amounts to a definitive source of cultural memory. Hers is a more complexly-formed idea of the Holocaust and what the trauma means to contemporary Jews. Just like the idea of Israel is dissipating as the definitive homeland of Jewish identity, she discards prescriptive ideas of what the Holocaust represents. Her emphasis on humor and satire and farcical characters drives the point that to define the event to the extent that previous generations have attempted to do is not

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possible. Contemporary generations need to negotiate with the past on their own terms in order to reside in the present. Other more recent Jewish American writers have relinquished the idea of the Holocaust as the definitive event and have focused attention on the tragedy of 9/11. The transition can be seen in the graphic novels of Art Spiegelman. His groundbreaking work on the Holocaust in Maus I and II has given way to an examination of 9/11. In In the Shadow of No Towers, he at first portrays himself, in a metafictional moment, as a personified mouse, the legacy of his original graphic narratives where the Jews are mice and the Germans cats. In the role of a mouse/Jew, he insists on putting the events of 9/11 in the context of the Holocaust and his father, a survivor of Auschwitz: “I remember my father trying to describe what the smoke in Auschwitz smelled like . . . That’s exactly what the air in lower Manhattan smelled like after Sept. 11!” (Spiegelman 2004, 3). This scene is where the trauma of the Holocaust and being a second generation survivor gives way to being a New Yorker and the eyewitness to a personal trauma. The human depictions shift to being human forms in varied guises to the point where the artist renders himself falling from the tower. He places himself in the tragedy as the narrative moves to the aftermath of the terrorist attack and how the event shifted the political landscape of the United States. Spiegelman depicts himself in a domestic setting, reading The New York Times in a nostalgic American living room scene, to drive home the point that he is at home in New York and was personally attacked on 9/11. The comic book frames depict him morphing from his own human form back to that of a mouse as if terrorism and trauma return him to his Jewish identity while at home in New York. Ken Kalfus picks up Spiegelman’s train of thought in A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006), but with one exception, his Jewish identity is never mentioned. He has the political climate of the United States squarely in view as he depicts how an unhappily married couple experiences the terrorist attack and its aftermath. The focus on the domestic grounds the situation in a decidedly American context, separating the global context of the attack from the way it takes place as a personal event. It forms a dichotomy that poses the broad context of geopolitics against private life. Marshall, the husband, envisions the dichotomy as a personal dilemma, Everyone was dating everything now from September 11, regardless of whether they or anyone they knew had been at Ground Zero—when was that going to stop? . . . “I was there. In the World Trade Center. I escaped.” (Kalfus 2006, 58)

The event has, as it did for Spiegelman, added a personal experience that heightened the feeling of being a New Yorker. Even in its global implications, the individuals that experienced New York on the day of the trauma take a personal stake in the event. Kalfus portrays this in the marital dispute of the couple. Each thought the other was killed in that attack and instead of mourning the loss was overjoyed at the thought of their spouse’s death. The terrorist attack had personal implications for them and the effect had nothing to do with the politics that take place around the world and everything to do with their domestic situation. The divorce turns out to be even “more painful to speak about than September 11” (Kalfus 2006, 59). Jonathan Safran Foer brings the domestic context of 9/11 to light through the eyes of a child. Oskar Schell lost his father in the World Trade Center and embarks on a journey to find a lock that fits the key he finds in his father’s belongings. Ultimately, it is a process of making meaning out of the “worst day” (Foer 2005, 11). It is unclear whether it is the worst day because the towers fell and many lives were lost or simply

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because Oskar lost his father. Either way, the day is a definitive split in which belief, faith, and all sense of place in the world are questioned. Safran Foer depicts all of the questions through the eyes of a child to contradict the set meanings of what the events meant to the world, the United States, and New York. The places are interrelated, contradicting at times, and ultimately more complex and ambiguous than imagined. The conversation between Oskar and his mother depict this sentiment: “What do you mean I sound just like Dad?” “He used to say things like that.” “Like what?” “Oh, like nothing is so-and-so. Or everything is so-and-so. Or obviously.” She laughed. “He was always very definitive.” “What’s ‘definitive’?” “It means certain. It comes from ‘definite.’” “What’s wrong with definitivity?” “Dad sometimes missed the forest for the trees.” “What forest?” “Nothing.” (Foer 2005, 43)

The child begins to learn that what was killed in 9/11 was a sense of center that provided definitive ideas about who people are or where they are going. The uncertainty and complexity brought to light in 9/11 and highlighted by Safran Foer and others shows the place of identity in the contemporary world. It is not tied to a sense of history or a single conception of what it means to be Jewish; identity forms based on events and interactions that occur in the contingent environment of a place. Paul Auster’s entire body of work has followed this same theme. A New Yorker himself, he has avoided direct discussion of 9/11 in his novels since the event. However, his questioning of freedom, America, and terrorism’s political goal lead into the same questions other have asked and provide a local, contingently constructed context for identity. Leviathan, although published before 9/11, remains his best meditation on the question. Ben Sachs, a writer and New York Jew, takes it upon himself to bomb replicas of the Statue of Liberty around the country in order to get his message about freedom to the public. He decides upon this course of action while writing an extended novel upon the subject, but he knows his writing will never have the political impact of the bombings. It is important to note that Auster depicts the Statue of Liberty as the target of the bombings, meaning the statue is the ultimate referent of freedom. It also appears on the cover of Sachs’s book in a blurry photograph, an apt metaphor for both the meaning of freedom and the blurring of the center of identity. As the referent gets lost in the shuffle of a global culture that is endlessly interconnected and complex, the center is lost and fixed meanings are thrown into question. Though Howe believed staunchly that the era that hailed Jewish American literature a force with which to be reckoned was drawing to a close, evidence of a newly revived Jewish American literary canon suggests that not only is Jewish American literature alive and well, but also that it is larger than the confines of Howe’s imagination could bear, perhaps even bigger—in terms of sheer breadth and the variety of its range—than it was during the advent of writers such as Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud. Although much of this has to do with the multiplicity of Jewish voices that have burst onto the literary scene in the past twenty years—from feminist writers, to those writing about neo-orthodoxy and Hasidic communities, to gay writers, and to post-Holocaust voices—one strong element of this literary persistence has to do with the newest generation of Russian Jews who have immigrated to

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the United States. Once again, the shtetl-like communities—though not impoverished and miserable anymore—play a central role in the fiction of Jewish American literature. The storytelling of this new generation of Jewish American writers is infused with both the memories of prior immigrant experiences and the experiences of new ones, and yet it is simultaneously innovative in its tendency to reconcile—or at least draw our attention to—disparate parts of the Jewish American identity. In an essay called “Against Logic,” which was part of a 1997 issue of Tikkun devoted to the explosion of new Jewish American literary voices, novelist Rebecca Goldstein (Mazel, 1995; The Mind-Body Problem, 1992) ponders the persistence of a collective Jewish literary imagination despite generations of assimilation into mainstream American culture. She writes: Yet here I am . . . dreaming Jewish dreams. Deep down in the regions of psyche where fiction is born, regions supremely indifferent to criteria of rationality, being Jewish seems to matter to me quite a lot; and in this way my own small and personal story might be offered up as a metaphor for the very re-awakening in Jewish American letters . . . For here we all of us are, after several generations that have tried their damnedest to shrug off the accidents of our shared precedents; here we all are, having sufficiently assimilated the culture at large to be able to inhabit, should we so choose, the inner worlds of characters to whom Jewishness is nothingness; here we all are, against logic, dreaming Jewish dreams.

And yet perhaps this logic-defying phenomenon has as much to do with a shared history, as it does with the ability of American Jews to thrive in and adapt to the places in which they find themselves, rather than lament the loss of a shared Jewish homeland. The ghettos may be far behind them, but they are not long forgotten—they continue to appear, albeit in newer and less miserable forms; Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach is a prime example of this new phenomenon of Jewish Russian immigrant communities. Moreover, Henry Roth’s attempt to reconcile the vulgarity of the English spoken by little immigrant street urchins with the Yiddish of an almost Shakespearean quality spoken in the home is mirrored by new sets of cultural discrepancies in the newest wave of Jewish immigrant literature. It turns out that, in terms of part of his prediction, Howe was right; he just didn’t know exactly how right he was. Much like the Jewish people and the collective history that is so much a part of the burden that compels them to satisfy, even fulfill, the literary imagination, their literature tracks the experiences of its people. Bibliography Abraham, Pearl. The Romance Reader. New York: Riverhead Books, 1996. Auslander, Shalom. Beware of God. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005. Auster, Paul. Leviathan. New York: Penguin, 1992. Bellow, Saul. Dangling Man. 1944. New York: Penguin, 1996. Bezmozgis, David. Natasha. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. Cahan, Abraham. The Rise of David Levinsky. 1917. New York: Modern Library, 2001. Chabon, Michael. The Final Solution. New York: Harper, 2004. Doctorow, E. L. The Book of Daniel. New York: Plume, 1971. ———. City of God. New York: Plume, 2001. Englander, Nathan. For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. New York: Vintage, 1999.

JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. New York: Mariner Books, 2005. Gold, Michael. Jews Without Money. 1930. New York: Carroll & Graff, 2004. Goldstein, Rebecca. “Against Logic.” Tikkun 12.6 (1997): 43. ———. Mazel. New York: Penguin, 1995. ———. The Mind-Body Problem. New York: Penguin, 1983. Goodman, Allegra. Intuition. New York: Dial Press, 2006. ———. Kaaterskill Falls. New York: Dell, 1998. Havazelet, Ehud. Like Never Before. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. Howe, Irving. Jewish American Stories. New York: New American Library, 1977. Kalfus, Ken. A Disorder Peculiar to the Country. New York: Harper Collins, 2006. Krasikov, Sana. One More Year. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2008. Malamud, Bernard. The Natural. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1952. Mirvis, Tova. The Ladies Auxiliary. New York: Ballantine, 2000. Ozick, Cynthia. Heir to the Glimmering World. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Potok, Chaim. The Chosen. New York: Ballantine, 1967. Reich, Tova. My Holocaust. New York: Harper Collins, 2007. Roth, Henry. Call it Sleep. 1934. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996. Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. New York: Vintage, 1997. ———. The Breast. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972. ———. The Counterlife. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987. ———. The Dying Animal. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. ———. Exit Ghost. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. ———. The Ghost Writer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979. ———. Goodbye, Columbus. New York: The Modern Library, 1959. ———. The Human Stain. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000 ———. Patrimony. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991. ———. The Plot Against America. New York: Vintage, 2004 ———. Portnoy’s Complaint. New York: Random House, 1969. ———. The Professor of Desire. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. Shneer, David and Caryn Aviv. New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora. New York: New York Univeristy Press, 2005. Shteyngart, Gary. Absurdistan. New York: Random House, 2006. ———. The Russian Debutante’s Handbook. New York: Riverhead, 2002 Singer, Margot. The Pale of Settlement. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2007. Spiegelman, Art. In the Shadow of No Towers. New York: Pantheon Books, 2004. ———. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Penguin, 2003. Ulinich, Anya. Petropolis. New York: Viking, 2007. Vapnyar, Lara. There are Jews in My House. New York: Pantheon, 2003. Yezierzka, Anya. Bread Givers. 1925. New York: Persea Books, 2003.

Further Reading Aleichem, Sholem. Tevye the Dairyman. Trans. Hillel Halkin. New York: Schocken, 1987; Babel, Isaac. The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel. Nathalie Babel, ed. Translated by Peter Constantine. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002; Bellow, Saul. Seize the Day. New York: Viking Press, 1956; Bukiet, Melvin Jules, ed. Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex. New York: Norton, 1999; Chabon, Michael. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. New York: HarperCollins, 1997; Diamant, Anita. The Red Tent. New York: Picador, 1997; Eisner, Will. The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005; Eve, Nomi. The Family Orchard. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000; Foer, Jonathan Safran. Everything is Illuminated. New York: HarperCollins, 2002; Goldberg, Myla. Bee Season. New York: Anchor, 2000; Horn, Dara. In the Image. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002; Kushner, Tony. Angels in America. New York: Theatre Communications Group,

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JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE 1992; Olsen, Tillie. Yonnondio: From the Thirties. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1974; Ozick, Cynthia. “The Pagan Rabbi.” The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995. 1–38; Rosen, Jonathan. The Talmud and the Internet. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000; Stern, Steve. The Angel of Forgetfulness. New York: Viking, 2005; Stern, Steve. The Wedding Jester. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1999; Stollman, Aryeh Lev. The Far Euphrates. New York: Riverhead, 1997; West, Nathanael. The Day of the Locust. New York: Buccaneer Books, 1981; Wiesel, Elie. The Time of the Uprooted. Trans. David Hapgood. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.

MONICA OSBORNE AND DAVID COCKLEY

L LANGUAGE POETRY Definition. Language poetry has its roots in the social upheavals of the 1970s. American poetry was a prominent voice in the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s that saw protests against the Vietnam War, the beginning of the Free Speech Movement, and the coming of Second Wave Feminism. With the advent of protest poetry, some writers viewed with dissatisfaction what they considered the artificial constructs of ego in the lyrical conventions of American poetry, particularly those well-grounded in the post-Romantic tradition and Modernism’s predilection for lyric and narrative verse forms, styles that came to prominence with the acceptance of “free verse” in the early years of the century. Language poets reject the Modernist assumption that language is a “transparent” medium that accurately captures the essence of the things described. Instead, they challenge what Bernstein calls “official verse culture,” the dominant use of lyric forms in academic writing programs (Bernstein 1986, 246). In his collected essays, Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984 (1986), Bernstein’s assessment hints at the confrontational nature of the early exchanges between traditional publications and the magazines supporting Language poetry. The acrimonious debates underlined the radical nature of Language poets’ challenge to representational structures. In The Marginalization of Poetry (1996), an essay collection by another leading poet from this period, Bob Perelman complained that in traditional poetry “sensibility and intuition reigned supreme,” and even if “craft and literary knowledge” were still evident, contemporary poetry had become simply “conversational” (Perelman 1996, 12). The techniques of the Language poets vary as much as the works themselves, but there are certain salient features. One of the leading critics in support of Language poets has been Marjorie Perloff. Her estimation of the poetry of Bruce Andrews, another prominent member of the early group, suggests many of the features found among its practitioners: “The poetic devices you use tend to be rhetorical figures rather than tropes—the pun, the neologism, the portmanteau word—and of course a great deal of sound-play rather than metaphor, simile, symbol” (Andrews 1996, 80). In

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THE BEGINNINGS OF LANGUAGE POETRY In the main, Language poets began to explore language as construction, not as a representational medium used to describe experience but as a set of relationships and signifying structures relevant to themselves. Charles Bernstein, a leading theorist and practitioner of the movement, has said, “We were interested in poetry that did not assume a syntax, a subject matter, a vocabulary, a structure, a form, or a style but where all these were at issue, all these were explored in the writing of the poem” (Senning 2005).The subject of Language poetry is often language itself, not its meanings or its message but the particulars of its formal structure and how it creates, and is created by, social and political ideas.

similar fashion, Perelman has argued that there are really many different “Language poetries,” and yet certain trends are common among the group: “breaking the automatism of the poetic ‘I’ and its naturalized voice; foregrounding textuality and formal device; using or alluding to Marxist or poststructuralist theory in order to open the present to critique and change”; and “the aggressive dismissals of self-expressive mainstream poetics as politically reactionary” (1996, 13). In her piece, “Experiments,” for the seminal anthology, The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (1984), Bernadette Mayer gives a list of exercises for writing poems that reflect the group’s understanding: “Systematically eliminate the use of certain kinds of words or phrases from a piece of writing, either your own or someone else’s, for example, eliminate all adjectives from a poem of your own, or take out all words beginning with ‘s’ in Shakespeare’s sonnets”; and again: “Get a group of words (make a list or select at random); then form these words (only) into a piece of writing—whatever the words allow. Let them demand their own form” (1984, 80). Such arbitrary conditions identify the formal nature of the works. The Marxist leanings of many of the Language poets in the 1970s made it clear that the normative relationships in language were not innocent correspondences but rather strictures created over time through the process of cultural production. Language, they realized, carried all the imprints of the society against which they had been struggling. The writers’ distrust of the poetic tradition was based on its fundamental correspondence with capitalism. But they were also aware of a parallel tradition, what they took as a subversive one composed of writers who had not followed the Modernist dictates of realism, naturalism, and symbolism. Among these were Gertrude Stein with her verbal repetitions, Louis Zukofsky with his musical analogies, and Ezra Pound (although associated with the mainstream tradition as well) with his demands that language must be rewritten to fit the age. Two of these, Zukofsky and Pound, were associated briefly by sympathies with the “Objectivist” movement, often cited as a precursor to the Language poets with its treatment of the poem as object. All Language poets were not, of course, Marxists, and some even found themselves in opposition to Marxism’s hegemony in academia in the 1970s (Hartley 1989). Initially, however, the Language writers turned to both Marxist and poststructural ideologies to inform their poetry (Perelman 1996, 13). These differences within the Language movement are partly responsible for the controversy over its definition. Many rejected the label of “Language Poets” on the grounds that such an attempt to unify the movement undermined the diversity of their approaches and concerns and was, in effect, a way of annexing their efforts. The movement wanted to maintain their marginality as a sign of the challenge to the historicizing process. This ahistorical position was not simply a refusal to accept

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recognition, Eleana Kim points out, but an effort to place themselves beyond socializing forces that had assimilated earlier avant-garde groups: An equally important consideration in any definition of Language poetry is the degree to which it was a self-identifying group. The group’s identity is, in many ways, a product of critics and scholars interested in establishing it as the latest in avant-garde formations, and the poets themselves demonstrated deep ambivalences as the tendency began to gain currency under the Language moniker. The poets often resisted a unified identity even as their public manifestations exhibited a more or less stable core to the movement. (1994)

The problem underlines their eventual acceptance into academic institutions, a move that both legitimized and historicized the movement in the 1980s. The desire to retain their individuality was tantamount to a statement rejecting the tradition, particularly aspects associated with old avant-garde poets represented in Donald Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry (1960). Allen had broken with New Critical traditions and gathered together elements of the Black Mountain school, the Beats, the New York school, and others in a wide-ranging, avant-garde collection. But the poets in this anthology soon found themselves at the center of a new poetic mainstream (Holcombe n.d.). The Language poets were intent on distinguishing themselves through an even newer understanding of “poetic inheritance, tradition, and the role of literary theory” (Kim 1994). Yet, even among Language poets there were difficulties on how to define the movement, as is evident in the organizing principles in two prominent anthologies: Ron Silliman’s In the American Tree (1986) and Douglas Messerli’s “Language” Poetries (1987). Silliman’s introduction to his anthology already warns of the “reductive assumptions” of the label “Language Poets,” and Messerli uses the plural, “poetries,” to show an inclusive factor in the movement (ibid). The main import of these moves to solidify the group was to show the ideological associations rather than the differences in poetries. Silliman suggests that no less was at stake than “The nature of reality. The nature of the individual. The function of language in the constitution of either realm,” and “The shape and value of literature itself” (1986, xix). History. Language poetry begins with a number of small magazines in the early 1970s, corresponding to groups in San Francisco, New York, and the Washington, D.C., area (Perelman 1996, 11). Some argue that it was really the first issue of This magazine in 1971 that started the phenomenon (Silliman 1986, xvi). The zenith of the early period is surely the publication of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine (1978–1982) in San Francisco. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E created a forum for the discussion of contemporary poetics that helped define the group’s distinctions from the lyric tradition (Perelman 1996, 16). The movement grew in the 1970s with the publication of other little magazines, including Tottel’s, Hills, Roof, Miam, Qu, The Difficulties, A Hundred Posters, Sink, Tramen, and Tremblor (Kim 1994; Hartley 1989; Kinsella 2007). Associated primarily with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E after 1978, it was referred to in various ways as the Language movement, Language poetry, the Language group and as the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets (Perelman 1996, 18; Izenberg 2003). By the late 1970s, a number of anthologies and journal special editions featured the group, adding to its critical legitimacy: Lisbon & the Orcas Islands (1973), Alcheringa (1975), Open Letter (1977), Hills (1980), Ironwood (1982), Paris Review (1982), The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (1984), Change (1985), Writing/Talks (1985), and boundary 2 (1986) (Hartley 1989). During this period, a number of poets were identified specifically with the movement, including Bruce Andrews, Rae Armantrout, Steve

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Benson, Charles Bernstein, David Bromige, Clark Coolidge, Alan Davies, Ray DiPalma, Robert Grenier, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Steve McCaffery, Michael Palmer, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, Peter Seaton, James Sherry, Ron Silliman, Diane Ward, Barrett Watten, and Hannah Weiner (Hartley 1989). But these experimental publications were the result of changes that had been building for some time. By the early 1970s the lyric trend in American poetry, sustained throughout much of the mid-century under the prominence of the confessional school of poets and their successors were under attack for what a new generation saw as self-centered emotionalism. The confessional school had refined the lyric as a mode of self-examination and personal experience, often dealing with human alienation. Perpetuated during the middle years by powerful influences such as Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, and Sylvia Plath, it was not until the protest poetry of the 1960s that political and social problems became a general focus of the poetry. A new social awareness brought with it a questioning of language itself as the medium for social and political change, even in the arts. Although to write the history of Language poetry proves as controversial an act as trying to define what it is, there are definite antecedents to the kind of experimentation that was attracting young poets in the 1970s. In The Poetics of Indeterminacy (1981), Perloff delineates a marginalized tradition within 20th-century poetry, and draws a line from Arthur Rimbaud and Gertrude Stein to contemporary postmodernist poets such as John Ashbery. She was one of the first to link the critical theorists of the French and Geneva schools to an understanding of the poetic tradition. By citing Gertrude Stein, and seeing in her word experiments an awareness that language is a material medium, like paint is for the painter, and that it can therefore be manipulated to expose social assumptions, Perloff helped create a critical space for the later understanding of Language poetry. Other predecessors can be found in the early-twentieth-century Dadaists, who reacted against the “idea of art” in much the way Language poetry would criticize the romanticized tradition. Tristan Tzara’s ideas could easily be read in a contemporary context: “It seemed to us that the world was losing itself in idle babbling, that literature and art had become institutions located on the margin of life, that instead of serving man they had become the instruments of an outmoded society” (Kinsella 1996). Perloff makes the connection that Dada was a community effort, not one focused on the individual, and that political action was a primary component of the movement (Perloff 1999). The “anti-art” stance was a political statement about the social constrictions of “high” art, and one that parallels Language poetry’s rejection of the Modernist tradition in poetry. Other influences were surely Concrete poetry, a form that took the material nature of letters and words to an extreme and constructed non-linear typographical images. Further connections have been suggested with Charles Olson and the Black Mountain school, William Carlos Williams, the Russian Formalists, the Surrealists, and the OULIPO group in the early 1960s (Kinsella 1996; Hartley 1989; Gelpi 1990; Perelman 1996). It may be indicative of the controversies surrounding its history that its efforts to avoid classification as yet another avant-garde group somehow ensured its place as an avantgarde group in literary history. Kim cautions, however, that the act of historicizing the group carries its own implications: “The connections between the movement and the European avant-gardes of the 1920s have been examined by academics who promote its formal innovations and political interventions, as well as frame it within a narrative of American transavantgardism or postmodernism” (Kim 1994).

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Trends and Themes. After a period of wider academic acceptance in the late 1980s and 1990s, the original Marxist components of the movement and the predominance of male writers in the original groups faced challenges from poets who demanded a greater awareness of gender and ethnic concerns. Consequently, many today have come to refer to the “Language Poets” as an historical movement dating to the early 1980s. Some of the earliest poets themselves now “refer to language poetry in the past tense” (Lilley 1997). But it is possible to see a continuance of concerns in what some today call the “postlanguage” poets (Wallace 1998). It might even be said that the “post” state of Language poetry is a necessary development in a poetics that rejected its own historical definition. At the same time, postlanguage poets are disclaiming aspects of the early coalition, and reformulating new positions. The movement existed on the fringe of American poetry until the mid-1980s, but its early uses of critical theory and poststructural ideas ensured its entrance into academic literary circles just then exploring these fields. Language poetry “enjoyed a privileged status among high-brow academics who had found an art form particularly suited, indeed, symptomatic, of the very forces engendering the rise of postmodern cultural and post-structuralist theories” (Kim 1994). But this also created a dichotomy in that it had “secured an institutional foothold which brokers against our usual notion of the avant-garde” (Reddy n.d.). Presently, theory is one of the critical points of difference, with some postlanguage poets critical of the dominant theoretical focus of the earlier poets (Wallace 1998). In the 1970s, theory was not just a concern but a cohesive element in the movement. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, for instance, was composed almost exclusively of “critical essays” not “poetry” (Watten 2003, 51). And even “genres” such as these were destabilized whenever possible. The postlanguage poets, however, have retained the intrinsic concern with language and its relationship to power (Wallace 1998). The preeminent role of critical theory in early Language poetry was due, in part, to its marginality within the academic community. Postlanguage poets have rather grown up in an environment accepting critical theory as part of the necessary dialogue of the times. But conceptualizing has become less important: Postlanguage poets often feel that theorizing their practice is a burden. Literary theory has often seemed to them something that the dominant power structures of the academy and their elders in avant-garde poetry have demanded that they create in order to justify their practice as poets. Literary theory does continue to be a central part of the practice of many postlanguage poets, yet they tend to undertake it with an ambivalent and often wearied eye. (Wallace 1998)

With greater visibility has come an increased awareness of Language writing in areas outside the two coasts, with poets now writing from regions as diverse as Oklahoma and Hawaii, with international groups in Europe and Australia (Wallace 1998). Whereas the first poets defined their work in an atmosphere of 1970s cultural revolution, newer members have moved beyond this “militant phase” associated with “manifestos” and turned “toward other, more meditative forms of literary inquiry” (Reddy n.d.). Some have even returned to specific aspects of poetry that were once disapproved of, including “narrative, lyric, spirituality, and a poetics of the every day” (Wallace 1998). Most now see a “growing array of hybridizing writing practices that make use of visual, sound, performance, and cyber media in order to bring the materiality of language (and thus the reader) into a more activist position”

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(Osman 2001). Consequently, today “the detached eye of the ‘language poem’ must share the textual stage with connective, collective, and absorptive forms” (Osman 2001). The influence of feminism has had the greatest effect on today’s Language poetry. Although poets Carla Harryman, Rae Armantrout, Lyn Hejinian, Hannah Weiner, Susan Howe, and Bernadette Mayer were all early members of the movement, much of the early critical theory was written by men, Charles Bernstein, Bob Perelman, and Ron Silliman (Perloff n.d.). The movement, in some ways, reflected the masculine nature of the New Left politics out of which it had grown. It was not until the mid-1980s, and the realization of Second Wave feminism, that women’s interests were addressed. Some argue that in the 1980s the movement represented women better than other disciplines, at least in the area of small magazine publication (Vickery 2000, 99). Today, the importance of cultural studies in academia has increased the awareness of gender and ethnic concerns. Postlanguage writers often “highlight problems of identity politics from specific cultural positions,” and “critique the limits of identity politics” by crossing “cultural boundaries” (Wallace 1998). Harryette Mullen, Tan Lin, Susan Schultz, Rodrigo Toscano, Myung Mi Kim, and Bob Harrison are writers who “have explored the complex ways that problems of cultural identity interact with poetic practice” (Wallace 1998). In the 1990s two anthologies were published that reflected these changes: Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North American & the UK (1996), edited by Maggie O’Sullivan, and Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women (1998), edited by Mary Margaret Sloan (Retallack 2003, 251). These were complimented by a number of critical studies, including Translating the Unspeakable: Poetry and the Innovative Necessity, by Kathleen Fraser (2000); Lyric Interventions: Feminism, Experimental Poetry, and Contemporary Discourse, by Linda Kinnahan ( 2004); and Women Poets in the 21st Century, edited by Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr (2002) (Ashton 2006). Early Language Poets conflicted with certain groups due to their denial of the validity of the “subject” in writing. “Since one of its early premises was the critique of ‘identity,’” Brian Kim Stefans observes, the movement “never had the language for dealing with minority issues that attempted to legitimize ‘identity’ as a central subject of discourse” (2001). Similarly, popular women writers of the 1970s, by choosing “traditional lyric forms” were participating in “an unwitting acquiescence to centuries of male dominance in the art of poetry” (Ashton 2006). Citing Rachel DuPlessis’s 1985 essay, “Otherhow,” Jennifer Ashton points out that “it is not sufficient to write lyric poems in which a woman’s experiences are the main subject matter of the song, for the very forms of the lyric—including even basic grammatical forms used to represent the presence of a speaker—are themselves indices of a history of male domination” (Ashton 2006). Finally, “The literary feminism that emerged in the 1980s thus transformed the attack on women’s underrepresentation into an attack on representation as such, and it did so by way of the avant-garde requirement of formal innovation,” insisting as it did “on an even more literal connection between the text and the body” (Ashton 2006). Others warn that the return to the “subject” risks an acquiescence to socially restrictive language, and writers need to keep the “systemic” nature of language in mind (Spahr 2001). Contexts and Issues. The critique of the “subject” was at the center of the Language movement’s argument with poetic tradition. According to Language poets, modern poetry had prioritized the speaker of the poem in such a way as to

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perpetuate the “illusion” that the poem simply expressed the truth of psychological states. As the editors of the journal Rethinking Marxism explain in “On Language Poetry”: “If language is historically changing and constitutive of subjectivity, making us as we make and use it, then it neither reveals nor represses some inner self, some ‘species being,’ that exists before the fact of its use” (1988). Modernism had lionized the subject and its psychological effects as the domain of the poem. The society within which the individual lives, however, is hegemonic, that is, it rules through official concepts and ideas. As Bernstein writes, “a poem exists in a matrix of social and historical relationships that are more significant to the formulation of an individual text than any personal qualities of the life or voice of an author” (Bernstein 1986, 408). Perloff calls this the “cardinal principle” of the Language group: the “dismissal of ‘voice’ as the foundational principle of lyric poetry” (Perloff 1998). The realities of the postmodern world are not centered on the individual but on the production of meanings generated by historical, social, and political forces. Writing therefore becomes a dynamic process of exchange. As Andrews writes in “Code Words,” “The subject loses authority, disappears, is unmade into a network of relationships, stretching indefinitely” (Andrews 1996, 190). In order to escape this constructed subjectivity poets explore nonreferential language, or words and phrases in other than traditional contexts, such as normative syntax or spelling. These are the semiotic and structural aspects of the language that allow for the free play of malapropos, solecisms, parataxis, and other syntactical experiments. The poetic techniques all attempt to dismantle the poem’s dependence on the individual’s intention or expression. “All writing is a demonstration of method,” Bernstein says, “it can assume a method or investigate it. In this sense, style and mode are always at issue, for all styles are socially mediated conventions open to reconvening at any time” (Bernstein 1986, 226). Henry Sussman argues that this opens the poem to new meanings: “The concrete handling of words and word fragments thus resides at the extreme of language’s generative capabilities” (Sussman 2005, 42). A brief example will help clarify: Andrews’s piece, “LETTERS” begins “THEIR midst mix power to crystallize with connected the next room hope openings bent her white fragments effusive neck smoked verge of recognition’s to hold fast as if unwittingly even to the fissures looming sight shadow surprises stays at home her words for the feeling to arrow soothed” (Silliman 1986, 315). The capitals of the title alert us to the fact that these are both “letters” as separate signs and “letters” such as one writes in correspondence. On the printed page the words are justified and also spaced just a little extra between each, so that each stands out as separate signs. It is possible to sense, rather than strictly “read” a context here, with words such as “crystallize,” “connected,” “white fragments,” “fissures,” and “stays at home.” These are all things that both kinds of letters do or suggest. Andrews is playing on the multiple sense of how signs both identify a social function, letter writing, and yet can be broken down to signify writing as a momentary act. The idea of nonreferentiality means that words relate to each other in more ways than through normative syntax, such as we are taught in school, or, the poets might say, as we are socialized to believe. The poem is not nonsense, but a disruption of normal reading processes to produce new effects. As Bernstein admits: Words are almost always referential, but what many of us were interested in exploring were nonconventional forms, allowing the expressive (and nonexpressive) features of language to roam in different territory than possible with tamer verse forms. So what

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A key work for the early Language poets was Roland Barthes’s essays, “The Death of the Author” (1968). Steven McCaffery, a Canadian member of the Language group, made the connection clear by titling his own essay, “The Death of the Subject” (1976). Andrews also wrote of the essay in his note “Code Words” for the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Barthes argues that “Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing” (Perloff 1998). His critique of the “subject” was a pivotal moment in the poststructural assessment of authorship. With Barthes’s lead, then, Language poetry became involved on an ever-increasing level with critical theory, even as it developed as part of curriculums across the country. Much has now been made of the “issue of careerism” among early participants in the movement (Stefans 1999). Although at the start it could be said that “despite their general obsession with theory and critical practice, the Language poets tend to be anti-Academic” (Kinsella n.d.), many have now taken academic positions at schools, including the University of California Berkeley, SUNY Buffalo, and the University of Pennsylvania. Kate Lilley points out a crucial aspects of this change: The point at which the means of production and distribution passed out of the hands of the original editors and contributors marked an historic juncture in the commodification of language writing as a school, with a reasonably secure curriculum and membership. It also signaled the beginning of the movement’s wider dissemination qua movement in a variety of prestigious literary and academic venues. (Lilley 1997)

The effect has been to change the nature of the original experiment: “Along with the assimilation of the group’s basic tenets and political strategies into a welcoming leftist academic agenda, the group’s deformation has left many of the major participants (most of whom are still writing and publishing) refining their initial positions” (Kim 1994). As Language poetry’s importance has grown in influence to compete with traditional poetics, it finds itself in a position not far from the establishment it originally set out to criticize for its dominance of the field: “A few minutes with the Arts and Humanities Citation Index confirms that, during 1994–1997, the number of academic citations for Bernstein’s work doubled those for [Anthony] Hecht’s” (Caplan 1997). By the 1990s, Language poetry was often talked about in the past tense, as if its new academic standing had somehow compromised its critical position (Kim 1994). Reception. Although initially accused of “elitism” and “a sense of haughtiness” in refusing to address ethnic or gender questions, there have been noticeable changes in the original makeup of the generally “white” male movement (Gelpi 1990; Stefans 2001). Much of the initial reception was antagonistic: “The negative polemics raised against the Language school project ranged from invocations of McCarthyism and corporate juntas . . . to dismissals of their so-called avant-gardism at a time in which the term itself had been evacuated of its historical or political effect” (Kim 1994). The sense that the new poetics might allow for a “co-opting” by reactionary political forces was extreme (Kovacik 2001). For although Language theorists would continually speak of social advocacy, there was an inherent conflict

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between hermetic experimentation and social relevance. The fact that all philosophy was now presented as a set of linguistic constructs “is not that the world is just codes and as a result presence is to be ruled out as anything more than nostalgia, but that we can have presence, insofar as we are able, only through a shared grammar” (Andrews and Bernstein 1984, 61). But in contrast, postlanguage poets were looking to reassert the importance of disenfranchised groups, whose identities might continue to be displaced by the theoretical focus on “authorless texts.” The practical reality was that authors still created texts: “[I]n practice, we do take signatures seriously as markers of a particular individual, a cultural practice, an historical period, a national formation, a convention, and so on” (Perloff 1998). Its reception today reflects specific changes that have allowed Language poets a more prominent place in contemporary poetry. Perloff argues for changes in three areas in particular: the early concern with demonstrating “referentiality” has become a more “nuanced emphasis on the how of poetic language rather than the what”; the condemnation of tradition poetic language as a “commodity fetish” has been criticized when poets realized that any language, even Language poetry, can become “fetischized”; and the efforts to give readers a role in the sense-making process of the poem has been seen as merely a shifting of authority from the author to the reader (n.d.). These factors have given today’s poets an historical vantage point. Postlanguage poets now incorporate what early groups omitted: “sound poetry, visual and concrete poetry, fluxus, conceptual art, appropriative strategies, oulipian process-oriented writing, a focus on the more performative aspects of poetry, not to mention technological innovations which weren’t available then” (Goldsmith 2001). Some of the strongest early criticism was from Marxist theorists such as Fredric Jameson. Jameson’s famous reading of Perelman’s poem, “China,” in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), saw the poem as an example of “schizophrenic language” (Hartley 1989, 42). Jameson’s position suggests a general attack on the idea of nonreferential language: “these sentences are free floating material signifiers whose signifieds have evaporated” (Jameson n.d.). For the Marxists, reference was grounded in a historical moment that cannot be escaped by poetic innovation. The real complaint, however, was aimed at the more extreme forms of theory: “Theory swallowed all: poetry submerged into criticism and linguistics, words about words; even Marxism exercised itself not in political action but academic analysis” (Gelpi 1990). The fact that postmodern poetry would deny its efficacy as political action was the key, and this difference has remained at the center of the ongoing argument. Kristin Prevallet summarizes an exemplary debate between poets Barrett Watten and Amiri Baraka: Watten embraced a poetics of alienation that matched the rupture between speech and society that he had witnessed during the Free Speech Movement and the Vietnam War. In his writing he seeks to reveal the material power of language in order to expose very real divisions between oppressive structures and the language used to maintain them. Baraka also writes to expose power structures, but uses poetry as a lived embodiment of intricately experienced intellectual, emotional, and musical realities. (Prevallet 2000)

The problem also goes to the heart of the question about poetry as an elitist endeavor. Language poetry has adjusted to the new social consciousness, but its initial position remains problematic for many: “Language poetry was a self-conscious

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avant-garde group,” Kim points out, “whose poetic and historical distinctions were articulated across of broad set of concerns. . . . It is a writing practice that started as a collective belief of a new generation of poets which became an actual shift in the consideration of poetry” (Kim 1994). More recently, Bernstein admits: “Poetry may not be able to redistribute the wealth, but it can open up a way of—again to say—representing the issues that can change how we respond, indeed keep us responding. For the political question is never just what is to be done but also the formulating and reformulating of the issues” (Senning 1999). Today, Language poets are a general influence in American poetry, not only felt among traditional poets who have adopted certain Language techniques but also by way of early Language poets who have begun to return to traditional forms and even the authorial voice. In addition, a number of early members of the movement: have been incorporating elements that might be thought of as postlanguage, including European forms and rhyme schemes, representation and narrative, and social constructions of cultural identity and subjectivity, although they use such elements in ways that expand possibilities for innovation, and critique and expose received notions of tradition and form. (Wallace 1998)

Poets have also revised early theoretical positions in order to accommodate a growing range of contemporary issues, including the realization that all art is not of the same value, whatever the “value” is determined to be (Perloff 1998). Selected Authors. Harryette Mullen (1953–) has come to the attention of critics particularly because she attempts to bridge certain contemporary concerns of the Language poets with an ethnic and gender focus. One of her most recent collections, Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), although not as sustained in its effort as her earlier, Muse & Drudge (1995), which Perloff has called a “pseudo-ballad . . . written, seemingly against the ‘Language’ grain” (Perloff n.d.), nonetheless questions ethnic roles in postlanguage terms. Many of the poems are “prose” poems, or sections of writing that follow declarative statement form. In “Once Ever After,” the mythic echoes are restructured under a feminist sensibility. The “princess” who “wet the bed through many mattresses” is yet “attuned,” although she “was born on a chessboard” and seems destined in some ways to struggle against an identity imposed upon her classic role (Mullen 2002, 53). The postlanguage elements include the suspended sentence fragments, “Her lips were. Her hair was. Her complexion was,” which go to anticipate the stereotypical phrases as descriptive limits to her identity, and yet by not completing such fragments, Mullen exposes the presuppositions in the mythic construction (Mullen 2002, 53). She does not limit herself to ethnic concerns, however, and can be read in a Language context in her efforts to “disable corporate jargon and political doublespeak” (Thomas 2002). Again, in “All She Wrote,” Mullen presents ironic contrasts that mean and do not mean what they say: “Forgive me, I’m no good at this. I can’t write back” (Mullen 2002, 3). And yet the collection is itself a “writing back” both against racial and gender stereotypes and against the idea of language as a simple, intentional act. Going beyond the deconstructive assumption that all oppositional terms are prejudiced in favor of one side or the other, a notion critiqued by both Language poets and poststructural theorists, Mullen re-imagines new configurations, including “a resistance to traditional dialectics,” by which she “disorganizes this pattern by imagining other ways of being opposite” (Hume 2003). Ultimately, the poetry addresses oppositions that “cannot

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be read in terms of dualities, the world according to binary oppositions which privilege one side of the equation (rational or emotional, public or private, white or black, male or female) over the other” (Hume 2003). Rae Armantrout’s (1947–) first collections, Extremities (1978) and The Invention of Hunger (1979), helped define what Silliman calls the “anti-lyric” challenge of the original movement (2004). In Up to Speed (2004), the poet moves into more subtle areas of experimentation, arranging her line fragments in three and four stanza groups so that they lend a secondary structure to the book. Armantrout addresses the once taboo subject of domestic angst, a familiar topic for lyric poets. But she does so in a fashion that challenges the reader’s notion of the domestic. She builds her poems on absences, but rather than avoiding the moment, each fulfills the collection’s sense of a deeper betrayal: “she calls to our attention the overlooked chinks and fissures in the linguistic exoskeleton that stands between us and the experiences it envelops” (Muratori 2002). There are the normal poststructural references in Up to Speed, but what has changed for Armantrout of late is that these seems less urgent: “I could handle symbols,” she writes, “without being manipulated by them” (Armantrout 2004, 3). Like others, she has moved away from the constant pronouncements of Language poetics, and focused more on human exchanges. At its best, the new work reflects a consciousness where both non-referentiality and humanity coexist. “One’s a connoisseur of vacancies,” she writes, “loud silences/surrounding human artifacts” (Armantrout 2004, 26). The humanistic concerns of Modernist poetry, which were first rejected wholesale by the Language poets in their efforts to destabilize the traditional emotionalism of the poem, return now with a certain casualness in moments of individualistic clarity: “She’s concerned with the rhythm/of her own sequence of events” (Armantrout 2004, 26). There is a sense in Armantrout’s recent work that the fragmentary impulses that sustain her early experiments are now coalescing more into questions of recurrent human values. Myung Mi Kim (1957–) was born in Seoul, Korea, and moved as a child to the United States, a fact that informs her use of poetic structures. For Kim, the experience of the immigrant is one where language always represents multiple voices. Kim seems to be more aware than most that poststructuralism is not simply an aesthetic preference but a natural attribute of growing up divided between cultural identities. Her first work, Under Flag (1991) was an important effort to bridge Language experiments with new ethnic concerns. Her most recent work, Commons (2002), moves into the area of transliteration, where Kim explores the difficulties of adapting one language to another, in this case her native Hangul alphabet to English. She asks: “Whose ears are at work? Where does the authority of romanizing reside?” (Kim 2002, 110). The questions are not just about the dissemination of meaning through the transliterative act but also about who has the authority to Romanize a language. The nuances of the Hangul are not lost so much as reinterpreted into something else in the standardization of English. Kim’s poetry breaks up the standards by fragmenting the impressions and scrambling the process of logical sequence in order to make plain the process hidden in cultural acquisition. Here the Language movement’s concern with process seems most clear but has been taken further toward an awareness of how acculturation itself works. About the poem, “Siege Document,” Jeon Joseph Jonghyun points out: “the primary audience for this poem is the reader who does not speak or read the Korean language and that knowledge of Hangul does not dramatically change one’s reading experience because the

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author’s central preoccupation is with sound; transliteration takes precedence over translation” (Jonghyun 2004). In the end, this is not a process of supplanting one language with another, but an interaction of two in the possibilities of an exchange (Jonghyun 2004). Lyn Hejinian (1941–) is one of the original west coast members of the Language movement. Her seminal work, My Life (1980), remains a major influence on writers. Instrumental in the ongoing critique of “autobiography,” it continues the questioning of subjectivity. Hejinian’s collected essays, The Language of Inquiry (2000), which includes the much cited “Two Stein Talks” on Gertrude Stein, makes clear her prominence among theorists. There is often a direct correspondence between Hejinian’s Russian ancestry and her formal tendencies, apparent in her writings on the Russian Formalists, particularly Viktor Schlovsky. Most important among her recent works is the long poem of narrative fragments, Happily (2000), which Perloff calls “a Steinian work” for its use of juxtaposed sentence fragments and stanzas. Although Stein’s own repetitions are a continual “insistence” of salient features rising to the surface of her prose, Hejinian’s fragments work more toward their own autonomous display, weaving a logic of prosaic inclusion rather than repetition. Hejinian has often worked with longer, open lines, with a tendency toward ideation that underlines her exploration into feminist differences. She creates a logic and sequence: “Now is a noted conjunction” she writes, moving to emphasize the immediate “place in place” (Hejinian 2000, 27, 3) that is yet a separation of the act and the moment that inspires it: “States of intuition may be only sudden / Now is a blinding instant . . .” (Hejinian 2000, 27). This fluid exchange within “a carefully plotted set of synonyms” plays on the contrasts in words like “happily” and “happen” (Perloff 2000). Hejinian’s use of “happily” as opposed to “happiness” is a way of denying the reduction of being to language or language to being: “the adverbial form [happily] is preferable to the noun happiness, since modification is much more likely to produce contingency than is nominalization, which suggests a state of being” (Perloff 2000). Hejinian’s sense of continuance, a Steinian feature in her works, adds to both the book’s coherence and its subtle rhythms, reinforcing the poet’s primary concern: “Perhaps it is the role of art to put us in complicity with things as they happen” (Hejinian 2000, 13). Others have moved into different areas of the Internet and electronic media. Silliman has his own blog, where he continues to engage poetic and political matters, and he has published recent reprints and compilations of works, including Under Albany (2004), an autobiographical “back story” that informs his earlier poem, “Albany” (ABC 1983). This autobiographical work contextualizes the original poem, at the same time that it explores Silliman’s own relationship to the “author” as historical sign. Another poet, Bernstein, recently published Girly Man (2006). Here he moves further into his familiar sense of parody and self-parody. “This is a totally / accessible poem,” he writes. If the work retains a political edge, it is through a renewed attack on governing authority. The poems continue a tradition of the “exploded cliché or the dislocated fragment of conventional unwisdom” (Kaufmann 2007). Bernstein has also written a libretto for an opera, Shadowtime (2005), with music by Brian Ferneyhough. Other divergent forms include Andrews’s interactive collage with Dirk Rowntree titled Prehab (2005) on UbuWeb.com., a leading avant-garde poetry Web site, and various examples of internet cyberspace experiments using flash technology. More centrally, there are increasing numbers of writers who incorporate Language concepts with traditional

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first-person and third-person voices. The most prominent among these are Juliana Spahr’s Fuck You—Aloha—I Love You (2001), Fanny Howe’s Gone (2003), Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s Nest (2003), Lucie Brock-Broido’s, Trouble in Mind (2004), and Michael Palmer’s A Company of Moths (2005). Bibliography Allen, Donald, ed. The New American Poetry. New York: Grove Press, 1960. Ashton, Jennifer. Our Bodies, Our Poems. American Literary History. December 8, 2006. Oxford University Press, 2006. Web Site http://alh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/ full/ajl039v1. Andrews, Bruce. Paradise and Method. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996. ———. Prehab (with Dirk Rowntree), 2005. UbuWeb.com. Web Site http://www.ubu.com/ contemp//andrews/a–ndrews.html. Andrews, Bruce, and Charles Bernstein, eds. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. Armantrout, Rae. Why Don’t Women Do Language-Oriented Writing? In In the American Tree. Ron Silliman, ed. Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1986; 544–546. ———. Up to Speed. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. ———. Veil: New and Selected Poems. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001. ———. Extremities. Berkeley, CA: The Figures, 1978. Bernstein, Charles. Girly Man. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006. ———. Shadowtime. Libretto for an opera with music by Brian Ferneyhough. Los Angeles, CA: Green Integer, 2005. ———. Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984. Los Angeles, CA: Sun & Moon Press, 1986. Berssenbrugge, Mei-Mei. Nest. Berkeley, CA: Kelsey Street, 2003. Brock-Broido, Lucie. Trouble in Mind. New York: Knopf, 2004. Caplan, David. Who’s Zoomin’ Who?: The Poetics of www.poets.org and wings.buffalo.edu/epc. Postmodern Culture Vol. 8.1 (1997). [Online January 2007]. Web Site http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v008/8.1r_caplan.html. Gelpi, Albert. The Genealogy of Postmodernism: Contemporary American Poetry. The Southern Review, Summer 1990. [Online December 2006]. Web Site http://www.english. upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/gelpi.html. Goldsmith, Kenneth. After Language Poetry. Reprint of OEI 7-8 2001 (Sweden). Anders Lundgerg, Jonas (J) Magnusson, and Jesper Olsson, eds. UbuWeb.com. [Online October 2006]. Web Site http://www.ubu.com/papers/oei/index.html. Hartley, George. Textual Politics and the Language Poets. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989. Hejinian, Lyn. Happily. Sausalito: Post-Apollo Press, 2000. ———, My Life. Providence, RI: Burning Deck, 1980. Howe, Fanny. Gone. New California Poetry, 7. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003. Hume, Christine. Review of Sleeping with the Dictionary by Harryette Mullen. The Constant Critic. [Online January 2007]. Web Site http://www.constantcritic.com/archive. Izenberg, Oren. “Language Poetry and Collective Life.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 30 Number 1, Fall (2003). Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism and Consumer Society. Athenaeum Reading Room. [Online December 2006]. Web Site http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/jameson.htm. Jonghyun, Jeon Joseph. Speaking In Tongues: Myung Mi Kim’s Stylized Mouths. Studies in the Literary Imagination, Spring (2004). [Online December 2006]. Web Site http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3822/is_200404/ai_n9471130/print. Kaufmann, David. Rattling The Chains Of American Poetry: Charles Bernstein’s Unique Blend of Polemic, Parody and Just Plain Invention. The Jewish Daily Forward, Jan 12

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LANGUAGE POETRY (2007). [Online January 2007]. Web Site http://www.forward.com/articles/rattlingthe-chains-of-american-poetry. Kim, Eleana. Language Poetry: Dissident Practices and the Makings of a Movement (1994). ReadMe, Issue #4, Spring/Summer (2001). [Online October 2006]. Web Site http://home.jps.net/~nada/language1.htm. Kim, Myung Mi. Commons. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. ———. Under Flag. Berkeley, CA: Kelsey St. Press, 1991. Kinsella, John. C-O-M-M-U-N-I-C-A-T-I-N-G An Ad-Hoc Introduction To American Language Poetry (1996). Fremantle Arts Review. Jane Cousins, ed. JohnKinsella.org. [Online October 2006]. Web Site http://www.johnkinsella.org/essays/communicating.html. Kovacik, Karen. Between L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and Lyric: The Poetry of Pink-Collar Resistance. National Women’s Studies Association Journal, 13.1 (2001): 22–39. [Online December 2006]. Web Site http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nwsa_journal/v013/13. 1kovacik.html. Lilley Kate. This L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Pamphlet in The Impercipient Lecture Series. Steve Evans and Jennifer Moxley, eds. Vol. 1 No. 4 May (1997). Reprinted in Jacket #2. [Online December 2006]. Web Site http://jacketmagazine.com/02/lilley02.html. McCaffery, Steve. North of Intention: Critical Writings 1973–1986. New York: Roof Books, 1986. Messerli, Douglas. “Language” Poetries. New York: New Directions, 1987. Mullen, Harryette. Sleeping with the Dictionary. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002. ———. Muse & Drudge. Philadelphia, PA: Singing Horse Press, 1995. Muratori, Fred. Seeming is Believing. Electronic Poetry Review. Review of Rae Armantrout’s Veil: New and Selected Poems. [Online December 2006]. Web Site http://www. epoetry.org/issues/issue4/text/prose/muratori1rev.htm. “On Language Poetry.” The Editors. Rethinking Marxism 1, 4 (Winter 1988). Osman, Jena. After Language Poetry. Reprint of OEI 7-8 2001 (Sweden). Anders Lundgerg, Jonas (J) Magnusson, and Jesper Olsson, eds. UbuWeb.com. [Online November 2006]. Web Site http://www.ubu.com/papers/oei/index.html. Palmer, Michael. Company of Moths. New York: New Directions, 2005. Perelman, Bob. The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Perloff, Marjorie. Language Poetry And The Lyric Subject: Ron Silliman’s Albany, Susan Howe’s Buffalo (1998). Electronic Poetry Center (EPC). [Online December 2006]. Web Site http://epc.buffalo.edu/. ———. After Language Poetry: Innovation And Its Theoretical Discontents (n.d.). Electronic Poetry Center (EPC). [Online November 2006]. Web Site http://epc.buffalo.edu/. ———. Dada Without Duchamp/Duchamp Without Dada: Avant-Garde Tradition and the Individual Talent. Stanford Humanities Review Volume 7.1 (1999). [Online December 2006]. http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/7-1/html/perloff.html. ———. Happy World: What Lyn Hejinian’s Poetry Tells Us About Chance, Fortune and Pleasure. The Boston Review, February/March (2000). [Online December 2006]. Web Site http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/perloff/articles/hejinian.html. ———. The Poetics of Indeterminacy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999. Prevallet, Kristin. The Exquisite Extremes of Poetry (Watten and Baraka on the Brink). Jacket #12, July (2000). [Online October 2006]. Web Site http://jacketmagazine. com/12/prevallet-orono.html. Reddy, Srikanth. Beyond the Manifesto: Language Poetry and Lyn Hejinian’s The Language of Inquiry. Poets.org. [Online December 2006]. Web Site http://www.poets.org/ viewmedia.php/prmMID/5895.

LANGUAGE POETRY Senning, Bradford. Charles Bernstein Interview. ReadMe, Issue #1, Fall (1999). [Online November 2006]. Web Site http://home.jps.net/~nada/bernstein.htm. Silliman, Ron. Forward to Veil: New and Selected Poems by Rae Armantrout. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001. ———. The New Sentence. New York: Roof Books, 1995. ———, ed. In the American Tree. Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1986. ———. ABC. Berkeley, CA: Tuumba Press, 1983. Sloan, Mary Margaret. Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women. Jersey City, NJ: Talisman House, 1998. Spahr, Juliana. After Language Poetry. Reprint of OEI 7-8 2001 (Sweden). Anders Lundgerg, Jonas (J) Magnusson, and Jesper Olsson, eds. UbuWeb.com. [Online October 2006]. Web Site http://www.ubu.com/papers/oei/index.html. ———. Fuck You—Aloha—I Love You. Wesleyan Poetry Series. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001. Stefans, Brian Kim. After Language Poetry. Reprint of OEI 7-8 2001 (Sweden). Anders Lundgerg, Jonas (J) Magnusson, and Jesper Olsson, eds. UbuWeb.com. [Online October 2006]. Web Site http://www.ubu.com/papers/oei/index.html. ———. Subject: BK Stefans on Standard Schaefer Date: Wed, 19 May 1999 08:13:45 -0400 (EDT). [Online December 2006]. Web Site http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/ 88/stefans-institutionalization.html. Sussman, Henry. The Task of the Critic: Poetics, Philosophy, and Religion. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Thomas, Lorenzo. Review of Sleeping with the Dictionary by Harryette Mullen. African American Review, Winter (2002). [Online December 2006]. Web Site http://findarticles.com/ p/articles/mi_m2838/is_4_36/ai_97515904. Vickery, Ann. Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 2000. Wallace, Mark. Definitions In Process, Definitions As Process/Uneasy Collaborations: Language And Postlanguage Poetries. Flashpoint Spring 1998, Web Issue 2. v [Online December 2006]. Web Site http://www.flashpointmag.com/postlang.htm. Watten, Barrett. The Secret History of the Equal Sign: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E between Discourse and Text. Poetics Today 20.4 (1999) 581–627. Reprint Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics (2000). [Online December 2006]. Web Site http://muse.jhu. edu/journals/poetics_today/v020/20.4watten.html.

Further Reading Bartlett, Lee. “What Is ‘Language Poetry.’” Critical Inquiry 12 (1986); Bernstein, Charles, ed. The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy. New York: Roof, 1990; Hejinian, Lyn. The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000; Howe, Susan. My Emily Dickinson. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1988; Huk, Romana, ed. Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003; McCaffery, Steve. Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001; Jerome McGann. “Contemporary Poetry, Alternate Routes.” Critical Inquiry 13 (Spring 1987): 624–47; Perelman, Bob. Virtual Reality. New York: Roof, 1993; Rasula, Jed. Syncopations: The Stress of Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2004; Watten, Barrett. The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.

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LATINO AMERICAN LITERATURE Definition. Terms of identity are particularly important in a review of Latino American literature, since there has been a tendency to lump all Latinos into one homogeneous group. The result of this has been an undifferentiated mixture of Latinos from Latin America and Latinos who are of the United States (citizens) all classified as one group. This has led to including Latinos from Latin America in anthologies of American (U.S.) literature as if they were Latino writers from the United States. For example, Isabel Allende is a Latina writer from Chile. Including her in The American Tradition in Literature (Norton 2002) as a representative of U.S. Latino writers is like including Chinua Achebe, an African writer, as a representative of African American writers. But the fact that she now lives and works in the United States makes her part of that diasporic group of Latino writers contributing to Latino American literature. Latinos in the United States fall into four broad categories: • Mexican Americans (many of whom identify themselves with the self-affirming term of “Chicanos”) constituting about two-thirds (30 million) of the 45 million Latinos counted in the U.S. Census and concentrated mainly in the American southwest states of Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and California • Puerto Ricans (many of whom identify themselves with the self-affirming term of “Boricuas”—from Borinquen, the original name of the island by the Taino Indians— to distinguish themselves from the four million Puerto Ricans from the island and not counted in the U.S. Census) numbering about four million in the Continental United States and concentrated in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Illinois • Cuban Americans numbering about two million, concentrated principally in Florida and • about nine million “other” Latinos from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

Spaniards are not considered in the Latino mix. For example, during the Spanish Civil War (and the period following during which Franco was consolidating the gains of his “revolution”), Federico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish playwright and poet, spent some time living and writing in New York. Some of his major works were written during this time. However, he is not considered a Latino. It is important to point out, however, that demographically Latinos in the United States are growing exponentially; they are everywhere in the United States. There are large enclaves of Dominicans in New York City and the District of Columbia. More than four million Mexican Americans are spread across the Ohio Valley Crescent from Northfield, Minnesota, to Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The distribution of Latinos in the United States is phenomenal. History. Many Latinos in the United States have their origins in Spanish settlements dating back to the Sephardic (Spanish) Jews of New Amsterdam, the Spanish communities that were part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 especially in New Orleans, and the Spanish communities like St Augustine that were part of the Florida acquisition by the United States in 1819. Countless Latinos immigrated to the United States from the founding of the nation to the present. The Cuban American community of Yuba City, Florida, dates from the early twentieth century, long before the mass exodus of Cubans to the United States after 1959. In the United States today there are two categories of Latino writers each with a considerably wide latitude in definition. The first group includes Latino writers from

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the Latin American countries previously mentioned with the exception of Puerto Rico (since all Puerto Ricans are considered U.S. citizens). For the most part, these Latino writers are still citizens of their countries, and their literary and social orientation are generally congruent with the literary and social orientations of their homelands. Many are in the United States as political refugees or exiles, although many more are in the United States because they are simply at odds with the ideological trends in their countries. The Cuban poet Valladares is a good case in point of a Latino writer living and writing in the United States because of political differences with the ruling group of his country. For the most part, this group of Latino writers deals with themes and conventions traditionally part of the literary orientation of their homelands, not with themes pertinent to Latino struggles in the United States. Their works are therefore not classified as Latino literature. In this regard, the works of the Russian writer Solzenitzen’s written while he lived (in exile) in the United States are not considered American literature. The second group of Latino writers is essentially indigenous to the United States, that is, Latinos who are citizens of the United States and identified as members of a Latino group like Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, etc. Like the British roots in the new American soil, U.S. Latino literary roots have yielded a vigorous and dynamic body of literature, which, unfortunately, has been studied historically as part of a foreign enterprise rather then as part and parcel of our American literary heritage. If one were looking for U.S. Latino writers in the libraries of the 1960s, one would not have found them since the Library of Congress and the Dewey System did not have that classification. For example, if one were looking for Mexican American writers, then one would have found them under the classification of “Mexicans in the United States.” Asking a librarian for the location of Latino writers would have yielded the names of Octavio Paz, Julio Cortazar, Gabriel García Márquez, Gabriela Mistral, and Miguel Angel Asturias, all in the card catalogs. These are Latino writers, but not Latino American writers. The point is that the term “Latino Writers” most often directs inquiries to Latin American writers. The unfortunate truth of the matter is that few Americans outside of literary specialists know very much about U.S. Latino Literature today. To be sure, there are successful U.S. Latino writers like Sandra Cisneros (Mexican American), Rudolfo Anaya (Mexican American), Denise Chavez (Mexican American), Piri Thomas (Puerto Rican), Miguel Algarin (Puerto Rican), Nicolasa Mohr (Puerto Rican), Achy Abejas (Cuban American), and Angel Castro (Cuban American). In the main, however, when pressed, uninitiated Americans will ask quizzically: Are there U.S. Latino writers? (Ortego 1983). Who are they? What this points to is the woeful ignorance of most Americans about U.S. Latino writers. Spaniards are not Latinos; and Latinos are not Spaniards. Though by and large, with the exception of the indigenous peoples of Latin America still there today, Latinos are a product of the historical “blending” (a euphemism for cohabitation) between Spanish males and indigenous women—a process commonly labeled as mestizaje, a term from which the word mestizo/a (the noun identifying the product of that process) derives. While the current perspective about U.S. Latinos is that they are recently arrived, Latinos have been markedly part of the American demographic landscape since 1848 when the United States annexed more than half of Mexico’s territory as a prize of war with Mexico (1846–1848). No one is sure just how many Mexicans came with the dismembered territory. Puerto Ricans became Americans with the

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U.S.-Spanish War of 1898. Cuban Americans began their Americanization process with Fidel Castro’s “liberation” of Cuba in 1959. The historical ingress of other Latino groups into the United States is hard to determine. Mexican American writers have been part of the United States since 1848, some 50 years before the acquisition of Puerto Rico and over a century before the arrival of Cubans in the United States. For more than a century, Mexican American writers produced their works mostly outside the U.S. literary mainstream. There were occasional Mexican American writers whose works were published by major U.S. publishers, but by and large Mexican American writers were known chiefly by Mexican American readers, their works circulating in books with modest runs or in manuscript form like the works of many Cuban American writers today. By the first half of the twentieth century notable Mexican American writers like Aurelio Espinoza, Nina Otero, Aurora Lucero, Arturo Campa, and Fray Angelico Chavez were being published by English-language periodicals, and their works were seriously acclaimed by non-Hispanic readers. While the boom (the Chicano Renaissance) in Mexican American Literature in 1966 established the primacy of English as the literary language for Chicanos (Ortego 1971) a number of Chicano writers like Alejandro Morales continue to produce works in Spanish. By and large, Boricua and Nuyorican writers, like most Chicano writers, direct their works toward English language audiences. Some Boricua and Nuyorican writers like Piri Thomas (Down These Mean Streets) and Nicholasa Mohr (El Bronx Remembered) are published by mainstream U.S. presses. However, most Boricua writers are published by “small” U.S. Hispanic presses like Arte Publico Press in Houston. Yet, there is really no significant number of American-born Cuban American writers, owing mostly to the recency of the Cuban influx into the United States. This is not to say there is not a large group of Cuban (now American) writers. On the contrary, large numbers of Cuban writers have fled to the United States since 1960. The literary production of Cuban writers in the United States (many, if not most, of them now citizens) may be described as “exilic.” Much of their writing is in Spanish and their aims by and large, have been to keep the Cuban American community aware of the state of affairs in Cuba while at the same time creating a positive image of the Cuban diaspora in the United States. As a group, Latino Americans who are not Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, or Cuban Americans is considerably small, although as a group it is the third largest group of U.S. Latinos, numbering some eight million. However, this group is not a coherent group, although there are large pockets of Dominicans, Salvadoreños, Guatemalans, and Peruvians throughout the United States. Until recently this group was identified as “Latinos,” rounding out the lexicon of labels that identified U.S. Hispanics: Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Latinos. Trends and Themes. The early works in English by Mexican Americans focused mostly on the folkloric traditions of Mexico as they existed in the Hispanic Southwest or as they were brought north from Mexico in the peregrinations of Mexicans and Mexican Americans crossing back and forth across the ephemeral U.S.-Mexico border. Until about the First World War, Mexican American literature was written primarily in Spanish and mirrored the themes and conventions of the Hispanic literary tradition as practiced in Mexico. For the period representing the start of the Chicano movement, 1848 to 1960, less than a dozen novels have been attributed so far to Mexican Americans. However,

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the project at the University of Houston on Recovering the Hispanic Literature of the United States is hopeful of finding more. The contemporary Chicano novel has its beginnings with publication of Pocho in 1959 by Jose Antonio Villarreal, followed in the 1960s with a pittance of novels by a handful of Chicano writers, among them John Rechy (City of Night, 1963) and Floyd Salas (Tattoo the Wicked Cross, 1967). There were a number of Chicano practitioners of the short story between 1848 and 1960, the most prominent of whom were Arturo Campa (1934) and Mario Suárez (1947), identified as “the most important short story writer of Mexican descent from the mid-twentieth century” (Suárez 2004, 1). From 1898 to 1960, there was scant production of fiction by Puerto Ricans in the continental United States. On the island, however, Puerto Rican writers produced a prodigious amount of fiction in novels and short stories (cuentos) in the continuing Spanish literary tradition as it had evolved there. What most characterizes Boricua and Nuyorican literature is its discontinuity from the literature of Puerto Rico (the island). The communicative context of each literature is different. Although some roots of Boricua and Nuyorican literature spring from the Puerto Rican literary tradition, Boricua and Nuyorican literature have sprouted other roots intertwined with the roots of mainstream American literature. Contexts and Issues. The most important issue to consider in surveying the conspectus of Latino American Literature today is that not all Latinos are immigrants in the United States. For example, Puerto Ricans are not immigrants: they are American citizens per their commonwealth status in the American hegemony. As Latinos, Mexican Americans pose a particular consideration. When the United States annexed more than half of Mexico’s territory per the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (February 2, 1848), the Mexicans who came with the land (a territory larger than Spain, France, and Italy combined) became Americans by fiat. There is no accurate number of how many Mexicans came with the dismembered territory. Estimates range variously from a low of 75,000 to a high of 300,000. The land of the Mexican Cession was not an empty wasteland. It included established cities like San Antonio, El Paso, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Tucson, San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Monterrey, and San Francisco as well as hundreds of smaller communities across the Hispanic landscape from south Texas to northern California. The San Luis Valley of southern Colorado was teeming with Hispanic villages and towns. In Mexican American history, this group of Mexican Americans is referred to as the “conquest generation.” Though their numbers were augmented by the ingress of subsequent immigrants from Mexico, this group of Latinos—most of whom eschew the term “Latino,” preferring instead to be identified as mejicanos (lower case m) or Mexican Americans or Chicanos (an ideological term)—remains steadfast in its avowal that the United States came to them and not the other way around. Unfortunately, one of the most difficult barriers for Latino American Literature has been the Spanish language. For the most part, Latino Americans wrote in Spanish, continuing in the literary tradition of the countries they came from. In other words, Cuban American literature reflects the themes and traditions of Cuba. So too, Puerto Rican writers on the mainland (Continental Puerto Ricans: those who were born or were raised in the continental United States) wrote employing the literary strictures of the island of Puerto Rico. The same is true for Mexican American writers who in the period of transition (1848–1912) maintained a literary

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tradition consonant with the literary traditions of Mexico. However, these extensions were short-lived. Within a generation Latino American writers with origins in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico (as well as the other Latin American countries) were writing in English, probing into their experiences in the United States, and emulating distinctively American themes as they evolved into Americans. This is not to say they were assimilated in the metonymical “melting pot.” On the contrary, in the contact zones of culture and language they were “sprouting up” as a bilingual and bicultural people, pushing the envelope of literary creativity to include both Spanish and English in unique binary productions, sometimes disparagingly called “Spanglish” or Tex-Mex in the Mexican American Southwest. This is the phenomenon of languages and cultures in contact: like consenting adults, their issue was innovative and startling. An aspect of this phenomenon blends English and Spanish in the same sentences (intrasententially). Other Latino American poets like the Chicano Tino Villanueva created poems with more emphatic code switching (alternating Spanish and English words more repeatedly in a sentence): always had a movida chueca somewhere up town.

Of course, not all Latino American writers code switch. In the main, though, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans code switch the most. Poetry is the genre in which code switching occurs most often among Latino writers. It occurs far less in fiction, and when it does, the Latino writers provide some help in deciphering the Spanish words or expressions by follow-up translations in English that are not intrusive. For example, in Philip D. Ortego’s story “The Coming of Zamora,” Alarcón is shooing away a stray dog, saying “Vete” followed immediately with “Go,” translation of the Spanish word “Vete” (Simmen 1971, 297). Like the Mexican Americans, Puerto Rican writers reflect the dual circumstances of their presence in the United States. On the one hand, Puerto Rico is still essentially a Hispanic “country” despite its commonwealth status with the United States. Perhaps better said, it is a “Hispanic state.” Unlike the Hispanic states of California, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado, whose Hispanicity has diminished over time, the Hispanicity of Puerto Rico is still as strong as ever. The relevance of this fact is manifest in Puerto Rican literature, which is still essentially a Spanishlanguage literature. However, there is another Puerto Rican literature that is more akin to the literature of Chicanos. This is the literature of Puerto Ricans in the United States proper, sometimes called “Nuyorican” literature. The tag would be appropriate except for the fact that Puerto Ricans in the United States are found everywhere, not just in New York. To distinguish themselves from Puerto Ricans from the island, many continental Puerto Ricans use the label “Boricuas” to identify themselves, just as some Mexican Americans choose to distinguish themselves from Mexicans by calling themselves “Chicanos.” No such term has surfaced for Cuban Americans, although the term “Cubano” is popular among them and issued much the way Mexican Americans use the term “mejicano” [lower case “m”] to identify themselves. Selected Authors. The most important Nuyorican writer of this period writing in Spanish and English was Jesús Colón, labor activist and polemicist, who paved the way for further Nuyorican literary production (Herencia: The Anthology of

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Hispanic Literature of the United States, edited by Nicolás Kanellos, Oxford, 2002, 12). Fiction was slow in gaining ascendancy among Puerto Rico writers who until mid-twentieth century were concerned with existential problems of freedom from Spain, then nationhood as a territory of the United States after the U.S. war with Spain in 1898. The most widely recognized Puerto Rican writer in the period extending to the post–World War II era was Enrique Laguerre, a Nobel Prize nominee. A remarkable Puerto Rican female storyteller publishing Puerto Rican folktales in the 1930s and 1940s was Pura Belpré, a librarian with the New York Public Library. Today, REFORMA (the National Association for Library Services to Hispanics, an ALA affiliate), honors her annually with its Pura Belpré prize for Children’s Literature. Of the Continental Puerto Rican writers (Boricuas), Piri Thomas’s autobiographical novel Down These Mean Streets published in 1967 heralded a wave of Boricua fiction that has not realized its premises nor its promises. Published in 1973, Nicholasa Mohr’s novel Nilda became a “touchstone” work in Puerto Rican fiction. Nilda is “a classic novel of a Puerto Rican girl coming of age in New York City during World War II” (Extracted from http://biography.jrank.org/pages/3407/MohrNicholasa-1938-Writer.html). Though principally a poet, Judith Ortiz Cofer published the novel Line of Sight in 1989 (University of Georgia Press). In the vein of Piri Thomas’s street esthetic, Abraham Rodriguez’s Spidertown (1994) lays out the gritty life of dope and hope in the South Bronx. Focusing on the seamy side of drugs in Spanish Harlem, Ernesto Quiñones’s Bodega Dreams (2000) serves up a story of hope gone awry by ignorance and romanticism. Since the year 2000, López Nieves has scored with a run of books including El Corazon de Voltaire (Voltaire’s Heart), winner of the 2000 Premio Nacional de Literatura (National Literary Prize) and again in 2006 with La verdadera muerte de Juan Ponce de León (The True Death of Juan Ponce de León). In 2003 he authored the historical novel Seva (Editorial Cordillera). Like the themes of Mexican American/Chicano writers of fiction, Puerto Rican novelists focus on self-identity, their cultural and racial identities, and the diasporic problems of life in the United States viewed as neocolonialism. By and large Boricua and Nuyorican writers, like most Mexican American/Chicano writers, direct their works toward English language audiences. Magazines like The Rican in Chicago sought to publish the splay of creative efforts by continental Puerto Ricans across the country. Puerto Ricans are well aware that the continental Puerto Rican experience is different from the island Puerto Rican experience. In Puerto Rico, there are still thoughts of independence. In the continental United States, Puerto Ricans are reaching for the “independence” of the mainstream. Their literary works reflect that outreach. Much Boricua literature may reflect anger, just as some black literature of the 1960s and 1970s reflected anger. But most of that anger deals with coming to terms with the facts of American life, not life in Puerto Rico, coming to terms with where “home” is and “what” home is. Piri Thomas’ protagonist in Down These Mean Streets is trying to carve out the sense of home in East Harlem just as Antonio Mares, Rudy Anaya’s protagonist in Bless Me, Ultima is trying to carve out the sense of “home” in northern New Mexico. The English language literary boom of the Chicano Movement does not appear until after World War II. “The Chicano Renaissance” is a product of that movement. Realizing they could expect little recognition by U.S. mainstream publishers, a group of Mexican American writers, led by Octavio Romano, launched a small

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journal of Mexican American thought appropriately called El Grito (The Cry). The first issue appeared in the Spring of 1967, and with its publication the “Quinto Sol” (Fifth Sun) writers (identified with the name of the press) announced their literary independence. Their goals were to praise the people, identify the enemy, and promote the revolution, the Chicano Movement being the revolution. Brown became beautiful and Mexican American writers (now Chicanos) set out like embattled visionaries to make a place for themselves in the American literary sun. The list of Chicano writers grew rapidly in all genres. Chicano writers won national and international literary prizes. Tomás Rivera won the coveted Quinto Sol Prize for literature for his episodic novel Y no se lo trago la tierra (And the Earth did not Part), 1971; and Rolando Hinojosa won the Cuban Premio Casa las Americas for his work Klail City y sus alrededores, 1976. Alejandro Morales had his works published in Mexico (Caras Viejas, Vino Nuevo, Old Faces, New Wine), Moritz 1975; and Jose Antonio Villarreal (Pocho, 1959), Richard Vasquez (Chicano, 1970), and Raymond Barrio (The Plum Plum Pickers, 1969) had their works published by mainstream presses. As a part of Latino American literature, modern Chicano literature exhibits unique characteristics in responses to the particular conditions of contemporary life. Tomás Rivera once called Chicano literature “life in search of form.” Indeed, much of contemporary Chicano literature addresses itself to the search for form, a linguistic fit to accommodate the lexical and cultural realities of Chicano life. Like Puerto Rican and Boricua writers, Cuban American writers have focused on the diasporic condition of Cubans in the United States, many of them now Americans as second generation Cubans in the United States. Their literary production as Latinos in the United States, while still scant, is experiencing a “boom” much like the Chicano Renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s, in English rather than Spanish. The most renowned Cuban American writers is Jose Yglesias, (seven novels) often referred to as the father of Cuban American fiction in English. In 1963, Holt Rinehart published Yglesias’s A Wake in Ybor City about Cuban immigration to Florida and their experiences as a cultural minority in the United States. For the most part, Cuban American writers in general, and writers of fiction specifically, have dedicated themselves to the preservation of cultural memory, the loss of patria (homeland) caused by the mass exodus of Cubans after 1960 bringing more than 700,000 of them to the United States. Like Chicano writers, Cuban American writers are vates (selected ones) in reinventing Cuban Americans in their search for fixity following political turmoil, a place from which to glance back at the “golden age” of their existence and also a place from which to determine their future. Relatively recent Cuban American writers like Oscar Hijuelos (The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, 1989, Pulitzer Prize) and Cristina Garcia (Dreaming in Cuban, 1992, and A Handbook to Luck, 2007) have spotlighted the fertility of the Cuban American literary imagination. In 1999, Hijuelos published Empress of the Splendid Season (Harper Perennial) the story of a search for roots. While not extensive, the list of Cuban American writers is growing substantially with voices like Elías Miguel Muñoz (Viajes Fantasticos, 1999), Gustavo Perez Firmat (Anything but Love, 2000), the satirist Roberto G. Fernández (En la ocho y la doce, 2001), Achy Obejas (Days of Awe, 2001), and Pablo Medina (The Cigar Roller, 2005). Latino American literature is rich in literary diversity with voices from many of the Latin American countries. This includes Dominican American writers like Julia Alvarez with How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), In the Time of the

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Butterflies (1994), and In the Name of Salomé, (2000); Junot Diaz Drown (1996) with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2008; the Colombian American Jaime Manriquez with Twilight at the Equator (2003); the Guatemalan American writer Francisco Goldman with The Long Night of the White Chickens (1992) and his most recent work, which is nonfiction, The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop (2008); and the Chilean (now American writer) Isabel Allende with House of the Spirits (1985). Chicanas have outdistanced their Chicano counterparts in the Chicano literary arena since the 1990s, creating a second-wave of the Chicano renaissance. This second wave actually started with Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua’s This Bridge Called my Back (1981). It was followed up by Intaglio (1990) by Roberta Fernandez; Eulogy for a Brown Angel (2002) by Lucha Corpi; So Far from God (1992) by Ana Castillo; The Candy Vendor’s Boy (1993) by Beatriz de la Garza; The Memories of Ana Calderón (1994) by Graciela Limón; Mother Tongue (1994) by Demetria Martinez; Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) by Helena Maria Viramontes; Loving Pedro Infante (2001) by Denise Chavez; Let Their Spirits Dance (2002) by Stella Pope Duarte; and Playing With Boys (2004) by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez. The canon of Latino American literature is beset by a division of nomenclature between Latinos who are residents of the United States (that is, born here), and Latinos who are immigrants. The outcome will depend on “mainstream” publishers— who they favor to publish, how they read the runes of canon formation in the Latino literary galaxy of the United States. Because of their numbers and historical priority, Chicano literary production has defined the parameters of the Latino literary canon, but their presence in that canon has diminished in the lexicon of Latinismo. Bibliography Allende, Isabel. House of the Spirits. New York: Knopf, 1985. Alvarez, Julia. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. New York: Penguin Group, 1992. ———. In the Time of the Butterflies. New York: Penguin, 1994. ———. In the Name of Salomé. New York: Algonquin Books, 2000. Anaya, Rudolfo. Bless Me, Ultima. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1994. Barrio, Raymond. The Plum Plum Pickers. San Francisco, CA: Canfield Colophon, 1971. Campa, Arturo. “The Cell of Heavenly Justice,” New Mexico Quarterly (August 1934): 219–230. Castillo, Ana. So Far From God. New York: Plume Penguin, 1992. Chavez, Denise. Loving Pedro Infante. New York: Washington Square Press, 2002. Cofer, Judith Ortiz. Line of Sight. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989. Corpi, Lucha. Eulogy for a Brown Angel. Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press, 2002. Diaz, Junot. Drown. New York: Riverhead Books, 1996. ———. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Putnam, 2008. Duarte, Stella Pope. Let Their Spirits Soar. New York: Harper Collins, 2003. Fernandez, Roberta. Intaglio. Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press, 1990. Fernandez, Roberto G. En la ocho y la doce (At 8th and 12th). Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Firmat, Gustavo Perez. Anything but Love. Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press, 2000. Garcia, Cristina. Dreaming in Cuban. New York: Ballantine, 1993. ———. A Handbook to Luck. New York: Knopf, 2007. Goldman, Francisco. The Long Night of White Chickens. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1992. ———. The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop. New York: Grove Press, 2008.

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LATINO AMERICAN LITERATURE Hijuelos, Oscar. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. New York: Harper Collins, 1989. ———. Empress of the Splendid Season. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999. Hinojosa, Rolando. Klail City y sus alrededores (Klail City and its Environs). Havana: Casa de las Americas, 1976. Limón, Graciela. The Memories of Ana Calderón. Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press, 2001. Manriquez, Jaime. Twilight at the Equator. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Martinez, Demetria. Mother Tongue. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press, 1994. Medina, Pablo. The Cigar Roller. New York: Grove Atlantic, 2005. Mohr, Nocholasa. El Bronx Remembered. New York: Harper Collins, 1993. ———. Nilda. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. Moraga, Cherrie, and Gloria Anzaldua. This Bridge Called my Back. New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1981. Morales, Alejandro. Caras Viejas y Vino Nuevo (Old Faces and New Wine). DF, Mexico: Moritz, 1975. Published as Barrio on the Edge/Caras Viejas y Vino Nuevo. Translated by Francisco Lomelí, Phoenix, AZ: Bilingual Review Press, 1997. Muñoz, Elías Miguel. Viajes Fantasticos. New York: McGraw Hill, 2000. Nieves, Lopez. El Corazon de Voltaire (Voltaire’s Heart). San Juan, Puerto Rico: Editorial Norma, 2006. ———. La Verdadera Muerte de Juan Ponce (The True Death of Juan Ponce). Hato Rey, Puerto Rico: Editorial Cordillera, 2000. ———. Seva. Hato Rey, Puerto Rico: Editorial Cordillera, 2003. Obejas, Achy. Days of Awe. New York: Ballantine/Random House, 2001. Ortego, Philip D. “The Coming of Zamora.” In The Chicano: From Caricature to Self Portrait. Edward Simmen, ed. New York: New American Library, 1971. Ortego y Gasca, Felipe de. “Mexican American Literature: Reflections and a Critical Guide.” In Chicana/o Studies: Survey and Analysis. Dennis Bixler-Marquez, et al., eds. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 2007. ———. “Chicano Poetry.” In The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006. ———. “Mexicans and Mexican Americans: Prolegomenon to a Literary Perspective.” Journal of South Texas 18.1 (2005): 71–90. ———. “The Minotaur and the Labyrinth: Chicano Literature and Critical Theory.” In Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies (Spring 2001). http://www.hispanicvista.com/ HVC/Opinion/Guest_Columns/032805ortego.htm. ———. “Twentieth Century Hispanics in Texas Letters.” In Journal of South Texas 14.1 (2001): 5–21. ———. “Towards a Cultural Interpretation of Literature.” In ViAztlan: International Journal of Chicano Arts and Letters April–May 4.4 (1986): 10–13. ———. “Chicano Literature: From 1942 to the Present.” In Chicano Literature: A Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985. ———. “American Hispanic Literature: A Brief Commentary.” ViAztlan: International Journal of Chicano Arts and Letters Part I, January–February 1985: 11–13; Part II, March 1985: 8-11; Part III, May 1985: 4–7. ———. The Cross and the Pen: Spanish Colonial and Mexican Periods of Texas Letters (Monograph). Washington, DC: The Hispanic Foundation, 1985. ———. “Are There U.S. Hispanic Writers?” Nosotros Magazine April (1983): 20–21, 60. ———. “An Introduction to Chicano Poetry.” In Modern Chicano Writers: Twentieth Century Views. New York: Prentice Hall, 1979. ———, with Jose Carrasco. “Chicanos and American Literature.” In The Wiley Reader: Designs for Writing. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1976. ———, ed. We Are Chicanos: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature. New York: Washington Square Press, 1973.

LEGAL THRILLERS ———. “Chicano Poetry: Roots and Writers.” In Southwestern American Literature. 2.1 (1972): 8–24. ———. Backgrounds of Mexican American Literature. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971. ———. “The Chicano Renaissance,” Journal of Social Casework 52.5 (1971): 294–307. ———. “Which Southwestern Literature and Culture in the English Classroom?” Arizona English Bulletin 13.3 (1971): 15–17. ———. “Mexican American Literature,” The Nation 15 Sept. 1969: 258–259. Quiñones, Ernesto. Bodega Dreams. New York: Vintage, 2000. Rechy, John. City of Night. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Rivera, Tomás. Y no se lo trago la tierra (And the Earth did not Part). Berkeley: Quinto Sol Publications, 1971. Rodriguez, Abraham. Spidertown. New York: Viking Penguin, 1994. Salas, Floyd. Tattoo the Wicked Cross. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Suarez, Mario. “Señor Garza.” Arizona Quarterly 3 (1947): 112–115. Suarez, Mario. Chicano Sketches: Short Stories by Mario Suarez. Francisco A. Lomeli, Cecilia Cota-Robles Suárez, and Juan José Casillas-Nuñez, eds. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2004. Thomas, Piri. Down These Mean Streets. New York: Knopf, 1997. Urista, Alberto, in El Espejo—The Mirror. Berkeley: Quinto Sol Publications, 1967. Valdes-Rodriguez, Alisa. Playing With Boys. New York: Macmillan, 2004. Vasquez, Richard. Chicano. New York: Harper Perennial, 1970. Villanueva, Tino. Hay Otra Voz Poems. Staten Island, NY: Editorial Mansaje, 1972. Villarreal, Jose Antonio. Pocho. New York: Random House, 1970. Viramontes, Helena Maria. Under the Feet of Jesus. New York: Penguin, 1995. Yglesias, Jose. A Wake in Ybor City. New York: Holt Rinehart, 1963.

Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás. Herencia. The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; Ortego, Philip D. Backgrounds of Mexican American Literature. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971.

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LEGAL THRILLERS Definition. Legal thrillers constitute a crime fiction subspecies focusing on the legal procedures in connection with crime. American writers John Grisham and Scott Turow are contemporary writers central to both form and concerns of the legal thriller. In countries adhering to the tradition of Roman law, the bench has a role during investigations prior to trial and the passing of sentence, for example, Georges Simenon’s Paris-based police investigator Maigret, whose life with “juges d’instruction” is seldom easy. In countries building on the Anglo-Saxon tradition of jurisprudence and law enforcement, the court machinery is usually involved only after the police have handed over a case for trial (except for judges’ authorizations of search warrants, etc.). Nonetheless, in legal thrillers, the questioning of police procedures and the call for additional or revised investigative procedures take the drama of full-scale crime detection into the courtroom. In the United States especially the genre has found fertile soil, an effect no doubt of the conspicuous role played by law at every level in society. History. Ancient sources are often, and then mostly facetiously, referred to as the forerunners of present-day popular literature. But it is hardly helpful to look back too far for generic models because the form obviously is dependent on modern print

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and distribution technology and cultural institutions and lifestyles of comparatively recent standing for its mode of being. It is true that Old Testament King Solomon did act in the capacity of investigative judge, and it is true that the old Chinese tales about investigative judges Dee Jendijeh and Pao Cheng show proto elements of the later full-grown genres. It is also true that lawyers have appeared regularly in literature in English since Chaucer. But to talk generally of generic fiction as such, or specifically of the legal thriller in the contemporary sense of the genre designation, as much older than the twentieth century would be misleading. The genre of the legal thriller grew out of the crime story adapting itself to the demands of a mass market audience fully ripe only in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. Throughout the nineteenth century court reports had been popular reading, as exemplified by the early career of British novelist Charles Dickens, who as a young man reported cases from the London courts. Dickens showed an interest in courts and lawyers in his later novelistic work but as part of a broader social critique not hinged particularly on this aspect of society administration. In terms of literary history, the investigator in public employ, as in the case of E.A. Poe’s Inspector Dupin, or in self-employ, as in the case of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, is more of a generalist than a legalist. Although Holmes had a more than working knowledge of jurisprudence, as he had of an astounding number of other things, fictional investigators of fictional crime typically celebrate their triumphs before the court machinery takes over, only to affirm by sentencing that which detectives have already brought out in the open. The courtroom, however, is where legal thrillers make their distinctive generic mark. It is within the fixed framework of court proceedings that criminal cases are not only wrapped up but also, and more importantly, looked into, frequently to the effect of completely upsetting expectations of routine business. In British crime fiction the bench was introduced by Gerald Bullett (1893–1958) and Cyril Hare, pseudonym of Arthur Alexander Gordon Clark (1900–1958). Bullett was a very versatile writer practicing a great variety of literary genres. Working for the BBC during and continuing work in broadcasting after World War II, Bullett wrote regular fiction, crime fiction, children’s fiction, and supernatural fiction and did translations. His poems were collected and published by the distinguished English philologist E.M.W. Tillyard in 1959. Bullett’s venture into legal fiction was with the aptly entitled The Jury in 1935. Belonging to the literary end of crime fiction with in-depth and sophisticatedly interlocking study of characters and their backgrounds, both of those centrally involved in the murder trial and of those on the jury, Bullett’s description of the court procedure reads deliberately like an unedited transcription. Hare drew on his background as a barrister for many of his nine novels and thirty-eight stories, which he started writing in the thirties. In 1950, he was appointed county court judge in Surrey after having done war-time service in various legal capacities. One of his most admired novels is Tragedy at Law from 1942, introducing barrister Francis Pettigrew, and, arguably, consolidating the legal thriller as a viable genre in England. Perhaps the all-time best-known fictional English lawyer is Horace Rumpole, who, despite his getting on in years and his gaining of experience by force of his controversial views, his preference for seedy clients, and his lack of ambition, remains a junior counsel in his London firm of barristers. The creator of hen-pecked, plonkswilling, literature-loving Rumpole, who applies his legal competence entirely

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within the short-story format, and who was so brilliantly TV-cast by Australian actor Leo McKern, was John Mortimer, himself a barrister noted for his freedom of speech cases and as a highly successful writer of novels and stage and TV drama. Among recent additions to the English variety of the legal thriller are the novels of Frances Fyfield. She worked for the London Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard) and as a public prosecutor in the employ of the British Crime Prosecution Service. Her work and private-life experiences found their way into her first crime novel, A Question of Guilt (1988), featuring Crown Prosecutor Helen West in problematic professional and amorous intercourse with Detective Superintendent Geoffrey Bailey. Fyfield has introduced the feminist agenda, already a stock element in the contemporary private-investigator and police-procedural whodunit, to the English legal profession in its parallel fictional world. Fictional lawyers, seedy representatives of the profession more often than not, made their appearance in American pulp-fiction crime stories as part of the crime/law set-up but then most frequently as part of the backdrop, not upstage with the main action. Erle Stanley Gardner, himself a member of the Californian legal profession, supplemented his meager income by writing for the pulp magazines and struck a rich vein when in 1933 he introduced Perry Mason as a very outgoing lawyer. He succeeded in alerting the reading public interested in crime stories to the drama of lawyers’ offices and court rooms as being an eventful universe just as exciting as the mean streets stalked by private investigators. Complementing the new development in the east, Eleazar Lipsky (1911–1993) focused on small-time criminals and their legal handlers in stories from the New York criminal underworld (Kiss of Death, 1948), based on his own experience as a Manhattan public prosecutor, whereas in Kentucky the father of pioneer feministwhodunit writer Sue Grafton, Cornelius Grafton (1909–1982), undertook fictional forays into the legal side of criminal events in the South just before the war (The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope, 1944). Apart from Erle Stanley Gardner’s courtroom dramas sprouting film and TV versions in the post-war period, and apart from the isolated appearances of courtroom activities in Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny (1951), Ben Traver’s Anatomy of a Murder (1958), and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), the legal thriller had to wait until the 1980s for its massive break-through. No doubt the flooding of the literary market with legal thrillers in the 1980s was due to a close watch of the legal profession from outside as well as inside. With the economic boom the spotlight was on the legal profession as the brokers of the golden times. Coinciding with offering assistance to the fast-track economy, lawyers were also busy in the fields of civil and human rights, areas by then recognized as part of the legal business, although usually not very remunerative but good for publicity. Also, the current and highly profiled discussion of the death penalty involved attention on the American way of handling justice. All in all these factors put the legal profession right in the middle of the public gaze. The practicing of law, being such a diverse field, attracted varied talents, among them lawyers also able to make up exciting stories from the corridors of the law firms and to put them over in compelling prose. It is a quite unique characteristic of the legal thriller, and not only in the United States, that its practitioners more often than not have a solid professional background in their chosen fictional field. Generally, writers of whodunits are professional writers, such as journalists,

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professional writers of fiction with a creative-writing or self-taught background, or academics in diverse fields, whereas very few writers of private-eye stories are private investigators or policemen who write police procedurals. Among the most commercially successful types of genre fiction, the legal thriller has been constantly on the bestseller lists since the mid-1980s. Outstanding authors such as John Grisham, Scott Turow, and Brad Meltzer are certain to attract huge interest when they use the court room or the lawyers’ offices not only as exciting settings for events where life and property are at stake but also, and certainly not to be ignored, as catalysts for casting critical glances at society at large. The breadth of the genre of the legal thriller in a perspective of issues adopted and positions taken is demonstrated by the gendered approach of such writers as Lia Matera, who presented her heroine Willa Jansson first in Where Lawyers fear to Tread in 1987. African American perspectives are provided by writers such as Jay Brandon, Christopher Darden, and Lee Gruenfeld. Issues of American multiculturalism, minority, and gender are not in themselves particularly suited for legal action but often appear as strong determinants when cases are taken to court. The legal thriller, like other varieties of the whodunit, has the capacity for reflecting and modeling the structure and substance of clashes and crises that the particular nature of American society presents. Trends and Themes. The extent of the scope for investigative action on the part of legal personnel—lawyers in most cases, seldom judges and jurors—depends entirely on national characteristics of the court system. In European countries bordering on the Mediterranean and in Latin America, all relying on the tradition of Roman Law, the use of investigative judges gives such functionaries a chance to complement—or compete with—the police from a point early on in an investigative procedure. In Great Britain, and with it in many countries formerly part of her empire, the traditional system with brief-commissioned barristers acting on behalf of defendants/accused directly represented by solicitors and with barristers commissioned by the state on behalf of the Crown as prosecutors is being increasingly supplemented with a system of state-employed public prosecutors under the judiciary, such as is the case in Germany and Scandinavia. The legal system of the United States is characterized by an extended democratic or popular element reflected in the foregrounding of trials by jury, also in cases of civil litigation, and in both bench and prosecution at the local level being elective offices. In a legal thriller, when the authorial sympathy is with the district attorney’s (DA) office, the antagonist is often organized crime or points of weakness on the public

COURTROOM THRILLERS COME FROM THE UNITES STATES The majority by far of contemporary legal thrillers, printed or screened, originate in the United States. Due no doubt to a mixture of a much more ingrained sense of law as society dynamic and the histrionic opportunities offered by jury trial, the drama of crime and its investigation has in large measure been taken into the courtroom. There can hardly be any doubt that the law—state and federal—is the glue that binds together the otherwise extremely heterogeneous nation. From the constitution and its interpretation by law panels over business law putting a brake on the potential running amok of private enterprise to the safeguarding of individuals, the law looms large in the American awareness, both public and private.

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side. Here the law and the courtroom guarantee society’s order against lawlessness. When the sympathy is with the defense, focus is often on the carelessness or the cynicism of the publicly employed officers of justice or on the willingness to sacrifice the individual accused of a crime for better statistics or re-election. But the genre is used as the platform for a great many different issues, all with a bearing on the law. Grisham, for instance, generally has a sharp eye for the greediness of the legal profession. Michael Crichton, in Disclosure (1994), deals with the issue of political correctness in terms of a case of sexual harassment. He demonstrates the potential damage of legislation well intentioned in its outset, but perhaps having uncalculated effects, as also showcased in the mainstream, but nonetheless legally concerned and focused, novels Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) by Tom Wolfe or A Human Stain (2000) by Philip Roth. Contexts and Issues. Marlyn Robinson’s opening of her short account of the history of legal thrillers points to the proceedings of the court room and the nature of narrative: “Whoever tells the best story, wins the case.” To many Americans, this modern maxim embodies the pivotal role of the lawyer: control of the narrative. Whether drafting a contract or laying out evidence in a courtroom, the lawyer’s ability to manipulate language determines the outcome of the client’s case. Many would argue that the law’s language, arcane procedures, rules and conventions are purposely made mysterious by its practitioners. What could be more natural than for lawyers and legal stories to have been instrumental in the creation of the mystery novel, and particularly, the subgenre legal thriller? (Robinson 1998)

By centering on courtroom procedures the legal thriller puts the emphasis of crime and its processing from the events of detection, which constitute whodunits relying on investigators, private or public, to the circumstances under which justice is meted out. It also shifts the perspective from the nonprofessional environment of investigators to the legal profession with its specialized personnel of judges and lawyers. Not of the least importance from a literary perspective, it replaces the action of precourt investigation with rhetoric. But, in most cases, the plot of a legal thriller is pivoted on the sudden and surprising turn that parallels the investigator’s breakthrough in the field. Since the legal thriller relies on the dialectics of court procedure for its narrative progression, focus is naturally on the verbal presentation of cases, involving witnesses, evidence rendered verbally, and argumentation. The detection of crime is either finalized and has been put into reports, or, insofar as it is still going on, it has to pass into the court room via the counsel for the prosecution or defense. The courtroom and its conventions constitute the narrative bottleneck through which everything must pass. Related structurally to the legal thriller is the police procedural. This subspecies of crime fiction is concerned only eventually with putting a case into the words of the report. The business is with the crime and all sorts of material evidence. But it shares with the legal thriller the dealing with crime in a publicly sanctioned institutionalized context and also the reliance on a collective effort within a pre-established paradigm of detection, which parallels the gradual unveiling and documentation of crime in the court room. The progression of detection in the police procedural, like the proceedings in court, lends patterns easily transformed into narrative structures

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with, admittedly, much more room for discourse maneuver in the police procedural, which, in turn, is less free than the private-eye subspecies, where the protagonist often makes a point of his acting with no strings attached whatsoever. Another sibling of the legal thriller is the political thriller, in its manifestation of “muckraking” domestic politics critique rather than dealing with international political relations. This is a thematic, not a structural sharing, as the critique may be contained within the structural conventions of the legal thriller. Since the law is the common ground of American civic life, it is the natural field for presenting social problems made visible by the crises implied by lawsuits and criminal cases. The narrative format and conventions of the legal thriller lend themselves readily to film and TV. Here known as courtroom drama, the intermedial dynamics of book-screen tie-in has been cultivated extensively, but many films and TV shows have also been based on scripts originally for the screen. Among extremely popular TV shows based on legal thrillers in book format the Perry Mason series stands out, whereas the intricate problems of a diversity of legal branches and specializations are presented in L.A. Law and Law and Order. The potential for integrating with the staple diets of soap opera and situation comedy are exploited in series such as Ally McBeal and Judging Amy. A counter-crossing infotainment phenomenon symptomatic of both the pervasiveness of the sense of the law and its reflection in the more or less fictionalizing formats of the media was The People’s Court running from 1981 to 1993, featuring the retired judge Joseph A. Wapner. Dealing with real cases presented voluntarily by litigants before his fictional but nonetheless efficacious court, the syndicated TV series reveals, as Helle Porsdam observes, that the “subtext of The People’s Court was a highly interesting discussion about the role of the legal system, moral values, and preferred behaviour in modern, pluralistic, and law-permeated America” (Porsdam 1999, 91). Reception. The huge sales figures of legal thrillers tell their own story about the popularity among readers of the genre. The community standing of a writer such as John Grisham, with his committee work for Washington, also tells us a good deal about the public esteem enjoyed by an outstanding practitioner of the genre. Verisimilitude and authenticity are mandatory in crime fiction, to a far greater extent than in the average realist piece of prose fiction. Even though elements may be spurious, great pains are taken by the author to persuade the reader of the real-world validity of such elements. Courtroom proceedings in themselves constitute drama and suspense, so there is no need to interfere with the plot progression. Staple devices for the creator of legal thrillers, when the action is taken inside the court, are the breaking down of the evidence presented by the opposition and the introduction of startling new evidence. Against that background it cannot surprise that critical interest has primarily been on the extent to which the genre can be said to simulate real court proceedings: in how far does this or that story reflect this or that real trial. Similarly, from the angle of the fiction, the closeness of the made-up train of events is often used to criticize current court principles and practices. In particular, writers of legal thrillers have been interested in the differences between the technicalities of the practice of law and its effects on the individual, whether guilty or not guilty. When capital punishment is involved, with the irreversibility of the sentence after having been carried out, the court with its many fine points of law and the reliance on the varied talents of its officers may sometimes find itself in the dock. That there is an energetic and very varied interest in not only the legal thriller but also all possible combinations of law and literature in the media and culture generally

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THE LAWYER IN POP CULTURE The University of Texas’s Tarlton Law Library in Austin, Texas, has an excellent popular collection and Web site, “The Law in Popular Culture Collection.” http://tarlton.law. utexas.edu/lpop/index.html. It features lists of legal thrillers, links to old novels that are available online, access to the list of materials included in its library collection, lists of films and posters, quotations about lawyers, and links to other related legal topics.

is in ample evidence from the very comprehensive bibliography, including legal poetry, at http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/. A comprehensive list of publications on law and the legal thriller, compiled by Marlyn Robinson, may be found at http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/lpopbib2.html. Selected Authors. The following list, ordered chronologically by date of birth of authors, aims at pointing to some important pioneers of the legal thrillers and at demonstrating the scope of the genre. It is by no means meant as exhaustive but is suggestive. It can be supplemented by consulting the bibliographical material in the reference section. Erle Stanley Gardner (1889–1970) must be thought of as the writer who pioneered the American legal thriller and probably set the pattern for the genre worldwide. Self-educated in jurisprudence he passed the Californian Bar Exam in 1911 and started to practice law. To compensate for lack of work and the trivia of the legal business he began to contribute whodunits to pulp magazines. Under various pen names—A.A. Fair, Kyle Corning, Charles M. Green, Carleton Kendrake, Charles J. Kenny, Les Tillray, and Robert Parr—his output of stories was prodigious from the start. What put Gardner on the map was the series of more than eighty titles with the defense lawyer Perry Mason in the lead, which started in 1933 with The Case of the Velvet Claws and The Case of the Sulky Girl. The Perry Mason stories, resulting in hugely successful cinema films and a TV series, are based on legal action in and out of the courtroom, centering on murder and reported in dialogue with only spare, and then uninventive, description. Mason is regularly helped by his faithful secretary Della Street and cunning private investigator Paul Drake and is always hard up against various representatives from the DA’s office. Retiring from law practice in 1933, Gardner retained a link with actual cases by his charitable initiative, “The Court of Last Resort,” which looked into alleged miscarriages of justice. Robert Traver is the pseudonym of John D. Voelker (1903–1991), a former judge of the Michigan Supreme Court. His Anatomy of a Murder, published in 1958, is a court room drama classic. Released in 1959 as a film by Otto Preminger with James Stewart in the lead, the novel is based on an actual crime in upper Michigan. The case seems straightforward, as Lieutenant Frederick Manion confesses to the deliberate killing of the man who raped his wife. Defense attorney Paul Biegler seems landed with the comparatively simple job of finding mitigating circumstances to partly exonerate the killer, whose crime was witnessed by several people. But as the case proceeds, there turns out to be more to it than meets the eye. Robert Traver’s legal thriller adheres to the pattern of balancing courtroom procedures with life outside the austere premises, but its high points occur before the jury. With the court technicalities in perfect order and the legal rhetoric in full flourish, the story unfolds against a background of harmonious,

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provincial America, as the opening paragraph testifies. Against this pastoral background the crime is a most unwelcome disturbance, but the judicial system is up to handling it. Herman Wouk (1915–) in 1951 published a novel first and foremost addressing the trauma of the Second World War in terms of a moral dilemma: whether to follow the leader under all circumstances. The Caine Mutiny was not written as a legal thriller, but to all practical purposes Caine avails himself of the genre format. The first part dramatizes mutiny on board a naval ship in the thick of war. To the fellow officers the behavior of the captain during a crisis seems irresponsible and possibly explainable as determined by incapacitating stress, which to them justifies their relieving him of his duties by force. When the case subsequently is given over to the court martial, what seemed a natural decision under pressure gets enmeshed in considerations that involve legal niceties and court room histrionics. The Caine Mutiny demonstrates with almost pedagogical clarity how what starts out as the processing (in the context of a court martial) of an allegedly criminal act soon entails deliberations to do with the rights and obligations of the individual. In this way Wouk’s novel puts focus on core values in American society. Nelle Harper Lee (1926–) made one of the most important literary contributions to the civil rights movement in her To Kill a Mockingbird (1960; filmed 1962). The novel deals with racial relations in the South during the Depression. The function of the court proceedings is to highlight the discrepancy between the ideals of American law and the realities of a society weighed down by history and prejudice. The court, though, is where all the unspoken is made to come out. Tragically, the ideal notion of equal justice for all is not allowed to triumph, but attention is called to the American legal machinery as a construction never any stronger than the people elected or appointed to serve it. William J. Coughlin (1929–1992) applied his experience as a defense counsel and judge in Detroit to the writing of fiction, starting with The Widow Wondered Why in 1966. Coughlin is especially known for his series hero Charley Sloan in Shadow of a Doubt in 1991. Sloan is on the verge of total disintegration from alcohol when an apparently impossible case requires his dormant talents. George Vincent Higgins (1939–1999) combined careers as journalist, writer, lawyer, and college academic at Boston College and Boston University. Having received his law degree from Boston College in 1967, he worked for the prosecution in Massachusetts, and later, in 1973, he went into private practice. He was counsel for Eldrige Cleaver. In his deliberately rough-hewn-style fiction, Higgins liked to see a case from the perspective of the accused, such as in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972), The Digger’s Game (1973), and Cogan’s Trade (1974). In his stories about the Boston criminal lawyer, Jerry Kennedy, he adopted the more conventional legalthriller format: Kennedy for the Defense (1980), Penance for Jerry Kennedy (1985), and Defending Billy Ryan (1992). Dudley W. Buffa’s (1940–) working experience came from his teaching of sociology (Union Power and American Democracy: The UAW and the Democratic Party, 1935–72, University of Michigan Press, 1984) and practice of law in Oregon. His legal crusader is Portland-based defense attorney Joseph Antonelli, who first appeared in The Defense (1998). Further legal thrillers, all with series hero Joe Antonelli, are The Prosecution (1999), The Legacy (2003), The Judgment (2002), Star Witness (2004), Breach of Trust (2004), and Trial by Fire (2005).

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Phillip Margolin (1944–) practiced criminal law in Portland, Oregon, and was defense counsel in a number of high-profiled murder cases, from 1972 to 1996, when he retired from the bar to become a full-time writer of legal thrillers. Having grown up in New York and been a Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia in West Africa, he received his degree from New York University School of Law. Margolin’s Proof Positive (2006) is the fourth novel about defense lawyer Amanda Jaffe, who appeared earlier in Wild Justice (2000), The Associate (2002), and Ties That Bind (2003). Margolin’s thrillers are not strictly court-room affairs, but tend to entangle those from the legal profession in often gorily dramatic off-bench goings on. Steve (Steven Paul) Martini (1946–) introduced his series hero Paul Madriani in Compelling Evidence in 1992. At that time he had already tried his hand at fiction with Simeon’s Chamber in 1987. Martini has a background as both a journalist specializing in legal affairs and, after having completed his law degree, an attorney in private law practice and in various legal capacities in the Californian judiciary. Martini is one of those writers of legal thrillers who make the most of the technicalities and fine points of law, something obviously appealing to the audience as his string of bestselling novel demonstrates. Scott Turow (1949–) sets an ideal pattern for a writer of legal thrillers, combining an active career in law practice and legal-committee work with his writing, which is always quite close to the legal problems of the contemporary United States. A graduate from Amherst College and having been a lecturer at Stanford in creative writing, he entered Harvard Law School, from which he received his Juris Doctor degree in 1978. At that time he had written and published his first book, about first-year law students, one L (1977), and had gained employment with the U.S. Attorney’s office in Chicago. With Presumed Innocent in 1987, Turow placed the legal thriller firmly on the literary map, following up with The Burden of Proof (1990), Pleading Guilty (1993), The Laws of Our Fathers (1996), Personal Injuries (1999), Reversible Errors (2002), and Limitations (2006). Ordinary Heroes (2005) takes us back to a mysterious World War II court martial case. Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer’s Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty (2003) has a bearing on Turow’s committee work for the Governor of Illinois. As an active lawyer in a Chicago law firm, Turow conducts pro-bono cases at the same time as he is committed on behalf of the writing profession. Michael A. Kahn (1952–) is a busy St. Louis-based practicing lawyer who also has found time to transfer his legal competence into a series of legal thrillers featuring attorney Rachel Gold. Introduced in Grave Designs in 1988, she quickly tired of the large law firm and set up her own office, the base of law practice that frequently takes her right into the centers of dramatic action. Michael Nava (1954–) is a Californian lawyer with roots in the gay community, a circumstance he has turned into his legal-thriller series of seven novels centered on gay lawyer Henry Rios, who made his appearance in The Little Death in 1986 and bowed out in Rag and Bone in 2001. Sharing atmosphere with the hardboiled whodunit, Nava’s Henry Rios stories constitute an increasingly complex character exploration of the protagonist set on taking upon himself the defense of underprivileged people from the edges of society. Since his breakthrough with The Firm in 1991, John Grisham (1955–) has delivered a book with clockwork regularity once a year, most of them legal thrillers. The Firm was his second novel. The first one, A Time to Kill, was published in 1988. The story about an outraged father’s retaliation against his daughter’s rapists was written when Grisham, after graduating from University of Mississippi School of Law in 1981, was

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working in a general law practice, as well as between 1983 and 1990 also being a representative in the state legislature. John Grisham’s legal thrillers have enjoyed massive popularity, in both book and movie formats. His distinction as a writer rests on a firm sense of community, which comes out in his thrillers in the form of lawyers caught between conscience and the more or less cynical demands of the law/politics complex combined with personal greed and other human vices. Memorable titles in his literary output, which also includes non-generic fiction (A Painted House, 2001) and nonfiction (The Innocent Man, 2006) about the South, where Grisham has homes in both Oxford, Mississippi, and Charlottesville, are The Pelican Brief (1992), The Client (1993), The Street Lawyer (1998), and The Last Juror (2004). Christopher Darden (1956–) was with the DA’s office during the trial of O.J. Simpson. He left in 1995 to teach law at various Californian universities until in 1999 he established his own firm of attorneys. With his In Contempt (co-written by Jess Walter) he in 1996 offered his version of the (in)famous trial of the football player. From 1999 he has collaborated with mystery writer and critic Dick Lochte in authentic fictional legal thrillers beginning with The Trials of Nikki Hill in 1999, and continuing with L.A. Justice (2001), The Last Defense (2002), and Lawless (2004). Brad Meltzer (1970–) is a versatile writer with both TV and graphic-book experience. He graduated from Columbia Law School and his jurisprudence shows clearly in his first legal thrillers, The Tenth Justice (1998) and Dead Even (1999). From The First Counsel (2001) Meltzer has veered away from the beaten path of the legal thriller and moved into the field of the political thriller, a genre he is familiar with from his work for TV. Alphabetical list of other American legal-thriller writers: David Baldacci, William Bernardt, Michael Bihl, Sallie Bissell, Bill Blum, Jay Brandon, Alafair Burke, David Compton, Rose Connors, Ellis Cose, Rankin Davis, Terry Devane, Dexter Dias, William Diehl, Richard Doolig, Linda A. Fairstein, Joseph Finder, J.F. Freedman, Pat Frieda, Philip Friedman, Lee Gruenfeld, Jeremiah Healy, Tami Hoag, Stephen Horn, Clifford Irving, Jonnie Jacobs, Michael Kahn, Lisa Kelly, John Hanff Korelitz, Carroll Lachnit, William Lashner, Stan Latreille, Mimi Latt, John T. Lescroant, Paul Levine, Harry Levy, Bonnie MacDougal, Christine McGuire, Malcolm MacPherson, John Martel, Penny Mickelburg, Peiri O’Shaughnessy, Barbara Parker, Richard Parris, Richard North Patterson, John A. Peak, Barry Reed, Nancy Taylor Rosenberg, Lisa Scottoline, Barry Siegel, Sheldon Siegel, Grif Stockley, Silliam G. Tapply, Robert K. Tannenbaum, Edwin Torres, Laura Var Wormer, Gallatin Warfield, Marianne Wesson, Carolyn Wheat, Kate Wilhelm, Sabin Willett. Bibliography Buffa, Dudley W. The Defense. New York: Henry Holt, 1997. Crichton, Michael. Disclosure. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1994. Coughlin, William J. Shadow of a Doubt. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991. Darden, Christopher, and Jess Walter. In Contempt. New York: ReganBooks, 1996. Grisham, John. A Time to Kill. New York: Wynwood Press, 1989. ———. The Firm. New York: Doubleday, 1991. The Lawyer’s Story: Legal Narrative e-Texts. 2008. http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/. Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1960. Margolin, Phillip. Proof Positive. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Martini, Steve. Compelling Evidence. New York: Putnam’s, 1992.

LITERARY JOURNALISM Meltzer, Brad. The Tenth Justice. New York: Rob Weisbach Books, 1997. Nava, Michael. The Little Death. Boston, MA: Alyson, 1986. Porsdam, Helle. Legally Speaking: Contemporary American Culture and the Law. Amherst, MA: Massachusetts University Press, 1999. Robinson, Marlyn. “Collins to Grisham: A Brief History of the Legal Thriller.” Legal Studies Forum, 21, 1998, accessible at http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/legstud.html. Robinson, Marlyn. http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/lpopbib2.html. Traver, Robert. Anatomy of a Murder. New York: St. Martin’s, 1958. Turow, Scott. Presumed Innocent. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1987.

Further Reading Ashley, Mike. The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2002; Bergman, Paul, and Michael Asimow. Reel Justice: The Courtroom Goes to the Movies. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2006; Bounds, J. Dennis. Perry Mason: The Authorship and Reproduction of a Popular Hero. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996; DeAndrea, William L. Encyclopedia Mysteriosa: A Comprehensive Guide to the Art of Detection in Print, Film, Radio, and Television. New York: Prentice Hall, 1994; Herbert, Rosemary. Whodunit? A Who’s Who in Crime and Mystery Writing. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003; Herbert, Rosemary, Catherine Aird, John M. Reilly, Susan Oleksiw (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing. Oxford and New York, 1999; Kahn, Michael A. Grave Designs. New York: Signet, 1992; Keating, H.R.F. ed. Whodunit? A Guide to Crime, Suspense & Spy Fiction. London: Windward, 1982; Lord, Graham. John Mortimer: The Devil’s Advocate. London: Orion Books, 2005; Murphy, Bruce F. The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery. New York: Palgrave, 1999; Porsdam, Helle. Legally Speaking: Contemporary American Culture and the Law. Amherst, MA: Massachusetts University Press, 1999; Van Dover, J. Kenneth. Murder in the Millions. New York: Ungar, 1984.

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LITERARY JOURNALISM Definition. Literary journalism has been defined as journalism that reads like a novel or short story. In other words, it tells a story in the conventional sense—starting with a complication that intrigues the reader, proceeding through a series of developmental actions, and concluding with a resolution to the complication. Unlike autobiography and memoir, which emphasizes personal revelation, literary journalism emphasizes cultural revelation. The experiences and individuals described in literary journalism are or were real. Literary journalism is not fiction in the sense of the conventional fictional novel or short story. It is not “made up.” Ultimately, literary journalism is part of a larger very fluid category of documentary prose, prose that claims to reflect or “document” our world of phenomenon. The name for the genre begs whether the conventional journalistic essay, such as a newspaper editorial or a think-piece in, say, The Atlantic Monthly, could be considered a kind of “literary” journalism, given that in the history of nonfiction forms the essay has been considered to have literary merit. In principle, yes—curiously, however, “literary journalism,” during the century in which the term has been used, has usually been applied to those true-life texts of journalism that read like a novel or short story. That may now be changing. Contexts and Issues. Historically, the term “literary” has been applied to “journalism” either because such work was perceived as reflecting the kind of universal values associated with belles-lettres or because the techniques used, those of artful description, were perceived as “literary.”

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THE MANY NAMES FOR LITERARY JOURNALISM The genre has had many names. In the 1960s it was called new journalism, and in the case of Hunter S. Thompson’s work, the subset was gonzo journalism. It is classified as reportage literature by the Library of Congress, although the latter is rarely used in the United States beyond the Library. It has also been characterized as the nonfiction novel and literary nonfiction, and more recently as nonfiction narrative, narrative journalism, and narrative serial in newspapers. Sometimes it has been called creative nonfiction, although this last tends to take in a broader range of belletristic nonfiction prose such as memoir and the personal essay. In Europe literary journalism is often called literary reportage and has a long tradition there.Today it continues to be known in the United States most commonly as literary journalism.

An alternative that has arisen in recent years is “narrative journalism.” Some authors prefer that term because they are uncomfortable and consider it presumptuous to characterize their work as “literary.” But “narrative journalism” poses problems of its own because it remains unclear if it is the same as literary journalism or whether it is a broader category of journalism (similarly with the aim of cultural revelation written fundamentally in a narrative mode) of which literary journalism is part. If it is a broader category, it can include more extended expository or argumentative discussion of the kind found in sophisticated feature writing (such as in The Atlantic Monthly), or it can include more narrative summary combined with analysis of the kind found in history writing. Although literary journalism is also “narrative” in the conventional sense of being a representation of an event or sequence of events, what has distinguished it in the past from such related forms is that it is also fundamentally and broadly descriptive in the attempt to portray people’s lives, the descriptive details framed by what Tom Wolfe, one of the eminent literary journalists of the 1960s, described as “scene-by-scene construction” (Wolfe 1973, 31–32). Thus, it is defined primarily by means of two modalities, narrative and descriptive, and for that reason has been characterized in the more rarefied air of academic research as a narra-descriptive journalism in order to differentiate it from a broader category of narrative journalism. Given that literary journalism is composed primarily of narrative and descriptive modes, this does not mean that the exposition or narrative summary are excluded. Rather, the emphasis in literary journalism is on narrative and descriptive modes synthesized “scene by scene,” with the expository and persuasive modes, along with narrative summary, playing tangential and supporting roles, if any. Contemporary writers of narrative journalism may indulge solely in literary journalism or move among the different modalities according to what they perceive as appropriate to their needs. Another issue that arises in distinguishing the boundaries of literary journalism, boundaries that are, to be sure, not hard and fast, is how literary journalism differs from and is similar to such forms as travel writing, true crime literature, and sports journalism that read like a novel or short story, among some of the more prominently delineated forms defined by their subject matter. What separates literary journalism from, say, travel writing is not that each is a discrete category of journalism, but rather that each is a different genre determined by the critical perspective brought to bear on them. Travel writing is a topical genre. Literary journalism is a modal genre, as determined by its dominant narrative and descriptive modalities.

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There is no reason why travel writing, for example, cannot be viewed as both a modal genre and as a topical genre. Thus they are not mutually exclusive. At the same time, not all travel writing need be literary journalism—or a journalism that emphasizes narra-descriptive modalities. That said there may be good reason for setting travel writing aside as a separate grouping if only because in literary history the sheer volume of travel writing could overwhelm considerations of literary journalism. That is the approach taken here. History Emergence of modern literary journalism. Literary journalism has a much longer history than generally acknowledged. The emergence of literary journalism in the United States as a modern genre can be traced to after the American Civil War. Three major periods have been identified for when it thrived—the 1890s, the 1930s, and the 1960s and early 1970s. However, it never really disappeared after each of the periods, and after the 1970s it has evolved increasingly into a mainstream literary and journalistic genre. It very much has an ongoing presence today and continues to be practiced for much the same reasons as it was after the Civil War. There are at least two related reasons for why a modern literary journalism emerged when it did. First, the post–Civil War period was a time of tremendous social and economic change and turmoil in the United States, when different sectors of society found themselves at odds with each other, laborers and capitalists serving as one example, native born and newly arrived immigrants serving as another. Second, this was the period when the concept of “objective” journalism began to emerge (or what at the time was called “factual” journalism). In what has proved a cultural irony, the highly distilled, abstract style of such journalism tended to alienate readers from what they most wanted to comprehend: the economic and social turmoil around them, or, in sum, the distress of society. In objective journalism, the personal voice of the reporter is viewed as a liability, one that interferes with presenting the news as “factually” or as “objectively” as possible. What practitioners of literary journalism understood then is that the personal voice is more honest in its relationship to the reader, based on the premise that there can be no absolute “objectivity.” As we well understand today, all discourse reflects to some degree the inherent personal taste, views, values, mores, and biases of a reporter—in short, what we often call “subjectivity” as opposed to objectivity. For example, the selection of the concrete descriptive details in the sceneby-scene construction by what has been characterized as the literary journalist’s “shaping consciousness” (Weber 1974, 20) appeals to what all of us at some level can concretely comprehend with our different senses of sight, touch, hearing, smell, and taste. To read and perceive with one’s senses a scene described in a piece of literary journalism is to vicariously “feel” it. Herein lies an important virtue of the form—one lacking in the abstraction of “objective” journalism—a virtue realized by means of a reporter’s individual (and subjective) choices in the creation of the text. The conditions that gave rise to literary journalism’s modern manifestation during the post–Civil War period are still very much with us today: As long as there is cultural distress and alienation such journalism remains a viable discourse for trying to understand those who are different from us. As Lincoln Steffens, an editor and advocate of the genre during the 1890s, noted, the purpose of literary journalism is “to get the news so completely and to report it so humanly that the reader will see

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himself in the other fellow’s place”—even if that place is occupied by a murderer awaiting execution (Steffens 1931, 317). Literary journalism, then, requires the subjectivity of a reporter to try to empathically understand the subjectivities of others, or what is frequently called the cultural “Other.” To be sure, practitioners of the form have been very much a minority in the journalism establishment, especially in the early years. Among some of those early literary journalists, Lafcadio Hearn stands out as an exemplar who foresaw the promise of the form in the 1870s. Shortly after he arrived in the United States from Ireland, he embarked on a remarkable career as a newspaper reporter. He brought to his work a Chekhovian realism and poignancy as reflected in such stories as “Dolly” and “A Child of the Levee.” In Cincinnati, one city where he worked as a reporter, his most common subject was the African American community, a marginalized group largely ignored by polite, genteel white Cincinnatians and, by extension, white Americans in general. Hearn’s focus, then, was on the cultural “Other,” and the attempt to understand the cultural Other remains a hallmark of literary journalism to this day. The 1890s remain the first significant period when narrative literary journalism thrived in the United States, and among some of its more noteworthy practitioners we find Hutchins Hapgood, Richard Harding Davis, Ambrose Bierce, George Ade, Nelly Bly, Abraham Cahan, Theodore Dreiser, and Stephen Crane. Bierce, Dreiser, Twain, Cahan, and Crane remain better known as literary fictionists. Others, such as Davis and Bly, remained active as literary journalists well into the twentieth century. Shortly after the turn of the century, in 1907, we see the as yet earliest instance of the term “literary journalist” applied as a name for writers of this kind of work. This came after a considerable debate in journals of literature and ideas on whether journalism could be literature. A lull in the practice of narrative literary journalism had set in by the First World War and lasted through the 1920s. One reason is that this was a period when the concept of “objective” journalism was theorized and ascendant. Nonetheless, the form never entirely disappeared, and Ernest Hemingway was one of its practitioners during this period. By the 1930s literary journalism thrived again for similar reasons as it had in the 1890s. This was the period of the Great Depression and once again Americans were trying to understand the social and economic dislocation around them. Not only was objective journalism not suited for understanding the subjectivities of Americans caught up in the adversity of the times, but the newspaper, the foremost venue for objective journalism, largely ignored the human or empathic element except in the highly personal writing of newspaper columnists. Instead, it fell mostly to magazines, especially Progressive magazines such as The New Republic and New Masses, to try to examine the cultural upheaval through literary journalism. Often such writing, because it strongly invoked the voice of the writer and thus the feelings of the writer, reflected leftist political sympathies. Two writers who fall into this group are Edmund Wilson and Erskine Caldwell. Yet there were still others who tried to avoid outright political posturing in their writing even as they maintained their personal voice as a means for engaging readers’ empathy. These include Sherwood Anderson (better known as a short story writer), Joseph Mitchell at the New Yorker, Martha Gellhorn, and, again, Ernest Hemingway (by this point also an established novelist and short story writer).

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Mitchell’s New Yorker, where he worked for more than 30 years, has been a mainstay of the genre since shortly after the publication’s founding by Harold Ross in 1925. Moreover, the magazine eschewed the Progressive and leftist sympathies of the other publications noted previously. Although the end of the Great Depression would result in less literary journalism, the 1940s are important because of what are considered two seminal works of modern American literary journalism, James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, published in 1941, and John Hersey’s Hiroshima, published in 1946. What separates them, of course, is a World War. But what they have in common is that they were both major influences on the third period of literary journalism during the 1960s and early 1970s, or what was called the “new” journalism. One measure of how compelling Hiroshima has proved in the American cultural experience is that in 1999 a distinguished panel of 36 journalists and academics at New York University ranked it as the most important work of American journalism in the twentieth century. The 1950s mark another lull in the fortunes of narrative literary journalism, although, as in the 1920s, it never entirely disappeared and The New Yorker and Esquire magazines were two of its most important venues at this time. Among the form’s practitioners during this period were Lillian Ross, A.J. Liebling, Mary McCarthy, Meyer Berger, and, again, Joseph Mitchell. The “New” Journalism. The 1960s usher in the third most important period of the form since it emerged after the Civil War, the century in between serving then as a kind of incubation period for the genre’s maturation. As perhaps the most memorable period, it continues to cast a long shadow over contemporary practice, which to some extent is still judged according to the “new” journalism. The genre would be called the “new” journalism because its earlier history was largely forgotten, and to many it did indeed seem new. The origin of the expression “new” journalist as applied to this period is not entirely clear. It has been attributed to Pete Hamill, a sometime “new” journalist and part of the movement, who attempted in the mid-1960s to characterize the journalistic trend. Once again, it appeared at a time of considerable social turmoil in the United States, although not necessarily economic as was true of the earlier periods. This was the time of the Cold War, fear of nuclear annihilation, political assassinations, racial strife, increased illicit drug use, changing sexual mores, and the Vietnam War and the mass protests it prompted. Once again “objective” journalism proved inadequate for trying to fathom the complexity of—and the humanity caught up in—those events. Gay Talese, one of the first of the “new” journalists and sometimes considered its godfather, detected this when he observed, “The New Journalism, though often reading like fiction, is not fiction. It is, or should be, as reliable as the most reliable reportage although it seeks a larger truth than is possible through the mere compilation of verifiable facts” (Talese [1970] 1993, xii). Thus he took aim at the inadequacies of a strictly “factual” journalism. So did Michael Herr, whose Dispatches is a collection of articles he wrote on the Vietnam War. He observed of that war, “The press got all the facts (more or less): it got too many of them. But it never found a way to report meaningfully about death, which of course was really what it was all about” (Herr 1991, 214–15). Besides Talese and Herr, some of the major writers of literary journalism during this period were Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, John McPhee, Richard Rhodes, Joe Eszterhas, and Sara Davidson.

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Unlike the 1930s, however, much of their work appeared in mainstream magazines and increasingly in book form, reflecting the genre’s greater cultural acceptance. Magazines included, among others, the New Yorker and Esquire again, the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, New York, Playboy, and the Saturday Evening Post. Among watershed book-length efforts are Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) and Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test (1968). What we detect in them are challenges to societal assumptions in order to understand the cultural “other.” Capote engaged in an assault on the American Dream by attempting to empathetically understand the psychologies of two killers who murdered the archetypal white American family. The book appeared to considerable critical acclaim, in part because Capote claimed he had invented a new genre, the “nonfiction novel.” As we understand now, he did not, but at the time it did seem new because of the lack of recognition of the genre earlier in the century. Although In Cold Blood is still considered a classic, it is a flawed one because evidence has emerged that some scenes in the book were invented. In other words, they are fiction. Still, the volume is considered fundamentally true and factual in the sense that the characters and experiences portrayed once existed. Wolfe’s Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test takes as its theme the counterculture of the 1960s. He accompanies the novelist Ken Kesey and a group of friends called the Merry Pranksters on a journey across the country in an old school bus painted colorfully in psychedelic designs. Often, they are smoking marijuana and tripping on LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs on their journey. To staid, white middle-class Americans, the book served as a similar challenge to the shibboleth of the American Dream. Wolfe has been characterized as the journalist most completely identified with the “new” journalism. In part this is because he created a critical furor with his linguistic pyrotechnics that seemed to pose a taunt to advocates of standard English usage, over-using, for example, expressive punctuation and onomatopoeia, such as the vocal imitation of a speeding car: “Ggghhzzzzzzzhhhhhhggggggzzzzzzzeeeeeong!” (Wolfe 1965, 129) The result is baroque in its exaggeration. What also attracted attention to Wolfe was his eye for phenomena that reflected and marked the tensions, ironies, and existence of subcultures, characteristics described as “status details” or “symbolic details.” These could include an individual’s gestures, as well as styles of furniture and clothing, and were often used for satiric effect. In 1973 Wolfe also published The New Journalism, an anthology of examples from the period. Aside from the examples, the work is perhaps more important because it included an essay of the same name, “The New Journalism,” by Wolfe that became a kind of coda for the genre for many of the aspiring literary journalists of the period. Thompson deserves to be singled out because he was a practitioner of what came to be called “gonzo” journalism, or a journalism that consistently challenged takenfor-granted assumptions about what constitutes “reality” by engaging in outrage. He did Wolfe one better because his journalism often was drug induced and he irreverently challenged many sacred American cultural themes, thus infuriating the cultural status quo. One example is Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which appeared in 1971. The term “gonzo” was coined by journalist Bill Cardoso in 1970, who characterized Thompson’s notorious and over-the-top journalism as “pure gonzo” (Weingarten 2006, 235). After the “New” Journalism. By the mid-1970s the “new” journalism no longer seemed so new and was entering a more stable middle age. It was also less noticed, perhaps,

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and as a result it would be easy to conclude that it had waned as it had in the 1920s and 1950s. This would be a mistake, however, and an understandable one because what had changed was that much of the social turmoil subsided after the end of the Vietnam War. What was gone by the late 1970s was the edge that whetted the social appetite for trying to better understand cultural “others” in a turbulent world. Another reason why it appeared to wane is that until very recently literary journalism remained largely unstudied by the academy: It was not considered politically correct either as journalism or literature. Except for a small group of pioneering scholars of the genre located in the journalism, literature, and American studies disciplines, it was largely ignored because of the difficulty of negotiating the divides between those disciplines, particularly between journalism and English. Nonetheless, literary journalism continued to be practiced and the “new” journalism served as an important inspiration for younger generations of writers. Among them was Jon Franklin. Franklin is notable because he was one of the few newspaper journalists to see the potential of publishing the form in the daily report. In 1979, writing for the Baltimore Evening Sun, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his series “Frightening Journey Through the Tunnels of the Brain,” an account of a risky brain operation in which Franklin witnesses the patient dying on the operating table. Eventually, and prompted in part by his public advocacy, daily newspapers would, by the 1990s, take an increasing interest in publishing a narra-descriptive journalism, a subject to be explored later. Another who saw the potential of literary journalism in newspapers is Barry Newman, who joined The Wall Street Journal in the 1970s and carved out a niche for himself as a narrativist who had to limit his stories to no more than 2,000 words. As a roving foreign correspondent for the Journal, he wrote on subjects as varied as maggot farmers and bullfighters. Although the seeds had been planted, then, for newspapers to publish more such work, literary journalists continued to publish books as well as articles in magazines. Tracy Kidder, who is still publishing today, first achieved considerable national recognition when he won the Pulitzer Prize for his book, The Soul of a New Machine. Published in 1981, his is an account of engineers engaged in inventing a new computer. Since then Kidder has published a number of critically acclaimed books of literary journalism, including House (1985), Among Schoolchildren (1989), Old Friends (1993), and Home Town (1999). To demonstrate the eclectic nature of his work, they are, briefly, and in the same order, accounts of building a house, the daily lives of elementary school children in the classroom, life in a nursing home, and life in a small town. As much of Kidder’s work demonstrates, the ordinary and prosaic can be just as promising as topics for literary journalism as the extraordinary and unusual. Other notable literary journalists during this period are Mark Kramer, Mark Singer, Jane Kramer, Richard West, Ron Rosenbaum, Ted Conover, and Bill Barich. Trends and Themes. The work of the current generation has been characterized as “the new new journalism” from a book of the same name by Robert Boynton who suggests that such writing differs today from the earlier “new” journalism because the contemporary “movement’s achievements are more reportorial than literary. . . . The days in which nonfiction writers test the limits of language and form have largely passed” (Boynton 2005, vii). The emphasis, then, is more on “how” such practitioners get the story, not on linguistic style as exemplified by such “new” journalists as Wolfe, Didion, and Thompson.

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But if the current generation is less inclined to literary flourish, one issue that has emerged is how “literary” such works are and the corollary of how memorable they will prove to be. A criticism that has been raised about such work is that it tends to be more ethnographic, sociological, or anthropological than such work in the past, which is not entirely surprising given literary journalism’s intent is to examine the cultural “other,” no matter how problematic that may prove as an act of linguistic representation. That social scientific ambition is, moreover, not surprising when one considers that in the formative years of a “factual” journalism (the 1890s), and in the formative years of “objective” journalism (the 1920s), the journalism community viewed itself as engaged in a scientific profession. That legacy still influences journalism today, including literary journalism. One example of a work perceived as having social scientific attributes is Conover’s Newjack. Conover is described as possessing “a sociologist’s eye for detail” by the publisher on the back of the book’s dust jacket. Similarly, a Newsweek reviewer characterized LeBlanc’s 2003 Random Family as “literary anthropology” (Agovino 2003, 68). Elsewhere the book has been characterized as “ethnographic” (Hartsock 2004, 193–194). By comparing their works to the social sciences, in other words investing them with the scientific ambition to eliminate ambiguity in meaning, the issue remains as to what may be lost in terms of literary qualities, given that literature is about the possibilities of meaning and not just about locking up meaning with the kind of unambiguous scientific precision associated with, say, a sociological text. To utilize one common definition of the literary, what about such work will “tease us out of thought”—this because of a deliberate linguistic ambiguity or resonance to suggest possibilities of meaning, much as one would find, say, in Shakespeare. Only time will tell if such recent works are as memorable as those of the period of the “new”journalism, when there was considerably more experimentation with language. Another consequence has been to further blur the already blurred boundaries between literary journalism in which the narrative and descriptive modalities predominate, on the one hand, and, on the other, the broader “narrative journalism” discussed earlier. That’s because many of the authors characterized as “new new” journalists, even as the moniker betrays they are part of the “new” journalism legacy, also engage in writing that is more expository at the expense of dominating “narra-descriptive” modalities. In other words, the writing tends to engage more in narrative summary and explication to make for a kind of “journalism-history,” or it simply tends to be more expository in the tradition of conventional feature writing. An example is Lawrence Wright’s 2006 The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. It is largely a summary narrative on the rise of Islamic terrorism and is integrated with essaylike analysis, much like a conventional history. Except for the chapter on the Boeing 747s crashing into the World Trade Center, the book for the most part lacks the sustained scene-by-scene descriptive construction to which Wolfe alluded. Such a “journalism-history” does not attempt to demarcate where journalism leaves off and history begins given the inherently problematic and ambiguous nature of such boundaries as reflected in the old adage that “journalism is the first draft of history.” The other variation can be found in the sophisticated and complex feature writing often found in The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly that may make

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a more limited use of the descriptive techniques associated with literary journalism. An example is Ron Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (1998). Occasionally, the book engages in the kind of scenic description associated with literary journalism, but it is not sustained, which is the hallmark of literary journalism at least as the term has been applied in the past. Instead, the expository mode predominates. Similarly, conventional feature writing is written largely in an expository mode framed by narrative elements. Often, it drafts brief descriptive sketches (presented sequentially in narrative form) to illustrate the expository point. Description then becomes only a handmaiden in support of exposition, the latter of which remains the dominant mode for such a discourse. But this is why the boundaries of literary journalism are not fixed and may indeed be shifting. Either they are enlarging to include such variations, or the narrative “journalism-histories” and the narrative-expository emphasis in complex and sophisticated feature writing are close siblings to a narra-descriptive literary journalism within a larger “narrative journalism.” Only time and cultural usage will tell. But even if it continues to be viewed as a form of journalism that reads like a novel or short story, literary journalism is a practice that is likely to endure for the foreseeable future. This is because the genre tells a story in the conventional sense— starting with a complication that intrigues the reader, proceeding through a series of developmental actions, and concluding with a resolution to the complication (although not necessarily a happy ending). Thus literary journalism helps us to understand, if only vicariously, how others live, think, and die in the real world of phenomenon, this in a way that “objective” journalism cannot. Whether it is in times of cultural turmoil or cultural peace, there will always be a need to better understand the nature of those who are different from us. Selected Authors Magazines and Books. The contemporary period of literary journalism finds practitioners continuing to ply their art in books and magazines. One signal event in the improving fortunes of literary journalism is that the venerable Atlantic Monthly magazine announced in 2005 that it would cease to publish fiction (an area in which it had excelled for more than 150 years) on a regular basis. In its place, it promised to publish more “long-form narrative reporting,” its term for a broad narrative journalism that includes literary journalism (Wyatt 2005). Today The Atlantic Monthly is one of the standard bearers among magazines to publish literary journalism, In addition to The Atlantic Monthly, other magazines that publish such writing include the perennial New Yorker, Outside, and GQ. Writers for magazines often expand their short-form literary journalism into books. For example, Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief (1998), an account of an obsessed lover (and thief) of rare orchids in Florida, first appeared as an article in the New Yorker. Similarly, Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild (1996) and Into Thin Air (1997) initially appeared as articles in the magazine Outside. The first is about a young man who starves to death when his efforts to live in the wilderness of Alaska go awry. The second is about an expedition to climb Mt. Everest that results in death during a horrific snow storm on the slopes.

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But another development has also emerged. As often as not, authors now write books from the outset and not initially magazine pieces. As the books near completion they may then be excerpted in magazines. For example, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc is the author of Random Family (2003), which is an account of uneducated and unemployed Latinas and Latinos attempting to survive in New York City’s barrios. The book was excerpted in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. Still another work conceived first as a book and not as a magazine article is Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action (1995), an account of a lawsuit against chemical companies who were sued on civil charges that their toxic wastes poisoned children in the community of Woburn, Massachusetts. Among other contemporary exemplars of the form is Alex Kotlowitz, the author of There Are No Children Here (1991), which is an account of two African American brothers growing up—and surviving—in the housing projects of Chicago. He followed this in 1998 with The Other Side of the River, an account of two neighboring Michigan towns divided by a river, the death of a black teenager, and how long-held misperceptions and attitudes undermine race relations. Another author is Lawrence Weschler, who has published several collections of magazine pieces, as well as Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (1995), which is an account of scientific oddities at the storefront “Museum of Jurassic Oddities” in Los Angeles. Since the advent of 2000 notable examples of literary journalism—or a “narradescriptive” journalism—include the following publications. Ted Conover published Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing in 2000. Conover, who had already established his credentials as a literary journalist with Rolling Nowhere: a Young Man’s Adventures Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes (1984) and Coyotes: A Journey Through the World of America’s Illegal Aliens (1989), demonstrates the extent to which literary journalists will immerse themselves in their material in order to write authoritatively about it. In Newjack he takes a job as a prison guard at the infamous maximum-security Sing Sing prison on the banks of the Hudson River above New York City in order to provide a cultural portrait about life on the inside, both for prisoners and their guards. In 2001 Michael Lewis published Next: The Future Just Happened, which is an account of how the Internet has challenged the hierarchical world of top-down knowledge. He tells his narrative with extensively developed sketches of individuals, such as 15-year-old Jonathan Lebed, who figured out how to hack into the stock markets online to engage in stock fraud. Although the volume is largely composed of such descriptive sketches, it also engages in some extended expository examinations of the issue, illustrating just how fragile the boundaries are between literary journalism and related narrative journalistic forms. Since Next, Lewis, who usually writes about the financial world and sports, published Moneyball: The Art of Winnng an Unfair Game (2003), which recounts how the Oakland Athletics defy the conventional business wisdom by winning games without paying astronomical star-athlete salaries. Richard Preston first gained national fame with The Hot Zone, published in 1994. The book, developed from one of his New Yorker articles, recounts an outbreak of the Ebola virus among monkeys in a laboratory in Reston, Virginia, and how it was contained from becoming an infectious disease crisis. He has continued to write about scientific topics, and in 2002 published The Demon in the Freezer, an account focusing on smallpox. Despite official pronouncements that smallpox had

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been eradicated in 1979, Preston relates how frozen specimens in a laboratory in Siberia remain unaccounted for and could be used as a weapon against humans who no longer receive smallpox vaccinations. Jane Kramer’s Lone Patriot: The Short Career of an American Militiaman (2002) recounts the life of a white supremacist who lives in the Pacific Northwest. Kramer is remarkable because her publication credits go back to the “new” journalism of the 1960s. In 1963 she published her first book, a collection of her stories from the Village Voice called Off Washington Square: A Reporter Looks at Greenwich Village. Thus she has been contributing to the genre for half a century. Still other examples include works by Richard Ben Cramer, William Langewiesche, Daniel Bergner, and, once again, Kidder and Kotlowitz. Cramer published Joe Dimaggio: The Hero’s Life in 2000. Aside from being an account of the baseball star written largely in the form of narra-descriptive journalism, it also illustrates once again how documentary genres can overlap. In this case the account is also an example of two topical genres, sports journalism and biography, thus serving as a cautionary lesson about trying to insist too strongly that documentary genres can be clearly delineated. Langewiesche is the author of, among other books, American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center (2002), an account, as the title suggests, of those who responded to the attack on and collapse of the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001, and then had the grisly task of removing the remains. In 2003, Bergner published In the Land of Magic Soldiers, which recounts the savagery of civil war in the West African country of Sierra Leone. Also in 2003, Kidder published Mountains Beyond Mountains, an account of an American doctor’s efforts to provide medical care for AIDS patients in Haiti. Meanwhile, Kotlowitz published Never a City So Real (2004), a personal account, or series of accounts, of everyday ordinary people who are representative of the Chicago not normally seen by outsiders. As these examples illustrate, the subject matter is eclectic, and indeed covers the range of human experience. Newspapers. Perhaps the most remarkable contemporary development in the area of literary journalism has been that since the 1990s daily newspapers have become more receptive to publication of the form. Except in individual newspaper columns, narrative literary journalism appears to have been largely (although not entirely) absent from newspapers through the course of much of the twentieth century. One notable exception was the old New York Herald-Tribune, which had encouraged the form in the 1920s and 1930s, and again in the 1960s. Also, its Sunday magazine, New York (not to be confused with the New Yorker) survived the newspaper’s bankruptcy and demise in 1967 to become a showplace in its own right for the form. But as noted, it was in the 1970s that Barry Newman and Jon Franklin began publishing literary journalism in their respective newspapers. Thus, in the aftermath of the “new” journalism, some editors and reporters at newspapers sensed the possibilities of the form for the daily report. This has important consequences for where we are today because the most dramatic growth for this kind of “story” journalism appears to be in newspapers. Just how much will stand the test of time as “literary” remains to be seen. But certainly what we can detect are ambitious efforts to write journalism that are narrative and descriptive in their modalities.

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The reasons for why newspapers are turning to this form are not difficult to understand. Increasingly since the 1920s, newspapers have had to share the media market with newer forms of media, starting with cinema, radio, and recorded music and then broadcast television, cable TV, and most recently the Worldwide Web. This has meant a decreasing portion of media market for newspapers. When one considers the inherently alienating nature of “objective” news reporting, one can see the attraction of a more “reader-friendly” literary journalism that elicits empathy from the reader and thus engages the reader on a more personal level. Moreover, a small group of practicing journalists has taken the lead in promoting publication of narrative literary journalism in newspapers. Perhaps most notable are Franklin; Managing Editor Jack Hart of the Portland Oregonian; Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute; The Associated Press’s features editor, Bruce DeSilva; and Mark Kramer of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. Aside from winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for his literary journalism, Franklin founded Writer-L in the 1990s, which is an online paid chat group that discusses literary journalism and has included Pulitzer Prize winners among its participants. Moreover, he is the author of Writing for Story: Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction by a Two-Time Pulitzer Prize Winner, which has been characterized as “iconic” and a “bible” for aspiring narrative literary journalists (Hartsock 2007). Hart of the Oregonian has nurtured his reporters to win Pulitzer Prizes for their narratives and since the 1990s has been one of the most vocal advocates of such work, writing frequently in trade journals about how newspapers could benefit from the genre, which he prefers to call simply “narrative journalism.” Clark, vice president of the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, which is dedicated to providing ongoing professional education to journalists, published a manifesto in The Quill, the journal of the Society of Professional Journalists, in the mid-1990s calling for more such writing in newspapers, and he continues to actively promote the genre to this day. DeSilva was hired by The Associated Press for the express purpose of encouraging this kind of writing at the wire service. Finally, Mark Kramer, whose publication history is in magazines and books, established the annual Narrative Conference at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. The conference has provided an important venue attended largely by newspaper reporters and editors to learn how to write narrative journalism, again, his preferred usage for the form. The results are that since the millennium newspapers around the country have been publishing more “story” journalism on a scale not seen since the beginning of the twentieth century. This is not to suggest that all newspapers are doing so. But that some are is still remarkable considering how absent traditional narrative storytelling had been from newspapers. A sampling of papers includes the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times, the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Boston Globe, the Asheville Times-Citizen, the Raleigh News and Observer, the Des Moines Register, the Baltimore Sun, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and the Seattle Times. To be sure, newspapers with national reputations also publish examples of narrative literary journalism, namely, The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. With their extensive resources, this is perhaps to be expected. But that newspapers without national readerships give reporters the time and other resources to write narratives reflects the value increasingly placed on publication of the form.

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One of the most notable examples was Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down. Bowden initially wrote it as a series that was published in 1997 in the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he was a reporter. Eventually it was expanded into a book as well as made into a feature-length movie. Among other exemplars in newspapers can be included Tom Hallman Jr., of the Portland Oregonian. His series, “The Boy Behind the Mask,” published in 2000, won the Pulitzer Prize. The series is about a boy who suffers from a disfiguring facial abnormality and requires a risky operation. Hallman’s relationship with Jack Hart, who was his coach on the story at the Oregonian, has been characterized “as the most innovative editor/writer team in America, which is why journalists everywhere should pay close attention to their work” (Clark 2003). Another exemplar of the form in the newspaper field is Thomas French of the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for his “Angels & Demons” series about how authorities tracked down the murderer of an Ohio mother and her two teenaged daughters in the Tampa Bay area. Still another is Sonia Nazario of the Los Angeles Times. Her Enrique’s Journey series reveals the lengths, once again, to which literary journalists will go to attempt to reconstruct a story. The Pulitzer Prize-winning series, published in the Times in 2002 and later published as a book, recounts the eight attempts by “Enrique,” a 17-year-old Honduran, to travel illegally to the United States to be reunited with his mother, a passage that an unusually high number of Central American children and teenagers make to be reunited with parents who immigrate illegally to the United States. She left him when he was 5 to find work in the United States so that she could send back money to support him and his sister. Enrique rides freight trains through Mexico to get to the American border. Seven times he was caught, arrested, and returned to Honduras by Mexican police. At one point he was nearly beaten to death by gang members who prey on illegal migrants traveling through Mexico. Finally, on his eighth attempt, he succeeds in crossing the Rio Gande illegally and eventually reunites with his mother. In reconstructing the story, Nazario took the same route as Enrique and rode atop freight trains herself along with a photographer from the Los Angeles Times, doing so at no small personal risk. Even The Associated Press has been encouraging reporters to engage in journalistic “storytelling,” their preferred term for literary journalism. Among them, Helen O’Neill has carved out a niche as a narrativist and in 2005 won an American Society of Newspaper Editors award for excellence in journalism with her 2004 series “The Kidnapping of Grandma Braun.” The story recounts the kidnapping and rescue of an elderly grandmother in Wisconsin. What makes The Associated Press’s encouragement of narrative literary journalism so remarkable is that the world’s largest wire service and news gathering organization has long been viewed as “the bastion of hard news leads and for-the-record coverage” (Grimes 1997, 28). Clearly that bastion has been breached. Some of the other accomplished newspaper reporters who write in the form are Bob Batz, Paula Bock, Anne Hull, Lisa Pollack, and Mary Miller. Medical topics— a patient, for example, who needs a rare surgical operation—seem to be one common theme, thus following in a tradition established by Jon Franklin. Other topics include murder (again), as well as homelessness, high school marching bands, adolescence, and mine disasters—in effect the vast experience of life in its many different shades and colors.

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Bibliography Agovino, Michael J. “I Wanted to be Here All of the Time.” Newsweek (10 February 2003): 68. Bergner, Daniel. In the Land of Magic Soldiers. New York: Picador, 2003. Boynton, Robert S. The New New Journalism. New York: Vintage, 2005. Clark, Roy Peter. “Tell Me a Story.” Poynter Online (12 December 2003). Available from: http://www.poynter org/content/content_view.asp?id=51437. Cramer, Richard Ben. Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000. Grimes, Charlotte. “Rewired.” American Journalism Review (October 1997): 28. Harr, John. A Civil Action. New York: Random House, 1995. Hartsock, John C. “Caught Between the Rhetoric of the Scene and the Rhetoric of the Polemic: A Review of Random Family.” Points of Entry 2.1 (2004): 192–195. ———. “It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: Newspaper Reporters Rediscover the Art of Narrative Literary Journalism and Their Own Epistemological Heritage.” Prose Studies (2007). Herr, Michael. Dispatches. New York: Vintage, 1991. Kidder, Tracy. Among Schoolchildren. New York: Harper Perennial, 1990. ———. Home Town. New York: Pocket, 1999. ———. House. New York: Mariner, 1999. ———. Mountains Beyond Mountains. New York: Random House, 2003. ———. Old Friends. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. Kotlowitz, Alex. Never a City So Real. New York: Crown, 2004. ———. The Other Side of the River. New York: Nan A. Talese, 1998. Krakauer, John. Into the Wild. New York: Villard, 1996. ———. Into Thin Air. New York: Villard, 1997. Kramer, Jane. Lone Patriot: The Short Career of an American Militiaman. New York: Pantheon, 2002. Langewiesche, William. American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center. New York: North Point Press, 2002. LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole. Random Family. New York: Scribner, 2003. Lewis, Michael. Next: The Future Just Happened. New York: Norton, 2001. Nazario, Sonia. Enrique’s Journey. New York: Random House, 2006. Orlean, Susan. The Orchid Thief. New York: Random House, 1998. Preston, Richard. The Hot Zone. New York: Random House, 1994. Rosenbaum, Ron. Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil. New York: Random House, 1998. Steffens, Lincoln. The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens. New York: Harcourt, 1931. Talese, Gay. [1970] Fame and Obscurity. New York: Ivy Books, 1993. Weber, Ronald. Some Sort of Artistic Excitement. In The Reporter as Artist: A Look at the New Journalism Controversy. Ronald Weber, ed. New York: Hastings House, 1974. Weingarten, Marc. The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight. New York: Crown, 2006. Weschler, Lawrence. Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder. New York: Pantheon, 1995. Wolfe, Tom. Last American Hero. In The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. New York: Farrar, 1965. ———. The New Journalism. In The New Journalism: With an Anthology. Tom Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, eds. New York: Harper, 1973. Wright, Lawrence. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. New York: Knopf, 2006. Wyatt, Edward. “The Atlantic Monthly Cuts Back on Fiction.” New York Times (6 April 2005): late edition, E2.

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Further Reading Barringer, Felicity. “Journalism’s Greatest Hits.” New York Times (1 March 1999): C1; Connery, Thomas B., ed. A Sourcebook of American Literary Journalism: Representative Writers in an Emerging Genre. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992; Hartsock, John C. A History of American Literary Journalism: The Emergence of a Modern Narrative Form. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000; Sims, Norman, ed. Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

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M MAGICAL REALISM The contemporary reader of magical realism by American authors—here meaning authors writing and/or originating from the United States—may not anticipate such an encounter or, indeed, recognize the experience for what it is. Although the United States shares in common with Latin America many of the seeds from which the literary mode sprang, critics and readers alike still ascribe to magical realism a decidedly Latin American sensibility. Yet contemporary American authors use the mode as a means of addressing such issues as consumerism and popular culture, as well as for challenging the veracity of history and revising notions of truth. Definition. Most readers approaching a novel or short fiction described as “magic realism” anticipate the presence of something “unnatural” or magical, but evidence of the supernatural in and of itself does not constitute magical realism. In magical realism, neither the natural nor the supernatural is compromised. The author creates a supernatural as ordinary or normal as the everyday, a supernatural that ultimately does not stand out for the reader. Critic Amaryll Chanady works toward a concrete and applicable rubric against which texts can be evaluated as magical realism. Chanady offers the following criteria for magical realism. First, it is characterized by two perspectives, one based on a “rational view of reality and the other on the acceptance of the supernatural as part of everyday life” (Chanady 1985, 21). Next is the fact that “the supernatural is not presented as problematic”; characters and narration alike perceive it as normal (Chanady 1985, 23). Finally, Chanady argues, magical realism lacks “judgments about the veracity of the events and the authenticity of the world view expressed in the text,” so that the supernatural world as the author presents it is not subordinate or the “real” world privileged (Chanady 1985, 29–30). The magical realist text makes no attempt to invoke the uncertainty that would challenge a reader’s decision to believe or not believe in the world described as it is in the text. Thus, the supernatural cannot be explained away—as a miracle, for example, or a possible illusion—or the equality between the natural and unnatural would be imbalanced. A final required aspect is that in order for the

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supernatural and the real to coexist without hierarchy or questions, they must be in balance. A magical moment in a text—even one that conforms to Chanady’s criteria—cannot be enough to warrant the text’s classification as magical realism. Franz Roh first coined “magic realism” in 1925 for post-expressionist art, but by the late 1920s the term had already crossed over into literature. Authors Alejo Carpentier, Arturo Uslar Pietri, and Miguel Angel Asturias and critics Angel Flores and Luis Leal were among those responsible for labeling magical realism as a distinctly Latin American phenomenon. Carpentier coined the phrase lo real maravilloso in the preface to The Kingdom of This World (1949), privileging a Latin American (or Caribbean or even Cuban) sensibility he believed unduplicated elsewhere in the world. Yet only after the 1960s literary event known as the “Boom,” when Latin American literature exploded onto the world scene, would magical realism become a marketable literary commodity—a simultaneous Latin American and literary happening. The text most influential both in the Boom and in Latin American magical realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude, brought Gabriel García Márquez international fame. At the same time, the literary mode’s sudden popularity and Latin America’s seemingly exclusive claims gave rise to broad generalizations that still threaten the term’s denotation and application. Perhaps the greatest threat to magical realist criticism in the years since critics such as Leal and Flores first borrowed it for literary applications—even greater a risk than the threat of reductive geographic constraints—is this tendency to misappropriate the term for contemporary literature without first establishing a decisive and applicable denotation. One failing of critics and publishers alike has been to use the term loosely—begging the question as they market texts or even label entire collections “magical realism”—and so inaccurately that other modes, genres, and even religious beliefs are subsumed under the heading. To this day, “magical realism” appears on book jackets to connote Latin American origins or to “explain” the inclusion of the supernatural or miraculous rather than to categorize a text that creates what critic Joe Benevento describes as a “hybrid” of the everyday with the supernatural. The end result has been that many scholars and readers fail to recognize the mode or, worse, begin assigning it with impunity to fantasy and folklore, myth and science fiction, and blurring the lines in between. Although the supernatural in literature rarely defies description, both magical realism and any number of other modes or sub-genres suffer when this literary mode is misidentified. Inevitably, other supernatural texts privilege either the real or magical worlds they create. Fairy tale, science fiction, horror, and fantasy, for example, create imaginary places—physical spaces defined not by the rules of the natural world as we know it—and conform to often rigid conventions or to explanations that explain away the supernatural altogether. Fairy tales, for example, often begin with the formulaic “Once upon a time,” letting readers know that the rules of reality no longer apply to the actions of the text. Legends and lore function as sites of communal knowledge or superstition and operate under similar systems of order. For instance, stories of vampires or of other supernatural creatures generally abide by a set of rules for the supernatural: we know that a silver bullet kills a werewolf and thus we can often explain away or mediate for the supernatural events in works with werewolves. In literary terms, magical realism’s closest European relatives are perhaps surrealism and the fantastic. Surrealism has no interest in portraying a realistic world; that divorce from reality is made manifest in an exploration of the workings of the mind

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and, in particular, the subconscious. Like surrealism, the fantastic avoids or distances reality altogether, though Roger Caillois claims that the fantastic “presupposes the solidity of the world but only to ruin it more radically” (qtd. in Durix 1998, 82). The fantastic requires what Tzvetan Todorov describes as “hesitation” on the part of the reader or characters. Unlike magical realism, the fantastic, because it does not establish that the supernatural events have or have not taken place, calls into question whether or not the reader should believe in them. History. As if magical realism’s bonds with postmodernism and American Romanticism were not enough to ensure that magical realism could hold its own in North America, our shared history and postcolonial status with Latin America and the changing face of the American reading public has augmented its appeal. Magical realism is a catalyst “for the development of new national and regional literatures” (Zamora and Faris 1995, 2), a development perhaps best understood by nations with relatively young literary traditions. The Americas, in sharing a certain cultural indebtedness to the historical and literary traditions of Europe, also have in common the goal of independence and distinction from those traditions. Arriving white Europeans brought much of that unrest upon our “historical selves” by attempting to superimpose European culture onto the indigenous races they found in or brought to the Americas. To some extent, though, the U.S. subjugation of the natives was unusual in that it largely displaced and marginalized indigenous peoples, pushing them ever westward and away from the center, or, in an even more radical displacement, introduced marginalized groups, such as during slavery. The Spanish, unlike the Protestants settling on the Eastern shores of the United States, were more concerned with the inclusive civilizing and conversion of native peoples. The make-up of the New World, largely through the colonizers’ own doing, is heterogeneous rather than homogenous. Of course, not all marginalized groups are brought to or made out of nations against their wills, as illustrated by the tremendous influx of Latino/a people into the United States. These new arrivals carry with them their traditions, whether historical, religious, or cultural; in addition, they transport their language and their literary legacies. As marginalized groups, natives and immigrants create only slight tremors in the structure of the nations they call home. Still, together they challenge ideas of national language and culture; out of their oppression and misfortune spring the tools of change—such as multicultural and bilingual education, affirmative action, and political correctness. And the features of their literary consciousness are slowly being woven together with the traditional strands of the majority. Just as the Americas are refining questions of “nation,” they are also either forming or redefining questions of national identity. Literary modes such as magical realism play an important role in the reviewing and revision of self; literature is the means by which assimilation of different influences is reflected. Because assimilation can sometimes mean the loss of culture, narrative modes such as magical realism also constitute a reaction to such potential loss. And because magical realism juxtaposes the reality of America with other options, it provides an excellent forum for the marginalized voices in the Americas. Latin American magical realism began as an outgrowth of and reaction against Latin American political upheaval and socioeconomic distress. Although the United States shares at least some of those socioeconomic concerns, the magical realism of the United States is necessarily something quite different. A relatively stable nation, with no major overturning of its system of government in the past 230 years, the

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United States reflects a facade of stability, yet magical realism still allows mainstream and marginalized communities alike to express discontent with oppressive situations, the political rhetoric of capitalism, and the consumer culture. Such American magical realist writers as Laurie Foos, Ana Castillo, and Marie Arana challenge the rhetoric that equates the consumer society with cultural norms by infusing the consumptions of goods with supernatural qualities. The magical realism of U.S. writers also frequently manifests itself as an extension of the marginalized, the “Other” of Western culture and society, as illustrated by the revision of accepted religious, historical, and even supernatural beliefs by such marginalized authors as Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, and Jonathan Safran Foer. As such, magical realist literature ultimately makes powerful statements about America as both a consumer culture and the Other in North Atlantic society, but the foundation of its assertions is primarily social or cultural rather than predominantly political. If the Boom privileged the white male center of Latin American culture, the North American counterpart has set out to dethrone the center. Magical realist authors—and American magical realist authors in particular—are not writing constantly in the mode. Jeanne Delbaere notes, “Writers do not as a rule think of themselves as magic realists or write exclusively magic realist works; if the label fits some of their novels or stories it is usually because what they had to say in them required that particular form of expression” (Delbaere 1992, 98). Some texts incorporate particular elements of magical realism but may ultimately fail to sustain the supernatural in juxtaposition with the real across the whole of the text; other works provide the acceptable rationale of religious beliefs, counteracting the possibility that the text can be read as magical realism. Yet those who draw upon magical realism for their short fiction and novels often employ supernatural effects. Thus, Laurie Foos’s Ex Utero, a feminist take on magical realism, is the only one of her novels to date that would classify as such. Twinship, her most recent work, is closer to the surreal, with characters and readers alike questioning the impossible notion of a woman giving birth to herself, her mother having planted the suggestion in her desire for a child just like the perfect daughter to whom she gave birth. Steven Millhauser’s short story “Flying Carpets” (surrounded as it is by a collection of works closer to the fantastic than to any other mode or genre) seems to call into question whether or not it could be magical realism. It is, after all, a story about the sort of “magic” readers expect in fairy tales. Yet Millhauser’s matter-of-fact description of the narrator’s first maneuvers on the carpet treats the title objects as little more than glorified go-carts for the boys in his neighborhood. And these details are balanced against the narration’s skeptical imaginings of anything “out of this world”: “My father had taught me not to believe stories about Martians and spaceships, and these tales [about cities in the clouds] were like those stories: even as you refused to believe them, you saw them, as if the sheer effort of not believing them made them glow in your mind” (Millhauser 1999, 72). Millhauser lulls his reader into an easy belief in the most supernatural effect in the story, a “toy” that bores its young owner when it promises the moon but seems instead to make his world shrink and that ultimately goes missing, neglected in the attic. The story both calls into question and romanticizes stories of Martians and floating cities and, in so doing, leaves us unguarded against flying carpets. Some North American texts lend themselves easily to a discussion of the magically real, upholding the precepts for magical realism set forth by Chanady. For example, such contemporary American texts as Ex Utero, Beloved, Everything Is Illuminated,

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and Cellophane—despite drastic differences among their authors, tones, settings, and purposes—provide clearly definable instances of magical realism by writers practicing in the United States. Other works, perhaps even those frequently described as magically real, require more extensive justification in order to be considered as such, particularly texts such as Tropic of Orange and Everything Is Illuminated, with their very postmodern approaches to storytelling. Trends and Themes Consumerism. In a capitalist, consumer culture, the “have-nots” do not live in remote villages where little interaction between the upper and lower classes takes place. Instead, daily life continuously emphasizes the differences between the two, and the popular culture is largely responsible for highlighting for the less-fortunate the paradox of living in America without living “the American dream.” William Leach explains that the separation of customer from goods on display behind glass contributed to the increasingly obscured “difference between the real and the unreal” in consumerism (Leach 1993, 189). Because even the language Leach uses to describe the consumer culture is rich with the same rhetoric of magical realism (where “the difference between the real and the unreal” is blurred), it stands to reason that the narrative mode is appropriated as an effective means for discussing socioeconomic conditions in the United States. Thus, the American brand of magical realism dramatizes both the popular culture and the consumer culture in all their manifestations; in doing so, it challenges the authority of those cultures and their effects on the American population. Dreaming in Cuban’s questionable magical realist status results from Garcia’s almost hesitant use of the supernatural. The fact that, generally, only one or two characters experience the supernatural at any one time might compromise the novel’s status as magical realism were it not for Garcia’s intentionally nonlinear storyline. Certainly, some events also can be accounted for by religion: Felicia’s dependence on the very traditional, Caribbean spiritual medium of Yoruba offers several moments that, though supernatural in tone, cannot be considered magical realism, even when her reliance on the occult fails her. But Garcia also incorporates other indefinable elements into Dreaming in Cuban, redeeming the magical realism by interspersing these examples throughout the text: the emotional bond between Pilar in the United States and her grandmother Celia in Cuba, Jorge’s visits to both daughter and wife after his death, Celia’s ability to transfer her son’s cancer to her own breast. In Cristina Garcia’s novel, even the most culturally marginalized characters rarely seem at risk of becoming consumed; instead their appetites as U.S. consumers are perpetually fed, both literally and figuratively. Consider, for example, Lourdes’s massive consumption of baked goods. Her appetite in the kitchen translates into a sexual appetite; and the “heavier she got, the more supple she became” (Garcia 1992, 21). Yet because she equates her dieting (during which she eats no solid foods whatsoever) with transparency, “as if the hard lines of her hulking form were disintegrating,” she loses interest in sex. Only when her “metamorphosis is complete,” when she can fit into a size-six designer suit, does she begin to eat again. “On Fifth Avenue, Lourdes stops to buy hot dogs (with mustard, relish, sauerkraut, fried onions, and ketchup), two chocolate cream sodas, a potato knish, lamb shish kebabs with more onions, a soft pretzel, and a cup of San Marino cherry ice. Lourdes eats,

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eats, eats, like a Hindu goddess with eight arms, eats, eats, eats, as if famine were imminent” (Garcia 1992, 174). As opposed to the literal consumption in Garcia’s text, Ex Utero transforms the consumer culture into the impetus for (and a menace against) the magical realism of the text. Foos refigures the shopping mall as the site of loss of womanhood for the main character. “Somehow, in her quest to achieve a versatile wardrobe, she’d lost her womb, the way some people misplace car keys or a pair of sunglasses” (Foos 1995, 2). Rita’s pursuit at the mall symbolizes the stereotypical female desire in our consumer shopper, the desire to “shop ’til you drop”—only in this instance the “dropping” refers to Rita’s uterus rather than to Rita herself. Shopping, the consumption of goods, and consumers themselves all play important roles in the creation and perpetuation of the consumer cycle. Popular Culture. Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban illustrates ways in which the consumer culture and the popular culture commingle. For Garcia, what Cubans import from the United States is as important as that they import. Cuban characters eat, drink, wear, and play the United States, even if they are unable or unwilling to live there. From Jorge’s and Lourdes’s love of baseball to the Coca-Cola they keep in their fridge, the del Pinos in Dreaming in Cuban are shaped by the popular culture of the United States as much as they are by their own. But when Jorge and Lourdes embrace this foreign element, it inspires them to move away from Cuba. Celia, by choosing to place her loyalty in El Lider, champions Cuba; her country is her spirituality. Of the many messages that Foos advances in Ex Utero, the most significant in terms of popular culture is her indictment of the talk show genre. After she loses her womb, Rita makes the round of the syndicated talk shows, finally ending up on The Nodderman Show. Rod Nodderman is the quintessential talk show host, and Rita finds herself in TV Guide, along with Nodderman, whose Nielson ratings skyrocket after her appearance. One character and fan of the show, Adele, likes to make love with her boyfriend Leonard while watching talk shows. There is something about the distant murmur of voices, she says, that never fails to propel her to orgasm. Some of the syndicated shows do the trick, but it is The Nodderman Show that drives her into a frenzy. Certain shows have sent her tearing at Leonard’s hair and begging for commercials. She has been known to scream with pleasure at the opening strains of game show theme songs, writhing on the bed from the spinning of the Wheel of Fortune. (Foos 1995, 33)

But her sympathy for Rita’s plight causes Adele’s vagina literally to seal shut, and not even Leonard’s hammering, drilling, and chiseling can reopen it. A third central figure in the text, Lucy, expresses her sympathy for Rita through constant menstruation. When reporters follow her trail of blood to her apartment, they pass unanswered notes under the door: “We just want a few shots of you bleeding, the notes say, or a couple of quotes about menstruation. Why won’t you give us that much?” (Foos 1995, 101). Women are not the only casualties of the media frenzy. Marty, a shoe salesman who cannot keep red pumps in stock after Rita’s appearance on the talk show, thinks “perhaps it is the constant bombardment of wombs by the media that has driven him to [an] insatiable lust” (Foos 1995, 75). Ex Utero equates popular culture or “the boob tube” with both the female reproductive system and sexual excitement; the novel’s supernatural elements become a pawn in the production and reproduction of mass media, daytime television, and femininity.

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The women in Ex Utero (whose bodies have rebelled against them) and in So Far From God (who gravitate toward rebellion) become media icons in what has become an all-too-familiar response to tragedy and personal misfortune. Castillo’s characters experience a very traditional set of supernatural occurrences in extremely unconventional ways. Castillo references resurrection, saints, curanderas, and even La Llorona in such original ways that the supernatural can no longer be explained away by the religion that supposedly produces it. Foos insists that the reader not only accept that her main characters’ sexual organs have “closed up shop,” but also that the corresponding effects on the male characters are immediate and drastic. Drawing upon the everyday settings of the television studio and the shopping mall, Foos directly implants the supernatural into the ideological constraints of North America, restrictions that typically guard against the representation of the supernatural as anything other than a ghost story. The temptation for some readers of magical realist fiction is to rely on more traditional or popular claims to explain away the supernatural elements in the texts. One popular attempt at contextualizing Morrison’s novel Beloved has been to refigure it as a ghost story; in her own discussions of the work, Morrison herself describes it as such. Yet Beloved’s continual presence, along with the other supernatural events in the novel, bumps up against but does not consume the natural aspects of the story. Her return encompasses many possibilities, and her primary effect on both the implied reader and the characters in the story is not to elicit horror or suspense. Beloved functions as the site for many histories, rather than just one; ultimately, she embodies magical realism. Truth and History. Returning to the origin of things, finding the “true” history and making meaning of it, seems a constant task for American magical realism. Because it delves into the historical, social, mythical, individual, and collective levels of human reality (Hancock 1986, 47), magical realism offers new ways of exploring literature, but it also offers a space where truth can be confronted, challenged, or even changed. Beloved is perhaps the best example of such revisions. Beloved’s recollections of the “other side” are the supernatural reflection of the South (and of the Middle Passage spawned by the South’s commodification of black flesh) in the text. Sethe’s house on Bluestone Road is the middle ground, the only place in the text where the two realms meet. The specter of Beloved seducing Paul D and torturing Sethe pale in comparison to Paul D’s earlier subjugation or Sethe’s victimization at the hands of the young white boys who steal her milk. Because we see slavery in such a light, because Morrison forces us to deal with hatred and racism and evil, two things happen for the reader: we can forgive Sethe’s actions, and we can accept Beloved’s presence as easily as the main characters do. After all, this spirit plaguing the text, comparatively, is neither fantastic nor terrifying. If history is the privilege of the oppressor, then revision of history, Morrison suggests, is the purview of the oppressed. The plague of truth in Cellophane recalls the insomnia plague in One Hundred Years of Solitude and demonstrates one of the ways in which Marie Arana manipulates what is “true” through magical realism. Even before the plague, Arana’s characters seek truths about the world—Tía Esther’s stories for Victor, Victor’s unwillingness to remember his past and his obsession with paper, Belén’s escape from reality into the library housing her books, and Elsa’s wishful translation of the note she believes the general has given her all conspire to create individual truths for characters surrounded by the unsympathetic and oftentimes hostile rainforest. And

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because Victor, an engineer, constantly looks for how reality works, he discovers that technology is a bigger joke on humanity than on nature. In the window of a shop in Lima, Victor both finds his calling (in a poster of the Peruvian rainforest) and learns to regard technology and the supernatural on equal footing. “Perhaps, as with Señor Urrutia’s perpetual-motion machine, an explanation [for the medicine man’s abilities in delivering Victor’s children or for other rain forest magic] lurked in the wings. Events only seemed miraculous—one had to look for the science behind them. . . . Someday he would trace all these circuits and see the truth of the world clearly” (Arana 2006, 10). Later, his spiritual guide and friend Yorumba tells him, “There is a difference between the truth of the world and the world as a person sees it. We cannot know the truth” (Arana 2006, 134). Technology fails to protect Victor’s fanciful and unnatural desire to produce cellophane out of the rainforest. Victor loses the war against nature and the people living in (rather than in conflict with) nature; the natives disassemble the machinery and return Floralinda to the land. Context and Issues. Critics such as Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wayne Ude contend that the United States, by looking “to the south,” is actually rediscovering its own influences on the Latin American magical realist tradition. Both Zamora and Ude cite the American Romantic tradition as a precursor, arguing that Latin American authors borrowed heavily from romanticism, which freed itself from the moral and realistic requirements of traditional forms. Ude suggests that the frontier myth plays a part in the emergence of the North American strain of magical realism and extends the mode’s family tree to include the Gothic and folklore traditions as well. Magical realism has even closer familial ties with postmodernism, another critical term with Latin American roots. Indeed, innovative postmodern features— including awareness of the work as a text, or metafiction; multiplicity; discontinuity; and the erasure of boundaries—are the frequent tools of magical realists. And both magical realism and postmodernism blur the lines between popular or mass culture and “high” or literary arts. Still, Romanticism and postmodernism do share their counter-realism with magical realism. Romanticism created readers who were ready for something new, for authors and texts that would counter scientific reason. Postmodernism discarded our conventional definitions of reality and challenged the literary techniques constrained by that reality. Both paved the way for magical realism’s journey north and, in doing so, prepared readers for the “new” mode.

IS MAGICAL REALISM FOUND ONLY IN LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE? Until recently, magical realism has been such a geographically bound commodity that it was difficult to imagine it in terms of literature outside Latin America, much less to apply the phrase in scholarly criticism of other literatures or, more specifically, to consider American texts through a magical realist lens.Yet the very features that distinguish magical realism as an historically situated mode—its postcolonial nature, its shared history with postmodernism—also keep it from such proprietary claims. Magical realism, as Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges suggests, may have germinated in, rather than been imported into, the United States.

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Reception. The many thematic capabilities of magical realism converge for the marginalized text. Issues of consumerism, popular culture, identity, history, revision, and truth intersect within the worlds of marginalized authors, where the magical realist mode allows writers to uncover inconsistencies of an American life. As such writers challenge the terms “mass” or “popular culture,” “identity,” and “history”—and because majority rules tend not to apply to predominantly diversified areas such as the Los Angeles of Tropic of Orange—marginalized authors relocate the mainstream and the margin to a more unified center. When critic Debra Spark laments the paucity of magical realist works in the United States, her own difficulties as a writer attempting the mode on American soil may ultimately hinge on a personal rather than communal difficulty. The American magical realist author does not work in the mode exclusively, and yet the breadth of offerings provide rich and convincing truth that the literary mode deserves careful and continued critical attention. Selected Authors. In Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything Is Illuminated, the magical realism revolves around the act of telling truths—whether those events are factual or not. Chronologically, the tale begins with the discovery that a wagon has overturned in the river Brod. The location—Trachimbrod—is named for an event that may not even have caused the death of Trachim, who is merely the rumored occupant of the wagon. The current-day setting for the work is no less interested in truthfulness: in the letters Alexander Perchov writes to the character Jonathan Safran Foer, Alexi weaves a series of not-truths into language that relies on a thesaurus to present a more engaging—though less, or at least alternately, meaningful—version of Alexi’s own words. He tells Jonathan, “In Russian my ideas are asserted abnormally well, but my second tongue is not so premium. . . . I fatigued the thesaurus you presented me, as you counseled me to, when my words appeared too petite, or not befitting” (Foer 2002, 23). As Jonathan and Alexi reconstruct the story of Jonathan’s European roots, crafting the novel together, Alexi’s letters reveal that fiction could tell the better story: “I could hate you! Why will you not permit your grandfather to be in love with the Gypsy girl, and show her his love? Who is ordering you to write in such a manner? We have such chances to do good, and yet again and again you insist on evil” (Foer 2002, 240). Soon after, in the same letter, Alexi contends, “I would never command you to write a story that is as it occurred in the actual, but I would command you to make your story faithful” (Foer 2002, 240). Alexi’s complaint comes full circle as he realizes that Jonathan’s narrative will also incorporate a more “actual” version of his own grandfather’s tale, the horrific version in which Grandfather is accomplice to his Jewish friend Hershel’s death in order to save his own family. Alexi’s preference for the “good” versions of these stories, where the Gypsy girl finds love with Safran and where Grandfather risks his family’s wellbeing to keep Hershel’s secret, might ironically create a world in which neither Alexi nor Jonathan was alive to tell any tale. Such attempts at revision comprise an equally important theme in contemporary magical realism. Morrison re-envisions the legacy of slavery incarnate in Beloved. Alexi actively participates in the process of revising the family history in the Jewish novel Jonathan is writing. American-Canadian writer Thomas King revises Native American creation myths, history, and even a classic John Wayne movie in Green Grass, Running Water. When the Indian characters (already in the act of revising the white Western canon by taking on iconographic names) Lone Ranger, Hawkeye,

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Robinson Crusoe, and Ishmael view a store owner’s favorite Western, they find mistakes in the production. “The next scene,” said Bursum, “used over six hundred extras, Indians and whites. And five cameras. The director spent almost a month on this one scene before he felt it was right.” “He didn’t get it right the first time,” said the Long Ranger. “But we fixed it for him,” said Hawkeye. (King 1994, 351–352)

These four new “directors” of the movie colorize their version and remove the cavalry that charges in to save John Wayne. “There at full charge, hundreds of soldiers in bright blue uniforms with gold buttons and sashes and stripes, blue-eyed and rosy-cheeked, came over the last rise./And disappeared [ . . . ]. ‘What the hell,’ said Bursum” (King 1994, 357). Those in the store watch as John Wayne and Richard Widmark “[pull] the trigger on empty cartridges” and the tide of the battle turns to favor the Indians. John Wayne looked down and stared stupidly at the arrow in his thigh, shaking his head in amazement and disbelief as two bullets ripped through his chest and out the back of his jacket” (King 1994, 358). Bursum’s response is to stab at the remote in an attempt to stop the revision, but Charlie— the son of Portland, an actor not “Indian” enough to portray himself until he dons a prosthetic nose—hisses “Get ’em, Dad” (King 1994, 358). King, whose text rewrites multiple histories, reverses the cultural impact intended by the movie. His Indians refigure the popular genre of the Western into a new space where the Portlands and not the John Waynes save the day. In doing so, King and his team of revisionists return to Charlie a father, as well as a culture and a history, of which he can be proud. Magical realism allows for supernatural blendings of history and identity, one of its most important benefits to authors searching for what makes the historic real for readers and characters. In Cellophane, Victor’s identity is defined by his actions; locals call him “the shapeshifter” for what he creates (cellophane, paper) out of nature (hemp, cotton). Jonathan’s grandfather is “Shalom-then-Kolker-now Safran” and then a statue known as the Dial in Everything Is Illuminated; his journey through the text is a constant attempt to find an identity that will allow him to fit into Trachimbrod. And Morrison’s Beloved encompasses any number of possible existences, including the “crawling-already?” baby, the young escaped woman from Deer Creek, and the Middle Passage personified. Using magical realism to negotiate the often merciless histories of contemporary existence, authors such as King, Foer, Arana, and Morrison rescue identities worth more than those allowed by outsider’s accounts. Humor. Magical realist texts make for some of the most haunting and brutal writing imaginable. Yet several contemporary writers use the mode to great comedic affect, even as those authors juxtapose playful rhetoric against the horrors of daily life. In Everything Is Illuminated, Alexi’s malapropisms and jokes are at the expense of the character and “author,” Jonathan Safran Foer, who is searching for the woman who saved his family from the Holocaust. Alexi’s first letter to Jonathan includes a scene where his father describes Jonathan to Alexi and his grandfather: “‘He desires to write a book about his grandfather’s village.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘so he is intelligent?’ ‘No,’ Father corrected. ‘He has low-grade brains. The American office informs me that he telephones them every day and manufactures numerous

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half-witted queries about finding suitable food.’ . . . Here,” Alexi inserts, well aware of Jonathan as his audience, “I will repeat that the hero is a very ingenious Jew,” but he immediate quotes his Grandfather’s lament that he does “not want to drive ten hours to an ugly city to attend to a very spoiled Jew” (Foer 2002, 6–7). Joe Hill’s “Pop Art,” with its easy and simple beginning—“My best friend when I was twelve was inflatable” (Hill 2001, 85)—uses humor as a mediator between reader and text, allowing the magical realist text to speak to injustice while still taking delight in the circumstances that would make Art easy prey. Hill’s text could thwart the reader’s efforts to accept its premise as a reality were it not for the author’s liberal use of practical concerns for a character weighing only eight ounces. The narrator describes Art early in the story: “Also, I can say truthfully, he was the most completely harmless person I’ve ever known. Not only would he not hurt a fly, he couldn’t hurt a fly. If he slapped one and lifted his hand, it would buzz off undisturbed” (Hill 2001, 87). Art writes with a crayon to avoid the danger of pencils and is kicked around, literally, on the playground for being different: “There was something special about Art, an invisible special something that just made other kids naturally want to kick his ass” (Hill 2001, 87). When another kid “held Art down during recess and wrote KOLLOSTIMY BAG with indelible ink,” Art writes on his pad that “[t]he worst thing was my mom saw. Bad enough she has to know I get beat up on a daily basis. But she was really upset it was spelled wrong” (Hill 2001, 89). The Native American experience King creates in Green Grass, Running Water counteracts its own spiritual origins by humorously reframing the traditional myths. King appropriates and rewrites The Last of the Mohicans, Robinson Crusoe, Moby Dick, the Bible, and even a radio-originated television series (The Lone Ranger). The four Native Americans—who are the four originary women of the story (First Woman, Changing Woman, Thought Woman, and Old Woman) and who first reject the Christian myths of “Ahdamn” and Eve, Noah and the Flood, Mary’s immaculate conception, and Christ (Young Man Walking On Water)—adopt their (male) names from the white Anglo texts and are responsible for establishing the narrative frame around the story. In the tale, then, King also irreverently modifies Native American myths because he uses four cross-dressing, cross-naming women to effect changes in the “present” of the text and because Coyote, the audience for their tale, is traditionally the story-teller. King’s playful irreverence does not stop with Native American mythology or the Western canon. When A.A. Gabriel (whose business card lists him as a Canadian Security and Intelligence Service agent and as the Heavenly Host) appears to Thought Woman, the interviewer attempts to rename her Mary, to require “virgin verification,” and to take her picture next to a “snake” who is actually Old Coyote. When she refuses him and floats away again on the ocean, A.A. Gabriel shouts after her: “There are lots of Marys in the world. . . . We can always find another one, you know” (King 1994, 301). And one of King’s most elaborate jokes unfolds over the course of the novel as he toys with the idea of “discovering” a continent filled with indigenous peoples. Columbus’s three ships’ journey to the New World is recreated and revised in the destruction of the Parliament Lake Dam by three cars sailing on the lake—“a Nissan, a Pinto, and a Karmann-Ghia” (King 1994, 448). King’s magical realism “out-Coyotes” Coyote because it plays tricks on the tricksters. Coincidence. Because coincidence calls into question the planned nature of human events and our seeming control of the world around us, many magical realists delight in confounding plots with nearly miraculous coincidences. Arana’s Cellophane is

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riddled with them. When he mistranslates the Australian’s course note, Luis inadvertently sparks love between John Gibbs and Marcela the school teacher, allowing Gibbs to be in the right place at the right time to save the family; Tía Esther arrives on the Australian’s boat the very day they will need to escape Floralinda. The tsantsa, a shrunken puma head Tía wears as a souvenir from a failed love affair from her youth, warns off the Jivaro; the tribe of Machiguenga inadvertently save Victor from the Jivaro. Most important to Victor’s family’s fate and yet a matter of coincidence itself, the monkey La Negrita’s fortune, suitably vague and drawn at random out of the mini shrine, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of the ending of the story. Coincidences conspire by the end of the novel, tying together the realist threads, becoming more than mere conveniences or plot contrivances, and these once random events begin to form a pattern for Victor’s life. Though Victor is a man who finds “truth . . . in tangible things” (Arana 2006, 49), as with his cellophane, the intangibles—as both the monkey fortune and Yorumbo warn him—force him to let go. Abby Frucht’s Polly’s Ghost translates coincidence into an extraordinary performance of motherly love. Polly, newly learning her abilities and limitations as a ghost, attempts to bond her youngest son Tip and his new acquaintance Johnny but instead causes the death of the man who will dissolve that bond. “I never intended for Tom Bane’s airplane to fall out of the sky,” begins Frucht’s narrative (Fruchy 2000, 11). Polly spends the novel learning how much she is at the whim of her dance partner, the night. Polly’s Ghost refuses the confines of a ghost story but also disallows Polly’s own need to offer Tip her forgiveness (she dies bearing him) and to have a motherly influence in his life. Instead, she hovers on the fringes, touching Tip’s life indirectly through the small influences she has with others; and as the novel winds to a close, that disparate group of individuals forms a protective chain around the now-adult Tip. Frucht literally illustrates how, according to Zamora, “[m]ost contemporary U.S. magical realists find a way to bring their ghosts above ground and integrate them into contemporary U.S. culture in order to enrich or remedy it” (Zamora 1995, 118). Marginalization. When we categorize a writer’s work as marginal, the issue often becomes a question of “nature or nurture”—is the author’s natural (biological or geographical) marginality the deciding factor, or does the theme or subject matter “nurtured” in the text determine whether the work is a peripheral one? Criticism that addresses this question generally chooses “natural” marginalization as the more dominant feature. Marginalized writers tend to produce marginalized works, whether they intend to or not, because the very conditions at work on the authors similarly affect judgments of their texts. According to Jean-Pierre Durix, “Through ‘marginal modes’ of expression, writers [search for their own roots and rediscover] those myths which might help them to transcend this marginal position” (Durix 1998, 148). Magical realism not only challenges the center, it also allows the margins to rediscover their historical and mythical past. Writers and critics in the United States are redefining our very “Americanness,” how we perceive ourselves as parts of a larger whole in the New World—a fluid perception that, for marginalized authors, is predetermined by their peripheral status. Magical realism provides a tool for revision of marginality, perhaps especially for those authors who are themselves bound by geography, by race, by gender, or by other collective categorizations of identity. Magical realism permits the margins more than an entry into the main discourse, it offers the opportunity to reevaluate that central ideological constraint and to challenge the very features of the mainstream that allow for a margin in the first place. And, as the marginalized female magical

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realists perhaps best illustrate, the revision of the center inevitably requires confronting the margins themselves. For the marginalized female writer, magical realism proves an optimum mode of choice because if its flexibility and marketability. Magical realism allows women writers who themselves exist on multiple planes to create worlds that can address all of those levels within a single work. Counterbalanced with this marginalization and silencing of the (m)other is the fact that women are cultural impetuses for the supernatural. Women provide magical realism with several things—children, homes, and rebellion being only a few of their offerings—as Morrison, Castillo, Foos, and others detail in their literature. Frequently, the imposed order of the mainstream needs to be revised in order for mother and daughter characters to survive the margins. Pilar Puente manages to get herself kicked out of the Catholic school to which she refers as “Martyrs and Saints” (Garcia 1992, 58). M.O.M.A.S. (Mothers of Martyrs and Saints) does this for So Far From God; for a people “so far” from the God of Catholic religion, the rules of martyrdom are bent in order to honor the children whom the Hispanic mothers are losing. La Loca’s death experience and visit to Hell reenvision what the priest understands his religion to be, but her experience grants her mother a privileged position in the community of other marginalized mothers. Though the Hispanic origins of both the characters and the authors are driving forces behind the magical realism of Castillo’s and Garcia’s works, these authors, by reveling in (rather than separating themselves from) an admixture of traditionally U.S. popular culture with Hispanic overtones, claim simultaneous places in the Latin American and North American traditions. Several of this chapter’s primary texts are set partially or entirely outside the United States, suggesting that a particular categorization such as American literature cannot hope to encapsulate the full landscapes of the text. In the most extreme cases, such as with Cellophane, Dreaming in Cuban, or Everything Is Illuminated, the supernatural occurrences are often or completely off site. Yet the authors refuse to compartmentalize the magic, to make it “foreign” or exotic and therefore less real. Bibliography Arana, Marie. Cellophane. New York: Dial, 2006. Castillo, Ana. So Far from God. New York: Plume, 1994. Chanady, Amaryll. Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved versus Unresolved Antinomies. New York: Garland, 1985. Delbaere, Jeanne. “Magic Realism: The Energy of the Margins.” Postmodern Fiction in Canada. Theo L. D’haen and Hans Bertens, eds. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992. Durix, Jean-Pierre. Mimesis, Genres and Post-Colonial Discourse: Deconstructing Magic Realism. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Foer, Jonathan Safran. Everything Is Illuminated. New York: Harper Perennial, 2003. Foos, Laurie. Ex Utero. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1995. Frucht, Abby. Polly’s Ghost. New York: Scribner, 2000. Garcia, Cristina. Dreaming in Cuban. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992. Hancock, Geoff. “Magic or Realism: The Marvellous in Canadian Fiction.” Magic Realism and Canadian Literature: Essays and Stories. Peter Hinchcliffe and Ed Jweinski, eds. Ontario, Canada: University of Waterloo Press, 1986. Hill, Joe. “Pop Art.” With Signs & Wonders: An International Anthology of Jewish Fabulist Fiction. Daniel M. Jaffe, ed. Montpelier, VT: Invisible Cities Press, 2001, 85–107. King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. New York: Bantam, 1994.

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MANGA AND ANIME Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York: Pantheon, 1993. Millhauser, Steven. “Flying Carpets.” The Knife Thrower and Other Stories. London: Phoenix, 1999, 66–75. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Plume, 1987, 1998. Yamashita, Karen Tei. Tropic of Orange. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1997. Zamora, Lois Parkinson. The Usable Past: The Imagination of History in Recent of the Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Zamora, Lois Parkinson, and Wendy B. Faris, eds. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.

SHANNIN SCHROEDER

MANGA AND ANIME Definition. Manga means, simply, “comic books” made for the Japanese market and anime is animation made for the Japanese market. In Japan these same terms are used in a general sense to mean works from anywhere in the world. For this essay, however, the narrower definition, which is the dominant one in the English speaking world, shall be used. Other terms are used to describe types of manga commonly seen. Shônen is used to refer to manga for boys from grade school to the late teens. Shôjo is manga for girls of roughly the same age. Seinen is the kind of managa aimed at young men from late teens through mid twenties, college aged or young working men. Gekiga can be translated as “dramatic pictures” and is used for grittier manga stories with a certain hard edge to them. There is no plural ending to Japanese words; thus manga can refer to one or many. Generally, in this chapter I list the English title after the Japanese title for the section on Japan and vice versa for the section on the English market; the title used will be for the U.S. commercial release rather than an accurate translation. In some cases, the title is the same in both languages. Why include animation in a work devoted to reading? Almost all anime available in North America is released subtitled; a format that historically the majority of anime fans have preferred over works being re-dubbed into English. Fans of anime and manga will notice that the historical section is slanted toward works and creators that have had an impact on the North American market. History Japan. Observing the history of manga and anime gives us a view on the development of these two forms of entertainment. This essay is far too short to go into much detail; however, this history can be seen as one of increasing sophistication and improvement of craft. Manga Predecessors. There are many types of works that are considered predecessors of modern manga. These range from graffiti left on ancient temples to the humorous “Animal Scrolls” of Bishop Toba from the twelfth century (Schodt 1986, 28). Later there were the various illustrated books of the Edo Period (1603–1867), some of which, such as the Kibiyôshi, had images taking up much of the page with text for dialog and narration. Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989) revolutionized the manga and anime industries with his willingness to experiment and innovate. One of his early innovations was to move away from conventional layouts in his manga and to draw his work as if he was using still images from the storyboards of a live action movie. Manga was then, and is still today, almost always black and white.

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THE BEGINNINGS OF MANGA During the Meiji Period (1868–1912) there was a rejection of older illustrated genres that led to the end of publication of these types of works for adults. At the same time the use of illustration in children’s magazines became common. After World War II there was a shortage of affordable entertainment so manga rental shops, kashibonya, became common. Several noted manga artists of the late 1940s and the 1950s wrote works intended for sale to these shops. Among these was Osamu Tezuka, a young medical school graduate who found he could make a living as a manga artist rather than as a doctor.

Although manga stories can be short, comparable in length to an American comic book, they commonly are long works with a single story spanning multiple volumes, such as Rumiko Takahashi’s Maison Ikkoku, which has 15 volumes in the English edition. The same is true of anime television series, which are often adapted from manga; usually television anime series are either 26 episodes or 13 episodes long. In these programs each episode is a chapter in a longer story; when the story is over, the series ends to be replaced by an entire new show. This structure for both anime and manga helps create a great deal of diversity because creators are able to try new ideas, and television time slots are not taken up by shows that last years. Another type of manga that bears mentioning is dôjinshi. These are self-published works and not always manga because they sometimes are text publications, much like zines in America. The dôjinshi scene in Japan is very different than the scene for fan-produced works in the United States. Dôjinshi often use actual characters from manga, anime, video games, movies, or television shows and sometimes even actual people. Who makes and consumes dôjinshi? Fans, often of high school or college age, are often girls. Many professionals in Japan started out publishing dôjinshi and later graduated to professional work. Some professionals still produce dôjinshi as a hobby, occasionally spoofing their own characters. There are even several conventions entirely devoted to creators selling their own dôjinshi; the largest is Tokyo’s famous Comic Market, commonly referred to as Comiket or Komiket, which takes place twice a year for three days in August and December drawing about 500,000 attendees. What do the Japanese companies think of this fan activity? They usually look the other way. Japanese trademark law is such that unauthorized use of their characters will not harm a company’s rights and the popularity of a series can be measured in a sense by how many dôjinshi there are based on it. Anime. The oldest commercial anime dates from 1917 when Oten Shimokawa made Imokawa Mukuzo genkanban no maki (Mukuzo Imokawa, the Doorman), the first of a series of shorts to be shown in movie houses before regular features. Such short works remained the norm until 1945 when the first anime feature length black and white film, Momotaro Umi no Shinpei (Momotaro’s Divine Sea Warriors), was released. This was the longest of a series of anime made for internal propaganda, and it was paid for by the Japanese Imperial Navy. It would not be until 1958 that the next feature, Hakujaden (Panda and the Magic Serpent), would be released, this time in color. The 1960s brought a new element to anime in Japan, works made for television. Otogi Manga Karendâ (Otogi Manga Calendar), made in 1962, was the first madefor-television series. Otogi Manga Karendâ consisted of three-minute educational

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clips discussing history; eventually 312 of these short works were made. The first half-hour children’s series firmly establishing anime format in the medium for television in Japan was Tetsuwan Atom (Astro Boy) in 1963 to be soon followed by Tetsujin 28-go (Gigantor) and 8 Man (8th Man). The 1970s saw the number of anime titles for middle school students increase as well as the further development of the “giant robot” genre that started with Tetsujin 28-go. The end of the decade saw pivotal titles establish that older viewers could be an audience for anime. Kido Senshi Gundam (Mobile Suit Gundam) was a giant robot science fiction show about future war. Unlike other giant robot shows, the enemies were not invaders from space or another dimension; they were other humans, rebelling space colonists. The show had a serious element also, including the impact of war on civilians as well as the emotional impact of combat on soldiers. The television series was cut short after the sponsor realized that the toys were not selling well. However, reruns of the show had a high viewership that was proven to be older than the usual giant robot show audience. When Gundam model kits were released, they sold very well. This resulted in other Gundam anime being made, some that were not set in the same “universe” as the original series. In fact, to differentiate between these “universes,” the original series and related works are referred to as belonging to the “Universal Century” Gundam shows. The 1980s brought anime creators a new method of distribution made possible by the VCR. Original Video Animation, usually referred to as OVA by the Japanese and sometimes as OAV by others, were works made for sale directly as videos rather than first shown in theatres or on television. This format allowed creators to experiment and produce works that did not have a clearly defined market or had one that was too small to be profitable with the previous methods of distribution. The first commercial OVA was Dallos, directed by Mamoru Oshii and released in 1983. The experimental nature of many of the early OVA is apparent in the variety of works released in this format in the 1980s. Some OVA titles, such as the successful Patlabor and Aa! Megamisama! (Oh! My Goddess), would later be adapted into television series. Creators of OVA also had an advantage over television series in that OVA did not have the strict deadlines that broadcasting requires. This meant a series episode could be delayed if needed to ensure quality work. The OVA formant also increased the number of erotic works. There had been some relatively tame erotic anime released in theatres in the late 1960s and early 1970s with little financial success. However, erotic anime is still a very small percentage of the market; only a few titles are released each year, compared to the much larger television, movie, and non-erotic OVA markets. In 1984 Hayao Miyazaki released his first independent animated feature, Kaze no Tani no Nausicaä (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind). A few years later Miyazaki was one of the most noted and internationally famous directors from Japan. In 1985 Miyazaki and fellow director Isao Takahata founded their own studio, Studio Ghibli, to make and release the kinds of anime they wanted to make. Also in 1984 a new company, GAINAX, was founded by a group of science fiction fans in their twenties, some of whom worked professionally in the anime industry. In 1987 GAINAX released Oritsu Uchuugun—Honneamise no Tsubasa (Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise), one of several anime that raised the standards of quality and sophistication at the end of the 1980s. Other transformative titles of the period were Akira, released in 1988 and directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, and Kidou Keisatsu Patlabor Gekijouban (Patlabor: The Movie) in 1989, directed by Mamoru Oshii.

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In the 1990s the anime industry experienced growth with an increasing number of programs on television, both conventional broadcast and cable or satellite. The general quality of the craft of animation increased with many works made for television rivaling feature films and OVA for the quality of their imagery. GAINAX continued to produce critically acclaimed works, and in 1995 it produced a 26-week episode television series that was to become one of the most watched anime series of the period. Shin Seiki Evangelion (Neon Genesis Evangelion), directed by Hideaki Anno, proved highly successful and resulted in two movies, as well as a continuing line of toys and related merchandise. There are still other Neon Genesis Evangelion works in production over a decade later. Miyazaki, Takahata, and Anno were only a few of the directors who attained auteur status in this period. Others include Oshii and Satoshi Kon. Kon, a manga artist, went from relative obscurity to international fame when the first anime he directed, the 1997 feature Perfect Blue, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival. Anno and Oshii have also made award-winning live action films, whereas Kon has steadfastly stuck to doing just animation. The United States and Canada 1960s. In the United States the history of translated anime began in the 1960s and manga in the 1970s. The earliest anime releases in the United States were three theatrical features, all re-dubbed into English in 1961: Magic Boy (Shônen Sarutobi Sasuke), Panda and the Magic Serpent (Hakujaden), and Alakazam the Great (Saiyuki). Televised anime series were broadcast in the United States beginning in 1963 with Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atom) by Osamu Tezuka. In 1965 the first color anime television series, also based on a Tezuka story, was shown on U.S. television. Kimba The White Lion (Jungle Taitei) was a series about an orphaned lion cub who was the ruler of his part of Africa. In fact, it was due to NBC licensing the show ahead of its production that allowed the use of color, which was much more expensive to produce than the various grays of earlier shows. Soon other Japanese shows, such as Gigantor (Tetsujin 28-go) and 8th Man (8 Man), were broadcast in the United States in edited and redubbed versions. The late 1960s saw another series that attained icon status for American television viewers, Speed Racer (Mach, Go, Go, Go), edited in the U.S. version so no one died. 1970s. The 1970s was an era in which animated shows with even a mild level of violence were removed from network television and relegated to independent stations showing reruns of older programs. Anime, which often was far more serious than American cartoons, was largely not available for television viewers during this time. However, in 1978 the first new anime series to be shown on U.S. television hit the airwaves. Battle of the Planets was a heavily rewritten version of Kagaku Ninjatai Gatchaman. The story was drastically altered with the intent to capture some of the popularity of the first Star Wars movie of the previous year. The original tale was set in Japan with a special force defending the earth; the U.S. script set the tale far away in another part of the galaxy and greatly toned down the seriousness of the original story. In 1977 there was another development that changed the market for anime and manga in the United States. The first anime and manga fan club, the Cartoon/Fantasy Organization, C/FO for short, held its first meeting in May 1977. Drawing its members heavily from existing science fiction fans, the founding of the C/FO was a significant event that resulted in similar clubs being established across the United

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States. These early clubs helped solidify and expand early English-speaking anime and manga fandom by holding regular meetings, screenings of shows in raw Japanese, publishing newsletters, sharing information, and recruiting new fans. These fans provided the foundation for the establishment of a market in North America for anime and manga. In 1978 the first English translated manga was published, the first volume of Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen)—the autobiographical manga of a Hiroshima survivor. 1980s. In 1983 the Japanese based publisher Kodansha International released the first book on manga in English, Manga! Manga!, by Frederik L. Schodt. Manga! Manga! quickly became, and remained, an essential reference for anyone interested in the subject. It was nearly a decade after Barefoot Gen was first published in English that new translated manga titles were released. In May 1987 First Comics published its first issue of excerpts from the Lone Wolf and Cub (Kozure Okami) manga series. In the same month a partnership between Eclipse International and the new, Japanese owned, company Viz Communications released its first joint publications: Area 88, Legend of Kamui (Kamui Gaiden), and Mai the Psychic Girl (Mai). These works were not published in book form; rather they were in the usual American pamphlet format of comic books. Manga finally became a regular feature of comic book shops. The following year was the beginning, by the Epic Comics branch of Marvel Comics, of publication for Katsuhiro Otomo’s famous manga Akira. This was a project that also involved adding color to the original black and white work and took until 1995 to complete. Also in 1988 was the Eclipse International publication of Appleseed by the soon to be famous Masamune Shirow and translated by Studio Proteus, a company founded by Toren Smith in 1986 and dedicated to high quality work in their releases. Many of these early manga were seinen manga aimed at a late teen and early twenties male audience. In 1989 the feature length version of the Akira anime was released redubbed into English to the American art house theatre circuit. It became a landmark film—for many years afterward if anyone had seen only one anime feature, the odds were that it was Otomo’s groundbreaking work. Several companies were established in 1987 and 1988 to release anime, such as The Right Stuf, U.S. Renditions, Streamline Pictures, and AnimEigo. All four companies began releasing anime on VHS in 1989 and 1990, including the first subtitled anime releases, which started with AnimEigo’s release of Metal Skin Panic Madox 01. North American fans were ready to go beyond club publications and began launching commercial anime magazines, beginning with Anime-Zine in April 1986, Animage in 1987, and Protoculture Addicts in 1988. Protoculture Addicts, published in Montreal, was devoted to one show, Robotech, until 1990, when it became a general anime, manga, and Japanese culture magazine; it still exists today, making it the longest running anime magazine in North America. In November 1987 Ann Schubert launched the first Usenet newsgroup devoted to anime, rec.arts.anime, and soon it was not only available through computer BBS networks but also via the Internet. Today it still exists divided into several specialized newsgroups all beginning with rec.arts.anime. In 1988 the Valley of the Wind BBS, the official BBS for Animag magazine, started in San Mateo, California. This was perhaps the first anime BBS established in North America. Another significant development in the late 1980s was the creation, with the use of computers and video editing hardware, of fan subs, that is, noncommercial, and

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illegal, video releases of anime with subtitles created by fans and distributed for free, mainly to clubs for showings, by networks of volunteers. This was to provide clubs with a greater number of titles to show and help spread anime to more viewers. College and University based anime clubs also came into existence at this time. Earlier some C/FO chapters used facilities at schools without actually being student organizations, for example the Cartoon/Fantasy Organization of Denver, founded in 1982, met in an available room at the Iliff School of Theology until the club president, Michael Burgess, who was an Iliff student, graduated. In time actual studentrun groups began organizing, such as Cal-Animage Alpha, the anime club at the University of California Berkeley, which was founded in January 1989, and MIT Anime, which was founded the following year. 1990s. Dallas, Texas, holds the distinction of being the location of the first U.S. anime convention with three locally advertised conventions, Yamatocon in August 1983 and March 1986 and Animagic in September 1986, and the first nationally advertised general anime convention, Project A-Kon, in July 1990. In 1991 AnimeCon ’91 took place in San Jose, California. Organized in part by Toren Smith of Studio Proteus and Toshio Okada of GAINAX, AnimeCon ’91 had a large number of Japanese guests and an original opening animation done by U.S. fans. In October U.S. Manga Corps, a division of Central Park Media, released the first tape of their first anime title Dominion. After this new anime and manga companies were established every few years. Viz entered the anime magazine scene with the release of Animerica issue 0 in November 1992. The magazine was to run until June 2005 as a newsstand publication and then be transformed into a free quarterly issued largely to publicize Viz products. In the early 1990s Studio Proteus changed publishers and had their seinen manga works handled by Dark Horse. With organized anime and manga fandom firmly established, AnimEigo released a title in 1993 that shaped fan activities for some time: they did not even bother to translate the title. Otaku no Video was another product from GAINAX, which was an OVA playfully mocking both Japanese fandom and their own science fiction fan origins. American fans looked at this work, which is extremely dense with examples of Japanese fan activities, and gleefully took part in many similar activities, even proudly calling themselves otaku. Otaku is a term with mixed origins: originally a word that can be used to address someone in a very polite manner, it became heavily used by polite and shy Japanese fans when speaking to each other. In time it came to be used to refer to obsessed fans and often not in a complimentary manner, much like nerd or geek in English. However, there are Japanese fans who without hesitation use the term to describe themselves. In recent years the term has lost some of its edge in Japan as otaku have come to be seen as important in both the production and consumption of entertainment, not only anime and manga but also live action movies and video games. The mid-1990s saw the earliest U.S. anime releases of works that were intended for a female audience. Starting in September 1995 Sailor Moon hit the television airwaves in a highly edited and redubbed version that quickly drew teenaged and younger girls to anime. This permanently transformed anime fandom; before Sailor Moon, fans were mainly male, college age and older. Girls and women now became major players in the fan scene. Partly due to the popularity of Sailor Moon bringing in younger fans, High School anime clubs began to spread at this time. The first subtitled video release of a title aimed at a female audience, Here is Greenwood, set in

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a boy’s high school dorm, was released in 1996. The following year, 1997, saw the first anime DVD released in the United States, Battle Arena Toshinden from Central Park Media. Given the growth of female fandom, a new company, Mixx Entertainment, began releasing the Sailor Moon manga in 1998, with the original characters renamed to match the anglicized names in the U.S. version of the television series. They also published a manga anthology magazine called MixxZine, later renamed TOKYOPOP, that ran until 2000. Other anthology magazines started at this time, such as the Eisner Award-nominated Pulp, aimed at releasing “manga for grownups,” Animerica Extra for boys and girls, and Smile, a girl’s magazine that also included manga. Most of these magazines only lasted a few years. However, at the same time, more of the manga publishers were abandoning the releasing of manga in American comic book format and switching to anthologies or directly to the paperback book format, which quickly became the standard way to package most manga. In July 1998 Viz did something very different—released the first volume of the Neon Genesis Evangelion manga in a special collector’s edition unflipped. Until this time all manga had been flipped from its original Japanese right-to-left orientation to the Western left-to-right orientation. This involved extra work on the part of the companies to touch up the art that not only increased the cost of production but also took time. Japanese artists also often requested that their design work not be reversed, and some were rumored to refuse to license their works unless they would not be flipped. Readers easily adjusted to the change, and it would not be long before leaving the art unflipped became the norm, even to the point of re-releasing previously flipped volumes in second unflipped editions. A few years later, in January 2002, TOKYOPOP not only announced that all of their manga were going to an unflipped format but they also made this decision a major part of their publicity for that year with their “100% Authentic Manga” advertising campaign. In the late 1990s there was another significant development—major chain bookstores began selling manga. This opened up the market to a significant segment of the population that would rarely enter comic book shops—girls. For the next several years, manga sales grew at a rate of over 100% per year mainly due to teen-age girls becoming a large segment of the customer base. This also resulted in companies placing more of their resources to serve the needs of this segment of the market The Internet also played a larger role in communication between fans. In 1995 the Anime Web Turnpike, a large directory of anime and manga related Web sites, was started to help fans locate useful resources online. In 1998 two new anime services were established on the Web, The Anime News Network and Anime on DVD. Both contain archives of press releases from companies, reviews, articles, online forums, reference tools, and the latest news. 2000–. In the early twenty-first century, magazine anthologies are still being released and experimented with in the United States, such as the successful monthly Shônen Jump boy’s manga anthology from Viz, which began publishing in 2002, and its sister publication, Shojo Beat, which began in 2005, serializing manga for girls. Other manga anthologies, such as the seinen and Raijin Comics (2003–2004) and the general Super Manga Blast (2000–2006), did not do as well. Trends and Themes. Anime and manga have had an impressive growth in North America over the past few decades; however, they still remain a niche market and have not become part of the mainstream entertainment industry. After all, entertainment news programs on television and columns in the press rarely cover anime

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or manga. Because of the niche market for these products, fans are a significant percentage of the consumers. Perhaps this will change in the near future—perhaps even by the time these words reach print. However, even now manga and anime are so firmly established that almost all manga is no longer flipped, and it is almost unheard of to release anime unless it is unedited and subtitled. The twenty-first century has also seen the practice of localization, the removal of Japanese elements in anime, and manga translations have almost vanished. Whereas in the past names were changed to American sounding ones, foods were given “familiar” names like pizza or pancakes instead of okonomiyaki, and in extreme cases scenes where people were eating with chopsticks were edited out, today many see the Japanese elements as part of why anime and manga sell. This has reached the point that some works are released under their original Japanese titles, such as Hikaru no Go, Rurouni Kenshin, Kaze Hikaru, Genshiken, Gokusen, Kaze no Yojimbo, and Haibane Renmei. Female fandom had changed since 1995 when Sailor Moon hit the American airwaves. Many of the earlier fans have grown up, but the girls did not leave their anime and manga interests behind when they became women. Instead they often delved deeper into anime, manga, and fan activities. This was evident in a convention that even five years earlier, before Sailor Moon, would not have seemed possible, an entire convention devoted to what is variously called shônen-ai, Boys Love, or BL by the Japanese. YAOI-con 2001 was an entire convention devoted to manga and anime that focus on male-male romance, often with a sexual element to it. Needless to say the convention had, and continues to have, an age requirement of 18 and over for admission. In Japan such male-male love stores have existed in women’s manga since the 1970s, the stories and images ranging from Platonic to torrid. The term yaoi is a Japanese abbreviation for the phrase yâma-nashi, ochinashi, imi-nashi (no climax, no punch line, no meaning). In Japan yaoi is a genre of fan-published manga, often male-male pairing parodies of commercial works, much like Slash fiction in Star Trek and other English language fandoms. English-speaking fans have come to apply the term yaoi to all stories involving male-male parings, not just fan produced works. In recent years the number of translated anime and manga that are in this genre have increased to the point that some stores have subsections devoted to these volumes. The growth of yaoi as a genre shows that adult women are not only consuming manga and anime but also actually becoming active in the translation and release of products, not only product lines of established companies, such as Digital Manga, but also independent companies, such as Blu and DramaQueen. Major players such as Viz and TOKYOPOP have for some time released non-yaoi manga for women. Adult male, seinen, fans have always had some anime and manga aimed at their interests, especially titles from Studio Proteus and Viz. In 2002 TOKYOPOP published their first manga title aimed at a seinen audience. For a publisher with a reputation for publishing works aimed at teen and pre-teen girls this was quite a step. This title was GTO: Great Teacher Onizuka by Tohru Fujisawa, the tale of a former biker turned private schoolteacher. GTO was to become very popular with adult fans of both genders as well as older teens; TOKYOPOP later released the GTO anime television series on DVD. TOKYOPOP has continued to publish some seinen with works such as GTO The Early Years and Rose Hip Zero, both also by Fujisawa.

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Another trend, reflected in the growing market for yaoi and seinen manga titles is the growing number of adults enjoying these stories—many of whom started out as fans at a younger age. Fans are also becoming much younger with grade school aged kids now wanting to read more manga and watch more anime. Companies now have to take both age ranges into consideration when they shop for new titles to bring out, not just readers in their teens. Since the turn of the century, a few manga companies began publishing works by North American creators with Asian elements and calling them manga. TOKYOPOP even began an annual contest called the Rising Starts of Manga; the winners have their works published. These have been variously called American-manga, Ameri-manga, Original English Manga, and other names. Some see this as a cynical ploy to simply make more money off the popularity of manga. After all, why refer to a work done by American creators with a Japanese term like manga when perfectly good English terms like comic book and graphic novel already exist? On the other hand, many American fans of anime, manga, and Japanese video games have begun to create their own comics with Japanese influences, some on the Internet in the form of Web Comics. Publishers in the United States have even commercially released a few of these Web Comics in printed form; popular examples include Megatokyo by Fred Gallagher or Peach Fuzz by Lindsay Cibos. The year 2003 brought several interesting developments. Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi) won the Oscar for best-animated feature. Vertical Inc., a respected New York-based publisher of Japanese popular literature, published the first hardcover volume in Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha eightvolume manga series. Buddha received excellent reviews in the regular press and sold well enough that the company started publishing older classic works that were unlikely to come out from other manga publishers. Also in 2003, the Fremont, California,-based manga publisher Comics One, later renamed DR Master, brought out a translation of the Onegai Teacher novel, a work related to previously released anime and manga series. Later, other manga publishers began releasing prose works related to manga and anime, such as Dark Horse’s release of the Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex novels, The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair by noted science fiction writer Haruka Takachiho, as well as ADV Manga’s release of GAINAX executive Yasuhiro Takeda’s autobiographical work The Notenki Memoirs. We are now also seeing licenses to anime and manga titles lapse, and they may either become available in English or be re-released by other companies. Sometimes after a title has been out of print for some time, another company steps in and picks up the license with the view that the market has changed and the particular work will do better now than in the past. An example of such a title is the manga Crying Freeman by Kazuo Koike that was originally licensed by Viz and years later reissued by Dark Horse. Televised anime have also changed, especially on cable and satellite systems. Whereas the Cartoon Network began regularly broadcasting anime in the late 1990s, other companies have also begun dedicated cable channels for anime. A.D. Vision established the Anime Network in late 2002, and in 2006 the FUNimation Channel was created. Because of its wide distribution throughout the country, The Cartoon Network’s two weekly slots, Toonami and Adult Swim, showing anime on a regular basis has had the greatest success in introducing many more viewers to anime and manga. As the other networks expand their market penetration, this could shift.

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To some, it appeared that the industry was becoming saturated with large numbers of titles being released, for example 810 different anime DVD releases for 2005 declining to 765 for 2006. For manga, 1,014 volumes were released in 2005 and 1,096 in 2006. In late 2005 the anime and manga industry was hit with a financial blow when Musicland shut down all 61 of the Media Play stores it owned, filed for protection from creditors, and closed many Sam Goody and Suncoast stores. Several anime companies had been selling directly to the Musicland-owned chains and found themselves lacking needed cash. In early 2006, Central Park Media announced that it was in the uncomfortable position of laying off most of its staff as a result of the Musicland bankruptcy. Central Park Media even issued a press release with an email address for prospective employers if they had positions open that former staff could apply for. In 2004 Toren Smith, citing a saturated manga market, sold Studio Proteus to his publisher Dark Horse Comics after nearly 20 years of producing some of the best manga translation in the industry. Smith continues to do translation work without the grueling schedule he had set for himself while running the company. Dark Horse, on the other hand, has continued to provide manga for the seinen audience, such as many works written by the prolific and popular Kazuo Koike, including a complete edition of the Lone Wolf and Cub manga series. Context and Issues Different Cultural Perspectives. Anime and manga give those who enjoy such products exposure to several perspectives that are very different from the U.S. and Canadian entertainment industries. On one hand, there is the exposure to Japanese culture and history, such as Rurouni Kenshin set in the late nineteenth century, Maison Ikkoku set in modern Tokyo, and Genshiken with its cast of college student otaku. On the other hand, there are also stories with different views than those reflected in American works. Relating to the concerns of adolescents, this is especially true for girls, a market largely ignored by American comic book and graphic novel publishers. However, this is also true for boys—for example, the male oriented romance manga, and the anime adapted from them, of Masakazu Katsura and Izumi Matsumoto. Issues of gender identity are also topical in some recent works, aimed at teens but popular with adults, such as Revolutionary Girl Utena (Shoujo Kakumei Utena), Day of Revolution (Kakumei no Hi), and Kashimashi—Girl Meets Girl. Geopolitics. Internal and international politics do not escape scrutiny. A recent twoseason series Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex (Kokaku Kidotai Stand Alone Complex) dealt extensively with a near-future Japan that, although neutral, did not escape damage and repercussions of World War III, such as large numbers of refugees afterward. The series also deals with Japan’s often-uncomfortable military relationship with the United States and the treaties between the two nations. In fact, one key thread that runs through many anime and manga that deal with war and the aftermath is the impact on the civilian populations. Japan’s experience of losing a significant percentage of its young male population and the destruction of its major cities in World War II is only part of what shapes such a view. There is also a considerable body of literature, memoirs, as well as manga and anime based on the experiences of children during war time, the most famous of these are Barefoot Gen and Studio Ghibli’s anime feature Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru No Haka).

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Libraries. Libraries have increasingly made manga and anime part of their collections. Workshops on graphic novels, manga, and anime are common at librarian conventions. Articles appear in the professional press and increasingly titles are reviewed to assist in the selection of material for library collections. This is not as easy as selecting books where there have been long established resources for evaluating items to add to collections. Anime and manga have only recently been sufficiently reviewed to enable libraries to make decisions about adding them to library collections. This is especially important with mediums that are visual; local community standards concerning violence, nudity, and sexuality have to be considered in ways that are not a problem with written text. Librarians have a long history of standing up for freedom of access to materials. However, they also do not particularly care for conflict and will pay attention to the community they serve. Sometimes elements in a community will not respect this viewpoint and will seek to impose their will on the local library with the assistance of outside forces such as local politicians. For example, in April 2006 Paul Gravett’s book Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics was pulled from the libraries of suburban San Bernadino County, California, on orders from Bill Postmus, Chairman of the Board of Supervisors. Why would a scholarly book on manga get pulled? Two pages, 144 and 145, had six small images—pages from adult manga with sexual content. The book was shelved in the adult section of the library, where a teen-age boy found it, checked it out, and showed the two pages to his mother. Conventions. Conventions continue to play a significant role in fan activities. The number of conventions in the United States and Canada has grown since the first small ones of the early 1990s to well over 100 each year. Many are small local events; some are much larger. The largest are Anime Expo, which in 2006 released attendance figures of over 40,000, and Otakon, which has had to cap attendance at 25,000, as that is what they feel the Baltimore Convention Center can safely handle. Reception Exhibits. Two art exhibits focusing on anime and manga were held in 2005. Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture, curated by Takashi Murakami, ran from April 8–July 24 at the Japan Society in New York City. Another ran from October 26–December 8 at California State University Chico and was titled Shojo Manga: Girl Power! and curated by associate professor of art education Masami Toku. The Shojo Manga exhibit also toured North America. Both exhibits sought to expose Americans to aspects of Japanese post-World War II entertainment, and both were curated by artists. In 2007 the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco held the first manga and anime exhibit at a major U.S. museum from June 2–September 9. The exhibit, Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga, was devoted entirely to one creator, Osamu Tezuka, whose influence and significance is widely acknowledged in Japan. Awards. In the U.S. comic book industry, the most prestigious award is the Eisner. Between 1998 and 2006 manga won Eisner awards 7 out of 9 times for the Best U.S. Edition of Foreign Material. Given the high quality of much of the European work released in the United States, these figures are significant. As was already mentioned, in 2003 Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away won the Oscar for best animated feature. However, other anime features not made for a child audience that have been submitted for consideration have not been able to reach the

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ballot. Many of these films have also received notable awards elsewhere, such as Millennium Actress, which won both the Best Animation Film and the Fantasia Ground-Breaker Award at the Fant-Asia Film Festival in 2001. Adaptations. The American movie and television industries have expressed interest in releasing remakes of several titles for the U.S. market. Proposed films include Neon Genesis Evangelion, Battle Angel Alita, Ghost in the Shell, Speed Racer, Witch Hunter Robin, and others. However, to date (2007) few have reached the stage of production. Selected Authors. To North American consumers many works released in Japan before 2000 have only recently become available in English. For this reason, any discussion of contemporary creators has to include some works done before 2000. Also, given the large number of persons and companies whose works are available, the following choices are limited to a few of the better known. Hayao Miyazaki is perhaps the best-known creator of anime. His Nausicaa manga, his only manga series to be translated, is available in a large format duplicating the tones and colors of the original Japanese release. One cannot mention Miyazaki without pointing out the work of his fellow Studio Ghibli cofounder Isao Takahata. Works recently released in North America directed by Takahata include Pom Poko and My Neighbors the Yamadas. Another name with both an anime and manga connection is Mamoru Oshii. Oshii has written both novels and manga, some of which have been adapted into anime. One of his most recent anime works, Ghost in the Shell Innocence, was funded in part by Studio Ghibli and animated by Production I.G, a well-known company heavily associated with Oshii’s projects. Production I.G also released the Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex television series, inspired by a manga series by Masamune Shirow. Shirow continues to release manga at a slow pace, as well as work on various video game and animation projects, such as the Appleseed movie series. Satoshi Kon continues to be productive with such recent works as Millenium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, the Paranoia Agent television series, and his most recent feature, Paprika. For manga, Osamu Tezuka, who died in 1989, has become widely known through recent translations of his works for adult readers, such as the Ode to Kirihito, Buddha, and Phoenix series. A major factor in the growing awareness of his work is the fact that magazines and newspapers that rarely cover manga have reviewed many of his titles. Writers popular with a younger audience include one of the best known, Rumiko Takahashi, author of large multivolume series such as Urusei Yatsura, Maison Ikkoku, Ranma 1⁄2, and Inuyasha. All of these works and several shorter ones have been adapted to anime and released in the United States. A contrast to Takahashi is a man whose works are very different than her teen and young adult style, a man who was her teacher when she was beginning her career. Kazuo Koike is best known in the United States for his lengthy Lone Wolf and Cub manga series. However, several other series of his have been coming out in English in rapid succession—Lady Snow Blood, Samurai Executioner, Path of the Assassin, and a new release of his Crying Freeman manga. Koike does not do the art; he is a writer and has worked with a variety of artists over the years. His manga have not only been adapted into anime but also into live action movies and television shows. An artist who works with several writers is Takeshi Obata, who illustrated Hikaru no Go, the tale of a high school student who discovered the ancient game of Go and struggles to become a professional player. Another work Obata illustrated is Death

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Note, a suspenseful tale of murder and the supernatural. Both titles are also available as anime in the United States. Reviews are difficult to track down, outside of anime and manga specialty magazines aimed at fans, only professional journals for librarians review such works with any regularity. One interesting development since 2000 is the increasing number of academics writing about anime and manga. For manga there are such books as Permitted and Prohibited Desires by Anne Allison and Adult Manga by Sharon Kinsella. Anime books include Anime From Akira to Princess Mononoke by Susan Napier released in 2000 and in a later edition titled Anime From Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle, Brian Ruh’s Stray Dog of Anime: The films of Mamoru Oshii, and Cinema Anime, an anthology of essays edited by Steven T. Brown. There is even an annual scholarly anthology of essays titled Mechademia published by the University of Minnesota Press. Bibliography Allison, Anne. Permitted and Prohibited Desires. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996. Kinsella, Sharon. Adult Manga. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2000. Koike, Kazuo. Path of the Assassin. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Manga, 2006. ———. Lady Snow Blood. Australia: Madmen Entertainment, 2005. ———. Lone Wolf and Cub. Tokyo: Futabasha, 1970–1976. ———. Samurai Executioner. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Manga, 2004. Miyazaki, Hayao. Spirited Away. San Francisco, CA: Viz Communications, 2002. Napier, Susan. Anime From Akira to Princess Mononoke. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Obata, Takeshi. Hikaru No Go. San Francisco, CA: Viz Communications, 2004. Ruh, Brian. Stray Dog of Anime. New York: Palgrave, 2004.

Further Reading Anime News Network: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/; Anime on DVD: http://www. animeondvd.com/; Clements, Jonathan, and Helen McCarthy. The Anime Encyclopedia: Revised and Expanded Edition. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2006; Patten, Fred. Watching Anime Reading Manga. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2004; Schodt, Frederik. Manga! Manga! Tôkyô: Kodansha International, 1986; Schodt, Frederik. Dreamland Japan. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 1996; Yasuhiro, Takeda. The Notenki Memoirs. Houston, TX: ADV Manga, 2005.

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MILITARY LITERATURE Definition. Stories about soldiers and war have been a staple in American literature. As such, military literature is an extremely expansive, influential genre. Military literature can be broadly defined as any literature that represents one of the many facets of the military. While much military literature is focused on what may be termed combat literature—fiction and nonfiction narratives that describe combat— military literature is much more than only stories about combat. As Philip K. Jason and Mark A. Graves write, “The literature of war has a wider arc that takes in presentations of causes and consequences of the battlefield action. It has political, cultural, and psychological dimensions” (Jason and Graves 2001, ix). In this broad scope, military literature portrays life in the military—both during war and times of peace—as well as explores how civilians interact with the military, either completely outside the military looking in or as family and friends of soldiers attempting to deal

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ACCLAIMED MILITARY LITERATURE WRITERS WHO NEVER SERVED Authors of military literature have often had close contact with the military, but service in the armed forces is not a prerequisite for writing military literature. For example, Sabina Murray’s The Caprices (2002) is written about two soldiers in the Pacific Campaign of World War II and has won many comparisons to military literature icon Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage for its imaginative power, especially because, like Crane, Murray never actually experienced the battlefield firsthand before writing about war. Likewise,Tom Clancy, usually classified as a techno-thriller writer, deals extensively in military representations and themes but was rejected from military service because of his nearsightedness (Garson 1996, 4). Even though these writers haven’t served in the military, their works are still considered military literature because some aspect of the military is focused on in their writing.

with how the military shapes their lives. Military literature is often, but not always, focused on soldiers (traditionally men, but this stereotype is slowly equalizing) who experience combat on the battlefront. Most military literature fiction, poetry, and memoirs tend to describe this aspect of the military and could be aptly called “war stories” for their focus on combat details But there are pieces of military literature that portray other aspects of the military, such as Dale Brown’s short story “Leadership Material” (Brown 2001), which describes the process of rank advancement while exploring the strained relationships of those who fight on the frontlines and those who provide the infrastructure necessary for the armed services to function. One of the most popular military literature genres is the memoir or personal narrative. Since 2000, memoirs on Vietnam and the first Gulf War have been widely published. Works such as Joel Turnipseed’s Baghdad Express (2003) or Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead (2003), which became a better-known movie two years after its publication, have held popular attention, especially with their publications coinciding with the beginning of the current war in Iraq. Fictional stories about the military are also extremely popular (just look through any bookstore and see how many tanks, planes, subs, or soldiers are on the covers) and traditionally tend to glorify the armed forces, combat, and undying patriotism toward the United States. Conversely, poetry about the military since Vietnam has been largely protestant. Fluctuating between these apparent polar opposites, memoirs are often a conflation of the two extremes, generally attempting to portray both the dehumanization of military experience while simultaneously describing the camaraderie and personal growth one finds in a military life. Historical works on past wars have also been extremely prolific, the Gulf War in particular during the buildup to and invasion of Iraq in 2004. Other forms of writing that could possibly be defined as military literature are blogs and letters of soldiers serving in the armed forces, as well as journalistic writing from reporters embedded with active troops. Overall, the defining element of military literature is that the piece of writing is about the military in some way. Because military literature is any writing that deals with military issues, there are obviously ample opportunities for blurring genre lines. For instance, Tom Clancy and Stephen Coonts, two authors whose works are traditionally labeled as technothrillers, could also easily be classified as military literature writers because many of

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their works focus on the armed forces. Likewise, contemporary military literature is not constricted to contemporary militaries or current conflicts, so one will quickly find multiple science fiction military literatures, such as David Drake’s collection Foreign Legions (2001) or Dave Grossman and Leo Frankowski’s The Two Space War (2005). Authors also often reach back in time to portray earlier wars. Jeff Shaara, for instance, wrote his highly acclaimed Gods and Generals (1998) about the Civil War, and has since written recently written To the Last Man (2004), which takes place during World War I, and The Rising Tide: A Novel of World War II (2006), among his many other works. Shaara’s and others’ works that deal with past events are traditionally labeled historical fiction, but their focus on war or the military of days gone by make these works military literature. While authors such as Shaara create historical fiction, the creation of alternate histories has also been a fruitful bed for authors, such as Harry Turtledove in his American Empire series, to explore military literature in a world of what might have been if, for instance, the Allies didn’t win World War II or if the North didn’t force the confederacy back into the Union. Vastly different from the other types of military literature, Married to the Military: A Survival Guide for Military Wives, Girlfriends, and Women in Uniform (Leyva 2003) or Shellie Vandevoorde’s Separated By Duty, United In Love (2006) appeal to an audience with a very different interest in and viewpoint of the military, that of the military wife. These books tend to focus on offering advice over telling a story. James Thomas’s My Dad Is Going Away, but He Will be Back One Day: A Deployment Story (2004) pushes genre limits even further by creating military literature in children’s book form. Military literature can be anything from techno-thrillers to self-help and relationship books to children stories. From this we see that military literature is a broad, inclusive term applicable to many genres of writing. In this chapter we will examine the most popular forms of military literature—novels and memoirs. This is not to slight other forms of writing dealing with any of the many aspects of the military but to instead focus on the most popular forms of military literature. See FURTHER READINGS at the end of the chapter for information on military poetry. History. This broad spectrum of possible military literature genres is to be expected. Stephen Coonts, author of countless fictional works, argues in his introduction to Combat, a collection of what he calls “techno-thriller novellas,” (Coonts 2001, 12) that “armed conflict has been a fertile setting for storytellers since the dawn of the written word, and probably before” (Coonts 2001, 9). Others agree. As John W.I. Lee informs us, the aristocratic Greek soldier, Xenophon, wrote the first soldier’s memoir in the fourth century B.C.E. (Lee 2005, 41). The Iliad, possibly the best-known example of military literature, is estimated to have been written about four centuries earlier. Every nation since (and most likely before) has had its various military literatures, and while American literature has been no different in writing about war, American literature is unusual because it is relatively modern, without ancient national literatures of its own. The modern war story, then, has undergone vast changes while keeping in touch with traditional military story themes. As we trace the development of military literature in America, it will be helpful to examine a few particular works to illustrate the depth of the genre. The pieces focused on in this chapter are often considered some of the most influential pieces of military literature, and themes we see in them are often returned to in military literature written today. Again, for space constraints we are forced to limit the

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number of “key” pieces of American military literature over the centuries, but the selected bibliography will offer those interested further readings connected to this issue. Before beginning this short summary, it is interesting to note that some scholars believe military literature perhaps consciously attempts to erase its literary legacy. According to Samuel Hynes, well known war narrative scholar, The stories that men tell of war belong to a curious class of writing. In most war narratives there is nothing to suggest that the author is aware of any previous example: no quotations or allusions or imitations of earlier models, and no evident knowledge of previous wars, or even of other theatres in the war that he is recalling. War writing, it seems, is a genre without a tradition to the men who write it. (Hynes 1997, 4)

This noted, it is interesting that there are still trends and threads of commonality among many military literatures. But Hynes’s commentary hinges on the word “seems” in the final sentence. In fact, military literature, as with most literature, in some way responds to the writing of earlier generations. As we will see, there are themes and trends in contemporary military literature that can be traced to literary ancestors since the Civil War. In this light, many view Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895) as the genesis of the modern American war story. Written by a young author who never experienced war before producing the novel, The Red Badge of Courage tells the story of a young soldier, Henry Flemming, usually identified as “the youth,” who enlists with the Union army; his subsequent fleeing from the battlefield; his attempt at self-justification for his supposed cowardice; and finally his triumphant return to the battle and earned self-respect. While Crane hadn’t experienced war personally before writing Red Badge, it was immediately hailed as a realistic depiction of the Civil War by veterans who experienced what the story depicts. Red Badge deals with, among other things, issues of courage, honor, duty, and the craziness and atrocities of war—themes that many pieces of military literature since have repeated. For example, note how the following passage describes a charge the main character, Fleming, makes with his company on the opposing army’s lines: But there was a frenzy made from this furious rush. The men, pitching forward insanely, had burst into cheerings, moblike and barbaric, but tuned in strange keys that can arouse the dullard and the stoic. It made a mad enthusiasm that, it seemed, would be incapable of checking itself before granite and brass. There was the delirium that encounters despair and death, and is heedless and blind to the odds. (Crane 2001, 102).

Crane uses particular words such as “frenzy,” “furious,” moblike,” and “delirium” to give a feeling of insanity and confusion in the charge, describing what many have called the “fog of war.” This craziness of war has been both repeated by many authors and transformed into a humorous theme by displaying just how absurd war is. Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller, unlike the seriousness of Red Badge, turns to humor and absurdity instead of poignancy and realism. In one instance the character Yossarian, a bomber pilot who has decided he doesn’t want to fly any more

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missions, tries to convince a doctor he is crazy, thus forcing the doctor to ground him and not allow Yossarian to fly any more missions. But as Doc Daneeka explains to Yossarian, the only pilots who are truly sane are those who don’t want to fly the missions. As Yossarian and Doc Daneeka discuss another “crazy” pilot, the narrator informs us There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. (Heller 1961, 46)

This passage is not only entertaining through its dizzying ridiculousness but also highlights another aspect of the craziness of war—that to desire to go to war is in itself an act of lunacy because it places one’s body in harm’s way. Both the serious and comic representations of the craziness of war have been underlying themes in many military literatures in American history. Catch-22 has been praised by many as one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century, and has influenced much subsequent military literature. For example, Turnipseed’s Baghdad Express also deals with issues of absurdity, in somewhat different fashions. While Turnipseed isn’t as out and out funny as Heller, he does use absurdity to add a humorous element to his memoir. For example, his memoir is dotted with homemade comics that break up the narrative tension his story creates. In one instance, a comic portrays soldier responses to an air raid call. Among the jokes in this comic is that the air raid informs soldiers that three enemy planes are en route to attack and that two are intercepted and destroyed, but it forgets to mention the state of the third enemy plane. Instead of mentioning the plane, the voice over the intercom states “the skies are now clear and should continue to clear up” (Turnipseed 2003, 49). The statement is even more absurd because the picture before it indicates the weather is rainy, driving all soldiers inside. Thus the clear skies are false on two levels. While the joke isn’t particularly funny, it’s medium—a comic in the middle of a memoir—helps to illustrate the absurdity of both the information given to troops as well as the illogical elements of the military itself. From this we see a gradual progression from one century to another where issues of the craziness of war are played out in different ways, and we can expect further representations of the craziness of war in military literature to come. Tim O’Brien has also held major influence over the military literature genre. His works Going After Cacciato (1978) and The Things They Carried (1990) have set standards of form and style that many military writers have felt compelled to follow. One of his most popular works, The Things They Carried is a series of loosely related stories dealing with issues such as one soldier’s contemplated draft-dodging or how soldiers cope with losing friends and fellow soldiers in battle. Like Catch-22, O’Brien’s narratives question the value of war by portraying the drastic psychological changes and moral dilemmas forced on individuals in wartime, as well as explore the sheer violence and madness of wartime situations. For example, O’Brien

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tells a story of one soldier, Curt Lemon, who steps on a mine. To drive the point home to an audience that may not be familiar with the effects of a landmine on a soldier, O’Brien writes the following: Then he took a particular half step, moving from shade into bright sunlight, and the booby-trapped 105 round blew him into a tree. The parts were just hanging there, so Dave Jensen and I were ordered to shinny up and peel him off. I remember the white bone of an arm. I remember pieces of skin and something wet and yellow that must’ve been the intestines. The gore was horrible, and stays with me. But what wakes me up twenty years later is Dave Jensen singing “Lemon Tree” as we threw down the parts. (O’Brien 1998, 83)

This passage illustrates aptly the aforementioned absurdity of war and the descriptive power of O’Brien’s writing, but it also signifies what other writers have tried to produce. Compare, for instance, Buzz Williams’s Spare Parts: A Marine Reservist’s Journey from Campus to Combat in 38 Days (2004) depiction of a look into the remains of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait he discovered during his tour during Desert Storm: It didn’t sink in right away . . . a mattress on the floor . . . bloody undergarments strewn about . . . lengths of rope for binding hands and feet . . . kerchief gags for muffling screams. [ . . . ] As I walked back to the living room, a toilet caught my attention. What I wanted was to take a leak, but even the bathroom wasn’t what it seemed. Electrical wires from a chandelier ran along the ceiling, with bare ends dangling into the bathtub. Next to the tub was a homemade device fashioned with batteries and wires. And more rope [ . . . ] The washer and dryer showed it had once been a laundry room. The blood splash on the wall, though, showed it had been used for executions. The walls and floor were sticky with innards—blood and guts and brains. The grisly scene drove me out into the alley gagging on the stench of death, spitting to rid my mouth of the taste, and blowing to lose the smell. (Williams 2004, 245)

Graphic violence such as this is intended to shock the reader into a sense of disgustinspired awe, a feeling to drive home the brutality and depravation of the situation, and is a common trope of much military literature. O’Brien’s work is also interesting due to his narrative structure. Instead of telling a consecutive story, each chapter building from the previous one and into the following one, O’Brien’s The Things They Carried makes jumps in time and space, going from various locations in the jungles of Vietnam to hometown America before the soldiers left for the war. In addition, instead of following the story of one or two characters, as most novels do, The Things They Carried follows the lives of the men in one company, telling incomplete stories for each of them. The final effect of this is to force the reader to be in a constant state of uneasiness, always attempting to understand how one story is placed in connection with another. This uneasiness, though difficult for the reader, is obviously what O’Brien wants his readers to experience. Instead of reading a tidy war story, O’Brien’s audience is forced into a new situation, as are the characters in the novel. This adds a greater sense of what a soldier in Vietnam would have faced, giving the reader a closer (though not perfect) connection to the reality of war experience. In addition to these highly acclaimed war novels, military literature on the popular front has been extremely prolific. One of the best known writers whose works

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deal with military issues is Tom Clancy. While usually classified as a techno-thriller writer, Clancy’s work often involves Special Forces, military weaponry, and even the military’s relationship with other branches of the government, therefore qualifying some of his novels as military literature. If we were to consider only the 1.6 million copies of Clancy’s Clear and Present Danger that sold in 1989 alone and exclude all the novels by other writers such as Stephen Coonts, Dale Turner, and Jeff Shaara, we can still see that military literature is extremely well received, at least in terms of book sales. Trends and Themes. From this short survey of twentieth century military literature and some of the descendants of these works, we can calculate where military literature in the twenty-first century is going. As we have seen, some but not all military literature is centered on blood, guts, weaponry, and Rambo-esque super soldiers single-handedly eradicating the enemy. While there is this tendency in much of what could be called military thrillers, and even some memoirs, to focus on the Rambo-style characters or small, elite groups of soldiers on secret missions, other genres of military writing offer other focuses. Military thrillers that focus on the technological aspect of the military or their need for the commandos to save the day and become national heroes in the end of the novel tend to be weak in strong character development and complexity, thus weakening the stories’ believability and influence over a reader’s response. But saying this doesn’t mean there aren’t many redeeming qualities in the military thriller. Instead of just being tales of suspense and action that are quickly forgotten, military thrillers, like other types of military literature, often deal with contemporary issues in the military and society. Like in The Red Badge of Courage, Catch-22, and The Things They Carried, the craziness of war is often portrayed in contemporary military fiction. But, interestingly, this theme has emerged more in the past decade in memoirs and personal narratives than in contemporary fiction. As we have seen, Turnipseed responded to the craziness of war in a quirky way and Pantano reacted to the craziness of war by trying to portray the graphic details of his encounter with the “rape room.” But most military fiction, especially the military thrillers, tends to overlook this detail to portray soldiers performing their duties with precision and even flair. The stereotypical military thriller hero is calm, composed, and deadly. Although different genres in military literature may employ different themes, just as often they share other themes across genre borders. One such shared theme is camaraderie among soldiers. Much military literature draws on the natural bond that is created through training and serving with a group of soldiers. This camaraderie separates soldiers from the rest of society. As Jason and Graves suggest, this theme, once used to exemplify the “melting pot” theory of America—that the United States is a blend of multiple nationalities and ethnicities—and create a greater sense of American nationalism, has been drastically changed to create instead a loyalty among soldiers, separate from the nation. In many ways, the soldiers become outcasts of society, freaks that can only relate to one another after their war experiences (Jason and Graves 2001, xi). For example, in Jarhead a scene takes place in Michigan, where Swofford and five other marines travel to a former comrade’s funeral six years after serving in the Gulf War. In describing the experience of mourning the death of his friend from the Marines, Swofford writes, “We were all hurt badly, and ready to die, to join our friend” (Swofford 2003, 76). After the funeral services, Swofford and his friends go to a bar where one of them drinks until he passes out. A local mocks the marine,

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hits his head against the bar, and a fight between the marines and apparently everyone else in the bar ensues. While Swofford feels he and the marines did their comrade an honor in fighting (“he’d have wanted us spending the evening of his funeral drunk and at combat” (Swofford 2003, 81), the dead marine’s mother is upset because she sees the marines’ actions as tarnishing her son’s memory. Swofford’s story illustrates that civilians can’t quite understand soldiers, and so soldiers must turn to their own kind for support. Another theme that is extremely prevalent in contemporary military literature is the individual’s growth. This theme is often seen in two forms—either in a character’s coming of age or in rehabilitation/healing of former problems. Jason and Graves claim that “the great bulk of war narratives that focus on young men [ . . .] are essentially initiation or coming of age stories” (Jason and Graves 2001, xi). While we don’t see this as much in military thrillers as we do in memoirs, it is still a common theme. Stephen Coonts’s novella, “Al Jihad,” likewise implies this same message; the military’s tough love, discipline, and second chance on life is symbolically offered through Charlie Dean (retired marine sniper turned gas station owner) giving Candy (a stereotypical multiple-facial pierced, thieving, cowardly punk) a beating for stealing from the station. This, along with Dean’s mercy as Candy’s plot to rob Dean’s filling station fails and Dean keeps Candy from being arrested, helps straighten out the troubled youth and turns him into a hardworking, respectable citizen. If the marine’s tough love can do this for Candy, then it can do it for anyone. Similar to Candy’s treatment, another trend in military memoirs is the rehabilitory effects of military service. Many characters are presented as troubled youth who the military straightens out. For example, Joel Turnipseed, in his Baghdad Express, describes his less than ideal youth with a father who beat his mother and horrific nightmares that turn out to be memories of a car fire that he barely escaped from as a child (Turnipseed 2003, 26). As Turnipseed states, “This awkwardness, this abruptness, was not new to me: I was born into it [ . . . ] In all, I went to a different school in a different city every year from kindergarten to tenth grade. It made me a connoisseur of loneliness” (Turnipseed 2003, 25). For Turnipseed and others, life in the military is seen as a step toward stability away from a chaotic family. Like the broad range of themes, there has also been a trend emerging in military literature to portray previously unheard elements of the military. Two that have been particularly interesting are the infrastructure and politics of the military and the roles of women in war. Neither necessarily focuses on combat, and so were not written about to a great extent in the past. But recently these subjects have seen more publishing. The tendency of the literature to focus on the soldier who has seen fighting creates a largely skewed vision of the military because most individuals who serve in the military do not experience firsthand firefights or modern warfare. From the majority of military literature, then, one forgets the huge infrastructure used to support a nation’s war efforts. Resource transportation, training, and paperwork happen away from the battlefront but require as much if not more manpower than troops on the ground. While most military literature is still focused on the men on the frontlines, there is an increasing trend to represent the military superstructure and women’s roles in the military in literature. One such example is Dale Brown’s “Leadership Material.” In this short story, we see the process of rank advancement through committee. In Orson Scott Card’s short story “50 WPM” (2002) we see another example of the bureaucratic element of the military. In this story, a young man is trained by his father to be exceptional at typing. The youth’s war veteran

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father chooses to train his son in typing in order to save him from battle in case he is ever drafted into the army, since this skill is a rare commodity and more useful in the general’s offices where there is less chance for fighting. Another realm where we see an expanded interest in non-fighting military stories is in the abundant memoirs about the Gulf War. Turnipseed’s Baghdad Express is his story of being a convoy driver, a dangerous job but not one that necessarily required him to constantly be on the front lines. From the popularity of these examples, we see a growing interest in not only what a military does on the battlefield but also rather a general interest in the mystery of how the military functions. Context and Issues. While many critics of military literature claim it is mostly a lot of pulp fiction that offers readers little valuable intellectual work, military literature in general since 2000 has done well responding to current events and debates. The two most obvious contextual issues are the post September 11, 2001, American “War on Terrorism” and its subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Each age of military literature has its stereotypical bad guys. In the 1980s and early 1990s it was the Soviet Union and communist countries in general. Today it is the terrorist, and stereotypically the Islamic, usually Middle Eastern or American convert, extremist bent on destroying good Americans wherever they exist, as in Oliver North and Joe Musser’s Mission Compromised (2003). As one would expect, direct and indirect responses to the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the failed attack on the White House pepper military literature. This trend is especially strong in military thriller novels, possibly because they are attempting to tap into readers’ fear in an attempt to entertain. The current war in Iraq stoked an already heated debate in the American culture as to what roles the different genders should play in war, especially in battle. Traditionally, women have been able to serve in various positions in the military, from nurses to supply troops, but never in active combat forces. While here is not the place to discuss the many sides of this debate, there are inexhaustible resources for those interested. For example, at http://www.militarywoman.org/reading.htm, one can trace one of these debates as it has evolved over more than ten years. And even the U.S. Army has made it a point to discuss women’s roles in fighting units as it has allowed some women to serve as HUMVEE turret gunners in patrol units (“Books about Women in the Military”). This debate was again revived as America invaded Iraq in 2003. Radio talk shows, TV news programs, newspapers, and even online forums discussed the national policy that barred women from combat duty. This debate was in part further ignited by the capture of U.S. convoy soldiers on March 23, 2003, and their subsequent rescue on April 1, 2003, including two female soldiers, Shoshona Johnson and Jessica Lynch. Initial reports (that are still unsubstantiated) that Lynch was repeatedly raped by her captors fueled those who feared this very possibility for servicewomen. Both women were rescued, along with members of their convoy, but media responses to their individual stories appeared biased toward Lynch—a blonde Caucasian—and away from Johnson—an African American, sparking another deeply seeded debate of racism in the military and media. Jessica Lynch’s story has continued to make headlines, with occasional updates on her college education and the birth of her daughter, Dakota. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Rick Bragg even wrote a book on Lynch entitled I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story (2003). While the country has argued about women’s roles in the military and infantry divisions, military literature writers have taken the opportunity to weigh in on the

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subject through their writing. For example, Charles W. Sasser’s Detachment Delta: Punitive Strike (2002) follows in part the story of two fictional soldiers—one a man and the other a woman—who are captured by Islamic terrorists. In Sasser’s novel, both the male and female prisoners are beaten, but only the female is assaulted sexually. From this we see military writers responding to current debates and events, possibly to garner an interested readership, but also to make statements on military policy. Just as headline savvy as those writers who discuss women in the military are the writers who take on issues of interrogation and torture. In Spring 2004 stories broke through The New Yorker and 60 Minutes II on torture and prisoner abuse at the U.S. controlled Iraqi prison, Abu Ghraib. This event called into question the actions of U.S. service men and women while offering fodder for those who criticized U.S. occupation of Iraq. Likewise, reports of U.S. interrogation methods came under fire as reports from Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay trickled out. David Alexander, like many other military literature writers, deals with this issue and other contemporary issues and debates directly in his novel Marine Force One (2003). As he describes early in his novel, Alexander portrays illegal interrogation by the U.S. government. He writes, “Saxon did not approve of the methodology of interrogation, but it was out of his hands now and in the hands of the spooks. The Geneva Convention (banning torture in interrogation) didn’t apply here. Neither did the Constitution or Bill of Rights. The spooks called the shots and they had opted for chemicals” (Alexander 2003, 41). This passage is especially illustrative in that it is shortly followed by the mentioning that the observers of the interrogation include “representatives from the president’s small group of advisors and the DOD and NSC deputies groups, as well as lawyers from the JAG and Marine Corps Office of Special Operations” (Alexander 2003, 41). That the narrator informs the audience that the main character openly disapproves of illegal interrogations serves to sway the reader’s opinion of events transpiring in the novel, even though we clearly see that the illegal interrogation is sanctioned by both the military and the president. Passages such as this draw the readers with news stories, such as one reported through Newsweek that “The Bush administration’s emerging approach [ . . . ] that America’s enemies in this war were “unlawful” combatants without rights” (Barry, Hirsh, and Isikoff 1996), thus linking Alexander’s novel to current hot debates. Alexander’s decision to present prisoner abuse as a negative thing offers his audience an extension of the debate. So from military literature’s dealing with women’s roles in the military and prisoner abuse and interrogation we see that military literature writers often offer their audiences both fiction dealing with current events and commentary on these debates and current events. Reception. While military literature has been a staple in the reading public, certain genres garner much more commentary, applause, and criticism than others. In particular, military memoirs are often seen as much more “valuable” literature than military thrillers and have therefore earned more attention. In the ever-expanding field of military literature, there has been a surge of military memoirs since 2000. This has happened in part because of the current war in Iraq, creating a reading audience wanting to experience the previous Gulf War as a means of understanding the current conflict. As a result, memoirs such as Jarhead and Baghdad Express have seen increased sales. Indeed, the exigency of the issue has spurred the public reception of the works. But even though these works have received a lot of public attention in the form of book reviews, they have not received much critical attention.

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Baghdad Express and Jarhead have garnered most of the critical attention, but even these two works have been slow to gain academic, or “literary,” acceptance. We will focus on the reviews of Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead because, as the most wellknown piece of military literature to be written within the decade, Jarhead offers both a continuation of a discussion of the themes and contextual issues in military literature as well as an opportunity to discuss how military literature is translated into major motion pictures. Jarhead is a contemporary war narrative that has, in good military fashion, stormed the United States, captured popular approval, and earned for its author, Anthony Swofford, all the essential popular literature medals of honor—numberless book reviewer’s hearts and praise, television interviews, including Good Morning America and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and the ever-coveted Hollywood blockbuster. There are generally three focuses reviewers have taken when dealing with Jarhead. First, reviewers have read Jarhead as a form of protest or antiwar narrative. This form of review is nearly always accompanied by accolades about how well written or how accurately Jarhead portrays reality. For example, a 2002 Publisher’s Weekly anonymous review of Jarhead says it “offers . . . an unflinching portrayal of the loneliness and brutality of modern warfare and sophisticated analyses of—and visceral reactions to—its politics” (241). Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down (1999), follows form, stating the following: Jarhead is some kind of classic, a bracing memoir of the 1991 Persian Gulf War that will go down with the best books ever written about military life. It is certainly the most honest memoir I have read from a participant in any war. Swofford writes with humor, anger and great skill. His prose is alive with ideas and feeling, and at times soars like poetry. He captures the hilarity, tedium, horniness and loneliness of the long prewar desert deployment, and then powerfully records the experience of his war. (2003, 8)

With phrases such as “some kind of classic” or “best books ever written about military life,” we quickly see Bowden approves of Swofford’s work. Marc Herman agrees with Bowden but expands this praise by lauding the accusational tone of the memoir, stating “Jarhead emerges as a scary, detailed, well-written indictment of life in the military” (2003, 76). Like Bowden, Herman uses imagery loaded phrases, “scary” and “well-written indictment,” to illicit a particular response from his audience. That this indictment of the military is “detailed” and “well-written” is Herman’s rhetorical evidence that not only is Swofford correct because he has offered enough proof through his details but also he has proven he is a trustworthy spokesman because what he has written is executed with skill. Herman also claims the memoir “could hardly be more timely” (2003, 76) by hitting the bookshelves at the start of the current war in Iraq (in fact, it was pushed a couple months ahead of schedule by publishers eyeing a valuable opportunity). The exigency of the issue, along with the message Jarhead appears to purport, leads Herman to believe Jarhead works as a protest against the current war and U.S. foreign policy. The second bend reviewers have taken toward Jarhead is to examine the work from a cultural perspective. Edward Nowatka believes Jarhead catches the incongruence of American feelings about war. In his 2003 article in Publisher’s Weekly entitled “On the Heals of Jarhead,” Nowatka, like Bowden and Herman, suggests

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Jarhead’s popularity comes from its ability to “[capture] the contradictions of modern warfare for the average soldier—the tedious days of waiting punctuated by moments of jolting terror, friendly fire, and surreal encounters with the dead” (2003, 20). This is what makes Jarhead so successful as compared to its Gulf War narrative counterparts—it shows not only the fear and surrealism of war, but balances these images with feelings of boredom and monotony, creating a more realistic and trustworthy work instead of works that focus “on the lives of elite warriors and read like thrillers” (2003, 20). Like Nowatka, Justin Ewers finds a rough cultural ambiguity in Jarhead, but for Ewers this ambiguity represents something more than accusations against the military. He writes in U.S. News and World Report that “In Swofford’s conflicted psyche and lucid prose can be seen the evolution not only of the war memoir but of American attitudes toward war—and war’s current place in the American consciousness” (Ewers 2003, 52). Claiming the American war memoir finds its roots in World War II, when more educated servicemen were returning from a grisly war and finding a need to write about their experiences, Ewers places Jarhead in a historical context of previous war memoirs. Common themes in these memoirs were often the brutality of war and distrust of officers and authority, while many “still overflowed with pride in the cause and the flag and the uniform” (Ewers 2003, 52). This changed in Vietnam, when, according to Ewers, “memoirs became overtly antiwar” (52). He claims Jarhead “combines the antiauthoritarian tone of World War II with the lingering cynicism of Vietnam” (52). Jarhead, then, is in many ways a culmination of the twentieth century war narrative, with Swofford’s anti-authoritarianism and cynicism oddly mixed with pride to be a marine, making the book reveal Swofford’s dysfunctional relationship with the marines. Margo Jefferson offers another cultural approach by referring to Walter Benjamin, who claims the two oldest forms of storytelling are the historical chronicle and the fairy tale. From this Jefferson decides “when we read a good memoir we know we are reading both history and legend,” in this case history and legend about “all male worlds of secrecy and ritual” where “strangers are seen as aliens, inferiors, or enemies” (2004, 27). For Jefferson, Jarhead is a peek into a world from which she and women have generally been excluded. Implied in her analysis of Jarhead is the suggestion that Swofford claims women are “aliens, inferiors, or enemies,” and she is right. There is plenty of male chauvinism in Jarhead, with women portrayed as comforting mothers, wives, or girlfriends while simultaneously being unfaithful to their soldier husbands. Few women are portrayed without sexual connotations attached to them, a fact that has garnered little attention from critics. The third approach reviews have taken to Jarhead is to read the personal over the narrative, or to examine the work as more indicative of Swofford’s psyche than the actual Gulf War. Edwin B. Burgess’s review typifies this approach by stating Jarhead “is in no sense a chronicle of the Gulf War but instead an interior monolog reflecting Swofford’s inner journey from despised childhood to coming of age as an enlisted marine and finally coming somewhat to terms with the man he has become. For Swafford, warfare was the culmination of everything he had experienced, so that his existential narrative hangs on his pivotal nine-month tour of duty” (Burgess 2003, 126). To Burgess, Swofford’s time in Iraq is the turning point in his life, where Swofford finds a greater sense of self through his training and experience than a bad childhood and chemical dependency offered, but at the same time is able to “back away from the total absorption of combat to live in the real world” (126). In this

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way Jarhead isn’t so much about the Gulf War as it is about Swofford’s personal development. In fact, Swofford, tells us on the second page of his memoir that “my vision was blurred—by wind and sand and distance, by false signals, poor communication, and bad coordinates, by stupidity and fear and ignorance, by valor and false pride. By the mirage. Thus what follows is neither true nor false, but what I know” (Swofford 2003, 2). From this early introduction of Swofford’s own acknowledgement of his shortcomings in describing his Gulf War experience, Swofford intends for his reader to understand that he is writing about himself. As we have seen, book reviewers have approached Jarhead in various ways, but what have scholars said about the memoir turned movie? Surprising or not, they have said very little. Except for the positive reviews the book has received, few scholars have paid much attention to Swofford’s memoir. This seemingly minor interest in Jarhead is surprising not only considering the vast amount of commentary it has produced in the public sphere but also that it falls into a natural position in the discussion of war narratives and provides much unbroken ground in war narrative studies. Even with the 2004 film based on the book, there has been relatively little scholarly work published on Swofford’s memoir. The fact that Jarhead is perhaps the best known, critically acclaimed piece of contemporary military literature that hasn’t been taken seriously in the academic world perhaps tells us a little about how military literature is being received generally. Bibliography Alexander, David. Marine Force One: Recon by Fire. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2003. Barry, John, Michael Hirsh, and Michael Isikoff. “The Roots of Torture.” Newsweek 1996. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4989436/site/newsweek/. (accessed Feb 28, 2007). Bowden, Mark. “The Things They Carried: One Man’s Memoir of the 1991 Gulf War and Other Battles.” New York Times Book Review 2 Mar 2003:8. ———. Black Hawk Down. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999. Bragg, Rick. I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story. New York: Knopf, 2000. Brown, Dale. “Leadership Material.” In Combat. Stephen Coonts, ed. New York: Tom Doherty, 2001; 73–147. Burgess, Edwin B. “Rev. of Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles.” Library Journal Jan. 2003: 126. Card, Orson Scott. “50 WPM.” In In the Shadow of the Wall: An Anthology of Vietnam Stories That Might Have Been. Byron R. Tetrick, ed. Nashville: Cumberland House, 2002. Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage. 1895. New York: Tor Classics, 2001. Drake, David. Foreign Legions. Riverdale: Baen, 2001. Ewers, Justin. “Soldiers’ Stories: A Marine’s Memoir Reflects the Changing Literature of War.” U.S. News and World Report 24 Mar. 2003: 52. Garson, Helen S. Tom Clancy: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996. Grossman, Dave, and Leo Frankowski. The Two Space War. Riverdale: Baen, 2005. Herman, Marc. “Jarhead.” Mother Jones 28.1 (2003):76 Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961. Hynes, Samuel. The Soldier’s Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War. New York: A. Lane, 1997. Jason, Philip K., and Mark A. Graves. “Introduction.” Encyclopedia of American War Literature. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001. Jefferson, Margo. “The Stuff of Legend.” New York Times, 2004. Lee, John W.I. “Xenophon’s Anabasis and the Origins of Military Autobiography.” In Arms and the Self: War, Military, and Autobiographical Writing. Alex Vernon, ed. Kent: Kent State University Press, 41–60.

MUSICAL THEATRE Leyva, Meredith. Married to the Military: A Survival Guide for Military Wives, Girlfriends, and Women in Uniform. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003. Murray, Sabina. The Caprices. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. 1990. New York: Broadway, 1998. Nowatka, Edward. “On the Heels of Jarhead.” Publisher’s Weekly 31 March 2003: 20. Pantano, Ilario, with Malcolm McConnell. Warlord: No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy. New York: Threshold, 2006. Sasser, Charles W. Detachment Delta: Punitive Strike. New York: Avon, 2002. Shaara, Jeff. The Rising Tide: A Novel of World War II. New York: Ballantine, 2006. ———. 2004. To the Last Man: A Novel of the First World War. New York: Ballantine, 2004. ———. Gods and Generals. New York: Ballantine, 1996. Swofford, Anthony. Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles. New York: Scribner, 2003. Thomas, James, and Melanie Thomas. My Dad Is Going Away, but He Will Be Back One Day: A Deployment Story. Victoria: Trafford, 2004. Turnipseed, Joel. Baghdad Express: A Gulf War Memoir. St. Paul, MN: Borealis, 2003. Turtledove, Harry. American Empire: Blood and Iron. New York: Del Rey, 2001. ———. American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold. New York: Del Rey, 2002. Vandevoorde, Shellie. Separated by Duty, United in Love: A Guide to long-Distance Relationships for Military Couples. New York: Citadel Press, 2006. Williams, Buzz. Spare Parts: A Marine Reservist’s Journey from Campus to Combat in 38 Days. New York: Gotham Books, 2004. “Books about Women in the Military.” http://www.militarywoman.org/reading.htm.

Further Reading Bates, Milton. The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996; Benedetto, Christian M. War Cries: A Collection of Military Poems. Shelbyville: Wasteland Press, 2005; Carroll, Joseph. “War novel (Representations of war in the novel).” In Encyclopedia of the Novel. 2 vols. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998; Gannon, Charles E. Rumors of War and Infernal Machines: Technomilitary Agenda-Setting in American and British Speculative Fiction. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003; Jason, Philip K. Acts and Shadows: The Vietnam War in American Literary Culture. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000; Jason, Philip K., and Mark A. Graves. Encyclopedia of American War Literature. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001; Smith, Myron J. War Story Guide: An Annotated Bibliography of Military Fiction. Metuchan: Scarecrow Press, 1980; Stallworthy, Jon. Were You There?: War and Poetry. Cheltenham: Cyder Press, 2005; Tatum, James. The Mourner’s Song: War and Remembrance from The Iliad to Vietnam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003; Vernon, Alex. Arms and the Self: War, the Military, and Autobiographical Writing. Kent: Kent State University Press, 2005; “Women in Combat Forces.” Military Women. www.militarywoman.org/reading.htm— debate. Acessed Feb 27, 2007; Yuknavitch, Lidia. Allegories of violence: Tracing the writing of war in Twentieth-Century fiction. New York: Routledge, 2001.

CHAD MCLANE

MUSICAL THEATRE Definition. “Musical theatre,” like “poetry,” might be a term better said to describe the presentation and reception of a work rather than its form or structure. In the last ten years, pieces as diverse as Contact (a set of three dramatic sketches set to mostly prerecorded music), Fosse (a revue of dances by choreographer-director Bob Fosse), and Hairspray (a traditional musical comedy in which the dialogue often gives way to songs sung as an extension of the spoken text) have all been given the “Best Musical” Tony Award. Scholars who attempt to define the genre usually

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define their boundaries generously. In the introduction to his book The World of Musical Comedy, Stanley Green writes that musical theatre “covers operetta, comic opera, musical play (now frequently merely called ‘musical’), musical comedy itself, revue, and, in the past, spectacle or extravaganza” (Green 1974, xiii). In his Encyclopedia of Musical Theater, published two years later, Green extends his definition to include opera “if offered for a regular commercial run” (Green 1976, v). In general, then, almost any piece of theatre that uses music in a significant way could be called a musical. In practice, though, the titles usually marketed and studied as musicals can be distinguished from other forms of theatre that use music by three defining characteristics: 1. Words are important. Unlike opera, which, in general, privileges music, and ballet, which privileges dance, the musical tends to encourage the audience to attend closely to its text. Sheldon Harnick, lyricist of Fiddler on the Roof, writes that the “book” (or unsung text of a musical) is “of primary importance” (Guernsey 1974, 38). This sentiment is echoed by lyricist and composer Stephen Sondheim who claims, “Books are what the musical theater is about” (Guernsey 1974, 91). Operas can be appreciated and understood purely for their music; they are often performed in a language unfamiliar to the majority of their audience. Musicals, as a rule, require the audience to understand what is being said and sung. 2. Songs are sung in a “popular” style. Opera and operetta are typically sung in a classical style, a performance practice developed to project the sound of the voice across great distances. In The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical, Mark Grant contrasts the classical with the “popular” style, which places “more emphasis on consonants and the clarity of the lyrics than on vowels and tonal beauty” (Grant 2004, 17–18). Musicals today are usually sung in a popular style that, arguably, privileges the acting (rather than singing) ability of the performer. “Opera is designed to show off the human voice,” says Sondheim, contrasting the form to his Sweeney Todd, which he says, “is about telling a story and telling it as swiftly as possible” (Bryer and Davison 2005, 202). 3. Extra-diegetic songs are used. Although most shows on Broadway use music in some way, songs in nonmusical plays are typically diegetic, that is, the characters in the play recognize these songs as songs. Musicals (and for that matter operas), on other hand, make extensive use of extra-diegetic songs (songs sung by characters who don’t realize they are singing). Musicals may, of course, contain diegetic songs—in The Phantom of the Opera, Christine sings “Think of Me” and is lauded by other characters for her exceptional performance. However, when she sings “All I Ask of You” to Raoul, there is no indication that the characters realize they are singing rather than speaking. A play that contains only diegetic songs is usually not considered a musical.

A musical may be defined, then, as a piece of theatre that uses both spoken text and extra-diegetic songs sung in the popular style to communicate to its audience. This definition, though, only circumscribes the form and distinguishes it from other, similar, kinds of performances. In the next section we will look further at the parts of the musical, both spoken and sung, to further understand the nature of the form itself. Parts of a Musical. The Book: In the study and practice of musical theatre, the term “book” is used to refer to the part of the musical that is spoken rather than sung. Stephen Sondheim further defines the book as “the scheme of the show, the way the songs and the dialogue work together, the style of the show” (Guernsey 1974, 91). Thus, musicals such as Les Misérables, which contain almost no spoken text, may

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still be said to have a book. The book is sometimes known as the libretto (though, often, this refers to the entire text, both spoken and sung). The Music: In addition to the songs, which will be discussed shortly, musicals usually include several pieces of instrumental-only music. • The Overture: The overture is the music usually played after the lights are lowered but before the action of the musical begins. It is entirely instrumental (there is no singing), and usually consists of a medley of songs from the show. The overture serves to lead the audience into the world of the musical and to establish the mood of the first scene. Since the early 1970s, overtures began to be less frequently used in new musicals. In 1969, the relatively traditional musical 1776 began with a fife and drum medley that transported the audience to the revolutionary congress in Philadelphia. In 1970, the musical Company brought the audience into the contemporary world of the musical, no less effectively, with the sound of a telephone busy signal. Since then, there has been an increasing tendency on the part of musical theatre composers to dispense with an overture of any significant length. • Underscoring: The underscore is the music that plays under spoken dialogue. It is common in nonmusical films and plays as well as in musicals and serves to enhance the mood of a scene. In musicals, underscoring often immediately precedes or follows a song and helps to make the transition between speaking and singing. • Bows/Exit Music: The bows and exit music are the counterpart to the overture. As the name suggests, this music plays while the performers bow to the applauding audience and continues while the audience files out of the theatre. The exit music usually consists of the most memorable melodies in the show and works to ensure the audience leaves the theatre with the songs in their head (hopefully predisposed to tell their friends about the show).

Songs: Theatre writer Aaron Frankel credits choreographer Bob Fosse with classifying musical theatre songs into three categories: “I am songs,” “I want songs,” and “new songs” (95). • In “I am” songs, in Frankel’s words, “the character commits himself in some way” (Frankel 2000, 95). This may be as simple as a character introducing himself (the title song in “The Phantom of the Opera”) or as complex as a character realizing the reality of her situation (“See I’m Smiling” from The Last Five Years). • “I want” songs, on the other hand, express the “need” of a character “to reach” (Frankel 2000, 95). The character may directly express her desires (“The Wizard and I” in Wicked) to the audience or may imply them by what he sings to another character (for instance, in a love song like Rent’s “I’ll Cover You”). • “New” songs are Fosse’s catch-all category for songs that don’t exactly fit into either of the other ones. “Masquerade” in Phantom of the Opera, for example, serves as a spectacular and colorful opening to Act II and underscores the musical’s theme of the masks but does not directly express the needs or nature of any of the characters.

Fosse, as a director, centered his categories on the motivations of characters. A more structural taxonomy is described by musical theatre teacher and writer Lehman Engel in his book, The American Musical Theatre. Engel describes the following six types of songs: • Opening number: As the name suggests, this is the song that begins the musical and establishes the world of the piece. The importance of the opening number is illustrated by the familiar story of the development of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which according to those involved, failed to entertain audiences

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MUSICAL THEATRE until Sondheim wrote the opening number, “Comedy Tonight,” which tells the audience how to respond to the show (Guernsey 1974, 67). • Soliloquy: A soliloquy is a moment in which a single actor expresses his inner thoughts as they move from one state to another. In Les Misérables, Jean Valjean sings “Who Am I” to the audience as he thinks through an ethical dilemma. By the end of the song he has made his decision, and he directs his song once more to other characters in the piece. • Charm Song: A charm song, in the words of Engel, “embodies generally delicate, optimistic, and rhythmic music, and lyrics of light though not necessarily comedic subject matter” (Engel 1975, 87). Rent’s “Santa Fe,” in which the action stops as two characters dream of opening a restaurant in New Mexico, is a recent example. • Musical scene: At the end of Act I of the musical Wicked, the two witches from The Wizard of Oz are trapped in a broom closet in the Emerald City. A moment of crisis has come, and they must each decide whether to defy the corrupted establishment or serve their own interests by joining it. Throughout the scene, the dialogue moves back and forth between spoken and sung text. This is an example of what Engel calls a musical scene. Other examples include “Light My Candle” in Rent and “Chip on My Shoulder” from Legally Blonde. • Comic song: Engel observes that the most successful comic song is usually character-driven and “evokes in people the amusement of seeing themselves (or others whom they recognize instantly) and being entertained by the spectacle of their own foibles” (Engel 1975, 104). “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist” and “The Internet is for Porn” from Avenue Q both fit into this category. • 11 o’clock number: Named for the actual time at which a song of this sort would be sung in an evening, 11 o’clock numbers are usually up-tempo songs close to the end of the final act, which serve to energize the audience for the final few scenes. The song “The American Dream,” in Miss Saigon, in which the character known as the “Engineer” fantasizes about American life in a spectacular, brassy number just before the action begins its final descent toward the musical’s inevitably tragic conclusion, is an example. Others include “What You Own” in Rent and “No Good Deed” in Wicked.

To Engel’s categories, I would add three others (though these are hardly original): • Recitative: Recitative (an Italian term that rhymes with “cassette at Eve”), describes words sung using the normal patterns of speech (usually without rhyme). The answering machine messages in Rent (e.g., “That was a very loud beep”) are an example. • Act I Finale: The finale of the first act of a musical usually establishes what remains to be accomplished in the next act. “Defying Gravity” in Wicked establishes the main character’s choice to be “wicked” (that is, opposed to establishment) and ends with her battle cry against anyone who would try to “bring her down.” Usually this song is upbeat and memorable so the audience will be likely to have it in their heads during intermission and return to their seats with the action of the first act fresh in their minds. • Finale: The final song of a musical is often a reprise of music that originated earlier in the show, but which is so connected with a major theme of the musical that it deserves repetition at the privileged final position. Rent’s finale begins with a reprise of “Without You” and concludes with a reprise of “Seasons of Love,” solidly establishing the musicals message about the importance of finding and maintaining loving relationships. Avenue Q, on the other hand, introduces a new song “Only for Now,” that explicitly expresses a response to the questions about “purpose” that are asked throughout the show.

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History. Recent studies of musical theatre have looked into the far past to find the beginning of musical theatre. In Musical! A Grand Tour, Denny Martin Flinn traces the beginnings of the musical from Greek theatre through Italian Commedia Dell’Arte to operetta. This path reveals a good deal about the sources of musical theatre, and, indeed, along this path one finds shows that meet the definition of a musical as given previously. However, the concept of musical theatre as an art form distinct from other forms of drama and with a corpus of its own only clearly emerged in the late nineteenth century. Many accounts of the history of musical theatre begin in September of 1866 at the opening of The Black Crook. The play, by a virtually unknown writer named Charles M. Barras, tells the story of the titular magician who has promised the demons that he will lead one soul a year to damnation in exchange for infernal powers and his own immortality. It was probably not originally intended to include a great deal of music, but, so legend has it, a fire at the Academy of Music stranded a troupe of French ballet dancers in New York and the producer of both the ballet and The Black Crook was inspired to combine them into the extravaganza that would, for many, define the beginning of musical theatre. The Black Crook has been designated as a milestone in musical theatre history since the form first became a legitimate object of study. Cecil Smith’s 1950 work, Musical Comedy in America, begins with the claim that the musical stage “reached major dimensions for the first time” when The Black Crook opened (Smith 1950, 3), and Lehman Engel dedicates a large portion of the first chapter of his 1967 book, The American Musical Theater, to a discussion of the show. Denny Martin Flinn makes a long stop in the sixth chapter of his tour to discuss The Black Crook and calls the show “the beginning of a new era in theatre” (Flinn 1997, 87). On the other hand, early musical theatre historian Julian Mates argues “nothing about The Black Crook justifies its position as the precursor of our modern lyric stage; all its forms and conventions derive from a long tradition established well before 1866” (Mates 1996, 31–32). Whatever the case, The Black Crook was, in many ways, a microcosm of the musical theatre of the next sixty years. It contained a more or less coherent plot told through both words and music, but it was also something of a variety show (later productions employed trapeze artists as well as dancers). This marriage of high art and low, of operetta and variety, represents for many the beginning of musical theatre. The Black Crook was followed by many similarly intentioned extravaganzas including The White Fawn (1868) and Evangeline (1874) (Smith 1950, 22). By the mid-1870s, the tastes of audience began to shift from spectacle to satire and from melodrama to comedy (a progression that occurred again, as we will see, at the beginning of the twentieth century). From 1871 to 1896, the Englishmen William S. Gilbert (lyricist) and Arthur Sullivan (composer) wrote a series of shows that redefined musical theatre for the remainder of the nineteenth century. Although sometimes called “comic operas,” these shows, when sung in the popular style, are barely distinguishable from musical theatre as it is understood today. Gilbert and Sullivan’s work, unlike most operas, privilege the libretto to a greater degree even than many of those shows undisputedly classified as musicals today. A better designation for Gilbert and Sullivan’s musicals is “operetta.” Operetta is not distinct from musical theatre but may be considered a subset of the larger genre. Operettas tend to be light, though not necessarily comic. Although Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta’s were primarily satirical, others of the time, such as Sigmond Romberg’s Desert

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Song, were melodramatic with valiant and aristocratic (if one dimensional) heroes and evil villains. At the same time that Gilbert and Sullivan operettas were entertaining middle and upper class audiences, variety shows continued to combine music, drama, and dance in a form that appealed, in general, to working class audiences (Hamm 1997, 175). Vaudeville shows (“family friendly” versions of the more risqué variety shows of earlier decades) often contained songs sung in character by actors in a short skit. At the turn of the century, vaudeville performers such as George M. Cohan extended Vaudeville-like sketches and songs to create full-length musicals (usually celebrating American patriotism during World War I). The plots of these musicals were, in many ways, just as melodramatic and their characters just as one dimensional as those in operettas, but they tended to tell the stories of “average” people in a musical idiom more like the popular “folk” music of the time than that of European concert hall. Also during this time Florenz Ziegfeld staged spectacular variety shows, known as the Follies, in which songs, dances, and dramatic sketches were stitched together against a backdrop of spectacular scenery and special effects. In the late 1920s Ziegfeld’s work took a more serious turn when he joined with writer P.G. Woodhouse, Lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, and Jerome Kern to produce Show Boat, a serious “musical play” that explored thematic elements unknown to either operetta or the Cohan musicals. The musical is now viewed as a milestone in the genre, and Geoffrey Block observed the following: “Beginning in the late 1960s historians would almost invariably emphasize Show Boat’s unprecedented integration of music and drama, its three-dimensional characters, and its bold and serious subject matter, including miscegenation [interracial marriage] and unhappy marriages” (Block 2003, 20–21). Throughout the 1930s, as the country entered the Great Depression, another subgenre, the political musical, emerged. Based in large part on the German works of Kurt Weill (e.g., Threepenny Opera), musicals such as Marc Blitzstein’s Cradle Will Rock and the Gershwins’ Of Thee I Sing satirized and critiqued the political and economic systems they saw as corrupt. Although Gilbert and Sullivan and other creators of operetta had addressed similar themes with their work, they were usually set in far off times and places. The political musicals of the 1930s were set in contemporary America (or at least an obvious allegorical representation thereof). Political musicals continued into the 1940s, though a rush of patriotism following the beginning of World War II swept away most of their earlier popularity. The public had also lost patience, however, with the one-dimensional patriotic pageants that had entertained the home front during the First World War. In response, the lyricist of Show Boat, Oscar Hammerstein II, and Richard Rodgers, composer of many of the operettas of the previous decades, developed a new form of patriotic musical for the new war. The musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein, beginning with Oklahoma in 1943, told stories that celebrated American ideology with fully developed characters who spoke and sang in the popular language of the time. These musicals distributed the storytelling over dialogue, song, and dance and integrated each into the narrative more fully than most of the work of earlier decades. The Rodgers and Hammerstein model more or less defined musical theatre until the mid1960s and for many, even today, is what the word “musical” evokes. The sixties were a time of many changes, however, and musical theatre was not unaffected by them. Patriotism, along with most sorts of institutional fealty, was out of fashion and had been replaced by a new ethos of individualism and institutional

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defiance. The 1969 musical, Hair, with no plot to speak of and songs with titles like “Hashish” and “Sodomy,” epitomized these values, but they found quieter expression in more traditionally structured musicals such as Fiddler on the Roof, which challenged the supremacy of tradition while at the same time celebrating it. In the following decade the transformation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein model was effectively completed by composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim. Sondheim had earned respect as a lyricist in the late 1950s and early 1960s for his work on West Side Story and Gypsy, but his music and lyrics for Company and Follies in the early 1970s made him, in the eyes of many, the master of late twentieth century musical theatre. Sondheim broke with the Rodgers and Hammerstein model in both form and content. Company and Follies, termed “concept musicals” because they were structured, not around a narrative, but by a theme or “concept,” explored the often unpleasant realities of marriage and growing old—concepts foreign to the idealistic celebration of love and marriage in The Sound of Music or Oklahoma. Like many of the artistic revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, however, what once defied convention was quickly absorbed into the mainstream. By 1982, the two most commercially successful musicals on Broadway, A Chorus Line and Cats, were concept musicals. The latter launched a new trend of spectacle-driven, sung-through, mostly British musicals popularly designated “megamusicals” for their scale. These musicals, especially Phantom of the Opera, Les Misérables, and Miss Saigon, were hugely popular with audiences, yet were largely reviled by critics and many in the theatre community who felt the shows promoted an aesthetic of spectacle that worked against the more serious direction the art form had taken in the 1970s. These critics were, to some degree, vindicated in the mid-1990s as the demand for bigger and better spectacles became unsustainable. Sunset Boulevard, one of the last of the megamusicals, closed quickly on Broadway and cut short its tour, in large part because the musical required unrealistically high ticket sales to recover its astronomical expenses. The season after Sunset Boulevard opened on Broadway, Jonathan Larson’s Rent announced the death of the megamusical and the beginning of a new era. Rent, performed on a nearly bare stage by a small cast, was, in its simplicity, a sort of implicit reaction to the excess of the megamusical. In contrast to the soaring ticket prices necessitated by the expense of the megamusicals, top tickets to Rent were available for $20 to fans who arrived on the day of the show. Rent, which dealt directly with contemporary problems including AIDS and drug addiction, was also as thematically far removed from the megamusical as the political musicals of 1930s were from the operettas that preceded them. Many who watched Rent’s rise to fame predicted Jonathan Larson would redefine musical theatre for the twenty-first century. Alas, the day before the first preview, Larson died of an aortic aneurysm. At the same time that Rent was working its way from workshop to Off Broadway to Broadway, a titanic machine was gearing up production for a new set of megamusical-like spectacles that would transform not just musical theatre, but the entire New York City Theatre District. Before the 1990s, the Disney Company, although responsible for some of the most successful film musicals of all time, had been content to produce live theatre only within the boundaries of its theme parks. Throughout the 1990s, however, New York City, and the Theatre District in particular, underwent a major urban revitalization project that made Broadway more attractive to tourists (and more acceptable to the clean and safe Disney ethos).

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Disney contributed to this revitalization through the purchase and reopening of several defunct theatres. In 1998 Disney reopened the New Amsterdam, the theatre in which Ziegfeld’s Follies had originally played but which had fallen into disrepair in the following decades, and soon after mounted within it an adaptation of its 1994 animated movie, The Lion King. The last chapter of the history of musical theatre in the twentieth century might end, then, with a newly redecorated Broadway under the new management of multinational corporations. The era of the megamusical had passed and had been replaced, not, as the success of Rent might have suggested, by small musicals produced by new, young artists, but by movie adaptations produced by committees rather than by artists. Such a narrative, while true to an extent, would, however, unfairly neglect the important voices that began to be heard from Off Broadway during this period and that, in important ways, laid the foundation for the musical in the beginning of the twenty-first century. Theatre in New York City is separated into three divisions: Broadway, Off Broadway, and Off Off Broadway. These distinctions are, among other things, used for determining the jurisdiction of the various theatre unions. There are 39 theatres designated by theatre producers and unions as “Broadway” theatres. Off Broadway is limited by the Actor’s Equity Association’s “Off Broadway Rulebook” to productions “presented in the borough of Manhattan” but not performed in “any theatre located in an area bounded by Fifth and Ninth Avenues from 34th Street to 56th Street and by Fifth Avenue and the Hudson River from 56th Street to 72nd Street” (in general, the area immediately around Broadway, the street) and in “any theatre having a capacity of more than 499” (Actors’ Equity Association 2005, 1). The 39 Broadway theatres are, in general, within these geographical boundaries and tend to have more than 500 seats. In their Seasonal Showcase Code, Actors’ Equity implicitly defines Off Off Broadway by limiting the union’s agreements for that “arena” to theatres in New York City with less than 100 seats (Actors’ Equity Association 2006, 1). During the 1990s the Off Broadway work of composers Jason Robert Brown, Michael John LaChiusa, and Adam Guettel provided a thoughtful alternative to the spectacle driven shows that were playing in Broadway theatres. Much like Rent, the work of these composers tended to explore nontraditional themes in experimental forms (Guettel’s Floyd Collins, for instance, uses bluegrass and country music to narrate the last days of a man who slowly dies after an accident traps him in a cave in Kentucky). Few of these artists had produced a commercial hit by the end of the century, but through cast recordings and regional productions, the influence of these composers’ shows extended beyond their limited original Off Broadway runs. Their work established a second, parallel stream of musical theatre work that, in the middle of the next decade, would arrive on Broadway. Trends and Themes. The twenty-first century began with the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. Escapist comedies based on popular movies set in what were perceived to be simpler times sprouted up in their wake. The Producers (set in the 1950s), Thoroughly Modern Millie (set in the 1920s), and Hairspray (set in 1962) all allowed audiences to momentarily forget the anxiety they might have felt from being in an area so near the location of the attacks. However, even as big budget musicals produced by big corporations continued to draw big audiences, small, low-budget musicals that, in earlier days, might have had limited runs in not-for-profit theatres also began to make their way to

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Broadway where they often were tremendously successful. Just days after September 11, Urinetown, a Blitzstein-esque satire of American capitalism opened on Broadway where it ran for three years. In the 2002–2003 season Universal Studios, a company best known for its films, produced the hugely successful, hugely expensive musical Wicked (based on Gregory MacGuire’s retelling of The Wizard of Oz). At the same time, however, the previously mentioned Avenue Q, a puppet show with very adult themes, rose quickly from a class project to an Off Broadway show to a Broadway hit that beat Wicked in almost every category at the 2003 Tony Awards. The 2002–2003 season demonstrated that there is an audience for both kinds of musical, and both Wicked and Avenue Q continue to play to packed houses at the time of this writing in December 2007. The success of Urinetown and Avenue Q paved the way for other, slightly quirky, relatively low budget musicals to come to Broadway. In the following seasons, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, The Drowsy Chaperone, Grey Gardens, and Spring Awakening all successfully transferred from Off Broadway to Broadway, where they found welcoming audiences and, often, critical acclaim. Many of these Off Broadway hits originated in the various musical theatre festivals and workshops that were founded in the previous century to promote the development of new musicals. The oldest and most successful of these, the BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.) Workshop, was founded in 1961 and originally directed by musical conductor Lehman Engel. It was intended to be, in the words of the official Web site, “a setting where new writers for the musical theatre could learn their craft,” and, given the names of its alumni, it has succeeded in being exactly that. Bobby Lopez and Jeff Mark, for instance, met and conceived the idea for Avenue Q at BMI and speak well of their experience in interviews. More recently, the New York Musical Theater Festival (NYMF), founded in 2005, has provided a venue for new artists to stage their work relatively inexpensively in New York. Over the few years of its existence, the Festival has produced the premieres of many Off Broadway hits, including the acclaimed Altar Boyz. Also during this period the non-animated movie musical became popular once again. The spectacular commercial failures of the 1985 movie version of A Chorus Line and the 1992 Disney movie Newsies led many in the 1980s and 1990s to believe the movie musical was a defunct form. However, in 2001, director Baz Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge—an original musical with a score composed mostly of pop songs from the 1980s—earned critical acclaim and surprising commercial profits. Over the next six years the success of the movie adaptations of Chicago, Dreamgirls, and Hairspray and the phenomenal popularity of the 2006 Disney Channel television movie, High School Musical, confirmed that the film musical was, once again, a commercially viable form. Selected Authors. Musical theatre is clearly alive and well in the twenty-first century. Despite the perennial complaints of cynics who complain musical theatre is a dying art, exciting new works are regularly produced on Broadway, Off Broadway, in workshops and festivals, and on film. The remaining pages of this chapter outline some of the most influential musical theatre authors producing these works in the twenty-first century. Of course, musical theatre is a highly collaborative art and it is not always easy to determine who should be considered the author of a particular show. At times, directors, producers, and even key performers exercise as much authorial power as do those who write the words and music. Still, because of space constraints I will limit this list only to librettists, composers, and lyricists.

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Even within these limits, it is impossible to be comprehensive, but I hope this list will give interested readers a sense of the genre in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Lynn Ahrens (1948–)—Lyricist & Stephen Flaherty (1960–)—Composers. Ahrens and Flaherty are among the few contemporary musical theatre writing teams that work almost exclusively together. They met at the BMI workshop in the 1980s and, soon after, had their New York premiere Off Broadway with Lucky Stiff (1988)—a musical about a man who, in order to inherit 6 million dollars, must take his dead uncle’s corpse on a gambling vacation. Their next collaboration, Once on This Island (1990), a retelling of The Little Mermaid set in the Caribbean, transferred from Off Broadway to Broadway and established the team as a thoughtful alternative to the megamusicals that then ruled Broadway. Their epic adaptation of the E.L. Doctorow novel, Ragtime (1998), about the maturation of America in the early twentieth century, is considered by many to be their masterpiece and one of the best musicals of the 1990s. Since 2000 the pair have collaborated on the critically and commercially disappointing Seussical (based on the children’s books of Dr. Seuss); a charming Off Broadway adaptation of the 1994 film A Man of No Importance (2002) about a gay bus conductor who longs to stage Oscar Wilde’s Salome in his conservative Irish community; Dessa Rose (2005), from a 1986 Sherley Anne Williams novel about the friendship of a runaway slave and the daughter of her old master; and The Glorious Ones (2007) about a troupe of commedia dell’arte players struggling to adapt to changes in dramatic taste in the sixteenth century. Jason Robert Brown (1970–)—Composer / lyricist. Jason Robert Brown is perhaps the most popular of the young musical theatre composers who rose to prominence in the 1990s. His first piece, Songs for a New World (1995), a song cycle of the his own work (mostly written for other projects), was directed by Daisy Prince and opened Off Broadway at the WPA Theater to critical praise. During rehearsals for the show, Brown was hired by the director’s father, Hal Prince, to collaborate on a musical based on the true story of Leo Frank, a Jewish man falsely accused of the murder of a young girl in Atlanta at the turn of the century. The musical, which was eventually titled Parade, opened on Broadway at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre in 1998 and, despite an early closing, earned Brown critical acclaim and a Tony Award. Brown’s next piece, The Last Five Years, a two-person song cycle about a short-lived marriage between a singer and a writer, opened at the Minetta Lane Theatre in 2002 to mixed reviews but went on to become a staple of regional and amateur theatre seasons. In 2003 Brown was nominated for his second Tony Award for his work as a composer, lyricist, and music director for the short lived and critically despised, Urban Cowboy. As of this writing, he is working on two new musicals: 13, about the quest of a Jewish boy in Indiana to find 13 friends to invite to his Bar Mitzvah, and Honeymoon in Vegas, a stage adaptation of the 1992 film of the same name. Brown’s music is a difficult to classify mixture of jazz, rock, and musical theatre ballad. He often cites Billy Joel and Joni Mitchell as major influences on his work, but he is also clearly aware of the traditions of classical music and musical theatre and has consciously and successfully adopted the styles of composers such as Charles Ives and Kurt Weill when a dramatic situation demanded it. The accessibility of his lyrics and music has earned him a large following of fans who celebrate his work on internet discussion forums and on the composer’s own blog (http://www.jasonrobertbrown.com).

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William Finn (1952–)—Composer / lyricist. William Finn has been working in New York theatre since the 1970s, but his contemporary style and subject matter often earn him a place in lists of the “new” musical theatre artists. Best known for his Off Broadway Falsettos trilogy about the life of a gay Jewish man named Marvin, Finn’s musicals are distinctive for their transparently autobiographical plots and characters. When Finn suffered a brain disease, originally diagnosed as an inoperable brain tumor, he wrote A New Brain about a musical theatre composer who survives a near-fatal brain operation. Most recently, though, Finn has branched out from purely autobiographical work and contributed music and lyrics for the 2005 Broadway hit 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, for which he earned a Tony nomination for Best Score. Ricky Ian Gordon (1956–)—Composer / lyricist / book writer. Ricky Ian Gordon, now in his forties, is one of the oldest of the “young” new musical theatre artists working in New York. His work, which in musical style tends to resemble opera more than musical theatre, has not yet been on presented Broadway, though his Only Heaven (a 1995 song cycle of Langston Hughes poetry), My Life With Albertine (2003, based on a novel by Proust), and his 2005 reimagining of the Orpheus myth all received critical praise for their Off Broadway productions and associated cast recordings. His most recent project, an opera adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, opened in Minnesota in February 2007. Adam Guettel (1965–)—Composer / lyricist / book writer. Adam Guettel is the grandson of composer Richard Rodgers and son of composer Mary Rodgers, but Guettel’s voice is unquestionably his own. Guettel’s Off Broadway musicals Floyd Collins (1996), about a man trapped in a Kentucky cave, and Saturn Returns (1998), a song cycle of Greek and Christian mythology demonstrated a style far removed from those of his grandfather and mother and established Guettel as an important new voice in musical theatre. Guettel’s first commercial success, the 2005 hit Light in the Piazza about an American mother and her mentally handicapped daughter’s romantic journey to Italy, ran for over a year at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre in Lincoln Center and earned Guettel Tony Awards for best score and best orchestrations. Stephen Sondheim appears to have great respect for Guettel and named “The Riddle Song” from Floyd Collins as a “song I wish I’d written” in a list compiled for a concert at the Library of Congress (Horowitz 2003, 171). Michael John LaChiusa (1962–)—Composer / lyricist / book writer. Michael John LaChiusa is perhaps the most prolific musical theatre composer in recent history. A musical featuring the work of LaChiusa has opened each year since 1999, usually to some critical praise but limited commercial success. Like many of the young, critically praised musical theatre composers listed here, LaChiusa’s subject matter tends to be unconventional. He has written song cycles about prominent first ladies (First Lady Suite, 1993) and sexual intercourse (Hello Again, 1993). His Broadway musicals, an updating of the Greek tragedy Medea (Marine Christine, 1999) set in Louisiana and an adaptation of the 1928 poem The Wild Party (unrelated to the Off Broadway adaptation by Andrew Lippa that also opened in 2000), were praised by some music critics but mostly confused audiences and closed quickly. LaChiusa remains an influential voice in the art form and is, in the eyes of many critics, an under-appreciated genius. Musical theatre historian Ethan Mordden expresses a common prediction for the composer in his book, The Happiest Corpse I’ve Ever Seen: “LaChiusa is now where Sondheim was in the early 1970s. But Marie Christine was recorded, and discerning ears will hear it. By the next generation or so, it will

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be in the repertory of every major opera company in the Western world.” (Mordden 2004, 153). Andrew Lippa (1964–)—Composer / lyricist / book writer. Andrew Lippa is probably best known for the additional songs he wrote for the 1999 revival of You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown, especially “My New Philosophy,” which helped launch the career of Broadway and film star Kristin Chenoweth. However, Lippa’s other work, including the book, music, and lyrics for the 2000 Off Broadway version of Wild Party (unconnected to the Broadway adaptation of the same title by Michael John LaChiusa) and john & jen (1995), earned him the respect of critics and fans as one of the important composer-lyricists-book writers of the post-Sondheim generation. Lippa’s music tends to be relatively accessible, though he has not yet written a complete score for a commercial Broadway hit. As of this writing, he is working on a musical adaptation of the Addams Family television series (Jones 2007). Stephen Schwartz (1948–)—Composer / lyricist. In the early 1970s Stephen Schwartz had three hit shows running simultaneously on Broadway: Godspell, Pippin, and The Magic Show. In the next three decades, though, Schwartz struggled to write a musical that would last even a few months on Broadway until his music and lyrics for the 2003 hit, Wicked, brought his work to the attention of a new generation of fans. Schwartz’s music is a blend of both rock and traditional Broadway sounds. In an interview for Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn’s 1985 book, Notes on Broadway, Schwartz cites “Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Lowe, Bock and Harnick, and Stephen Sondheim” as well as “The Mamas and the Papas” and “Jefferson Airplane” as influences on his work (Kasha and Hirschhorn 1987, 267). Thematically, his work is often centered on moral, even religious, questions. Three of his musicals—Godspell, Children of Eden, and the animated film Prince of Egypt—are adaptations of Biblical stories, and Mass, as the title suggests, is an adaptation of a Christian church service. Wicked is less obviously religious, though it does explore the nature of good and evil and begins with a main character asking, in a parody of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, whether people are “born wicked” or “have wickedness thrust upon them.” As of this writing, Schwartz is working on an opera version of the 1964 film Séance on a Wet Afternoon, commissioned by the Opera Santa Barbara, which will premiere in a staged reading at Lincoln Center in January of 2008. Jeanine Tesori (1961–)—Composer. Jeanine Tesori debuted as a New York composer with her 1998 Off Broadway musical Violet about a young girl whose face was disfigured by an accident at age 13 and who travels across the country on a bus to be touched by a faith healer. The musical was recorded on CD and was staged in several regional productions, but Tesori’s real rise to prominence came in 2002 with her Tony Award nominated score for the stage adaptation of Thoroughly Modern Millie. She was further lauded for her work with Tony Kushner on his semi-autobiographical Caroline, or Change—about a black washer-woman and the Jewish family who employs her in 1960s Louisiana. She is currently working on a musical adaptation of the Dreamworks animated film, Shrek (Gans 2007). David Yazbek (1960–)—Composer / Lyricist. Originally a rock musician whose best known work was, perhaps, the theme song to the 1990s PBS game show “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego,” Yazbek reports having no real interest in theatre music until composer Adam Guettel suggested to producers that Yazbek might be the appropriate composer-lyricist for a stage adaptation of the 1997 movie

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The Full Monty (Finn 2001). He was hired and was nominated for a Tony Award for his efforts. Yazbek went on to contribute lyrics to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s production of the Bollywood musical Bombay Dreams and music and lyrics to the 2005 adaptation of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Critics praise Yazbek’s work as a much needed updating of the somewhat anachronistic Broadway musical style that, at the beginning of the decade, lagged significantly behind the rest of the music culture (Singer 2001). Bibliography Actors’ Equity Association. Seasonal Showcase Code. 2006. . [Accessed December 16, 2007.] Actors’ Equity Association. Off Broadway Rulebook. 2005. . [Accessed December 16, 2007.] “The BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop.” .[Accessed December 16, 2007.] Block, Geoffrey. Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Brown, Amanda. Legally Blonde. New York: Plume, 2003. Brown, Jason Robert. The Last Five Years. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2002. ———. Songs for a New World. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Corp., 1996. Bryer, Jackson R., and Richard Allan Davison. The Art of the American Musical: Conversations with the Creators. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Engel, Lehman. The American Musical Theater: A Consideration. New York: Collier, 1975. Finn, Robin. “‘Full Monty’ Composer’s Tony Anxiety Is Pell-Mel.” New York Times 31 May 2001: B.2. Finn, William. A New Brain. Miami, Florida: Warner Brothers, 1999. ———. The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Van Nuys, California: Alfred, 2005. Flaherty, Stephen. Lucky Stiff. Miami, Florida: Warner Brothers, 1998. Flaherty, Stephen, and Lynn Ahrens. The Ahrens and Flaherty Songbook. Miami, Florida: Warner Brothers, 2001. Flinn, Denny Martin. Musical!: A Grand Tour: The Rise, Glory, and Fall of an American Institution. New York: Schirmer Books, 1997. Frankel, Aaron. Writing the Broadway Musical. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2000. Gans, Andrew. “Keenan-Bolger and Sieber Are Part of Aug. 10 Shrek Reading.” Playbill Online. 10 August 2007. . [Accessed December 17, 2007.] Gordon, Ricky Ian. Finding Home: The Songs of Ricky Ian Gordon. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2003. Grant, Mark N. The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical. Lebanon: University Press of New England, 2004. Green, Stanley. The World of Musical Comedy. 3rd ed. New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1974. ———. Encyclopedia of the Musical Theatre. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1976. Guernsey, Otto L. Playwrights, Lyricists, Composers on Theater: The Inside Story of a Decade. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1974. Guettel, Adam. Light in the Piazza. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2005. Hamm, Charles. Irving Berlin: Songs from the Melting Pot: the Formative Years, 1907–1914. Oxford University Press, 1997. Hollman, Mark. Urinetown. New York: Faber and Faber, 2003. Horowitz, Mark Eden. Sondheim on Music: Minor Details and Major Decisions. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2003.

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MYSTERY FICTION Kasha, Al, and Joel Hirschhorn. Notes on Broadway: Intimate Conversations with Broadway’s Greatest Songwriters. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Jones, Kenneth. “Go, Go, Go Gomez! Addams Family Musical, by Lippa, Brickman and Elice in Development.” Playbill Online. 21 May 2007. . [Accessed December 16, 2007.] Larson, Jonathan, et al. Rent. New York: Rob Weisbach, 1997. Mates, Julian. “The Black Crook Myth.” Theatre Survey. 7 (1996): 31–43. Mordden, Ethan. The Happiest Corpse I’ve Ever Seen: The Last 25 Years of the Broadway Musical. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Schwartz, Stephen. Wicked. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2003. Singer, Barry. “Pop Self-Consciousness Finally Infiltrates Broadway.” New York Times 26 Aug 2001: 2.3. Smith, Cecil. Musical Comedy in America. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1950. Tesori, Jeanine. Thoroughly Modern Millie. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2003. Yazbek, David. The Full Monty. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2000.

Further Reading Block, Geoffrey. Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003; Bryer, Jackson R., and Richard Allan Davison. The Art of the American Musical: Conversations with the Creators. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005; Chesterton, G.K. “Introduction.” In Gilbert and Sullivan: A Critical Appreciation of the Savoy Operas, A.H. Godwin. Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1926; Ganzl, Kurt. The Musical: A Concise History. Boston: University Press of New England, 1997; Hernandez, Ernio. “Wicked Creator Schwartz’s First Opera, Séance on a Wet Afternoon, to Be Presented in January.” Playbill Online. 14 December 2007; Hibbert, Christopher. Gilbert and Sullivan and Their Victorian World. New York: American Heritage Publishing Co., 1976. . [Accessed December 16, 2007.]; Perry, George C., et al. The Complete Phantom of the Opera. New York: Henry Holt, 1988.

DOUG RESIDE

MYSTERY FICTION Definition. At its broadest, the definition of mystery fiction is that of a story in which a crime is solved. The popularity of crime fiction in the United States is significant. Over 28,000 fiction titles were released in the United States in 2004 (“U.S. Book Production”). Although it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what percentage of this production is mystery/detective/crime fiction, a recent estimate is that crime fiction grabs approximately 25 percent of the fiction market (“U.S. Book Production”). The subgenres and categories of mystery fiction are seemingly endless. The most influential subgenres, however, have been the cozy, the hard-boiled detective, the police procedural, and most recently the forensic detective. History. There is scholarly disagreement about which novel is the first true mystery novel, as many early novels contained elements of the mystery genre. Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories about C. August Dupin, Anna Katharine Green’s The Leavenworth Affair (1878), and William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) have all been put forth as firsts on both sides of the Atlantic. In general, however, the origin of the detective story is usually traced to mysteries solved by Poe’s Dupin: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (1842), and “The Purloined Letter” (1844). In these stories, Poe established some of the conventions of detective fiction, including an eccentric detective, an impossible crime, and the creation of a series character.

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In the nineteenth century, dime novels with their sensational and lurid stories proliferated and the detective novel was born. Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton, R. Austin Freeman, Jacques Futrelle, and Anna Katharine Green were major contributors to the field until the 1920s. In 1920, Agatha Christie made her debut with The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which was followed soon after by Dorothy Sayers’s Whose Body in 1923. Together they ushered in what is known as the Golden Age with novels often referred to as cozies. Cozies have low levels of overt violence (the murder takes place off-stage), are solved by an amateur, and are usually set in a narrow environment (a small village, an estate, a train, etc.), which allows the detective to find a motive among a few limited suspects and to concentrate on the victim’s relationship to the killer. The Golden Age belonged to the British. In the United States, the 1920s produced Earl Derr Bigger’s Charlie Chan novels and S.S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance. The establishment of the magazine The Black Mask, co-founded by H.L. Mencken, offered writers like Raymond Chandler, Rex Stout, and Erle Stanley Gardner a place for their more robust stories. The launching of the hard-boiled detective is credited to the writers published in The Black Mask between 1926 and 1936. The hard-boiled detective is described as being a loner, a man with values that are laced with moral ambiguity: a man who doesn’t shun violence. James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Cornell Woolrich’s I Married a Dead Man (1948), and Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me (1952) were so dark that their style of writing was dubbed noir, a genre upon which Hollywood capitalized. By the 1960s, Cold War espionage or spy fiction had all but ousted the traditional detective and the cozy. Writers like Ian Fleming, John le Carré, and Len Deighton wrote novels set in post World War II Berlin or Moscow. Romantic suspense authors, influenced by the gothic novels of eighteenth-century Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe and of the nineteenth-century Charlotte Brontë (particularly Jane Eyre, 1847), were immensely popular as well. Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart, and Phyllis A. Whitney penned dozens of romantic suspense novels. (See Romance Novels.) The subgenre of historical mysteries, those set in an historical era, such as the Middle Ages, or the age of Victoria, exploded in the 1970s. Elizabeth Peters’s nineteenth-century sleuth Amelia Peabody and Ellis Peters’s medieval monk Brother Cadfael were among the popular offerings. Women have always populated the mystery field as heavily as men; however, it wasn’t until the 1980s that their work began to receive much critical acclaim. Female sleuths occupied the police force and private eye offices in record numbers. Women’s novels frequently commented on social issues. Since then, the mystery genre has seen contributions from increasing numbers of writers from multicultural backgrounds, and the field is dominated by diversity. It is also apparent that while there are still many mysteries that are clearly genre-driven, just as many are blurring the line between mystery and mainstream fiction. Trends and Themes. There are numerous subgenres within the genre of mystery fiction. Some of the most notable and popular are described below. The Cozy. A lack of graphic crime scene description is the first indicator that one is reading a cozy. Another is the fact that the mystery takes place in a seemingly ordinary environment where violence is not a common occurrence. The cozy sleuth is an amateur, helped by or a helper of the official investigative force. Cozies, established in the 1920s, dominated the world of fiction for many decades, waning and

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waxing in popularity. In recent decades, cozies have splintered into dozens of categories. Many readers of this genre are interested in books with a certain type of sleuth: bibliophiles, cooks or gardeners, dog or cat lovers, or practitioners of innumerable hobbies (quilting, for example). Academic and religious mysteries also fall into this category. Teachers, professors, and anthropologists are some of the characters found in academic mysteries; priests, pastors, and other lay people are central to religious mysteries. Mary Higgins Clark appeared on the mystery scene in 1975 with the publication of her first suspense novel, Where Are the Children. Because of the lack of on-stage violence, Clark’s books are often categorized as cozies. She has written more suspense novels than true mysteries, basing her plots on current events and newspaper headlines and providing social commentary with her clearly defined good/evil characters. Clark’s books have been praised for their fast pace, detailed locations, and breathless action. At the same time her characters and plots have been criticized for being formulaic. However, Clark’s formula of rollercoaster storylines and strong heroines have led to the publication of over 20 suspense novels selling 80 million copies worldwide. Her latest, a novel based on telepathy, is Two Little Girls in Blue (2006). Since 2000, she has co-authored three Christmas suspense titles with her daughter Carol Higgins Clark. The younger Clark is best known for her Regan Reilly mysteries, of which Decked (1991) was nominated for both the Agatha and Anthony Awards. Academic Mysteries. Scholarship is the basis of many mystery subgenres. Religious sleuths such as Rabbi Small and Father Koesler delve into Scripture and the Torah to solve crimes. Historians of every ilk, manuscripts in ancient abbeys, archaeological digs, Native American pottery, herbology—any and all subjects lend themselves to scholarship. Mysteries set in academic settings are popular mostly with academics themselves; universities and boarding schools serve as the most popular locations. The popularity of academic crossover novels is seen by writers such as A. S. Byatt and her novel Possession (1990), about the mystery surrounding the letters of a Victorian poet. Dan Brown’s successful Da Vinci Code (2003), although definitely not a cozy, follows Harvard professor Robert Langdon’s scholarly romp through the mysteries of the Holy Grail, indicating that the study of esoteric subjects can have wide appeal. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, one of the first female professors of literature at Columbia University, created the pseudonym Amanda Cross in the 1960s. Her character professor Kate Fansler served as Cross’s alter ego, combating chauvinism in the academic world and overcoming obstacles as Heilbrun herself did. Fansler first appeared in the 1964 In the Last Analysis, which received an Edgar nomination, and became an immediate favorite. Cross’s academic mysteries are considered the finest of the genre, mixing solid plots with witty satire directed against the university. Often compared to Dorothy Sayers, who Cross admired, her Fansler mysteries are set in a university locale and examine both feminist and academic issues. The Edge of Doom (2002) was the last Cross novel before Heilbrun committed suicide in 2003. Gillian Roberts’s character Amanda Pepper is an English teacher in a Philadelphia prep school. Pepper made her debut in the 1988 Anthony-winning Caught Dead in Philadelphia. A Hole in Juan (2006) and All’s Well That Ends (2007) are Roberts’s most recent installments in the Pepper series. Charlotte Macleod’s charming Professor Peter Shandy is introduced in the 1978 Rest You Merry. Her series of 10 novels

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is set at Balaclava Agricultural College headed by college president Thorkjeld Svenson. Macleod’s humorous narratives about academic life culminated in her 1996 Exit the Milkman, her final Shandy novel. Pamela Thomas-Graham presents a darker look at academia. Harvard University is the location of amateur sleuth Nikki Chase as she struggles to become the first tenured African American woman at the university. Culinary Mysteries. Nan and Ivan Lyons introduced the combination of food and mysteries with the 1978 Someone Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe. It was food editor Virginia Rich’s creation of chef Eugenia Potter in the 1982 Cooking School Murders, though, that set the stage for the dozens of culinary mysteries that crowd the mystery shelves in bookstores. Eugenia appeared in three Rich novels until her death in 1985. Nancy Pickard completed Rich’s The 27 Ingredient Chili Con Carne Murders (1993) and went on to produce several Potter mysteries on her own. In a culinary mystery, the sleuth is usually a food professional of some sort (chef, restaurant or inn owner, caterer, even a restaurant critic), but not a professional detective. The murder is often committed through the food itself, with a kitchen utensil, or in a culinary environment, such as a party, a convention, a kitchen, or even in a cooking school. Some famous mystery characters have an interest in food, even though they are not professionals. For example, Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe and Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta are food lovers and have had their recipes collected in cookbooks. A true culinary mystery, however, is one that focuses on the food and its relationship to the murder victim. Culinary mysteries often feature recipes from the characters as well. Mystery Readers International devoted two issues to “Culinary Crime” in 2002 by contributors who are mostly gastronomic mystery writers. Catering seems to be a risky business; several authors have created characters who become involved in murder while catering events. Diane Mott Davidson is one of the foremost names in cooking crimes. Her novels feature Goldy Bear, Colorado owner of Goldilocks Catering, her son Archie, and husband investigator Tom Schulz. The series opener is titled Catering to Nobody (1990) and is followed by 12 more Goldy Bear installments, the most recent Dark Tort (2006). Katherine Hall Page’s character Faith Fairchild, a minister’s wife, owns a catering business in Aleford, Massachusetts. Fairchild has starred in 16 mysteries, the most recent The Body in the Ivy (2006). Lesbian restaurant owner Jane Lawless stars in over a dozen Ellen Hart mysteries (Night Vision, 2006). Bed and breakfasts, or inns, are often locations of culinary mysteries. Claudia Bishop’s Hemlock Falls series features Sarah Quilliam and her sister Meg as owners of the Hemlock Falls Inn in upstate New York. The fourteenth book in the series is Ground to a Halt (2007). Like many other culinary mysteries, Bishop’s include recipes from the books’ storylines. Tamar Myers began her Pennsylvania Dutch Mysteries with Recipes series in 1994 with Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth featuring PennDutch Inn owner Magdalena Yoder. The series has been very popular and Hernia, Pennsylvania has been the setting for 16 Yoder mysteries. Food writers and restaurant critics often appear as main characters. Another Ellen Hart character, Sophie Greenway, is a Minneapolis Times Register restaurant reviewer/sleuth (No Reservations Required, 2005). Scores of mystery titles have humorous titles that rely on puns or other wordplay, but culinary mysteries seem to take the art of punning to a higher level. Plays on cooking terms and techniques are seen in such examples as Nancy Fairbanks’s

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Crime Brulee (2001), Farmer’s Dim Sum Dead (2001), and Lou Jane Temple’s Red Beans and Vice (2001). Along with their humorous titles are often hilarious romps featuring irate customers, cooking mishaps, and other kitchen slapstick. Though some culinary mysteries do have serious crimes and themes at the heart of them, most are light cozies penned for sheer enjoyment rather than edification (unless one counts the inclusion of recipes). Gardening Mysteries. In 1868, Wilkie Collins published The Moonstone, one of the all-time great mystery novels. The detective in the novel, Sergeant Cuff, has a passion for rose gardening, and the first connection between gardening and mysteries was established. The most famous detective/plant lover was Nero Wolfe whose love for food was matched only by his passion for orchids. Barbara Michaels, fond of gardening, penned The Dancing Floor (1999) in which mazes and country gardens figured. Gardening mysteries include gardeners, herbalists, and florists. Kate Collins introduced Abby Knight, flower shop owner in Mum’s the Word (2004). Nursery owner Janis Harrison has created the Gardening Mystery series featuring florist Bretta Solomon. The most popular gardening author is Susan Wittig Albert. Her China Bayles series is set in Pecan Springs, Texas, where Bayles moves to open an herb shop after quitting her law practice. Spanish Dagger (2007) is the fifteenth entry in the series. Although not based on a book, a British TV series produced from 2003–2006 called Rosemary & Thyme was a popular program, featuring two female landscape design and gardening sleuths. Religious Mysteries. G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown appeared in 1911 in The Innocence of Father Brown. Other notable British authors of religious mysteries are Ellis Peters (Brother Cadfael), Veronica Black (Sister Joan), Margaret Frazer (Dame Frevisse), and Peter Tremayne (Sister Fidelma). There are quite a few sleuths in religious orders on the American side of the Atlantic as well. Religious sleuths are often underestimated by the other characters around them. Chesterton’s Father Brown is a stumpy sort of individual, very plain looking and mild seeming, yet he is well versed in the complexities and depravities of the human mind. Religious figures are often privy to times of grief and horror and the events that precipitate them. Their understanding of people and their knowledge of their particular religious order make them useful in solving crimes, often surprising the police with their accurate solutions. An ordained priest, Andrew Greeley is a prolific author of books on religious and sociological topics. It is for his Father “Blackie” Ryan series, however, that he is best known. Greeley’s The Bishop in the Old Neighborhood (2005) marks the fifteenth installment in the Father Ryan, or rather the Bishop Ryan series, as he achieves this status midway through the series. Greeley uses his fiction not only to criticize various aspects of the Catholic Church, but to explore matters of Christian living that he feels do not receive enough attention by parish priests. After leaving the priesthood in 1974, William X. Kienzle combined his journalistic skills with his knowledge of the Church and experience as a Roman Catholic priest to create the popular Father Koesler who debuted in the 1979 The Rosary Murders. Detroit and its environs operate as the backdrop for the Koesler mysteries, and Kienzle’s familiarity with the city comes through in his detailed descriptions of Detroit’s locales and people. Compared to Greeley in his use of the mystery novel to highlight problems in the Church, Kienzle’s Koesler series has, however, received the praise for his plots and characters that Greeley’s often

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failed to. Kienzle’s final installment in the series, The Gathering (2002), was published posthumously. Harry Kemelman began his writing career contributing stories to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. These stories, about a New England English professor were collected in The Nine Mile Walk (1967). With a desire to chronicle the lives of suburban Jews, he eventually used his mystery writing talents to create Rabbi Small, an armchair detective who solves crimes in his community using Talmudic logic. The Rabbi Small novels depict a community and its people, not just the character of Small and his family. Friday the Rabbi Slept Late (1964) won the Edgar award and Rabbi Small went on to become one of the most famous and loved fictitious rabbis. In the final Rabbi Small mystery, The Day the Rabbi Left Town (1996), a retired Small begins teaching at a local college. Kemelman’s books have been praised for their intellectualism and depiction of the often-uneasy existence of Jewish communities in a predominantly Gentile culture. Notre Dame professor Ralph McInerny began his Father Dowling series in 1976 at an agent’s suggestion. Her Death of Cold (1977) has been followed by 25 more Dowling novels. A teacher of philosophy, McInerny invests his novels with serious considerations of moral issues. Under the pseudonym Monica Quill, McInerny wrote a series of mysteries about Sister Mary Magdalene, a Carmelite nun, which culminated in a collection of stories and novellas in the 2001 Death Takes the Veil. Ministers are not the only religious sleuths popular with mystery writers; nuns have also been successful as amateur detectives. Aimée and David Thurlo are better known for their Ellah Clah series (see Native American Mysteries), but Sister Agatha who is an extern nun for a cloister in New Mexico, has proven popular as well. The eighth Sister Agatha mystery is Prey for a Miracle (2006). Sister Carol Anne O’Marie introduced Sister Mary Helen in Novena for Murder (1984), which she has followed up with 10 more Sister Mary Helen titles. Neither a minister nor a nun, Faith Fairchild is the wife of a minister in Aleford, Massachusetts. Katherine Hall Page’s Body series has 16 titles, the latest The Body in the Ivy (2006). Crimes Feline, Canine, and Equine. Beginning with the Depression-era publication of D.B. Olsen’s The Cat Saw Murder (1939), cats have been featured as detectives in a niche that has turned into a subgenre all its own—that of cat mysteries. Cat mysteries can be defined as mysteries in which a cat either solves a crime or assists its human in doing so. Lilian Jackson Braun is the undisputed queen of cat mysteries: her “Cat Who” series numbers over two dozen titles. Jim Qwilleran, a retired journalist, moves to a small town up North to escape the hectic rush of big city life. He partners with KoKo, a Siamese cat, in his first mystery, The Cat Who Could Read Backwards (1966). Along with Yum Yum, another rescued Siamese, Qwill and KoKo have starred in 29 Cat Who mysteries, the most recent, The Cat Who Had Sixty Whiskers (2007). The series, although always featuring a murder, is loved for Braun’s humorous depiction of small town life and lack of overt violence. Close behind Braun in production is Lydia Adamson, who has published 21 feline mysteries since 1990. Alice Nestleton is an actress/cat sitter who stumbles across crimes while taking care of her feline charges. Lydia Adamson is the nom de plume for Frank King who has written both a dog series and a cat series under the Adamson name. Carole Nelson Douglas’s feline mysteries revolve around Midnight Louie, who solves crimes in Las Vegas. Unlike the lighthearted Cat Who books, Douglas’s series has won much praise and a number of awards for its exploration

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of such serious issues as sexual addiction. To mystery readers, Rita Mae Brown, who achieved critical acclaim with Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), is better known for her Mrs. Murphy and Sneaky Pie Brown mysteries. Set in Crozet, Virginia, the animals help their owner, postmaster Harry, solve crimes. Elizabeth Peters/Barbara Michaels has not written about a feline sleuth, but many of her novels include cats, the most famous being Bastet who appears in the Amelia Peabody books. Other detectives own cats, even though they don’t participate in their owners’ sleuthing: Sharon McCone, Peter Shandy, Amanda Pepper, and Annie Laurence Darling are all fictional sleuths who own cats. Although cats are popular as companions to sleuths, dogs are close behind in representation. Susan Conant has won the Maxwell Award for Fiction Writing given by the Dog Writers’ Association of America for three of her Dog Lovers Mysteries titles. Her detective is Holly Winter, a dog trainer and columnist who owns two Alaskan Malamutes. The novels are humorous and replete with dog information along with the requisite crime solving. Gaits of Heaven (2006) is the most recent Malamute and Winter novel. Another author who sets her mysteries in the far North, Sue Henry lives in Alaska, where she teaches writing at The University of Alaska. Her Alaska mystery series featuring musher Jessie Arnold debuted with Murder on the Iditarod Trail (1991), which won both the Anthony and the Macavity awards. Dick Francis is unquestionably the ruler of equine mysteries. A former jockey, Francis used his knowledge of horseracing to write over 40 equine mysteries. Following in his footsteps is Kit Ehrman, whose Steve Kline mysteries are set in the horseracing circuit. Another veterinarian, Gail McCarthy, solves crimes in mysteries related to horses in Laura Crum’s series. Quarter horse trainer Michaela Bancroft is the creation of Michele Scott, author of the Horse Lover’s Mystery series. Hard-Boiled. It is argued that the hard-boiled detective is a truly American phenomenon that grew out of the disillusionment of the post World War I period. Carroll John Daley’s Race Williams is one of the first tough guys of detective fiction. Dashiell Hammet’s Continental Op and Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe made the genre memorable, particularly with the help of Humphrey Bogart playing the part of Spade and Marlowe in several Hollywood blockbusters. A loner, the hard-boiled private eye works on the margins of society, offering a window into both the underworld of criminals and the mainstream world as it appears to the outsider. Often cynical and seemingly callous, the typical hard-boiled detective is no stranger to the meanness in his fellow man, and woman. Women are often portrayed as deceitful and insincere, luring the detective into danger for purposes often nefarious. The detective is tough and inured to violence, but often presents dark gallows humor and a fondness for metaphorical descriptions. Almost disappearing under the onslaught of espionage novels in the 1960s, the hard-boiled detective was revived by Robert B. Parker’s Spenser and Bill Pronzini’s Nameless Detective. Andrew Vachss’s Burke, Loren D. Estleman’s Amos Walker, Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder, and Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins (see African American Literature) are descendants of the hard-boiled tradition. Set in Northern California, Bill Pronzini’s prolific series about the Nameless Detective follows the detective’s career through 32 installments in as many years (The Snatch was published in 1971 and Savages in 2007). Nameless is a detective in the pulp tradition. Overweight, a smoker, he resembles Raymond Chandler’s Continental Op. Like the Op, Nameless views the world of San Francisco through the

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eyes of a working-class stiff who sees the seamier side of both the underbelly of the criminal world and the glitzy neighborhoods of the wealthy. Unlike Chandler’s detective, Pronzini’s investigator solves “impossible” or “locked room” crimes. These types of crimes, difficult to solve as it appears impossible for the criminal to have been able to enter or leave the room without being detected, usually belong to the school of ratiocination, where crimes are solved by sheer intellectual genius. Pronzini has created a hard-boiled detective with a brain. Hoodwink (1981) features Pronzini’s astonishing grasp of the history of mystery fiction. Nameless, a collector of pulp fiction, attends a pulp convention, where he investigates two murders. The novel combines Pronzini’s passion for pulp with Nameless’s strong detection skills, earning the novel a Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award for best novel. Andrew Vachss began his career as a children’s rights lawyer among other legal system jobs. He uses his background in many of his novels. Since the publication of his first novel Flood (1983), featuring ex-con and private investigator Burke, Vachss has been labeled a writer of “hard-boiled” or “neo-noir” detective stories. His characters, particularly Burke, cross the line of right and wrong easily, resorting to vigilante violence when justice does not seem to be forthcoming through legal channels. In Vachss’s 16 Burke novels, the tough investigator is often called upon to find child abusers and killers. Vachss’s novels are often brutal, but they are praised for their high quality writing. Lawrence Block is one of the most respected mystery writers today. The creator of three popular series and dozens of stand-alone titles, Block has become synonymous with successful mystery fiction. His Bernie Rhodenbarr series is written in the tradition of the humorous caper. Novels about Evan Tanner are set squarely in the Cold War years of spy novels. Tanner is a Korean War veteran who becomes involved in international intrigues. Block’s most successful series, however, is the dozen or so novels about former cop and alcoholic Matthew Scudder. After a gunshot goes awry, killing a small girl, Scudder resigns from the police force, drowning his guilt in alcohol and fighting bad guys with the help of his less-than-upright friends. The first novel in the series, The Sins of the Fathers (1976), introduces Scudder and reveals his drunken life working out of the hotel room in which he lives for the better part of the series. As morally ambiguous as any hard-boiled detective ever created, Scudder is not above using criminal behavior or relying on the “favors” of criminals to obtain justice for his clients. A bottle in the desk drawer has been a hard-boiled detective tradition, equating to strength and masculinity. As the series progresses, though, Scudder dries out, but maintains his bachelor lifestyle combing the streets of New York and visiting with his old bar buddies, all of whom live on the seamy side. His sometime girlfriend, the high-priced prostitute Elaine, marries Scudder in a recent installment, and they begin making a life together. Nothing is as it appears in Scudder’s world: The good are often evil and the bad guys, although not saints, are often the ones who reclaim a justice that the universe has denied the victims. As Block’s characters age, the darker tone of Scudder’s nihilistic early appearances recedes; yet the world he and Elaine inhabit is still a rough one. Michael Connelly’s novels are located in the noir world of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles. He exploded onto the mystery landscape with the publication of his first novel, The Black Echo, featuring detective Harry Bosch, in 1992. The novel

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was well received by critics and readers, winning the Edgar Award for Best First Novel by the Mystery Writers of America. Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch is named for the fifteenth-century Dutch painter whose nightmarish canvases were peopled with grotesque figures against the backdrop of violent landscapes. Bosch is a fictional composite of bits from both real detectives and fictional ones: Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Ross McDonald’s Lew Archer, along with film icons Dirty Harry and Frank Bullit are some of the characters who shape Bosch. In Echo Park (2006), Bosch is out of retirement and working cold cases for the Open Unsolved Unit. He is obsessed by a 13-year-old case that he was unable to solve. Bosch’s whole career as a cop is thrown into question when a jailed serial killer confesses to the death of the woman whose killer eluded him. In all of Connelly’s Bosch novels, he creates a real man performing a real job. The man is flawed and his flaws contribute to his own torturous path through his career and into his own psyche. Bosch must confront his own demons and find a way to make peace with his path to salvage his future. Robert B. Parker is best known for his Spenser novels, a series that prompted the creation of the television series Spenser for Hire (1985–1988), in which Robert Urich played the part of the Boston detective. A prolific author, Parker has written over 30 Spenser novels beginning with The Godwulf Manuscript in 1974. Unlike the archetypal private investigator, Spenser does not hold himself apart from the community in which he works. In Spenser, Parker has created a detective whose connection to Boston and its people is strong, and a sense of place is important in the novels. Like his predecessors, Spenser does have an idealistic code that he is unable to carry out in the traditional venue of police work; thus he strikes out on his own. Along with his partner, Hawk, and his lover, Susan Silverman, this college-educated private eye battles stereotypes, all the while upholding his traditional hard-boiled image. In the late 1990s, Parker created two more series characters, former LAPD detective Jesse Stone and another former police officer (a female this time), Sunny Randall. Another Boston writer is Dennis Lehane, whose series is set in working-class immigrant neighborhoods. The gritty Mystic River (2001), bringing together three childhood friends in an investigation of one of the group’s murdered daughters, was made into a successful film. Lehane’s writing career began with a mystery series featuring Boston detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. The novels, particularly Darkness, Take My Hand (1996), generated praise for their brutally realistic portrayals of Boston and its environs. Both Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone, Lehane’s 1998 title featuring Kenzie and Gennaro, have been made into successful and critically acclaimed films. Hard-boiled detective fiction was long the jurisdiction of male writers. The genre appeared particularly ill suited to women characters. Although historically there have been many female private eyes in mystery fiction (one of the first was Seeley Regester’s Dead Letter: An American Romance, which appeared in 1864), it wasn’t until the 1980s that the female sleuth broke the barrier of the male-dominated private detective and garnered praise for doing so. Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, and Marcia Muller are the foremost authors with female private eye protagonists. Marcia Muller introduced the popular Sharon McCone in the 1977 Edwin of the Iron Shoes. Influenced by her husband Bill Pronzini (see Hard-Boiled Detective), Muller created the first female detective to compete in the hard-boiled tradition. McCone begins her career working as a detective for the All-Souls Legal Cooperative.

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Unlike most hard-boiled PI’s, though, McCone has a circle of friends and family to whom she is close and who she often helps. Female sleuths are rarely portrayed as loners. Muller’s earlier titles show McCone as becoming personally invested in her client’s problems; in later works, the issues are more social and political in nature. McCone also becomes hardened, particularly after she kills a man in self-defense. Muller’s plots involve shady ethics in many industries (dot coms, country music, politics), and she finds in typical hard-boiled fashion, that her own ethics in pursuing justice for her clients become slippery as well. Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton both began their publishing careers in 1982 with series characters that became much more commercially successful for them than Sharon McCone did for Marcia Muller. Paretsky and Grafton are consistently on the bestseller lists. Sara Paretsky founded Sisters in Crime in 1986. The worldwide organization states that its mission is “To combat discrimination against women in the mystery field, educate publishers and the general public as to inequities in the treatment of female authors, raise the level of awareness of their contributions to the field, and promote the professional advancement of women who write mysteries.” Paretsky’s protagonist, V.I. Warshawski introduced readers to strong, capable female characters who are not victims, but rather the protectors of victims. Playing with the conventions of the hard-boiled genre, Paretsky carves a niche for Warshawski and for other female authors in the male world of hard-boiled private eyes. Warshawski is a fighter for justice, taking on cases where the downtrodden have no other hope. Her cases are often more socially oriented than Chandler’s or Hammett’s would be. In Indemnity Only (1982), Paretsky provides a background for her character that is strengthened as the series continues. Warshawski left the public defender’s office jaded with the corrupt nature of the job. Thirteen novels later Paretsky has legions of fans of the feminist ideas imbued in her mystery fiction. Warshawksi is involved with feminist issues, but also with issues of community and social responsibility. Her cases often center on white-collar crime, which defrauds the poor and defenseless. She comes up against, and overcomes, traditional patriarchal objections to her decision to ply a man’s trade. Like McCone, Warshawski differs from male hard-boiled detectives in her deep social relationships with families and friends. Kinsey Millhone is one of the best-recognized female sleuths being published today. She was introduced by Sue Grafton in the 1982 A is for Alibi. T for Trespass (2007) is her twentieth Millhone installment. Grafton has created in Millhone a traditional loner of a private eye, one with demons in her past, including a stint as a police officer and two failed marriages. What sets the novels apart from those of her male predecessors is the consistently strong background and personality development of Millhone. Grafton’s novels tackle social themes in an effort to understand the “whys” behind the murders investigated. Police Procedurals. Helen Reilly was a prolific author of mystery novels, whose career stretched from 1930 to 1962. Her books feature New York City Police Inspector Christopher McKee. They were among the first American novels to stress police procedure. Authors of police procedurals strive to create an accurate environment in which their characters respond to crime scenes, perform investigative work, and apprehend criminals. They focus in on the various officers in a force, their relationships with each other, and the development of their characters. Lawrence Treat’s V as in Victim (1945) is usually acknowledged as the first novel in this genre; however, the television show Dragnet (1951–1959) is often credited with

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jumpstarting the popularity of police procedurals. Unlike the classic hard-boiled private eye or cozy, with its amateur sleuth, the hero of a police procedural is acting as part of a team. The reader of this genre is thrust into a setting where rules (procedures) are followed and the operation of a police force is described in great detail. Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels are a superb example of this genre. Ed McBain, pseudonym of Salvatore Albert Lombino (AKA Evan Hunter), was a prolific writer, with over 125 novels published under various names. More than 50 of these titles have been part of the influential and highly regarded 87th Precinct series, which provided the impetus for many police force television series, such as Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue. The 1956 Cop Hater was the first novel in the 87th Precinct series. McBain’s novels stood out from the heroic detective story in that the hero was a collection of police officers, each with his own eccentricities and talents, working together as a team to apprehend criminals. The novels are set in New York and the setting is an important part of the series’ success. New York is portrayed through the eyes of those on the streets, walking the beat, knocking on door after door to find witnesses, questioning suspects, gathering evidence bit by bit. The settings are realistic as are the characters, the dialogue, and the crimes. In over 40 years of creating novels for the series, McBain has continued to move forward in time, keeping his characters updated in the latest crime-solving techniques and innovations. His novels have been consistently praised for their strong characters and gritty outlook. The final 87th Precinct novel, Fiddlers, was published in 2005, the year McBain died. Stuart M. Kaminsky, well known for several series characters (see Historical Mysteries), is most celebrated for his series about Russian inspector Porfiry Rostnikov. Death of a Dissident (also published as Rostnikov’s Corpse) was published in 1981 and was praised for both its depiction of police work in a constantly changing Russia and the characterization of Rostnikov himself, a dedicated cop in a corrupt world. Kaminsky’s 1989 Cold Red Sunrise won an Edgar for best novel. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist John Camp is better known as John Sandford. Sandford has published 17 novels in his Prey series, beginning with Rules of Prey in 1989, setting his Police Lieutenant Lucas Davenport mysteries in Minneapolis. Capers. A caper is a humorous mystery novel, one in which both felons and law enforcement are equally incompetent. Capers often involve criminals attempting to pull off major heists and usually doing so badly. Donald Westlake’s Dortmunder series and the Parker series written under a pseudonym, Richard Stark, are two of the best caper characters. Stark’s first Parker installment, Point Blank (1962) was made into a film starring Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson. Parker was such a successful character that Westlake created Dortmunder, a bungling jewel thief, who debuted in the 1970 The Hot Rock. There have been over a dozen Dortmunder titles and over 20 Parker titles, all absurdly fast-paced and comic. Bernie Rhodenbarr, created by Lawrence Block, is the proprietor of a used bookstore by day and a thief at night. As humorous as Westlake’s Dortmunder series, Rhodenbarr is a far cry from Block’s retired cop and reformed alcoholic Matthew Scudder. Block introduced the thief in Burglars Can’t Be Choosers (1977) and has written almost a dozen more installments in the series. Forensic Science. The current public fascination with forensic science reaches back to the television series Quincy, M.E. (1976–1983), starring Jack Klugman, and is now reflected in dozens of shows, specifically the CSI franchise currently on the air. Forensic novels are those that use science to solve crimes: pathology, anthropology,

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toxicology, and behavioral profiling among many other fields. High-tech investigative techniques are often employed to solve otherwise impossible crimes. The novels are also often gory with descriptions of autopsies and close-up details of the victims’ causes of death making for unsettling reading. Kathy Reichs, Patricia Cornwell, and Jeffrey Deaver lead the pack with detectives who use science to solve crimes. Although preceded by P.D. James’s Death of a Expert Witness (1977) and Susan Dunlap’s Pious Deception (1989), both medical detective mysteries, Patricia Cornwell’s 1990 Postmortem introduced mysteries readers to the world of Kay Scarpetta, Chief Medical Examiner for the State of Virginia, and opened the floodgates to a slew of forensic mysteries. Cornwell’s novels employ all of the features of forensic science in her Scarpetta mysteries. Critics praise Cornwell’s use of highly detailed forensic techniques, but often criticize the character of Scarpetta as being too introspective, and at times, downright unpleasant. Postmortem was followed by over a dozen more Scarpetta novels, following the medical examiner as she moves to several states, working in various capacities to solve crimes. Kathy Reichs is a forensic anthropologist for Quebec, medical examiner for North Carolina, and anthropology professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Her experience in the field has helped her books about Temperance “Tempe” Brennan rival those of Cornwell. Brennan debuted in Deja Dead (1997) where readers are also introduced to Brennan’s archenemy, Montreal Police Inspector Luc Claudel. Grisly forensic details are based on Reich’s own examination of bodies too far decomposed to be identified by pathologists. It is Reichs’s ability to combine explanations of forensic procedures with strong storylines that have captured an ever-increasing fan base for her novels. The television series, Bones, is based on Reichs and her character. The tenth Brennan installment is Bones to Ashes (2007). Jeffery Deaver has introduced a new type of forensic scientist. Injured while working a case, Lincoln Rhyme is now a quadriplegic, able to move only a finger. Equipped with every high-tech gadget known to the world of forensic science, Rhyme works out of his home/lab in New York. A complex man, Rhyme does not endear himself to many, but his intellect is highly sought after. In The Bone Collector (1997), made into a 1999 movie starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie, Rhyme begins working with Amelia Sachs. Sachs goes where Rhyme sends her and acts as his eyes and ears as she investigates crime scenes and tracks criminals. Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme series is praised for the books’ dizzyingly fast-paced and twisted plot lines. Nursery rhyme titles catapulted James Patterson into the spotlight. Along Came a Spider appeared in 1993, and much to his readers’ delight, has been followed by 10 more Alex Cross novels. Cross is a psychologist who works with the police department to track killers. His ability to get inside the mind and psyche of criminals often clashes with his desire to live quietly with his family. Patterson’s books are filled with action, and despite his doctoral studies in literature at Vanderbilt, simple in style and language. Kiss the Girls starring Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd was released in 1997, followed by Along Came a Spider (2001); Roses Are Red is scheduled for release in 2007. Thomas Harris’s novels about FBI agent Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter are often categorized as forensic mysteries, and forensic mysteries are often grouped along with those about serial killers. Forensic techniques, particularly psychological profiling of killers, are often employed to track down the criminals. In Silence of the Lambs (1988), the second Harris book to include Lecter, Agent Starling must use

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Lecter’s own psychological insights along with her intuition to track down a serial killer. The book was made into an extremely successful movie (1991) starring Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster and has become the definitive serial killer movie, against which all others are evaluated. Silence was followed by Hannibal (1999, a prequel to Silence), and Hannibal Rising (2006, a sequel to Silence). Both have been made into films along with Red Dragon (1981), which was made into the movie Manhunter (1986). Ridley Pearson’s police procedurals about serial killers featuring detective Lou Boldt and police psychologist Daphne Matthews are set in Seattle, Washington. Like Reichs and Cornwell, Pearson employs up-to-the-minute forensic techniques in his mysteries. Caleb Carr offers readers a look at forensic science as it “might have been.” In The Alienist (1994) Laszlo Kreizler, a psychologist (alienist) tracks down a killer in 1896 New York. The characters from The Alienist reunite in the 1997 Angel of Darkness. Set in future world of 2023, Gideon Wolfe is an expert criminal profiler criminologist living in an apocalyptic New York in Killing Time (2000). Edgar winner Aaron Elkins introduced anthropologist and forensics professor Gideon Oliver, better known as the “Skeleton Doctor” in Fellowship of Fear (1982). Oliver travels to various locales worldwide to read the crimes written in the victims’ bones in this often-humorous series. Elkins’s latest novel is Unnatural Selection (2006), which follows Oliver to the Isles of Scilly. Other sciences prove useful in finding killers as well. Forensic geologist Em Hansen (Sarah Andrews) uses her background to help her dig up criminals in Utah and Montana. In Cold Pursuit (2007) is the eleventh Hansen novel. Sarah R. Shaber’s Professor Simon Shaw is a forensic historian in North Carolina, solving crimes with southern connections. Archaeology is a subgenre of forensic mysteries. Sharyn McCrumb has received awards for her contributions to Appalachian literature with such titles as If I’d Killed Him When I Met Him . . . (1995). Elizabeth McPherson appears in nine mysteries set in Appalachia. As a forensic anthropologist, McPherson uses her knowledge to solve old crimes that have modern repercussions. (See also Regional Mysteries.) Beverly Connor has created two more bone experts: Lindsay Chamberlain, who divides her time between excavating archaeological sites and solving crimes, and Diane Fallon, who is the director of the RiverTrail Museum of Natural History in Georgia. Context and Issues Cultural Diversity in Mysteries. Since the 1980s, the mystery genre has seen an explosion of authors from different cultural backgrounds. Novelists who had been on the publishing fringes were beginning to enter the mainstream mystery market. Multicultural characters as well as those of alternate sexual orientations appeared on the shelves with more regularity. Gay and Lesbian. Two excellent sources cover the history of gay detective fiction: Drewey Wayne Gunn’s The Gay Male Sleuth in Print and Film (2005) and Judith Markowitz’s The Gay Detective Novel (2005). Both investigate the history of this subgenre from the first openly homosexual character, the British psychiatrist Tony Page (The Heart in Exile by Rodney Garland, 1953) to Ellen Hart’s lesbian restaurant owner, Jane Lawless. They trace the development of gay mystery fiction, at its height until 2000, with several authors contributing to the genre with their series:

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Mark Richard Zubro (Paul Turner, a gay Chicago police detective), John Morgan Wilson (journalist Benjamin Justice), Lev Raphael (English professor Nick Hoffman), Dorien Grey (detective Dick Hardesty), and Richard Stevenson (private investigator Donald Strachey). One of the better-known sleuths is George Baxt’s creation, Pharoah Love (deliberately misspelled), a homosexual African American New York detective who makes his first appearance in A Queer Kind of Death (1966). The novels have not aged well, and although there is much humor in the adventures and characters surrounding Love, the characters are more stereotypical and campy than modern gay detectives. Joseph Hansen’s Dave Brandstetter novels were a groundbreaking phenomenon in the world of mystery fiction. As tough as traditional mystery protagonists of the late 1960s, Brandstetter was also openly homosexual. Hansen introduced Brandstetter in the 1970 Fadeout, a mystery in which the upstanding gay characters are positioned as being extreme opposites of the sleazy heterosexual ones. Hansen’s first mystery, Known Homosexual (also published as Stranger to Himself, 1978, and Pretty Boy Dead, 1984) involved a love affair between an African American and his white lover. In a 1991 interview with Peter Burton (collected in Talking To . . . , 1991), Hansen said he wanted to overturn gay stereotypes with his characters. He had not planned on writing so many books about Brandstetter, but mainstream acceptance of the character led him to write 12 mysteries featuring the insurance investigator. M.F. Beal’s Angel Dance (1977) broke ground with Latina private eye, Kat Guerrera. From the beginning, lesbian mystery writers have foregrounded serious subjects in their novels, tackling issues of racism, sexism, violence against women, and homophobia. Lesbian mysteries often also have a romantic subplot that is often missing from gay mysteries. The now defunct Naiad Press (it has been incorporated into Bella Books) began publishing lesbian mysteries in the 1980s, featuring the works of Katherine V. Forrest who created the first lesbian police detective. Kate Delafield is a former Marine and first appears in Amateur City (1984). Forrest has twice won the Lambda Literary Award for best mystery. The latest Delafield novel Hancock Park was published in 2004. Another feminist publisher, Seal Press, brought forth the Pam Nilsen series by Barbara Wilson. Sandra Scoppettone’s lesbian character Lauren Laurano is a private investigator living in Greenwich Village. Very successful, Scoppettone is the first author of a lesbian mystery to be published by a mainstream press. Laurano was a very popular character and when Scoppetone ended the series at number six, Gonna Take a Homicidal Journey (1998), her fans begged for her return. Laurie R. King is best known for her Mary Russell series set in England during World War I. Russell solves mysteries with the retired Sherlock Holmes, whom she marries. Although heterosexual herself, King has also created San Francisco-based Kate Martinelli, a lesbian homicide detective. King’s first Martinelli novel, A Grave Talent (1993) won the Edgar Award for the best first crime novel of the year. Jane Lawless is a restaurant owner in Minneapolis. Ellen Hart, Lawless’s creator, has been compared to Agatha Christie and Barbara Vine. Extremely popular, the latest Lawless installment, Night Vision (2006), numbers the fourteenth in the series. African American. Before the Continental Op, Philip Marlowe, Lew Archer, and Sam Spade, there was John Edward Bruce’s The Black Sleuth appearing in McGirt’s

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Magazine in 1907. Bruce’s West African protagonist Sadipe Okukenu is one of the earliest known black mystery writers ever published. And then there was Florian Slappey, a black private detective created by Octavus Roy Cohen. Regrettably stereotypical and conceived out of the minstrel show tradition, the Slappey stories achieved great popularity and were published in the “Darktown Birmingham” column in The Saturday Evening Post. Rudolph Fisher’s 1932 The Conjure-Man Dies was a product of the Harlem Renaissance. Chester Himes was one of the most important African American mystery novelists. His novels introduced Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones in A Rage in Harlem (1957) after the publication of several other novels. Himes’s mysteries showed the violence of African American lives in Harlem and the racism that kept whites and blacks divided. Highly regarded in France where he moved in the 1950s, Himes won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policiére in 1957. After Himes there were no African American detective series with much staying power until the Shaft novels appeared in 1970. John Tidyman, the white author of the Shaft novels, was awarded the NAACP Image Award. The Shaft movies were immensely popular, and Shaft was remade in 2000 starring Samuel L. Jackson. John Shaft was ranked as one of the toughest hard-boiled detectives of the 1970s. Other African American detectives created between the 1950s and 2000 are Ezell “Easy” Barnes, created by Richard Hilary; and Carver Bascombe, originally created by Kenn Davis and John Stanley. In 1990 Walter Mosley achieved critical acclaim with his first Easy Rawlins book, Devil in a Blue Dress. Rawlins, a war veteran, walks the streets of post World War II Los Angeles. Mosley’s novels follow Rawlins through time as he marries and starts a family; the first novel is set in 1948, the most recent, Cinnamon Kiss (2005) takes place in 1969. A series featuring Fearless Jones and his sidekick Paris Minton is also set in the Los Angeles of the 1950s. A third series character is Socrates Fortlow (Walkin’ the Dog, 1999). Through Socrates and Rawlins, Mosley poses hard questions about the nature of race relations and the future of the black man in America of the fifties and sixties and in the Los Angeles of the 1990s. His novels are seen as providing strong social commentary on the life of African Americans in a volatile period that still has repercussions today. Racial tension and violence are the backdrop for Gary Phillips’s Ivan Monk series set in Los Angeles. C.J. Floyd is Robert Greer’s Denver-based bail bondsman and private eye. Greer is a professor of Pathology and Medicine at the University of Colorado, and he brings his erudition to the Floyd novels (The Fourth Perspective, 2006). Police Commander Larry Cole of the Chicago Police Department is the creation of Hugh Holton. Holton himself was a police detective until his death in 2001. A scene formerly dominated by male writers has experienced an explosion of female authors. Along with focusing on social issues as their male counterparts do, African American authors often infuse their mysteries with family dynamics as well. Former Essence magazine editor Valerie Wilson Wesley’s Tamara Hayle is a Newark, New Jersey ex-cop turned private eye. Wesley’s novels follow Hayle as she struggles to raise her son. Barbara Neely created Blanche White, a nosy 40-year-old domestic who frequently finds trouble. Blanche on the Lam (1992) was her first appearance and won the Agatha, the Macavity, and the Anthony awards. Nikki Chase solves crimes while teaching economics at Harvard (Orange Crushed, 2004). Eleanor Taylor Bland’s popular series stars Marti McAlister. McAlister is a Chicago cop transplanted to a small town, Lincoln Prairie, Illinois, where fighting crime goes

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hand in hand with fighting small town attitudes. Suddenly a Stranger (2007) is the fourteenth in the series. Native American. Although not a Native American himself, Tony Hillerman is unquestionably the most popular author to feature Indian characters. Influenced by Arthur W. Upfield’s Australian police officer who is part Aborigine, Tony Hillerman created Joe Leaphorn, a member of the Navajo Tribal Police in New Mexico. Leaphorn grew out of an encounter Hillerman had with a Texas sheriff he met while a young reporter. His Leaphorn novels, beginning with The Blessing Way (1970), became very popular for their authentic depictions of Navajo life and the Southwest. Leaphorn’s partner Jim Chee was introduced with People of Darkness (1980), adding a deeper look into the religious beliefs of the Navajo as Chee balances his desire to be both a law officer and a shaman. Based on the students Hillerman taught at the University of New Mexico, Chee is young and idealistic. Although he has written other mysteries and nonfiction titles, the Leaphorn/Chee novels are the most popular; almost 20 have appeared since his 1970 publication of The Blessing Way. The most recent title is the 2003 Sinister Pig. The husband and wife team of Aimée and David Thurlo has written two series of books based on Navajo characters. Lee Nez is a nightwalker, the Navajo equivalent of a vampire in the Lee Nez series (Second Sunrise, 2002). Nez teams up with an FBI agent to solve crimes both human and supernatural. Blackening Song (1995) is the first in the acclaimed Ella Clah series about Clah, a former FBI agent, now a Navajo Police Special Investigator, who combines modern investigative techniques with ancient Navajo tradition as she solves crimes on the reservation. Turquoise Girl (2007) is the latest in the series. Peter Bowen’s Gabriel Du Pre, cattle-brand inspector and Toussaint, Montana deputy, makes his first appearance in the 1994 Cattle Wind. Bowen’s 13 Du Pre mysteries revolve around current events as well as Native American issues. Margaret Coel is an expert on the Arapaho Indians. Her series featuring Father John and Arapaho lawyer Vicky Holden are set on the Wind River Reservation. In the eleventh book of the series, Eye of the Wolf (2005), the inhabitants of the Wind River Reservation are on the brink of civil war with the neighboring Shoshone. Award-winning Jean Hager is the author of two series characters: Mitch Bushyhead is a half-Cherokee police chief, and Molly Bearclaw is an investigator for the Cherokee Nation. Inupiat Police Detective Ray Attla investigates mysteries in Christopher Lane’s Inupiat Eskimo series. Like many mysteries featuring Native Americans, Lane’s series features the tension of Attla trying to straddle two different cultures. Another Alaskan native, Dana Stabenow, is the author of the Kate Shugak mysteries. A Cold Day for Murder (1992), winner of the Edgar Award, introduces Shugak, an Aleut who has left her job with the Anchorage district attorney to live in the Alaskan wilderness. Stabenow’s books have been praised for their accurate depictions of Native Alaskan societies, particularly fishing communities. James D. Doss adds an element of humor to his Southern Ute tribal policeman Charlie Moon series. Stone Butterfly (2006) is the eleventh novel to feature Moon and his aunt Daisy Perika, an Ute shaman. FBI special agent Anna Turnipseed, a Modoc Indian, and Bureau of Indian Affairs Investigator Emmett Parker, a Comanche, star in Kirk Mitchell’s mysteries. In the 2003 Sky Woman Falling, an Oneida creation myth stirs up modern day trouble. Asian American and Hispanic American. Japanese American gardener Mas Arai becomes involved in unraveling a decades-old mystery in Naomi Hirahara’s Summer

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of the Big Bachi (2004). Bachi is the Japanese spirit of retribution; Mas’s less than pure life after Hiroshima is catching up with him. Sujata Massey has created Japanese American sleuth Rei Shimura, a Japanese American antiques dealer working in Tokyo. The seventh installment, Agatha Award nominee The Pearl Diver (2004), finds Shimura making a fresh start in Washington, D.C. New York City detective lieutenant Jimmy Sakura solves crimes in Harker Moore’s Cruel Season for Dying (2003) and A Mourning in Autumn (2004). S.J. Rozan’s mystery series featuring Chinese American private investigator Lydia Chin, have garnered many nominations and awards (Winter and Night, 2003, won the Edgar and Macavity awards and was nominated for the Shamus and the Anthony). Sonny Baca appears in Rudolpho Anaya’s Albuquerque Quartet. Baca is a minor character in Albuquerque (1992), but in the next three installments he takes the lead role. Each installment of the quartet is concerned with the Mexican American traditions associated with the seasons. Anaya combines Mexican mythology, history, and legend with current issues, such as drugs and corporate greed. In Shaman Winter (1999), Baca fights his nemesis Raven as he travels back in time to 1598 New Mexico. The series has been continued beyond the quartet with Jemez Spring (2005). Critically acclaimed Michael Nava writes mysteries about a gay Chicano character, Henry Rios. Inspired by Joseph Hansen, Nava has created a character who represents a marginalized group within the marginalized Chicano society. Rios is introduced in the 1986 The Little Death, in which he resigns from his position in a law firm to start his own business defending society’s outcasts. Rag and Bone (2007) is the seventh Rios mystery. Like Rios, Luis Montez is a Chicano legal aid attorney helping the down and out. Burned out by his job, Ruiz longs for his activist youth in the series debut, The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz (1993). Rex Burns has written several mysteries featuring introspective Hispanic American Gabe Wager, a homicide detective for the Denver Police Department. Cuban American Lupe Solano is the creation of Carolina Garcia-Aguilera. The Miami private investigator has been featured in six installments (Bitter Sugar, 2001). K.J.A. Wishnia’s New Yorker Filomena Buscarsela returns to her native Ecuador in Blood Lake (2002). Regional Mysteries. Although many mysteries have strong locales as part of their plots, some mystery writers are inextricably linked to a particular region: the South, the West, and even specific states or cities: New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles. More so than most general fiction, the often-regional nature of many mysteries, especially those written with series characters, appeal to readers in various geographic regions. New England. Boston figures prominently as a locale for a number of mystery writers. Jane Langton’s series about Homer Kelly includes Cape Cod and other Massachusetts environs, while Linda Barnes’s Carlotta Carlyle investigates crimes in Boston. Other popular Bostonians are Robert B. Parker and Jeremiah Healey. Dennis Lehane’s series featuring private investigators Kenzie and Gennaro is set in his hometown of Dorchester, Massachusetts. Mid Atlantic. New York City has been cited as the U.S. city most frequently serving as the setting for mystery novels. Ed McBain, Rex Stout, and Donald Westlake have all set mysteries in New York. Lawrence Block lends a strong air of realism to his several series of mysteries, including the popular Matthew Scudder, by evoking New York both pre- and post-9/11. Janet Evanovich sets her wildly popular novels about

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bond agent Stephanie Plum in New Jersey. Gillian Roberts’s Amanda Pepper series is set against the backdrop of Philadelphia as are those of Lisa Scottoline and Jane Haddam. K.C. Constantine created the mythical Rocksburg, Pennsylvania, and Tamara Myer depicts the Pennsylvania Dutch country. Margaret Truman’s Capital Crimes series in set in Washington, D.C., as are George P. Pelecanos’s Derek Strange novels. The South. The South is home to many mystery writers. Patricia Houck Sprinkle and Kathy Hogan Trochek both use Atlanta and its environs as settings. Charlotte, North Carolina is the setting for both Kathy Reichs’s Temperance Brennan series and for Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta titles. (See Forensic Mysteries.) Julie Smith sets her novels in New Orleans and Edgar Award-winning James Lee Burke’s hard-boiled mysteries about Dave Robicheaux span the area from the Big Easy to the bayous. There are currently sixteen titles featuring Burke’s character Dave Robicheaux, a retired New Orleans police officer who has moved to the small town in New Iberia parish. The setting is intrinsic to a Burke novel. The bayous and their landscapes and wildlife are not just backdrops, they act as characters, often fighting against the same ills faced by many southern locales: increasing development and crime, which decimates the wildlife and the economy of rural areas. Into the mix are thrown felons hiding in the swampy backwoods and the often crime-laced nightlife of the French Quarter. Florida is the location of Carl Hiaasen’s novels, which tackle the multiple issues of theme parks, endangered species, and overdevelopment. Strip Tease (1993) was the first of Hiaasen’s novels to make the best-seller list. The novel was later adapted for the screen in 1996 with Demi Moore and Burt Reynolds. Readers are introduced to a recurring character in Hiaasen’s work: Clinton “Skink” Tyree, a Florida governor who suddenly vacates the office after the corruption around him becomes too much to bear. Tyree ultimately flees into the swamps and becomes something of an ecoterrorist or prankster, a role often taken up by characters in later works, sometimes after direct contact with Skink, who appears to mature into a teacher figure. Joan Hess’s characters live in Farberville, Arkansas and feature bookstore operator Clair Malloy. Hess’s 16 novels featuring Malloy present all aspects of southern culture, including family relationships and racism. Hess’s other character is Arly Hanks, chief of police in Maggody, Arkansas. Ruby Bee’s Bar & Grill and Estelle’s Hair Fantasies are the locations Hanks goes to relax, and that provide moments of humor in the midst of sometimes biting social commentary. The Appalachian Mountains of Eastern Tennessee are the setting of Sharyn McCrumb’s extremely popular best sellers. Her Ellen McPherson mysteries are read as social satires of southern life as she works as a forensic anthropologist. McCrumb’s novels on the McPherson series provide voluminous information about the history of the South, both its Confederate ancestors and its Native American ones. Her ballad series, beginning with If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O (1990) are set in a fictional Tennessee town, and the mysteries are structured like ballads with their stories of passion that have their roots in the past and their violent consequences in the present. Margaret Maron sets her dozen judge Deborah Knott titles in the South as well. Her characters are representative without being stereotypical, with sharply rendered dialogue and plots played out against the backdrop of a fictionalized North Carolina comparable to William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi.

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One of the most popular mysteries series set in the South has been Carolyn Hart’s “Death on Demand” and “Henrie O” novels. Set on a fictional South Carolina resort island, the “Death on Demand” series features an attractive, wealthy couple, Annie and Max Darling. They own a mystery bookshop, and also work together to solve the many real mysteries that come their way. Hart hit on a winning formula with her “Death on Demand” series. The stories combine elements of romance, mystery fiction, and bibliophilia, and have proven tremendously popular with readers. Part of the fun of the series comes from Annie Laurance Darling’s devoted customers, all of whom are fanatical mystery readers. The author reveals in the books a familiarity with esoteric mystery fiction that appeals to devotees of the genre. The Midwest. William Kienzle’s Father Koesler mysteries and Loren D. Estleman’s Amos Walker novels are both set in Detroit; and Ellen Hart’s Jane Lawless and John Sandford’s Lucas Davenport both operate in Minnesota as well. Estleman is equally well known and well respected for his westerns as for his mysteries. Amos Walker was created in the tradition of Hammett and Chandler, but the streets he walks are those of Detroit instead of Los Angeles. Motor City Blue (1980) is the first Walker novel and shows Estleman’s deep research and sharp eye as the characters ply their trades on the often seedy and dangerous streets of the city. A detective with a bluecollar background, Walker takes the reader on location from Detroit’s povertystricken inner city to the prestigious Grosse Point. The West and Southwest. Rudolfo Anaya, best known for his coming of age novel Bless Me, Ultima, joins the ranks of mystery writers with his series featuring Sonny Baca set in New Mexico. The novels of Susan Wittig Albert are set in Pecan Springs, Texas. Nevada Barr sets her environmental mysteries in various national parks, including those in New Mexico and Texas, among other southwestern locales. Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins prowls the streets of Los Angeles along with Michael Connolly’s Harry Bosch. T. Jefferson Parker has published well-received novels set in 1950s Orange County, California. Selected Authors Historical Mysteries. There are dozens of mysteries that feature historical characters, real or imagined, solving crimes in every time period imaginable—from the Paleolithic to World War II. The following discussion focuses on characters created by Americans and writers still producing works in the 2000s. Robin Paige, the pseudonym of husband-wife team Susan Wittig Albert and Bill Albert, has created a series set in Victorian England and featuring Kate Ardleigh and Sir Charles Sheridan. Susan Wittig Albert, better known for her China Bayles series, has developed a series of mysteries around the children’s author, Beatrix Potter. Emily Brightwell introduced Mrs. Jeffries in the 1993 The Inspector and Mrs. Jeffries. Mrs. Jeffries keeps house for Scotland Yard Inspector Witherspoon and helps him solve crimes. These historical mysteries are light enough to be considered cozies. Far from the world of cozies, Caleb Carr is a military historian and novelist who has written thrillers set in the past and future. Reviewers praised The Alienist as an engrossing book infused with the authentic atmosphere of turn-of-the-century New York. Some critics, however, found that the story was sometimes overwhelmed by historical detail. A sequel to The Alienist is The Angel of Darkness. In 2005, Carr published The Italian Secretary: A Further Adventure of Sherlock Holmes. There

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has long been a mania for creating Sherlock Holmes stories to satisfy the detective’s legions of fans. In The Italian Secretary, Watson and Holmes are joined by Holmes’s brother, Mycroft, and the three are drawn into an investigation of the mysterious death of two workers at Queen Victoria’s castle in Scotland. Conspiracy theories abound, along with the possibility of supernatural predators hovering in the gloom, but the clues that Holmes discovers lead him in quite a different direction. Laurie R. King is another author who has created a series based on the further adventures of Sherlock Holmes. King’s Mary Russell first appeared in 1994 with The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. The novel is set in 1914 and Homes takes the 15-year-old Mary under his wing and the two solve crimes; she eventually becomes his wife. Sherlock Holmes purists rejected King’s novels, but their inclusion of a female character at the heart of the mysteries have won over many female readers. In the eighth series installment, Locked Room (2005), though, Holmes emerges as the lead character. Barbara Mertz writes under two extraordinarily popular pseudonyms: Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Michaels. Peters has set dozens of books in nineteenth-century Egypt with its many tombs and historical locations described in great detail. Family life may have curbed her archaeological activities, but her vast knowledge of the field lends much background interest and credibility to her Amelia Peabody novels (begun in 1975), which are set against the backdrop of the excavations of Egypt’s Valley of Kings. Mertz has continued to publish yearly installments in the Amelia Peabody series. Tomb of the Golden Bird (2006) is the eighteenth Peabody novel. Bruce Alexander’s final two installments in the Sir John Fielding series about an eighteenth-century blind London judge are The Price of Murder (2003) and Rules of Engagement (2005). Stuart M. Kaminsky is a prolific author of mysteries and creator of several sleuths, one of them the World War II-era Toby Peters. The Peters mysteries feature historical figures, such as Errol Flynn and Emmett Kelly, involved in fictional actions. Legal Mysteries and Thrillers. Technically speaking, a thriller is a genre that has a plot devoted to the chase or hunt. Thriller subgenres are endless: medical thrillers, techno thrillers, spy novels, and so on. However, legal thrillers are popular with mystery readers because the pursuit of justice is usually local and based on a particular crime as is a traditional mystery. John Grisham, a former Mississippi attorney and author of almost 20 best-selling novels, most of which are legal thrillers, has said, “Though Americans distrust the profession as a whole, we have an insatiable appetite for stories about crimes, criminals, trials and all sorts of juicy lawyer stuff” (Grisham). As early as Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, the legal thriller was appearing in the marketplace to great popular success. For example, Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) and The Woman in White (1859) contain elements of a legal thriller: an innocent person, the criminal justice system (legal proceedings and courtroom drama) playing an intrinsic part of the storyline (e.g., Dickens’s Bleak House [1853]), witness testimony, legal documents (wills, etc.), and lawyers assisting in solving the crime. In the 1930s Erle Stanley Gardner, a practicing attorney, became one of the most prolific and popular authors of courtroom dramas with his creation of Perry Mason. Many authors of legal thrillers are former attorneys themselves. Grisham, Scott Turow, Richard North Patterson, and Steve Martini are four of the most recognized

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attorney/authors in the genre. It was Turow’s 1987 Presumed Innocent that opened the floodgates to modern courtroom dramas. Turow’s first novel, One-L (1977), written while Turow was a law student at Harvard, documented the difficulties of law school. Presumed Innocent was published while Turow was working as an assistant U.S. district attorney in Chicago. The novel was well received and its publisher, Farrar, Strauss, paid more money for the title than they ever had for a book by a first-time author. Their chance paid off as Presumed Innocent hit the best-seller lists. The novel was praised for its insight into the legal system and its refusal to divide the world into simplistic fields of black and white, good and evil. The film, starring Harrison Ford, was released in 1990. Turow’s most recent title is Limitations (2006), originally published as a weekly serial in the New York Times Magazine. John Grisham’s first novel, A Time to Kill (1989), was slow to take off in the market, but when it was republished by a major publishing house, he became a household name very quickly. A Time to Kill was inspired by a courtroom case, but several of his subsequent novels were criticized as being too formulaic. His 1994 The Chamber was written at a much slower pace and garnered more critical acclaim than some of the earlier titles. Grisham’s novels, although sometimes criticized for their unrealistic plots, are almost always praised for their characterization and their intense pace. These two elements have led to several of Grisham’s titles, among them A Time to Kill, The Firm (1991), and The Pelican Brief (1992), being made into blockbuster films. Before turning to fiction writing, Richard North Patterson was a successful lawyer who worked for the prosecution on the Watergate case of the 1970s. His literary career took off after the publication of his second novel, Degree of Guilt (1992) published after an eight-year hiatus from writing. Unlike many other mystery writers, Patterson does not have a series character; each novel is written about a different protagonist, in a different place, with different kinds of crimes. The common thread in Patterson’s mysteries is the attention paid to the legal system. In the 2005 Conviction, an eleven-year-old conviction is re-investigated; Balance of Power (2003) combines politics and law in issues about gun control; and in Exile (2007) the Middle East of today’s headlines is at the center of attorney David Wolfe’s most difficult case. Steve Martini is a former journalist and attorney. His skills combine to make him one of the foremost authors of courtroom drama. Most of Martini’s titles feature attorney Paul Madriani, whose cases are always part of a larger, more corrupt, political scene. He has been praised for his torn-from-the-headlines plots and exceptionally well-drawn and exciting courtroom pyrotechnics. Double Tap (2005) is the eighth Madriani installment. Many people are curious about how the law works and doesn’t work, and authors spend a good amount of ink on explaining points of law that make the novels not only entertaining but educational. As in forensic mysteries, the author of legal thrillers must clearly explain the points, in this case legal, upon which a case rests. Legal mysteries often focus on glitches in the justice system or the manipulation of the law by shady attorneys. The protagonists themselves are usually of two types, the idealistic young attorney who is up against a corrupt system, or a jaded lawyer who is closer to the wrong side of the law than to the right. Michael Connelly has created Michael Haller, who is an example of the latter type in The Lincoln Lawyer (2005).

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THE EDGAR AWARD FOR BEST MYSTERIES Since 1946, the Mystery Writers of America has annually presented the Edgar awards, named in honor of Edgar Allan Poe, for the best mysteries of the year, although there was no “Best Novel” category until 1954, for fear of alienating key members. (Instead, there was a “Best First Novel,” which is still given.) The recent “Best” mystery novel winners have included 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000

The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin (2007) Citizen Vince by Jess Walter. Regan Books. California Girl by T. Jefferson Parker.William Morrow. Resurrection Men by Ian Rankin. Little, Brown. Winter and Night by S.J. Rozan. St. Martin’s Minotaur. Silent Joe by T. Jefferson Parker. Hyperion. The Bottoms by Joe R. Lansdale. Mysterious Press. Bones by Jan Burke. Simon & Schuster.

Source: Mystery Writers of America Web site. http://mysterywriters.org/

Female authors have cornered a large sector of the legal thriller market as well. Lia Matera began publishing fiction after law school, creating the characters Willa Jansson and Laura Di Palma, who have starred in over a dozen titles. Lisa Scottoline is another former lawyer who sets her novels in Philadelphia. Her novels about the all female law firm Rosato and Associates have won her many awards. Reception Awards. There are several awards for mystery fiction. The Edgar Allan Poe Awards (The Edgars) were established by the Mystery Writers of America for various categories (best novel, best first novel, etc.). The first award was given in 1953 to Jay Charlotte’s Beat Not the Bones. The winner of the 2007 award for best novel is The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin. The Grand Master Award, also presented by the Mystery Writers of America association, recognizes lifetime achievements of nominees. Recent winners have been Stephen King (2007), Stuart Kaminsky (2006), and Marcia Muller (2005). Other awards include the Agatha, which honors the traditional mystery and is awarded by Malice Domestic. The Anthony Awards are named for Anthony Boucher, one of the founders of Mystery Writers of America. And finally, there is the Macavity Award, presented by Mystery Readers International. Bibliography Anaya, Rudolpho. Albuquerque. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992. Anderson, Patrick. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction. New York: Random House, 2007. Bailey, Frankie Y. Out of the Woodpile: Black Characters in Crime and Detective Fiction. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. Beal, M.F. Angel Dance. New York: Daughters, 1977. Bishop, Claudia. Ground to a Halt. Waterville, ME: Wheeler, 2007. Block, Lawrence. The Sins of the Fathers. Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1976. Brown, Dan. The Da Vinci Code. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

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MYSTERY FICTION Browne, Ray B. Murder on the Reservation: American Indian Crime Fiction, Aims and Achievements. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Burke, Jan. Bones. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. Burton, Peter. Talking To . . . Peter Burton in Conversation with Writers Writing on Gay Themes. Exeter, England: Third House, 1991. Carr, Caleb. The Alienist. New York: Random House, 1994. Clark, Mary Higgins. Two Little Girls in Blue. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006. Collins, Max Allan. The History of Mystery. Portland, OR: Collectors Press, 2001. Conant, Susan. Gaits of Heaven. New York: Berkeley Prime Crime, 2006. Connelly, Michael. Echo Park. New York: Little, Brown, 2006. Cross, Amanda. The Edge of Doom. New York: Ballantine, 2003. “Culinary Crime: First Course.” Mystery Readers International 18.2 (Summer 2002). “Culinary Crime: Second Seating.” Mystery Readers International 18.3 (Fall 2002). Deaver, Jeffrey. The Bone Collector. New York: Viking, 1997. Demko, George J. Crime in Cold Places: A Geographic Review of George J. Demko’s Landscapes of Crime. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~gjdemko/toc.htm. Fischer-Hornung, Dorothea, and Monika Mueller. Sleuthing Ethnicity: The Detective in Multiethnic Crime Fiction. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2003. Goodwin, Jason. The Janissary Tree. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Gorman, Ed, et al., eds. The Fine Art of Murder. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1993. Greeley, Andrew. The Bishop in the Old Neighborhood. New York: Forge, 2005. Grisham, John. “The Rise of the Legal Thriller: Why Lawyers are Throwing the Books at Us.” New York Times, Book Review Section. 18 October 1992: 33. Gunn, Drewey. The Gay Male Sleuth in Print and Film. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005. Harris, Thomas. The Silence of the Lambs. New York: St. Martin’s, 1988. Helen Windrath, ed. They Wrote the Book: Thirteen Women Mystery Writers Tell All. Duluth, MN: Spinsters Ink, 2000. Hiaasen, Carl. Strip Tease. New York: Knopf, 1993. Johnson, Adrienne Gosselin, ed. Multicultural Detective Fiction: Murder from the “Other” Side. New York: Garland Press, 1999. Kemelman, Harry. The Day the Rabbi Left Town. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1996. Kienzle, William. Motor City Blue. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. King, Laurie R. The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. New York: St. Martin’s, 1994. Klein, Kathleen Gregory, ed. Diversity and Detective Fiction. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999. Klein, Kathleen Gregory, ed. Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction, 1800–2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Lansdale, Joe R. The Bottoms. New York: Warner Books, 2000. Malmgren, Carl Darryl. Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2001. Markowitz, Judith. The Gay Detective Novel: Gay and Lesbian Characters and Themes in Mystery Fiction. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2004. McDermid, Val, and Nevada Barr. A Suitable Job for a Woman: Inside the World of Women Private Eyes. Scottsdale, AR: Poisoned Pen Press, 1999. Mizejewski, Linda. Hardboiled and High Heeled: The Woman Detective in Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 2004. Mosley, Walter. Devil in a Blue Dress. New York: Norton, 1990.

MYSTERY FICTION Murphy, Bruce F. The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur Books, 1999. Panek, Leroy Lad. New Hard-Boiled Writers, 1970s–1990s. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2000. Parker, T. Jefferson. California Girl. New York: William Morrow, 2004. ———. Silent Joe. New York: Harper Collins, 2003. Pronzini, Bill. Savages. New York: Forge, 2007. “New York and London Are Most Popular Settings for Novels, According to Newly Released Fiction Statistics Analysis from Bowker.” Bowker. http://www.bowker.com/press/ bowker/2006_0121_bowker.htm. Quill, Monica. Death Takes the Veil. Waterville, ME: Fiver Star, 2001. Rankin, Ian. Resurrection Men. Boston: Little, Brown, 2003. Reddy, Maureen. Traces, Codes, and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Reynolds, Moira Davison. Women Authors of Detective Series: Twenty-One American and British Writers, 1900–2000. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2001. Rich, Virginia. Cooking School Murders. New York: Dutton, 1982. Rippetoe, Rita Elizabeth. Booze and the Private Eye: Alcohol in the Hard-Boiled Novel. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2004. Rodriguez, Ralph E. Brown Gumshoes: Detective Fiction and the Search for Chicana/o Identity. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Roth, Laurence. Inspecting Jews: American Jewish Detective Stories. Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Rozan, S.J. Winter and Night. New York: St. Martins, 2002. Schwartz, Richard B. Nice and Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction. Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2002. “U.S. Book Production, 1993–2004.” Book Wire. http://www.bookwire.com/bookwire/ decadebookproduction.html. Walter, Jess. Citizen Vince. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006. Watson, Priscilla L. Walton, and Manina Jones. Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition. California: University California Press, 1999. Williams, John. Back to the Badlands: Crime Writing in the USA. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2007. Woods, Paula. Spooks, Spies, and Private Eyes: Black Mystery, Crime and Suspense Fiction. New York: Doubleday, 1995.

Web Sites African American Mysteries. http://mystnoir0.tripod.com/MystNoirDir/. Classic Crime Fiction: The History of and Articles about Detective, Crime, and Mystery Fiction. http://www.classiccrimefiction.com/history-articles.htm. Crime thru Time: Historical Mysteries. 1999. http://crimethrutime.com/. “Detective, Mystery, and Suspense Fiction.” New York Public Library. 2007. http:// www.nypl.org/research/chss/grd/resguides/detective/print.html. Grost, Michael E. A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection. 2007. http://members.aol.com/ MG4273/classics.htm. “History, Literary Criticism & Theory and Other Agendas.” The Thrilling Detective Web site. 2007. http://www.thrillingdetective.com/trivia/triv257.html. Malice Domestic. http://www.malicedomestic.org/. The Mysterious Home Page. 2005. http://www.cluelass.com/MystHome/index. html. Mystery Writers of America. http://www.mysterywriters.org/. Sisters in Crime. http://www.sistersincrime.org/. Ultimate Mystery/Detective Web Guide. 2003. http://www.magicdragon.com/UltimateMystery/.

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Further Reading Anderson, Patrick. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction. New York: Random House, 2007; Collins, Max Allan. The History of Mystery. Portland, OR: Collectors Press, 2001; Johnson, Adrienne Gosselin, ed. Multicultural Detective Fiction: Murder from the “Other” Side. New York: Garland Pr., 1999; Murphy, Bruce F. The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur Books, 1999; Schwartz, Richard B. Nice and Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction. Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2002.

PATRICIA BOSTIAN

Books and Beyond

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Books and Beyond The Greenwood Encyclopedia of New American Reading

VOLUME 3:

N–S

Edited by

KENNETH WOMACK

GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Books and beyond : the Greenwood encyclopedia of new American reading / edited by Kenneth Womack. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978-0-313-33738-3 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0-313-33737-6 (v. 1 : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0-313-33740-6 (v. 2 : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0-313-33741-3 (v. 3 : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0313-33742-0 (v. 4 : alk. paper) 1. Books and reading—United States—Encyclopedias. 2. Reading interests—United States—Encyclopedias. 3. Popular literature—United States—Encyclopedias. 4. Fiction genres—Encyclopedias. 5. American literature—History and criticism. 6. English literature—History and criticism. I. Womack, Kenneth. Z1003.2B64 2008 028’.9097303—dc22 2008018703 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2008 by Kenneth Womack All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008018703 ISBN: 978–0–313–33738–3 (set) 978–0–313–33737–6 (vol. 1) 978–0–313–33740–6 (vol. 2) 978–0–313–33741–3 (vol. 3) 978–0–313–33742–0 (vol. 4) First published in 2008 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents Preface

ix

Introduction: Reading in America Today

xi

Entries Academic Fiction Adventure Fiction African American Literature Arab American Literature Arthurian Literature Asian American Literature Autobiography and Memoir Beat Poetry Biography Chick Lit Children’s Literature Christian Fiction Comedic Theatre Comic Books Coming of Age Fiction (Bildungsroman) Contemporary Mainstream American Fiction Cyberpunk Dramatic Theatre Dystopian Fiction Ecopoetry Erotic Literature

1 13 26 40 53 66 87 97 112 137 162 185 195 209 222 249 274 289 312 325 338

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CONTENTS

Fantasy Literature Film Adaptations of Books Flash Fiction GLBTQ Literature Graphic Novels Historical Fantasy Historical Fiction Historical Mysteries Historical Writing (Nonfiction) Holocaust Literature Humor Inspirational Literature (Nonfiction) Jewish American Literature Language Poetry Latino American Literature Legal Thrillers Literary Journalism Magical Realism Manga and Anime Military Literature Musical Theatre Mystery Fiction Native American Literature New Age Literature Occult/Supernatural Literature Parapsychology Philological Thrillers Poetry Regional Fiction Road Fiction Romance Novels Science Fiction Science Writing (Nonfiction) Sea Literature Self-Help Literature Series Fiction Space Opera Speculative Fiction Sports Literature Spy Fiction Suspense Fiction Sword and Sorcery Fiction

351 366 385 401 416 427 440 455 468 483 498 511 521 537 552 561 571 587 600 612 625 638 663 682 699 717 732 740 767 782 796 805 833 848 862 880 894 917 930 954 962 971

CONTENTS

Terrorism Fiction Time Travel Fiction Transrealist Fiction Travel Writing True Crime Literature Urban Fiction Utopian Literature Vampire Fiction Verse Novels Western Literature Young Adult Literature Zines

995 1012 1025 1034 1047 1065 1078 1091 1119 1131 1147 1163

Contemporary Authors by Genre

1177

Suggestions for Further Reading

1191

About the Editor and Contributors

1195

Index

1205

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N NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE Prior to 1968—the dawn of an era known as the “renaissance” of American Indian literature—most literary scholars would have struggled to name a single Native American literary work. However, with the 1960s came profound social transformation; Civil Rights activism, including a new phase of feminism, prevailed throughout the rest of the century. Both movements galvanized advancements on multiple fronts by Native Americans and other disfranchised groups. Nowadays, by contrast, nearly all Americanists, and even some undergraduate literature majors, can name at least a few Native writers. Definition. Still, no concise definition of “Native American literature” exists. Debates revolve around definitions of “literature,” as well as conceptions of “Native” identity. Such debates do not resolve with the passage of time; on the contrary, they continue to broaden and deepen. Significant philosophical and literary critical developments, along with the steadily increasing body of works written by American Indians, have facilitated our understanding of Native American literary art in recent years. Ironically, these same developments make defining the field more difficult. In general, a crisis in terminology has transformed intellectual (and to an extent, popular) discourse throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. During the twentieth century, political, social, and intellectual revolutions continually focused on the powers of language, which in the aftermath of structuralism and deconstruction, are no longer presumed to access “truth” about objective “reality.” Intellectual inquiry proceeds in a state of heightened awareness of how language shapes experience and ideas according to perceptual and conceptual screens, which are themselves sustained by discourse. Scholars across diverse disciplines, including even the physical sciences, ponder the verbally constructed frames of reference that define their fields of study. The West has witnessed a widespread shift of intellectual attention onto the nature of representation.

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Questions about the meaning of the terms “American” and “literature” arise from this intensely self-conscious frame of mind. After the 1960s, critics concerned with ethnic and gender politics began, for instance, to ask why the word “America” has implicitly meant “United States,” and to object to the definition of “American” literature primarily as an Anglocentric, masculine enterprise. Beginning in the 1980s, New Historical critics, confronting traditional disciplinary boundaries, asked whose writings, and what kinds of writing qualify as “literature,” as opposed to “popular,” historical, or anthropological material. Indeed, the last half of the twentieth century saw a substantial erosion of conventional, Eurocentric conceptions of who, and what, counts as “American” and “literary.” Therefore, defining “Native American literature”—with its many nonwestern features eluding Eurocentric generic classification—presents a noteworthy challenge. Since 1968, and N. Scott Momaday’s publication of House Made of Dawn, which expressed multicultural themes from Navajo, Pueblo, Kiowa, and Eurocentric cultures, an expanded critical vocabulary and more suitable frames of reference have become available for scholarly discussion of Native literature. The pre-1968 material—a variety of traditional stories, songs, chants, oratory, ceremonial works, nonfiction and autobiographical works—is no longer exclusively the province of historians, folklorists and anthropologists with non-literary and non-tribal (Eurocentric) perspectives; it has become newly “visible” for critical reassessment by both Native and non-Native literary scholars. Such a reclamation project is daunting, for inclusion of these early works leads to more, rather than fewer questions about the intellectually constructed boundaries defining fields of academic inquiry. Before the European colonization of North America, over 300 indigenous tribes existed; they spoke more than 200 different languages. Though none of these languages were orthographic, petroglyphs and pictographic varieties of expression nevertheless amounted to a kind of “writing” that belies descriptions of tribal cultures as purely “oral.” Tribal “literature” thus includes these iconographic forms of representation among a variety of other modes that, until recently, fell outside the print-oriented, Eurocentric vision of the “literary.” Today, we understand Native American literature to include such material as both content and contextual background. Pre-twentieth century written texts frequently reveal the heavy-handed editorial interference of non-Indians. Before 1968, there were few unmediated Native literary voices, and even today, finding “pure” cultural and literary artifacts is impossible.

ESTABLISHING DATES FOR CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN INDIAN LITERATURE Using the year 1968, and the publication by N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa/Cherokee, 1934–) of his Pulitzer Prize-winning House Made of Dawn, to mark the beginning of an Indian literary “renaissance” compares to using the year 1798, and the publication of The Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, to mark the beginning of the British Romantic Period.To do so is clarifying, but also somewhat arbitrary and misleading. Native American literary forms existed long before 1968, just as romanticism existed long before 1798. However, the pinpointed year is heuristically useful; it focuses our thoughts around key questions.

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Contemporary written works are cross-cultural forms, and even some of the oldest tribal stories sometimes hint of cross-cultural connections with ancient European lore. “Deer Woman” (1991), by Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna/Metîs, 1939–), and the old Dakota tale that inspired it, suggest this kind of connection. A story from Dakota Texts (1932), collected by Ella Deloria (Yankton-Dakota, 1889–1971), and Allen’s narrative both feature magical beings who lure ignorant, innocent characters and hold them captive; both stories are vaguely allusive of Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle.” Irving’s romance, in turn, is informed by German folklore. Along with Jungian archetypal critics and New Historicists, one may speculate from sophisticated perspectives about the circulation of such apparently transcultural elements; however, neither traditional nor contemporary Native American literature is comprehensible from within exclusively Eurocentric critical frames of reference. Today’s Native writers emphasize this fact in works requiring the reader’s knowledge of indigenous cultural contexts and interpretive practices. Twentieth-century efforts to preserve indigenous cultural material have included recordings and films; moreover, Native people now write, record, film, and publish their own works. Still, even in the hands of Native artists, both writing and audiovisual technology are western modalities. Electronic media freeze narration and performance in time, thus failing to render important experiential dimensions of tribal dramatic arts that are usually based on different spatial, temporal, and other cosmological paradigms. Translation of older works into English, as well as the creation of newer works in English rather than tribal languages, present additional, formidable barriers to unmediated preservation. In fact, many contemporary Native writers deal overtly in their art with questions about how to render tribal worlds and ways in the English language, and in Eurocentric genres. Finally, definitions of “Native American literature” sometimes turn on identity politics, on questions contesting not only which modes of expression, but also which writers may be counted as Native American. Some insist that DNA alone determines “Indian” identity, but arguments develop over “blood quantum”— whether one is full-blood, half-blood, mixed-blood, or partly white, black, Mexican, and so on. Others contend that being “Indian” is a result of cultural experience, such as growing up “on the rez.” N. Scott Momaday and Gerald Vizenor (White Earth Anishinaabeg, 1934–) probably represent the polar extremes in this controversy. On the one hand, Momaday claims that being an Indian is mostly a matter of having a certain self-conception, a way of knowing oneself and the world that stems from super-consciousness or collective memory. On the other hand, Vizenor declares that there is no such thing as an “Indian”; an “Indian” is a verbal, historical, cultural construction. He believes that the term misleadingly defines individuals and homogenizes hundreds of North and South American indigenous groups. Like Vizenor, Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene, 1966–) argues, controversially, that Native identity today is less a matter of bloodline or culture than of politics. Thus, attempting to define Native American literature and identity, we may concur with David Murray—nowadays, “every term seems contested” (2005, 81). History. In an arena of legitimately contested terms, the best strategy for discussing Native American literature may be to invoke as few such terms as possible. Useful in an historical overview of Native American literature, however, are the conventional distinctions between pre- and post-1968 works, and between works (usually pre-1968) originally composed in tribal languages and those originally composed in English.

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Native American Literature Before 1968. Consisting of oral and, to a lesser extent, iconographic forms of expression (rock art, sandpainting, pictographic narrative, and performative gesture, for instance), the pre-colonial, indigenous repertoire included foundational stories, ceremonial and ritual performances, songs, chants, prayers, and merely entertaining or instructive tales. With the eradication of hundreds of tribes following colonization, much of this traditional material was lost. Nevertheless, much has survived through successive generations in tribal memory; it informs the contextual background of contemporary Native literature that must be engaged if a reader hopes to comprehend these works. Indigenous cosmologies, a key part of this context, are communicated through foundational stories, which range from the tribally specific, such as the Diné bahane’ (Navajo), Hactin and Black Hactin stories (Apache), and the Basket Dice Game (Pawnee), to the relatively pan-tribal, such as the Earth Diver narratives common among North American groups. Foundational works address questions about the origins of life, both material and spiritual, and the interconnections among beings and places on the earth. These works often center around the deeds of culture heroes and trickster characters, usually the world’s first inhabitants following its creation by spiritual entities—not entirely separate “gods,” but individual manifestations of the all-pervasive Creator. Heroes and tricksters are responsible for the preservation or destruction of the worlds the creators have made. Culture heroes include, for instance, Monster Slayer and Child of Water (twin figures known by various names among southwestern tribes and clans), Pine Root and Beaded Head (Cree), Hisagita misa (Seminole), I’itoi (Pima), and Beaver Man (Yukon), among many others. Some best known pan-tribal tricksters are Coyote, Raven, Glooscap, and Winabojo, who sometimes resemble or even double as culture heroes. Tricksters and heroes might be shape-shifters, have animal relatives or helpers, and move between dimensions of reality in ways that ordinary beings cannot. Indigenous ceremonial and ritual works are integrally connected to foundational narratives. The Hero Twins play important roles, for example, in Navajo healing ceremonies such as Blessingway, Nightway, and others. Though ceremonies are frequently kept secret by tribes and groups within tribes, parts of some are preserved in writing. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for instance, Washington Matthews, Elsie Clews Parsons, Ruth Benedict, Franz Boas and others undertook such projects, usually with the assistance of tribal people. Recording ceremonials is often controversial because of their sacred status and power, and because Native Americans justifiably resent Eurocentric appropriation of their spirituality, whether intellectually or commercially motivated. After all, not until 1978, with U.S. congressional passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, were Native people allowed the free and legal practice of their religions. Today, cultural preservation continues, but with tribal members taking the lead and sometimes engaging in cooperative efforts with such organizations as the Smithsonian Institution (the National Museum of the American Indian) in Washington, D.C., and the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona. Some museums, such as the Hatathli Museum at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona, are located on tribal college campuses and thus entirely under tribal management. Ceremony and ritual are also conducted through the songs, chants, and prayers that make up another category of traditional Native literature. According to the Navajo Blessingway, the world was created through song. Songs heal, tell stories,

NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE

give power to individuals undergoing initiations into clans and societies, open psychic channels to higher knowledge, and preserve memories and information. Songs are sometimes gifts to humans from plants or animals. Songs may be dreamed or inherited. Some songs are also prayers. Finally, traditional literature also includes a vast array of entertaining and instructive works. Coyote’s foolishness, Crow’s tendency to gossip, and other characters’ general misbehavior in humorous tales make people reflect on the worst of human traits. Making us laugh at the human predicament, they remind us of our imperfections and responsibilities to ourselves, to others, to all creation. Instructive stories also include historical accounts of heroic deeds and significant events; parables that teach morality, ethics, and values; and tales that provide models for behavior, or explain natural phenomena. During the late eighteenth century and, increasingly, during the nineteenth, a variety of written autobiographies and other accounts of Native life began to appear as more and more Indians “learned paper.” Many of these, such as Black Hawk, An Autobiography (1833), fall into the “as-told-to” category—works dictated by Indian authors to non-Indian editors who, intentionally and unintentionally, shaped the stories they were told. Examples include Frank Linderman’s collaborations with Plenty-Coups (Crow) in 1928 and Pretty-Shield (Crow) in 1930, and Ruth Underhill’s partnership with Maria Chona (Tohono O’odham) in 1936. Culturally assimilated Indians writing in English also produced their own texts. One well-known and frequently anthologized work by Samson Occum (Mohegan, 1723–92), A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian (1772), warns a mixed audience of Indians and whites concerning alcohol. Occum’s sermon and A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1774) are the first works published in English by an Indian writer. The first autobiography written in English by a Native American is Son of the Forest (1829), by William Apess (Pequot, 1798–1839). Apess’s well-developed political awareness shows in this text, and in An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man (1833), where he chastises whites for their widescale destruction of Native communities. Nevertheless, like Occum, Apess was Christianized and deeply assimilated into Eurocentric culture. Such early Native American autobiographers worked within the strictures of Eurocentric generic forms (Christian redemption narrative, for example) that shape the narrator’s self-representation. Thus, as scholar H. David Brumble III contends, Native “lifewriting” must be distinguished from Eurocentric “autobiography” owing to different underlying conceptions of “self.” Brumble identifies six types of “life-story” antecedent to European contact: coup tales (tales of daring encounters with enemies), informal accounts of experiences or achievements, self-examinations, self-vindications, educational narratives, and stories of vision and power quests. Well-known pre-1968 written autobiographies include Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (1847), by George Copway (Ojibwe, 1818–1869); the autobiographical Life Among the Piutes (1883) by Sarah Winnemucca (Paiute, 1844–1891); Indian Boyhood (1902), and From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916), by Charles A. Eastman (Santee Sioux, 1858–1939), who also wrote The Soul of the Indian (1911), a work addressing indigenous spirituality and the Ghost Dance phenomenon of the 1890s; and Talking to the Moon (1945), by John Joseph Mathews (Osage, 1894–1979). Reprinted in 1972 and after, Black Elk Speaks, Nicholas Black Elk’s spiritual autobiography as told to John Niehardt, has been

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admired since its first appearance in 1932. As-told-to autobiographies continue to appear well into the late twentieth century: John (Fire) Lame Deer (Lakota), in Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions (1972), and Mary Brave Bird in Lakota Woman (1990), both collaborated with Richard Erdoes to produce popular texts of this type. Native nonfiction and lifewriting have a longer continuous history than written fiction. In fact, Native Americans published no written works of fiction before the 1820s, when Jane Johnson Schoolcraft (Ojibwe, 1800–1841) wrote poems and stories for her own magazine, The Literary Voyager, or Muzzeniegun (1826–27). In 1833, Elias Boudinot (Cherokee, 1804–1839), published the first novel by a Native American, Poor Sarah; or The Indian Woman (1833); Boudinot was also the editor of the first tribal newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, printed in both Cherokee and English. However, better known is The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit, by John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee, 1827–1867), which appeared in 1854. Some years later, S. Alice Calahan (Muscogee-Creek, 1868–1894) published Wynema (1891). Other notable early Native American authors include poet and short story writer Emily Pauline Johnson (Canadian Mohawk, 1861–1913); poet and journalist Alexander Posey (Muscogee, 1873–1908); Mourning Dove (Okanogan/Colville 1882–88?–1936), whose autobiographical novel, Cogewea, the Half-Blood (1927), highlights Indian women’s issues; John Joseph Mathews, whose works include a history, Wah’Kon-Tah (1932), and a novel, Sundown (1934), as well as the previously cited autobiography; John Milton Oskison (Cherokee, 1874–1947), who wrote both nonfiction and fiction, including Wild Harvest (1925) and Black Jack Davey (1926); Zitkala-Så (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, Yankton Dakota, 1876–1938), who recorded traditional stories in Old Indian Legends (1901), and American Indian Stories (1921); [George] Todd Downing (Choctaw, 1902–1974) a writer of mystery and detective fiction; and D’Arcy McNickle (Metîs Cree/Salish, 1904–1977), best known for three novels, The Surrounded (1936), Runner in the Sun (1954), and Wind from an Enemy Sky (1978). McNickle’s The Surrounded was admired as the most complex work of fiction by a Native writer before N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, with which it shares thematic concerns. Also enjoying a measure of fame in the early twentieth century were Lynn Riggs (Cherokee, 1899–1954), whose play, Green Grow the Lilacs (1931) was staged as Oklahoma, and William Penn Adair “Will” Rogers (Cherokee, 1879–1935), who during the 1920s wrote columns for the New York Times and the Saturday Evening Post that occasionally addressed Indian concerns. Since 2000, several American literary scholars have begun to note the influence of such pre-1968 non-narrative material—journalism, speeches, treaties, and popular nonfiction genres—on contemporary Native American writing, most obviously, perhaps, in the speeches and writings of Sherman Alexie. Native American Literature Since 1968. American Indian writers emerging since 1968 include novelists, short story writers, poets, nonfiction writers, and dramatists, most of whom publish in more than one genre. They are included in anthologies of American literature as well as in a proliferating number of anthologies of Native American literature. Among the best known are Kenneth Rosen’s The Man to Send Rain Clouds: Contemporary Stories by American Indians (1974); Duane Niatum, Carriers of the Dream Wheel (1977) and Harper’s Anthology of Twentieth-Century Native American Poetry (1988); Simon Ortiz’s Earth Power Coming: Short Fiction

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in Native American Literature (1983); Clifford E. Trafzer’s Blue Dawn, Red Earth: New Native American Storytellers (1996); Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird’s Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writings of North America (1997); Mimi D’Aponte’s Seventh Generation: An Anthology of Native American Plays (1999); Jaye T. Darby and Hanay Geiogamah’s Stories of Our Way: An Anthology of American Indian Plays (1999); and John L. Purdy and James Ruppert’s Nothing But the Truth: An Anthology of Native American Literature (2001). Browsing through these anthologies affords insight into both stable and evolving patterns in post-1968 Indian writing. We may observe, for instance, the integral relationship between contemporary works and their tribal, traditional predecessors. Momaday’s House Made of Dawn and The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), together with Ceremony (1977) and Storyteller (1981) by Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna, 1948–), clearly articulate important topical and structural paradigms informing indigenous oral and written storytelling; these texts present fictive worlds complexly interlaced with foundational stories and tribal cosmologies. In Momaday’s House, the protagonist, Abel, is physically, emotionally, and spiritually ill, partly because of his experiences as a soldier in World War II, and partly because he is ignorant of his Puebloan identity. Returning home to Walatoa (Jemez Pueblo) and recognizing his identity as a Dawn Runner lead to his gradual healing. Momaday’s narrative unfolds as Abel recovers, and the reader discovers, an Indian “reality” alternative to that of mainstream U.S. society. The author spins an intricate web of Navajo, Pueblo, Kiowa, and Eurocentric tropes and allusions that readers must negotiate accurately if they wish to assume the participatory reader’s role in this demanding text. Like House, Momaday’s autobiographical The Way to Rainy Mountain undertakes a cross-culturally informative task. Three kinds of prose—United States history, tribal stories, and the author’s personal experiences—choreograph the reader’s role. In the top halves of recto pages, the reader finds the “official” view of the dominant society, while the bottom halves contain italicized, autobiographical matter. Verso pages bear Kiowa stories and tales that pertain to U.S. history, as well as to Momaday’s own self-definition. The three bodies of information, and their respective discursive modes, cast significant light upon one another, inviting readers to reassess dominant society perspectives. In Ceremony, Silko develops a plot similar to Momaday’s in House. Like Momaday’s Abel, Silko’s protagonist, Tayo, is a spiritually ailing, World War II veteran on a healing vision quest. With the help of a powerful mixed-blood Navajo healer, he finds his way back home to Laguna Pueblo to become a storyteller with world-sustaining responsibilities. As Tayo’s story unfolds, it incorporates into itself Navajo and Pueblo foundational stories that are at first presented separately, as lyrical, italicized passages within the text. This textual orchestration implies that for Tayo, to heal is to meld with Native culture, to comprehend and wield the creativedestructive potentiality of words. Like Momaday and Silko’s works, most writing by Native Americans emphasizes this power of language. Moreover, these works collectively articulate a fundamental structural pattern of American Indian written narrative. Indeed, William Bevis has argued that a separation-illness-return-recovery pattern informs Native American narrative, comparable to the way the bildüngsroman pattern informs the western novel. Well-known Indian writers whose novels, poetry, short stories, plays, and

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other works variously reiterate these topical and structural features include James Welch (Blackfeet/Gros Ventre, 1940–2003), Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe, 1954–), Anna Lee Walters (Pawnee-Otoe-Missouria, 1946–), Robert Conley (Cherokee, 1940–), Linda Hogan (Chickasaw, 1947–), and others. For Native writers, the use of western literary forms to convey tribal worldviews poses monumental challenges. Post-1968 writers develop strategies for transforming these genres to their own purposes. Momaday and Silko’s technique of interweaving foundational material into their works is an intertextual strategy that also negotiates basic differences between western and indigenous conceptions of time. Western forms are constructed around Eurocentric notions about space and time; representation of nonwestern realities within such western forms thus requires much ingenuity. To dramatize the role that traditional and foundational stories play in the lives of characters is to dramatize for the audience the indigenous experience of the presence of the past. Unlike the western temporal paradigm of “clock” time (linear time, the measured, industrial time of “progress”), the indigenous temporal paradigm is cyclic (natural, seasonal), emphasizing an eternal present that enfolds not only past and future, but also other dimensional worlds (such as the world of spirits). American Indian writing depicts worlds based on such alternative spatiotemporal models, despite significant formal resistance presented by western, written genres. Momaday and Silko’s works, again, provide definitive examples. Both Abel in House and Tayo in Ceremony must align their present-time lives with the lives of other-dimensional characters in foundational stories; their lives are, in essence, coterminous with the lives of foundational characters in the “one story,” the neverending story of Creation. To be out of sync with the “story” is to lose one’s identity, one’s connections to family, society, humanity, and the earth. To meet such aesthetic challenges, post-1968 Native writers exploit a variety of postmodern textual strategies. Much literary critical discussion explains how postmodern developments have facilitated communication of indigenous messages. Using multiple narrators, engaging readers in self-reflexive reader roles, developing nonlinear organizational tactics, and focusing attention on the nature of language, discursive forms, and representation are only a few of the postmodern techniques that Native artists have adapted to serve their purposes. Like Momaday in The Way to Rainy Mountain, Silko in Storyteller, and Anita Endrezze (Yaqui/mixed European, 1952–) in Throwing Fire at the Sun, Water at the Moon (2000), they have also introduced fascinating multi-generic forms. Native American writing is frequently also metatextual, instructing the audience about the interpretive practices necessary for reading the text even as they are reading it. Silko’s Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead (1991) are replete with metatextual cues, as are Ghost Singer (1988), by Anna Lee Walters, and Eye Killers (1995) by A.A. Carr (Navajo/Laguna, 1960–). In American Indian literary works since 1968, we may also observe that content and themes have shifted gradually away from preoccupation with the past and the near impossibility of living in the dominant society, to a revisionary emphasis on the future—to the subversive transformation of the dominant society. Gerald Vizenor’s works, in particular, exemplify this trend. Insisting on the powers of language to construct reality, he also deploys the destructive and deconstructive powers of language to undermine cultural stereotypes. In his fiction and nonfiction, we observe these dynamic, transformative forces in the hands of Native narrators and characters who are determined, according to Vizenor as literary critic in Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent (1981), to create a “new urban turtle island” (xi). One

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such creator himself, Vizenor employs an array of transformative tactics, ranging from revisions of tribal lore, to the invention of new terms such as “imagic,” “survivance,” and “postindian,” to the use of “fictional characters with real names” (Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart, 1978, xxi). Novels and short stories by Canadian Native Thomas King (Cherokee/European, 1943–) also fit into this postmodern revisionary category. Green Grass, Running Water (1993), Truth and Bright Water (1999), and many of King’s short stories disrupt both Eurocentric and Native stereotypes. In Green Grass, Native Americans rent John Wayne movies, “edit” them to include significant changes, and then return them to video stores where they become transformational instruments within popular culture. Equally revisionary agendas but less overtly postmodern tactics characterize the works of other contemporary Native authors. Linda Hogan’s novels, stories, poems, and essays outline a future inhabited by powerful, rather than victimized indigenous people. In Solar Storms (1995) and Power (1998), young female protagonists resist pressure from both tribal and U.S. society to control their destinies. Such characters embody hope for a new generation of Native people to heal the past through efficacious participation in the present. Though Hogan’s and other future-oriented works such as Almanac of the Dead by Silko, Eye Killers by Carr, and Indian Killer (1996), by Sherman Alexie, honestly confront serious problems without easy resolutions, their emphasis on the renewed presence of empowered Native Americans reminds readers of ancient Native prophecies foretelling the end of colonial domination. Trends and Themes. These observable trends in post-1968 Native writing corroborate Paula Gunn Allen’s claim in her critical study, Song of the Turtle: American Indian Literature, 1974–1994 (1996). She identifies two phases in the development of Native American literature since the 1970s. In works from the early 1970s through the early 1990s, she sees a healthy expression of anger about history, combined with a pronounced sense of “renewal and hope,” particularly in the tendency of these works to convey information about Native identity and cosmology to a diverse, receptive audience. Beginning in the early 1990s, Allen observes a shift toward concern with contemporary Native life, with urban Indian experience, and with designs for the future. Post-1968 writers best known as novelists are Momaday, Vizenor, Silko, Welch, Hogan, Erdrich, Walters, Alexie, Conley, King, Louis Owens (Cherokee/Choctaw, 1948–2003), Michael Dorris (Modoc, 1945–1997), and Greg Sarris (Miwok/Pomo, 1952–). Also notable are Carr, Susan Power (Standing Rock Sioux, 1961–), Gordon Henry (White Earth Chippewa, 1955–), LeAnne Howe (Choctaw, 1951–), and Debra Magpie Earling (Bitterroot Salish, 1957–). Short story writers include most of these novelists, along with Allen, Endrezze, Ralph Salisbury (Cherokee, 1924–), Beth Brant (Mohawk, 1941–), Carter Revard (Osage, 1931–), Peter Blue Cloud (Mohawk, 1933–), and Duane Niatum (S’Klallam, 1938–), among many others. Though novels and short stories (during and after the twentieth century) feature more prominently in popular culture than other genres, a discussion of Native American literature must include a few words about poetry and drama. Momaday’s “Earth and I Give You Turquoise” (1958), patterned on oral chant and articulating the foundational theme of indigenous connection with the land, inspired his generation of Native poets including Simon Ortiz (Acoma, 1941–), Silko, Hogan, Welch, Joy Harjo (Muscogee Creek, 1951–), Vizenor, Lance Henson (Cheyenne/Oglala, 1944–), Revard, and others. Native American poets address many of the same issues

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as novelists, and often even more directly borrow from traditional oral genres such as song, prayer, and chant. A major contemporary writer, Joy Harjo transforms many of her poems into lyrics, which she and her bands, Poetic Justice, and later, Arrow Dynamics, in turn have set to a multicultural pastiche of musical styles. Her most recent works include A Map to the Next World (2000), and How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems (2002). Louise Erdrich is also well known for her poetry. Like her novels, many of her poems deal with cultural and spiritual experiences of people attempting to preserve indigenous lifeways and values within an unreceptive, sometimes hostile, dominant society. One of her most frequently anthologized poems, “Jacklight” (1984) and several of her recent ones in Original Fire: Selected and New Poems (2003), deal directly with bicultural individuals and situations in the lyrical style typical of her narrative works. “Captivity” (1984) is a fascinating poem in which the speaker assumes the voice of Mary Rowlandson, author of the famous colonial narrative of Indian captivity, but tells a somewhat different story. Other widely published, post-1968 poets (many of whom also write novels, short stories, and nonfiction) are Hogan, Ortîz, Blue Cloud, Mary Tall Mountain (Athabascan, 1918–1994), Jim Barnes (Choctaw, 1933–), Lance Henson (Cheyenne, 1944–), Geary Hobson (Cherokee-Quapaw-Chickasaw, 1941–), Maurice Kenny (Mohawk, 1929–), Roberta Hill Whiteman (Oneida, 1947–), Allison Hedge Coke (Cherokee, 1958–), Wendy Rose (Hopi/ Miwok, 1948–), Diane Glancy (Cherokee, 1941–), Ray Young Bear (Mesquakie, 1950–), Luci Tapahonso (Navajo, 1953–), Armand Garnet Ruffo (Ojibway, 1955–), and Gloria Bird (Spokane, 1951–). Like poetry, Native American theatre does not enjoy as high a profile as fiction. Nevertheless, it has developed steadily alongside other genres since the 1970s. Hanay Geiogamah (Kiowa/Delaware, 1945–) is well known for Body Indian (1972) and two other plays published together in New Native American Drama: Three Plays (1980). Diane Glancy is the most prolific of today’s Native playwrights, and her works include War Cries (1997) and American Gypsy: Six Native American Plays (2002). Tomson Highway (Cree, 1951–) is a recognized Canadian Native playwright best known for his comedy, The Rez Sisters (1988). Many of these playwrights earned reputations in theatre companies such as the Native American Theater Ensemble (NATE), Spiderwoman Theater, Red Earth Performing Arts Company, and Echo Hawk, all founded in the 1970s. Throughout the 1980s, other companies appeared, including Indian Time Theater and Washington’s First American Theater/Free Spirit Players. Unfortunately, American Indian theatre productions in the United States are still rare; the situation is somewhat better in Canada, but even there, the relatively small number of venues, in general, inhibits the development of indigenous theatre. Literary nonfiction, including autobiographical and “life” writing, is an increasingly visible genre in both American and Native American letters. Most of the writers previously mentioned, including Momaday, Silko, Vizenor, Hogan, Allen, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Dakota, 1930–), and many others have written nonfiction and autobiographical essays concerned with indigenous experience. Particularly popular when it appeared was Michael Dorris’s The Broken Cord (1989), which recounts the short, tragic life of his (and Louise Erdrich’s) adopted son who suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome. Other significant contributions to nonfiction are Silko’s Sacred Water (1993), and Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays

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on Native American Life Today (1996), Louise Erdrich’s The Bluejay’s Dance: A Birthyear (1995), and Hogan’s The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir (2001). Collective “life writing” includes Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders (1990) by Julie Cruikshank with Angela Sidney (Tagish/Tlingit, 1902–), Kitty Smith (S. Tuchone/Tlingit, c. 1890–), and Annie Ned (S. Tuchone/Tlingit, c. 1890s–), a clan history melded with commentary on the land; the three female elders offer the book as a message to the younger generation. Selected Authors. Novelists, poets, playwrights, short story and nonfiction writers from the post-1968 “renaissance” have established enduring trends and themes in American Indian literature. Grounded in Native cosmologies and shaped by unique historical forces, the following basic thematic emphases will undoubtedly prevail throughout the foreseeable future: concern with collective and individual identity, including matters of gender; focus on preservation of ancient knowledge, traditions, and practices; attention to marginalization of Native people within the dominant society; concern with the natural environment; attention to the continuing effects of history on the present time and thus, insistence on repatriation of tribal artifacts; preoccupation with the power of language and human responsibility for its use; and interest in cross-cultural educational initiatives. In the twenty-first century, a list of major Native American authors still includes most members of the “renaissance” generation such as Momaday, Silko, Welch, Erdrich, and others we have noted, plus a number of younger writers such as Sherman Alexie, whose works have received a disproportionate amount of attention, doubtless owing to his high public profile as a speaker and filmmaker. To some extent, all contemporary Native writers concerned with identity must engage with patterns set by Momaday, Silko, and Welch. Momaday’s Abel in House Made of Dawn, Silko’s Tayo in Ceremony, Welch’s Jim in The Death of Jim Loney (1979), and his nameless narrator in Winter in the Blood (1974) make very clear the equation of a Native individual’s tribal connections with his or her physical, spiritual, emotional, and psychological well-being. Abel, Tayo, and Jim must not only learn their tribal heritage and reestablish contact with their relatives, living and dead, but also literally return home to the geographical spaces inhabited by their tribes. The scholar William Bevis thoroughly addresses this Native foundational theme of returning home in the works of these writers, and Ron McFarland and others have argued that Welch’s Jim dies primarily because he is unable to reconnect in these ways; thus, he joins his people in spirit by deliberately arranging his own warrior’s death. Welch’s later works, however, particularly The Indian Lawyer (1990) and The Heartsong of Charging Elk (2000), branch out into a new direction regarding such matters of identity. They entertain controversial questions about assimilation into the dominant society; in so doing, they underscore the message inherent within all of his works—the fact that Native individuals are entitled to freedom from pressure to live up to the ideas of other people (including Native Americans) about Native Americans. Sylvester Yellow Calf, in The Indian Lawyer, stops short of complete identification with Native people; though he works on their behalf, he refuses to define himself exclusively in terms of a single cultural frame of reference. In Heartsong, Welch’s protagonist, Charging Elk, is a nineteenth-century Lakota who joins Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and goes to France, where he remains by choice even when given a chance to return home. Critics of Welch’s

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later works focus on the author’s implied departure from the Native-identity models that he himself helped establish. Related to the subject of identity, Welch sets precedent questions about gender roles, as well, a subject often explored in Native American literature. Jim Loney’s masculine identity is compromised because no place for a traditional Indian warrior or hunter exists in the modern world. Welch suggests that without constructive outlets for their energy, and without desirable roles in either tribal or mainstream society, men like Jim, and like Silko’s destructive male characters in Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead, become prone to alcohol abuse and violence. Welch and his contemporaries explore the consequences of this dilemma for women as well as for men; the female characters in Jim Loney’s life, his sister and girlfriend, are forced into compensatory, caretaking roles that distort their own identities. Likewise, though Silko’s Ceremony features a male protagonist, the novel addresses the key issue of social and cosmological disorder resulting from men’s loss of respect for themselves and for women. When Silko’s Tayo insults female deities and curses the rain, he intensifies his own plight as well as the suffering of his own people. Similarly, Louise Erdrich’s novels variously address the subject of masculine and feminine roles and power; the interconnected worlds of her novels that are first introduced in Love Medicine (1989) feature multi-generational families who must continually renegotiate self-definitions arising from conflicts between tribal and Eurocentric traditions. The conflicts destroy potentially powerful women and men, such as Lulu Lamartine and Gerry Nanapush, and profoundly confuse others, such as Lipsha Morrissey. Even more directly focused on the lives of women, Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms and Power examine the experiences of multiple generations of women as they attempt to survive in the dominant society without sacrificing their Native identities. Hogan portrays the god-like, collective female power of mothers and caretakers in many poems included in Book of Medicines (1993), and develops variants of this message in all of her novels. Not only in fiction but in nonfiction works, Erdrich, Hogan, and Allen also deal with matters of gender. Picking up the thread established in the nineteenth century, when Jane Johnson Schoolcraft, Sarah Winnemucca, Mourning Dove, and others first attempted to correct Eurocentric notions about Indian women and their roles within tribal societies, Allen since the early 1980s has educated her readers through nonfiction works emphasizing past and present roles of Native women, particularly within Puebloan, matrilineal societies. Probably Allen’s most famous, groundbreaking work is The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986), a nonfiction discussion of Native literature delineating features that distinguish it from Eurocentric genres. Embodying these features, her novel, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983), develops a female protagonist who must recover, and to an extent, reinvent a woman’s spiritual tradition lost owing to the European destruction of tribal worlds. Also speaking on behalf of Native women is the poet, musician, and screenwriter, Joy Harjo, whose art celebrates female strength and endurance in ways that shatter stereotypes not only of Native women, but women in general. Her poetry, frequently recorded as lyrics by her and her bands, reflects her powerfully visual imagination. With co-editor Gloria Bird, in Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writing of North America, Harjo offers a collection of writings by Native authors exploring the “beautiful survival” of Indian women.

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Interwoven with the theme of individual and collective identity is concern with the preservation of ancestral knowledge and lifeways. Momaday, Welch, Silko, Erdrich, Hogan, Walters, and Harjo, among numerous others, connect such preservation with survival itself. Hogan’s Power equates the near-extinction of the Florida panther with the demise of the Taiga tribe, whose cosmology is founded upon their relationship with this animal. The young girl protagonist, Omishto, bears profound responsibility as the youngest member of the Taiga to figure out how to adapt to twenty-first century life without breaking the hearts of the elders, who adhere to the old ways. However, Hogan’s novel—like Silko’s Ceremony, Walters’ Ghost Singer, Erdrich’s Tracks, and A.A. Carr’s Eye Killers—suggests that even the most powerful traditional knowledge, ceremonies, and rituals are sometimes inadequate to the crises of the present day. Key characters in these books—Betonie in Ceremony and Michael Horse in Mean Spirit (1990), for instance—frequently display visionary capacities for imagining a future in which tribal lifeways survive in rejuvenated forms. Native humorists Vizenor, King, and Alexie also contribute to this conversation through the development of characters good at disruption and disorganization of the dominant society in ways that open spaces for Native inhabitation on their own terms. Appearing in several of his works, Vizenor’s Almost Brown is an adept transformer of Eurocentric language and technology to Native purposes. In the comical short story, “Feral Lasers” (1991), for example, Almost creates enormous holograms of animals, Native Americans, and American folk and historical figures, then sends them out to wreak havoc among drivers on crowded urban highways. These figures symbolically suggest the ways in which technologically knowledgeable Native people may begin to manage representation and thus attain a larger share of the social and political power that such control entails. In a similar comic vein, Thomas King confronts Eurocentric society with the absurdity of their own thoughts about Indians in his story, “A Seat in the Garden” (1990, 1993), where two white characters are unable to recognize actual Indians, but quite good at conjuring up illusory ones from their own imaginations. Like Vizenor, King implies that Eurocentric ways of seeing and controlling reality can be used by disfranchised outsiders who learn to wield representational power in creatively disruptive ways. Sherman Alexie joins comic writers Vizenor and King in his own denouncement of Indian stereotypes. Alexie is in some ways like a real-life embodiment of Vizenor’s character, Almost. Indeed, in the dialogue among Native writers about who may call him- or herself a “real” Indian, Alexie shares Vizenor’s notion that Native identity is more clearly defined by self-creative, individual expression and personal politics than it is by cultural heritage. Well known for his novels Reservation Blues (1995) and Indian Killer, and for collections of short stories including The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), Alexie’s ideas are developed in five different genres, including two films, Smoke Signals (1998) and The Business of Fancydancing (2001). Critic David L. Moore aptly describes Alexie’s iconoclastic, comic irony as a style conjoining aesthetics and ethics in a revisionary project for retelling history. Stories in The Toughest Indian in the World (2001) suggest that the best way for Native people to break free of stereotypical representation—including their own ideas about themselves—is by adopting a kind of postmodern self-consciousness content with uncertainty and marked by perpetual self-reinvention. Common to contemporary Native literature is also a concern with alienation, marginalization, and geographical displacement of Native people within the dominant

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society. Concerned with both past and present—indeed, the present effects of the past—Walters’s Ghost Singer treats the ongoing consequences of the Long Walk for the Navajo; she instructs the audience not only about the forced removal of the Navajo from Dinétah to Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico from 1864 to 1868, but also the ways in which the Long Walk continues to this day to affect the Navajo and many other people. Robert Conley’s Mountain Windsong: A Novel of the Trail of Tears (1992) asks the reader to ponder the consequences of the forced removal of the Cherokee from their southeastern homeland to Oklahoma Indian Territory during the 1830s. Forced removal of Native people did not end with the nineteenth century, but continued in various ways well into the twentieth century with consequences extending into the present. Hanay Geiogamah’s Body Indian and Bruce King’s Evening at the Warbonnet (1990) are plays that expose the suffering of spiritually and physically damaged Indians living in cities. Subjects of various twentiethcentury “relocation” policies of the U.S. government, displaced urban Indians also appear in Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, Vizenor’s Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart, and Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, Alexie’s works, including Indian Killer, and in the poems of Hogan, Harjo, Henson, Welch, and Ortîz. Political concerns are reflected in James Welch’s poems in Riding the Earthboy 40 (1971) and in Simon Ortîz’s poetry in Going for the Rain (1976). Both collections offer Native perspectives on America around the time of the nation’s bicentennial year. Combining prose and poetry, Ortiz’s Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land (1980) and Sand Creek (1990) deal with the ongoing historical effects of the 1680s Pueblo Revolt upon contemporary life, and with the implications for American politics of the Sand Creek massacre of 1864. A third thematic thread connecting major works and authors addresses the western appropriation and industrial destruction of the earth. Environmental damage is not only a material but a spiritual problem from tribal perspectives, for most Native people conceive of the earth not as an inert, commodifiable “resource,” but as a living being. Traditional American Indian literature reveals a spiritual relationship among humans, animals, spirit entities, and the North American land, a relationship that continues to inform literary works of the present day. The geographical space one inhabits is not just a physical location but a spiritual home as well. Thus the Long Walk and the Trail of Tears are more tragic for Native people than might be obvious to non-Natives. For the Navajo, to leave or destroy the place inhabited by the Holy People, who shape and sustain the tribe, who include Nilchi, the Holy Wind that is the breath of life, is to wither and die. Diné bahane’, for instance, teaches that the life patterns of the Holy People and other spirit entities are replicated in the lives of human beings within a cosmos where spiritual and material dimensions are inseparable. Thus, for a person to lose the land where he or she draws breath is to become profoundly displaced, to risk illness, death, and nonbeing. Likewise, for the Cherokee, removal meant leaving behind the place chosen for them by Great Buzzard—the Tsalagi country full of mountains (North Carolina)—for a land they did not know and that did not know them. A fundamental claim of Native literature is that specific places were made for specific people, animals, and spirits, and that centuries of exile cannot alter this fact of creation. In the early years of the twenty-first century, the White River Band of Utes have been returning to Meeker, in Colorado’s White River Valley, from a reservation in Utah where they were banished over 100 years

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ago; this is one of many real-life events underscoring the authenticity of views expressed in literary works. Even more devastating than appropriation of tribal homelands is the utter destruction of such places by logging, mining, oil-drilling, urban development, and other western forms of encroachment. Mary Tall Mountain’s poem, “The Last Wolf” (1981, 1995), is a melancholy testimony to such loss. The speaker addresses the wolf, who seems to search for her throughout the “ruined city” to seek her help. Similar lamentations occur in Silko’s Ceremony, in its concern with atomic warfare, and Almanac of the Dead, which addresses global environmental issues, and Carr’s Eye Killers, in its focus on the widespread pollution of the Southwest by nuclear testing and uranium strip-mining. Hogan’s Mean Spirit deals with the U.S. government’s repeated exploitation of inhabitants of Indian Territory, particularly the Osage, owing to the discovery of oil on tribal lands. Her more recent novel, Power, deals with the destruction of Florida’s natural environment, home to the nearly extinct Florida panther. Louise Erdrich’s Tracks (1998) and Four Souls (2004) address logging practices that have laid waste to tribal lands and to the hearts of tribal people in the region of the Dakotas and Wisconsin. Yet another thematic strand of Native literature concerns tribal demands for the repatriation of property, particularly ceremonial items and human remains. Like Native people who belong in the places the Creator designed for them, tribal artifacts must return to their home lest the world continue to be disrupted by their restless spiritual energy. “Old Students of the New Physics” (1993), a poem by Marilou Awiatka (Cherokee, 1936–), develops this theme. She asks us to ponder the Butterfly Effect, a metaphor used by physicists to illustrate small-scale physical events that can have very large-scale effects: figuratively, a butterfly flapping its wings in one place on the earth may cause a hurricane in another. In Awiatka’s poem, when earthmoving equipment in an urban development project scatters bones from an Indian gravesite, the speaker predicts consequences felt far and near. Other literary works dealing with stolen, abused, or misplaced Native artifacts include, as previously mentioned, Carr’s Eye Killers and Walters’s Ghost Singer. In Eye Killers, prayer sticks brought home by Navajos to Dinétah from Bosque Redondo, and kept safe by Puebloan families, are powerful enough to vanquish modern-day monsters—vampiric creatures representing the European presence in North America. In Ghost Singer, part of the plot revolves around stolen objects and human remains wreaking havoc among employees of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History who come in contact with them. Indeed, Walters’s novel, a profound explanation of tribal views on the subject, may have played a significant role in the passing of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. Hogan’s Mean Spirit (1990) likewise addresses the fate of Indian bones scattered about the land with the arrival of more and more white settlers. Two novels by Louis Owens, The Sharpest Sight (1992) and Bone Game (1994), deal with a man’s repatriation of his veteran brother’s bones, and with the threat of their ending up in a museum, the ultimate desecration for Native people. In Erdrich’s The Painted Drum (1995), a real estate agent sells to a museum some Indian bones that she finds on property she has purchased, but she steals a ceremonial painted drum that should have been, along with the bones, returned to the Ojibwe. Like poet Joy Harjo, who stresses the ways in which social and political problems of the present day are related to imperialist atrocities of the past, Erdrich and others insist that the past cannot be

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simply forgotten, stored away in archives, or appropriated for present-day use in a Eurocentric agenda. Still another theme that distinguishes most contemporary American Indian literature concerns the creative and destructive powers of language. Louise Erdrich’s Nanapush, an important character in several novels and a narrator in Tracks, remarks on the power of language to “cure or kill,” a power that Silko’s Ceremony similarly highlights in a plot driven by the destructive magic of beings showing off their storytelling abilities in a contest of “dark things”; the story of atomic energy escapes its author’s control and cannot be called back. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Cold War nuclear arms race are the result. Such narratives emphasize how potential realities originate in thought, find expression in words, and then take actual shape in material forms and practices. Because of this monumental power of words to create, sustain, and destroy worlds and their inhabitants, Native storytellers believe profound responsibility accompanies language use, and storytelling in particular. In Hogan’s Power, Omishto and Ama are caught up in real events that unfold according to an ancient tribal story. The humorous works of writers such as Vizenor and King are rife with tricksters, including Coyote, who manipulate stories and other modes of representation for revolutionary, revisionary purposes. Though King’s Coyote in Green Grass, Running Water usually claims to have been out of town when bad things happen, the reader entertains no doubts about the material consequences of trickster discourse. A comic element in Momaday’s House Made of Dawn involves a member of the Native American Church, a “priest of the sun,” who observes that part of what is wrong with creation is that after St. John the Divine said in the Bible that, “in the beginning was the Word,” he should have been quiet; he should have trimmed the “fat.” Instead, he talked too much. Too much talk wreaks havoc. Indeed, a common complaint of Native people about whites is that they talk too much. In Walters’s Ghost Singer, Indian characters advise whites to “be quiet” so that they might “learn something” about indigenous views of the world. Finally, we may observe among major American Indian authors an educational initiative comprising another thematic pattern uniting their work. An enduring educational trend in nonfiction writing began, perhaps, with Eastman’s The Soul of the Indian and continues today in works by Hogan, Silko, Allen, Momaday, and many other major Native writers who have written not only poems, novels, and short stories, but also nonfiction essays and autobiographical pieces serving educational purposes. Ongoing efforts have ranged from Luther Standing Bear’s Land of the Spotted Eagle (1933), to many works by Vine Deloria, Jr. (Yankton/Standing Rock Sioux, 1933–2005), most recently The World We Used to Live In: Remembering the Powers of the Medicine Men (2006). Current works focusing on the distinctiveness of Native worldviews, and suggesting that Native values and practices are needed for the preservation of the world, include Defending Mother Earth (1996), by Jace Weaver (Cherokee); The Tewa World (1967), by Alfonso Ortîz (San Juan Pueblo, 1939–1997); Talking Indian (1992), by Walters; and Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (1995), by Robert Warrior (Osage). Not to be overlooked is the powerful instructive message regarding education itself that emerges from Alexie’s novel, Indian Killer. Insisting that any kind of non-Native intervention in Native cultures, sometimes especially wellintended intervention, is a violation, Alexie attacks cross-cultural adoption, anthropological preservation efforts, and non-Native teachers of Native material.

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Contrary to Alexie’s radical rejection of non-Indian enthusiasts, many Native authors offer metatextual instruction to their projected readers, who are given important information about history, cultural context, and Native interpretive practices that significantly enhance their understanding of the texts in the process of reading them. Ghost Singer offers the reader historical information, as well as information about Navajo and Puebloan cosmology, through characters’ dialogue. Silko’s Ceremony, Conley’s Mountain Windsong, and Hogan’s Mean Spirit, among others, do the same. These authors are variously skillful at integrating the necessary “educational” content into plot and character development without artificial digressions. Critical Views of Native American Literature. Native American literature has enjoyed voluminous critical attention since the 1980s by both Native and non-Native scholars, and the pace of scholarly activity shows no signs of slowing. Moreover, literary critical response to Native literature of all genres has become increasingly sophisticated with each passing decade. Studies of particular interest, and related to broader social and cultural concerns of the twenty-first century, include Joni Adamson’s American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism (2001), and Eric Gary Anderson’s American Indian Literature and the Southwest (1999). Adamson highlights Native American literary and philosophical contributions to global discussions of environmental crisis. Anderson’s book is a thought-provoking study of the complex, cultural composition of the American Southwest, and the interconnections between Native and non-Native American literature that this land has inspired. Also concerned with cultural negotiations between Native and non-Native groups are Gretchen M. Bataille, editor of Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images and Literary Appropriations (2001), and Devon Abbott Mehesuah, Indigenous American Women: Decolonization, Empowerment, Activism (2003). These critical studies deal with questions of Native identity, both individual and collective, and its preservation despite adversities of dominant cultural pressure, past and present. Significant introductory studies of Native literature published within the current decade are Eric Cheyfitz’s The Columbia History of Native American Literature Since 1945 (2005), Joy Porter and Kenneth M. Roemer’s The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (2005), Suzanne Eversten Lundquist’s Native American Literatures: An Introduction (2004), and Roemer’s Native American Writers of the United States, Dictionary of Literary Biography (1997). More specialized studies treating particular literary critical issues include Arnold Krupat’s Red Matters: Native American Studies (2002), Robert Dale Parker’s The Invention of Native American Literature (2003), Elvira Pulitano’s Toward a Native American Critical Theory (2003), Theodore Rios and Kathleen Mullen Sands’s Telling a Good One: The Process of a Native American Collaborative Biography (2000), Catherine Rainwater’s Dreams of Fiery Stars: The Transformations of Native American Fiction (1999), and Craig S. Womack’s Red on Red (1999). Dealing with Native American poetry are Norma C. Wilson’s The Nature of Native American Poetry (2001), Kenneth Lincoln’s Sing with the Heart of a Bear: Fusions of Native and American Poetry, 1890–1999 (2000), and Robin Riley Fast’s The Heart as a Drum: Continuance and Resistance in American Indian Poetry (1999). Fast focuses on the concern with negotiation of physical space in Native

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poetry, while Lincoln traces intercultural developments, and Wilson develops readings of specific poets’ works. Critical views of Native American theatre are found mostly in reviews and newsletters; a few book-length critical studies have appeared since Per Brask and William Morgan’s collaborative study of Native Canadian theatre, Aboriginal Voices: Amerindian, Inuit, and Sami Theater (1992), a work pertinent to the study of Native theatre in the United States. Also useful is Hanay Geiogamah and Jaye T. Darby’s American Indian Theater in Performance: A Reader (2000). On nonfiction and “life writing,” David H. Brumble III remains an authoritative voice. His American Indian Autobiography (1988) is an indispensable work, as are Arnold Krupat’s Who Came After: A Study of Native American Autobiography (1985), and The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon (1989), and Gerald Vizenor and A. Robert Lee’s Postindian Conversations (1999), among others. Reception The Many Audiences for Native American Literature. Though Momaday’s House Made of Dawn received critical attention when it appeared, this novel and most other writing by Native Americans presents difficulties for the average reader, and even for literary scholars who are unversed in Native cultural contexts. Work by Native writers that appeared throughout the 1970s drew a mostly literary and academic audience. Novels by Louise Erdrich that began to appear in the late 1980s probably helped create whatever popular audience exists today for Native writing, for even though her works are steeped in Native culture, their plots and characters are relatively more accessible to the general reader than are most of the writings of her predecessors. By the turn of the twentieth century, the readership for Native works was further expanded owing to multicultural educational agendas in schools and universities where students are introduced to works by minority writers. The growing number of literary critical books and articles on Native works is helpful to those who wish to teach them. Consequently, whereas in 1970, a bookstore patron looking for Native American writing would have come out empty-handed, the same visitor in the 1990s and after could easily fill a cart to include a broad selection of literary critical studies to enhance his or her understanding of the material. Moreover, most current anthologies of American literature contain both traditional and contemporary Native works. Today’s Native American writers share a keen sense of the diversity of their potential audience, which may include other members of their tribe, members of other tribes, Eurocentric people of many ethnicities, and non-Eurocentric, non-tribal people; in other words, there is a global audience for their work, often translated into a variety of languages. With this fact in mind, many Native writers have become impressively inventive of ways to reach their audience. Some of these techniques are developed based on oral storytelling practices, for oral storytellers are traditionally adept at audience accommodation—altering the way a story is told depending on who is listening. The popular audience for Native American writing, however, as opposed to the scholarly one, remains relatively small, to an extent owing to difficulties the material presents. Though Hollywood films such as Dances with Wolves (1990), and film adaptations of popular novels set in Navajo country by Tony Hillerman (not Native

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American) are box-office hits, most Native people and scholars of Native literature entertain, at the very least, mixed feelings about this phenomenon. Despite the fact that such works by non-Native people are often composed in good faith and contain accurate information, they nevertheless amount in various degrees to appropriation of Native cultures. Unfortunately, many more people have seen Dances with Wolves and the Disney cartoon Pocahontas (1995) than are familiar with Sherman Alexie’s Smoke Signals (1998), or Valerie Red Horse’s Naturally Native (1999); few have heard of films such as Spitz and Klain’s The Return of Navajo Boy (2000). Native filmmakers and screenwriters legitimately fear the inevitable co-optation and trivialization that accompany mainstream productions. For instance, when A.A. Carr negotiated with film companies for rights to Eye Killers, he withdrew from projects when he was told that the Navajo material would have to be cut. Had he agreed, a film version of his novel would have been little more than another vampire tale set among stereotypical Indians in the Southwest. N. Scott Momaday did collaborate with Richardson Morse and an independent film company to produce a video of House Made of Dawn in 1972; starring the Laguna/Santo Domingo actor and poet Larry Littlebird, the film was re-released in 1996, but never drew popular or critical attention. Like Carr and Momaday, most Native artists prefer not to lose control of their materials to the dominant culture; consequently, movie adaptations of their works are rare to nonexistent. This challenge seems, so far, difficult to overcome. Bibliography Alexie, Sherman. Smoke Signals. New York: Hyperion, 1998. Allen, Paula Gunn. Song of the Turtle: American Indian Literature, 1974–1994. New York: Ballantine, 1996. Awiatka, Marilou. Selu: Seeking the Corn-Mother’s Wisdom. Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1993. Bevis, William. Native American Novels: Homing In. In Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature. Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987; 580–620. Brumble, H. David, III. American Indian Autobiography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Carr, A.A. Eye Killers. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Erdrich, Louise. “Jacklight.” In Jacklight. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984. ———. “Captivity,” In Jacklight. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984. ———. Love Medicine. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984. ———. The Painted Drum. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Geiogamah, Hanay. New Native American Drama: Three Plays. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980. Hogan, Linda. Power. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998. ———. Mean Spirit. New York: Atheneum, 1990. ———. Solar Storms. New York: Scribner, 1995. King, Thomas. “A Seat in the Garden.” In One Good Story, That One. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. ———. Green Grass, Running Water. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. McFarland, Ron, ed. James Welch. Lewiston, NY: Confluence, 1986. Momaday, N. Scott. House Made of Dawn. New York: Harper and Row, 1968. ———. The Way to Rainy Mountain. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969. Moore, David L. “Sherman Alexie.” In The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature. Joy Porter and Kenneth M. Roemer, eds. New York: Cambridge, 2005; 397–410.

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NEW AGE LITERATURE Murray, David. “Translation and Mediation.” In The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature. Joy Porter and Kenneth M. Roemer, eds. New York: Cambridge, 2005; 69–83. Porter, Joy, and Kenneth M. Roemer. The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature. New York: Cambridge, 2005. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin, 1977. ———. Storyteller. Boston: Little, Brown, 1981. Tall Mountain, Mary. “The Last Wolf.” In Listen to the Night: Poems to the Animal Spirits of Mother Earth. Ben Clarke, ed. San Francisco: Freedom Voices, 1995. Vizenor, Gerald. Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart. Saint Paul, MN: Truck Press, 1978. ———. Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981. ———. “Feral Lasers.” Landfill Meditation: Crossblood Stories. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1991. Walters, Anna Lee. Ghost Singer. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988. Welch, James. Heartsong. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2001.

Further Reading Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon, 1986; Lundquest, Suzanne Eversten. Native American Literatures: An Introduction. New York: Continuum, 2004; Native American Authors Project (Internet Public Library), www.ipl.org/div/natam/; Owens, Louis. Other Destinies: Understanding the Native American Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992; Rainwater, Catherine. Dreams of Fiery Stars: The Transformations of Native American Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999; Storytellers: Native American Authors Online, www.hanksville.org/storytellers/index.html; Vizenor, Gerald, ed. Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989; Wong, Hertha D. Sweet. Sending My Heart Back Across the Years: Tradition and Innovation in Native American Autobiography. New York: Oxford, 1992.

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NEW AGE LITERATURE Definition. “Faith is universal. Our specific methods for understanding it are arbitrary. Some of us pray to Jesus, some of us go to Mecca, some of us study subatomic particles. In the end, we are all just searching for truth, that which is greater than ourselves,” says Vittoria Vetra in Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons (Brown, 2000, 110). In this quote, Brown encapsulates New Age ideology. In order to discuss New Age literature, it is first necessary to understand key concepts of the movement that sparked the literature. The predominating concern is the healing of the self, others, and the planet through the raising or expanding of spiritual consciousness. The holistic healing and personal transformation movements were some of the very earliest manifestations of the present-day New Age. Late in the twentieth century, alternative healers began incorporating Eastern healing traditions. Along with Eastern healing traditions come Eastern spiritual beliefs, including chakras (the seven key energy centers in the body), karma, reincarnation, meditation, and yoga. In addition to incorporating Eastern spirituality, the New Age draws upon and often blends ancient forms of knowledge from many paths. It’s not at all unusual to find an author illustrating a principle by blending Christian, shamanic, and other metaphysical traditions. Creating your own reality is another major component: the theory that human beings are co-creators with a Higher Power or the Universe, and, therefore divine,

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that what we focus on, we bring into being. Certain interpretations of quantum physics seem to support this idea of mind manipulating matter. Another path to spiritual consciousness is in the channeling of either deceased loved ones or evolved entities who wish to bring knowledge of spiritual truth to the human race. This technique has been utilized from Edgar Cayce to Sylvia Browne. Two main complications arise when trying to define New Age literature. The first is that two epochs have been assigned the term “New Age.” The term was originally coined by Alice Bailey, a channeler, in the 1920s. A later incarnation grew in strength in the 1980s but had its roots in the revolutionary atmosphere of the late 1960s. In Not Necessarily the New Age, J. Gordon Melton, author of several authoritative works on the New Age, and on religion, writes a fascinating essay linking the modern-day New Age Movement back to Frank Anton Mesmer’s principles, Transcendentalism, Spiritualism, The New Thought Movement, the Theosophical Society, and more (Basil, 1998, 35). For the purposes of this entry, we will concentrate on the latter period, mentioning the older wave inasmuch as it pertains to its influence on the present-day New Age literature. History. Though the genre is purported to have sprung up in the 1980s with the cultural upheaval of the 1960s having played a significant role, most of the basics were established in the eighteenth-century religious/spiritual search. In fact, in a recent article, Doreen Virtue, author of several books about angels, and a holder of a PhD in Counseling Psychology, attributes many of the ideas in her new book, DIVINE MAGIC: Seven Sacred Secrets of Manifestation (2006) to a 1908 book, Kybalion (Evolve, 6.1, 4). However, to reach that far back into history is beyond the scope of this entry. We’ll begin in the 1960s, when much of the population was ripe for exploration into a redefinition of values in the wake of the Vietnam War, the draft, and mistrust of the government, and was questioning the validity of the then-current social norms in the midst of civil rights, women’s, and other movements. Society was ready for a broader definition of truth. Almost synchronistically, [Asian immigration] barriers were lowered in 1965. In the late sixties and early seventies, a new wave of Indian gurus found a receptive audience among young Americans seeking religious inspiration from nontraditional sources . . . This spiritual subculture, which was in many ways the successor movement to the counterculture of the sixties, led directly to the New Age Movement of the eighties. (Diem, 1992, 48)

In addition, information was easily disseminated. Susan Love Brown reminds us that the Baby Boomers were the “first generation to be affected by television” and were “also a highly educated generation—nine out of every ten graduated from high school and half have attended college . . . more than twice as educated as their parents” (Brown, 1992, 91). Some credit the countercultures’ experimentation with drugs as one avenue to expand consciousness. While that was certainly true in the 1960s, Basil, in his introduction to Not Necessarily the New Age, detects a shift. “Today, however, the key to enlightenment isn’t dope—according to many New Age magazines, such a key is more likely to be raw vegetables.” About attending the 1987 Harmonic Convergence celebration at Niagara Falls, he states, “Although there were

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more than a thousand people [there] for instance, I smelled no pot, only incense” (Basil, 1998, 27). Three of the most visible authors from the 1970s to 1980s era are Richard Bach, Jane Roberts, and Shirley MacLaine, and Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull is one of the most well-known stories. The classic 1970 allegory is told much like a parable. Instead of being interested in flying only as it facilitates the getting of food (read: the pursuit of material success), our seagull is determined to reach beyond the ordinary, to fly for the joy of flying and for the joy of perfecting his flight. He yearns to show all gulls that “Instead of slogging forth and back to the fishing boats, there is a reason to live! We can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can be free! We can learn to fly!” (Bach, 1970, 27). Because of his disregard for tradition, the Elders banish him. Alone, he increases his flying skills until he encounters two shining seagulls who take him to a new land that he thinks is heaven, but soon he finds out is another level of existence on his climb to perfection. Here, the idea of reincarnation enters. He finds very few other gulls there because, he is told, most gulls have to live “thousands or even tens of thousands of ordinary lives” before they achieve the level he has (Bach, 1970, 55). He essentially becomes an ascended master and returns to earth to teach others that “We are free. When we are our true selves, there are no limitations” (Bach, 1970, 82). This is the message of so much of New Age literature, that there are no limitations. When Jonathan Seagull ascends to the next level, he leaves Fletcher, his apprentice, to teach the students. Near the end of the tale, Fletcher tells them, “To begin, . . . you’ve got to understand that a seagull is an unlimited idea, an image of the Great Gull, and your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip, is nothing more than a thought itself.” From here we launch into another major phenomenon of New Age literature— the series of Seth books. Seth, an entity channeled by Jane Roberts, teaches much of what will later abound in New Age literature. Creating one’s own reality by manipulating matter through thought is his most prominent theme in both The Seth Material (1970) and Seth Speaks (1972). Seth says, “We form the physical world as unselfconsciously as we breathe. . . . Our bodies are the materialization of what we think we are. We are all creators, then, and this world is our joint creation” (Roberts, 1970, 112). Also, he talks about reincarnation: I write this book though the auspices of a women of whom I have become quite fond. To others it seems strange that I address her as “Ruburt,” and “him,” but the fact is I have known her in other times and places, by other names. She has been both man and woman, and the entire identity who has lived these separate lives can be designated by the name of Ruburt. (Roberts, 1972, 3)

These three things, then—being creators of reality, reincarnation, and having a Being larger than the one manifested in the current incarnation—along with channeling, form the core of New Age ideology. Someone who brought these ideas to the public in a highly visible way was the already-famous actress and dancer, Shirley MacLaine, when the mini-series based on her book Out on a Limb was televised. In her series of autobiographical books in the 1980s, including Out on a Limb (1983) and Dancing in the Light (1986),

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TRENDS AND THEMES As James R. Lewis states, “When studying an amorphous movement like the new age, one almost always has difficulties deciding where the phenomenon begins and ends . . .” (Lewis and Melton, 1992, 1). The same problem applies to the literature of the movement, since many of the works that can be categorized as New Age fit equally well under other headings. Do self-help manuals that tell us that in order to change our luck we will have to change our way of thinking belong to the realm of the New Age or to the field of psychology? If they say instead we have to change our way of believing, do they then fall under metaphysics?

MacLaine recounts her own spiritual search, including her friend Kevin Ryerson the channeler, out-of-body experiences, past lives, even traveling to a South American city to spot UFOs. Her new work, The Camino: A Journey of Spirit, is described as her pilgrimage “called the Santiago de Compostela Camino across northern Spain.” It is “a nearly 500 mile-trek across highways, mountains, cities and fields.” “Through a range of astonishing and liberating visions and revelations, Shirley saw into the meaning of the cosmos, including the secrets of the ancient civilizations of Atlantis and Lemuria, insights into human genesis, the essence of gender as sexuality, and the true path to higher love” (shirleymaclaine.com). Whenever we read that a person can change his/her health or quality of life by changing the focus of his/her thoughts—that thoughts are simply a form of energy from which matter (or reality) is formed—we can be confident that, at least loosely, what we are reading will qualify as New Age. Often instructional manuals for anything from increasing creativity to developing psychic powers, the genre covers anything from variations on traditional Christianity to Buddhist and Hindu beliefs. Native American spirituality and healing methods are often linked to New Age, as are elements of Wicca. Jungian psychology is drawn from in books on synchronicity, and the literature also takes the form of autobiographies of psychics. Therefore the majority of New Age literature falls under the non-fiction category. However, novelists like Dan Brown, James Redfield, and Richard Bach take these non-fiction concepts and transform them into some engrossing fiction. Some would even include twelve-step literature. The New Age Encyclopedia points out that its religious affirmations are the type that tends to appeal to New Agers. For example, there is an AA custom of referring to one’s “Higher Power” rather than to “God” and of insisting that members are free to define their “Higher Power” in any way that they choose (Melton, 1990, 469). A common thread that flows through the literature can be found as early as the 1970 book The Seth Material. Seth, a disembodied entity channeled by Jane Roberts, states, “In reality you project your own energy out to form the physical world” (Roberts, 1970, 3). This concept is reiterated in the most recent popular books and movies What the Bleep Do We Know and The Secret. These ideas have become so mainstream that the movies can be found on the shelves of rural video stores and on Internet movie clubs such as Netflix. A host of messages from channeled entities can now be accessed as easily as doing a simple Google search. Major networks carry shows featuring psychics, such as Montel Williams with Sylvia Browne. Other psychics, including James Van Praagh, appear regularly on major television shows, and Echo Bodine has her own radio show.

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Context and Issues. The need for spirituality has always existed. Many people find this new form more inclusive and less discriminatory. Like Wicca, New Age addresses, includes, and empowers women, where the church and other maledominated traditions often had not. Ehud Sperling, president of Inner Traditions/Bear and Company publishing, says: What makes the Da Vinci Code exciting . . . isn’t the character development or even the setting, it’s the whole mystery and magic around a reinterpretation of the Christian mythos. There’s a real thirst and a hunger in our society today for a different story around Christianity. (Kalye, 2004, 36)

Judith Rosen’s Publishers Weekly article, “Casting a Wider Spell,” quotes Katie McMillan, publicity manager for Inner Ocean Publishing: “Let’s face it, between the war, terrorism, and the economy, people are dealing with issues they may not have ever had to deal with before, and they are looking for the tools that will help them” (Rosen, 2003). The upside of all of this is that New Age spirituality and the literature that accompanies it do fill a need for spirituality for some who can not find it in traditional establishments, and can enhance the spirituality of others who do fit within mainstream religion. The downside is that, like anything, there are charlatans. Frauds existed in the Spiritualism era and still do. This is not to debunk all New Age practitioners. People willing to take advantage of the gullible abound in all walks of life, from used car sales to politics. “There’s no arguing the fact that for every legitimate, gifted, honest psychic who’s ever existed, there have been thousands and thousands of frauds,” says Sylvia Browne (Browne, 2006, 11). Reception. How is all this received by the “mainstream” public? Many people are comforted by this more inclusive spirituality. That fact is proven by the mere sales numbers of such books and movies. On the other hand, though, there’s sentiment by some on the Native American side that whites are ripping off their spiritual practices just like they did their land. Their ways are sacred and not to be “sold.” Many Wiccans and Neo-Pagans look down on some of the New Age gurus, viewing them as more concerned with money-making than spirituality. Also, there of course will always be those who insist that others not following the tenets of the religion they themselves follow are worshipping Satan. As far as the desire for this knowledge by the general public, sales speak for themselves. Judith Rosen again quotes Katie McMillan: “New Age is no longer becoming mainstream; it is mainstream . . .” (Rosen, 2003). “‘New Age titles are still the cash cow,’ says Hay House publicity director Jacqui Clark. ‘The main difference these days is that New Age has moved into the mainstream market with sales to Target, Walmart and Costco as the norm . . .’” (Rosen, 2003). Others have found it less popular. The New Age Encyclopedia has found that “Neo-Pagan Witches [ . . . ] operate with an ethic that forbids them to accept money for initiating or training anyone in the essential practices of the Craft as a religion. [ . . . ] As a result of this ethic, Neo-Pagans look upon the psychic fairs and New Age expos with open contempt, and consider most New Age gurus to be moneyhungry frauds who are exploiting the public by charging exorbitant fees for spiritual practices that can be learned for free within a Neo-Pagan coven.” (There are, nevertheless, a few Neo-Pagan Witches who consider themselves to be part of the New Age Movement as well.) (Melton, 314)

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Lisa Aldred explains the stance taken by many Native Americans: “By far, the biggest business in New Age appropriation of indigenous spirituality transpires in the publishing industry where plastic medicine men authors are big sellers.” About titles by Mary Summer Rain and Lynn V. Andrews, she says, “Native American activists have greatly castigated these works for their trivialization of Native American spirituality” (American Indian Quarterly 24.3, 2000). Within the Catholic community, articles can be found either denouncing the movement as a whole, or somewhat accepting it, and making an effort to understand. “The Devil has much to gain from a witch hunt,” says Stratford Caldecott in Catholic Culture (June 26, 2002). In this article, the author takes a somewhat amiable stance in attempting to quell the fears Catholics and others may have about New Age beliefs. Instead of demonizing these New Age beliefs, the writer urges the reader to look upon them as an honest quest to connect to the divine. Caldecott calls upon Catholics and the church to rather examine the church from within to discover what it is that needs to be addressed as far as why so many people are looking for something more or different. The April 2007 issue of The Sun features an interview by Diane Covington with John O’Donohue, a poet, philosopher, and former priest. In answer to Covington’s questions, he states: There is a fierce hunger for spirit at the heart of an American culture that has lost all belief in the old language about God. New Age spirituality is rising up to try to fill the gap. I do not wish to criticize any system which can nourish people’s spirits, but I find that a lot of New Age writing cherry picks the attractive bits from the ancient traditions and makes collages of them; it usually excises the ascetic dimension. In general it is not rigorously thought out, but is what I would call ‘soft’ thinking. (Covington, 2007, 5–6)

Others denounce New Age thought as a trick of Satan. On the Web site BibleProbe, Steve Keohane reviews Texe Marrs’s Ravaged by the New Age, calling it “a shocking expose of the New Age occultism . . . snatching up our innocent children in its rotten net. It also reveals the hidden plan of New Age leaders to bring our teenagers into hideous bondage through Satan worship and witchcraft” (Keohane). All in all, this surging interest in redefining spirituality might be best summed up in the words of a The Da Vinci Code character: It is the beauty and wonderment that serve our souls, not the Grail itself. The beauty of the grail lies in her ethereal nature . . . For some, the Grail is a chalice that will bring them everlasting life. For others, it is the quest for lost documents and secret history. And for most, I suspect, the Holy Grail is simply a grand idea . . . A glorious unattainable treasure that somehow, even in today’s chaos, inspires us. (Brown, 2003, 444)

Selected Authors Mind/Body/Spirit Connection. The mind/body/spirit connection is based on the idea that physical illness is only a symptom of some underlying emotional or spiritual “dis-ease.” Practitioners work on the entire being to heal, hence the term “holistic.” Furthermore, curing and healing are not the same thing. Curing only eliminates

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symptoms, and not permanently, since the underlying spiritual cause has not been addressed. Deepak Chopra is one of the leading proponents of this idea. Chopra, winner of the Einstein award through Albert Einstein college of Medicine, “is one of the best known and widely respected leaders in the field of mind/body medicine in the world today,” hailed by Time Magazine as “one of the top one hundred heroes and icons of the twentieth century” (enlightenment). Chopra, author of approximately 40 books, most having to do with the connection between healing and spirituality, explains much of his thinking from a Hindu or Buddhist perception, though other spiritual traditions are also employed to make his points. Being a medical doctor, he approaches his information from a scientific standpoint. Early in The Book of Secrets (2004), he introduces us to a concept called “cell wisdom.” He declares that cells of the body possess a form of intelligence: Ten years ago it would have been absurd to speak of intestines being intelligent . . . Now it turns out that the intestines are not so lowly after all. The scattered nerve cells form a finely tuned system for reacting to outside events—an upsetting remark at work, the threat of danger, a death in the family. The stomach’s reactions are just as reliable as the brain’s thoughts, and just as intricate. Your colon, your liver and your stomach cells also think, only not in the brain’s verbal language. What people had been calling a “gut reaction” turned out to be a mere hint of the complex intelligence at work in a hundred thousand billion cells. (Chopra, 2004, 7)

In a nutshell, thoughts affect the physical body, causing illness or health. Sylvia Browne, world-renown psychic and author of 115 volumes on psychic phenomenon, explains in The Other Side and Back (2000), the power of the mind to manifest things in the physical body: Under hypnosis—when the subconscious mind is in charge—if you’re told that the hypnotist’s finger is a white-hot poker, and the hypnotist touches you with that finger, a blister will form where you were touched. The body doesn’t intervene and say, ‘Hold it, you can’t fool me, I can’t be burned with a finger.’ It hears ‘white-hot poker’ and responds appropriately. (Browne, 2000, 94)

Create Your Own Reality. In an essay titled “The Magical Staff: Quantum Healing in the New Age,” Catherine L. Albanese explains the principles of quantum physics as they relate to healing and the formation of reality, referring to Einstein’s discoveries: At the subatomic level, matter—as it turned out—was not nearly so solid as it first appeared. If light could act like waves in some ways and like particles in others, electrons had become microchameleons. Matter dissolved into energy and then reconfigured itself as matter. (Albanese, 1992, 72)

The curiosity about quantum physics has become so widespread that a film entitled What the Bleep do We Know? (2005) is popular enough to be an item on video store shelves. The visually stunning film has Marlee Matlin as Amanda, a recently divorced woman betrayed by her husband, walk through ideas of quantum physics. Interspersed with the action are interview-type sequences with prominent scientists, theologians, psychologist, and the entity Ramtha channeled through J.Z. Knight. In addition, animation aids in illustrating concepts. Some interesting things about cell

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wisdom and thoughts affecting health are demonstrated in a scene where the main character, a photographer, is assigned to photograph a wedding, a distasteful job to her because of her previous experience with marriage. Animated cell-creatures appear on the screen to demonstrate what happens inside the body when various person’s addictions to feeling are aroused: sex, anger, and overeating. Dr. Joe Dispenza, who holds post-graduate degrees in physiology, neurochemistry, and neuro-physiology, states: Nerve cells that fire together wire together. If you practice something over and over, those nerve cells have a long-term relationship. If you get angry on a daily basis, if you get frustrated on a daily basis, if you suffer on a daily basis, if you give reasons for victimization in your life, you’re rewiring and integrating that neuro-net on a daily basis and that neuro-net has a long-term relationship with all those other nerve cells called an identity.

Hope is offered, though. Dispenza goes on to say, “ . . . nerve cells that don’t fire together no longer wire together.” Therefore, it again comes down to the power of thought and what the individual focuses on—or in this case, refuses to focus on. In a subway scene, Amanda comes upon a demonstration complete with tour guide on Emoto Masaru’s photographs of water molecules. The first molecule is untouched and quite shapeless. The second has been blessed by a Zen Buddhist Monk, and the third was kept in a bottle onto which Masaru had simply taped a label saying “Thank you.” These display a strikingly lovely, symmetrical quality. However, the last water molecule, labeled “You make me sick. I want to kill you”, is hideous. The point of this sequence arrives when a stranger turns to her and says, “It makes you think, doesn’t it? If our thoughts can do that to water, what do you think our thoughts can do to us?” This is the lesson Amanda learns by the end of the movie. Drips of water from the bathroom faucet cause her to remember his words at a time when she is looking in a mirror and saying “I hate you,” to herself. Realizing what her thoughts have done to her, she consciously changes her focus and is happy and self-accepting as the film closes. One reviewer commented that the movie “has the corny, ham-handed feel of an old 16 mm educational film” (Monaghan). Jean Lowerison, however, in her review for San Diego Metropolitan Magazine praises it as “a great discussion starter, and it’s a pleasure to find a film that actually requires gray matter participation” (Lowerison). Australian filmmaker Rhonda Byrne talked to Evolve! magazine about the process of creating the film and book The Secret. She “stumbled upon The Secret in a hundred year old book her daughter gave her” and in an excerpt from chapter four, Byrne cites gratitude as the single most powerful tool to bring about abundance. She quotes Dr. Joe Vitale, a metaphysician: It is impossible to bring more into your life if you are feeling ungrateful about what you have. Why? Because these thoughts and feelings you emit as you feel ungrateful are all negative emotions. . . . Those feelings cannot bring you what you want. They can only return what you do not want. Those negative emotions are blocking your own good coming to you. (Evolve!, 6.1, 10)

Vitale states this in the film, as well. This work is an unusual case in which the movie came out before the book. At first the DVD was available only through the Internet, then it became possible to purchase it through book clubs. In 2006, The Secret was released in CD and book form (Evolve, 6.1, 10).

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The Secret (2006), we find out, is the Law of Attraction. The film puts forth the idea that the Universe is like a giant genie, saying “Your wish is my command.” That genie doesn’t make any distinction between negative or positive, it just grants whatever a person is focusing on, whether it’s poverty or wealth. This film also states that what we focus our thoughts on we bring into being. However, The Secret takes it a step farther and says it’s what we focus our feelings on as well. While we might think positive thoughts on the surface, if feelings of fear or negativity are stronger underneath the surface, thoughts will not be enough. This film depends on such notables as Dr. John Hagelin and Fred Alan Wolf, the Reverend Michael Beckwith, Esther Hicks (Ask and It is Given), John Proctor, philosopher, Dr. Denis Waitley, psychologist, and others (most played by actors) to illustrate how the Law of Attraction works. Like What the Bleep Do We Know?, dramatizations are used. However, unlike the former film, this film does not depend on animation. The book and film received another boost when The Secret and Byrne were featured on Oprah Winfrey’s television program in 2007. The movie answers the question about why people who think they are focusing on positive thoughts sometimes get no results. Affirmations have to be done correctly. If you say “I will get out of debt,” the word and idea of “debt” exist in the sentence thereby causing you to focus on debt. Instead, the film tells you, you must visualize yourself having things you want. There is a sequence in which a man in pajamas and robe is sitting in his easy chair pretending to drive the new sports car he is wishing for, making corresponding motions of shifting gears and producing sounds of the car revving up. He is so thorough in his visualization that he even remembers to turn around and lock the car with his imaginary remote locking device when he leaves his chair. This is because passion is a force that brings things into existence even faster. Criticisms of this film rise both from other New Age practitioners and from the medical community. Health care providers are concerned that seriously ill persons may try to use positive thinking instead of seeking medical treatment. The overall reception of the book, however, tends to be on the positive side. Rachel Deahl notes in her March 1, 2007 Publishers Weekly article that “Simon and Schuster has placed the biggest reorder in its history . . . Going back to press for two million more copies.” In another Publishers Weekly article, “The Secret Bashing Begins,” Lynn Garrett quips, “you’re nobody in spiritual publishing until other authors start lining up to debunk you,” and lists There is More to “The Secret” by Ed Gungor, The Secret Revealed: Exposing the Truth About the Law of Attraction by Jim Garlow and Rick Marschall, and The Secret of the Secret by Karen Kelly as publications in the works in opposition to The Secret (Garrett, 2007). Variations on Traditional Christianity. Dorren Virtue holds advanced degrees in counseling therapy. Having authored some 22 books on mind, body, and spirit issues, she serves as founding director of Nashville’s WomanKind Psychiatric Hospital. During her career, Virtue has also directed three outpatient psychiatric centers, including, most notably, a center devoted to treating drug and alcohol abuse. Virtue’s Angels 101 offers a comforting message to those who have grown up with what they consider a punishing God. She says that angels, even Archangels, are available to us always and that they love us unconditionally. “The angels will help you with anything and everything . . . there’s nothing too big or too small for them to handle. You needn’t worry about bothering the angels, as they’re unlimited beings

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who can help everyone simultaneously . . . Angels have unlimited time, energy and resources” (Virtue, 2006, x). She goes on to assure readers they don’t have to follow any certain religious path to have access to angels (Virtue, 2006, x–xi). She responds to such inquiries as “Why can’t I hear my angels?” “I’ve asked my angels for help, but nothing seems to happen,” and “Why don’t the angels save everyone, especially innocent children?” Angels and God can’t or won’t violate free will, she explains. This is an important explanation not only in New Age thinking, but in a lot of traditional religious belief as well: If we refuse to follow our guidance, or if we are stuck in having our prayers answered in a certain way, we won’t recognize blessings if they arrive in another form. Also, it seems that we all have a “time” to return home to Heaven, which our souls determine prior to our incarnation (Virtue, 2006, 114–117). This theme, that we create a “blueprint” for our lives before we incarnate on earth, runs through most of the New Age thought, from Seth to Sylvia Browne. Another uplifting thing Virtue asserts is that God and angels know “ . . . while we can grow through suffering, we can grow even faster through peace. And our peacefulness inspires others in a way that suffering cannot” (Virtue, 2006, 121). The Sacred Feminine. The sacred feminine is not a new concept; it is probably one of the oldest concepts existing. The female life-giving force has been honored since the earliest civilizations. It enjoyed a resurgence in the early women’s movement when many women were searching for a spirituality that was personal to them. This quest for the lost feminine is sometimes called the quest for the Holy Grail and is at the center of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code. Like any good mystery, it starts with a murder. Also, like any good mystery, it is jammed with plot twists, danger, and chases. The central mystery, however, is a metaphysical one: It invites the reader to ponder on the idea of the sacred feminine being lost or suppressed by mainstream Christianity. It goes so far as to conjecture that Mary Magdalene was more than a follower of Jesus—she was his wife. The Grail in this case becomes not a vessel from which to drink, but the vessel of Mary’s womb that was carrying the bloodline of Jesus at his crucifixion. The plot: Robert Langdon, a symbologist and art historian, is called in to interpret symbols on the body of murdered Louvre curator Jacques Sauniere and soon finds himself the prime suspect. He connects the symbols to early Goddessworshiping imagery, which would be in keeping with the curator’s research and publications. He is aided in escaping the French police by Sophie Neveu, a cryptologist on the French force, and, it will later be discovered, the estranged granddaughter of Sauniere. The two embark on a quest to find the Holy Grail—the one way to prove Langdon’s innocence—aided by symbols Leonardo da Vinci encoded within his paintings, particularly of The Last Supper. Circumstances cause them to hide in the home of Langdon’s friend, Leigh Teabing, where the idea of the Grail being not a cup but a womb is revealed to Sophie, Teabing claiming the figure seated next to Jesus in The Last Supper was not John, but Mary Magdalene. Langdon and Neveu follow the clues in these paintings in search of documents tracing the genealogy of this bloodline, allegedly protected and kept hidden by the Priory of Sion and the Knights Templar. Meanwhile, another group is just as desperate to find this evidence. In a complicated relationship, a bishop who is the head of Opus Dei, a man he’d

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saved, and an anonymous mastermind called “The Teacher” are in deadly pursuit of our heroes. In the end, the pair find information that confirms the Grail, but not the Grail itself. Though the novel does question the church and religion, and the suppression of female divinity within the church, like every well-structured argument, Brown’s characters concede in many places within the text that religion has done much good in the world. In fact, a main dilemma in the novel is the fear that exposing the document will go farther toward destroying that good than it will in setting other things right. That conflict is not resolved by the end of the novel. Controversy over The Da Vinci Code has spawned at least a dozen books and a few movies. The first film, of course, is the one based on the novel. While filmmakers must necessarily condense a 454-page novel in order to fit it into a one-and-one-half to twohour viewing time, some of the shortcomings are glaring. For instance, the red-eyed albino has the most beautiful bright blue eyes. Opus Dei and the Vatican are grossly misrepresented in the film. In the book, Bishop Aringarosa, head of Opus Dei, is a man with something to lose acting on his own for personal gain—the Vatican has threatened to remove its support from Opus Dei, and he’s going to blackmail the Vatican with the information he hopes to find. The movie makes it appear that the whole of Opus Dei and the whole of the Vatican are behind the four plus murders and a conspiracy. Brown is much kinder to these two entities, making it clear that the villains are acting separately from these two bodies. Of documentaries exploring the ideas in this novel, we’ll confine ourselves to two: Breaking the Da Vinci Code (Grizzly Adams Productions, 2005) and Beyond the Da Vinci Code (History Channel, 2005). The History Channel’s production comes off as the more believable of the two, delving into both sides of the issue and featuring experts that propound various views. Breaking the Da Vinci Code attempts to debunk all of the ideas of Mary Magdalene and the sacred feminine by—basically—nitpicking. This side of the story claims there was no Priory of Sion in 1099; that it wasn’t formed until 1956. However, the History Channel does find evidence for this organization as early as 1099. About Gnosticism, Breaking claims that the Gnostic texts that include Mary Magdalene as an equal to Jesus weren’t written until approximately 300 years after the rest of the Gospels, therefore weren’t important. Beyond the Da Vinci Code disagrees, saying the Gnostic Gospels were contemporary with the Gospels found in the modern-day Bible—they just weren’t found until years later. The reason for this is that Gnosticism was proclaimed a heresy and followers felt compelled to hide any evidence of their beliefs. Also, Breaking tries to defend its side of the controversy by saying that books weren’t eliminated from the New Testament at the Council of Nicea. A moot point—Brown got his dates wrong, but that does not disprove the sacred feminine a part of early Christianity. The fact remains that gospels were eliminated from the New Testament about half a century later and the Gnostic texts were indeed among those. Art historians, though, back up one aspect of debunking the da Vinci conspiracy of couching pagan symbolism in his art, as well as painting Mary instead of John at the right hand of Jesus. In journals of Leonardo da Vinci, they say, can be found notes on his strict adherence to compositional techniques. Also, that he painted many of his younger male subjects looking feminine to emphasize their extreme youth. For instance, the fact that some of these figures do not have beards is because they are as yet too young to grow them. A point well taken. The paintings of The Last Supper shown in any

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of these three movies show Jesus himself with a face as feminine-looking as John’s (or Mary’s). A major theme in the New Age thriller, Angels and Demons (2000), Dan Brown’s “prequel” to his Da Vinci Code, is science versus religion. Father Vetra, a Catholic priest and quantum physicist, attempts to reconcile God (religion) and science. He’s used a particle accelerator in order to isolate the smallest particle into light/photons, recreates the Big Bang and creates matter (actually, antimatter) with this energy. He believes that he’s proved the existence of God with his experiments—connecting to two New Age themes: that we are co-creators with God, and the theory that matter is energy. Unfortunately, he’s found dead at the opening of the novel. Branded into his chest is the word Illuminati, the name of a secret society of scientists formed around the time of Galileo to safely discuss scientific matters labeled as heresy by the church. An assassin, who believes he’s a descendant of one of the Illuminati’s number, steals this canister of antimatter for purposes of destroying the Catholic Church. (If the antimatter comes into contact with matter, there will be an explosion that will destroy nine city blocks.) This time the artist whose clues Langdon follows is Bernini, the sculptor’s statues pointing the way across Rome to the ancient Illuminati lair that Langdon and his lovely young acquaintance—again the daughter of the murder victim—must find to capture the mastermind of the plot and retrieve the antimatter before a timer goes off. Ancient arcane symbols of the Illuminati and its offspring—the Masons—are what Langdon and Vittoria Vetra must decode before they even discover that they need to follow the statues. Channeling. Echo Bodine and Sylvia Browne are psychics who extend very similar messages. Both write books not only to explain psychic phenomena, but also to teach readers how to develop their own psychic talents, often called channeling. They have so much in common, in fact, that Browne is one of the persons Bodine lists in her dedication in The Gift. At the age of 17, Echo Bodine learned that she had psychic powers, as well as innate gift for healing. “Echo Bodine discovered at age 17 that she has psychic powers and the gift of healing” (New World Library). She’s appeared on Sally Jesse Raphael, Sightings, Encounters, and other national TV shows and even as the cover story for an April 1992 issue of Corporate Report (New World Library). Bodine, author of eight books on psychic phenomenon, was recently featured along with other psychics in Minneapolis’ New Age newspaper Edge Life, giving predictions for 2007. Here is part of what she had to say: It seems to be a year of resolution in many areas, and it has to do with finding a whole new way of approaching things. We’ve heard a lot about the feminine energy these last few years and I see it being more noticeable than ever before in the new year. Women and men both will be using their intuition. We’ve come to see that our intellect alone can’t bring about the changes we need. I’ve seen an obvious movement in the last five years to get people to pay more attention to the still small voice within and we’re going to be reaping rewards from that in this new year. It’s the new order of things. (Edge Life, Jan. 2007, 14)

Bodine tells us in The Key (2002) that there are four types of psychic awareness: clairvoyance, the ability to see the future or spirits; clairaudience, the ability to hear the unseen; clairsentience, being able to feel presences or people’s auras; and clairgustance, the ability to smell such things (10). Bodine makes a distinction between

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ghosts and spirits, claiming that ghosts prefer to hold on to their former lives and identity. Many are filled with self-pity, anger, resentments, fear, or self-loathing. Often they are afraid to go into the light after death for fear of punishment for what they’ve done in this life, or because they are attached to certain people or locations they don’t wish to leave. Also she states possession is possible, especially by ghosts of people that were alcohol or drug addicted in life. They like to take over the bodies of living alcoholics or addicts to feel the high. Spirits, however, are evolved beings that come to earth to guide us. They may be departed family members, or they may be other entities whose work on the other side is to help those on the earth-plane (Bodine, 2002). Sylvia Browne agrees with the spirit guide concept, and she has much the same to say about ghosts. Possession, however, she denies vehemently as “a physical and spiritual impossibility” (Browne, 2006, 92). Like most New Age adherents, both Bodine and Browne believe that we’ve all lived before and that those past lives can affect us in this life. As in many traditional religions, the belief is that the individual returns to earth again and again to learn, and to perfect spiritually. Browne, however, discusses reincarnation in every one of her books. She asserts that we incarnate on earth in order to experience and overcome negativity. The subject is treated in depth in the 2001 title Past Lives, Future Healing. She recounts case histories in which events in past lives have affected persons in the present incarnation. For instance, in one such chapter, she tells the story of Camille, who came to Browne for help with chronic lower back and hip pain. Sylvia regressed Camille to a past life in 1851 in which she was traveling by covered wagon and the train was attacked by a hostile tribe. “Arrows pierced Camille’s lower back and ‘left hip.’” In another life, the same woman was thrown from a horse and “her hip and lower spine were shattered . . .” (Browne, 2001, 160). Her 2006 book Insight: Case Files from the Psychic World is a summation of her 50 years working as a psychic. Born on October 19, 1936, in Kansas City, Missouri, she had her first psychic vision when she was three, and met her spirit guide, Francine, when she was eight. This was terrifying to Browne, but her grandmother, Ada Coil, was also psychic and guided Sylvia to make use of her gift. During her college years she feared that these voices she heard from Francine and other spirits proved she was schizophrenic. She says that a psychiatrist diagnosed her as not schizophrenic but psychic. She started a teaching career at the age of 19, but later became a full-time psychic reader (Browne, 2006, 17–24). Browne describes heaven in The Other Side and Back (2000) as “A breathtaking infinity of mountains, and oceans, and vast gardens and forests . . . The landscape with brilliant design and variety . . . temples, concert halls, courtyards, sports arenas . . . and homes to meet every presence’s personal preference” (Browne, 2000, 5). Criticisms arise from many quarters, especially from James Randi, a stage magician, and Robert Lancaster, whose Web sites James Randi Educational Foundation www.randi.org/ and StopSylviaBrowne.com (respectively) are devoted to disproving Sylvia Browne’s psychic claims. Browne has 115 titles to her credit, including audio books and translations of her works. She also advances the cause of the female principle, devoting a book apiece to Mother God and Father God. Expanding Consciousness—Maximizing Human Potential. Another author who successfully employed fiction to convey spiritual messages is James Redfield, whose contributions to environmental and humanitarian causes is extensive, and has resulted in Humanitarian of the Year awards from Habitat for Humanity and the

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International New Thought Alliance, and in Wisdom Media Group’s Worldview Award (enlightenment). His Celestine Prophecy (1993) is a fictional search in South America for some scrolls that are legended to hold nine important spiritual insights. Similar to the later Da Vinci Code, these insights are so valued that many will kill for them. The lead character hears about these manuscripts and travels to Peru to search for them in a story in which spiritual insights are constantly revealed. Synchronicity continually pops up—beginning with affordable airline tickets. Throughout his journey, revelations abound and he begins to see through the fabric of existence. Redfield’s gone on to write other such tales, including The Tenth Insight (1996) and The Secret of Shambala (1999). Then, in 2002 he teamed up with Michael Murphy, a founder of the Esalen New Age community in California and author of Golf in the Kingdom, and documentary filmmaker Sylvia Timbers to pen God and the Evolving Universe. Their purpose can be best summed up thus: For millennia, poets have envisioned times and places in which people lived with joyous accord. Philosophers have long dreamt of good societies. And activists in many fields have embodied such dreams in programs for creative cultural change. We believe that the aspiration for social transformation implicit in such visions and activities is essential to the greater life pressing to be born in us. Our ego-transcendent nature, our larger self, has a fundamental urge to help further the world’s advance. This drive, this call, has long been expressed in the dreams of humankind. (Redfield, Murphy, and Timbers, 2002, 157)

One message of this book, along with Deepak Chopra’s The Book of Secrets and Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth, is that in order to experience creation to the fullest, and to actualize a heaven on earth, we must transcend the ego and operate from the pure Being that is behind the ego. Here, ego is not equal to conceit. Ego is a false but very necessary self the soul must don in order to maneuver on the physical plane. However, separation generates the feelings of envy, anger, and fear that lead to war and atrocities when individuals conceive of the ego as being the true and only self. In fact, they all warn us that the planet is in such dire straits that humankind must evolve or die. Evolution is recounted in God and the Evolving Universe from the Big Bang, through animal and human evolution, to the evolutions of art, philosophy, religions, and societies, and the authors say it all culminates in evolution of spirit. Similar concerns are voiced in Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth (2005). Tolle espouses being present in the moment. Tolle, in A New Earth, explains how the ego comes into being. The ego attaches itself to and therefore identifies with “things.” When a young child learns that a sequence of sounds produced by the parents’ vocal cords is his or her name, the child begins to equate a word, which in the mind becomes a thought, with who he or she is. At that stage, some children refer to themselves in the third person. ‘Johnny is hungry.’ Soon after, they learn the magic word ‘I’ and equate it with their name, which they have already equated with who they are. Then other thoughts come and merge with the original I-thought. The next step are thoughts of me and mine to designate things that are somehow a part of ‘I.’ This identification with objects, which means investing things, but ultimately thoughts that represent things, with a sense of self, thereby deriving an identity from them.

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NEW AGE LITERATURE When ‘my’ toy breaks or is taken away, intense suffering arises. Not because of any intrinsic value the toy has . . . but because of the thought of ‘mine.’ The toy becomes part of the child’s developing sense of self of ‘I.’ . . . My toy later becomes my car, my house, my clothes and so on. I try to find myself in things but never quite make it and end up losing myself in them. This is the fate of ego. (Tolle, 2005, 35)

He explains the pain-body, the painful emotions carried since childhood, and demonstrates that it is not the emotions alone that are carried and block pure Presence in each moment, but the thoughts that accompany and shape the emotion. The pain-body, he says, becomes addicted to the chemicals that emotion and thought produce, and, usually totally unaware, persons draw negative situations to themselves to feed the pain-body’s addiction. He blames identification with “things” (which include thought patterns) for all the wars, atrocities, and damage to the environment that has been perpetrated. Not only do we identify with objects, but we can also identify with a group, religion, nation, or cause. That in itself is not a bad thing, but the idea of making “me” right and “you” wrong is an identity the ego can attach to and feel the need to strengthen. His ideas about ego have much in common with Chopra’s; it is a false self, one necessary for survival in a physical existence. Chopra tells us: The ego, we are told, blinds us with its constant demands, its greed, selfishness and insecurity. That is a common theme but a mistaken one, because throwing the ego into the dark, making it an enemy, only creates more division and fragmentation. If there is one reality, it must be all-inclusive. The ego can’t be thrown out any more than desire can be thrown out. (Chopra, 2004, 25)

Bibliography Albanese, Catherine L. The Magical Staff: Quantum Healing in the New Age. In Perspectives on the New Age. James A. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton, eds. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992. Aldred, Lisa. “Plastic Shamans and Astroturf Sun Dances: New Age Commercialization of Native American Spirituality.” American Indian Quarterly 24.3 http://www.demo/ american_indian_quarterly (2000). Bach, Richard. Jonathan Livingston Seagull. New York: Macmillan, 1970. Basil, Robert. Introduction. In Not Necessarily the New Age. Robert Basil, ed. New York: Prometheus, 1988. Beyond the Da Vinci Code, DVD. History Channel. A&E Entertainment. 2005. Breaking the Da Vinci Code, DVD, directed by David Priest. Grizzly Adams Productions. 2005. Brown, Dan. Angels and Demons. New York: Pocket Books, 2000. ________. The Da Vinci Code. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Brown, Susan Love. Baby Boomers, American Character and the New Age: A Synthesis. In Perspectives on the New Age. James A. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton, eds. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992. Browne, Sylvia, and Lindsay Harrison. Insight: Case Files From the Psychic World. New York: Dutton, 2006. ———. The Other Side and Back. New York: Signet, 2000. ———. Past Lives, Future Healing. New York: New American Library, 2001. Browne, Sylvia, and Antoinette May. Adventures of a Psychic. Carlsbad: Hay House, 1990. Byrne, Rhonda. The Secret. New York: Atria Books, 2006.

NEW AGE LITERATURE Caldecott, Stratford. “An Approach to the New Age.” Catholic Culture. Crux Publications Ltd. 26 June 2002. Ebscohost http://www.search.ebscohost.com. Chopra, Deepak. The Book of Secrets. New York: Harmony Books, 2004. Clark, Jerome, and Aidan Kelly. New Age Encyclopedia. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, Inc., 1990. ________. “New Thought and the New Age.” In Perspectives on the New Age. James A. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton, eds. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992. Covington, Diane. “The Unseen Life That Dreams Us.” The Sun. Chapel Hill, NC: The Sun Publishing Company, 2007. Da Vinci Code, The. DVD, directed by Ron Howard. Columbia Pictures and Image Entertainment, 2006. Diem, Andrea Grace. “Imagining India: the Influence of Hinduism on the New Age Movement.” In Perspectives on the New Age. James A. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton, eds. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992. Echo Bodine’s Bio Page. New World Library. www.newworldlibrary.com/client/client_pages/ authorbios/bios/bodine.cfm. Enlightenment. “James Redfield Biography and Resources.” http://www.wie.org.bios. ________. “Deepak Chopra Biography and Resources.” http://www.wie.org.bios. Evolve! “Divine Magic.” Minneapolis, MN: Magus Books, 2007. ________. “The Powerful Process of Gratitude.” Minneapolis, MN: Magus Books, 2007. Freke, Timothy, and Gandy, Peter. Jesus and the Lost Goddess. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001. Garrett, Lynn. “The Secret Bashing Begins.” Publishers Weekly 28 March 2007. http://www.publishersweekly.com. Kayle, Hillary S. “Inner Traditions/Bear and Company Da Vinci Code Redux.” Publishers Weekly 6 September 2004. Ebscohost http://www.search.ebscohost.com. Keohane, Steve. “The Age-Old New Age Movement.” BibleProbe. http://bibleprobe.com/ new_age.htm. Lowerison, Jean. “The Reel Story.” San Diego Metropolitan Magazine April 2007. http://www.sandiegometro.com. Melton, J. Gordon. “A History of the New Age Movement.” In Not Necessarily the New Age. Robert Basil, ed. New York: Prometheus, 1988. Miejan, Tim, ed. Edge Life. Minneapolis, MN: Leap Publications, January 2007. Monaghan, John. Detroit Free Press, in Rotten Tomatoes, 04/10/07. Redfield, James, Michael Murphy, and Silvia Timbers. God and the Evolving Universe. New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 2001. Redfield, James. The Celestine Prophecy. New York: Warner Books, 1993. Roberts, Jane. The Seth Material. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1970. Roberts, Jane. Seth Speaks. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1972. Rosen, Judith. “Casting a Wider Spell.” Publishers Weekly 1 September 2003. http://www.publishersweekly.com The Secret. DVD. Directed by Drew Heriot. Prime Time Productions, 2006. Shirley MacLaine’s official Web site, “The Book the Camino by Shirley,” http://www.shirley maclaine.com Tolle, Eckhart. The Power of Now. Novato: New World Library, 1999. ________. A New Earth. New York: Dutton, 2005. What the Bleep do We Know? DVD, directed by William Arntz, Betsy Chasse, and Mark Vincente. Captured Light Industries and Lord of the Wind Films LLC, 2005.

Further Reading Barrett, Jayme. Feng Shui Your Life. New York: Sterling, 2003; Braden, Gregg. The Isaiah Effect. New York: Harmony Books, 2000; Bradley, Marion Zimmer. The Mists of Avalon. New York: Ballantine, 1984; Browne, Sylvia. Mother God. Carlsbad: Hay House, 2004;

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NEW AGE LITERATURE Chopra, Deepak. Creating Affluence: Wealth Consciousness in the Field of Possibilities. San Rafael: New World Library, 1993; Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade. New York: HarperCollins, 1987; Freke, Timothy, and Gandy, Peter. The Jesus Mysteries. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2000; Gawain, Shakti. Living in the Light. Novato: New World Library, 1998; Myss, Caroline. Anatomy of the Spirit. New York: Harmony Books, 1996; Starhawk and Hillary Valentine. The Twelve Wild Swans. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001; Walsch, Neale Donald. Communion with God. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2000; West, Kate. The Real Witches Craft. London: HarperElement, 2005; Wilson, Colin. From Atlantis to the Sphinx. New York: Fromm International, 1997.

DEBBIE K. TRANTOW

O OCCULT/SUPERNATURAL LITERATURE Definition. Supernatural fiction is a generic term that encompasses a wide range of fields, almost all of which deal with matters that defy science and can be classified as “the unknown.” The phrase “supernatural fiction” has fallen out of common usage in recent years, subsumed within the marketing categories of horror or fantasy, but the categories that make up the field remain popular and easily definable. These include such basic icons as ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and zombies plus those that fall under the more specific term of occult fiction. Since some occult knowledge may have a scientific rationale, the occult may be seen as covering a borderland between the natural and supernatural. It can include those subjects that to the majority of us seem strange, such as fortune-telling or divination, but which to practitioners are completely natural. What distinguishes the natural from the supernatural is often a matter of faith and perception and consequently the borders of the supernatural realm are vague and, to the influential mind, believable. It highlights the facts that those things that may be perceived as supernatural—such as hauntings, visions, curses, or dreams-come-true—may be psychological manifestations and reflections of a tortured, drugged, or demented imagination. All too often in fiction the supernatural and madness form an unholy bond. While supernatural fiction is broad enough to encompass fantasy fiction, by convention the two tend to be kept apart. Supernatural fiction is set in the world we know upon which occult or strange events intrude. Fantasy allows for another world in which stories may be set entirely or in part and which may be governed by rules totally alien to our world. History. The supernatural features in all of the world’s ancient legends, but as the world of ghosts, gods, and demons was a central part of cultural beliefs these tales were simply reflecting an interpretation of the world and were not intended as fiction. These ancient fears of the unknown are deeply inbred and are the basis for the popularity of supernatural fiction. Supernatural manifestations appear in many

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WHAT DOES OCCULT MEAN? The world “occult” comes from the Latin occultus, meaning hidden or concealed, a secret not to be divulged. So while matters occult may still be unknown to many, they are known to a select few. Central to the occult, therefore, is secret knowledge, which may take the form of magic or demonology or witchcraft or other religious beliefs, such as theosophy or obeah.

early works of fiction, such as “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” (c1392) by Geoffrey Chaucer (c1343–1400) or Caesar’s Ghost in Julius Caesar (c1599) by William Shakespeare (c1564–1616), but these were plot devices used as portents and were not central to the plot. We have to wait for the Age of Enlightenment to allow minds to view the supernatural logically and objectively before it can be reintegrated into fiction. During this transition the progenitor of the true ghost story appeared, “A True Relation of the Apparition of Mrs. Veal” (1706) by Daniel Defoe (c1660–1731), an account of an apparent haunting in Canterbury, Kent, in 1705. Defoe’s approach was to render the event in story form and in so doing he set the prototype for many basic ghost stories. Defoe had a fascination for the supernatural and his open-mindedness allowed for a more healthy skepticism of the supernatural, distancing the imagination from belief and allowing more objective research. Investigations of apparent hauntings have remained fundamental to supernatural fiction, most notably in one of the most influential of all Victorian ghost stories, “The Haunted and the Haunters” (1859) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873), which brought together the threads of ghost and occult fiction in a detailed exploration of a haunting in both rational and imaginative terms. Gothic Fiction. That ambivalence between logical skepticism and emotional doubt is what fuels the supernatural tale and led to the eruption of gothic fiction in the late eighteenth century, starting with the success of The Castle of Otranto (1765) by Horace Walpole (1717–1797). His attempt at mock medievalism brought with it all the supernatural trappings of rattling chains, ghostly groans, and spiritual manifestations that remain symbolic of the genre, along with the ghosts being both portents of doom and a substitute for guilt. The gothic mood prevailed for over 40 years and its shadow continued to be cast over the Victorian period, influencing the so-called “penny dreadful” cheap fiction of which Varney the Vampire (1847), attributed to James Malcolm Rymer (1814–1881), is perhaps the most extreme. The gothic atmosphere was ideal for the rise in novels of the occult, where those who dabble in demonology or necromancy suffer the inevitable fate. There was a rash of deal-with-the-devil stories including Vathek, originally An Arabian Tale (1786), by William Beckford (1760–1844) and The Monk (1796) by Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775–1818). While Faust (Part 1, 1808; Part 2, 1832) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) may be the best known deal-with-the-devil story, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Robert Maturin (1780–1824), is the epitome, regarded by Everett Bleiler as “one of the most remarkable novels in English and certainly one of the great classics of supernatural fiction” (Bleiler, 1983, 351). It symbolized the figure of the accursed wanderer, which became adopted into vampire fiction, starting with “The Vampyre” (1819) by John Polidori (1795–1821). This drew upon Polidori’s mentor, Lord Byron, who became the living embodiment of the accursed wanderer, infusing the vampire with the romantic and tragic image that has remained ever since.

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Bulwer Lytton figured strongly in the development of the occult novel, most notably with Zanoni (1842) and A Strange Story (1861). Their significance lies in the degree of detail that Lytton provides, drawn from his own researches into kaballistic and eastern religions. Although both suffer from Lytton’s notoriously excessive prose, they are the prototype of the romantic occult novel which uses genuine knowledge, rather than speculative, as a source for realistic fantasy. Psychological Explorations of the Supernatural. The desire for more realism saw a significant shift in the supernatural tale during the Victorian period from the gothic extravaganza towards subtler psychological explorations. Key to this was the Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873). His early works, such as “The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh” (1838) and “Schalken the Painter” (1839), followed the gothic tradition, but with “The Watcher” in Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (1851) and especially “Green Tea” (1869), Le Fanu raised the question of whether the ghosts, visible only to the victim, are real or imagined and, if the latter, whether they are drug-induced or a prelude to insanity. Le Fanu rightly does not answer these questions, leaving the reader to decide, and as a consequence he created a whole new school of ghost story. Sullivan has called it “a thoroughly modern tale” and in its modernity “unexpectedly daring” (Sullivan, 1978, 12). Charles Dickens (1812–1870) had recognized that ghosts may as likely be a product of the brain than of the spirit world; Scrooge remarks that there is “more of gravy than of grave” about Marley’s ghost in A Christmas Carol (1843), but it was Le Fanu who gave voice to the dilemma. The concept was developed by others, none better than Henry James (1843–1916) in “The Turn of the Screw” (1898). The Golden Age of the Ghost Story. The Victorian age is generally regarded as the Golden Age of the ghost story, encouraged by the growing interest in spiritualism, and though it advanced in the capable hands of Le Fanu and others, the basic story became formulaic. Although there were many talented writers whose stories, individually, are of merit, the overall effect began to pall. Nevertheless the field was notable for the number of women writers who brought characterization and motive to the stories. In Britain these included Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897), Mary Molesworth (1839–1921), Charlotte [Mrs J.H.] Riddell (1832–1906) and, arguably the best of them, Vernon Lee (real name Violet Paget, 1856–1935); plus in America, where the New England ghost story flourished, Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911), Mary Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930) and, the mistress of the ghostly tale, Edith Wharton (1862–1937). In their hands the ghost story moved away, generally, from a tale of warning to tales of helplessness where people are trapped by the past. Memories can evoke a potent haunting, especially of a lost loved one, making the story both poignant and effective. By the end of the Victorian age the old-style ghost story had fallen out of fashion, replaced by a demand for more complex stories displaying a deeper understanding of arcane matters. This took several related forms. The most popular in their day were the spiritualist fantasies of Marie Corelli (1855–1923), starting with A Romance of Two Worlds (1886), which propounded a confusing concept of psychic vision and religious theory but which at the heart dealt with past lives and reincarnation. Along similar lines were the theosophical works of Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891), including her stories in Nightmare Tales (1892), which point to hidden masters and secret doctrines. Linked to this pursuit of arcane knowledge is the antiquarian ghost story. Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936), Dean of King’s College, Cambridge (and later Provost of

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Eton), is generally regarded as the dean of the ghost story, many of which he first recounted to his students and only later collected in Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary (1904) and subsequent volumes. James takes the adage that “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” to frightening extremes in tales that are seldom traditional ghost stories but more often related to ancient evils, once trapped but now released by unwary meddlers. James’s horrors are usually very physical, with plenty of teeth and hair. His approach of a learned or amateur investigator delving into matters best left alone and suffering the consequences proved irresistible to others. Not only was he imitated by fellow antiquarians such as Edmund Gill Swain (1861–1938) and R.H. Malden (1879–1951) but also by his contemporaries, such as the brothers A.C. Benson (1862–1925) and E.F. Benson (1867–1940), and his influence continues today. The Occult Detective. The antiquarian interest also ushered in the dawn of the occult detective, including Van Helsing in Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker (1847–1912), and others in the works of Arthur Machen (1863–1947), Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951), and William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918) with Carnacki the Ghost Finder (1913). Both Machen and Blackwood were students of the occult, and members of the kaballistic Order of the Golden Dawn, along with W.B. Yeats and Aleister Crowley, and they used their knowledge in a remarkable range of fiction. Blackwood, who was a nature mystic, took this further. Stories such as “The Willows” (in The Listener, 1907) and those collected in Pan’s Garden (1912) explore man’s place in the cosmos and his general insignificance against the vast powers of Nature and beyond. Both Blackwood and Machen influenced the American writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937). Over time, Lovecraft developed what has since been called the Cthulhu Mythos, built around the idea that alien god-like entities had once been either banished from Earth or imprisoned here, from where meddling humans or some catastrophe may release them. Lovecraft’s vision is a blending of science fiction concepts with supernaturalism; the latter meaning, as Blackwood also perceived it, that everything is natural, but that humans are limited in their comprehension so that inexplicable events appear to be supernatural. Like M.R. James, Lovecraft’s work was immensely influential. He encouraged fellow writers to contribute to his concept of the Elder Gods, among them Frank Belknap Long (1901–1994), August Derleth (1909–1971), and a young Robert Bloch (1917–1994). It has continued to remain popular throughout the last five decades and even attracted contributions by such literary figures as Colin Wilson (1931–) with The Mind Parasites (1967) as well as influencing such writers as Ramsey Campbell (1946–) and Brian Lumley (1937–). The supernatural story remained popular until the 1930s, especially following the rise of interest in spiritualism after the First World War, with stories by Herbert Russell Wakefield (1888–1964), Leslie Poles Hartley (1895–1972), Walter de la Mare (1873–1956), and Oliver Onions (1873–1961). In “The Beckoning Fair One” (in Widdershins, 1911), Onions created what some regard as “the best classical ghost story” (Bleiler, 1983, 391). Although on the surface a haunted-house story, it deftly portrays how the residuum of an evil personality gradually drains that of the new resident and a new personality emerges. The only spectral manifestations are sounds, so slight as to be imagined, and with commendable restraint Onions creates an atmosphere charged with the supernatural. Supernatural Literature after World War II. The horrors of the Second World War and the rise of commercialism in the 1940s and 1950s led to a waning of interest in the supernatural. Only a few writers persevered in Britain, primarily Dennis Wheatley

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MOVIES AND SUPERNATURAL HORROR FICTION The boom in supernatural horror fiction in the 1970s was encouraged by the cinema, mostly because of the success of Rosemary’s Baby (1967) by Ira Levin (1929–2007), filmed in 1968, and The Exorcist (1971) by William Peter Blatty (1928–), filmed in 1973. These introduced a more violent, physical horror, which made the supernatural more convincing and frightening. It tapped into a mood that had also regenerated interest in fantasy fiction in the late sixties, partly because of the hippie fascination with drugs and alternate religions, but also because of the question of faith at a time when the “God is Dead” movement had taken hold.

(1897–1977) and Robert Aickman (1914–1981). Wheatley’s occult thrillers had started before the war with The Devil Rides Out (1935) and continued through to The Irish Witch (1973). In America authors like H.P. Lovecraft, Frank Belknap Long, Manly Wade Wellman (1903–1986), Robert Bloch, and Ray Bradbury (1920–) had been published in the pulp magazines, notably Weird Tales, but this also ceased in the fifties. Although Wellman continued to write weird fiction during the fifties, along with Joseph Payne Brennan (1918–1990), Charles Beaumont (1929–1967), and Ray Russell (1924–1999), many writers, including Bloch and Bradbury, shifted from supernatural fiction to crime and mystery. The spirit of the supernatural was kept alive chiefly by August Derleth. In partnership with Donald Wandrei (1908–1997), he established a specialty publishing business, Arkham House, which reprinted the best of the classic material and encouraged new work. Stephen King called Derleth “an editor of pure genius” (King, 1981, 284) and the books he produced during the horror drought of the mid-twentieth century were a major source of inspiration for the new generation of writers who emerged in the sixties and seventies. You could not believe solely in evil without also looking for its counterpart, and when, in the 1960s and 1970s, the horrors of the Vietnam War were a daily reminder of the evil that men do, there was some consolation in reading novels of supernatural horror where the evil might be vanquished. There was not only a rash of horror films in the seventies, most notably the sequence starting with The Omen (1976), but there was also a resurgence in supernatural fiction. Blatty believed that “The Exorcist brought a new legitimacy to the field of horror; in publishing and film-making parlance, horror was now profitable” (Winter, 1990, 62). Several authors emerging at that time were ideally placed and equipped to take advantage of this revival, among them Stephen King (1947–), Peter Straub (1943–), Dean Koontz (1945–), and Anne Rice (1941–) and their work, and those of their imitators and colleagues, not only dominated the horror boom of the next 20 years, but remains preeminent among works since 2000. Trends and Themes. During the seventies the category “horror” emerged as a publishing niche, subsuming supernatural fiction. The film versions of The Exorcist and Stephen King’s first novel Carrie (1974; film 1976) had emphasized the graphic nature of horror over the supernatural, while non-supernatural films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) went for all-out gross and became idiomatic of horror, which took on terms like splatterpunk or slash-horror. One of the trends during the seventies and eighties was to blur the boundaries between themes, creating more doubt and uncertainty about the nature of the inexplicable. There is a case to make, for instance, that Carrie is science fiction rather

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than supernatural, if one interprets the girl’s psychic power as emanating from within rather than as the result of a poltergeist. Three major themes emerged, all with considerable overlap. 1. Magic or strange religion in all its forms, either ancient or black magic, involving demonic (or angelic) entities and ancient gods. This includes secret cults or hidden worlds. 2. Apocalyptic fiction. This is closely related to (1) as it usually involves secret knowledge or the discovery of a lost secret that might give clues to a forthcoming apocalypse. 3. The undead, principally vampires, but including ghosts, possession by spirits, and reincarnation.

It is worth looking at these themes in some detail as it highlights the key writers and trends that developed during the seventies. Contexts and Issues (1) Black Magic and the Occult. The rise in interest in satanic and witchcraft fiction was primarily due to the popularity of the book and film versions of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, though it had been gathering pace during the late sixties with the emergence of the drug culture and the exploration of pagan and other “New Age” religions. Newfound sexual, moral, and social freedoms in the western world had caused many to abandon old values, and to those who remained faithful the social order in the late sixties and early seventies must have seemed like the devil had taken over. The most notorious example was the murders committed by Charles Manson’s “Family” in August 1969, which were linked to satanic and apocalyptic beliefs, with Manson being referred to variously as “God” or “Satan” by his followers. The films in turn had their influence. A 17-year-old youth found guilty of murdering a 9-year-old girl in October 1975, in York, England, claimed he was “possessed” after seeing The Exorcist. A survey conducted by Birmingham University, England, in 1971 concluded: The decline of institutional religion seems to have been offset by the growth of ‘superstitions’ or non-Christian beliefs about the supernatural or the meaning of life, and by the rise of a large number of cults such as spiritualism, theosophy, scientology and the flying saucer movement. (The Times, 10 April 1971, 2)

The fascination for works of the occult increased. Some were relatively mild, usually set in a remote town where innocents unwittingly stumble upon devil worshippers or other religious cults. New England proved a popular locale for such stories. Harvest Home (1973) by Thomas Tryon (1926–1991), became the prototype novel of this approach in the seventies. It was a form parodied, to some degree, by John Updike (1932–) in The Witches of Eastwick (1984). Charles L. Grant (1942–2006) developed a series of novels set in the fictional New England town of Oxrun Station (connected series also became a trend during the seventies), starting with The Hour of the Oxrun Dead (1977), which involved a covert group of Satanists. John Saul (1942–) worked a variant on the theme in Cry for the Strangers (1979) in which a jealously guarded town proves a haven to an emotionally disturbed boy, though all other “strangers” start to disappear. Places of learning also seem ripe for satanic activities, and this dates back long before the popularity of J.K. Rowling’s Harry

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Potter books. In Conjure Wife (1943; expanded, 1952), Fritz Leiber has a college professor discover that his wife is a witch who has been protecting him with her magic. More recently Edward Lee (1957–), one of the writers of more extreme horror, has a college as the focus for a supernatural force in Coven (1991), while in University (1994; aka Night School) Bentley Little (1960–) has an entire college campus gradually meld into a tangible supernatural evil. Cults, usually satanic, became a stock item, especially after the success of the British cult film, The Wicker Man (1973) from the script by Anthony Shaffer (1926–2001). That film involved no supernatural events, but followed the investigations of a policeman into the disappearance of a girl on a remote island, where he falls foul of a pagan group. In The Night Church (1982), Whitley Strieber (1945–) depicted a cult that used selective breeding to produce Satanists. In Servants of the Twilight (1984), Dean Koontz depicts a cult that has helped deliver a son of Satan, while in Hell’s Creation (1995) by John Russo (1939–), a mother is so convinced her newborn child is the son of Satan that she gives him to Satanists. Another Satanist cult appears in Once Upon a Halloween (2000) by Richard Laymon (1947–2001). In both Ceremonies (1984) by T.E.D. Klein (1947–) and The Song of Kali (1985) by Dan Simmons (1948–) people stumble across plans by cults to resurrect ancient gods. Ray Garton (1962–), renowned for the extreme physical and sexual imagery in his books, depicts a violently evil Manson-like cult leader called Mace in Crucifax (1988), a novel that proved so explicit that it was heavily edited with the uncut version appearing from a small press as Crucifax Autumn (1988). Mace is not entirely human, but Garton created him as the embodiment of all the misery and disaffection experienced by youngsters when they are abused or abandoned by their parents. Mace becomes a revenge figure against inhumanity. Running alongside works of satanic interest have been those exploring both old and new gods. Some of this has arisen because of the New Age movement and an interest in Celtic and other religions. Witchcraft is central to Dark Sister (1992) by Graham Joyce (1954–). John Farris (1936–) produced what many regard as one of the best novels to explore voodoo, its African origins, and its impact in the United States, in the southern gothic novel All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By (1977; aka Bad Blood). In Darkness Comes (1984; aka Darkfall), Dean R. Koontz has the police confront a Haitian priest who uses voodoo to summon creatures to do his killings. The venerable pulp writer Hugh B. Cave (1910–2004), who lived in the West Indies and had direct experience of voodoo ceremonies, incorporated much authentic detail in several of his novels including Legion of the Dead (1979), The Evil (1981), and Disciples of Dread (1989). Inevitably these novels also feature zombies, favorites of the cinema ever since the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, from a script by John Russo and George Romero. Russo returned to the zombie theme on several occasions, including Inhuman (1986) and Living Things (1988). A more thought-provoking use of voodoo occurs in Darker Angels (1997) by Somtow Sucharitkul (1952–) under his alias S.P. Somtow. Set during the American Civil War it develops a deep understanding of the voodoo religion and the role it might play in resurrecting the dead. Other ancient gods feature increasingly in new fiction. The spirits of the sea are worshipped in The Devil’s Churn (1996) by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (1960–) while in Forests of the Heart (2000) Charles de Lint (1951–) explores the conflict between Celtic spirits that have migrated to America and come into conflict with ancient American powers. A similar idea was explored in American Gods (2001) by Neil

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Gaiman (1960–) in which various ethnic deities have accompanied their emigrants to America. Other forms of mythical spirits, alien though not necessarily harmful and usually in forests, are revealed in Wildwood (1986) by John Farris, Campbell Wood (1986) by Al Sarrantonio (1952–), and The Midnight Sun (1990) by Ramsey Campbell. All of these works explore our primitive desire for gods or spirits to help us cope with life. Michael Jordan observed that the world is a frightening place and that if we create gods, the “responsibility for our actions is taken from us and given into the hands of an all-powerful if unseen being” (Jordan, 1992, viii). In a series of stories collected in Deathbird Stories (1975), Harlan Ellison (1934–) considered how we have abandoned the old gods and created new ones, spirits borne of greed and violence. In “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” a woman about to be murdered calls upon the spirit of violence to save her. In “Basilisk” the gods of war manipulate humans for their own ends, while in “The Deathbird” we discover that God has been lying all along and it is time to atone. These stories explore humanity’s spiritual reconciliation with the world. Among conspiracy theorists there has long been a belief that it is not gods but Secret Orders that control history. These date back at least as far as the Rosicrucians and also occur as the Secret Masters in Theosophy. Such secret organizations need not be supernatural. Notable recent examples may be found in The Illuminatus Trilogy (1975) by Robert Shea (1933–1994) and Robert Anton Wilson (1932–) and The Da Vinci Code (2003) by Dan Brown (1964–). Mark Frost (1953–) combined the conspiracy theories with the supernatural in The List of 7 (1993) where Arthur Conan Doyle becomes involved in a quest to unearth a secret society that is using supernatural means to take over the world. John Crowley (1942–) questioned the very nature of history in Aegypt (1987) and, in its sequels Love and Sleep (1994) and Daemonomania (2000), charted the rise of cults and the possible end of the world. The sequence may be described as fantasy, but its use of alchemical imagery and metaphysical rationalization places the books firmly in the world of the occult. The supernatural versions of these works posit some form of secret race or elder gods within our world, the idea most notably explored by H.P. Lovecraft and perpetuated by many of his disciples, including Robert Bloch, whose Strange Eons (1979) charts a coming apocalypse as the Elder Gods prepare to return. Lovecraft’s fiction aside, there are other forms of hidden worlds. T.M. Wright developed a sequence of books exploring the lost Earth Children, an ancient race surviving hidden in America, which form the basis of mysterious events in Strange Seed (1978; revised, 2006), Nursery Tale (1982), The Children of the Island (1983), The People of the Dark (1985), and most recently Laughing Man (2003). Vampires may also exist as secret societies as explored further below. Dean Koontz introduced his own ancient race in Twilight Eyes (1987) in which the protagonist has the ability to see “goblins,” evil creatures who masquerade as humans. Goblins were created, genetically, by a very ancient advanced civilization, but while that race was wiped out in a nuclear war, the goblins have survived and cause most of the woes on Earth. Koontz sets this story for the most part in a travelling carnival, which is another form of secret world much beloved by writers. It was perhaps most wonderfully evoked in Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) though its prototype was The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935) by Charles G. Finney (1905–1985). The carnival is the lure for the unwary who, once they have arrived, are trapped by

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their desires or failings. Others who have found evil lurking in the sideshow include Al Sarrantonio in Totentanz (1985) and Thomas Monteleone (1946–) in The Magnificent Gallery (1987). All of these tap into our dreams for wish-fulfillment. Indeed, all occult novels, especially those involving black magic, explore the mortal desire to reach out for forbidden fruit. If occult fiction teaches us anything, it is to know our place in the world. (2) Apocalyptic Fiction. The coming end of the millennium brought forth considerably more apocalyptic fiction than usual, and this time a high proportion looked to Armageddon and a religious apocalypse. Most significant in this respect was The Omen (1976) by David Seltzer (1940–), the book based on his own film script, and the seminal work on the Antichrist. The interest in apocalyptic fiction had been rekindled a few years earlier by James Blish (1921–1975) in Black Easter (1967) and its sequel The Day After Judgement (1971). This developed from the “God-is-dead” belief prevalent in the sixties. In this novel a black magician is commissioned to let demons loose on the world for one night to cause as much chaos as possible. The demons refuse to return to Hell and a satanic city is created on Earth. With God dead, Satan finds he has to fill that role. Stephen King brought a modern idiom to the idea in The Stand (1978), where a plague wipes out much of humankind and Satan, manifested as the Walking Dude, recruits an army for the last battle. George R.R. Martin (1948–) took the idea further by linking Satanism and rock music in Armageddon Rag (1983), while in Swan Song (1987) by Robert McCammon (1952–) a nuclear war not only virtually wipes out humankind but unleashes an ancient demon determined to take control. Charles L. Grant used the approaching Millennium as the basis for a sequence of four books—Symphony (1997), In the Mood (1998), Chariot (1998), and Riders in the Sky (1999)—each volume following the impact of one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. In quieter mode in The Last Coin (1988), James Blaylock (1950—) looks to the coming Armageddon triggered once an obsessive collector has amassed all the silver coins Judas received in payment for betraying Jesus. The Millennium was also the catalyst for two books by Thomas Monteleone, which blend science and the supernatural. In Blood of the Lamb (1993) those seeking to engineer the Second Coming clone a human from the blood on the Turin Shroud. He becomes a Roman Catholic priest with the power of healing and the ability to raise the dead. In the sequel, The Reckoning (1999), the priest has been elected Pope and subverts Catholicism to his own ends. John Shirley (1953–) has always been an author to push the limits. In Demons (2000; expanded, 2002), he lets an army of demons loose on the world in the near future. This is no ordinary apocalyptic novel. Shirley looks deep into our souls and at the consequences of our actions or inactions in bringing the Earth to its current state. It is as much a mystical novel as supernatural, exploring consciences and motivations in a world of destruction. British writer Garry Kilworth (1941–) saw the approaching Millennium as a moment when the war between Heaven and Hell broke loose on Earth. In Angel (1993), angels have been sent to Earth to destroy escaped demons, though they do not discriminate between demons and humans. In its sequel, Archangel (1994), a Heavenly force tries to protect a convocation of religious leaders seeking to obtain world peace, while Hell does its best to destroy it. Perhaps the ultimate apocalypse is when Hell breaks loose. The idea of Hell as a real place to visit dates back at least as far as the Greek legend of Orpheus in the

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Underworld and Dante’s Inferno (written c1307). In The Sentinel (1974) by Jeffrey Konvitz (1944—), a Roman Catholic priest is the guardian of the doorway to Hell and the time has come for the Church to seek a replacement. Dante’s version of Hell was revisited in Inferno (1976) by Larry Niven (1938— ) and Jerry Pournelle (1933—), but an even more disturbing Hell was created by Edward Lee in City Infernal (2001) and Infernal Angel (2003). Here a young girl discovers she has the power to enter Hell where she goes in search of her dead sister. Lee creates a gothic, Bosch-like Hellscape, but also infuses the book with sharp satire and humor, unusual among his works. The increase in apocalyptic fiction has been responding partly to a market need encouraged by the Millennium, but the number and content of the novels suggest a deeper need, one related to the growing interest in occult novels, namely that the world has become a more violent and dangerous place and that retribution is nigh. (3) Vampires and the Undead. The fascination with the undead, especially vampires, has grown significantly since the seventies to the extent that it might be considered a genre in its own right. Vampire fiction has always been popular but it received a double boost with the success of both Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot in 1975 and Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire in 1976. Salem’s Lot successfully transferred the horrors of Dracula’s Transylvania to small-town Maine, but it is Rice’s novel, the first in her Lestat series, that has had the most impact. In this and the many sequels, especially The Vampire Lestat (1984) and Queen of the Damned (1988), Rice created an entire culture of vampires living, like a secret society, hidden within our own. The use of New Orleans as a decadent setting is also evocative of an ancient world. Rice portrays the vampires as a race with their own form of honor, building upon the accursed wanderer of Polidori’s original image, but now far more multilayered, and with overt eroticism. While Rice portrayed vampires sympathetically, they remained otherworldly. In The Dracula Tape (1975), Fred Saberhagen (1930–) sought to humanize them. He revealed the true story of Dracula as recounted by the Count himself. Saberhagen showed that Stoker’s account of him, via Jonathan Harker, was misrepresentative and that vampires are misunderstood, being as equally forces for good as for evil. On its own, Saberhagen’s novel is an ingenious and, at times, credible account. However, Saberhagen continued the series, starting with The Holmes Dracula File (1976), with Dracula an adventurer combating various villains, which demoted the Count to a pulp hero. The idea of seeing humanity through a vampire’s perception, however, caught on. Two further series appeared, simultaneously, which traced a romanticized image of the vampire through history. In The Black Castle (1978), Les Daniels (1943–) introduced Don Sebastian de Dellanueva, a vampire living in Spain in 1496, at the time of the Inquisition. Sebastian is appalled at the horrors committed by mortals against their own kind. This becomes the central theme to the series with Sebastian witnessing various atrocities committed by humankind over the centuries. In The Silver Skull (1979) it’s the conquistadores decimating the natives in the New World; in Citizen Vampire (1981) it’s the horrors of the French Revolution, while in No Blood Spilled (1991) it’s the violence of British colonial India. In all of these books, Don Sebastian is in search of arcane knowledge and a quest for Truth and discovers that humanity has its own thirst for blood. The Saint-Germain Chronicles by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (1942–) follows a similar outline. Yarbro has adapted an historical character, Le Comte de Saint-Germain,

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who lived in the eighteenth century and who claimed to have discovered the elixir of life and to have lived for centuries. Yarbro treated the Count’s elixir of life as blood itself. He was an ideal choice for an honorable vampire, not least because one claim concerning his origin was that he was a Prince of Transylvania. She introduced the Count in Hotel Transylvania (1978), which developed as much historical information as we have about him with a storyline featuring Satanists at the court of King Louis XV. Thereafter the 20 books at present in the series range from ancient Rome (Blood Games, 1979) to the First World War (Tempting Fate, 1982) and many points in between. The novels by Rice, Daniels, and Yarbro cover a vast timescale. By contrast, despite the title, The Vampire Tapestry (1980) by Suzy McKee Charnas (1939–) is a series of snapshots in the life of a vampire, currently masquerading as a professor of anthropology, Dr. Weyland, who has no memory of his previous existences prior to various hibernations. Weyland knows of no others of his kind and tries to keep his true nature a secret, but when it is discovered he has to go on the run. In They Thirst (1981) by Robert McCammon a vampire lord, Count Vulkan, descends on Los Angeles with his evil cohorts, intent on attacking and converting all of the city’s inhabitants to vampires, passing the vampire virus on like a plague. In The Hunger (1981), Whitley Strieber reverses the situation. His solitary, predatory female must hunt for her mate for it is only the female vampire that is ageless. Although the males do not die they wither, surviving as mere shadows. This novel was a one-off until Streiber returned to his female vampire in The Last Vampire (2001), while in Lilith’s Dream (2002), he developed the series by resurrecting the world’s oldest vampire, Lilith. Throughout these books the vampire is shown as superior but persecuted. Indeed, the vampire has become a symbol for many persecuted minorities and Streiber’s books struck a chord with the feminist movement. J. Gordon Melton noted: “In contrast with the powerful male vampire, the female vampire of the 1980s emerged with the many new roles assumed by women in the larger culture and as important models (however fanciful) of female power” (Melton, 1994, 698). In Fevre Dream (1982), George R.R. Martin (1948–) produced an overlooked classic of vampire fiction. It is set in 1857 on a Mississippi steamboat that has been chartered by a vampire who has created a potion that inhibits the vampire’s lust for human blood. He is in conflict with a leader of other vampires who still yearn for the old days. The conflict portrayed is thus between vampire factions striving for a new world or trying to safeguard the old. Set at the time of increasing unrest about slavery and advancing technology the novel parallels American life. Many of the vampire novels and series that appeared in the eighties and nineties were by women and their work is often categorized as “dark fantasy” rather than occult. In addition to those by Anne Rice and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro are works by Elaine Bergstrom (1946–), Nancy Collins (1959–), Patricia [“P.N.”] Elrod (1951–), Poppy Z. Brite (1967–), Storm Constantine (1956–), Laurell Hamilton (1963–), and Karen Koehler (1973–). Their work has emphasized the erotic and generally portrays vampires as benevolent and misunderstood. Most recently the vampire has become a subject for “paranormal romances.” Premier among these is the Dark series by Christine Feehan, which began with Dark Prince (1999) and has currently reached 14 volumes. Feehan has created the dying race of the Carpathians, supernatural creatures who can shapeshift but who, if they do not find their soul mate, will eventually devolve into soulless vampires.

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Vampires created by male writers tend to be more violent and the stories feature more original twists. Perhaps the most extreme work is Ray Garton’s Live Girls (1987) where a nightclub allows female vampires to prey upon their male victims. In the series that began with Necroscope (1986), Brian Lumley’s powerful vamphyri invade Earth from an alternate reality. John Farris relates vampires to the fallen angels in Fiends (1990). Bentley Little’s vampire in The Summoning (1993) is Chinese rather than Transylvanian, with a fear of jade and willow. Lucius Shepard (1947–) depicts a rich and fascinating vampire culture in The Golden (1993), which he also turns into an unusual detective story when the vampires have to solve a murder in their midst. Dan Simmons looked for a scientific rationale for vampires in Carrion Comfort (1989), seeing them as a genetic mutation, though in Children of the Night (1992) he resorted to a more traditional view when a child with a unique immune system turns out to be a son of Dracula. Brian Stableford (1948–) also explored a scientific rationale in Young Blood (1992), where vampirism is a viral infection. He had used the vampire theme earlier in The Empire of Fear (1988), set in an alternate history where the ruling aristocracy in Europe, including Charlemagne and Richard the Lionheart, are all vampires. An adventurer goes into darkest Africa to find the source of the vampire bloodstock and the secret of immortality. Both Brian Stableford and Kim Newman (1959–) have a fascination with the late Victorian period and have used it as a setting to rework the vampire theme against other fictional and historical settings, Stableford in The Hunger and Ecstacy of Vampires (1996) and Newman in a sequence starting with Anno Dracula (1992), which incorporates Jack the Ripper. The vampire theme continues to fascinate writers, though in the last decade it has been somewhat diverted by the paranormal romance movement and the popularity of the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), which has led to many spinoff and imitative novels. Romance and young adult markets come together in the series by Stephanie Meyer that began with the best-selling Twilight (2005), which follows the love between a young girl and a vampire. The theme has remained more enduring than that of werewolves, which lacked a basic template like Dracula, and does not have the romantic or erotic connotations. Such early novels as did explore the theme, such as The Werewolf of Paris (1933) by Guy Endore (1900–1970), which equates lycanthropy to cannibalism, never attained cult status, and it has always remained of secondary interest. The most successful of recent books was The Howling (1977) by Gary Brandner, made into an influential movie in 1980. Brandner treated werewolves rather like vampires, as creatures who looked for safety among their own kind and existed as a secret community until unearthed and destroyed. Whitley Strieber likewise depicted werewolves, or as he perceived them wolves of superior intelligence, as an ancient race who try to remain secretive. In Wolfen (1978) he shows how they choose their prey among the outcasts of society who would not normally be missed. Perhaps the most ambitious werewolf work of recent years is the trilogy by Brian Stableford, The Werewolves of London (1990), The Angel of Pain (1991), and The Carnival of Destruction (1994), which combined various occult and apocalyptic imagery in a late Victorian setting to portray a secret war being conducted throughout London by werewolves combating a reawakening of fallen angels, bent on regaining the Earth. In Wolf Moon (1988), Charles de Lint portrays a werewolf who is a victim and searches for a means to stop his affliction, which is eventually cured by love. It is a story reminiscent of the fairy-tale motif of the beauty and the beast. Although the werewolf theme has less appeal for the paranormal romantics, it does appeal to the

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feminist movement as it can depict powerful individuals seeking to assert themselves in the world. Of recent works in this vein the most striking is the Women of the Otherworld series by Kelley Armstrong (1968–) that began with Bitten (2001). Once again there are werewolves existing as a secretive pack society. A unique female werewolf tries to survive in the human world but finds the call of the wild drawing her back. As the series developed Armstrong incorporated witches and other creatures within her supernatural menagerie. Unlike vampires and werewolves, which have a powerful physical presence, ghosts are usually intangible. The interest in traditional ghosts faded in the fifties and sixties and took a while to recover in the seventies, although The Haunting of Hill House (1959) by Shirley Jackson (1919–1965) and the similar Hell House (1971) by Richard Matheson (1926–), both about investigations into haunted houses and both effectively filmed, helped keep the theme alive. From the late seventies onwards there was a shift to making ghosts more violent. It was the double whammy in 1979 of Ghost Story by Peter Straub and the film The Amityville Horror (1979) based on the 1977 book by Jay Anson (1921–1980) that galvanized this change. Straub had already written two novels featuring malevolent ghosts, Julia (1975) and If You Could See Me Now (1977), both of which sold well, but it was Ghost Story, filmed in 1981, that caught the imagination and became a best seller. Here the ghost of a woman accidentally killed and concealed by a group of men many years before returns in a violent way, able to interact with the world and take her revenge. The events described in The Amityville Horror were purportedly true though subsequent challenges have suggested that much of it may have been fabricated. Nevertheless the book, which recounted a violent haunting and psychic infestation of a house where a family had been murdered two years before, became a best seller and catapulted interest in hauntings and possession back into the public conscience. At the same time Stephen King had published his novel of possession in a haunted hotel, The Shining (1977), while the first of Clare McNally’s popular books, Ghost House (1979) appeared, itself very reminiscent of the Amityville story. A new generation of ghost stories soon established itself, dealing with houses haunted by an evil presence that frequently tried to take possession of or in some way harm the occupant. The film Poltergeist (1982) successfully whetted the public appetite further. Such stories include Cold Moon Over Babylon (1980) by Michael McDowell, The Brownstone (1980) by Ken Eulo (1939–), A Cold Blue Light (1983) by Marvin Kaye (1938–) and Parke Godwin (1929–), A Manhattan Ghost Story (1984) and The Waiting Room (1986) by T.M. Wright, Familiar Spirit (1983) by Lisa Tuttle (1952–), The Night Stone (1986), Winter Wake (1989), and Dark Silence (1992) all by Rick Hautala, Soulstorm (1986) by Chet Williamson, and Night Relics (1994) by James Blaylock. John Saul delighted in stories of ghostly children, which featured in several of his early novels: Suffer the Children (1978), Comes the Blind Fury (1980), and When the Wind Blows (1981). T.M. Wright explored a haunted school in The School (1990) while Douglas Clegg (1958–), one of the best of the new generation of writers, developed a sequence of novels about a haunted house that had become a school starting with Mischief (2000) and continuing through Infinite (2001), Nightmare House (2002), and The Abandoned (2005). Reception. Although critics will argue that the bottom fell out of the slash-horror market in the 1990s, since 2000 ghost stories have continued to thrive. Most follow fairly traditional lines, though good writers continue to apply that novel twist. Richard Laymon (1947–2001) brought together vampires and a carnival in The

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Traveling Vampire Show (2000) in what proved to be one of his last books and which won the Stoker Award as that year’s best novel. Diana Barron blended the circus with a far from traditional ghost story in her first novel, Phantom Feast (2001). There are plenty of ghostly evils in The Deceased (2000) by Tom Piccirilli, The Darkest Part of the Woods (2002) by Ramsey Campbell, The Lovely Bones (2002) by Alice Sebold, The Hour Before Dark (2003) by Douglas Clegg, Perfect Circle (2004) by Sean Stewart, and The Night Country (2004) by Stewart O’Nan (1961–), plus some rather bizarre haunted (or evil) houses in House of Leaves (2000) by Mark Z. Danielewski (1966–), A Winter Haunting (2002) by Dan Simmons, House of Bones (2003) by Dale Bailey, and Riverwatch (2003) by Joseph Nassise. In all of these books, whether by new or accomplished writers, old themes have been given original twists. Although much emphasis remains on gross horror and the macabre, the supernatural is center stage, and not just in the wings. The continued appearance of these books and the popularity of the film The Sixth Sense (1999) shows that there is still considerable life in the ghost story. Selected Authors. Devotees of supernatural fiction tend to remain loyal to their favorite writers so that such longtime authors as Ramsey Campbell, Stephen King, Richard Matheson, and Ray Bradbury, who have been producing material for 40, 50, even 60 years, find much of their work still in print. Readers are as likely to pursue an old book by H.P. Lovecraft or Arthur Machen as they are a new one by Douglas Clegg or Tom Piccirilli. Moreover the popularity of sequels and series means that authors like Anne Rice and Laurell K. Hamilton have a ready-made readership for their next volume. Currently most popular writers of supernatural fiction tend to be classified either under horror fiction (Tom Piccirilli, Douglas Clegg, Rick Hautala) or fantasy (Charles de Lint, Jonathan Carroll, John Crowley). Occasionally an author will throw everything into the pot, challenging genre definitions. Serenity Falls (2003; reprinted in three volumes as Writ in Blood, The Pack, and Dark Carnival) by James A. Moore is a panjandrum of a book that combines just about every archetypal image in supernatural fiction. It starts out as the story of a town cursed by a dying witch 300 years before, but her curse takes many forms, which inflict the town until the apocalyptic final battle. Moore’s novel is a kaleidoscope of horrors but within a modern context showing how even tired old images can be sharpened and refocused. This is evident in the work of Tananarive Due (1966–), one of the strongest new talents of the last decade, who has created several variations on old themes. My Soul to Keep (1997) and its sequel Living Blood (2001) revisit the deal-with-the-devil theme with a dash of vampirism as a woman discovers that her Ethiopian husband is a 400-year-old immortal. In the sequel she too becomes possessed of the living blood and discovers the powers it grants her. In The Good House (2003) Due breathed life into the voodoo novel while in Joplin’s Ghost (2005) she provides a novel twist on the traditional ghost story. The Afro American culture is potently recreated in all of these books, which are as firmly rooted in the past as in the future. Cross-genre fertilization has continued to develop, particularly since the early days of Dean Koontz, Stephen King, and Peter Straub, some of whose works were thrillers and mysteries first—and certainly marketed that way for maximum sales— but with the supernatural as seasoning. In recent years, however, these authors, notably Koontz, King, and Straub, have returned to the roots of supernatural fiction to explore new directions.

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Dean Koontz, whose books continue to hit the best-seller lists, has also returned more deeply to the supernatural. With Odd Thomas (2003), Forever Odd (2005), and Brother Odd (2006), Koontz has completed a trilogy about Odd Thomas, who can see spirits of the recent dead who remain in limbo. Sometimes Thomas can help them move on and sometimes the spirits, such as that of Elvis Presley, hang about him for reasons he does not know. Thomas can also see bodachs, strange wolflike shadows which, like vultures, seem to know of impending, violent deaths. Thomas sometimes tries to stop these deaths before they happen. Other times he helps the police solve murders. Thomas cannot avoid being drawn into these events any more than he can avoid his special talent and, as a result, he can be manipulated as happens in the second book where an evil woman lays a trap for him. As a consequence by the third book Thomas has sought refuge in a monastery hoping to escape his ghosts, but death follows him. These books mark a change for Koontz, not only because for once he has developed a sequence featuring the same character, but also because the book focuses on the supernatural as a form of salvation rather than horror. It is an indication of one growing trend in recent years where the supernatural is not necessarily the focus of the horror, but a means to fight it. This is most evident in the recent work of the two major writers of the last 30 years, Stephen King and Peter Straub. King’s ability to sustain a varied and popular output of considerable proportion is remarkable, though in recent years the significance of his work has been challenged. While there are those who believe that Stephen King is American horror fiction, he has plenty of critics. When King received the National Book Foundation Medal in 2003 for services to literature, Harold Bloom remarked that he only wrote what used to be called “penny dreadfuls” (New York Times, 15 September 2003). King’s most vociferous critic is probably S.T. Joshi who commented: King’s domination of the bestseller lists over the last two decades has been an unmitigated disaster for the weird tale. By being the chief exemplar of the ‘banalization’ of horror, he has caused an inferior strain of weird fiction (commonplace, flabby, sentimental work full of ‘human interest’ but entirely lacking in originality of conception) to gain popular esteem. (Joshi, 2001, 95)

Yet it is almost certain that had it not been for King causing horror fiction (at least, as per the marketing label) to be among the best sellers, publishers would not have been so open to other writers during the seventies and eighties, and the next generation of writers would not have found it so easy to enter the market. King hoped that his success did encourage others. When interviewed in 1990 he commented: I’m not sure how much we raised the awareness of horror or gave it any kind of cultural cachet. I’m sure that we allowed a lot of contracts to be signed by a lot of writers, put a lot of money in a lot of pockets that otherwise wouldn’t have gone there. And I think that’s a wonderful thing . . . because most of the people who are doing it aren’t in it for a free ride. They’re serious about it. I think now—and I didn’t use to think this way—but I think now that we might actually have a serious place in American literature in a hundred years or so. (Wiater, 1990, 100)

The main impact King has had on the content of supernatural fiction is to emphasize the horrific so that the supernatural, if present, has become a means to an end rather than the main feature of the book. Although King has continued to place an

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emphasis on horror in his non-supernatural books, like Cell (2006), several of his more recent books have explored a quieter, more reflective form of the macabre with a stronger emphasis on the therapeutic significance of the supernatural. Bag of Bones (1998) is, unusually for King, written in the first person by a best-selling novelist, giving the book a stronger personal feel. The novelist, Mike Noonan, is recently widowed and is suffering writer’s block. He is haunted by dreams of his dead wife who seems to be luring him to their lakeside summer home but once there he finds the dreams stronger and the supernatural becomes a driving force to discovering past sins. Here the supernatural makes memories tangible, and King is able to show how the past lives on around us and within us. King has provided a counterpoint to Bag of Bones in Lisey’s Story (2006), this time the story of a widow coming to terms with the death of her husband, Scott, who had been a writer, after 25 years of marriage. Scott comes alive in the story within her memories as she sorts out his papers, and their close relationship takes her into a private world that Scott had escaped to in his childhood when abused by his father. This world is both a source of imagination and inspiration. King shows how you can draw strength from the past and how hauntings can be as positive as they can be frightening. In these novels King uses the supernatural to stir the emotions through the heart rather than the gut. Recently King has collaborated again with his friend Peter Straub on Black House (2001) a sequel to their 1984 dark fantasy novel, The Talisman. Straub has himself been very active in recent years producing a number of novels, three of which won the Bram Stoker Award for the Best Horror novel in their respective years. Mr. X (1999) is an extremely complex novel of a man, Ned Dunstan, coming to terms with his bizarre family from which he had been cut off for his own safety when his mother fostered him out as a baby. In particular Dunstan has to confront his real father, the eponymous Mr. X., whom Dunstan had never known, and through whose evil mind part of the story is revealed. There is also the mystery of Dunstan’s possible twin brother, a doppelganger presence that seems to follow Dunstan like a shadow. Straub draws upon much Lovecraftian lore in depicting the bizarre ancestry of this family, which provides most of the occult element, and though the supernatural is intrinsic to the plot, the novel also works as a mystery, driven by its strong but enigmatic characters. Straub’s other recent award-winning books Lost Boy Lost Girl (2003) and In the Night Room (2004) also explore family relationships but in a more multi-layered and multi-perspective way. They are complex metafictions which question the basis of reality and perception and in so doing blur the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural and between the real and the fictional. The central character of both novels is the author Tim Underhill who had previously appeared in Straub’s dark mystery novels, Koko (1988) and The Throat (1993). In Lost Boy Lost Girl Underhill returns to his hometown of Millhaven where his brother’s wife has killed herself. Their son, Mark, is missing, perhaps the victim of a serial killer who seems to be copying a killer from 20 years before. Underhill’s quest to find his nephew centers on the house once occupied by this former killer which may or may not be haunted by a young girl, perhaps the killer’s daughter. However, in In the Night Room we discover that Lost Boy Lost Girl is only Underhill’s version of events, written to assuage the fate of his nephew, which had remained unsolved. In the Night Room seeks to step back and re-explore the real events. Straub is entering the territory of the mystics, discovering that beyond our own belief in events is a

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further understanding, a truer interpretation, uncorrupted by memory or guilt or pain. But how much can we face that reality? As with King’s recent books, Straub is exploring how memory and reality haunt us and how ghosts may be psychological manifestations of alternate existences. It is this lack of a firm connection to reality that evokes horror and uncertainty, and yet our natural reaction is to retreat into ourselves to escape the horror. Straub has constantly challenged the boundaries between genres recognizing that “it’s all about a point of view” (Locus #507, April 2003, 66). His novels may thus be seen as fantasies of perception in which the supernatural is but one method of understanding. Straub’s recent work marks one of the high points of supernatural fiction, utilizing basic, age-old themes such as a haunted house, but refashioning it with images not solely from fantasy and horror but from within our own psyche to produce a book that deliberately defies categorization. It is perhaps one of the best examples of a key direction that supernatural fiction may take in the new century, to make us aware that it is us who fashion the world about us, including all things of Heaven, Earth, and Hell. Bibliography Bleiler, Everett F. The Guide to Supernatural Fiction. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1983. Jordan, Michael. The Encyclopedia of Gods. London: Kyle Cathie, 1992. Joshi, S.T. The Modern Weird Tale. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001. King, Stephen. Bag of Bones. New York: Scribner, 1998. ________. Danse Macabre. London: Macdonald, 1981. ________. Lisey’s Story. New York: Scribner, 2006. Koontz, Dean. Odd Thomas. New York: Bantam, 2003. Melton, J. Gordon. The Vampire Book. Detroit, MI: Visible Ink Press, 1994. Straub, Peter. “Horror’s House,” Locus #507, April 2003. ________. In the Night Room. New York: Random House, 2004. ________. Lost Boy Lost Girl. New York: Random House, 2003. ________. Mr. X. New York: Random House, 1999. Sullivan, Jack. Elegant Nightmares. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1978. Wiater, Stanley. Dark Dreamers. New York: Avon Books, 1990. Winter, Douglas E. Faces of Fear. London: Pan Books, 1990.

Further Reading Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997; Bleiler, Richard. Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror. 2nd ed. New York: Scribner’s, 2002; Briggs, Julia. Night Visitors. London: Faber, 1977; Campbell, Ramsey. “A Life in Horror,” Locus #507, April 2003; Cavaliero, Glen. The Supernatural & English Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995; D’Ammassa, Don. Encyclopedia of Fantasy and Horror Fiction. New York: Checkmark Books, 2006; Datlow, Ellen, and Windling, Terri (& others), eds. The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988–present; Fonseca, Anthony J. and Pulliam, June Michelle. Hooked on Horror: A Guide to Reading Interests in Horror Fiction, New Edition. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2003; Frost, Brian J. The Monster With a Thousand Faces. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989; Frost, Brian J. The Essential Guide to Werewolf Literature. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003; Gelder, Ken, ed. The Horror Reader. London: Routledge, 2000; Gordon, Joan, and Hollinger, Veronica. Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture. Philadelphia,

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OCCULT/SUPERNATURAL LITERATURE PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997; Heldreth, Leonard G., and Pharr, Mary. The Blood is the Life: Vampires in Literature. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997; Joshi, S.T. The Weird Tale. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990; Joshi, S.T. The Evolution of the Weird Tale. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2004; Joshi, S.T., and Dziemianowicz, Stefan. Supernatural Literature of the World. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005; Magistrale, Tone, and Morrison, Michael A. eds. A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1996; Ramsland, Katherine. Dean Koontz, A Writer’s Biography. New York: HarperPrism, 1997; Schweitzer, Darrell. Discovering Modern Horror Fiction – I. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1985; Schweitzer, Darrell. Discovering Modern Horror Fiction – II. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1988; Sheehan, Bill. At the Foot of the Story Tree. Burton, MI: Subterranean Press, 2000.

MIKE ASHLEY

P PARAPSYCHOLOGY Definition. Parapsychology is the term introduced in the 1930s by J.B. Rhine, one of the field’s pioneers, for the scientific study of scientifically paranormal claims, but belief in the phenomena that parapsychologists attempt to study appears to be as old as humanity itself. The set of phenomena of interest to the parapsychologists is referred to by many names, including psi powers, psychic phenomena, paranormal abilities, and the most popular of all, extrasensory perception (ESP). This last name is of special interest to psychologists, as perception is typically defined as the brain’s cognitive processing of information received from the senses. Perception is therefore sensory by definition—ordinarily the only circumstances under which it occurs in the absence of sensory input would involve either hallucination or direct stimulation of the brain. This is one of the things that makes psychic research both fascinating and frustrating: If parapsychologists are able to establish convincingly that these phenomena occur, then much of what we know about how the human brain functions (to say nothing of the rest of the physical world, including the basic laws of physics) must be, at best, incomplete and obsolete, and at worst, just plain wrong. Trends and Themes. The alleged phenomena include the following: • Telepathy—The ability to send or receive information without using the usual sensory apparatus (speaking, hearing, seeing, etc.). Also colloquially referred to as mind reading. Anecdotal evidence abounds for telepathy, as when one “knows” who is calling when the telephone rings, or two close friends or relatives say the same thing at the exact same time (there are of course more parsimonious, but far less exciting, explanations for these situations). A demonstration used by selfproclaimed psychics (and which has been repeatedly tested by parapsychologists) involves remote viewing, in which the “sender” travels to a remote (and unknown to the receiver) location and proceeds to concentrate on a landmark, picture, or other stimulus. The “receiver” attempts to form a mental impression of what the sender is seeing, and then draws or describes it. Under very loose testing conditions, remote viewing demonstrations are often successful; under conditions that have

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PARAPSYCHOLOGY been set up to exclude various other ways of accomplishing the feat (several are well known among stage magicians), successes are quite rare. • Clairvoyance—Knowing information without resort to ordinary perception, memory, or inference. Again, anecdotes abound about this sort of thing, and it is what dowsers claim to be able to do—they can allegedly detect water or minerals underground (often guided by a gently-held stick or other device). Many laboratory experiments have attempted to demonstrate clairvoyance, usually requiring the subjects to detect the identity of a hidden target object (frequently a card). • Psychokinesis (previously known as telekinesis)—Sometimes referred to as “mind over matter,” this is the ability to use the mind to cause physical movement or changes in other objects without resort to normal means of doing so. The term telekinesis fell into such disrepute in the early days of psychic research, thanks to the many fraudulent manifestations produced by spirit mediums, that psychokinesis is now the preferred term. • Precognition—Knowing of events in advance of their occurrence, again without resort to the usual means of acquiring knowledge. Stories of prophecy abound in religion, mythology, and folklore, and so many people are certainly prepared to believe that such a phenomenon exists. As with other psychic gifts, this one has not been reliably manifested by anyone under controlled conditions. • Spirit mediumship—Some practitioners, known as mediums, claim to obtain their extrasensory knowledge from the spirits of the deceased. In the early days of the practice (late-nineteenth century), this information (often spoken by the medium in an eerie voice) was often accompanied by physical manifestations (odd sounds, mysteriously floating objects, ectoplasm, etc.—more information about this follows below), but most current mediums have completely abandoned this approach in favor of a fully vocal approach.

History. The initial burst of interest in scientific study of the paranormal was a direct result of the explosion in popularity of spiritualism (also called spiritism) in mid-nineteenth century America and Europe. In spiritualism, which eventually became an organized church based in New England, people interested in communicating with the spirits of the dead would hold séances, in which they would gather about a table in a darkened room, holding hands, and ask the spirits to communicate with them. The response would usually come in the form of mysterious rapping noises. Over time, the phenomena involved in séances grew to include such things as trumpets floating in the air and being mysteriously blown, the table rising briefly into the air, and the production of ectoplasm, or ghost substance, a mysterious shimmering product that the medium would pull from thin air, or sometimes from various body parts, and wave about. The birth of the Spiritualist movement can be dated quite precisely: The first séances were held in 1848, in the Hydesville, New York, home of the teenage Fox sisters (Margaret and Kate), who decided to have a bit of fun at their parents’ expense. Margaret had developed the ability to produce loud rapping sounds with her toes, which seemed to be mysterious communications from beyond when performed in a dark room with everyone holding hands on the tabletop. Very soon the Fox sisters were performing séances with a wide range of people, and others followed their lead until people all over Europe and America were communicating with the dead, and performing ever more elaborate variations on their initial deception. Within a few years, some eminent men of science, believing the phenomena to be real, began to investigate the conditions under which they occurred. The first

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attempt to describe a method of investigating these phenomena (and to provide a theory of sorts to explain them) was produced by the French author LéonDénizarth-Hippolyte Rivail, writing under the pseudonym Allan Kardec, primarily in two books: Le Livre des Esprits (1856) and Le Livre des Mediums (1861). Kardec’s interest in the subject seems to have begun when he met two young mediums, whose father was known to him, and they told him (or rather, the spirits whose words were coming through them told him) that he had an important spiritual mission to carry out. The resulting “spiritist theory” which he detailed in his books was the result of responses produced by these mediums via rapping and planchette movement (the trick best known today as the OuijaTM board). Indeed, the pseudonym was provided by the spirits as well: both Allan and Kardec were alleged to have been his names in prior lives. The spirits even told him what to call the book. Le Livre des Esprits become an instant sensation, making converts to his brand of spiritualism all over Europe. Kardec founded the Parisian Society of Psychologic Studies, which met in his home on Fridays in order to receive, via automatic writing (another standard medium technique), further instructions from the spirits. One outgrowth of this organization was his editorship of La Revue Spirite, which he continued to produce until his death (though not thereafter; it is still published today by the World Spiritist Congress). Kardec’s impact on his world was remarkably far-reaching: Napoleon III even sent for him several times to discuss the teachings in Le Livre des Esprits. In the wake of the founding of Kardec’s organization, other such groups were rapidly formed throughout Europe and America. As with most spiritual movements, schisms were evident early on, however, as the French version of Spiritualism differed markedly from the American in Kardec’s endorsement of the idea of compulsory reincarnation—in Kardec’s books, it is made clear that all are required to live multiple lifetimes. This is an odd feature of Kardec’s teachings, given that he followed up his early successes with books such as The Gospel as Explained by Spirits (1864), Heaven and Hell (1865), and Genesis (1867), whose target audience couldn’t be expected to be particularly receptive to the doctrine of reincarnation. Context and Issues “Psychical Research”Takes Hold. As the phenomena produced by mediums began to attract the attention of more scientifically minded observers as well, these men also became interested in investigating the claims of mind readers, hypnotists, and fortune-tellers. Soon they had formed formal organizations, and their “psychical research” was a respectable and rapidly growing enterprise. The Society for Psychical Research formed in London in 1882; the American Society for Psychical Research, today the Parapsychological Association, followed in 1885. Early in their investigations, they began to document a few things about the conditions under which such phenomena seemed more likely to occur. A successful séance, for example, required darkness—the materializations would not occur in a well-lit room, and the spirits would often not communicate at all. The presence of very skeptical people, who might watch very closely, also seemed to make the spirits less likely to turn up. Despite these inconvenient facts, several skillful “superstar” mediums emerged (D.D. Home and Eusapia Palladino are probably

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the best known) over several decades following the Fox sisters’ initial breakthrough, and they were instrumental in attracting the interest of serious scientists. Sir William Crookes, the great chemist (known for, among other accomplishments, the discovery of thallium, as well as early developments in the field of chemical fertilizer), for example, became interested in spiritist phenomena following the death of his brother. After attending a séance with the Fox sisters, Crookes was instrumental in getting other scientists to take more seriously the phenomena they produced, along with validating the levitation and tabletilting of D.D. Home. Following his example, the Society for Psychical Research counted several members of the British Royal Society among its early constituency. Alfred Russel Wallace, best known as Charles Darwin’s chief competitor for the discoverer’s role in the saga of evolutionary theory, also dabbled in psychical research, attending séances and speculating on the sources of the phenomena witnessed therein. Despite the legitimizing influence of Crookes, Wallace, and other prominent scientists (in America, William James was also an early enthusiast), Home and Palladino were also frequently caught cheating. This was readily overlooked by clients as well as by some of the prominent scientists, who were quick to accept the idea that too-close scrutiny prevented the rather shy spirits from showing up. People who openly deceived others for a living (especially such magicians as Houdini), however, began to take notice of these competitors who claimed their miracles were real. Houdini, still the best known of all conjurers, made a second career of attending séances and exposing fraud therein. Harry Houdini’s (born Erich Weiss; 1874–1926) A Magician among the Spirits. Unlike most who arrived in a medium’s parlor, Houdini was uniquely qualified to detect the trickery involved in spirit manifestations. Early in his career, he and his wife hosted regular séances for a Midwestern medicine show, during which he would cause tables to tip and float, while he also played musical instruments, all while tied to his chair! After his career as an escape artist took off circa 1899, Houdini left the stage medium business behind and largely forgot about it. His interest was revived in the early 1920s when he befriended Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Theirs was an odd friendship, balancing Houdini’s professional skepticism with Doyle’s extreme credulousness (among other things, he wrote a book endorsing the clearly faked photos three young girls took of fairies at Cottingley). Having become a Spiritualist leader, Doyle introduced Houdini to several prominent mediums in hopes of convincing him of the reality of the manifestations they produced. Far from being converted to Spiritualism, Houdini immediately recognized the fairly obvious tricks he had given up earlier in his career, and was offended at their deception of grieving people hoping only to reunite with their loved ones. He was especially sympathetic toward the victims, as he was still tormented by the unexpected death of his own mother a decade earlier. He set out to show that the business of psychic readings, far from being helpful to those left behind, was in fact built on their exploitation. An early book on the subject, Miracle Mongers and their Methods (1920), set the template for the far more influential A Magician among the Spirits (1924). Houdini made big changes in his stage act, in order to demonstrate far and wide that as a mere magician, he could not only reproduce all the effects associated with the mediums, but could actually perform them more convincingly. He went beyond reproducing their

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effects, however, going so far as to attend séances and expose the trickery while it was occurring. This had the added benefit, of course, of keeping his name before the public at a time when he was becoming too old to continue performing the very physically demanding stunts on which he built his career. According to his book, Houdini frequently attended séances in disguise, with both a reporter and police officer in tow, so that he could simultaneously have the medium arrested for fraud and have a story about the incident (prominently featuring Houdini’s own role, naturally) published in the local newspaper. He would also sometimes forego the disguise, instead challenging local mediums in the cities where he performed to demonstrate their powers on stage. The most noteworthy of these challenges involved a medium who went by the name of Margery (real name: Mina Crandon), billed as “The Boston Medium.” Margery had already convinced some prominent scientific investigators, a committee put together by Scientific American, that she was the real deal. When the committee sent Houdini to investigate, however, he found that she was just like all the other mediums he had seen, using the same fraudulent techniques (he published a separate pamphlet concerning this case, entitled “Margery” The Medium Exposed, expanded to book length as Houdini Exposes the Tricks Used by Boston Medium “Margery”). Among other things, he reported catching her ringing an electric bell with her foot and levitating a table by leaning over and lifting its edge with her head. So confident was he of her methods that he offered her $10,000 to demonstrate her abilities on stage at Boston’s Symphony Hall. The only condition attached to the prize was that she produce a manifestation he could not duplicate. When she refused, Houdini recreated her entire act for the audience, and subsequently went on to do so as a permanent part of his stage act. Following his success with Margery, he went on to expose the methods used by many other famous mediums, including the Fox sisters, as well as the single most famous medium of the time, Eusapia Palladino. These exposés, and the stories behind them, make up the bulk of A Magician among the Spirits. The impact of earlier exposures of fraud on the popularity of the mediums had been quite minimal (a common reaction: The spirits don’t always respond, so of course they have to cheat sometimes—that doesn’t mean it isn’t real on the other occasions! This justification continues as a major part of the arsenal of certain psychic performers today), even when the originator of the movement admitted her fraud: In 1888 (40 years after getting it all started, but 36 years before Houdini’s book), Margaret Fox, by this time a widow, told her story and gave public demonstrations of how the effects were achieved. Because of his high media profile and name recognition, Houdini was far more effective. The book was quite influential in starting the decline of the large-scale popularity of spirit mediums, as it became much harder for them to justify the need for darkness in order for their effects to occur (ectoplasm, for example, was far less convincing to readers who knew it was usually cheesecloth coated with luminous paint). They have never completely gone away, however—the National Spiritualist Association of Churches still boasts 3000 members, and they still hold séances. Furthermore, spiritualist resorts are still in business: Just as children go to summer camps to learn outdoor skills or improve their athletic abilities, thousands of (mostly elderly) spiritualists attend such places as Camp Chesterfield in Indiana to communicate with the departed. Camp Chesterfield (still in operation) became well known outside spiritualist church circles in 1976, with the publication of M. Lamar

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Keene’s The Psychic Mafia. Keene spent years as one of the camp’s top mediums, and his book lays out in great detail the extent to which not much had changed from the previous century. It was ultimately conscience that led Keene to abandon the camp and publish its secrets: Among other things, he expresses some regret over the large amounts of money his congregations would donate to the church “building fund,” all of which was destined not for construction but rather for Keene’s own wallet. The book reveals numerous tricks of the trade that had not previously been exposed, such as the technique used to “apparate” items that the attendees had lost. Often, the items had in fact been surreptitiously stolen from their homes by church accomplices. The book also goes into great detail regarding the use of common, simple magician’s tricks to convince the audience that the medium is actually in touch with the spirits. Keene’s book had the usual impact of such exposés on the fraud being exposed: Almost none. Not only are spiritualist churches still in business, the last quarter of the twentieth century and the turn of the millennium saw several waves of new spiritualist practitioners boasting new approaches to the same old thing. In the mid-1980s, a new wave of mediums emerged, with a new name: channelers. Gone were the physical manifestations, and thus gone also was the need for the cover of darkness. Furthermore, to make their statements even harder to pin down, the new mediums did not claim to be in touch with spirits of dead friends or relatives of their audience, but rather with ancient wise beings removed from the present (and thus from specific details known to the audience) by thousands of years. Rather than answering questions, these mediums would enter a trance, after which their body language and voice would change, indicating that their bodies had been taken over by entities who wished to speak to the modern world. The most successful of these was certainly JZ (the initials stand for Judy Zebra) Knight. A pretty, small blonde woman, she believes she has been taken over by a 35,000-year old, 8-foot-tall male warrior named Ramtha, from the lost continent of Atlantis. In addition to performing for years to capacity crowds, she published several bestselling books about her experiences, the best known of which is A State of Mind: My Story. From the back cover of the 1988 paperback edition: . . . he spoke to her with vital spiritual messages for our time. This visionary event changed her life and was to change the lives of countless others all over the world as they flocked to see and hear JZ Knight “channel” the teachings of Ramtha on the eternal paths of unconditional love. . . .the thrilling quest of the spirit that has led to a UFO encounter, miraculous healing, visits from the ever-watchful dead, and—most of all— an eternal wisdom that points to a future of radiant, limitless hope for us all.

The vague positivity of this description is typical of the content of her channelled communications as well, although Knight also frequently appears to espouse a sort of feminist-apocalyptic vision, in which men are brutal creatures who eroticize violence and who must be removed from power and replaced by women—an odd philosophy for a great male warrior from the past. Knight was part of a wave of channelers that crested and broke in the late 1980s, and most have faded back into obscurity. Knight is still making an impact on the entertainment world, however. Some of her followers, members of the Ramtha Foundation, were behind two popculture phenomena in the new millennium. The first, the 2005 semi-documentary film What the Bleep Do We Know?, explores a variety of esoteric subjects with the

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help of various on-screen experts (physicists, neuroscientists, etc.), among which Knight appears (with the on-screen credit Ramtha). The movie caused a bit of a sensation at film festivals and had a popular run at the box office. Some of the same production team was behind a 2006 publishing success, the book and accompanying movie entitled The Secret. The book is credited to Rhonda Byrne, and the film incorporates the same blend of slick production values and alternative interpretation of science (some would say misrepresentation) that made What the Bleep . . . such a success. The producers have taken full advantage of modern technology, spreading the book and movie through a Web site that describes the book/film as follows: The Secret reveals the most powerful law in the universe. The knowledge of this law has run like a golden thread through the lives and the teachings of all the prophets, seers, sages and saviors in the world’s history, and through the lives of all truly great men and women. All that they have ever accomplished or attained has been done in full accordance with this most powerful law. . . .The Secret explains with simplicity the law that is governing all lives, and offers the knowledge of how to create—intentionally and effortlessly—a joyful life. This is the secret to everything—the secret to unlimited happiness, love, health and prosperity. This is the secret to life. (www.thesecret.tv)

As it turns out, the secret is fairly straightforward: Byrne proposes that in order to attain whatever we wish, we simply have to believe fervently that we shall attain it, and it will come to pass. The universe wants us to be happy, and we just need to make clear what we desire. The channelers were not the only ones to begin a new mediumistic ascendancy in the last several decades—there are currently several popular entertainers (such as Sylvia Browne, John Edward, and James Van Praagh) who have become successful by claiming to communicate with the dead in yet another, somewhat old-fashioned, manner. Like the channelers, they’ve eliminated the need for darkness, but are still using a very old technique known among magicians as cold reading. In cold reading, the medium asks many questions and zeros in on specific information based on the answers that are given. The person receiving the reading will often only remember the questions to which the answer was “yes” (hits), while forgetting about the much larger number of misses. These mediums have mostly had little impact in publishing, with the exception of Sylvia Browne, who has many books to her credit. Some concern the expected messages of comfort from the “other side”—both in the books and in her public readings with the bereaved, she claims that her information is provided by a “spirit guide” named Francine. These works include, among others, Temples on the Other Side: How Wisdom from “Beyond the Veil” Can Help You Right Now (2008), Sylvia Browne’s Lessons for Life (2004), Sylvia Browne’s Book of Angels (2004), Conversations from the Other Side (2002), and the forthcoming End of Days: What You Need to Know Now about the End of the World (2008). Uniquely among current mediums, however, Browne has also positioned herself as a spiritual leader, founding a church called the Society of Novus Spiritus, which she presents as a Gnostic form of Christianity. Her books therefore also include such explicitly religious titles as The Two Marys: The Hidden History of the Mother and Wife of Jesus (2007), Sylvia Browne’s Book of Angels (2004), and If You Could See What I See: The Tenets of Novus Spiritus (2006).

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The Emergence of Scientific Parapsychology. Given the continuing current popularity of mediums who claim to communicate with the dead, it is important to note that the scientific study of psychic phenomena abandoned the notion that psychics were actually communicating with the dead over a century ago. In the late nineteenth century, the Society for Psychical Research had already begun to turn its attention toward paranormal phenomena beyond those manifested by the spirit mediums. In an 1886 two-volume collection of reports of ghosts and contact with the dead, entitled Phantasms of the Living, Society members Edmund Gurney and Frederic W.H. Myers speculated that some of the apparitions they studied were actually due to thought-transference (a theory, incidentally, about which Alfred Russel Wallace then wrote a highly critical paper), for which they coined a new word: Telepathy. By the early twentieth century, psychical researchers had become less interested in the spirit mediums, and were concentrating their attention more fully on telepaths and clairvoyants. As their methods became more rigorous and quantitative, and psychologists began to take over a field previously dominated by physical scientists, the new science began to find a home at major universities. Pride of place for publishing the first report of an experiment on clairvoyance (card guessing, in this case) goes to John Coover, the first holder of a Fellowship in Psychical Research at Stanford University. In the monograph Experiments in Psychical Research, he published the results of four large studies, involving 100 research participants. Somewhat prophetically for the field of study as a whole, he concluded that he had found nothing supportive of belief in ESP. Perhaps in part because of his willingness to publicize his negative results, Coover is largely forgotten even among those who know the parapsychological literature well. Selected Authors. James Banks Rhine (1895–1980) is known to nearly everyone with even a passing interest in parapsychology. In 1934, he cofounded and became director of the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University, located in North Carolina. Rhine and his wife, Louisa, first went to Duke to join the psychology department and work with William McDougall, who shared their interest in paranormal phenomena, and soon this shared interest took psychical research in a new and altogether more scientific direction. Although he agreed with Houdini after a session with Margery, the Boston medium, that she was guilty of fraud and trickery, Rhine was nonetheless fascinated by telepathy and similar phenomena, and he wanted to establish the study of this more scientifically observable subject matter as a subject distinct from the study of those who claimed communion with the dead. It was Rhine who shook off the phrase “psychical research” with its attendant baggage and popularized the more scientific-sounding parapsychology (a term used as far back as 1889 by the psychologist Max Dessoir) to replace it. He also introduced the terms extrasensory perception and psychokinesis, and was easily the most influential of all parapsychologists, both in his methods and in his ability to popularize the field in his books, articles, and lectures. More than through books, Rhine’s influence came via the publication of a research journal. He founded the Journal of Parapsychology in 1937, thus providing American parapsychologists with a respectable peer-reviewed journal in which to publish their findings. The Journal is still published today, appearing semiannually. Twenty years after founding the journal, Rhine was also instrumental in founding the Parapsychological Association. In the lab at Duke he developed, with

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his colleague Karl Zener, the most popular piece of equipment in parapsychology, the Zener cards. The Zener cards are a deck made up of five simple symbols, one on each card: star, circle, square, cross, and wavy lines. The Zener cards were widely used in ESP experiments, in which the participant was required to identify a hidden target card from a set of five known possible targets. In a telepathy experiment, the cards were viewed by a remote person (the sender) who attempted to “transmit” the information to the participant. In a clairvoyance experiment, the participant would simply attempt to identify the order of the cards, without anyone looking at them first. Rhine’s first book, Extra-Sensory Perception (1934), may well be the most important book in the history of parapsychology, if only because it gave the world (via its title) a new term for the phenomena of telepathy and clairvoyance. The book’s publication was also a watershed event in that it started a new era of publishing on parapsychology and on paranormal phenomena in general. Extra-Sensory Perception established the pattern that would be followed thereafter, in which experimental work is largely ignored (and when not ignored, largely ridiculed) by the scientific community but becomes massively popular when sold directly to the public in book form. In this book, Rhine reached exactly the opposite conclusion from that reached by Coover: That “it is independently established on the basis of this work alone that Extra-Sensory Perception is an actual and demonstrable occurrence” (162). This seminal work was followed in rapid succession by a popular treatment of the research, New Frontiers of the Mind: The Story of the Duke Experiments (1937), which sold quite well and was rapturously received by reviewers outside the scientific community, who compared Rhine to Copernicus and to Darwin, among others. Extra-sensory perception had entered the popular lexicon, as had the idea that it was scientifically testable using the Zener cards, and both have endured in the popular imagination ever since. New Frontiers was followed over the next several decades by many more books, some co-authored by his wife, Louisa Rhine, a prolific psychic researcher in her own right. The Rhines’ entire body of work continued to champion the view that Rhine’s lab results consistently demonstrate the reality of extra-sensory perception, in the face of the equally consistent failure of other laboratories to replicate his results when adequate precautions against cheating were taken. Significant titles include the following: The Reach of the Mind (1947), New World of the Mind (1953), Parapsychology, Frontier Science of the Mind: A Survey of the Field, the Methods, and the Facts of ESP and PK Research (1957), Extra-Sensory Perception after Sixty Years: A Critical Appraisal of the Research on Extra-Sensory Perception (1967—co-authored with J.G. Pratt). It should be noted that two years after Rhine began his studies of ESP at Duke (in 1927, working with William McDougall), Pulitzer Prize-winner Upton Sinclair published Mental Radio (1929) detailing a series of clairvoyance experiments he conducted with his wife. The book was a popular seller, and the extent to which the idea of clairvoyance was seen as a legitimate topic for study at the time is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that Albert Einstein wrote a preface to the book. In the preface, Einstein stresses Sinclair’s honesty and integrity, as well as the dubious nature of the phenomenon itself: . . . it is out of the question in the case of so conscientious an observer and writer as Upton Sinclair that he is carrying on a conscious deception of the reading world; his good faith and dependability are not to be doubted. So if somehow the facts here set

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This passage is sometimes presented as indicating an endorsement of paranormal abilities on Einstein’s part. It does not indicate any such thing, but he was clearly open to further study of the phenomena, especially the idea that something psychological rather than paranormal is at work. The additional introduction by Rhine’s collaborator, William McDougall, is less guarded: The experiments in telepathy, as reported in the pages of this book, were so remarkably successful as to rank among the very best hitherto reported. The degree of success and the conditions of experiment were such that we can reject them as conclusive evidence . . . only by assuming that Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair either are grossly stupid, incompetent and careless persons or have deliberately entered upon a conspiracy to deceive the public in a most heartless and reprehensible fashion. (from Sinclair 1929)

Then came the (temporary) decline of academic parapsychology. Despite Rhine’s continuing conviction that the body of research supported the reality of ESP, however, the ongoing lack of replicable evidence had lost his quest most of the little remaining support it enjoyed in the academic scientific community by the end of the 1950s. In 1962, with several decades of research having failed to conclusively demonstrate the existence of any paranormal phenomena, Duke University followed the lead of most other major institutions and quietly distanced itself from parapsychological research. Without the university’s continuing support, Rhine moved off campus and founded the Parapsychological Laboratory’s successor, the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man (now the Rhine Research Center), up the street from Duke. As the 1970s dawned, and brought with them a new wave of “occult” fads (including such things as astrology, Kirlian photography, UFOlogy, pyramid power, the Bermuda Triangle, transcendental meditation practitioners claiming to be able to levitate, etc.), Rhine became quite concerned for the future of parapsychology, as well as its popular image as an experimental science. Many parapsychologists took a positive and uncritical approach to such ideas as the ability of pyramids to focus undefined “energies” to keep blades sharp and prevent food from spoiling when kept under them. Rhine recognized, correctly, that this was eroding the credibility of their continuing research on ESP. Despite Rhine’s concerns, parapsychological research has continued unabated, though it has remained marginalized, with very few degree programs in parapsychology still in existence. Despite the large number of universities in the United States, for example, only two still maintain active parapsychology programs. This has not halted innovation, however—parapsychology has come a long way from card-guessing experiments. In the early 1970s, even as the number of parapsychology labs dropped dramatically, the productivity of those remaining researchers remained high, and a number of new, more sophisticated paradigms arose to replace the old Zener cards with high technology. Work in scientific parapsychology continued in the 1970s. Helmut Schmidt, a German-born parapsychologist who worked at the Rhine Research Center, began in the late 1960s to conduct experiments on micro-psychokinesis, or micro-PK, in which subjects attempt to influence the generation of random numbers by computers. He continued this research in the 1970s, and has written many scholarly articles in which he claims to have demonstrated a slight human mental influence on the oper-

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ation of machines, an influence he explained in terms of quantum mechanics. This has become a common explanatory mechanism for parapsychologists in the ensuing years, although few people outside of physics actually understand quantum mechanics. Other researchers have conducted hundreds of experiments attempting to replicate his findings, frequently claiming to have found further support for micro-PK. Meanwhile, Stanley Krippner, Montague Ullman, and Charles Honorton were using the sleep lab at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn to conduct experiments in dream telepathy, collected in the volume Dream Telepathy (1973), edited by Ullman and Krippner. In these experiments, which involved over 100 participants, one person would attempt to “send” thoughts to a second person, while the second person was sleeping. The second person was then awakened and asked to describe his/her dreams, and the dreams were examined for evidence of the sent content. The authors claim to have found, in many instances, a significant relationship between what was sent and what was dreamt. The volume also contains two papers by Honorton that purport to present strong scientific evidence for precognitive dreams. Throughout recorded history, people have of course believed to varying degrees in the ability of dreams to sometimes predict the future—Honorton was the first to claim scientific proof of the phenomenon. Honorton’s dream research is noteworthy mostly for inspiring the next stage of his research, which introduced a highly touted recent parapsychological paradigm: The ganzfeld experiment, widely regarded by parapsychologists as the best evidence for paranormal ability so far. The word ganzfeld means “total field” in German and is used to refer to a technique of sensory deprivation that creates an absolutely uniform visual field. The usual procedure involves taping halves of pingpong balls over the experimental subject’s eyes. A bright light is then pointed at the eyes, creating a visual field without discontinuities. In addition to the bright light, the subject usually wears headphones playing pleasant noise, such as the sound of surf. Parapsychologists believe the pleasant, relaxed state thus produced is highly conducive to the reception of psychic signals. After the subject (receiver) has spent about 15 minutes in this state, a sender is given a target image, randomly selected from four possible pictures, which were in turn randomly selected from a larger pool of possibilities. The sender concentrates on the picture for a prearranged interval, while the receiver, in a soundproof room, freely describes all mental impressions that occur during this period. At the end of the session the receiver selects from the four the picture that best matches his impressions. Over a large number of trials, the receiver could expect to get 25 percent correct by chance. An actual rate of correct responses significantly above this level is assumed to be evidence of ESP. Honorton and others have claimed success rates in some experiments as high as 55 percent, but various psychologists (most notably Ray Hyman) have written extensive critiques faulting both the methodology and the statistical techniques involved. Both the random-number and ganzfeld techniques found new life in the hands of Robert Jahn, a Princeton University physics professor and dean who established the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory to conduct parapsychological research in 1979. Though his background is in physics and engineering, he became convinced that the human mind directly influences the world around it, an idea described fully in Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World (1987, co-authored by Brenda J. Dunne). In the book, they claim to have replicated Schmidt’s random number generator findings, and thus to have

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demonstrated the reality of micro-PK. In 2007, the PEAR lab at Princeton University shut down, but its work continues at a new nonprofit organization, International Consciousness Research Laboratories. Carrying on Jahn’s ideas, however, is fellow physicist Dean Radin, author of the popular (in its fifteenth printing as of late 2006) The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena (1997).In the book, Radin introduces a now fairly popular interpretation of psychic phenomena in terms of quantum mechanics (which often makes little sense to most of the physics community Recognizing the extent to which other scientists reject his ideas, he treats this rejection as temporary setback on the road to a forthcoming validation. From the introduction: In science, the acceptance of new ideas follows a predictable, four-stage sequence. In Stage 1, skeptics confidently proclaim that the idea is impossible because it violates the Laws of Science. This stage can last from years to centuries, depending on how much the idea challenges conventional wisdom. In Stage 2, skeptics reluctantly concede that the idea is possible, but it is not very interesting and the claimed effects are extremely weak. Stage 3 begins when the mainstream realizes that the idea is not only important, but its effects are much stronger and more pervasive than previously imagined. Stage 4 is achieved when the same critics who used to disavow any interest in the idea begin to proclaim that they thought of it first. Eventually, no one remembers that the idea was once considered a dangerous heresy. . . . The idea discussed in this book is in the midst of the most important and the most difficult of the four transitions—from Stage 1 into Stage 2. While the idea itself is ancient, it has taken more than a century to conclusively demonstrate it in accordance with rigorous, scientific standards.

After the long dry spell in the world of celebrity (non-medium) psychics prompted by the decline of the spiritualists, popular parapsychology came back in a big way in the 1970s, and at the center of this revival was a tall, handsome, Israeli-born psychic named Uri Geller (1946–). Geller burst onto the international stage with an original, if underwhelming, claim to psychokinetic ability: He appeared to bend silverware, keys, and other small metal objects with his mind. In addition, he claimed to be able to reproduce drawings made by people at some distance from him—sometimes in the next room, sometimes in another part of the world. Uri Geller’s genius was in convincing apparently reputable scientists (with no experience of magicians’ methods) of his skills, and then parlaying the publicity attendant on their published articles and books into further television appearances and books of his own. In 1972, for example, Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff conducted a series of tests of Geller and another young psychic, Ingo Swann, focusing on the drawingreproduction trick described above, to which Targ and Puthoff gave a new name: remote viewing (Honorton’s ganzfeld experiments simply represent a refinement of this technique, which attempts to more thoroughly control for the possibility of cheating). After numerous revisions to remove some of the odder material, the highly respected British science journal Nature published Targ and Puthoff’s “Information Transmission under Conditions of Sensory Shielding” in October 1974. This publication led to a substantial amount of respectful, positive publicity both for the psychics and the authors, with even the New York Times treating it as a serious scientific paper. What none of the publicity mentioned was that Nature had decided to publish the article to let the rest of the scientific community evaluate the quality of current paranormal research. The article was accompanied by an editorial that

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explained this, and which used such words as “weak,” “naïve,” and “flawed” to describe the research. Despite the collective yawn of the scientific community, Targ and Puthoff went straight to the public with a summary of their experiments, entitled Mind Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Ability. The book featured a foreword by Jonathan Livingston Seagull author Richard Bach, and an introductory essay by respected anthropologist Margaret Mead, in which she indicates that the research described in the book uses solid laboratory science to confirm the existence of remote viewing. Elsewhere in the book, Targ and Puthoff create a new term to refer to Geller’s apparent ability to weaken metal with his mind: The Geller Effect, which also became the title of Geller’s successful autobiography. The book was co-authored by Guy Lyon Playfair, who has written many other books on paranormal topics, with a special focus on hauntings and reincarnation. Geller has ridden the wave of publicity ever since, with frequent television appearances and a continuing stream of books and products, most now available via his Web site. His repertoire has varied little since the early 1970s: A typical TV appearance includes the bending of silverware and the guessing of drawings made by other guests. One venture presented him as a health practitioner of sorts; the book Mind Medicine, a 1999 publication, barely mentions his putative powers and instead offers a wide range of fairly ordinary health-related advice on the power of such things as relaxation and meditation. James Randi (1928–), Canadian-born magician and escape artist, had a highly successful career as a stage performer from the 1950s into the 1970s, but since the early 1960s he has been primarily known for picking up where Houdini left off, as the world’s leading skeptical investigator of paranormal, occult, and supernatural claims. In the beginning of this phase of his career, he carried around a blank check for $10,000, which he promised to anyone who could show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event. With inflation and the participation of some generous donors, the prize is up to over $1 million today, and has never been given away.

THE AMAZING RANDI VERSUS THE AMAZING GELLER James Randi achieved his greatest fame with his ongoing battle with Uri Geller, whose frequent television appearances (and his insistence that his powers were real and that he never used tricks) offended Randi, who saw not a psychic but a magician, with a very limited repertoire, when he looked at Geller. They also bothered The Tonight Show’s then-host, Johnny Carson (a skeptical ex-magician himself), who called Randi in as a consultant on ways to prevent Geller from cheating.The result was an embarrassing 22-minute appearance in 1973 during which he was unable to perform any of his usual feats. (Videos of the Geller Tonight Show appearance are available on You Tube, www.youtube.com.) Following this experience, Randi went on to write an entire book detailing ways to duplicate many of Geller’s psychic feats without resort to any paranormal gifts. The Magic of Uri Geller was first published in 1975, and was retitled, more directly, The Truth about Uri Geller in 1982. It remains in print under that title, despite numerous lawsuits Geller has directed Randi’s way. Contrary to the content of Geller’s legal complaints, Randi does not state that Geller is definitely a fraud— he simply points out that Geller does nothing that cannot be done better using simple magician’s tricks. Despite Randi’s investigations, Uri Geller continues to perform around the world and has an extensive Web site.

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James Randi has investigated psychic Uri Geller a number of times, and in addition to publishing The Magic of Uri Geller in 1975 (retitled The Truth about Uri Geller in 1982) he provided further information on Geller’s history, including an entire chapter devoted to what he considers the poor methodology of Targ and Puthoff (Randi titles the chapter “The Laurel and Hardy of Psi”), in Flim-Flam (1980). Among many other problems, Randi believes that in one of the more famous tests of Geller (the one that was written up in Nature), the room in which Geller was placed to isolate him from the “senders” actually had a hole in the wall through which Geller could hear the experimenters discussing the stimulus item. The book also includes chapters on many other odd beliefs of the 1970s, including the presence of space aliens in ancient Egypt (and the resulting pyramid power), the Bermuda Triangle, and the Houdini-Doyle conflict over the Cottingley fairies, as well as an excellent history of the Fox sisters and the early days of psychical research. Randi’s mantra is a simple one: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If a person is claiming something that is not possible given our current understanding of the world, then it is unlikely to be true, and substantial scientific evidence should be required of that person before his claim is believed. His devotion to the pursuit of truth against a rising tide of nonsense and pseudoscience earned him a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant (a prize usually given to people pursuing groundbreaking academic research) in the 1980s, which he put toward his efforts to expose the tricks of phony faith-healers. In 1976 he was a founding fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP, made up of leading scientists and thinkers in a variety of disciplines), and he has more recently left CSICOP behind (in part as a result of their being named as co-defendants in lawsuits filed against Randi by Geller and others) to form his own organization, the James Randi Educational Foundation. The JREF serves as a clearinghouse of information on pseudoscience, skepticism, and the paranormal, and also hosts an annual conference (“The Amazing Meeting”) devoted to those topics. Given parapsychology’s ongoing failure to produce replicable psychic events involving humans, it is somewhat unsurprising that some authors have turned to the animal world instead. Most prominent in this field is Rupert Sheldrake. He has a PhD in biochemistry, but has chosen to focus his attention on a wide range of paranormal topics, frequently jumping on current paranormal bandwagons. He has joined the ranks of Jahn and Radin, for example, with The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (1995), and Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness (co-authored by Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Jean Houston, 2001), in which he and his colleagues attempt to use complex systems theory to explain how psychic powers work. In books such as these, he has added an explanatory piece of jargon to the parapsychological lexicon: morphic resonance, a term for the process he believes underlies telepathy. The basic idea is that all living things generate a morphic field (which cannot be measured), and that these fields interact in ways that we cannot currently detect. Sheldrake has in the last decade or so moved toward a rather unusual career path focused on studies of two phenomena: The sense of being stared at and psychic pets. He has attempted to give a scientific foundation to the fairly ancient folk belief that people can sense when they are the object of staring, claiming to have experimentally demonstrated that people really can tell when somebody out of their line of

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sight is staring. His primary work on this is the book The Sense of Being Stared At: And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind (2003), in which he argues that, thanks to morphic resonance, the mind is able to sense this phenomenon without resort to the usual senses. Other scientists and reviewers have been fairly merciless in their criticism of his methods, but Sheldrake has accepted this criticism with a wry sense of humor, collecting and responding to his critics’ objections in an issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, with a piece called “Sheldrake and his Critics: The Sense of Being Glared At” (2005). Sheldrake has also become convinced that our pets, especially dogs, have far more sensitive psychic gifts than their owners, an idea he explored thoroughly in Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home: And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals (2000). In the book he claims that experiments show that even when owners come home at unusual times, and dogs are prevented from in any way seeing or hearing any signs that they are coming, the dogs nonetheless begin to become restless or excited shortly before the owner’s arrival. Like the staring research, this has been largely ignored or dismissed by the scientific community, including other parapsychologists, but the book has been quite successful. Reception. Despite over a century of research into psychic phenomena, the field of parapsychology remains a publishing success but a scientific failure. The essential problem is that a large portion of the scientific community, including most research psychologists, regards parapsychology as a pseudoscience, due largely to its failure to move on beyond null results in the way science usually does. Ordinarily, when experimental evidence fails repeatedly to support a hypothesis, that hypothesis is abandoned. Within parapsychology, however, more than a century of experimentation has failed even to conclusively demonstrate the mere existence of paranormal phenomena, yet parapsychologists continue to pursue that elusive goal, and readers continue to accompany them. Bibliography Browne, Sylvia. Sylvia Browne’s Book of Angels. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 1993. ———. Sylvia Browne’s Lessons for Life. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 2004. ———. If You Could See What I See: The Tenets of Novus Spiritus. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 2006. ———. The Two Marys: The Hidden History of the Mother and Wife of Jesus. New York: Dutton, 2007. Byrne, Rhonda. The Secret. New York: Atria Books, 2006. Geller, Uri. Mind Medicine. Boston: Element Books, 1999. ———. Uri Geller’s Mindpower Kit. New York: Penguin Studio, 1996. Geller, Uri, and G.L. Playfair. The Geller Effect. New York: H. Holt, 1987. Gurney, Edmund, F.W. Myers, and F. Podmore. Phantasms of the Living. London: Trubner and Co., 1886. Houdini, Harry. A Magician among the Spirits. New York: Arno Press, 1972 (1924). ———. Houdini exposes the tricks used by the Boston medium “Margery” to win the $2500 prize offered by the Scientific American. Also a complete exposure of Argamasilla, the famous Spaniard who baffled noted scientists of Europe and America, with his claim to X-ray vision . . . New York: Adams Press, 1924. ———. Miracle Mongers and their Methods: A Complete Exposé. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1981 (1920). Hyman, Ray. The Elusive Quarry: A Scientific Appraisal of Psychical Research. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1989.

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PHILOLOGICAL THRILLERS Jahn, Robert, and Brenda Dunne. Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987. Kardec, Allan. The Spirits’ Book (Le Livre des Esprits). Albuquerque, NM: Brotherhood of Life, 1993. ———. Book on Mediums (Le Livre des Mediums). Boston: Colby and Rich, 1874. Keene, M. Lamar, and Allan Spraggett. The Psychic Mafia. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1997, 1976. Knight, J.Z. A State of Mind: My Story. New York: Warner, 1987. McMoneagle, J. The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, 2002. Morehouse, D. Psychic Warrior: Inside the CIA’s Stargate Program: The True Story of a Soldier’s Espionage and Awakening. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996. Radin, D. The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Reality of Psychic Phenomena. New York: HarpersEdge, 1997. Randi, James. Flim-Flam! Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1982. ———. The Truth about Uri Geller. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1982. Rhine, J.B. ExtraSensory Perception. Boston: B. Humphries, 1964. ———. New Frontiers of the Mind: The Story of the Duke Experiments. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1937. Sheldrake, Rupert. Dogs that Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. New York: Crown, 1999. ———. “Sheldrake and his Critics: The Sense of Being Glared At.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 12.6 (2005). ———. The Sense of Being Stared At. New York: Crown, 2003. ———. The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature. New York: Times Books, 1995 (1988). Sheldrake, Rupert, T. McKenna, and R. Abraham. Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2001. Sinclair, Upton. Mental Radio. Springfield, IL: C.C. Thomas, 1962 (1929). Targ, R., and H. Puthoff. Mind Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Ability. New York: Delacorte, 1977. Ullman, M., S. Krippner, and A. Vaughan. Dream Telepathy. New York: Macmillan, 1973. What the Bleep Do We Know? Dir. by Mark Vicente, Betsy Chasse, and William Arntz. Twentieth Century Fox. 2005. 108 mins. Wolman, B.B., ed. Handbook of Parapsychology. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1977.

Further Reading James Randi Educational Foundation. www.randi.org; Rupert Sheldrake, Biologist and Author. www.sheldrake.org; Uri Geller’s Web site. www.urigeller.com.

LUIS A. CORDÓN

PHILOLOGICAL THRILLERS Definition. Philological thrillers base their suspense effect on mysteries soluble by scholarship or learning. Plots are pivoted on matters requiring the attention and skill of a protagonist well versed in history and literature, often requiring indepth linguistic command of classical Greek and Latin, and with broad cultural knowledge. Specialization on the part of the investigator in some arcane subject or sign system/language is mandatory. Usually following the structure of the action thriller with its leading up to a final showdown the learned hero must also possess a modicum of physical prowess, and all in all turn out to command mental and physical resources more than matching those of his vile opponent. In a

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TYPES OF PHILOLOGICAL THRILLERS Like all generic fiction somewhat blurred at the genre edges, the philological thriller seems to subdivide into mysteries to do with antiquity, notably ancient Egypt, mysteries to do with the origins and circumstances of the Christian faith, mysteries about the Knights Templar (the latter two categories often, by force of their shared concerns, fused into one), and a group with no distinct shared thematic emphasis but sharing the central issue of a mystery, the solution of which depends on successful philological enquiry, exhibiting the element of ancient and/or coded texts in need of interpretation.

perspective of time setting the philological thriller typically usually works in terms of a tension between a past containing mysteries in need of interpretation and a present inviting or necessitating such interpretation and, which is essential, making such interpretation possible (e.g., Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code). In cases where such tension is not activated because of events taking place completely in the past, the approach of the investigator is markedly modern (e.g., Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose). As the mystery of the philological thriller involves specialist knowledge for its unravelling, an important characteristic of this kind of thriller is its strong efforts to ensure the reader’s appreciation of what is at stake, hence its prominent didactic elements, which may often amount to what is known from popular-science writing. History. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003) was, in market figures, the culmination of a literary trend with increasing mass appeal since Umberto Eco’s very learned but nonetheless best-selling The Name of the Rose (1980). There is a history of philological-thriller elements before Eco, but to talk of a (sub-) genre as such would hardly make any sense. Indeed, it is even only to a superficial reading that Eco’s novel may be said to be the first instance of the modern bona fide philological thriller. The Name of the Rose, as it appears with all desirable clarity from Eco’s separately published Postscript to The Name of the Rose (1983), the novel was meant to argue against the Newtonian rationalism that pervades most thrillers. Based on semiotics, Eco’s specialty as a scholar, the novel is a practical but always subtle demonstration of how meaning is constructed and works by systems of signs. Nonetheless, it makes sense, despite authorial intention, to read the work as a rather straight story of uncovering a secret of immense importance to certain clerics of the medieval church, a secret of a nature only immediately appreciable by philologists and literary historians familiar with Antiquity. No doubt the good quest-cum-mystery yarn of Eco’s novel secured an audience beyond the literary and semiotic connoisseurs, who recognize it, in accordance with Eco’s intention, as a work in an anti-rationalist tradition embracing writers before him, like Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov, and after, like Thomas Pynchon and Paul Auster. We may take it that it is exactly this quest-cum-mystery quality that two decades later appealed to the perhaps even larger audience of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Dan Brown’s best seller from 2003 is the work that gathered up narrative and thematic elements in a particularly successful combination in terms of reader appeal. It may consequently be considered the common reference work in the genre, a status given irrespective of criteria to do with evaluative criticism.

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Central to the philological thriller is a quest for some knowledge deemed of crucial importance, of such an importance indeed that the generally accepted historically based self-understanding of modern (Western) society is in for radical adjustment. In the case of Eco it was the lost—and eventually lost again!—manuscript of Aristotle’s treatise on comedy, considered unsound for proper religious observance. In the case of Brown it was the dogma-thwarting notion of a feminine lineage from Christ. Such involvement of searching for tradition-disturbing basics resembles the famous quests for the Holy Grail catalogued by European mythology and literature. We find the myth material to do with the Holy Grail in medieval romance cycles in the Romance languages as well as in English. It found expression in the operas of Richard Wagner, here merging with elements from Nordic mythology, and later also in, for instance, the fiction of such different writers as Lawrence Durrell (The Avignon Quincunx), J.R.R. Tolkien (Lord of the Rings), and J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter). Victorian adventure fiction (e.g., H. Rider Haggard) often involves the solution of riddles needing a scholarly approach combined with muscular activities. Trends and Themes. Philology, from classical Greek meaning the love of words, and a concept and term introduced as late as the early nineteenth century in the context of modern university enquiry, presupposes a common culture constituted by written language—texts—accessible by methods relying on the philologist’s textual instruments such as what we today would call linguistics, historiography, and literary study, often extending its practices to draw on related domains within anthropology, psychology, and so on. Central to the philological thriller is the common attribution of extraordinary power to language and other cultural constructs. The phenomenon is well known in the observing of religious and quasi-religious practices. For the transformation— transubstantiation—of the bread and wine of the Eucharist into the body of Christ the Roman Catholic liturgy requires a verbal formula including the Latin words Hoc est corpus meum. Although inherently nothing mysterious in the Latin words they have come to be associated with the metaphysical transubstantiation depending on faith, an association all the more apparent in the layman’s lack of understanding of the Latin that has resulted in the expression hocus pocus, designating that which cannot be immediately understood. To Plato the poets posed a danger to the polity, since their words were capable of arousing feelings contrary to the common sense needed for everyday transactions. To the Nordic Vikings the runes had power of fate. And in most civilizations the written word has carried more importance, in, say, business matters, than oral understandings, although oaths, affidavits, and so on, by having been uttered, do carry legal consequences. In other words, language has traditionally served a double purpose as both means of communication and— more or less powerful—object of communication. Arguably, also the pervasive postmodernist climate of recent decades with its predilection for a “textual” or “verbal” approach to existence has made philological enquiry of topical interest. Eco radicalized philological enquiry by way of semiotics, a theory of signs developed from the Swiss philologist Ferdinand de Saussure’s posthumous publication Cours de linguistique generale (1916) consisting of students’ lecture notes taken 1906–11, with notable contributions from linguistic scholars such as the Dane Louis Hjelmslev and the American Charles Peirce. In his notes for his novel, Postscript to The Name of the Rose (1983), Eco himself draws attention to the way he treats language and text conventions to challenge and redirect interest in cultural-, text-, and language-dependent constructs. The philological enquiry at the heart of

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the story, the discovery of the lost treatise by Aristotle on comedy, a companion piece to the Greek philosopher’s famous and philologically fully processed treatise on tragedy, is the kind of work requiring the philological expertise represented by the “investigating officer,” the English monk William of Baskerville, whose procedures parallel and complement the present-day philological work of the author of the novel. Whereas Eco undertakes to question and put at risk cultural conventions taken for granted in Western culture and thereby joins forces with contemporary philosophical work deconstructing seemingly cultural givens pioneered by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, Dan Brown’s center of interest in his best seller is in the ancient “conspiracy theory” regarding the possible issue of Christ and the existence of a female Christian tradition. The way to the (re-)discovery of this alternative to established Christian dogma is a chain of riddles left by the guardians of the heresy. Unlike Eco’s mystery that leaves the investigator and the reader enmeshed in the net of language, Brown’s protagonist, the symbologist professor Robert Langdon, and the reader with him, is able to break the code insofar as it is constituted by a series of enigmatic ciphers, but will have to negotiate himself the theological implications of Langdon’s quest into apocryphal Christianity. Contexts and Issues. Structurally, philological thrillers generally follow the broad outlines of the action thriller, the learned labor in the study accompanied by the physical exertions that the pursuit of the implications of the paperwork entail, with or without the heightened danger presented by rivals invariably less given to intellectual sorting out than the protagonist and his/her entourage. A shared trait of most philological thrillers is their two-epoch setting. The mystery or riddle belongs to the past, whereas its solution is a matter of present-day effort calling for all the state-of-the-art tools of the modern scholar. As the modern philologist—historian, linguist, Egyptologist, and so on—relies very much on technological resources, and as the mystery handled by the philological scholar may very well be in the area of text-dependent science, the philological thriller shares some ground with its cousin the scientific thriller. Also the historical novel, to the extent it is characterized by preoccupation with some problem requiring the scrutiny of texts, and the historical whodunit, may be said to be cousins. The parallel-world explorations of regular science fiction may share elements with the reconstructions of the past in terms of either counter-factual or complementary-factual events. The philological thriller is characterized by the quest for origins, factual or fictional. As such the application of philological instruments and procedures are made to work in relation to a set of elements existing prior to or outside of the fiction, so to speak. A variety of the philological thriller could be said to exist in the strong tradition in the English academic whodunit (e.g., Michael Innes, pseudonym of the literary historian J.I.M. Stewart), for letting the plot revolve around matters to do with literature, to the point of hinging the plot on some literary element, a tradition playfully honored in the more recent crime novels of Colin Dexter (featuring Inspector Morse) and Reginald Hill (featuring the investigating duo of Dalziel and Pascoe). In generic perspective the philological thriller is a hybrid. It combines features from the straight mystery whodunit with its sleuth combining hard evidence and intuition for the investigation of crime, the action thriller with its dependence on crude suspense construction, the political thriller with its potential for consideration of matters of (geo)political importance, the regular realist novel with its invitation

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to empathy, and the historical novel with its reconstructions of plausible pasts. Sam Bourne’s The Last Testament from 2007, to choose a novel in the wake of The Da Vinci Code, is a good illustration of the way that these elements are joined to create a successful philological thriller. The central event in Bourne’s novel is the appearance of old Babylonian clay tablets after the pillage of the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad in April 2003. Among the clay tablets is one that turns out to be the will of Old Testament Abraham, assigning ownership of Mount Moria, the present-day sacred site in central Jerusalem, facing claims from his two sons Isaac and Ishmael, celebrated by Jews and Muslims respectively. If it can be proved that either one received the land from Abraham, it would give the successful side a legitimate claim rooted in history. The political thriller is in evidence in the importance of the old tablet for current political and military efforts. The mystery element is in the efforts on the part of the two protagonists to get to the root of the matter. The action is in the chases following upon the competition for control of the tablet, with Israeli, Palestinian, and American agents chasing one another. The historical aspect is in the building up of the whole background of Old Testament historiography and archaeology. The empathy is secured by a realist portrayal of Maggie Costello, professional negotiator suffering from past trauma and being first presented as Washington housewife and very much living in a recognizable everyday world. The philological element is a code-breaking involving first the specialist appraisal of the tablet’s cuneiform language. In this case it is not the domain of the protagonist(s), but of the character that furnishes the inciting event of the plot, and who is immediately killed. But by the flashback narrative technique the reader is allowed to follow his investigation and interpretation of the tablet, except for the circumstance that information as to the exact nature of Abraham’s decision is protracted for structural suspense reasons until the very end. The philological aspect here also applies to the mastery of the Internet resource of Second Life, without which the endeavors of the protagonists would have come to nothing. Reception. Usually relegated to the popular-fiction dump of the adventure novel or mystery story by its very topic, setting, and thematic issue—murder in the medieval monastery—Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose created quite a critical stir at the same time as the general reading public took warmly to it. It was published at a time when deconstruction, metafictional concerns, and attention to intertextuality were sweeping the literary-critical landscape worldwide. It could be read as an ingenious murder mystery, modelling itself deliberately on the Sherlock Holmes stories, or as a slyly devised practicing of linguistic and literary-critical theories centring on the epistemological implications of language and culturally conditioned verbal constructions such as (non)fictional texts, or it could be read as a warning against the tendency by the powers that be to exercise censorship, or, and surely by most readers, as just a gripping yarn. Eco in one fell swoop set a new and critically acclaimed standard for the historical suspense story turning it into a trendsetting philological thriller. Eco’s novel rekindled interest in the Middle Ages generally, reflected in both academe and entertainment. No doubt his approach to language and other cultural constructs as systems of signs propelled interest in language and language-derived issues. Since language is a kind of cipher agreed upon for its meaning in a given culture, the urge to look into cipher proper is a natural consequence. Literary criticism contemporary with Eco’s novel welcomed instances of language games, such as we

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find in the fiction of British Julian Barnes (Flaubert’s Parrot (1984)), Lawrence Norfolk (Lemprière’s Dictionary (1991)), and Iain Pears (An Instance of the Fingerpost (1997)) or by American Allan Kurzweil (A Case of Curiosities (1992)), or Susan Sontag (The Volcano Lover (1992)). Whereas the success of Eco’s book resulted first and foremost indirectly as an encouragement in this upsurge of narrative integrating themes of self-reflection in the text, the success of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code lacked the academic acclaim bestowed on Eco’s book with its invitation to sheer enjoyment at the same time as critical scrutiny according to taste and training. The reason is not far to seek. The mystery in Brown’s novel may be hard for the fictional characters involved to solve and it may, as it has certainly done, give rise to lively theological debate, but only to the extent that its solution is a matter of reading on and thus dealing in a very basic way with the sign nature of language— understanding the words on the page—does it offer a challenge. Arguably, the work of Eco and Brown between them, however different their intentions and literary executions, opened the field for seeking out the lacunae or mysteries of the past—a lost Aristotelian manuscript in the case of Eco, generation in Christ’s family in the case of Brown—and offering a bid for fictional redress. Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece and Rome, the Crusades and the Knights Templar, and a host of other historical figures, events, or complexes ripe for conjecture opened themselves up to writers’ and readers’ interest alike. Since Eco’s The Name of the Rose there has been an increasing production of philological thrillers. Accelerating conspicuously since Dan Brown’s best seller, most of them go unheeded by academic literary criticism, but they obviously satisfy a hungry craving on the part of the reading public. Selected Authors Mysteries Related to Antiquity, Notably Ancient Egypt. The ancient Egypt of the pharaohs constitutes a particularly inviting site for the genre of the philological thriller. Although many of the riddles to do with social, religious, and political life were more or less solved after the interpretation of the Rosetta stone made hieroglyphs readily accessible as a language, there still remains considerable material for thrilling stories, both in the old civilization itself and in the history of its discovery. Preeminent among those who have written suspenseful tales about ancient Egypt, based on his own expertise as a world-renowned Egyptologist, is Christian Jacq. His novels, most of them gathered together in series (Ramses, Stone of Light, Queen of Freedom, Judge of Egypt, Mysteries of Osiris, and Vengeance of the Gods) lean toward the historical novel, but have distinct traits of the philological thriller. Among those who have tried their hands on the Kingdom of the Nile are Tom Holland with The Sleeper in the Sands (1998), Arthur Phillips with The Egyptologist (2004), Matthew Reilly with Seven Ancient Wonders (2005), Paul Sussman with The Last Secret of the Temple (2005), and Nick Drake with Nefertiti—the Book of the Dead (2006), all of them relying on philological means to explain and explore phenomena sparking off danger and drama. Regarding ancient Greece and Rome philological work has been carried out in bulk since the Renaissance; indeed, it was the rediscovery of Greece through Rome—and through the medieval heritage of Rome—that triggered philology as a line of academic enquiry. Homeric echoes and Greek mythology are the subject of modern-Greek-andByzantine-history specialist Roderick Beaton’s Ariadne’s Children (1995), making

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the archaeological work on the Minoan civilization in Crete the basis of an exciting plot, and A.J. Hartley making Mycaenean Greece the background of American Museum drama in The Mask of Atreus (2006). Novels about ancient Rome have been staple fare in the genre of the historical novel, with Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) as the perhaps best known, and best loved, of its kind. The British writer Robert Harris offers his angle on the volcanic eruption of the Vesuvius in 79 AD in Pompeii (2003) with the variation of having a stateemployed water engineer “read” the signs of the imminent catastrophe. The philological interest habitually associated with generations of Latin-school pupils reading the speeches and letters of Cicero is the background of the same writer’s portrayal, through sources accessible by philological effort, in his novel Imperium from 2006. Disputed Origins of the Christian Faith. In this category Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003) has pride of place. The murderous lengths to which orthodox Christianity, here in the shape of the Opus Dei organization within the Roman Catholic Church, will go in order to protect dogmatic vested interests found a ready public, ever craving and welcoming conspiracy theories. The popular response to the novel showed that fiction’s claims on reality were readily accepted for reality itself. No doubt the offering of a female link to Christ chimed in with a readership since the 1970s raised on gender consciousness. With a bearing on Dan Brown we find also Kathleen McGowan’s The Expected One—Book One of the Magdalene Line (2006). The author depicts her heroine Maureen Paschal pursuing signs of Mary Magdalene having been seen by people from various cultures throughout the centuries. It goes without saying that this is a venture that, as soon as dogmatic apologists become aware of her, promises serious threats to Maureen. Michael Cordy offers his approach to the question of numinous genealogy in The Miracle Strain (1997), a story bridging across to the science thriller in that it has its protagonist, a gene scientist, start work on divine genes. Knights Templar and the Crusades. The Knights Templar and the Crusades of the Middle Ages saw their justification as the protectors of the Christian faith against Islam, the great imperialist of the time in the lands of the Bible. In concrete terms the Knights Templar were a partly religious, partly mundane order of knights supervising the control with the holy places in the present-day Middle East. As soldiers and warriors they, so to speak, kept open access from the European West to the various holy places and shrines. Associated with the knights was a rich mythology about their passing on from generation to generation the guarding of relics and powerful documents, the most important of them all being the Holy Grail, Christ’s drinking cup from the Last Supper. Also in this area the historical novel has long held its own, with Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820) and various nineteenth-century workings of the Robin Hood stories referring to the crusading Richard Lionheart, as central in this tradition. In Raymond Khoury’s The Last Templar (2005) we are offered a story that moves between 1291 and present-day New York. The decrypting of an old document plays the central role and justifies the designation of philological thriller. The identical structure of narration, switching between the Middle Ages and the now we have in Kate Mosse’s Labyrinth (2005). The whereabouts of the Holy Grail will only be revealed to the person in possession of the Trilogy of the Labyrinth, a book preserving in its entirety the truth about the grail. The Knights Templar having something of considerable importance is likewise the subject of Steve Berry’s The Templar Legacy (2006), a story that throws long glances back into the Middle Ages at the same time as it unfolds its plot by counterpointing events in contemporary Copenhagen and the south of France.

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Whatever the nature of any secret held by the medieval order of knights and its relation to Christian dogma, there seems to be boundless opportunities in this line of fiction. Assorted Philological Thrillers. Ancient civilizations and Christianity are favorite haunts of the philological thriller, but a good many works of exciting fiction have made use of a need for, or at any rate a sympathizing with, philological competence as the motor of a story, and with an everything but conventionally heroic philologist in a central role. Mention has been made of Umberto Eco and his The Name of the Rose, followed by other Eco works deserving the designation of philological thriller, such as Foucault’s Pendulum (1988; with a bearing on the Knights Templar) and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004). In Eco’s genuinely learned tradition we find Dame Antonia Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990), about two literary researchers gradually uncovering great secrets in their efforts, which to begin with seem like so much lit crit-career-sustaining drudgery. Also in the kind of literature distinctly not designed for the best-seller lists we have Lawrence Norfolk’s Lemprière’s Dictionary (1991), a story of a young English scholar setting out to write a mythological dictionary. In his research and as a result of his dictionary work he discovers startling things about his father, things that seem to have a very dramatic and deadly bearing on his surroundings while at the same time reflecting his literary endeavors. In this book Eco’s and other semiologists’ notion of the world in terms of sign systems is made of central importance. In Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club (2003) the authentic work by New England philologists and literary critics on a new American translation of Dante form both the background, and, as it turns out, the foreground of deadly events in picturesque campus surroundings. There is no need to be able to read The Divine Comedy in the original medieval Italian, but a certain familiarity with the work makes for a more satisfactory response. Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason soon after published The Rule of Four (2004). Here we have to do with a story in which the progression of the plot keeps pace with the gradual translation of a medieval document in Latin and six other languages, The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. It turns out that working on the old texts previously cost the on-the-point-of-graduating Tom Sullivan’s philologist father his life. And more violence is in store, as Tom and his Princeton roommates concentrate beyond the call of curriculum duty on the secrets of the document. In The Romanov Prophecy (2004), Steve Berry anticipated his Crusades story by a story set in present-day Russia. When the American lawyer Miles Lord is sent to the Russian archives in Moscow to find documents justifying the claim of the Romanovs on the Russian throne, the dreary work in the vaults has dramatic repercussions. Leaning to the side of conspiracy theory—what actually happened when the Bolsheviks executed the Czar family and did they all die?— Berry makes archive enquiry into a very dangerous discipline. Also to do with recent history, but necessitating the mind of the trained philologist we have Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian (2005). This is a Dracula story that closes in on that monster by a combination of careful work on old texts and muscular action in brisk interaction. Old texts and strange artifacts form the key to an old secret in John Fasman’s The Geographer’s Library (2005), a story that centers on medieval alchemy. Switching between 1145 and present-day provincial New England a journalist is asked to write the obituary of an Estonian professor of history, who has died while in the United States. The story proceeds along with the collection and interpretation of 15 artifacts. But the interests of others are ignited as the journalist makes his enquiries.

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It seems as if philology is a rich vein for fiction with a wide audience appeal. Certainly since the end of the twentieth century it has been mined with increasing interest and imagination by contemporary writers. Unfortunately there is no critical literature to cover the whole field as presented above. This is partly due to the fact that “philological thriller” has yet to be recognized as a useful designation for a kind of literature enjoying popular appeal but to a superficial glance of immense variety. Partly it is due to the fact that this kind of fiction has suddenly, almost tsunami-like, flooded the book market, with the consequence of virtually stunning those attempting to compare and categorize. As for critical curiosity it is recommended to search for sources under specific author names or in treatises on suspense fiction generally. Bibliography Barnes, Julian. Flaubert’s Parrot. New York: Knopf, 1985. Beaton, Roderick. Ariadne’s Children. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996. Berry, Steve. The Romanov Prophecy. New York: Ballantine, 2004. ———. The Templar Legacy. New York: Ballantine, 2006. Brown, Dan. The Da Vinci Code. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Bourne, Sam. The Last Testament. London: Harper, 2007. Caldwell, Ian, and Dustin Thompson. The Rule of Four. New York: Dial, 2004. Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. Fasman, John. The Geographer’s Library. New York: Penguin, 2005. Harris, Robert. Pompeii. New York: Random House, 2003. Holland, Tom. The Sleeper in the Sands. Boston: Little, Brown, 1998. Khoury, Raymond. The Last Templar. New York: Dutton, 2005. Kostova, Elizabeth. The Historian. Boston: Little, Brown, 2005. Kurzweil, Alan. A Case of Curiosities. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. McGowan, Kathleen. The Expected One. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006. Mosse, Kate. The Labyrinth. New York: G.P. Putnam, 2005. Norfolk, Lawrence. Lemprière’s Dictionary. New York: Harmony, 1991. Pearl, Matthew. The Dante Club. New York: Random House, 2003. Pears, Iain. An Instance of the Fingerpost. New York: Riverhead, 1998. Phillips, Arthur. The Egyptologist. New York: Random House, 2004. Sontag, Susan. The Volcano Lover. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1992.

Further Reading de Saussure, Ferdinand. Cours de linguistique generale. Paris: Payot, 1972; Eco, Umberto. Postscript to The Name of the Rose. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.

LARS OLE SAUERBERG

POETRY Definition. “Poetry, the art of articulation, renders us inarticulate when it comes to defining it.” So proclaims David Lehman, series editor of the wildly successful Best American Poetry, in his forward to the 2002 edition. One of the most popular texts used in college poetry classrooms, Sound and Sense, acknowledges that “people have always been more successful at appreciating poetry than defining it” (2002, 3). If people whose livelihoods depend upon their cogent definitions of poetry fumble and hesitate, the average reader can be forgiven her or his tentative stabs at a definition. Most of us know a poem when we see one but when pressed to define one, retract almost every definition or characteristic as we articulate it. Young children associate poetry with its rhyme, and while it is true that poetry often contains

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WHAT IS POETRY? In his famous explorations of the differences between poetry and prose, William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) elliptically announced that “prose has to do with the fact of an emotion; poetry has to do with the dynamization of emotion into a separate form. . . . poetry: new form dealt with as a reality in itself. . . . [T]he form of poetry is related to the movements of the imagination revealed in words—or whatever it may be” (1970, 133). And Wallace Stevens’s definition announces that a poem is “the cry of its occasion.” “A poem should not mean / But be,” says Archibald MacLeish.

rhyme, we cannot define poetry by its presence. Much poetry does not rhyme. We may point out that poetry is created from the basic unit of a line, so we may identify poetry as writing that is preoccupied with that unit; however, the line, too, becomes a blurry characteristic, particularly when one examines the genre of prose poems or Language poetry, both of which confound our understanding of what constitutes a line. Rhythm or regular meter frequently marks poetry, but even that characteristic cannot be offered as part of an unwavering definition. Poets themselves often present ambiguous definitions of poetry, couched around what it contains and what it does rather than what it is, definitions that suggest that each poem creates its own parameters. In her introduction to the Best American Poetry 2004, poet Lyn Hejinian writes “What is, or isn’t, a poem? What makes something poetic? These questions remain open. And the fact that there are no formal answers is one source of the vitality of the art form” (2004, 9). Influential poetry critic Helen Vendler remarks that “[w]e have been conscious, too, that a poem can be any one of a number of things, from a whimsical couplet to a sublime sequence” (1987, x). The definition of poetry, like some of its most intriguing examples, resists closure. When Vendler does define poetry, she offers a list of features: intensity, a point, concentration of the form, and melody (1987, xxx), and this listing technique for defining poetry is common. Most handbooks of literary terms and poetry textbooks will define poetry according to its content and purpose along with one or two of its most salient features. Some will call poetry a rhythmic, imaginative expression intended to supply pleasure, offer an idea of significance, or engage in some manner with meaning, frequently marked by its concentrated and organized use of language. And that’s where the definition will begin: a poem is an attempt to communicate some idea of importance through language that is frequently concerned with itself as an artistic medium. For in treating language as art, the definition allows but does not require attention to sound and rhyme, rhythm, image and metaphor, compression and intensity in the definition of the genre. Identifying poetry’s basic material as language rather (as is often the case) than the line allows poetry to exist on the page or on the stage, to offer complete sentences or merely sounds, even symbols. In the broad swath of printed, recorded, and audio-visually taped materials that constitutes current American poetry, more appears to fall under the rubric of poetry than ever before. In James Longenbach’s discussion of this expansion of the genre in 2004, he intones that “[i]t’s difficult to complain about poetry’s expanding audience, but it’s more difficult to ask what a culture that wants poetry to be popular wants poetry to be” (2004, 6). Poetry is still

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the “emotion recollected in tranquility” that it was when Wordsworth said so. And it is still marked by attention to image and metaphor, line breaks and rhythm, sound, compression. But it is also now gesture and voice inflection, meaning divorced from words, ideas divorced from sentimentality. The profusion of genres, schools, and even events that identify themselves as poetry or poetic have pushed the already broadly outlined definitions of poetry even further. Poet Marvin Bell announced in 2003 that “Poetry is a great big Yes: Yes to formalists, yes to free verse writers, yes to surrealists, yes to political poets, yes to the poets of wordplay and slippery self-consciousness” (131). His description responds to the expansion of poetry’s definition, which has always been the most slippery of definitions. The Tendency toward Dichotomies. As welcoming and all-inclusive as contemporary poetry seems to be, any discussion of poetry must navigate the bifurcation that constantly dominates the world of poetry and the interpretations and assessments of it. Longtime editor of the Cambridge History of American Literature Sacvan Bercovitch acknowledged that poetry was one of the two most problematic areas covered under the rubric of “American Literature” during the past 20 years, in part because of the multiple simultaneous concepts that render the split. Critics disagree not only on what schools or movements may be included under the rubric of poetry, but also on what specific parameters should be used to differentiate between those schools. Most critics prefer to speak in terms of dichotomies, for example, yet Robert Hass’s review of American poetry published in 2001 convinced him of three traditions, and the triad of traditions he notes does not contain mention of any oral traditions. Granted, he speaks in an introduction to the best poetry published and therefore restricted to the printed medium, but he offers no qualifiers to his list of poetic traditions. As is the case in almost all histories of various art forms, each burgeoning new trend or radical challenge to the prevailing artistic practices rejects the philosophies and the features that hold sway. As the new trend accumulates adherents and those adherents gain popular acceptance, important awards, or critical acclaim, its experimental, radical slant against or relationship to the mainstream eventually shifts from the position of radical outsider to prevailing insider. We could identify the acceptable, mainstream poetry as traditional, if we keep in mind that what falls into this category is ever-shifting. Traditional does not mean for all time, but rather, for some recent period of time. And we also must remember that what is traditional at any given moment very likely occupied the position of challenger or avant-garde prior to its ascent (some would call it descent) to the category of traditional.

DO YOU PREFER YOUR POETRY RAW OR COOKED? One of the rather static rifts has divided the poetic world between the realm of acceptable or mainstream, and that which challenges the status quo, or the avant-garde. Robert Lowell (1917–77) rather famously divided the two into the “raw” and the “cooked” in his acceptance speech for the National Book Award for poetry in 1960, with cooked referring to that “marvelously expert and remote” poetry of the accepted mainstream academic poetry and raw, to that which challenged it.

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Despite the near-constant stream of poetic schools and movements from avantgarde to status quo, then back out again, one line over which the two realms divide has remained rather consistent for approximately the past half-century. Most twentieth-century schools of poetry have organized themselves in relationship to the position of the self in the poem and the poem’s fashioning—or not—of its speaker. Alternately described by critics as the absence or presence of the speakerly self in the poetry, as impersonal versus personal or objective or subjective content, as cooked compared to raw, as poetry keening toward the universal arrayed against that of the local, this essential line over which the poets and critics split the discussion has remained fixed pretty much since the midpoint of the twentieth century. Another way the world of American poetry is presented as bifurcated focuses on the division between academic and popular judgment, between the worlds of high and low culture, of elitists and commoners. Poetry and criticism emanating from the academy—what university writers’ workshop faculty members and students study and write, what journals housed in those universities publish, what published critics deem worthy of their attention, what movements in and schools of poetry constitute the syllabi in college poetry classes—often deviates severely from the poetry that popular audiences demand and applaud, that which average Americans will purchase or that which members of the public will attend. However, in the same way that experimental challenges to the status quo eventually become part of the world of mainstream poetry, so is there constant traffic between the poetic worlds of low and high culture. What is at one point eschewed by the realm of academic presses and classrooms because of its origins among the masses or from the streets rather than from within the walls of institutions of higher education eventually enters academia. Today’s academic poets were often yesterday’s popular, radical, marginal, even street poets and enjoy a symbiotic or at least connected relationship. The two categories feed each other. The connectedness of these two worlds must remain in view whenever one assesses the current state of poetry. While at the same time that many have lamented the deplorable decline of national reading practices, and anyone particularly interested in poetry could specifically lament the infrequency with which poets’ books are read (let alone purchased), the numbers of Americans—particularly young Americans—who consider themselves poets, participate in local poetry events, apply to Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs in poetry, and submit poetry to journals and presses that publish it have surged. Public interest in and community activism to promote poetry are also very high. A recent summation of the state of American poetry noted that reading “is in chronic decline” particularly among the 18–24-year-olds at the same time that the President of the Poetry Foundation, John Barr, predicts of “a new Golden Age for poetry” (Walker, 2004, 93–94). A bestselling book of poetry is purchased by only 500 Americans, but the National Poetry Slam competition can fill a major stadium in a large city, with the price of admission roughly equivalent to the cost of that best-selling book of poetry. History The American Tradition of Poetry. A complete understanding of the current state of American poetry requires familiarity with the development of the American tradition in poetry, a tradition of mavericks inaugurated in Walt Whitman (1819–1892) and Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) in the nineteenth century, whereby “American”

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poetry became associated with or defined by the challenge it proffered to whatever tradition was currently in vogue. Within the context of this association of “American” with challenge of the status quo, we can look at the specific movements of the previous century whose reactions to the status quo continue to exert defining forces on the current trends in the genre. Most surveys of American poetry root the national tradition in Whitman, who offers the first successful American challenge to the status quo. Dickinson also figures predominantly in the establishment of a distinctly American tradition; however, only a few of her poems were published in her lifetime, and some additional publications followed shortly after her death, but a scholarly collection of her work did not appear until midway through the twentieth century. Her challenge to the status quo entered critical consciousness a full century after Whitman’s. Stemming from European epic traditions, particularly British poetry, American poetry of the mid-nineteenth century centered itself on the impersonal, universal, objective, cooked side of the poetic divide. The dominance of the epic, particularly Virgil’s Latin epic The Aeneid, in scholarly traditions handed to the United States from England, allowed little room for poetic exploration of either the local or of the autobiographical. There was no room for the poet to craft a speakerly “I” within his work. Rigid structures with regular, prescribed meter and rhyme also dominated the world of published poetry. Into this poetic world Whitman avowed something “transcendent and new” in his poetry, challenging the deeply entrenched epic tradition that dominated intellectual strains of poetry, while at the same time he avoided the unfaltering metrics and rhyme scheme of the poetry so widely read during the American nineteenth century. His “Song of Myself,” always central to the various iterations of Leaves of Grass, brashly revises Virgil’s epic promise to sing of arms and of a man whose fate had made him fugitive; Whitman boldly sings, “I celebrate myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” His democratizing assertion of equal possession (“every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”) was a direct challenge to the poetic traditions that celebrated mythic, long-dead but singular national heroes such as Aeneas and Odysseus. In her summary of Whitman’s project, Helen Vendler points out that America itself “was to be democratic, not monarchic; free, not feudal; revolutionary, not traditional; America, new in spirit, was to be new in art” (1987, xiv–xv). If the European epic traditions celebrated the epic journey of their nations’ founding fathers, often partdivine offspring of the gods, Whitman’s celebrates the meandering of his own poetic self, which he also identifies as “Divine . . . inside and out.” Compared to the carefully planned and rigidly executed epic structure, which demands divisions into books or cantos, Whitman’s epic (a term his preface disavows) presents 52 sections of such variant length and focus that critics continue to wrangle over the exact dividing lines of those sections, to say nothing of the debate over the topic and meaning of the sections. His individual lines defy all attempts at scansion in hopes of discovering a regular meter, an attempt obliterated already in the first section, where the short line “I celebrate myself” coexists with the run-on lines that catalog what about himself he celebrates: “My respiration and inspiration. . . . the beating of my heart. . . . the passing of blood and air through my lungs, / The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and darkcolored sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn[. . . . ]” More than comfortable with ambiguity of meaning, Whitman’s poem revels in its contrary nature, famously catechizing, “Do I contradict

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myself? / Very well then . . . I contradict myself[.]” Rather than impose an external structure that dictates meter, line length, rhyme scheme, and division of content, Whitman’s poetry employs organic form, the notion that the idea or concept of the literary work dictates its structure or allows the work to grow into its form. Initially derided and dismissed by many influential critics, Whitman has since come to occupy the seminal place in American poetry. In Whitman, American poetry also obtains its first, tradition-forming icon of resistance: in the tradition of Whitman, the poets deemed most central to the American tradition of poetry continue to be those whose work resists classification. Numerous conflicting current schools of poetry claim Whitman as an antecedent. A perfect illustration of his confounding of categorization is that despite his claim that his poem is not epic, most studies of the modernist epics begin with Whitman. At the same time, beat and confessional poets also cite him and Leaves of Grass as precursor and influence. In his poetic challenge to the mid-nineteenth-century American status quo, Whitman crafted poetry that embraced both sides of the apparent dichotomies that have come to describe poetry, most notably the partition set between the roles of the self in the poetry. This dual embrace also marks some of the most exciting poets publishing today and those poets most definitively linked to an American tradition. Twentieth-Century Poetic History High Moderns and New Critics. Whitman serves as an iconic example of the quintessential American poet’s trajectory from upstart to paradigm, a trajectory that specific movements have followed as well as individual poets. Of particular concern to anyone who wishes to study contemporary poetry are the upstart movements that reacted to what was, at the midpoint of the twentieth century, the overwhelming mainstream and academic acceptance of the high modern poets and power of the new critics to interpret that poetry. For those movements—the confessional school, the Black Arts movement, and Language poetry—both hearkened back to strong elements of previous poetic traditions and advanced or broadened the definition of what was acceptable within poetry. Each of these three movements became a powerful force in and of itself, asserting in time its own indelible mark on the shape of American poetry and becoming that against which future movements reacted. The early poetry of Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) and Robert Lowell (1917–1977) and the many historically based, culturally allusive, intellectually driven poems of Ezra Pound (1885–1972), T.S. Eliot (1888–1965), Wallace Stevens (1879–1955), HD (Hilda Doolittle, 1886–1961), and William Carlos Williams, including the devotion of many of them to the epic form, suggested that the high modern poet’s role was to serve as a voice for his or her time without necessarily crafting a speakerly self in the poem that narrates that voice. In the dichotomy noted above, much of the high moderns’ poetry would fall on the absent, impersonal, objective, universal side of the line. Following an earlier, self-described imagist devotion to no idea but in things, these poets focused on epic poems like Pound’s Cantos, H.D.’s Helen in Egypt and Trilogy, T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, and Hart Crane’s (1899–1933) The Bridge. An indication of the importance that these poets presumed accompanied them and their work is evidenced in the rather humorous fact that Pound gave a copy of his Cantos to Mussolini (who misunderstood them if he read them at all) and defined his project, an epic poem, as a poem “that contains history.” In a focus from things to history, the speakerly self was easily obscured. Of course, reducing all these poets to simplified summaries that outline the similarities among them fails to value the complexity or subtlety of the individual poets

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and some of their most enduring poems. Even the quintessentially impersonal poem The Wasteland, written by the poet who coined the term objective correlative, can be persuasively argued as a personal grouse, as the poet’s facsimile edition asserts. And William Carlos Williams supplies an equally confounding body of work that much more closely mirrors Whitman’s embrasure of competing traditions. Interpretations of high modern poetry were dominated by a group of critics and then an intellectual movement known as New Criticism, which firmly established itself in the academies of the United States. These critics evaluated poetry according to its ability to craft complex yet unified explorations centered on some theme of universal significance, furthering the presumption that good poetry was objective poetry. The best poems were those that employed the most formal poetic elements in this unified statement, crafting “well-wrought urns” whose aesthetically pleasing surface rested upon a structurally complex yet perfect interior. The best readings were those that accounted for as many of these elemental features as possible. The text itself supplied all the reader needed in order to ascertain this statement. In fact, autobiographical details and authorial intention were not to enter into the discussion of the work unless the work itself invited the reader to do so. The poem’s effect on the reader also could not be included in the evaluation of the piece. At its most basic, New Criticism focused on text over act: how a poem conveyed its meaning was far more central to its value than why the poet said it, what occasioned the writing of the poem in the first place, or how readers responded to it. Mid-century Challenges to the New Critics Confessional Poetry. Confessional poetry presented the first significant challenge to the readings of the new critics and the writings of the high moderns. Confessional poetry brings private, personal details and issues into the public arena of poetry, often through direct addresses of the audience and the use of the first-person pronoun. As Whitman proffered his radical departure from the rhyme and rhythmically rigid poetic forms of his era, the confessional poets of the late 1950s and 1960s reacted against rigidly confined content matter established in the mainstream, academic poetry of their day. In direct violation of poetic trends and principles, confessional poets crafted poetry in which the speakerly self was very much present, very much personal and often autobiographical, focusing not on universal but extremely personal issues. The confessional poets—often most deeply associated with Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), Anne Sexton (1928–1974), Robert Lowell, W.D. Snodgrass (1926–), Theodore Roethke, and Diane Wakoski (1937–)—popularized the practice of writing from the first person in poetry that was distinctly autobiographical, without the intervention of a poetic persona. It was not narrated upon a world stage, as many of the High Modernist epics were, but rather, it tended to focus on the poet’s own life, particularly among those moments limited to the poet’s immediate family or times of crisis. If under the scrutiny of the new Critics elements of “good” poems revealed issues of universal significance (itself a much contested entity), in the hands of confessional poets, national or mythic materials often revealed the poet’s own emotional or mental breakdown. This is not to say that the sole subject of confessional poetry is the self. On the contrary, poets in this movement presented poems that revealed how the personal is political. Many participants in this movement used their poetry to issue scathing critiques of American culture at the mid-century, especially those portions of culture deemed inappropriate for polite conversation or public discussion. Many critics

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suggest that Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) wrote what could be identified as one of the earliest confessional poems in 1956, with “Howl,” a poem that hearkens back to the rhythms of Whitman’s self-described barbaric yawp and reclaims the poet’s right to employ the first-person pronoun and write about personal experience, but this first-person poem reveals personal disillusionment and disaffection with empty American consumerism in the postwar era. Anne Sexton’s bitter fairy-tale revisions in Transformations (1971) exposes the false promise of happiness in marriage, where parents are “never bothered by diapers or dust, / never getting a middle-aged spread.” As described by Diane Wood Middlebrook, the work of confessional poets “investigates the pressure on the family as an institution regulating middle-class private life” (1993, 636) at a time when the nuclear family was depicted in all forms of popular culture as a source of sustenance and support. In the poetry of the women in particular, the picture of middle-class family life contradicted the images television sitcoms and mass advertisement campaigns promoted, of the happy homemaker bedecked in a cashmere twin set and pearls and a scrubbed, cheerful family whose biggest concern was Junior’s B on Friday’s spelling test. The family life revealed in confessional poetry included domestic and substance abuse, mental instability, sexual promiscuity, and rage at many forms of victimization, among other topics considered taboo in polite and popular society. In fact, many young readers of confessional poetry still gravitate toward the depiction of a young woman’s rage simply because it is so rare to see women’s rage acknowledged at all, in Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy.” The legacy of the confessional poets is enormous. Initially lambasted by the critical establishment, confessional poets soon earned the nation’s most prestigious awards (W.D. Snodgrass won the Pulitzer Prize and Lowell won the National Book Award in 1960), entered the most austere anthologies, and secured a place in the canon of American poetry. Their success gave permission to all future poets to plumb their own experiences for poetic inspiration, and to complain, if need be, about those experiences. And to a large extent, much of the poetry popular with Americans since 2000 is just that: one person offering public confession of certain experiences and thoughts, sometimes without much attention to the artistry of the language. At least one critic has complained that “[t]o a large swath of the general public now, that’s what poetry is” (Walker 2004, 97): confessional prose without metaphor, compression, rhythm, use of sound, or attention to language. The “autobiographical encounter,” to use poet Gregory Orr’s term, has become not just acceptable, but mainstream in contemporary American literature, so much so that critics still identify the demarcations in American poetry as those between confessional and avant-garde. The other deep legacy of the confessional poets is the emphasis on voice that still predominates most discussions of poetry, both written and performed. Most poetry workshops are designed to help emergent poets discover their own voice, poets of renown are discussed according to the uniqueness of their voice, and some of the most well-respected treatises on poetry start with or emphasize the role of voice in poetry. Among the most influential of poetry critics, Helen Vendler introduced Part of Nature, Part of Us, her collection of essays published in 1980, with the admission that her “own preference is to focus on poets one by one, to find in each the idiosyncratic voice wonderfully different from any other,” noting that what lingers in her memory of the poets are “the voices of genius” (1980, x). A later Vendler publication was titled, tellingly, Voices & Visions. And a 2004 review of three

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contemporary poets opened with “We think of ourselves as having voices, but these days our poets are voices. That is to say, the word ‘voice’ has come to be synonymous with the word ‘poet’ in all of those venues in which we discuss poetry” (Martin 2004, 34). The confessional poets ensured this continued focus on voice as something the poet develops rather than just imparts onto the poem, and its implication, then, that the voice in poetry is always also the poet’s own. Black Arts. Another important challenge both to high modernism and to the affiliation of “good” poetry with that coming from American universities surfaces in the Black Arts or Black Aesthetic movement of the 1960s. Inspired by both the successes of the civil rights movement and the radical militant stance of Black Nationalism, Black Arts emerged as a way for African American artists to pursue distinctly African American art forms. Chief among its tenets were the beliefs that one couldn’t separate the artist from his or her community and that in order for African American art to flourish, it needed to develop its own aesthetic values separate and distinct from those that descended from or were rooted in European or white American art forms. It sought to provide support and space for African American artists to develop and present their art to an audience comprised of African Americans. Poetry written by those of African descent in America, when it was discussed or published at all in mainstream presses and journals, was always presented as peripheral to the primary activities of poetic development. The chronicles of American poetic history have always ghettoized or separated out poetic schools or movements populated by significant numbers of non-white poets, and many continue to do so today. Granted, many such movements deserved discussion in their own right; however, consistently addressing African American poets under the rubric of the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts movement, or even under a currently popular category of black poets, serves to foster a misunderstanding about the centrality of nonwhite, particularly black, poets to the development and significance of the genre as a whole. Many reference sources will devote a chapter or section to one of the two movements mentioned above but not address a single non-white poet in its pantheon of poets of import and significance. The effect of such treatment may be a false popular consensus that the poets who participated in those movements—or the black poets not specifically part of those movements—are insignificant. This exclusion of black voices and black experiences was even more pronounced in the 1960s than it is today. An instrumental participant in and shaper of this movement, Amiri Baraka (1934–) describes in his autobiography about the moment he realized that he could never write poetry like that which the New Yorker published unless he were to become someone alien to himself. The language he uses focuses on how “out” he feels from this world—from the poetic world that in this country, at that time, published almost exclusively white writers. The black writers who did publish, most famously Gwendolyn Brooks, who had by that time already won a Pulitzer Prize for her poetry in 1950, were not calling attention to their art as distinctly African American art. Not yet. Born LeRoi Jones, Baraka attended Rutgers and Howard, following which he joined the United States Air Force. He moved to Harlem shortly after the assassination of Malcolm X, where he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School and was a major force in the Black Arts’ search for a distinctly Black Aesthetic. Remaining true to the notion that an artist must remain rooted in his community and create art for his

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people’s sake, Baraka lived, worked, and performed in Harlem. The dedication to and awareness of the audience’s role crucial to the development of one’s art prefigures the current spoken word movement’s attention to its audience. Furthermore, the Black Arts movement in general and Baraka’s commitment to Harlem in particular reinforced the vibrant primary role of the urban setting in poetry. Eastern coastal cities had long been identified as meccas for poets, as centers of poetic life, but more so for the publishing houses and major universities located within than because of the distinctly urban lifestyle that fostered poetic communities, communities nourished in coffee houses and apartment meetings, in street life and in neighborhoods. Concomitant with forging a new system of aesthetic valuations, the Black Arts movement also charted the history of art created by artists of African descent and, in so doing, established historical artistic timelines and traditions that hearkened back to African sources. Paradoxically, in examining African and African American art in isolation from other traditions, namely other American ones, Baraka and others reminded critics and historians of elements from Africa and African American art that are central to our understanding and development of American art. The spoken word has been identified (and is so here) as a revolution, yet the Black Arts movement reminds us that orality remains a cultural fixture both in the various griot traditions of oral African communities and throughout the history of African American literature. The African griot traditions and specifically the Gicaandi competitions, as well as the tradition of the dozens among some African Americans, should be acknowledged as some of the foreparents of current slam poetry and poetry bouts. In the Gicaandi competitions, a seed-filled gourd rattled an accompaniment for the contestants, who competed against each other with songs, riddles and conundrums, wise sayings and wisecrackings, often performed by moonlight in the town square. So the audience was asked to participate in this ritual competition of verbal sparring performed rhythmically. The gicaandi, or gourd, rooted the performer to his community, as it was grown locally in special plantings. Its traditions were inherited, with a griot father teaching his son the history lessons and details of cultural importance along with all of the improvisional, performative techniques with which to craft his poetry. The griot subtly crafted each performance to match the particulars of his audience. Similarly, in the ritualized insults of the dozens, the audience is crucial as the insults are intended more for their entertainment than for the opponent’s shame. Even our current avant-garde movement, with explicit origins in the Language poetry movement (see below) must acknowledge the conceptual contribution of African American poetry, especially that which was fostered by the Black Arts movement. In its frequent employment of blues- and jazz-inspired elements in poetry, the Black Arts movement occasionally celebrated artistic elements merely for their own sake. Within jazz the celebration of sound for its own sake, in the use of scat, predates the Language poetry movement that calls heightened attention to the material of poetry—the words and even letters themselves. So the new Black Arts poets’ use of and references to jazz already celebrated the material apart from its referent or its references to anything other than itself. Scat is celebration of sound as sound, not of sound as representative of something else. Furthermore, in directing our critical gaze at the history of African American poetry, where orality reigns as a if not the dominant feature, the Black Arts artists reminded the United States of a long-established tradition of orally performed

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poetry that predates the current performance poetry craze. Numerous African American poets crafted poems—many of them sermons—with the intended medium of oral performance, not the silent page. James Weldon Johnson’s “Creation” from God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927) is one such poem that begs, even demands, to be performed. Gwendolyn Brooks coined a term, preachment, with which to address and discuss it; so prevalent is the sermonic mode in African American poetry. One could argue, in fact, that African American preachers are the new world equivalents of the African griots, as their community-saving roles and public language performance methods are nearly identical. Language Poetry. Though many Americans are likely less aware of the Language poetry movement than they are of the confessional poets or Black Arts, this movement, too, has profound influence on the current trends in both academic and popular poetry, particularly in the way its approach to language in poetry has remained synonymous with the definition of avant-garde or experimental poetry. Often written out as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, in homage to one of the two prominent early Language poetry journals, the movement, which began in the 1970s, was enabled in part by structural theorists and linguists, who insist that and reveal how language shapes and dictates humans’ perceptions of their own experiences. Like virtually all significant movements in the genre, this one challenged mainstream poetry and organized itself around a radical political stance, as its practitioners believed that traditional verse form, conventional syntax, and linear narrative— those aspects of mainstream poetry and other writing they disavowed— “transmit[ted] conservative ideologies” (Gilbert 2001, 567). The work of such linguists as Ferdinand de Saussure, who explored the arbitrary connection between the signifier and the signified, the utterance and the referent, laid the groundwork for the philosophical underpinnings of this movement. Translated into English and made widely available in the United States in the 1950s, Saussure’s work called attention to the deep structure of language (or langue)—the relationships and differences that govern our language rules—rather than the surface phenomena of the individual utterances (or parole). Since utterances (or words, signifiers) refer to the concepts they represent only by dint of social convention (“tree” represents a large organic growth composed of trunk, limbs, and foliage only because all speakers of English have agreed to relating the word “tree” to our concept of tree, not because of any inherent features of a tree in the utterance itself), we must acknowledge the arbitrary nature of the words we use to represent concepts. From these ideas arose the theory of structuralism, a mode of interpreting meaning that searches for the underlying patterns that structure our language (and, by extension, our literature). Given the arbitrary relationship between words and concepts, structuralists posit that all patterns are those perceived by the human mind and imposed onto our language. As we learn language, we learn to privilege or recognize some differences but not others. So, a young child in early stages of vocabulary development learns to recognize the difference between dogs and cats as significant because those are the early words he learns, but those differences between a poodle and a German shepherd are coded in the language and offered to him as insignificant differences, ones not worthy of note just yet. The language, therefore, doesn’t reveal the world to him but it shapes the way he perceives the world. In governing our perceptions of the world, language controls our experiences of the world. This assertion that language structures meaning and not the other way around was crucial to the Language poets’ project. The movement placed complete emphasis on

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the language of the poem, calling self-conscious attention to the words and letters themselves, often breaking up words to reveal smaller words subsumed within the larger ones, creating non-words, or grouping letters or symbols according to their size or shape. For example, skinny letters might form a line of poetry, like ilklih, or a poem or a line may be composed entirely of symbols, as in Armand Schwerner’s (1927–99) “Tablet III,” which includes the lines “+ + + + + + + + + / + + + + + + + + + + + / + + + +. . . . .. . . . .. . . . . tremble” (1983, 66). The poetry rarely offered what in prose would be considered complete sentences (in fact, Ron Silliman 1946–, one of Language’s practitioners claimed to be part of the creation of the “new sentence”) in part to remind us that poetry offers readers not someone’s “voice,” but someone’s voice as mediated and conveyed by language. Therefore language itself is always the subject of poetry, and the word or letter alone serves as the material. Language poets could have used as their motto one of William Carlos Williams’s assertions, made much earlier in Spring and All: “[T]he word must be put down for itself” (1923, 102). To Language poets, their strategy was simply more honest than others. They didn’t pretend that there was some external idea the language was trying to convey: the language dictated the idea; the language IS the idea. Central to the Language poetry movement was the notion of an active reader, whose action was inspired rather than hampered by what may appear as obscure poetic text. The initial barriers to understanding arising from the text’s difficulty, so the practitioners argued, invited repeated returns to the text. Furthermore, in calling attention to the role of language itself in controlling and shaping meaning, poets of this movement hoped to train readers to question the agenda of their other encounters with language. Aware that language usage in popular culture directs consumer attention to just that—consumption—and away from issues that might inspire radical political action (or any political action), Language poets posited that language as used in popular culture served as a means of social control. As scat within jazz reminded listeners that the basic material, the stuff of jazz, is sound—not music—Language poets reminded readers of poetry that the stuff of poetry is language, not meaning. Many Language poets emphasized the human role within language development (the human process of perceiving and imposing patterns) by devising and imposing outrageous structural requirements onto their poetry. A particular success example of this is Lyn Hejinian’s (1942–) My Life, written when she was 37 years old and comprised of 37 sections of 37 sentences each. When she revised it eight years later, she added eight sentences to each pre-existing section and an additional eight sections to represent the additional years of her life since the original publication date. In the same way that the autobiographical, speakerly self of the confessional poet, who reports internal observations in a consistent voice, continues to be affiliated with acceptable mainstream poetry, the experimental approach espoused by Language poets that privileges attention to the medium of language itself over the relationships between language and its referents remains identified as the avant-garde. Yusef Komunyakaa (1947–) even calls such poets the “new avant garde, those exploratory poets . . . [who] introduce tonal and linguistic flux as the center of the poem” (1993, 15, italics mine). Komunyakaa criticizes them for what “seems” like their “attempt to undermine the importance of recent history . . . anything goes because the poet or the poem’s speaker doesn’t exist. It’s death in language” (1993, 15). Komunyakaa’s comment embodies the dichotomy that still dominates poetic discussions. He eschews the avant-garde in favor of poetry “that embodies content”

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(1993, 17). Self-referential poetry—that which uses language to call attention to its linguistic creation without offering someone’s (presumably the poet’s) thoughts about an event that exists beyond the poem’s parameters—was not worthy of the designation best, in his opinion. His comment testifies to the power the mid-century poetic movements still wield over contemporary poetry. Trends and Themes. As alluded to in Marvin Bell’s “Yes!” above, poetry in the United States currently is enjoying a wave of popularity, as the spoken word revolution and technically savvy poets and community-builders create spaces for virtually any voice to be heard. The widespread availability of Internet access has democratized poetry as well, with ordinary Americans (some without any or much formal training in reading poetry) making public comments about some of the nation’s most well-educated and well-paid critics. James Longenbach’s recent book The Resistance to Poetry points out that there are over 300,000 Web sites devoted to poetry, and that in rankings of terms most frequently inserted into Internet search engines, the term poetry ranks eighth, above both football and the Bible (2004, 6). Americans can buy books of poetry online, read the collection, then return to the online bookseller to write a review of that book; and many do just that, so University of Chicago critic Harold Bloom can be identified as “grumpy” by an anonymous Amazon.com reader because of his emotionally expressive introduction to The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988–1997. In the same way that any consumer can describe how a certain shoe runs narrow in an online description at Zappos.com or assess a professor’s grading difficulty on ratemyprofessor.com, so can ordinary readers of poetry “publish” their review of poetry and evaluate other published reviews. Occasional Poetry and the Post-9/11 Response. The many hands that craft poetry also reinforce the many purposes of poetry, and the trend of poetry as more than aesthetic object has also marked American poetic activity since 2000. Among its supraaesthetic roles include “its function in times of war and peace, its role in subverting dominant ideologies, its purpose in communicating the concept of American identity” (Gwiazda, 2004, 462). Perhaps no war has dominated the American imagination (not to mention electoral politics, national budget decisions, even changes to our concepts of personal liberties and acceptable intrusions in or erosions of them) as the War on Terror that emerged in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Virginia Woolf noted during World War I that war always moves people to poetry, and the twenty-first century so-called War on Terrorism is no exception. Immediately after 9/11 our nation witnessed a renewed outpouring of poetry and a renewed faith in poetry to express our collective emotions and make the first move toward healing our sense of national or collective grief. Internet-enabled forwarding of poetry that seemed to speak to the shock of 9/11 made instant household names of poets such as W.H. Auden, whose “September 1939” shot over countless wireless connections. Numerous newspapers printed poems to the editor rather than or in addition to letters to the editor, poems which were written not for their aesthetic value but simply to convey the writer’s strong emotion. So numerous are such letters that Internet Web sites devoted to bad 9/11 poems published in local newspapers emerged. Trained poets responded to 9/11 as well, with poems contributed to anthologies devoted expressly to the subject of 9/11 and with shifting poetic techniques that the poets attribute in interviews explicitly to either 9/11 or a post-9/11 world, attitude, or mentality. Most notorious of the 9/11 poems was Amiri Baraka’s. Baraka was heretofore best known for his seminal work with the Black Arts movement of the 1960s. His

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poem in response to the attacks, “Somebody Blew Up America,” caused an uproar after he read it at the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival in September 2002. Several lines from this 200+-line poem were extracted as examples of Baraka’s allegedly anti-Semitic stance. When the Anti-Defamation League charged Baraka with hate speech, New Jersey Governor McGreevey asked Baraka to resign his post as the state poet laureate, but Baraka refused on the grounds that his accusers were misreading his poem. The lines purported to be anti-Semitic—“Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed/Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers/To stay home that day/Why did Sharon stay away?”—Baraka claims are actually an “attack” on anti-Semitism (see amiribaraka.com). His questions are rhetorical, designed to encourage the reader to question who truly knew and why those who knew did nothing. The answer to that question, who knew?, as all of Baraka’s answers, is complicated. The totality of the poem is an invective against imperialism, a litany of abuses against minorities Baraka sees as systemic in the United States, an encouragement to question how the current presidential administration has used the 9/11 attacks to pursue an agenda and pass acts such as the Patriot Act otherwise unacceptable to the American people and identified by Lyn Hejinian as “nefarious policies”; and as such, this poem is no different from the kinds of poems Baraka has written throughout his career, particularly since 1974 when he renounced his former black nationalist stance and embraced world socialism/Leninism-Marxism. The unprecedented reliance on poetry and poets to speak for a national moment reinforces an affirmative answer to the question posed by Dana Gioia: Can Poetry Matter? American popular use of the Internet, willing attendance at spontaneous readings, the profusion of sincere if untrained poetic responses sent out for local but public view seems to repeat Marvin Bell’s emphatic “Yes!” If we are in a new Golden Age for poetry as the president of the Poetry Foundation claims, some of the supporting evidence would include the selection of various levels of poets laureate. Our nation names a national poet laureate, and 37 states name one as well. In recent years, many cities, including some mid-sized ones, have begun to name their own poet laureates. One might expect San Francisco and New York City to boast its own laureate, so married are the cities of the nation’s coastal poles to our poetic traditions, but some might be surprised to learn that midwestern cities such as Kansas City, the Quad Cities, and even Grand Rapids, Michigan, have named their own poet laureate. During their tenure as poet laureate, titleholders are charged with promoting the reading, writing, and appreciation of poetry among the public. How they do so remains up to the individual laureates. Our national poets laureate since 2000 include Stanley Kunitz (2000), Billy Collins (2001–2003), Louise Glück (2003–2004), Ted Kooser (2004–06), Donald Hall (2006–2007), and Charles Simic (2007–present). Certainly the broadening of poetry’s outreach net nourished by the various laureates is partially responsible for sustaining the country’s 250 MFA (Master of Fine Arts) programs, its 500 presses and its 2000 journals that publish poetry, 1100 of them nationally circulated. Poetry has truly been wrested from the exclusive hands of the universities with successful programs like Billy Collins’s (1941–) program Poetry 180. This program supplies a poem a day for high schools to share with their students on each of the 180 days of the school year. Another program designed to bring poetry to the masses is the People’s Poetry Project, which brings together folk,

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ethnic, inner city, and literary poets as it turns Lower Manhattan into a poetry village for three days. Such programs guarantee that the future of America’s poetry lies in many people’s hands, if not in many elite hands. Spoken Word Revolution. What in the late 1980s may have been identified as a trend in American poetry must by now, in 2007, be acknowledged as at least one of, if not the most reinvigorating forces in the genre: spoken word poetry. Spoken word is an umbrella term for poetry performed. It reaches its audience via oral (often also theatrical) transmission, thereby diminishing the centrality or importance of the printed word. As a performance, the poetry frequently attempts to engage its audience in ways not available through the printed medium. For example, in many poetry slams, judges of the poetry are randomly selected from the audience, or the audience’s applause becomes the scoring system, with the loudest and most enthusiastic audience responses marking the winning poems. So central is the spoken word revolution to current American poetry that Roger Gilbert deemed the performance culture “the most significant development in American culture” (2001, 568) of the final two decades of the twentieth century. Slam Poetry. The birth and growth of poetry slams, coupled with their cousins, poetry bouts, and the numerous urban venues that sprung up in support of both have welcomed those for whom academic poetry was either stale or inaccessible. Winners of and participants in the National Poetry Slam and of the now-defunct World Heavyweight Poetry Bout were and continue to be predominantly young and urban, often with working-class roots and frequently people of color. Their energy, passion, and humor make the spoken word revolution attractive to producers of visual media, and part of its swift rise to prominence must be attributed to its media coverage and savvy incorporation of and connections to other forms of media. MTV, for instance, played and plays a large role in promoting the works of particular poets, most notably perhaps of Maggie Estep (1962–), so-called poet laureate of MTV. With this coverage, winning one of these competitions could launch a poet’s career, and so frequently have careers been thereby launched that now, after more than 20 years, slam poets and academic poets are, in some cases, synonymous, as the winners accept positions at prestigious universities, earn book contracts with mainstream or academic presses, and continue to win some of poetry’s most coveted national (often academic) awards. Slam poets have been known to win the Yale Younger Poets Award, for instance, and Pulitzer Prize winning poets have been known to compete in slam contests. In a local slam the rules may be determined by the organizers of the event, but in a National Slam pre-set rules govern the competition in the organizers’ attempt to be fair to all contestants. All poems must be work written by the poets themselves and be read aloud in three minutes or less, with point deductions incurring incrementally for every 10 seconds the poet exceeds this time limit. No props or costumes are allowed, though some interesting debates about what constitutes either have ensued. (Apparently if a poet’s bare chest can be considered a prop has yet to be definitively determined.) The five judges score each poem on a point system to reflect both the writing of the poem and its performance, with zero representing the lowest possible score and 10, the highest. The high and low scores for each poem are discarded and the rest, added together, resulting in 30 points as the highest possible score for any single poem. Judges hold their scores up on large cards, Olympic style. All of the rules and protocols are designed to enliven the event and draw the audience into an active relationship with the poet. It is precisely this keen audience

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awareness that both rejuvenates the current popular perception of poetry and recalls some of the oldest forms of poetry. Poetry slams, which celebrate spoken word poetry, descend from numerous predecessors, some of which are as old as the genre of poetry itself. The primary epics of the world (primary epic refers to an epic which exists first in oral form, as opposed to secondary epics, which exist first in written form) were originally delivered to their audiences via public, spoken performances, and these poems form the bedrock of many an academic department, course, or lecture. Within the epic tradition, bards or griots would perform the epic over numerous nights, often to his audience’s participatory beat. The best bards always paid careful attention to audience, shaping the story to praise, ridicule, or otherwise add material unique to each particular performance’s audience members. The rhythmic participation of the audience facilitated the community learning that was to occur during these performances, as primary epics often were used to teach the audience members their national history, instill a sense of national pride, teach them about proper modes of citizenship, and celebrate the achievements of their culture. So integral to the genre of epic poetry is its oral history that many theorists proclaimed the genre dead once it transitioned to a primarily print or literary one. In delineating slam’s predecessors, one could and ought to look to numerous sources both within and without the United States. The bardic traditions of oral societies, including Greek and African, should be noted, with both epic and lyric histories taken into account. Specific moments in American poetic history, such as Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Amiri Baraka’s “Nation Time” come to mind, with Ginsberg’s subsequent trial for obscenity foreshadowing Sarah Jones’s recent run-in with the FCC over the alleged indecency of one of her performance poems/songs. The poetry happenings and open mike nights that flourished in the late 1950s and through the 1960s certainly contributed to the current atmosphere, offering the notion of spontaneous readings perhaps moderated by a skilled or entertaining emcee, welcoming anyone with courage to proclaim themselves poets and perform on-the-spot for an audience. Numerous West Indian dub poets such as Linton Kwesi Johnson (1952–) and Jean “Binta” Breeze (1956–) have been performing spontaneous, improvised, musically centered poetry that would be difficult to distinguish in some cases from performance poetry; and the Four Horsemen, a Canadian group of poets, added to an American appetite for vigorously read poetry. What is of special interest regarding these non-Western, non-European origins of spoken word performances is that it reflects the relatively contemporary emphasis on globalization and democratization in both poetry and the world at large. As modern technologies make instant communication with virtually any part of the world a possibility for the average American, the parameters of what subject matter can enter American poetry, what constitutes a predecessor to an American poetic trend, and, indeed, who is considered an American poet constantly expand. Despite the numerous claims of ancestry, slam poetry as its own event holds a rather specific history. Poetry slams began in 1984 with public poetry readings at the Get Me High lounge, then the Déjà vu Bar in Chicago, organized by Marc Smith. The year 1985 marked the first Uptown Poetry Slam as well as coverage by the Chicago Tribune, and the formation of the Chicago Poetry Ensemble, which began holding its slams in 1986 at the Green Mill, a Chicago jazz landmark. These early readings coincided with increasing national—if controversial—attention on performance art, perhaps most notable for Marc Smith when Chicago performance

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artist Karen Finlay lost an NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) grant for a piece in which she smeared chocolate pudding over and into her body. By 1987, Ann Arbor, Michigan, began holding its own slams, quickly followed by slams in New York City, San Francisco, and Fairbanks, Alaska. The urban movement embracing young poets was born. Cities began sending teams to compete at what by 1991 was dubbed the National Poetry Slam. In 1992, 17 cities sent teams to the competition, including the first Native American team. Another first followed in 1993 with the first Canadian team, paving the way for additional international teams in future years. Much as winning the competition is connected to a potential future as a professional poet, the real purpose of the slams is to promote the writing, enjoyment of, and learning from poetry. The rallying cry of the competitions since 1994 has been “the points are not the point; the point is the poetry,” a dictum found on the Web site and often repeated. The energetic performances of the poets combined with the competitive atmosphere translated well into visual mediums, evidenced in 1996, when the documentary Slam Nation was filmed and released at the Sundance Film Festival two years later, featuring a stand-out performer from Team Nuyorican, Saul Williams (1972–). The documentary series The United States of Poetry and Have You Heard the Word aired on PBS featured slam and other competitions and helped to spread the popularity of slams even more quickly. Nuyorican Poets Café. Founded by poet and professor Miguel Algarin in 1973, the Nuyorican Poets Café established as its mission to create a multicultural venue that both nurtures artists and exhibits a variety of artistic works. Founded close on the heels of the Black Arts movement, the Café reacted to some of the same feelings of alienation and disconnection Baraka and other black poets experienced when they assessed the contemporary American poetry scene. With prizes awarded and publications selected primarily by white men, poets whose experiences and sensibilities— as well as whose voices—were forged in multicultural settings did not view the traditional path to poetic fame as a conduit to an audience that would value their work: enter an MFA program, learn under a famous white poet, submit poetry to a contest judged by white poets, and publish your prize-winning poetry in a journal edited by a white poet and read by hundreds more of the nation’s white poets. Even more than 20 years after the Café’s founding, the guest editor of one of the most successful annual poetry publications announced her strategy to correct for this “literary apartheid” (Rich, 1996, 19), and Web sites devoted to exposing the nepotism of major poetry prizes—contests which award the prize money or publication contract to the judges’ students, friends, or lovers even before all the entries are read—continue to suggest an inbreeding or good old boys’ (or woman’s) club cultivated among the nation’s elite and predominantly white MFA instructors and press editors (see Foetry.com). The quick success of the Café is testament to the validity of its poets’ perceptions. There was an audience hungry for their work, but that audience wasn’t necessarily in the universities. Its constant attempt to “put the poem into action,” as Algarin promised, enlivened the world of American poetry with its reminder of poetry’s long relationship with the world of theatre. This venue has become of the most recognized poetry venues of the nation, and its high profile alumni have demonstrated significant success crossing over into other artistically defined cultural arenas. Its team won the National Poetry Slam in 1996,

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the year Slam Nation was filmed. Although he was not the individual winner of that year, Saul Williams of Team Nuyorican, who is featured in the film, saw his poetic career launched. He later performed the role of an ex-con poet in the film Slam and has seen four of his books to print, two of them with MTV Books. The PBS series on African American art in the twentieth century, I’ll Make Me A World, closed its six-part series with Williams reciting one of his poems, and his musical album, Amethyst Rock Star, has met with critical praise. Concurrent with Marc Smith’s attention to poetry slams, Terry Jacobus, a student of poets Ed Dorn (1929–1999), Robert Creeley (1926–), and Anne Waldman (1945–), began Poetry Bouts, slightly different in nature from slams. In a poetry bout, two poets clash one-on-one with each other, with one round of spontaneous composition on a topic selected at that moment. As such, the poetry bouts claim to be the origin of competitive poetics. The first bout, with Terry Jacobus pitted against Gregory Corso (1930–2001), occurred in 1981. This event, like the slam, saw phenomenally swift growth, particularly in the reputation of the poets it attracted. Made part of the Taos Poetry Circus in 1982 and continued until its demise in 2003, the World Heavyweight Poetry Bout winners have included Jimmy Santiago Baca (1952–), Saul Williams, Wanda Coleman (1946–), Simon Ortiz (1941–), Gregory Corso, Ed Dorn, Sekou Sundiata, Quincy Troupe, Jr. (1939–), Patricia Smith, Anne Waldman, and four-time winner Sherman Alexie (1966–). Many of these poets have earned crossover success in other genres, with CDs, film credits, and radio commentaries on their resumes. Contexts and Issues Use of Multi-Media. Sherman Alexie, Saul Williams, and Sarah Jones (1973–) are accurate representatives of the new directions poetry has taken into the worlds of performance and media other than print, as all three are successful in multiple artistic genres. Alexie continues the tradition of poetry and poets in performance, as his own tours seem more akin to stand-up comedy than they do to traditional poetry. His successful film Smoke Signals, a collaboration between Alexie and Cheyenne/Arapaho Indian Chris Eyre based on one of the short stories from Alexie’s collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, probably did more to bring him to the awareness of a poetry-reading public than his first two books of poetry, The Business of Fancydancing and I Would Steal Horses. Alexie also demonstrates the ability of the radical avant-garde challenger to move into positions of power and influence, with his numerous prestigious awards and academic posts. His short stories have earned selection in The Best American Short Stories of 2004, Pushcart Prize XXIX of the Small Presses, The O’Henry Prize Stories 2005, and he was named Artist in Residence to the University of Washington for both 2004 and 2006. Poetry’s successful marriage with the world of musical production also marks the years since 2000. Nuyorican Poetry slam winner Reg E Gaines wrote the libretto for the Broadway musical Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk. When Def Poetry Jam appeared on Broadway in the fall of 2002, it did so under the production of Russell Simmons, Def Jam recording label founder. In fact, much has been written about the black poetry to be found in rap and hip-hop, and some may suggest that to simply remove the instrumental backdrop from rap or hip-hop would result in spoken word. Despite that oversimplification, the poetic movement did and does benefit from the money and fame of the musical world. A Broadway stage alive with dancers can, indeed, put a poem into action.

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Like fellow Nuyorican Poets Café poet Saul Williams, Sarah Jones enjoys success in the world of performance, even garnering a 2006 Tony Award for her one-woman show Bridge & Tunnel. Jones represents as well some of the connections between poetry and music. She also achieved notoriety when she successfully sued the FCC for its censorship of her song “Your Revolution,” for indecency, itself a playful response to Gil Scot Herron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (Jones’s chorus repeats “your revolution will not be between these thighs”). Like many of the slam poets, Jones involves herself in political and civic activism, taking up such projects as protesting discriminatory laws against women and disparities in health care practices that follow racial and ethnic lines. Her 2003 tour of Surface Transit, another one-woman show, frequently scheduled talkbacks and Question & Answer sessions after the performance, allowing Jones further arenas to advance her activist projects. Protest Poetry. Sarah Jones’s use of her poetic stage for a soapbox is part of a larger awareness that poetry can be and currently is an appropriate vehicle for protest. Just as each war produces its flurry of poetry that in its graphic or realistic content serves to denounce the war that produced it (one thinks of Wilfrid Owen, Siegfried Sasson, even Homer’s The Iliad, as icons of detailed violence that laments the situations that produced them), so does war inspire protest at home. The nations turning to poetry in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 emboldened poets to use this bright spotlight to their advantage. As the U.S. administration pushed for war, poets pushed for peace. On the eve of war in Iraq, on February 17, 2003, the Lincoln Center presented Poems Not Fit for the White House, a poetic response to the possibility of war: a resounding no. Another vibrant protest movement is spearheaded by the People’s Poetry Project, this one protesting the disappearance of the world’s languages—and with it, the poetry composed in those languages—as the very technologies that increase the speed of worldwide communication also reduce the number of languages in which that communication occurs. Its Declaration of Poetic Rights and Values clearly establishes its reasons for preserving the world’s oral, written, and ceremonial poetry in the language in which it was composed as part of its efforts to retain humanity’s creative genius, invested in its poetry. Culture Wars. This constellation of activities associated with the spoken word has not been without its well-heeled critics. Most famous, perhaps, is critic Harold Bloom’s pronouncement that the spoken word marks the “death of art” in the Paris Review. However, Bloom’s summation may be better understood in the context of American poetry and the culture wars. Bloom operates from a critical position that was schooled during the New Critics’ heyday, and he places a rather narrow definition onto what he would deem “good” poetry. To him, aesthetics is all, and in his determination of aesthetics, a poet’s or a poem’s purpose—if it is anything other than to impress the well-educated reader with its tightly controlled use of meter, rhyme, ambiguity—cannot be considered in that aesthetic evaluation. His infamous introduction to the The Best of the Best American Poetry reveals his belief that the United States is overrun with a culture of resentment, with angry professors leading the charge against those who would value craft. In that introduction, he hurls an angry invective against his editorial predecessor, Adrienne Rich (1929–), who, in his words, created in her edition of the series “a monumental representation of the enemies of the aesthetic who are in the act of overwhelming us. It is of a badness not to be believed, because it follows the criteria now operative: what matters most are the race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic

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origin, and political purpose of the would-be poet” (1998, 16). He remarks that he could not find a single poem included in Rich’s edition that was worthy of inclusion in the Best of the Best. By her own admission, Rich was not seeking primarily the most aesthetically complex or pleasing poems. Her project was to include those poems that are “especially urgent, lively, haunting, resonant, demanding to be reread” (1996, 15). As Rich points out in her introduction to the Best American Poetry of 1996, most literary magazines in this country are edited by white men. And the list she supplies of major U.S. poetry prizes “administered largely by white judges and bestowed largely on white men” includes the Ruth Lilly Prize, Kingsley Tufts Prize, Academy of American Poets fellowship, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Critics Circle Award (1996, 18). It is this “literary apartheid” (Rich 1996, 19) that the commitment to a multicultural venue fights. The antagonism between Bloom and Rich should be understood in the larger context of the culture wars marking American society. The 2004 elections and the media focus on blue vs. red states reminded us that the brief moments of national unity heralded in our collective response to 9/11 were over. The culture wars suggest that what polarizes Americans are hot-button issues, with ideology rather than any factor such as religion, race, or social class acting as the divisive factor. Those who are pro-Affirmative Action are likely also pro-choice, anti-gun, environmentalists who believe global warming is a real threat and that Americans have the right to die with dignity and with medical intervention if need be. They tend to reject Intelligent Design, favor the separation of church and state, and support same-sex marriage. Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly calls such people Secular-Progressives and those on the other side of the ideological divide, Traditionalists. The Traditionalists are the ones engineering the backlash against such race-, gender-, class- , and sexual orientation-sensitive social movements that demanded civil rights and affirmative action. California, Washington, and, as of 2006, Michigan’s so-called “Civil Rights Initiatives” ban affirmative action that given preferential treatment to groups based on race, gender, color, ethnicity, or national origin for public employment, education, or contracting purposes. Each state or city court that recognizes same-sex unions galvanizes the Traditionalists to mount a campaign for a Defense of Marriage Acts, with 40 states as of January 2007 with a DOMA on the books and resulting Web sites to keep lawyers updated on the interpretation of those acts. Identity Politics. Bloom, Rich, and spoken word poetry fit into the culture wars with Bloom representing the Traditionalists; Rich, the Secular-Progressives; and spoken word, the ground in which the Secular-Progressives work out their identity politics. Identity politics is the practice whereby members of minority groups identify themselves according to shared discrimination they have endured as members of that group and agitate for social change based on what that discrimination has denied them. Ironically, to determine both whether or not some benefit has been systematically denied to members of that particular group and to chart progress in re- or instating those benefits requires that all members identify themselves as such. If the goal of identity politics is to level some heretofore uneven playing field (as is often the case) and erase the results of the difference that caused the unevenness in the first place, that very difference must first be marked and thereby made visible again. For example, were a university to redress the claims of lesbian faculty members that they were unfairly passed over for promotion and pay increases, that university would

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first need to ask all members to identify themselves according to their gender and sexual orientation, specifically marking lesbians as such. If their complaint was that their gender compounded by their sexual orientation was the difference that accounts for the pay discrepancy, that very difference would first have to be invoked in order for the effects of the institutional discrimination because of that difference to be reduced or erased. As various groups organized around identity politics and agitated for inclusion in university curriculum as well as national publications, American poetry publications—both primary and secondary sources—enjoyed surges in anthologies and critical collections devoted to each minority group. This trend began with the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and the feminist movement of the 1970s, both of which sought to recover past writers either forgotten or ignored, thereby revealing or establishing a tradition of black or woman’s art. Both movements also supported emergent writers, support that continues today. Each movement that organized around an aspect of identity—the American Indian Movement, the post-Stonewall gay rights groups like Act Up, for example—worked to recover and promote writers and poets who represented them and contributed to an artistic tradition that foregrounds issues of particular concern to members of that group. Their success can be measured in both the changing parameters of the national debates and, often more hopefully, in the burgeoning publications that include or focus on those issues of concern. Though civil rights and specific, legal protection for gay and lesbian Americans have been slow in coming, the ever-increasing critical attention given to poets who identify themselves (or who have been identified) as gay or lesbian testifies to the success of identity politics to bring gay and lesbian issues to the attention of our nation’s scholars and students. The annual American Literary Scholarship section devoted to poetry from the 1940s to the present, for example, notes that from 2001–2003, scholarship on closet lesbian Elizabeth Bishop “far exceeds that on any other poet of the period” (2003, 425). A first-rate poet of major import, Bishop’s command of critical attention nonetheless is boosted by college courses devoted specifically to lesbian issues. Ask Google to find poetry anthologies with lesbians as a keyword and 768 hits appear. Harold Bloom and new critics would cringe at the thought of a poet’s sexual orientation or a poem’s subject matter serving as selection criteria for inclusion in an anthology, but they work with a limited view of poetry’s purpose, particularly in the context of current American culture. Traditional views of poetry hold that its purpose, to borrow Piotr Gwiazda’s descriptions, is to serve “as an object of aesthetic contemplation,” whereas the secular-progressive view is that poetry may also serve as “a vehicle for social change” (2004, 462). In the years since 2000, poetry publications suggest that poetry is being used—frequently—by those who hope to effect change. Reception. The questions that a student of poetry would ask now are the same questions they would ask since poetry was first spoken, or written. Is poetry primarily an oral or a written art? What is its primary purpose? Does it serve to entertain, or is its purpose to inform, educate, enrage? Should its subject remain rooted in the personal, the local, or must it move toward the oft-ridiculed “universal,” or national? Is poetry now wildly popular or caught in a dismal state of affairs? These questions are not rhetorical, nor are they simple to answer. To examine popular American poetry since 2000 is to track developments in several media that embrace and excite the young of our country and to bemoan; to roam the latest

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applications of the most recent technologies and to be thrown into a study of classical and pre-literate histories. The most exciting and important trends in American popular poetry continue to be the multiple manifestations of the same movement: to get poetry out of the exclusive hands of the elite and the academic and into the hands of the masses, particularly the young. The spoken word revolution dominates this trend and illustrates how poetry has reinvigorated itself by simultaneously returning to some of poetry’s origins, reminding its contemporary audience that the written form is a late-comer to poetry, and capitalizing on new technologies and other forms of popular cultural media. Performance, specifically dramatic performance, as well as the celebration of sound and music that marks the world’s earliest poetic forms, have been the vehicles through which countless new, young Americans have been introduced to poetry, often in flashy, slickly produced events. Selected Authors. Any discussion of poets in a venue such as this would be ridiculously limited and revelatory of the author’s own biases. This discussion will not prove an exception to that rule. However, three will be presented for their command of the critical attention and their relationship to the largest prize the world offers poets, the Nobel Prize for Literature. One, Derek Walcott, has already earned that prize; yet he remains an active poet and, according to some criteria, remains an “American” poet. The other two poets are perhaps most likely of all the American poets writing today to win the prize in the future, if critical attention is any indication. A discussion of popular American poetry would not be complete without addressing one of the most astounding best-selling books of poetry, Derek Walcott’s Omeros. Though one can question including Walcott in a list of “American” poets because of his birthplace, the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, by virtue of his long tenure at universities in the United States and with a broad definition of America that includes the various Americas, compounded with the amazing sales of his poetry within our country, he is an American poet to be reckoned with, publishing two books of poetry since 2000: Tiepolo’s Hound in 2000 and The Prodigal in 2004. Winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature, Walcott was born in 1930 in Castries, St. Lucia, to a schoolteacher mother and civil servant father (who died before Derek and his twin brother, Roderick, reached their second birthday). His 325-page poem, Omeros, published by Farrar Straus Giroux in 1990, cemented his reputation not only as the premier Caribbean poet, but also as the “very man by whom the English language lives,” according to his friend and fellow Nobel-prize winning poet Joseph Brodsky. Its publication and subsequent widespread appeal are widely accepted as the catalyst for Walcott’s Nobel Prize. What astounds about Walcott’s success with Omeros is that the brisk sales of his long and culturally dense but masterful poem testified as early as 1990 that a poetry resurgence was on its way to the United States. Perhaps only one other recent American book, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, has so quickly entrenched itself in the canon of U.S. literature classrooms. That Walcott did so with poetry, and an epic poem no less, almost baffles the mind. Perhaps, we can read in Walcott several trends converging to contribute to that success. Just as identity politics seems to offer a boost to some poets whose member group is currently active in the academy, demanding courses and attendant anthologies and critical scholarship to support those courses, Walcott’s poem appeared two years shy of the five-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s so-called discovery of the New World. Many thinkers and cultural critics were interested in assessing the legacy of Columbus, and in the pantheon of New World voices whose

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very existence was forged in the often violent histories that converged on the New World between 1492 and 1992, Walcott presented an example of artistic nearperfection that even the New Critics would agree was worthy of the designation “best” poetry. Titled with the Greek word for Homer and divided into seven books of multiple chapters each, with the first and final two books set in St. Lucia and the middle three in Africa, the United States, and Europe, the poem, like Walcott himself, contributes to a new American definition that is globally inclusive. Walcott has made much of the fact that his last name along with his brown skin and green eyes testify to his varied ancestry—Dutch, African, and British. Rather famously, one of his poems declares “either I’m nobody or I’m a nation.” As his very body carries the strains of several world cultures converging upon him, so, too, does his poetry retain the several literary heritages he claims. The characters with whom Walcott populates this narrative poem further suggest the deliberate relationship between this poem and The Iliad and The Odyssey alluded to in the poem’s title. Walcott also embraced several genres, notably poetry and drama, at a time when poetry reinvigorated itself by reminding its audience of its dramatic roots. Walcott began his career as a playwright, with his earliest writing successes in drama. He spent many years nourishing the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, which he founded and for which he wrote his early plays; and his first post-Nobel publication was a stage version of The Odyssey, his Caribbean-infused reworking of Homer’s text, composed primarily in verse. The Stratford Festival of Ontario, Canada, is staged this play for its 2007 season. And like some of his younger poetic contemporaries, he has also made forays into musical theatre, though with rather disastrous results: his longtime collaboration with Paul Simon on Capeman resulted in a financial flop. He has even included his own watercolor paintings as cover art and within his books of poetry. The contemporary avant-garde, the exploratory poets for whom language itself is both barrier to understanding and stuff of meaning, can find much in Walcott’s poetry to admire. For Walcott the poet, among the maladies cured by the convergence of cultures in the Caribbean is no less than the problem of language. Often questioned for his apparent bifurcated devotion to the Caribbean as a place on the one hand and the language and literary traditions of Western Europe on the other, Walcott asserts in Omeros his right to all of the beauties of the English language, described in his earlier poem “A Far Cry from Africa” as “the English tongue I love.” In Omeros Walcott writes that “this language carries its cure” (1990, 323). Most notable may be that near the millennium’s end, with one decade remaining, Walcott offered up what he has described as a love poem to St. Lucia, his home island, that simultaneously serves as an epic reassessment of Caribbean culture. The astoundingly beautiful and technically perfect poetry contained in this assessment celebrates the achievements of those in the Caribbean who, in the words of the poem, “walked. / They survived. There is the epical splendour.” When Walcott uses his poetry to “give those feet a voice,” his vision transforms a history built on pain and forced migration, marked by poverty, into a testament of beauty. The poets since 2000 who continue to garner the most critical attention and praise—those most likely identified as The Major Poets compared to the merely influential poets or A Major Poet—remain those in the inclusive, paratactic tradition of Whitman and Williams. Our current poets who practice a both/and form of poetics, who, in Vernon Shetley’s words, “find some kind of middle way between

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the alternatives of a poetry descended from Eliot . . . [and] oppositional politics of a figure like Ginsberg” (1993, 16–17) are those who remain our most interesting, our most significant. Jorie Graham. One of the most exciting and prolific of those poets is Jorie Graham (1951–), longtime faculty member of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop now at Harvard. Like the most profound American poets, Graham deftly and masterfully dances the line that so often has divided poetry, redefining the dichotomy often aligned over the absence or presence of the poem’s speakerly self, the impersonal poem against the personal, the confessional mode in which the poet-as-I reveals the self arrayed against the avant-garde mode in which issues of the poet’s voice become obsolete as language itself is presented as the only material of poetry. Kirstin Hotelling Zona describes this as Graham’s “dance between autonomy and contingency” (2005, 669)—the poetic self that shapes its destiny only as it realizes its dependence upon and existence only within the contexts of relationships. Graham crafts a poetic persona hungry for meaning, and presents that persona in the act of creating that meaning, simultaneously embracing and abjuring the power and responsibility involved in the act of making that meaning. Like Whitman, she fuses features from both sides of the poetic divide, “locat[ing] writerly authority not in the ruptured referent, nor in the lyric ‘I’ who appears to choose one action over another, but in the play between these positions—between presence and absence, desire and dislocation—from which the ‘I’ emerges” (Zona 2005, 670). Graham’s nine books of poetry, three since 2000, and her resume of achievements have secured her position as Major Poet. Following a trilingual childhood abroad, Graham earned a BA from New York University (1973) and an MFA from Iowa (1978). She has earned an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Whiting Award, and a Pulitzer (for Dream of a Unified Field), and been awarded both a Guggenheim fellowship and an NEA grant. Even when critics pen mixed reviews of her books, they are forced to admit the intellectual rigor and the beautiful poetics that mark her writing, as well as the uncanny way she locates her work at the nexus of the debate about poetry, embodying the oppositions and making out of them poetry that unites previously separated worlds. James Longenbach identifies her “acts of inclusion” as the defining feature of her distinct voice and formidable achievements, referring to various, often opposing, poetic traditions infused into her poetry. From Graham’s debut book of poetry, Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts (1980) to Never (2002), what many critics have noted is the range of Graham’s poetry. Each book takes a new direction, sometimes to the bafflement or consternation of critics who enjoyed the poetics of the previous one. Especially laudatory readings have been published in two of the most prestigious literary journals since 2000, one in PMLA and another in Contemporary Literature, and one of the nations most formidable poetry critics, Helen Vendler, makes Graham one of three poets who are the subject of a recent book. Graham has said that she writes for the “harried” reader and much has been said about her “breathless” lines, both of which might yield an impression of a poetic world crowded with images or hurried in its presentation. But Graham is also an unceasing advocate for poetry—revealed both by the unflagging interest in and encouragement to the younger poets she teaches, and in her undogged defense of the art. She appears to bristle in interviews only when poetry is identified as marginal and when questions about the proliferation of bad poetry are posed. Her emphasis on the ways poetry can put us in contact with sets of values not affiliated with other

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forms of learning—how it can inspire curiosity, teach ambiguity—makes her a champion of all forms of poetry. Only in the economic sense, she insists, is poetry marginal, and she suggests that economic value holds little real value to that associated with the heart’s knowledge. Another prolific poet whose command of critical attention derives from her mastery of both sides of a poetic divide is Louise Glück (1943–). Former poet laureate and winner of most prizes awarded to poets, including a Pulitzer in 1993, the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize, Glück’s poetic hallmarks include archetypal symbolism, mythic subject matter, formal experimentation, and the use of epic material in poetry that foregrounds “the personal, the occasional, the interior” (Murnaghan and Roberts, 1992 4). As is the case with Jorie Graham, however, Glück’s poetry evades all categories set to it. Her “need to resist [the closed self’s] seduction is her great theme,” writes James Longenbach in 2004. Like Plath, who employs myth to embody a personal or speakerly self in the poetry, Glück eschews both confessional and intellectual traditions at the same time that her poetry toys with them. Her poetry is simultaneously personal and distant from the persona, with classical figures such as Penelope and Odysseus representing a contemporary couple caught in the process of a dissolving marriage, as is the case in her 1996 collection Meadowlands. Her most recent poetry collection, Averno (2006) may indeed be her “masterpiece,” as the New York Times Book Review announces, a collection that announces Glück’s self-positioning with the world’s most notable poets (the title refers to the Italian lake that ancient Romans believed ran to the underworld, immortalized in Virgil’s Aeneid). The poems in this collection promise to reveal “a theory that explains everything,” yet that theory comes from the persona of the poet who takes “it upon myself / to become an artist, / to give voice to these impressions.” The frequency with which these three poets publish and, even more so, command critical attention suggest that they are the future of American academic poetry. The future of American popular poetry lies with us all. Bibliography Algarin, Miguel, and Bob Holman, eds. Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café. New York: Henry Holt, 1994. Baraka, Amiri. “Somebody Blew Up America.” http://www.counterpunch.org/poem1003.html. Bell, Marvin. “The Poetry Scene: No One Way.” In The Spoken Word Revolution: Slam, Hip-hop, & the Poetry of a New Generation. Mark Eleveld, ed. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2003. Bloom, Harold. “Introduction.” The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988–1997. New York: Scribners, 1998. Gilbert, Roger. “Contemporary American Poetry.” In A Companion to 20th Century Poetry. Neil Roberts, ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Gioia, Dana. Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture. St Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2002. Glück, Louise. Averno. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2006. Graham, Jorie. “The Glorious Thing: Jorie Graham and Mark Wunderlich in Conversation.” Interview with Mark Wunderlich. American Poet. (Fall 1996): 20–23. ———. Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980. ———. Never. New York: Ecco, 2002. Gwiazda, Piotr. “The Aesthetics of Politics/The Politics of Aesthetics: Amiri Baraka’s ‘Somebody Blew Up America.’” Contemporary Literature 45.3 (2004): 460–485.

POETRY Hass, Robert. “Introduction.” Best American Poetry 2001. New York: Scribners, 2001. Have You Heard the Word? TV Ontario, 1994. Hejinian, Lyn. “Introduction.” Best American Poetry 2004. New York: Scribners, 2004. Kearful, Frank. “Poetry: The 1940s to the Present.” American Literary Scholarship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003, 425–474. Komunyakaa, Yusef. “Introduction.” Best American Poetry 2003. New York: Scribners, 2003. Lehman, David. “Forward.” Best American Poetry 2002. New York: Scribners, 2002. Longenbach, James. Modern Poetry After Modernism. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. ———. The Resistance to Poetry. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Martin, Charles. “The Three Voices of Contemporary Poetry.” The New Criterion 22.8 (April 2004): 34–37. Middlebrook, Diane Wood. “What Was Confessional Poetry?” In The Columbia History of American Poetry. Jay Parini, ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Murnaghan, Sheila and Deborah H. Roberts. “Penelope’s Song: The Lyric Odysseys of Linda Pastan and Louise Glück.” Classical and Modern Literature 22.1 (1992): 1–33. “The People’s Poetry Language Initiative: A Declaration of Poetic Rights and Values.” People’s Poetry Project. http://peoplespoetry.org. Rich, Adrienne. “Introduction.” Best American Poetry 1996. New York: Scribners, 1996. Schwerner, Armand. Sounds of the River Naranjana & THE TABLETS I–XXIV. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1983. Shetley, Vernon. After the Death of Poetry: Poet and Audience in Contemporary America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. The United States of Poetry. Washington Square Films, 1996. Vendler, Helen. The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. ———. Part of Nature, Part of Us. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980. ———. Voices & Visions. New York: Random House, 1987. Walcott, Derek. Omeros. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1990. ———. The Prodigal. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2004. ———. Tiepolo’s Hound. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000. Walker, Jeanne Murray. “A Comment on the State of the Art: Poetry in 2004.” Christianity and Literature 54.1 (Autumn 2004): 93–110. Williams, William Carlos. Spring and All. 1923. Imaginations. New York: New Directions, 1970. Zona, Kirstin Hotelling. “Jorie Graham and American Poetry.” Contemporary Literature 46.4 (Winter 2005): 667–687.

Further Reading African-American Review 37.2–3 (Special Issue on Amiri Baraka); Arp, Thomas, and Greg Johnson, eds. Perrine’s Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry. Tenth edition. Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle, 2002; Brown, Fahamisha Patricia. Performing the Word: African American Poetry as Vernacular Culture. New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press, 1999; Glazner, Gary Mex, editor. Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry. San Francisco: Manic D P, 2000; Otten, Thomas. “Jorie Graham’s ___s.” PMLA 118 (2003): 239–253; Perloff, Marjorie. “William Carlos Williams.” Voices and Visions. 157–203; poets.org.

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R REGIONAL FICTION Definition. In his essay, “The Regional Motive,” novelist, essayist, poet, and environmentalist Wendell Berry confesses that he knows “no word that is more sloppily defined . . . or more casually understood” than “regionalist” (Berry 1972, 63). Because it lacks intellectual dimensions, the “regional” label leaves a writer feeling branded and embarrassed. The label is more embarrassing than other modifiers of contemporary American fiction writers because it implies that the writer is either a mouthpiece for over-storied regions (such as New England, the South, Appalachia, or the Midwest) or a fetishizer of the remains of rurality in America. Forced to negotiate received notions of places and vernacular expression, regionalists confront a dialectic clash between preservation and renewal. The most innovative regional fiction defies the traditional iconography of standard regions, disturbs reader expectations about vernacular expression, and dismantles encyclopedic ownership of place. With this progressive agenda, it would seem that regional fiction is beginning to merge with “literary fiction,” with its focus on the larger cultural and human problems often eclipsed by excessive interest in local detail. However, the entire genre of regional fiction, from the most traditional to the most innovative texts, retains an adverse relationship to official literary culture for a couple of reasons. First, as Marilynne Robinson indicates, the very existence of a “regional” category reveals “a cultural bias that supposes books won’t be written in towns you haven’t heard of before” (qtd. in Kowalewski 2003, 7). Secondly, regional fiction has internalized the distinction between regional and non-regional writing insofar as it elevates the importance of place over its mere necessity as a background upon which to stage a character’s psychological development or “soul search.” In this sense, regional fiction has the potential to destabilize the distinction between setting and narrative voice. On the other hand, there remains a nostalgic model of regional fiction, which preserves vernacular relics for no other reason than that they are scarce. In this sense, regional fiction is either dismissed or revered as a genre purporting to contain

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“authentic” representations of rural places and folk wisdom. To a large degree, regional fiction is persistently popular because, in America, the question of authenticity is asked on so many fronts. For instance, in November 1998, the State Department issued a publication entitled Outline of American Literature, the final section of which was entitled “The New Regionalism.” This section of the publication claims that regionalism is making “a triumphant return in American literature, enabling readers to get a sense of place as well as a sense of time and humanity” (Outline, 1998). Similarly, but on a more literary front, Joyce Carol Oates has recently called the regional voice the universal voice. Her prose poem “My Faith as a Writer,” printed in the front matter of her collection of craft essays, The Faith of a Writer (2003) and reprinted on her lecture tour pamphlets, reads as follows: Through the local or regional, through our individual voices, we work to create art that will speak to others who know nothing of us. In our very obliqueness to one another, an unexpected intimacy is born. The individual voice is the communal voice. The regional voice is the universal voice. (Oates 2003, 2)

Even in her introduction to the Oxford Book of American Short Stories, Oates answers the question “Is American literature at its core a literature of regions?” in the affirmative, asserting that contemporary writers resemble one another “along lines that have less to do with traditional American themes than with . . . highly specific, brilliantly realized American places” (Oates 1992, 15). This curious endorsement from both the federal government and the literati indicates that the question of region is important to both the political and cultural engines of American public opinion. As the State Department publication indicates, regional fiction is popular because it “enables” curious readers to assume a “sense of place.” It thus facilitates a manner of thinking territorially, which helps explain why the State Department has a stake in its comeback. Regional fiction is also, as Oates indicates, a fiction that builds cosmopolitan and humanist connections from the raw materials of the unique timbres of our own voices. It is uniquely “American,” these claims suggest, to think territorially and to think that specificity is a pathway to universal, trans-territorial, humanity. Like Whitman, whose careful inventory of body parts “sings the body electric,” the regional fiction writer uses the specificity of place to generate tangible patterns of commonality. Regional fiction became popular in American literature in the late nineteenth century, primarily as a category of realism devoted to representing local specificity. The genre, usually understood as “quaint” representations of places outside the beltway of industrial progress, satisfies reader fantasies about a preindustrial past. Originally solicited elite periodicals, such as The Atlantic Monthly, regionalism entered literary history as a genre whose subject (people and places untouched by national standardization) serves a social need (to pacify anxiety about rapid standardization). As Stephanie Foote argues, this category of realism gained popularity because it “represented various sections of the consolidating nation to an audience that was conscious of itself as a national elite” (Foote 2001, 4). In other words, regional fiction allowed middle-class urban readers to think that the disappearance of locally diverse rural communities was part of a natural progression, not a revisable byproduct of industrial progress. Late-nineteenth century regional fiction was remarkably

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anti-modern. Its stories were set outside the patterns of industrial progress, in what Brodhead calls “zone[s] of backwardness where locally variant folkways prevail” (Brodhead 1994, 150). In this sense, regionalism can be defined as a form of cultural incubation, wherein literary representation preserves the cultures and landscapes threatened by the ongoing procession of modern progress. In the late twentieth century, regional fiction has achieved a renaissance of popularity. The reason is similar; contemporary globalization has introduced another concentric circle by comparison to which the value of the smaller, tangible spheres to which people actually feel the bond of affiliation appear to be in jeopardy. A definitional obligation to address early in explaining regional fiction is the distinction between “regionalism” and “local color.” Where literary regionalism refers to literature that is specific to a particular set of geographical coordinates, local color is a feature of realism that facilitates the production of regional fidelity. Local color differs from realist representation in that it “subordinated plot to the revelation of personality . . . capture[d] the speech patterns of unlettered Americans . . . [and] distinctly rejected any sense of capturing Truth” (Nagel 1997, xxii). Local color, then, is a representational tool that facilitates regional fiction. Though it is possible to do local color without writing a regional text, it is impossible to read a regional text that is devoid of local color. Local color is basically a mode of realism that captures the peculiarities local to places outside the literary mainstream, a mode of representation that highlights the specificity of places not yet on literary maps. As Hamlin Garland explains, “Local color in a novel means that it has such quality of texture and back-ground that it could not have been written in any other place or by any one else than a native” (Garland 1894, 53–54). The formal properties of regional fiction are (1) a setting that is outside the world of modern development but whose existence is in some discernible way being threatened by modern development, (2) the inclusion of characters and cultural features that personify some form of humanity that has been sacrificed in the name of progress, and (3) a concerted effort to employ local knowledge and to textualize the peculiarities local to the region in which the piece is set. For instance, vernacular dialect and “foreign” cultural traditions are often a focus of regional fiction. Considering these defining properties, many see regional fiction as engaging in conservative cultural work. Looking at the same characteristics, others argue that regional fiction resists unchecked modernization. Recently scholars have argued that what looks like nostalgia is in fact the type of anti-modern ambivalence that drives literary modernism. The difference between modernism and regionalism, though one sees few differences after reading Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), is the obvious preference in the latter for realist representation. In addition, regional fiction differs from modernist anti-modernism in that its moral urge is similar to that of nature writing. Regional fiction is now studied as a genre that synthesizes the clashes of opposing concepts such as “city” and “country,” “center” and “margin,” “tradition” and “modernity,” even “masculinity” and “femininity.” Instead of favoring one or another side (i.e., leaning too conspicuously in the direction of conserving rural values), regional fiction oscillates between sides, producing a symphony of voices and positions whose source of resolution is the reader-writer agreement to survey the whole scene. Regionalism thus treats the delicate textures of its subject gently, sharpening them by emphasizing the contrasting hues needed to represent “the local.” This means that the narrator’s process of encountering a specific region becomes a process of balancing different

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perspectives on culture, of accommodating the concentric circles of human affiliation. Finally, then, regional fiction, regardless of the historical period it is produced in, is an arm of realism that captures the spirit of place. Its practitioners assume that there is enough aesthetic value in specific soil to sustain the art of fiction. Sometimes excessively limited in focus, regional fiction seems conspicuously interested in reinforcing the special existence or value of what is off the beaten path. More specifically, literary works that stay within the lines of region seem to neglect or eclipse the greater social and human issues to which literature is supposed to respond. However, the proponents of regional fiction argue that it represents the confluence between who and where human beings are in the world. Its limited focus, like that of pastoral poetry, induces “universal” themes and resemblance from the grainy details of the local. History. There is some debate regarding which is the earliest work of regional fiction; the regional coordinates and literary form of each disputed work indicate much about the bifurcated history and development of the genre. Some critics cite the first Southwest humorist work, Augustus Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes (1835), as the first book-length regional work. Other critics agree that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s first novel, set in Maine, Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862), was the first regional offering. It is generally agreed, however, that the publication of Mark Twain’s humorous sketch, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865) in New York’s Saturday Press, and Brett Harte’s frontier sketches published in the Overland Monthly (1868–1870) inaugurate the “heyday” of regional fiction in America. It would appear, then, that the masculine-inflected, frontier humor sketches were the agenda-setting texts of regional form, and that the serene sketches of the New England countryside represent a second tier of regional form. However, this master narrative has been revised in recent years, as the early works of Twain and Harte have become attached to the histories of adventure fiction and Western literature more so than to regional fiction. This is true especially in the wake of feminist revision of regional history. In the 1970s and 1980s, feminist literary critics claimed regional fiction as a “woman’s genre,” beginning the history of the genre in New England, concentrating mostly on the work of Sarah Orne Jewett. In fact, the first publications of prominent feminist literary critics such as Elizabeth Ammons, Josephine Donovan, Ann Douglas, Judith Fetterley, Marjorie Pryse, and Alice Hall Petry were on the subject of Jewett’s New England fiction. This feminist reclamation seems counterintuitive, since the genre’s “miniaturism, descriptiveness, and domesticity bears the hallmarks of the dominant nineteenth-century gender ideology, specifically the notion of separate spheres and the dismissal of most women’s writing as merely ornamental” (Ammons and Rohy, 1998, xviii). Even after considering the impact of feminist criticism on the history of the genre, any history of regional fiction must begin not by choosing to link the genre to either New England domestic realism or Southwest humorism, but by acknowledging the institutional origins of this bifurcation and gauging the development of regional fiction from within these competing historical narratives. In Reading for Realism, Nancy Glazener argues that regional fiction gained popularity through the efforts of a conglomeration of literary institutions. The “Atlantic group,” as Glazener calls it, “shared contributors . . . endorsed each other’s authority, and based that authority in similar understandings of class-inflected cultural trusteeship” (Glazener 1997, 257). Glazener reveals the meta-editorial chatter

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among these periodicals, which sought to define fiction written in America as uniquely “American.” Atlantic-group editors (not the least of which is William Dean Howells) have faith in the ability of regional fiction to, as Foote characterizes it, “construct versions of local culture that can coexist peacefully in a single political entity” (Foote 2001, 9). Yet, as Foote further argues, this faith “conceals, as regionalism itself will, the absence of certain kinds of local cultures, identities, and accents” (9). The primary cultures, identities, and accents that these editors concealed are obviously those which cannot “coexist peacefully,” those that do not ultimately bend regional fiction around a nationalist project. A byproduct of this exclusionary literary nationalism, argues Donna Campbell, is what an 1897 Atlantic Monthly editorial terms the “Feminine Principle” and “Masculine Principle” of American fiction. This division is similar to the traditional understanding of the split between domestic local color and untamed naturalist fiction. As Campbell explains, a gendered logic is built into regional fiction. The Atlantic editorial, written by novelist James Lane Allen, explains that naturalist writers rebel against the popularity of preservation-centered realism. They dislike, among other things, the assumption that preserving local variance is inherently a good idea. Campbell provides an insightful reading of Stephen Crane’s story, “The Monster,” as naturalist fiction that deliberately subverts regional conventions in order to expose the conservative logic of regionalism’s popularity. Crane’s setting, a small town that has lost its economic reason for being, features a self-destructive man on the verge of disaster, for whom small-town rituals are a source of anger and oppression. Presenting local color this way, Crane dramatizes the impulse toward violent self-destruction that has long loomed under the surface of even the most innocuous regional fiction. New England Regionalism. More important than Crane’s critique of regional fiction is Edith Wharton’s more popular and fully realized critique in Ethan Frome (1911), in which Wharton portrays local knowledge as the raw material of self-destruction. In the famous penultimate scene, Ethan and his star-crossed lover steer their sleigh down a hillside in bucolic Starkfield, Massachusetts, straight into an elm tree. This suicide collision marks the beginning of an ongoing critique of nostalgic representation of rural America. It is Wharton’s effort, in her words, to “contradict the ‘rose and lavender’ pages of native writers . . . Mary Wilkins [Freeman] and Sarah Orne Jewett” (qtd. in Hamblen 1965, 239). Ethan Frome is thus a “blackly comic joke, a vision of the genre so extreme as to border on private parody” (Campbell 1997, 172). By using the standard trappings of New England local color (the sleigh, the snowy hill, the innocent lovers) as the instruments of violence, Wharton “confronts local color fiction on its own terms . . . disrupt[ing] and transform[ing] its narrative conventions,” ultimately revealing that regions can be crippled by their own quaintness (162). Wharton hopes her anti-local color will catch on as the New England fiction writer’s “siren-subject”; she hopes regional writers will answer her prefatory call to crash their “cockle-shell to the rocks,” meaning to abandon the “woman’s work” of representing the delicate, irrelevant hues of New England (Ethan Frome, vii). Wharton’s Fromes are deliberately colorless, characters she describes as “scarcely more articulate” than “granite outcroppings” (Wharton 1911, vii). They are recounted through the detached sobriety of an outsider narrator, or “looker-on with scope enough to see it all, to resolve it back into simplicity” (viii–ix). Wharton thus replaces interest in the delicate, exotic, and endangered details of regional difference with a crude formal essentialism wherein difference is

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reduced to proto-elemental categories like soil and rock. Fetterley and Pryse criticize Wharton for having “treat[ed] regionalism with extreme hostility” (Fetterley and Pryse 2003, 58). But Wharton was hostile not toward regional fiction in general, only toward the fact that popular regional fiction was “[s]uffocatingly claustrophobic; utterly regressive; filled with meaningless whining drone voices of women incapable of development” (58). In short, Wharton was no fan of the “Feminine Principle.” This isn’t a surprise, especially considering that her strong suit is the urban social fiction. As Fetterley and Pryse imply, Wharton’s New England novellas (which include Frome and Summer [1917]) read as cautionary tales that warn women writers against market expectations that require them to write nostalgic portrayals of rural America. But they are produced with a fairly standard representational objective. In Wharton’s words, her novellas “draw life as it really was in the derelict mountain regions of New England,” a life “utterly unlike that seen through the rose-coloured spectacles of my predecessors” (qtd in Fetterley and Pryse 2003, 58). Wharton’s critique of rosecolored regionalism is a critique of the kind of reader interest in representations of New England that find roses and lavender where there is only stark granite. The effect of contradicting the “‘rose and lavender’ pages” of Jewett and Freeman reveals a key moral tension of regional fiction. Wharton’s heartbreaking hues have inadvertently inspired writers to turn to New England for tragic plotlines and even horror. Even the recent State Department publication has taken note of this phenomenon in new regionalism, citing Joyce Carol Oates’s “haunting works” of the northeast United States whose “obsessed characters’ attempts to achieve fulfillment within their grotesque environments lead them into destruction” (Outline, 1998). The publication also notes the fact that Stephen King “generally sets his suspenseful page-turners in Maine—within the same region.” Also in Maine, recent novelist G.K. Wuori has started to receive recognition for his short story collection, Nude in the Tub (1999), and novel, An American Outrage (2000), about the north woods of Quillifarkeag, Maine. According to Kent Ryden, the New England of recent regional fiction is a place “where moral corruption and violence hide behind a static surface” (Ryden 2003, 206). Wharton likely did not intend to replace nostalgic representations with horrifying representations of the New England region. Instead, she seems to have wanted to point out that the basic presuppositions of regional fiction are problematic. The fact that an entire (mostly female) faction of writers somehow depend upon the survival of backwards folkways is troubling to Wharton for obvious reasons. A less obvious problem that writers like Wharton have with the nostalgia tradition is that it makes inventories of provinciality mean as much as, if not more than, the larger cultural or human problems that take root in rural regions. Since Wharton, much has happened to literary New England. It has become, through Robert Frost’s poetry, the site of “the social and emotional costs of living in a poor and declining part of the country”; it has been allegorized by Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) as “the imaginative property of the entire nation” (Ryden 2003, 206–208). But anyone who has read Stephen King’s Castle Rock novels knows that the unseemly side of rural New England is the most enduring in popular fiction. King’s horror parallels that of H.P. Lovecraft, as both draw their horror from their native knowledge of place. Both fuse and reuse real historical locations and fictional New England locations. Lovecraft explains his interest in New England by claiming the “night-black Massachusetts . . . is material for a really

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profound study in group neuroticism; for certainly, none can deny the existence of a profoundly morbid streak in the Puritan imagination” (qtd. in Joshi and Cannon 1999, 2). King, along with Russell Banks, Richard Russo, and lesser-known contemporaries like Ernest Hebert and Wuori, flock to New England settings for similar reasons. This “group neuroticism” has become absorbed into a fiction of isolated, self-destructive blue-collar males. Whether probing the psychic contours of such men or writing plainly of the topology of the region, contemporary New England writers always demonstrate a self-evident correspondence between the region and its wrecked lives. Tragic antiheros are matters of fact, lives that, like the Puritan culture that once ruled the region, have already ended and are told just to get the record straight, to continue Wharton’s revision of regional fiction to include the violent impulses indigenous to the American landscape. Trends and Themes. Though the legacy of New England regionalism is evident in many recent works of fiction, most contemporary regional fiction has more in common with the other side of the original bifurcation in regional fiction, that of the Southwest humorist tradition. New England fiction, and perhaps more importantly scholarship about New England regionalists, has helped the genre mature and develop beyond the nostalgia model. However, New England regionalism tends to focus too heavily on the life and death of a single endangered culture. This monocultural thematic center has lost resonance in a literary marketplace eager to absorb the multicultural complexities dramatized in the fiction of Julia Alvarez, Sandra Cisneros, Oscar Hijuelos, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-Rae Lee, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Amy Tan. As Dwight MacDonald forecasts in his polemic “Masscult and Midcult” (1961), New England has been “pushed aside by history” and has since the mid-twentieth century been slowly “dwindling to provincial gentility” (MacDonald, 1961, 34–35). In the wake of losing New England as a cultural center of American thought and letters, America’s “pluralistic culture” finally becomes realized in the 1960s (35). This pluralism makes the organizing tension of New England fiction, namely that between rurality and urbanity, seem outmoded and of no concern to the larger polity. The obsolescence of New England is contested in the fiction of Anne Tyler, Russell Banks, Richard Russo, and others, but only to the extent that the economic problems facing New England are the problems of America at large. As opposed to the New England strand of regional history, the Southern and Western strand produced some of the earliest examples of crosscultural contact in regional fiction. From Joel Chandler Harris’s racially problematic “Uncle Remus” sketches to George Washington Cable’s epic portrait of Creole culture, The Grandissimes (1880), fiction of the American South has simultaneously highlighted regional fidelity and dramatized cross-cultural tensions. This fiction is thus thematically more in touch with multicultural America and therefore is a more viable progenitor of fiction in today’s era of globalization. Southern Regionalism. The fiction of the American South is the ideal case study of parallel development of regional fiction and multiculturalism. Indeed, as Andrew Hoberek indicates, literary critics are starting to ask whether “southern literature might be understood as the origin of American multiculturalism and identity politics” (Hoberek, 2000). However, in his survey of contemporary Southern and Western fiction, Robert Brinkmeyer asks the crucial question: “Should we, in these days of the global village of cyberspace, do away with the designation ‘Southern’ and stop worrying about literary classifications grounded in place and region?” (Brinkmeyer 2000, 3). Though the reasonable answer seems to be yes, scholars of

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Southern fiction still focus their inquiries on motifs of place. Such scholarship is problematic when it refuses to acknowledge modern realities, such as the fact that agricultural references to the South as the “Cotton Belt” are less accurate than the corporate reference “Sun Belt.” Motivated by nostalgia for a monocultural Southern community, some Southern literary scholarship often clings to the idea that the South is immune to the standardizing effects of corporate capital. On the other hand, some contemporary Southern writers rely too heavily on historical designations such as “Old South” and “New South” to exorcise the troubling ancestors from their regional lineage. Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Wendell Berry have contributed the most substantial battery of essays on the trend of viewing regional fiction, multiculturalism, and identity politics as parallel phenomena. Welty and Percy represent opposite extremes of the argument, expressing conflicting ideas about the virtues of place-based multiculturalism. Welty sees the regionalist framework of her fiction as an intuitive site for interracial encounter. Her late fiction, most notably The Optimist’s Daughter (1972), uses this specificity of place not to defend against postmodern spatial amnesia, but to put local-level knowledge and power in the service of larger-scale forms of intimacy. Percy, on the other hand, is reluctant to embrace place and local-level racial tensions. Being more interested in existential and psychological themes, Percy sees place as an accident of birth. His essay “Why I Live Where I Live” explains that the importance of geographical location will diminish as the age of postmodern consumerism takes root, especially considering that most Americans find themselves living in the “nonplaces” of American suburbs. Indeed, Percy’s confession that Dixie beer is the only outlet for “authentic” local knowledge of New Orleans for those who live in the satellite suburb of Covington, LA, indicates that, if uninterested in wrestling with enduring historical and racial tensions, there’s little reason to write about the South anymore. Obviously, not all contemporary Southern writers share Percy’s pessimism about the bankruptcy of Southern soil. Many think that the Southern writer has an obligation to the legacy of Southern history. Berry, for instance, sees the debate over Southern regionalism as having both political and aesthetic repercussions, as regional protocols have typically been used in Southern literature to monumentalize a particular version of the place and its history. Berry notices that regional thinking promotes “exploitive” marketing strategies that put the “picturesque” and “old charm” qualities of the region in the service of producing a collectible version of the South (qtd. in Wilson 1997, 145). Whether writers use parody, the grotesque, or less refurbished literary conventions to counter this type of appropriation, the important writers of the contemporary South contribute at some level to the type of placebased thinking that overlooks the contemporary similarities among American places. One needs only to realize how near in chronological time Southern writers are to the “Southern Renaissance” of the 1920s and 1930s, to see why writers from the South want to be perceived as also being of the South. Unlike New England, whose “Brahmins” of the “American Renaissance” lost currency after the Civil War, the South is still enjoying literary dominance. Proud Southerners today assert that their ground is still rich in divisive, almost prurient, distinction. The history of the South has thus afforded the rest of the United States some measure of awareness of the virtues and limitations of multiculturalism. In fact, as Brinkmeyer notes, the

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SOUTHERN FELLOWSHIP The truth is that local affiliation is still very important to Southern writers. In fact, a “Fellowship of Southern Writers” was founded in 1987. The “fellowship” counts nearly every noteworthy contemporary writer of Southern persuasion as a member. With the anachronistic-sounding name “fellowship,” the FSW appears to be as conspicuously interested in imposing its trusteeship on Southern literature as was the Atlantic group. The fellowship meets biennially to award numerous prizes to fiction writers who continue to contribute works to the canon of Southern fiction. The fellowship’s charter members include such pivotal arbiters of Southern literature as A.R.Ammons, Cleanth Brooks, James Dickey, Ralph Ellison, Shelby Foote, John Hope Franklin, Ernest Gaines, Walker Percy, Reynolds Price, Mary Lee Settle, Elizabeth Spencer, William Styron, Peter Taylor, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and C.Vann Woodward. Elected members include contemporary dynamos such as Wendell Berry, Lee Smith, Richard Bausch, William Hoffman, Allan Gurganus, Josephine Humphreys, Bobbie Ann Mason, Kaye Gibbons, Barry Hannah, and Larry Brown. Through their allegiances, these writers advance the argument that where one hails from is an indispensable consideration when evaluating the production of fiction.

culturally conservative Agrarians are important forerunners of recent literary concerns. In addition to being the first to articulate the New Criticism (with John Crowe Ransom’s 1938 The World’s Body), the Agrarians enumerated the virtues of non-acquisitive cultures in ways that anticipate contemporary non-Southern environmentalist writers, such as Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, John McPhee, and Terry Tempest Williams. Despite their goal of producing a Southern monocultural South, Agrarian documents like Ransom’s “Aesthetics of Regionalism” (1934) were the first to interrogate the ideological and literary implications of regional form, exemplifying the warrant that region is socially, rather than geographically, constructed. This Agrarian sociology still influences alternative taxonomies of recent Southern literature. For instance, Matthew Guinn groups contemporary Southern writers such as Dorothy Allison, Larry Brown, and Harry Crews together as “mythoclasts,” or blue-collar writers who reject the dominant cultural legacies of Agrarianism, namely nostalgia for capital “S” Southern aristocracy. These writers delineate the virtues of “poor white trash,” an endeavor that has arguably been on the Southern intellectual agenda since W.J. Cash’s popular and controversial history of the South, The Mind of the South (1941). Contemporary Southern women writers, specifically Bobbie Ann Mason, articulate what Patricia Yeager calls the “crises of whiteness” that have resulted from the success of multicultural models of contemporary fiction (Yeager 2000, 11). Contexts and Issues. Literary critic Mark McGurl claims that these supposed crises of whiteness are not limited to Southern women writers, but are a concern also of male writers. McGurl lists a slate of successful contemporary male writers— including Wallace Stegner, William Kennedy, and Cormac McCarthy—who “have staged their careers . . . in the continuing tradition of literary regionalism” (McGurl 2005, 119). Using regional writing as a way of breaking into the literary market is not a new tactic. As Brodhead reminds us, all major late-nineteenth century American writers, with the exception of Henry James and Howells, succeeded

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through regional form (viz., Cable, Jewett, Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Abraham Cahan). According to Brodhead, “authors in this [regional] mode typically had their first efforts published” (Brodhead 1994, 165). Wallace Stegner has not only sustained a long career via regional protocols, he has also produced a generation of American writers who capitalize on their regional inflections. Having founded and run the Stanford University writing workshop, Stegner shaped the careers of many influential writers, the list of which includes Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Ken Kesey, and Larry McMurtry. Teaching a genre that, according to McGurl, “has always been cultural pluralist . . . a form of appreciation of diversity,” Stegner helped young white, male writers attain an “alignment by analogy” to the market requisite of diversity (McGurl 2005, 119). Unlike McGurl, who encourages readers to view regional fiction as a cheap trick used to break into the literary market, Sally Robinson categorizes such writerly positions as gestures toward “marked” embodiment. This is the writer’s earnest impulse to register his distinct presence in an era of “identity politics,” which Robinson and colleague Peggy Phelan call “visibility politics” (Robinson 2000, 2). No longer the “historical malady of underrepresented populations” alone, invisibility has become a legitimate problem for white men at the end of the twentieth century (2). As Susan Faludi explains, the 1990s male resembles the 1950s housewife archetype in that “the empty compensations of the ‘feminine mystique’ are transforming into the empty compensations of the masculine mystique” (Faludi 2000, 40). Faludi’s historical explanation for this phenomenon is basically that in the late 1960s, in the wake of the civil rights movement and with the rise of women’s and homosexual liberation, white men began to take the role of victim of historical processes. Robinson agrees with Faludi, adding that from the late sixties to the present, dominant masculinity appears to have suffered one crisis after another, from the urgent complaints of the “silent majority” following the 1968 presidential election, to the men’s liberationists call for rethinking masculinity in the wake of the women’s movement in the 1970s, to the battles over the cultural authority of “dead white males” in academia, to the rise of a new men’s movement in the late 1980s. (Robinson 2000, 5)

McGurl wants to categorize male-authored regional fiction as the most recent “men’s movement.” Indeed, even Robinson explains each men’s movement in literary terms, noticing how all assertions of white masculinity employ a “language of crisis, . . . vocabulary of pain and urgency to dwell on, manage or heal the threats to a normativity continuously under siege” (5). Through this process of reacting to the changing tide, white men have become “marked men.” In fact, white men are becoming so specialized a group, Robinson claims, that the “enduring image of the disenfranchised white man has become a symbol for the decline of the American way of life” (2). By acquiring “markings,” in this case place-based determinants, the masculine reclamation of regionalism, as both McGurl and Robinson conceive of it, perpetuates the prominence of identity politics by making the survival of difference a key objective of literary production. Branding the otherwise bland experience of white men with a retroactive ethnic mark is supposed to equalize the playing field among diverse authors, as it makes white masculinity into another kind of diversity. In this sense, male writers have appropriated what Mary Louise Pratt calls the “rhetorics of diversity and multiculturalism” that have emerged in contemporary

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America. The “import” of these rhetorics, Pratt warns, is “up for grabs across the ideological spectrum” (Pratt 1999, 617). Jonathan Franzen, a leading contemporary fiction writer and occasional arbiter of literary culture, has recently (begrudgingly) acknowledged this misuse of diversity. Regionalism, Franzen claims, “is still thriving” in both American literature and on American campuses (Franzen, 2003, 68). Indeed, some forms of academic fiction seem also to be forms of regional fiction, namely Jane Smiley’s novel about a fictional midwestern state university Moo (1995). Naysayers such as Franzen see regional fiction as a genre hungrily “feed[ing] on specificity” and finding “the manners of a particular region . . . fertile ground” for exploitive literary enterprises (68). Franzen complains that “it’s fashionable on college campuses nowadays to say that there is no America anymore, there are only Americas; that the only things a black lesbian New Yorker and a Southern Baptist Georgian have in common are the English language and the federal income tax” (68–69). In short, regionalism has facilitated an almost curricular pathway toward the emergence of a post-national imagination; or, to employ Franzen’s pessimism, regional fiction writers and identity politicians alike have become so skilled at delineating the differences among Americans that the United States is beginning to look like a small-scale version of an inassimilable world rather than like a unified national body. The question is whether or not these skills should be used to dismantle commonality, whether or not America’s national identity should be debated to the point of being irrevocably splintered. The regional writer ostensibly has no preference, save to represent the living ground local to her experience. Reception. The most telling barometer of both the reception and gender inflection of regional fiction at large is Oprah Winfrey’s agenda-setting book club. Since its inception in the fall of 1996, Oprah’s Book Club has frequently selected regional fiction by contemporary women authors. In a sense, the book club is the popular manifestation of the female-centered regional fiction championed in the scholarship of Judith Fetterley, Marjorie Pryse, and others. Oprah’s Book Club does some of the same cultural work as this scholarly endeavor. As Foote argues, the “feminist retrievals” of the 1970s and 1980s construct an “alternative literary tradition” that values community over alienation, nature over urban zones, and the values of “cooperation, communication, and a tradition of feminine knowing” (Foote 2001, 33). Oprah’s Book Club is a similar and more popularly effective engine of public opinion that values feminine community over masculine alienation. By elevating regional settings and identities as discrete from society at large, however, Oprah’s Book Club also threatens to re-inscribe counterproductive cultural divisions. From its first selection, Jacquelyn Mitchard’s The Deep End of the Ocean (1996), Oprah’s Book Club has favored regional inflections in its women authors. In The Deep End of the Ocean, a Wisconsin photographer and housewife loses her son in a Chicago hotel lobby and is reunited with him nine years later. The novel highlights a core binary of regional fiction, the tension between dangerous urban centers and the more innocuous “homeland” of middle-class suburbia. Through the selection of Jane Hamilton’s Book of Ruth (1989), also in the charter season, Oprah’s Book Club recovers and republishes the first novel of a writer whose biographical note highlights the author’s quaint regional credentials by stating that she “lives, works, and writes in an orchard farmhouse in Wisconsin.” Since then, the book club has popularized subsequent novels by Hamilton. Other female regional novels selected for the book club include: Kaye Gibbons’s A Virtuous Woman (1989), Marry McGarry Morris’s Songs in Ordinary Time (1995), Edwidge Danticat’s Breath,

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Eyes, Memory (1995), Billie Letts’s Where the Heart Is (1995), Joyce Carol Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys (1996), Gwyn Hyman Rubio’s Icy Sparks (1998), Melinda Haynes’s Mother of Pearl (1999), Tawni O’Dell’s Back Roads (2000), Christina Schwarz’s Drowning Ruth (2000), and Lalita Tademy’s Cane River (2002). In recent years, book-club selections have shifted away from feminine regionalism, favoring instead novels by traditionally canonical “literary” figures (such as Tolstoy, Faulkner, Steinbeck) and contemporary memoirs. This shift appears to be the result of criticism that Oprah might be devoting disproportionate attention to themes of feminine travails. Most apparent, however, is the fact that the shift followed a scandal involving Franzen’s being invited, then disinvited, to the list. Franzen’s discomfort, more specifically his claim that the book club includes “enough schmaltzy, one dimensional” novels to give any serious fiction writer pause, sparked a public debate about the virtues and limitations of popularizing “literary fiction.” It should have investigated the question of why Oprah found Franzen’s The Corrections (2001) a novel to shelve alongside feminine regionalism. Stylistically, Franzen differs much from the novelists named above; he is much less invested in realist narration or sentimental tones. On a thematic level, however, The Corrections resembles the very novels Franzen considers “schmaltzy.” Like the work of Mitchard, Hamilton, Letts, and others on Oprah’s list, Franzen’s novels question the heartland values and bourgeois complacencies of red-state America. His first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), dramatizes municipal corruption in St. Louis, representing a heartland whose households act as incubators against the multicultural revolution. Continuing this theme in The Corrections, Franzen delineates the political, cultural, and psychological decline of the Midwest. The difference between The Corrections and the regionally inflected late-twentieth century novels that precede him on Oprah’s list is that it does not approach the representation of place as what W.J. Keith calls “a welcome limitation of possibility” (Keith 1988, 10). Rather than uncover the “numinous landscape beneath a desacralized, irradiated, and overdeveloped one,” which Michael Kowalewski takes to be the goal of contemporary regional writers, Franzen acknowledges the transformations that globalized capital brings to the Midwest (Kowalewski 2003, 18). This acknowledgment of the effects of progress on regional landscapes might be the cultural work of twenty-first-century regional fiction. For more than a century, the genre has exploited its difference from the mainstream, entertaining audiences whom Foote describes as “preoccupied with national problems regarding the proper constitution of the citizen” (Foote 2001, 36). Regionalism, according to Foote, has helped those audiences “negotiate their fear of foreigners alongside a romantic longing for rural countrymen” (36). The recent re-appropriation of local knowledge by male writers, though it might be reducible to a marketing ploy, indicates that the regional fiction of tomorrow will be inclusive, not separated into gendered camps, with women regionalists protecting the quaintness and sanctity of place and men regionalists exploring the “territories.” Selected Authors. In fact, gender roles in regional fiction seem to have reversed. For instance, Bobbie Ann Mason exemplifies the exploitive tendencies of the Southwest humorist tradition. Her fiction, according to Fred Pfeil, “allows upscale readers to savor the narrative as a virtual transcription of likeable, down-home stupidity” (Pfeil 1990, 76). Mason’s very career mimics the economy of latenineteenth century regional writers. After leaving the academy in 1979 to become a full-time writer, Mason has published short stories about the “New South” in

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The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly. These stories, later collected in Shiloh and Other Stories (1982), feature a “white trash” culture (with strip malls, fastfood, and bad TV) that the reader is positioned to encounter with condescending amusement. Similarly reminiscent of traditionally masculine modes of regional fiction, is the work of Annie Proulx. In fact, Proulx’s career trajectory moves geographically in the direction of male-centered regionalism. Her early novels, Postcards (1992) and The Shipping News (1993), are set in the typically feminine rural New England. Next, her innovatively structured novel, Accordion Crimes (1996), defies locational fidelity by following a Sicilian accordion from the “Old World” to a diverse set of American regions, such as New Orleans, rural Iowa, Maine, and the Mexican border. Finally, Proulx’s most recent work has been two short story collections set in rural Wyoming—Close Range (1999) and Bad Dirt (2004). These collections evoke the spirit of Bret Harte to the extent that they feature “ne’er-do-well antiheroes unlikely to appear” in the promotional literature for the Wyoming region she documents (Kowalewski 2003, 11). Furthermore, these collections ignore the over-storied zones of Wyoming, such as Jackson Hole and Yellowstone, echoing Harte’s “pioneering” accounts of the seedy side of the frontier landscape while also highlighting the homoeroticism of the all-male frontier (Close Range includes “Brokeback Mountain,” the story that Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana adapted into an Academy Award winning screenplay). On the other side of both the country and the gender line, New England has recently become the favorite setting for small-town realists such as Ernest Hebert, Russell Banks, and Richard Russo. In Dogs of March (1979), Hebert produces the prototypical self-destructive New England everyman in the character of Howard Elman, after whom Banks models Wade Whitehouse, antihero of his novel Affliction (1989). Elman is a former foreman of a textile mill who loses his job when the mill is sold to a company from the New South. According to Kent Ryden, Elman is the realistic counterpart to the romanticized “Yankee”; he is “profane and given to drinking, a factory worker who deliberately refuses to farm the fields that he owns, an imperfect father and husband” (Ryden 2003, 209). He has no interest in the physical beauty championed by a previous generation of New England regionalists. Hebert implies that this lack of appreciation is an essential feature of postindustrial New England. This argument is evident in the novel’s culminating scene, wherein Elman’s ugly trailer home (a symbol of economic decline) obscures the view of the idyllic countryside for which the novel’s other main character, an idealistic midwesterner, had left his life in the Midwest. Similarly, Banks’s early works confront the allegorical resonance of blue-collar New England. His story collection, Trailerpark (1981) is a storehouse of America’s fears about its orphans. In the tradition of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, each story couples a culture in decline with the fears that such decline inspires in the general reader. For instance, the lead story introduces the park through the eyes of its lenient resident manager. Her passive acceptance of her tenants’ infractions is challenged when she learns that a tenant is breeding rodents. The guinea pig trailer becomes a metaphor for overpopulation, an image that corresponds with the fear of being outnumbered by undesirable others. As the early 1980s popular imagination is subdued by pathos-driven images of the large-scale poverty and overpopulation on remote continents, Banks’s small-scale parable reminds the reader of homegrown orphans. The eccentric guinea pig lady, her illogical allegiance to her

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rodents’ natural impulse to reproduce, brings global “epidemics” uncannily close to the reader. Banks extends this relationship between the shrinking world and the small town in his most recent novel, The Darling (2004). The narrator, a middle-aged former 1960s political radical who has made a life out of abandoning anything that takes on even the slightest resemblance of home, moves from rural New England to wartorn Monrovia to reunite with a chimpanzee sanctuary she had abandoned during the Liberian civil war. Banks’s international turn is not anti-regional, but a reinvention of regional storytelling that elevates the resemblance of socially disparaged regions throughout the world. The resemblance between old New England and the Third World allows readers to assess the enduring value of local color. Ultimately, Banks, like his predecessor Wharton, champions the destruction of sentimental attachment to local color, but not without dramatizing the complexities of mobilizing the local knowledge of unfamiliar places, such as Monrovia, into fictional narratives that build a version of world citizenship from the common ground of local affiliation with postindustrial economic and cultural realities. Recent popular novels set in the Midwest also evoke postindustrial moods and landscapes. For example, Whitney Terrell’s The Huntsman (2001) and Michael Collins’s The Keepers of Truth (2001) cast a kind of third-world shade on the Midwest. In Terrell’s novel, a Kansas City judge claims that there is “no difference between [Kansas City] and the most obscure village on the Congo River that Conrad once went past. . . . And that, then, is the dream, isn’t it? . . . that we are not, in fact, so obscure as savages, eh? That we have some reason not to kill and rape?” (Terrell 2001, 341). In short, Terrell represents the “heartland” as a place to “go native,” a place so inconsequential as to be a no man’s land, or what Tom Lutz calls the “bloody crossroads” between cultures (Lutz 2004, 12). Collins is an Irish citizen who has himself recently gone native in the Midwest, writing a series of murder-plot novels set in the rustbelt detritus of Illinois. Collins strikes a similar logic of resemblance between the Midwest and the Third World. His narrator names the obvious opponent to Midwest economic stability—outsourcing— but for unobvious reasons. His midwestern men have the typical paradox of guilt and contempt regarding sweatshop labor, which simultaneously shuts down factories in the Midwest and makes consumer habits less prohibitive. But more importantly, Collins’s male characters “long for . . . immigrant exhaustion” (Collins 2001, 173). Therefore, where Terrell exploits the lawless remoteness of the Midwest, Collins romanticizes the botched camaraderie between its unemployed men and the “women and children . . . of places without names” (173). These narratives of postindustrial resemblance respond to Amitava Kumar’s call for fiction that does not simply showcase the diverse cultures that are now available as a result of economic globalization, but that “forge[s] new connections and elaborate[s] on . . . new coalitions and emergent subjectivities” (Kumar 2003, xxiii). Such narratives are setting the agenda for future generations of writers who think territorially. Bibliography Ammons, Elizabeth, and Valerie Rohy. “Introduction.” American Local Color Writing, 1880–1920. New York: Penguin, 1998, vii–xxx. Banks, Russell. Trailerpark. 1981. New York: Perennial, 1996. ———. The Darling. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.

REGIONAL FICTION Berry, Wendell. “The Regional Motive.” A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural. New York: Harcourt, 1972, 61–68. Brinkmeyer Jr., Robert H. Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. Brodhead, Richard. “Regionalism and the Upper Class.” In Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations. Wai Chee Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore, eds. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, 150–174. Campbell, Donna. Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885–1915. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997. Collins, Michael. The Keepers of Truth. New York: Scribner, 2001. Faludi, Susan. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. New York: Perennial, 2000. Fetterley, Judith, and Marjory Pryse. Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Foote, Stephanie. Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. Franzen, Jonathan. The Corrections. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2001. ———. How to Be Alone. 2002. New York: Picador, 2003. Garland, Hamlin. “Local Color in Art.” In Crumbling Idols: Twelve Essays on Art Dealing Chiefly with Literature, Painting, and the Drama. 1894. Jane Johnson, ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960, 49–55. Glazener, Nancy. Reading for Realism: The History of a U.S. Literary Institution, 1850–1910. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Gray, Richard. Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Guinn, Matthew. After Southern Modernism: Fiction of the Contemporary South. Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. Hamblen, Abigail Ann. “Edith Wharton in New England.” New England Quarterly 38.2 (1965): 239–244. Hoberek, Andrew. “Reconstructing Southern Literature.” Postmodern Culture. 11.1 (2000). http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.900/11.1.r_hoberek.txt. Joshi, S.T., and Peter Cannon, eds. More Annotated H.P. Lovecraft. New York: Dell Publications, 1999. Keith, W.J. Regions of the Imagination: The Development of British Rural Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. Kowalewski, Michael. “Contemporary Regionalism.” In A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America. Charles L. Crow, ed. Malden: Blackwell Press, 2003. Kreyling, Michael. Inventing Southern Literature. Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Kumar, Amitava. “Introduction.” World Bank Literature. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003, xvii–xxxiii. Lutz, Tom. Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. MacDonald, Dwight. Against the American Grain. 1962. New York: De Capo Press, 1983. McGurl, Mark. “The Program Era: Pluralisms of Postwar American Fiction.” Critical Inquiry 32 (2005): 102–129. Nagel, James. “Introduction: The Literary Context.” In The Portable American Realism Reader. James Nagel and Tom Quirk, eds. New York: Penguin, 1997, 20–32. “The New Regionalism.” In Outline of American Literature. Kathryn VanSpanckeren, ed. 1998. U.S. Department of State, Washington. 12 June 2005. http://usinfo.state.gov/products/ pubs/oal/lit8.htm#regionalism. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Introduction.” Oxford Book of American Short Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, 3–16. ———. The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.

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ROAD FICTION Percy, Walker. “Why I Live Where I Live.” Esquire 93 (April 1980): 35–36. Pfeil, Fred. Another Tale to Tell: Politics and Narrative in Postmodern Culture. New York: Verso, 1990. Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” In Ways of Reading. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petroksky, eds. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999, 605–619. Proulx, Annie. Close Range. New York: Scribner, 1999. Robinson, Sally. Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Ryden, Kent C. “New England Literature and Regional Identity.” In A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America. Charles L. Crow, ed. Malden: Blackwell Press, 2003, 195–213. Terrell, Whitney. The Huntsman. New York: Penguin, 2001. Wharton, Edith. Ethan Frome. 1911. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987. Wilson, Charles Reagan. “American Regionalism in the Postmodern World.” Amerikanstudien 42.2 (1997): 145–158. Yeager, Patricia. Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing 1930–1990. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

JASON ARTHUR

ROAD FICTION Definition. The literal road is a structured path that enables someone to transport or relocate people, vehicles, animals, and other objects to another area. The metaphorical road enables someone to travel down a structured way in order to find a personal path, for example, a place in society. The road is also a learning device, incorporating life experience as education, involving learning about different cultures and traditions of dissimilar people in other places. “Simply put, a road story shows that experiences away from home—perspectives gained on the road—reveal and even transform identity. The road dares us to dream of a better life” (Mills 2006, 22). History. Road fiction began as a genre in the late 1950s and through the 1960s, starting with the emergence of Jack Kerouac and his highly praised novel On the Road (1957). Upon publication, On the Road was heralded as an inspirational work and its creator as the voice of a new generation: the Beat generation. Taking their name from the pulsating style of jazz and scat, the Beat generation authors composed prose and poetry that had a distinctive rhythmic pattern. Beat also reflected the feelings of many people in postwar America: tired, poor, and abused. After World War II, travel became more accessible because of automobiles and newly constructed highways. Most automobile production had been suspended for the duration of the war, which had left many people without an affordable means of transportation. With a new sense of mobility, the Beats were able to use this automotive freedom as a source of rebellion—a way to reject the traditional life of a house, steady job, and family that was labeled the American Dream in 1930s and 1940s. “Through their pursuit of mysteries, Kerouac and Ginsberg supplanted the road stories they knew from childhood—the tragedies and screwball comedies of the Depression in which the road story signified hard times and chastity” (Mills 2006, 39). Starving for adventure and excitement, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and friends Lucien Carr and Neal Cassady set out on the road to put the university life behind them and to learn what real life could teach them. Literature of rebellion often includes thoughts on how to represent new ideas— the presentation of conscious changes in literary style, word use, sentence structure,

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and even point of view and narration. Jack Kerouac purposefully wrote to change the conservative way of thinking in postwar America. Kerouac was not alone in his new vision. His friend, and sometimes coauthor, Allen Ginsberg wrote poetry in accordance with the spontaneous beat developed by Kerouac. Criticized for being indecent and, more often, vulgar, the Beats wrote about America as they saw it in their travels and from the stories they would share with one another. “Beginning with Kerouac’s On the Road, however, the Beats initiated an ambitious remapping that went far beyond the theme of the road, becoming a radical experiment in the style and syntax of literary expression” (Mills 2006, 40). The Beats loved the vernacular of other cultures and their changing signifiers, meaning that their slang terms were constantly being reformatted over the years. They drew from the subculture in America; they loved the raw sound of jazz and admired the constant changing of slang words, which fueled their desire to have language become more feeling than meaning. “The writers’ experiments with language and with the mobility of meaning have distilled over time into set themes—bebop jazz, sexual freedom, male bonding and rivalry—or have been reduced to their bare predictable narrative patterns—escape, rebellion, renewal” (Mills 2006, 36). The Beat authors craved the slang language being spoken by minorities and the American youth. This new language was being used in music, in new literature and poems, and most importantly, on the street. Kerouac utilized the new “talk” in his first versions of On the Road and Visions of Cody. Kerouac wrote in On the Road, “What’s your road, man?—holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?” (1976, 251). Like the nonsensical lyrics of scat, Kerouac developed the new language of the Beatniks. The new generation now had a new language with which to rebel against conventional American society. Minority authors had a natural, yet not always appreciated, place in literature. LeRoi Jones found inspiration in Kerouac’s On the Road and decided to write his own version from a black man’s point of view. Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man was published in 1952, just five years before Kerouac’s On the Road. Both Ellison and Jones’s novels represent the African American man in postwar America. Woman writers, such as Joyce Glassman and Hettie Jones, also took it upon themselves to write from the female point of view, trying to break the stereotypical mold of women on the road and at home. The Beat generation also sought to expose the subculture or counterculture of American society by openly discussing the growing popularity of drug use. Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Ken Kesey, and Allen Ginsberg often cited drug use in their works, intending for their readers to help break the taboo of such controversial subjects. They also wanted to break the taboo concerning minorities, not just for women and African Americans, but also for Mexicans and Native Americans, for gays, lesbians, and transgenders, and for the working lower class of Middle America. “The Beats’ emulation of minority subcultures also helped to reassert some of the social changes begun by the war, including the demand by minority cultures for representation and the refusal of non-conformists to be labeled ‘deviant’” (Mills 2006, 38). These Caucasian men of middle-class families discovered a world that was secret and taboo; they encountered racial and sexual diversity, made friends with drug addicts and the homeless, immersed themselves in the working class, and deliberately learned what poverty was like. Irony, however, can be found in Kerouac’s narrative in On the Road, when his main character Sal Paradise,

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a representation of himself, becomes excited to leave his familiar and safe world behind for the excitement of the open road but at several times during his trip becomes frightened of his surroundings and retreats back to familiar ground. African American writer LeRoi Jones, on the other hand, “finds racial salvation on Louisiana’s segregated roads” (Mills 53). Kerouac tried to capture life from all angles but could not truthfully report on all of the aspects of a culture that society refused to let him experience; in other words, only a black man can tell you what it is like being a black man. Landmarks of Road Fiction. One of the aspects of the road, or Beat, authors is their interconnection with each other. They often gave credit to their friends for the style, content, and even titles of their own novels and poems. Without this connection, the Beat counterculture would not have held together for almost two decades, until Kerouac’s death in 1969, and continued through the Beats as individual artists into the 1970s through the 1990s. The connection between Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey, LeRoi Jones, Hettie Jones, and Joyce Johnson can be seen through each other’s stories and novels. All of these writers were somehow connected in life, inspiring one another and helping each other transform new literary ideas into a new literary genre. Jack Kerouac, On The Road (1957) and “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” (1958). Kerouac is regarded as the forefront master of road fiction, a movement he set out to create, though he felt uncomfortable with the title of creator. Like a traditional quest story, On the Road concludes in the same place it started, in New York City. Alter Ego to Kerouac is Salvatore (Sal) Paradise. Ironically, his last name is a paradox to what Sal actually finds on the road. He is interested in humanity and everything that has to do with humanity, including jazz, women, and his friends and other people who are connected to him. He has a fascination with his friends Dean Moriarty and Carlo Marx, the landscape, traveling, and writing about the landscape. Sal, like Kerouac, believes that the narrator is the writer as the creator; he is the man experiencing the experience. He tries his best to write everything that happens down in his notebooks, just as Kerouac himself had done during his own travels that inspired the writing of the novel. He tries to be a truthful witness, finding words for every sight he sees, including those around him, who are just as important to the story as the road itself. The character Dean Moriarty, inspired by good friend Neal Cassady, is the perfect travel companion: “With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road . . . Dean is the perfect guy for the road because he actually was born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926, in a jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles” (Kerouac 1976, 1). Dean, a free spirit, is imprisoned; “only a guy who’s spent five years in jail can go to such maniacal helpless extremes . . . Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live” (236). In marriage, too, Dean finds himself trapped. He is three times married, twice divorced. Prison is representative of any situation in which one feels trapped, whether school, family, or marriage. The restrictions of the war left many Americans needing freedom—personal freedom, educational freedom, freedom of movement, and the right to be themselves in an unconfined society. Kerouac believed that one of the ways to learn about the world, which affected his writing and his life in general, was to travel the roads of the American countryside, learning

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as he went, exploring the landscapes, and experiencing a life different from that to which he had been accustomed. Sal finds the difference between the education one can receive at school and the education that one can receive on the road, living the experience of what life has to offer him. He also finds disappointment on the road, not the glamour or glory of traveling. He befriends people of the lower classes and the subcultures, and he is intrigued by them and fears them and their society. Coming from a middle-class family, Sal feels uncomfortable being poor and often retreats back into the world to which he is accustomed, a place that is familiar and safe. Kerouac knew that the road did not have all of the answers. He discovered on his own travels that not every trip was going to be magical or perfect; “the road is life” (Mills 2006, 22). Kerouac experienced, firsthand, the “starving Sidewalks and sickbeds” (1976, 8). Kerouac set out to change the style of writing and to create a movement in terms of identity. He believed that writing should not be altered or edited once initially written. He thought writing was visceral and natural, which was similar to the position of the surrealist poets of France in the 1940s. They too believed in a constant, undisturbed line of thought called the stream of Consciousness. This concept entitled the writer to continuously write without stopping, creating a unified and blended narrative. Kerouac writes in his essay “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” (1958), “Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea words, blowing on subject of image” (72). This type of writing is considered a kind of literary liberation and challenges the writer to keep focused on the one thought instead of changing from one idea to another. Kerouac’s first draft of On the Road was written in three weeks in 1951 on a continuous scroll of Teletype paper. Publishers, however, would not publish his novel because of the controversial content and the unusual experimental writing style. Kerouac edited his manuscript several times before it was finally published six years later in 1957. An unedited version of On the Road was published as Visions of Cody which was part of one pre-publication version of On the Road, in 1972. Kerouac’s infatuation with jazz can be seen in the narrative of Visions of Cody more than in On the Road. The Mad Road, lonely, leading around the bend into the openings of space towards the horizon Wasatch snows promised is in the vision of the west, spine heights at the world’s end, coast of blue Pacific starry night—nobone half-banana moons sloping in the tangled night sky, the torments of great formations in the mist, the huddled invisible insect in the car racing onward, illuminate.—The raw cut, the drag, the butte, the star, the draw, the sunflower in the grass—orangeubuttered west lands of Arcadia, forlorn sands of the isolate earth, dewy exposures to infinity in black space, home of the rattlesnake and the gopher—the level of the world, low and flat. (1972, 391)

Kerouac used his spontaneous prose to try to capture the landscape in words, rather than focusing on story plot and character traits. He wanted to paint a picture of the landscape by using words. After publication of On the Road, Kerouac had the credibility of a successful writer and had the freedom to return to his spontaneous prose style and nonconformist attitude, as can be seen in moderation in The Dharma Bums (1958) and The Subterraneans (1958).

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Allen Ginsberg, “Howl” (1954) and Selected Poems: 1947–1995 (1996). Ginsberg met Jack Kerouac during his first year at Columbia University, along with other writers such as William S. Burroughs and John Clellon Holmes. Ginsberg and Kerouac became good friends, and Ginsberg even makes an appearance in Kerouac’s novel On the Road, as the character Carlo Marx. Being a poet, Ginsberg did not write about his road experiences in the same way as Kerouac, though he admired his spontaneous prose style and spent years applying it to his composition of poetry. He also drew inspiration from French surrealist poet André Breton. Ginsberg was also a part of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and often would perform his poetry on the road with them, “keeping apace with their psychedelic experiments” (Mills 2006, 92). Ginsberg became good friends with William S. Burroughs after their introduction by mutual friends Lucien Carr and David Kammerer. After Burroughs was arrested for conspiracy to deliver marijuana on the basis of letters found by police that he had written to Ginsberg, he moved his family to Mexico. Ginsberg still kept in touch with Burroughs and encouraged him to continue his writing even after the death of his common-law wife, Joan. Ginsberg traveled with Jack Kerouac to Tangiers, where Burroughs had gone in order to write. Burroughs compiled several manuscripts and sought his friends’ advice on how to edit them. Their trip resulted in Burroughs’s masterpiece Naked Lunch. Kerouac collaborated with Ginsberg on a film version of the poem “Pull My Daisy,” written by Ginsberg, Kerouac, and friend Neal Cassady. The poem had been written in the Beat style scat that Kerouac had employed in his earlier versions of On the Road. The film was also titled Pull My Daisy and was to be made into an art film version of On the Road. Photographer Robert Frank was chosen to direct the movie. “Frank’s cinematography in this film—grainy black and white imaged, titled horizons, atmospheric and spontaneous shots—helped lay the aesthetic groundwork for the New American film” (Mills 2006, 61). Ginsberg became famous for his insight into the American culture and his desire not only to change it but to make it more aware of its subcultures and emerging counterculture. He also attacks the mass-media images such as movies, radio, and television in his poem “I Am a Victim of Telephone” (Selected Poems 1996, 141). His dream about changing American society with the innocence of youth as a vehicle became his life passion, and most critics would say that he achieved it. One of his best-known poems is “Howl,” a biographical look at the Beat poets’ destructive lifestyle. The Beats’ fascination with the subculture of America brought them to less-than-desirable sections of strange cities where they learned the lives of drug addicts and prostitutes. Accused of being immoral and obscene, Ginsberg’s poem came under attack from the public, and it was therefore banned in many bookstores across the country. An obscenity trial boosted its popularity, and the Beat generation became famous as champions against censorship, fighting for First Amendment rights. Ginsberg also claimed he wanted to talk about taboo subjects in order to start a conversation, bringing the taboo to light in the public eye and therefore helping to bring about change. William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959). Burroughs started writing in 1945, resulting in a collaboration with Jack Kerouac about the murder of David Kammerer by a mutual friend, Lucien Carr, called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Allen Ginsberg encouraged Burroughs to continue writing, but it was not until the

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shooting death of his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer Adams, in Mexico in 1951— for which Burroughs was arrested and convicted absentia of homicide—that he claims he began to really write. In the introduction to Queer (1985), he wrote, “The death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me in to a life long struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out” (xxiii). Before Joan died, while in Mexico with Joan and their three children, he had written two novels: Queer and Junkie. (Queer would not published until 1985, and Junkie would be published in 1953.) Burroughs and Ginsberg’s collection The Yage Letters, which was published in 1963, includes correspondence letters between Burroughs and Ginsberg from when Burroughs was in South America. In 1953, because there was no restriction on the use or sale of drugs, Burroughs traveled to Morocco and stayed in a small apartment in Tangiers. Over the next four years, with the help of readily available drugs, he composed a first draft of what would become his most influential novel, Naked Lunch. In 1957 Ginsberg and Kerouac traveled to Tangiers to help Burroughs edit his manuscript and shape it into the version that was finally published in 1959. Parts of the Naked Lunch manuscript also resulted in three other novels: The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964). All have the same style of writing as Naked Lunch, meaning that while composing the manuscripts, Burroughs used creative techniques such as a nonlinear style, cutting sentences apart and splicing them with other phrases to create an altered sense of reality like the real reality he experienced during his drug-induced writing sessions: “fumbling through faded tape at the pick up frontier, a languid grey area of hiatus miasmic yawns and gaping goof holes” (1959, 63). Burroughs would confuse readers further by editing the pre-published proofs and sending them to the publisher, ironically, in no particular order, resulting in the final unintentional chapter splicing that can be found in the final publication of the novel. Like Kerouac, Ginsberg, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson, Burroughs enjoyed the ambiguity of his writings, most often created by accident, but his work is still considered as natural writing. The creativity of the nonlinear form was a direct representation of Burroughs and how he lived his life. “The Beats flocked to subcultures that manipulated the precarious nature of language to create new and unexpected meanings” (Mills 2006, 37). Also like Ginsberg, Burroughs’s masterpiece went on trial for obscenity soon after its publication. California was the first state to accuse the novel of being obscene, but in 1965 all charges were dropped. In 1966, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts declared that it was not obscene and considered the novel an important contribution to American literature. Several excerpts from the Boston trial are included in the 1991 edition of Naked Lunch, published by Grove Press. The freeing of the artist in literary presentation is as much a precondition of the desirable creating of adequate opinion on public matters as is the freeing of social inquiry. Artists have always been the real purveyors of news, for it is not the outward happening in itself is news, but the kindling by it of emotion, perception, and appreciation. (xxxiv)

Allen Ginsberg was one of many people to testify for the novel, having experienced the same accusation in 1956 for his poem “Howl.” Burroughs remained friends with Ginsberg throughout his life, supporting him especially during the late 1970s when Burroughs’s son William S. Burroughs Jr.

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(Billy) became ill from liver cirrhosis. In 1974 Ginsberg found Burroughs a job teaching creative writing at the City College of New York. Burroughs lasted a semester, claiming that he was uninspired by his students “The teaching gig was a lesson in never again. You were giving out all this energy and nothing was coming back” (Morgan 1988, 477). Burroughs became a cult figure in American popular culture in the 1980s and 1990s. He had cameos in many films, notably a small role as a junkie priest in Gus Van Sant’s film Drugstore Cowboy (1989). In 1997 he made appearances in the video for U2’s song “Last Night on Earth.” He also contributed a spoken word performance on a track by Nirvana called “The Priest They Called Him.” Burroughs recorded the song “Just One Fix” with the 1990s alternative band Ministry and made an appearance in the video version of the song. He also made an appearance on the television show Saturday Night Live in 1981 (Internet Movie Database). Context and Issues. Since the 1960s, other authors have written about the road and thematically the experiences of the traveler, the adventure and the culture that they encounter, and the culture that they create. Following are some of those books: Erika Lopez’s Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Thing (1997), Joyce Johnson’s Come and Join the Dance (1961), LeRoi Jones’s The System of Dante’s Hell (1965), Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), Vladimir Nabokov’s The Annotated Lolita (1970), Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (1974), Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), Tom Robbins’s Another Roadside Attraction (1971) and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976), Mona Simpson’s Anywhere But Here (1986), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Don DeLillo’s America (1971), Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees (1988) and Pigs in Heaven (1993), Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country (1985), Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), and Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel Lost at Sea (2005). Music and film have also drawn upon the road experience. Bands of the 1960s included the Grateful Dead and Jim Morrison and The Doors, and musicians of the 1970s included Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seager. Road movies have included Easy Rider (1969), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), Mad Max (1979), Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1982), Thelma and Louise (1991), My Own Private Idaho (1991), Dumb and Dumber (1994), Road Trip (2000), and Sideways (2004), and there have been television shows such as Route 66 in the 1960s and the commodification of the road in the reality show Road Rules in the 1990s. Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005). Thompson is best known for his gonzo style of journalism. Gonzo is a term he invented to describe this free-flowing, naturalistic writing style, similar to that of Kerouac’s spontaneous prose: “one of the basic tenets of gonzo: no revision. Gonzo was to be first-draft, written-at-the-moment . . . a genuinely spontaneous feel” (McKeen 1991, 49). Thompson started his style when deadlines began to expire; instead of sending his editors polished and reworked articles, he would send them his notes, often written by hand from his point of view as representative of the finished article. The style became widely popular. Thompson had always believed that writing should be natural and spontaneous, putting the author himself into the middle of the action. He wrote many of his articles and novels in first person, using his own experiences and encounters as his storylines.

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His first full-length published book, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (1967), introduced Thompson as a risk-taker. Like many of the road authors, Thompson became immersed with the subculture of America. The one thing that made his writing different, however, was that Thompson felt that the deeper one submerges oneself into the culture, the better one can write about it, as he demonstrates with his nonfiction piece Hell’s Angels, based on his travels with the infamous biker gang in late 1965. Because the group was known to dislike outsiders, Thompson presented his assignment for The Nation, open and honestly, to the thenleader of the gang, Ralph “Sonny” Barger, with the help of Birney Jarvis, a former Hell’s Angels member and police-beat reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. Thompson built a reputation with the gang, ultimately earning their trust. Thompson shared the life of a Hell’s Angel for over a year, but then several of the members with whom Thompson was not familiar, who suspected him of profiting from his writings about the gang, demanded a part of Thompson’s compensation. Thompson tried to explain to them that although he would be paid for the articles, it was not more than his regular pay. Unconvinced, they gave Thompson a “stomping,” as they termed it, meaning that the bikers gave Thompson a severe and brutal beating. His involvement with the gang dwindled, but in letters to friends later in his life, Thompson always held Ralph “Sonny” Barger in high regard and felt no ill will toward him, despite the incident involving his gang members. Much of American society feared the Hell’s Angels because of their disregard for others. Their attitude toward outsiders, the law, and society in general earned them the reputation of being a part of a degenerate society. The outlaw gang gained a quick reputation when they were hired to act as security for a concert for the Rolling Stones in California, which ended in the beating death of one of the spectators by several of the bikers-turned-guards. The opening page of Hell’s Angels presents the reader with Thompson’s witnessed description of the elusive gang: The Menace is loose again, the Hell’s Angels, the hundred-carat headline, running fast and loud on the early morning freeway, low in the saddle, nobody smiles, jamming crazy through traffic and ninety miles an hour down the center stripe, missing by inches . . . tense for the action, long hair in the wind, beards and bandanas flapping, earrings, armpits, chain whips, swastikas and stripped-down Harleys flashing chrome as traffic on 101 moves over, nervous, to let the formation pass like a burst of dirty thunder. (1996, 3).

Eliot Fremont-Smith (1967), a book reviewer for the New York Times, called Hell’s Angels an “angry, knowledgeable, fascinating and excitedly written book” that details the gang “not so much as dropouts from society but as total misfits, or unfits—emotionally, intellectually and educationally unfit to achieve the rewards, such as they are, that the contemporary social order offers.” These “misfits,” such as they were regarded by American culture as a whole, were a part of the subculture that only being on the road could uncover. They existed because of the road, the inspiration of mobility on the road, rebelling against the social norm and doing so in an extreme, but effective manner. Thompson’s best-known novel, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), originated from a road trip he took with Oscar Zeta Acosta, a popular Mexican American attorney and activist for human rights in Los Angeles. Thompson and Acosta traveled to Las Vegas using Thompson’s assignment for Sports Illustrated as

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a reason. Throughout the novel, Acosta is referred to as “my attorney,” whereas Thompson appears as his alter ego, Raoul Duke. “‘I want you to know that we’re on our way to Las Vegas to find the American Dream.’ I smiled. ‘That’s why we rented this car. It was the only way to do it. Can you grasp that?’” (Thompson 1996, 6). Their search for “the American Dream” becomes futile as their penchant for drugs deters them from their path. “The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab” (4). The book, considered a cult classic, became even more popular after the release of the film version in 1998, starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro. Thompson was always looking for the American dream in his writings, but somehow it always eluded him in his writings and his personal life. The American dream that Thompson was looking for did not exist. Thompson died in 2005 from a selfinflicted gunshot wound to the head in his home in Colorado. Tom Wolfe (1931–). His journalistic-style novel The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test detailed the adventures of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters in the late 1960s. Wolfe’s novel became an anthem for the emerging hippie culture of Southern California, with its promotion of drug use, music, and rebellion against conventional American society and the ensuing Vietnam War. Wolfe, like Kerouac, experimented with new literary techniques such as free association (spontaneous prose), repetition, and overuse of punctuation in order to express the drug-induced hysteria of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, accounted in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. This style of writing, Wolfe called “New Journalism.” “[New Journalism] has revolutionized several genres of writing. Thanks to Wolfe, not Kesey, strangers understand that to be ‘on the bus’ means to have awareness” (Mills 2006, 88–89). Along with E.W. Johnson, Wolfe edited an anthology of journalism titled The New Journalism. Unlike Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo journalism, The New Journalism claims that the reader will get a better understanding of the narrative if the text is written in third person but recounted from firsthand author experience. What really characterizes the New Journalism, at least as it is represented in this book, is first, a certain elusiveness on the part of the writer. The more he puts himself forward, hopping about inside his own story, nattily dressed, bearded, drunk, eccentric, acting up, the less we seem to know about where he stands, because he has made it his job to hide his opinions, or to hint at them only indirectly, or perhaps even to have none. (Wood 1973)

Wolfe itemized the happenings aboard Kesey’s “Furthur” bus, keeping detailed accounts of the stories developed by the larger-than-life characters. Ken Kesey (1935–2001). Kesey is best known for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962). The novel was an instant success. The film version was released in 1975 and won five Academy Awards. To coincide with the counterculture of the late 1960s, Kesey hosted a series of parties called “Acid Tests” that included psychedelic themes such as the music of the Grateful Dead, visits from members of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang, black lights and florescent paint, and hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD. The 1960s icon Timothy Leary, who popularized the term psychedelic, was among the guests at Kesey’s parties. Out of these parties came the group Kesey put together known as the Merry Pranksters, who traveled across the county in a repainted school bus named Furthur. These journeys are

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described in detail in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), utilizing Kerouac’s spontaneous prose method. Other members of the Merry Pranksters included Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and Timothy Leary. The Merry Pranksters are also mentioned briefly in Hunter S. Thompson’s book Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (1967). Kesey replaced Kerouac as the voice of the new generation. On the Road was . . . stance-changing. We all tried to imitate it. Yet, even then, no one considered it the work of a Truly Great Writer. I recall my initial interpretation of the phenomenon, that, yeah, it was a pretty groovy book, but not because this guy Ker-oh-wak was such hot potatoes; that what it was actually was one of those little serendipitous accidents of fate, that’s all. (Kesey 1983, 60)

After the release of his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, in 1964, Kesey decided to stop writing and focus on the film that he was making about his friends: The Merry Pranksters Search for the Kool Place. “For Kesey and his collaborators, the road story needed retelling, not because the road had lost its meaning but because the road novel had. The Pranksters wanted to enlighten others, not only through LSD and their ‘acid tests’ but also through America’s primary mechanism of altered consciousness—the movies” (Mills 2006, 93). Kesey believed that his movie would be the ultimate road trip, looking for “something wilder and weirder out on the road” (Wolfe 1981, 90), but Kesey failed to finish it. The unfinished acid road trip movie, however, was upstaged by the failure of another acid road trip movie that was released: Magical Mystery Tour, produced by the Beatles in 1967. Kesey continued to write essays, short stories, and plays throughout his life. He and the Merry Pranksters also made appearances well into the 1990s, especially at Phish concerts, a band that is said to resemble the Grateful Dead. Kesey died on November 10, 2001, at his home in Pleasant Hill, Oregon. LeRoi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka) (1934–). The Beat icons Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were Jones’s early influences, especially with their love for jazz in common. Jones’s wife, Hettie Cohen, became a successful Beat author with her memoir about her life with Jones titled How I Became Hettie Jones (1996). His decision to marry a white woman shocked some of the literary community, but it was the first step in Jones’s rebellion against the racism raging in the country at the time. The publication of his novel The System of Dante’s Hell, in 1965, propelled him to Beat fame. Mostly inspired by Kerouac’s novel On the Road, Jones decided to write his own road novel from an African American point of view. Jones was raised in a middleclass family; however, he was also raised in the middle of America’s turmoil with racism. Selby’s hoodlums, Rechy’s homosexuals, Burroughs’ addicts, Kerouac’s mobile young voyeurs, my own Negroes, are literally not included in the mainstream of American life . . . They are Americans no character in a John Updike novel would be happy to meet, but they nonetheless Americans, formed out of the conspicuously tragic evolution of modern American life. (Jones 1963, xiv)

Jones dedicated much of his writing to trying to break the stereotype of black writing; he wrote from his perspective but kept it culturally neutral, not to hide the

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fact that he was African American, but to blend into literature the black writer’s point of view, without making it racially biased. “His belief at the time [was] that a writer’s creative individuality—the writer’s ‘voice’—becomes his only voice” (Mills 2006, 52). Jones admired Kerouac’s use of style and language. He felt that Kerouac was able to capture creativity in his writing voice with the use of his spontaneous prose. Similar to Kerouac’s character Sal in On the Road, Jones’s character Roi, in The System of Dante’s Hell, sets off on the road to discover the real America and to shun the society in which he was raised. Unlike Sal, Roi does not feel displaced in the African American communities. Whereas Sal feels “scared” (Kerouac 1976, 157), Roi rediscovers his lost past and comes to terms with his ethnicity. “If we can bring back on ourselves, the absolute pain our people must have felt when they came onto this shore, we are more ourselves again, and can begin to put history back on our menu” (Jones 1965, 153). Like his character and alter ego Roi, Jones left his wife Hettie to return to the black community. “Hettie, ‘the white wife,’ was a liability for a young Afro-American male who felt ethnically illegitimate and who wanted now to be black, which tragically for Jones meant being seen as black by both blacks and whites . . . [He became] distanced from his bohemian life and closer to a ‘deeper black’ identity” (Watts 2001, 141). Later in his life, Jones wrote many critical essays about jazz, blues, and other black-influenced music. He became a professor of African American studies in 1984. In 1989 he won an American Book Award and a Langston Hughes Award for his collection of works. He was named poet laureate of New Jersey in 2002 but was forced to relinquish the title because of the controversy surrounding his poem about 9/11, “Somebody Blew Up America,” in 2003. Women in Writing Road Fiction. Unlike many African American male writers, women authors were often overlooked in the 1950s and 1960s, overshadowed by their male counterparts and dismissed as not having original thoughts among the Beat generation authors. The male authors, such as Jack Kerouac, tried to give women a voice of their own in their works but failed to do so; instead they stereotyped women into roles of caretakers, prostitutes, and wives who were partly responsible for their husbands’ misery in marriage. Hélène Cixous states in her 1975 essay “Sorties” that women authors need to develop a separation from male writers, opposing themselves from their points of view. Janet Wolff wrote in her 1993 essay “On the Road Again: Metaphors of Travel in Cultural Criticism” that she believes women are following in the footsteps of their male counterparts, utilizing the same language in their own writings, causing the female authors to become marginalized. “Just as women accede to theory, [male] theorists take to the road . . . [and] the already-gendered language of mobility marginalizes women who want to participate in cultural criticism” (234). She feels that it is necessary for women to develop their own metaphors so that they can be recognized as women writers, instead of following in the same linguistic footsteps of male authors, such as Kerouac, who had popularized the “road” as a male-dominated domain in literature. Joyce Johnson wrote her own version of On the Road, titled Come and Join the Dance, in 1961. It was not until the end of the 1990s that she gained fame with the play version of her memoir Minor Characters, detailing her life as a woman writer in the 1960s and as Jack Kerouac’s girlfriend and representing every other female character that had become a supporting role in the novels written by the popular male authors of that time. As noted previously, Hettie Jones, wife of LeRoi Jones, also made a name for herself later in life with her memoir about her life with Jones

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and the racism they experienced being a mixed-race couple in the 1960s. Other female writers include Diana di Prima and Carolyn Cassady. Hélène Cixous expressed belief that “another thinking as yet not thinkable will transform the functioning of all society” (1988, 289). Erika Lopez explores new ways of thinking, living, and traveling, finding her own freedom and adventure in her novel Flaming Iguanas: An All Girl Road Novel Thing (1997), in which she not only explores the life of the woman on the road but also explores the lesbian perspective of life on the road. “When you’re on the road, you just let your head go. You start thinking about your life, and it’s just kind of inevitable. You also lighten up on yourself, because you’re not next to other people, so you don’t really have anyone to gauge yourself by. You feel quite normal and very much OK about your thinking and who you are . . . You’re just there, thinking” (qtd. in May 1997). Erika Lopez grew up on the road, on welfare and in the middle of the impoverished society Kerouac set out to find. Lopez was raised to speak her mind, and because her mother practiced Quakerism, Lopez was also raised to not be subservient to anyone, a lesson the women of the 1950s and 1960s did not have the luxury to practice. Joyce Johnson (nee Glassman) (1935–). Joyce Johnson claims that she was “determined . . . to write about sex frankly, unusual for a young women at the time” (qtd. in Tallmer 2003). Sexual freedom—women’s freedom—was another theme of road fiction. Johnson’s memoir Minor Characters won her a National Book Critics Circle Award. The memoir was also turned into a play, titled Door Wide Open, in 2003. Based on her life with Jack Kerouac and the rest of the Beat authors and poets, Minor Characters is first and foremost Joyce’s own story, showing us what it was like to be a young woman coming of age in the tumultuous and transitional fifties, as the youth of postwar America chafed against the constraints of a buttoned-up conservative society. (Knight 1998, 167)

Her novel Come and Join the Dance (1961) tells the story of a young woman, Susan, who yearns to be free of the confines of university life. She wants to become a rebel. Susan daydreams during her exams and excitedly waits for her time to leave her life of comfort and constraint and travel to Paris. She feels that once she is on her own, things will happen for her. Similar to other Beat authors and poets, Glassman believed that a university education is good, but life experience is better. Susan is given the voice of a strong woman, ready for the road and the experiences that come with it, but she stays true to herself, realizing that no man is able to give her what she cannot give to herself. “She remembered she had a train to catch, suitcases to pick up four blocks away, and a door to close for the last time. She was slipping away from Peter, just as he was slipping away from her. This was the end of something that had been completed” (171). She had no regrets about leaving him to pursue her travels in Paris. Female characters are often given a minor role in novels authored by men, with stereotypical personalities, but written from a woman’s perspective, Susan is given an independent personality, a radical change for female characters in the 1950s and 1960s. As Kerouac’s lover from 1957 to 1958, Glassman witnessed his shot to stardom after the publication of On the Road. The Beats became famous in American literature, but Glassman still struggled to have her voice heard over the many talented men who were finally getting recognized for their visions. Like Hettie Jones,

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Glassman found it difficult to conform to society’s preconceived notions of the role of the woman in 1950s and 1960s America. Some of Glassman’s fame came from her connections, rather than her talent as a writer. This made Glassman even more determined to make a name for herself based on her own merit. Hettie Jones (nee Cohen) (1934–). Hettie Jones had to overcome not only the fact that she was a white Jewish woman but also that she was married to a black man and was raising two daughters of mixed race during the 1960s. Being the wife of author and poet LeRoi Jones, Hettie had to fight to make a name for herself in a predominantly male-oriented literary world. “She discusses the manner in which her life as a woman and particularly as a bohemian wife and mother restricted her opportunities to edit, write, and otherwise engage her mind in ways available to her husband, LeRoi” (Watts 2001, 44). Brenda Knight wrote about Hettie in her collection Women of the Beat Generation (1998) as being a woman who, from childhood, knew she did not belong in conventional society, in the traditional role of a Jewish woman on Long Island during the 1950s. “Hettie Cohen made a choice to leave behind comfortable Long Island and the fifties’ ideal of a cookie-cutter marriage when she went to a women’s college in Virginia to study dramas. There she explored the creative arts, discovered jazz, and realized there was no turning back” (360). Thus, Hettie Jones entered into the nonconformist lifestyle of the Beat generation. Bibliography Baudrillard, Jean. America. Trans. Chris Turner. New York: Verso, 1988. Beauvoir, Simone de. America Day by Day. New York: Grove, 1953. Belasco, Warren. America on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910–1945. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979. Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1972. Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch. New York: Grove Press, 1991. Originally published 1959. ———. Queer. New York: Penguin, 1985. Cain, Chelsea. Dharma Girl: A Road Trip across the American Generations. Seattle, WA: Seal, 1996. Cervantes, Miguel Saavedra de. The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. Ed. Joseph R. Jones and Kenneth Douglas. New York: Norton, 1981. Charters, Ann, ed. The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America, Part 2. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Volume 16. Detroit, MI: Gale Publishing Group, 1983. ———, ed. The Portable Beat Reader. New York: Penguin, 1992. ———, ed. The Portable Jack Kerouac. New York: Viking, 1995. Cixous, Hélène. “Sorties.” In Modern Criticism and Theory. David Lodge, ed. New York: Longman, 1988, 287–293. Originally published 1975. Coupland, Douglas. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone, 1995. Originally published 1967. DeLillo, Don. America. New York: Penguin, 1971. Dettelbach, Cynthia Golomb. In the Driver’s Seat: The Automobile in American Literature and Popular Culture. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1976. Devitt, Amy J. Writing Genres. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage, 1990. Originally published 1947. Feldman, Paula R. “Joan Didion.” In American Novelists Since World War II. Jeffrey Helterman and Richard Layman, eds. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit, MI: Gale, 1978, 121–127. Fremont-Smith, Eliot. “Books of the Times; Motorcycle Misfits—Fiction and Fact.” New York Times 23 February 1967: 33.

ROAD FICTION Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and Other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2006. ———. Selected Poems: 1947–1995. New York: Harper, 1996. Helterman and Richard Layman. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Volume 2. Detroit, MI: Gale, 1978, 121–127. Holmes, John Clellon. “The Name of the Game.” In The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America, Part 2. Ann Charters, ed. 627–629. ———. “The Philosophy of the Beat Generation.” In The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America, Part 2. Ann Charters, ed. 631–636. DLB volume 16. Originally published 1958. ———. “This Is the Beat Generation.” In The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America, Part 2. Ann Charters, ed. 629–631. Originally published 1952. Hunt, Tim. Kerouac’s Crooked Road: The Development of a Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Internet Movie Database. “William S. Burroughs.” Retrieved June 6, 2007, from http:// imdb.com/name/nm0123221. Johnson, Joyce [Joyce Glassman]. Come and Join the Dance. New York: H. Wolff, 1961. ———. Minor Characters. New York: Penguin, 1999. Jones, LeRoi. The System of Dante’s Hell. New York: Grove, 1965. ———. The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America. New York: Corinth, 1963. Kael, Pauline. “Woman on the Road.” Rev. of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, dir. Martin Scorsese. New Yorker 13 January 1975: 74–78+. Kerouac, Jack. “Beatific: The Origins of the Beat Generation.” The Portable Jack Kerouac. Ann Charters, ed. 565–573. Originally published 1958. ———. “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.” Evergreen Review 2.5 (1958): 72–73. ———. On the Road. New York: Penguin, 1976. Originally published 1957. ———. “The Vanishing American Hobo.” Holiday (March 1960): 60–63. ———. Visions of Cody. New York: Penguin, 1972. Kesey, Ken. “Is There Any End to Kerouac Highway?” Esquire December 1983: 60–63. Knight, Brenda. Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution. Berkeley, CA: Conari, 1998. Lackey, Kris. Road Frames: The American Highway Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Least Heat Moon, William. Blue Highways: A Journey into America. New York: Fawcett, 1982. Lopez, Erika. Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Thing. New York: Simon, 1997. May, Sandra. “20 Questions: Interview with Erika Lopez.” City Paper.net 1997 July 17. Retrieved March 17, 2007, from http://www.citypaper.net/articles/071797/ article001.shtml. McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Knopf, 2006. McKeen, William. Hunter S. Thompson. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Mills, Katie. The Road Story and the Rebel: Moving Through Film, Fiction, and Television. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006. Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw. New York: Avon Books, 1988. Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: Plume, 1987. Originally published 1977. Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated Lolita. Ed. Alfred Appel Jr. New York: McGraw, 1970. Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. New York: Quill, 1979. Primeau, Ronald. Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway. Bowling Green, OH: BGSU Popular Press, 1996. Robbins, Tom. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976. Simpson, Mona. Anywhere But Here. New York: Vintage, 1986.

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ROMANCE NOVELS Tallmer, Jerry. “The Beat of New York in the Fifties.” The Villager. 2003. http://www. thevillager.com/villager_4/thebeatofnew.html. Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories. New York: Random House Modern Library, 1996. Originally published 1971. ———. Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. New York: Ballantine, 1996. Originally published 1967. Watts, Jerry Gafio. Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Wolfe, Tom. “The Chief and His Merry Pranksters Take a Trip with Electric Kool Aid.” World Journal Tribune: New York 29 January 1967:4–7. ———. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New York: Bantam, 1981. Originally published 1968. ———. The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. New York: Farrar, 1968. Wolff, Janet. “On the Road Again: Metaphors of Travel in Cultural Criticism.” Cultural Studies 7.2 (1993): 224–240. Wood, Michael. “The New Journalism.” New York Times 22 June 1973. Retrieved March 15, 2007, from http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/08/specials/wolfe-journalism.html.

ANNE BAHRINGER

ROMANCE NOVELS Definition. The term romance novel is used to categorize a type of fiction focused on stories of successful love. In academic discussions, the word romance may be used to characterize a story of a triumphant or tragic relationship, but in the retail book industry, it is specifically understood that a book marketed as a romance novel will conclude on a happy or hopeful note. Naturally, there are numerous novels classified in other genres (including erotic literature, historical fiction, and chick lit) in which romantic relationships play a prominent role in the plot. Whether a book is regarded specifically as a romance novel or as mainstream fiction depends in part on authorial intent and publisher specialty: the genre attracts legions of devoted readers because it promises reliable entertainment in the form of likable protagonists and accessible plots. Many readers become attached to specific authors, series, or imprints, while others become connoisseurs of a particular subgenre. In recent years, there has been an upswing in the promotion titles across multiple genres, such that publications such as Romantic Times regularly feature reviews of writers whose books are primarily marketed, shelved, and nominated for awards in other genres such as mystery novels, science fiction, and fantasy literature. These writers include Janet Evanovich (b. 1943), Lois McMaster Bujold (b. 1949), Elizabeth Bear (b. 1971), and Naomi Novik (b. 1973). Be they manuals for writers, promotional brochures aimed at library and bookstore patrons, or Web sites and blogs with reviews and forums for multiple types of participants, many guides to romantic fiction emphasize the diversity of the field by outlining its major subgenres. One primary form of distinction is temporal— that is, the grouping of novels into “historical,” “contemporary,” and “futuristic.” The Romance Writers of America (RWA), a professional network for both published and aspiring authors, currently lists the end of World War II (1945) as the dividing point between “historical” and “contemporary,” but Estrada and Gallagher (1999) set the cutoff year as 1899, “a time distant enough to be considered ‘historical’ by the masses” (16), whereas the “Browse by Time Period” feature on the Historical Romance Writers Web site includes listings for the Korean War (1950–1953) and the Vietnam War (1954–1975). There is general agreement,

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however, that the most popular setting for historicals is Regency-era Great Britain. While the future George IV’s reign as Prince Regent ran specifically from 1811 to 1820, narratives set in the decades immediately preceding or following that span of time may also be perceived as Regency style if their characterizations or plots originate from events such as the Napoleonic Wars (for instance, veterans of Waterloo reentering society, contending with profiteers, or awakening the interest of bereaved, would-be spinsters). A further distinction is often drawn between traditional Regency romances, which are often characterized as light comedies, and Regency-era historicals, which are generally viewed as longer and more sexualized in content (Beau Monde 2005). Another primary form of classification within the genre is that of format. There are two major formats: category romances, relatively short novels (approximately 50,000–70,000 words) that are packaged as part of a routinely issued series by their publishers (often 2–6 volumes per month), and single-issue or stand-alone titles (generally between 70,000 and 120,000 words), which are promoted similarly to general fiction titles (and indeed sometimes referred to as mainstream books by some romance industry professionals). It is important to note that “series” has two separate definitions in this context. In relation to category romances, the term refers to a group of books published under a specific publisher’s imprint. The books are written by different authors and are not directly related to each other except in overall theme and tone (for instance, books in Harlequin’s American Romance line are promoted as “fast-paced, heartwarming stories about the pursuit of love, marriage and family in America today,” while those in the Steeple Hill Love Inspired line depict “Christian characters facing the many challenges of life and love in today’s world,” and those for Kimanu TRU offer younger African American readers stories about “real-life situations they encounter without being preachy or naive” (eHarlequin.com). In relation to singleissue romances, the term “series” refers to a group of books created by a single author with shared characters (such as protagonists who belong to the same family) and a storyline that is extended from one book to the next. The stories of a particularly engaging clan (such as Nora Roberts’s MacGregors) may build into a saga that spans multiple volumes and generations. A common career trajectory among romance writers is to debut as a category writer and then progress to single-issue work as one gains experience and confidence. In both formats, the majority of authors see their work printed as massmarket paperbacks; hardcover publication is generally reserved for new volumes of especially popular storylines (as well as reissues or omnibus editions of those series’ older volumes). For example, Stephanie Laurens’s Bar Cynster series commenced with six stand-alone novels about a group of brothers and cousins; these were issued between 1998 and 2001, all as mass-market titles. As the series’ fan base solidified, the series expanded into additional stories about characters who had appeared in secondary roles in the earlier novels; three of these were also issued only in massmarket format (2001–2002), but all the others (more than a half dozen to date) have first appeared as hardcover volumes, the series’ devotees having proved themselves eager enough for each new installment to pay the additional expense (often listed at three times the mass-market price) rather than wait for the mass-market edition (in Laurens’s case, customarily issued 10 months after the hardcover). At the same time, Laurens’s Bastion Club storyline formally debuted in 2003 as a massmarket series and has remained in that format.

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The Bastion Club series by Laurens demonstrates another narrative strategy that established authors sometimes employ—that of “borrowing” characters or events from their other titles or series for cameos in their newer novels. Laurens’s Captain Jack’s Woman (1997), originally published as a true stand-alone story, is now listed on her Web site (stephanielaurens.com) as a prequel to the Bastion Club series, and characters from the Cynster clan sometimes show up in the ballrooms of Bastion Club narratives. When crafted properly, such scenes reward an author’s longtime fans with the pleasure of an in-joke without requiring newer readers to be familiar with books outside of the series. A third type of subgenre label signals the story’s style to would-be readers. Examples of such labels include classic, ethnic, inspirational, paranormal, romantic comedy, sensual, suspense, and time travel. Both the specific labels and their scope vary among publishers, reviewers, and writing instructors, but it is common practice to adopt or develop a system of such labels when discussing the genre as a whole. Coding books by subgenre enables prospective consumers to sift efficiently through the dozens (and sometimes hundreds) of blurbs in a typical review publication or marketing campaign, allowing them to ascertain and assess the titles most likely to match their tastes more quickly. Authors who specialize in one subgenre and then choose to write in a radically different style sometimes adopt separate names for each type of story in order to manage reader expectations. As Jayne Ann Krentz puts it, “This way readers always know which of my three worlds they will be entering when they pick up one of my books”; as a specialist in suspense novels, Krentz uses her married name for contemporary stories, the name Amanda Quick for historicals, and Jayne Castle for futuristic and paranormal tales (Krentz “Biography”). On the “Frequently Asked Questions” page of her Web site, Sabrina Jeffries cites similar reasons for writing as Deborah Martin and Deborah Nicholas. Authors also may elect to publish their novels under pseudonyms because of other marketing considerations (such as the fear of prolific output being equated with poor quality), contractual obligations (some names are restricted to specific publishers), or personal concerns (Gorlinsky); if an author’s name becomes a powerhouse brand, where readers habitually seek out that author’s work regardless of subgenre, multiple pseudonyms may become an open secret among booksellers and fans (Little and Hayden 2003, 376) and later formally publicized (292–93). Selected Authors. The most influential classic in the history of romance novels is Pride and Prejudice (1813) by Jane Austen (1775–1817). In addition to remaining popular in its own right (placing third in All About Romance’s “Top 100 Romances” poll in 2007 and consistently ranked among the top 25 titles in earlier incarnations of the list), it has inspired more than 60 sequels and adaptations in various media (www.pemberley.com). Austen is credited as the main literary model for Georgette Heyer (1902–1974), who in turn is considered the pioneer of Regency stories as a subgenre of historical romance (Regis 2003, 125–126). Allusions to Pride and Prejudice also permeate chick-lit bestseller Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) by Helen Fielding (b. 1958), and it has been dubbed “the original chick-lit masterpiece” (Swendson 2005). (Some writers view chick lit as a subgenre of romance, while others treat it as a distinctly separate niche.) Among nineteenth-century novels, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) also has demonstrated enduring appeal and influence (All About Romance 2007; Falk 1999, 217), as has her sister Emily Bronte’s classic Wuthering Heights (1847), with its

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iconic brooding hero, Heathcliff. Among twentieth-century authors, Barbara Cartland (1901–2000) and Kathleen E. Woodiwiss (1939–2007) were two of the romance genre’s giants. Cartland composed over 700 novels between the 1920s and her death; habitually dressed in pink and prone to voicing conservative opinions, she catered to the traditional perception of romance novels as chaste, ultra-feminine fare. Woodiwiss was far less prolific, producing just 15 novels across 35 years, but she is revered by many modern writers for revolutionizing the genre; when it first appeared in 1972, The Flame and the Flower electrified readers with the scope of its plot (significantly broader than category romances, which had dominated romance publishing up to that point), the feistiness of its heroine, and the explicit details incorporated into its love scenes. The success of Woodiwiss’s novels and other stand-alone titles such as Rosemary Rogers’s Sweet Savage Love (1974) and Bertrice Small’s The Kadin (1978) encouraged publishers to view long historical romances as commercially viable (Radway 1991, 33–34). By the advent of the twenty-first century, steamy novels had become very much the norm—enough to invite considerable criticism from both within and outside the field. For example, in one discussion of trends, author Dorothy Garlock (b. 1942) complained that classic storytelling was “being replaced by raunchy erotica published as romance,” a lament actively echoed and debated in All About Romance (AAR) forums between 1997 and 2000 (AAR; Authors on the Web 2003; Gracen 1999). When asked about changes in the genre since The Flame and the Flower, Woodiwiss suggested that explicit sex had become “overdone” (Wehr and Weiss 2000). At the same time, interest never wholly waned in milder novels. The Christian romances of Grace Livingston Hill (1865–1947), popular during her lifetime, were regularly reissued during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Janette Oke (b. 1935) has been lauded as the author whose Love Comes Softly series (1979–1989) proved the viability of Christian fiction to modern publishers. In 1999 AAR began “One Foot on the Floor,” a periodically updated recommendations list of romances featuring “kisses only” or “subtle sensuality” (www.likesbooks. com/onefoot.html). In 2007 the president of the RWA, Sherry Lewis, observed that both inspirational romance and erotic romance were “two of the hottest subgenres” in the field (Robbins 2007). Trends and Themes. Writing mavens frequently advise would-be novelists to eschew chasing trends, in part because regular romance readers tend to be very wellversed in their subgenres (and thus quick to detect and dismiss phonies) and in part because books created merely to capitalize on fads may fail to reach retail buyers before the market becomes saturated and interest fades. Moreover, because the perception of trends is often based on local, anecdotal observation rather than global statistical analysis, experts may disagree on whether a pattern is truly in effect: for example, interest in historical romances is commonly thought to have peaked during the 1990s, but some industry professionals contend that the audience for that subgenre never materially decreased. Rather, it may have become less prominent as the markets for other subgenres grew. Nonetheless, some analysts believe historicals fell out of fashion during the early 2000s, returning to favor in 2007 (MacGillivray 2008; Robbins 2007; St. Claire 2007). Other possible trends that have attracted notice in recent years include significant turnover among romance editors (resulting in younger staff and shifting perspectives), the popularity of strong, athletic heroines in other media (such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer),

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and the success of hero archetypes beyond the “alpha male” of stereotypical bodicerippers, such as in Vicki Lewis Thompson’s Nerd series (Wheless 2007; Vinyard 2004, 93–98). Some observers believe that the conventional boundaries between romance and other genres have become increasingly flexible, allowing for subgenres such as paranormal romances, romantic mysteries, and time-travel fantasies to flourish. Publishers have become more aware of the sophisticated and diverse tastes of presentday romance readers and have refined their submission and purchasing standards accordingly. For instance, the writing guidelines for the Harlequin Romance imprint stress that “stories must have a global outlook that is mindful of the different lifestyle choices of our readers worldwide” (eHarlequin.com). Another editorial department offers tips on what to avoid among its subgenre specifications—for example, writers of time-travel romances should “beware of philosophizing about the meaning of time, and how the past affects the present. No time machines, please” (Dorchester Publishing 2004). With Internet access becoming commonplace, both author- and fan-based Web sites and blogs have proliferated. In addition to serving as marketing tools, many sites host forums or encourage extended comment threads that permit authors and readers of romance novels to champion underappreciated texts, commiserate with each other on misconceptions about romance fans, debate appropriate responses to plagiarism scandals, kibbitz about experiences such as attending conventions or chapter meetings, and partake of other interactive opportunities. There is a wide range of tone among these sites, ranging from the demure Romance Reader (www.theromancereader.com) to the raucous and blunt Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books (www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com). In addition to online communities and local book clubs, romance readers also congregate at regional and national gatherings. These have included the yearly Booklovers extravaganza organized by Romantic Times since 1982 and Celebrate Romance! (also known as “CR”), an annual conference founded by romance fans in 1998. For writers, agents, and publishers, the RWA’s national and chapter-based conferences provide opportunities to network, attend workshops, and promote their manuscripts or books. Throughout the 1990s and most of the 2000s, the viability of electronic books (frequently referred to as “e-books”) was repeatedly explored by both entrepreneurial and established publishers. The format has not displaced print editions of books to any appreciable degree, but as the devices and interfaces for downloading and perusing e-texts became more affordable and user-friendly, the distribution of romance novels through Web-based vendors received more attention from reviewers and consumers, and the RWA established a special-interest chapter to support authors of electronic and small press titles. The e-book industry has been praised for making available romance novels deemed too non-commercial or risky for print publishers, particularly those by authors who push depictions of erotic adventures, homosexual or polysexual relationships, or paranormal phenomena beyond the perceived limits of conventional taste. Some authors have also earned royalties via the e-publication of older books that had lapsed out of print. Although romance novels have often been disparaged as “trashy” throwaway stories with short shelf lives, a number of titles in the genre have demonstrated substantial staying power, remaining in print and appearing on top 100 lists (AAR 2007) more than a decade after their first appearance in publishers’ catalogs.

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Modern classics include Lord of Scoundrels (1995) by Loretta Chase (b. 1949), Outlander (1991) by Diana Gabaldon (b. 1952), The Bride (1989) by Julie Garwood (b. 1946), MacKenzie’s Mountain (1989) by Linda Howard (b. 1950), Dreaming of You (1994) by Lisa Kleypas (b. 1964), and Paradise (1991) by Judith McNaught (b. 1950). Context, Issues, and Reception. The lack of respect accorded to romance fiction by both professional critics and the general public has long been a source of frustration to its fans. Although romance fiction now accounts for over 25 percent of all books sold each year (RWA 2008), its books are frequently condemned as formulaic, trite, and unrealistic and its authors accused of perpetrating fairy-tale myths or soft-core pornography. As with works of science fiction, fantasy, and mystery, the genre classification frequently applied to romance novels is simultaneously an asset and a liability: while the designation helps publicists, booksellers, and librarians identify and promote new titles to readers likely to enjoy them, it can also result in the “ghettoization” of such books, where their separation from mainstream literary fiction encourages academic and “serious” readers to dismiss them as irrelevant fluff. Women seen perusing romances in public still run the risk of being automatically judged as intellectually lightweight or unfulfilled in their relationships; in response to charges that the genre celebrates passive protagonists and patriarchal values, defenders of romantic fiction have repeatedly pointed out the strength, independence, and resourcefulness of its heroines (Allen 2007; Bly 2005; Michaels 2007, 6; Regis 2003, 9–16). Another criticism leveled at romance authors has been that they graft overly modern characterizations or concerns onto historical scenarios, rendering their stories inherently anachronistic; the degree to which works of fiction should be expected to conform to real-life history and culture (as well as the exact nature of said history and culture) is a perennial source of contention among romance readers. The expectations among readers regarding historical verisimilitude vary wildly, and a detail that strikes one reader as an insignificant error may cause another to abandon the story in disgust (and, in the opposite direction, a reader who expresses concern about an item she considers inaccurate may be viewed either as helpfully informative or as unnecessarily nitpicky, depending on the author in question). A recurring source of debate and tension within the field has been its treatment of non-Caucasian characters. As in the wider world, there has been much heat and little consensus over questions such as if and how an author’s description of a Native American or Middle Eastern hero may reflect or perpetuate racist stereotypes, where best to display African American romance novels (in romance? in African American literature? in general fiction?), why Asian American protagonists are rare, if political correctness and historical accuracy are mutually exclusive, if the casts of contemporary romance novels need to become more multicultural, and other concerns. Issues such as the romance industry’s perceived role in propagating ageist and heterosexist beliefs have also prompted discussion and analysis. That said, positive attention to romantic fiction also has increased in recent years, with libraries investing more thought and resources into building collections that offer their patrons the best of the genre (Bouricius 2000; Wyatt et al. 2008). In 2008 the American Library Association’s Reading List Council initiated its annual list of the Best Adult Genre Fiction, and it has become common for major public library systems to include romance recommendations on their Web sites (Atlanta-Fulton, Nashville, New York, and Seattle among those doing so).

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ROMANCE AWARDS The RWA bestows a number of awards each year, including ones that recognize booksellers, librarians, and other professionals whose support of the genre has been exceptional.The top awards for novels are the RITAs (named after the association’s first president, Rita Clay Estrada), which are currently awarded in 12 categories. Authors who win three or more RITAs in the same category are inducted into RWA’s Hall of Fame.The members of the Hall of Fame include Jo Beverley (b. 1947), Justine Dare, Jennifer Greene, Kathleen Korbel, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Francine Rivers (b. 1947), Nora Roberts, LaVyrle Spencer (b. 1944), Jodi Thomas, and Cheryl Zach (b. 1947).Winners of the RWA’s Lifetime Achievement Award have included Estrada, Howard, Krentz, Phillips, Roberts, and Woodiwiss, as well as Heather Graham, Robin Lee Hatcher, Maggie Osborne, and others. The most recent RITA award winners for the Best Traditional Romance category have been Claiming His Family by Barbara Hannay (2007); Princess of Convenience by Marion Lennox (2006); Christmas Eve Marriage by Jessica Hart (2005); Her Royal Baby by Marion Lennox (2004); The Christmas Basket by Debbie Macomber (2003); Quinn’s Complete Seduction by Sandra Steffen (2002); The Best Man & The Bridesmaid by Liz Fielding (2001); and Annie, Get Your Groom by Kristin Gabriel (2000).

Bibliography All About Romance. All About Romance: The Back Fence for Lovers of Romance Novels. http://www.likesbooks.com ———. “Top 100 Romances, November 2007.” 2007. http://www.likesbooks.com/top 1002007results.html Allen, Louise. “My Heroines Are Independent. This Is Not Patriarchal Propaganda.” Guardian Unlimited December 12, 2007. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/dec/12/comment.books Authors on the Web. “Romance Author Roundtable.” 2003. Retrieved January 2, 2008, from http://www.authorsontheweb.com/features/0302-romance/romance-q11.asp Beau Monde. “About Us.” 2005. Retrieved January 21, 2008, from http://thebeaumonde. com/about Bly, Mary. “A Fine Romance.” New York Times 12 February 2005. Bouricius, Ann. The Romance Readers’ Advisory: The Librarian’s Guide to Love in the Stacks. Chicago: American Library Association, 2000. Chase, Loretta. Lord of Scoundrels. New York: Avon, 1995. Dorchester Publishing. 2004. “Submission Guidelines.” Retrieved January 24, 2008, from http://www.dorchesterpub.com/Dorch/SubmissionGuidlines.cfm eHARLEQUIN.com. “Writing Guidelines.” Retrieved January 23, 2008. Estrada, Rita Clay, and Rita Gallagher. You Can Write a Romance. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer’s Digest, 1999. Falk, Kathryn. How to Write a Romance for the New Markets and Get It Published! Columbus, MS: Genesis, 1999. Gabaldon, Diana. Outlander. New York: Delacorte, 1991. Garwood, Julie. The Bride. New York: Pocket Books, 1989. Gorlinsky, Rachel. “Sensual Romance—What’s in a Name?” Retrieved January 23, 2008, from http://sensualromance.writerspace.com/WIAN_Aliases.html Gracen, Julia. “Too Darn Hot: Romance Fans Clash Over a New Breed of Explicit, Kinky Love Story.” Salon.com 5 October 1999. Historical Romance Writers. http://historicalromancewriters.com. Accessed January 20, 2008. Howard, Linda. MacKenzie’s Mountain. New York: Mira, 2000. “Jane Austen Novels and Adaptations.” 2008. http://www.pemberley.com/

ROMANCE NOVELS Jeffries, Sabrina. “About Sabrina—Frequently Asked Questions.” Retrieved January 24, 2008, from http://www.sabrinajeffries.com/faqs.php Kleypas, Lisa. Dreaming of You. New York: Avon, 1994. Krentz, Jayne Ann. Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1992. ———. “Biography.” Retrieved January 23, 2008, from http://jayneannkrentz.com/ biography.html Little, Denise, and Laura Hayden. The Official Nora Roberts Companion. New York: Berkley, 2003. MacGillivray, Deborah. “Historical Romances? The Phoenix of Romance Novels.” Romance Writers Report, January 2008. McNaught, Judith. Paradise. New York: Pocket Books, 1991. Michaels, Leigh. On Writing Romance: How to Craft a Novel That Sells. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer’s Digest, 2007. Nashville Public Library. 2006. “Books, Movies & Music: Romance.” Retrieved January 19, 2008, from http://www.library.nashville.org/bmm/bmm_books_romance.asp Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, With a New Introduction by the Author. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1991. Originally published 1984. Regis, Pamela. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2003. Robbins, Sarah. “Textually Promiscuous: Romance Readers Definitely Read Around.” Publishers Weekly 19 November 2007. Romance Writers of America. http://www.rwanational.org. Accessed January 26, 2008. Schoenberger, Chana R. “E-Bodice-Ripper.” Forbes 18 July 2007. St. Claire, Roxane. RWA Conference Blog 12 July 2007. http://www.rwanational. org/cs/rwa_annual_conference/rwa_conference_blog Swendson, Shanna. “The Original Chick-Lit Masterpiece.” In Flirting with Pride and Prejudice: Fresh Perspectives on the Original Chick-Lit Masterpiece. Jennifer Crusie with Glenn Yeffreth, eds. Dallas: BenBella, 2005, 63–69. Vinyard, Rebecca. The Romance Writer’s Handbook: How to Write Romantic Fiction & Get It Published. Waukesha, WI: Writer Books/Kalmbach, 2004. Wehr, Isolde, and Angela Weiss. “Interview with Kathleen E. Woodiwiss.” 2000. Retrieved January 23, 2008, from http://kwoodiwiss.forumwise.com/archive/o_t/t_39/ an_interview_with_kathleen.html Wheless, Karen. “CR2007 Write Up.” Celebrate Romance Conference Blog. http://www.crspring.com/cr2004-write-up Woodiwiss, Kathleen. The Flame and the Flower. New York: Avon, 1972. Wyatt, Neal, Georgine Olson, Kristin Ramsdell, Joyce Saricks, and Lynne Welch. “Core Collections in Genre Studies: Romance Fiction 101.” RUSQ—Reference & User Services Quarterly (January 2008). Available at http://www.rusq.org

Further Reading All About Romance: The Back Fence for Lovers of Romance Novels, http://www. likesbooks.com; Dear Author: Romance Book Reviews, Author Reviews, and Commentary, http://dearauthor.com; Regis, Pamela. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2003.

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S SCIENCE FICTION Definition. Despite science fiction’s familiarity and prominence in contemporary culture, no definition of it commands universal scholarly assent. Certain formal elements, however, do feature in most definitions. First, science fiction is marked by novelty—or what Suvin (1979, ix, 3) calls “the novum”—essentially a violation of, or break with, some aspect of historical experience. At the same time, it displays rationality, that is, a degree of deference to the worldview and the established theoretical paradigms of modern science. Finally, it contains realism, in the sense of literalness and verisimilitude: the events depicted are to be understood as actually happening, even if they have a further, metaphorical level of meaning. Hence, science fiction’s presentation of novel phenomena such as innovations in technology is constrained to some extent by its characteristic rationality and realism. Many works read and discussed as science fiction fit somewhat uncomfortably in a narrative genre that is characteristically focused on technological innovations or their social impact. These works include (1) alternate (or more correctly, alternative) history stories—such as Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), which describes a world where the Axis powers won World War II; (2) stories that describe contact with alien civilizations, even if set in the present and not involving any

SCI-FI CHARACTERISTICS Science fiction is a genre or mode of narrative characterized by novelty, rationality, and realism. It typically depicts future developments in social organization, science, or technology, and its main thematic focus is on the effects of technological change, whether on individuals or societies. However, this is a somewhat idealized description. Science fiction is extremely varied, and it has been shaped by historical contingencies and commercial realities that have not favored conformity to any abstract ideal.

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technological innovations by human beings; (3) stories that describe certain kinds of natural disasters, such as asteroid impacts; (4) postholocaust narratives about the aftermath of a global war; and (5) prehistoric fiction, which speculates about humanity’s distant past, as in Jean M. Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980). Nonetheless, these kinds of narrative do combine novelty, rationality, and realism. Their composition and intelligibility depend, moreover, on modern scientific knowledge or a general sense of human societies’ historical contingency. For example, nuclear holocaust stories would be impossible but for the scientific advances that led to the development of nuclear weapons. Stories about asteroid impacts, alien contact, or mankind’s distant past were not readily imaginable until science began to describe the vastness of space and depth of time, and to theorize systematically about human origins. Such stories are made possible by a modern, scientific image of the world and of humanity’s limited place within it. A more troubling set of issues arises when science fiction is compared to the modern fantasy genre. Fantasy is notable for its depiction of gods, demons, and other supernatural beings; rationally inexplicable events; or the effective operation of magic in some form. Its plots and character types tend to draw on those found in myth, legend, fairy tale, and romance. Yet, though initially seemingly paradoxical, science fiction and fantasy share an extensively overlapping audience and often exert a similar appeal. To resolve the paradox, we must acknowledge that the contrast is not absolute, that there are certain similarities, as well as differences, between these genres. Importantly, the work of modern fantasy writers, such as J.R.R. Tolkien or David Eddings, much resembles science fiction in its detailed portrayal of imaginary societies, and sometimes of entire worlds. Moreover, fantasy narratives can display a kind of rationality: the operation of magical forces and methods may be internally consistent within the narrative, not unlike the body of self-consistent natural laws postulated by science. There is a sense that problems are being solved within a set of “rules.” Conversely, science fiction’s deference to real science can be quite arbitrary, and the fictional science it describes can appear magical. As a result, much of what is marketed as science fiction could be understood as a kind of fantasy with technological trappings. Science fiction and modern fantasy are not simply equivalent, and science fiction is not merely a variety of fantasy. However, where the emphasis is on extraordinary adventures in exotic societies, magic and superscience are approximately equivalent. Upon reflection, then, it is understandable that many narratives blend science fiction and fantasy elements, that adventure-oriented science fiction and fantasy are particularly likely to blur into each other, and that the two genres have overlapping audience appeal. As a further complication, a rich body of literary narrative has responded in one way or another to social, economic, scientific, and technological change. Much of this work bears no resemblance to science fiction, but some of it includes obvious science fiction elements, such as the depiction of future social and technological developments. However, it may also display features—for example, a concern for literary style and relatively subtle characterization—that are atypical of what can be called “genre science fiction,” that is, narratives produced for a specific, identifiable science fiction market. Historically, most literary science fiction narratives are antiutopian (or dystopian) in nature. Much of Thomas Pynchon’s fiction—such as Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Against The Day (2006)—resembles science fiction’s New Wave and cyberpunk

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styles. Indeed, Gravity’s Rainbow was a major influence on the cyberpunk writers of the 1980s, such as William Gibson. Another influence was William S. Burroughs’s bizarre oeuvre—notably The Naked Lunch (1959), The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket that Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1966)—which depicts mind control, dystopian forms of social oppression, alien invasion, and transmutations to and from human form. Popular fiction that emphasizes danger and adventure may not be marketed as science fiction, even when it displays science fiction elements. This is especially true of techno-thrillers by such authors as Michael Crichton. Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990), Prey (2002), and Next (2006), for example, could easily have been badged as science fiction novels if that had been commercially justified. It is often observed (e.g., by Clute, 1999) that the authors and publishers of works with broad appeal may be reluctant to categorize them as science fiction. The practical reality is that the commercial classification of novels as science fiction or as something else (e.g., as “literary” novels or as thrillers) often depends on marketing considerations as much as formal narrative elements. History. Human societies have always experienced periods of tumultuous change from such causes as war, famine, and plague. However, as Robert Scholes has argued, the idea of future societies with radically different social and economic organization was probably unthinkable before the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while the transformation of societies by irreversible technological change became apparent only in the nineteenth (Scholes, 1975, 14–15). For the first time, it became possible to think of a future greatly different from the present as a result of continuing advances in human knowledge and technology. This breakthrough in conceptualizing the future offered new opportunities for storytelling. Some works written in the early phases of the Scientific Revolution can be seen as prototypes for science fiction; examples include Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1629), a utopian fragment that glorifies science and technology. However, the modern genre finds more immediate roots in the fiction of Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, Edward Bellamy, H.G. Wells, and other literary giants of the Romantic and Victorian ages. During the nineteenth century, imaginative writers increasingly speculated about technological devices not yet invented. They conceived of diverse possible futures, and used imagined places and times as exotic locations for tales of adventure and heroism. Brian Aldiss (1986, 18) identifies Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) as the first true science fiction novel, and it does indeed have a respectable claim to the title. It depicts Victor Frankenstein’s use of advanced, scientifically based technology to create something entirely new in the world: a repulsive and powerful artificial man. Some of Poe’s stories from the 1830s and 1840s also have science fiction elements. However, a substantial body of work that resembles modern science fiction first emerged around 1860, particularly with the stories and novels of Jules Verne. Verne is best known for novels in which science and technology provide the means to accomplish fantastic journeys, as in Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1863), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), and 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1870). H.G. Wells’s career as a writer of what were then known as “scientific romances” commenced a few decades later, with a group of short stories that led up to his hugely influential novella The Time Machine (1895) and his first full-length “scientific romance,” The Island of Dr Moreau (1896). Wells

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was more didactic and socially concerned, while Verne was more focused on adventure and had an engineer’s sense of realism—the plausible depiction of technological novelties. Though they are the best remembered proto–science fiction authors today, Verne and Wells were certainly not the only writers of their era producing work with elements similar to those of modern science fiction. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such elements appeared in many utopias, lost-race novels, and stories of near-future geopolitical disruption. The latter described wars, invasions, and racial conflict, but not necessarily any new technologies or methods of warfare. Nineteenth-century adventure novels, such as H. Rider Haggard’s She: A History of Adventure (1886), frequently took place in remote, exotic, and often mildly erotic locations. The use of interplanetary settings merely took this a step further. The first novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars (1917)—actually first published in All-Story Magazine in 1912—epitomized this trend. It defined one pole of early science fiction, emphasizing action and adventure in an alien setting. Burroughs revitalized the lost-race motif, and he was the major influence in science fiction until the mid-1930s, with many imitators writing similar stories set in faraway places (Clareson, 1990, 11–12). Elements of this style can be found up to the present day. However, genre science fiction is a newer phenomenon, dating from the 1920s and 1930s, when the genre’s direction was shaped by two great American editors: Luxembourg-born Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell. Though Gernsback looked for original stories that emphasized futurism, science, and gadgetry, the immediate context for his contribution was the popular success of exotic adventure stories such as those by Burroughs. He first showed this sort of interest with the magazine Modern Electrics (1908) and the novel Ralph 124C41+ (1911), but he did not devote an entire magazine to genre science fiction until the launch of Amazing Stories in April 1926 (Clareson, 1990, 14–15). Amazing Stories is usually considered the first specialized science fiction magazine, though Gernsback originally coined the term scientifiction. He adopted the usage science fiction for the first issue of Science Wonder Stories in 1929, and it became the established term in 1938, when it was incorporated into the title of Campbell’s Astounding Science-Fiction (Clareson, 1990, 16). During the Gernsback era, Verne and Wells came to be thought of as science fiction writers. Their work was often reprinted in genre magazines, alongside new stories that tended to applaud the advance of science and technology. Also during this first era of modern science fiction, the subgenre now known as space opera became an established form. This type of narrative involves action on a galactic scale, or beyond, rather than mere adventure on the local planets of our solar system. Space opera often includes space voyages that are analogous to Earth-bound naval fleets, and it may involve such elements as contact with alien species, war on a colossal scale, descriptions of immensely destructive weapons, and other kinds of superscience. The Skylark of Space (1928), by E.E. “Doc” Smith, was the novel that really established the form, and it has been argued that Gernsback’s principal contribution to the new genre was the discovery of Smith’s exuberant talent (Clareson, 1990, 17). Science fiction’s so-called golden age began in the late 1930s and lasted until the end of the 1940s. In 1937, John W. Campbell began to assume editorial duties at

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THE FUTURE HISTORY OF HUMANITY During the golden age of science fiction, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and others developed the concept of a future history of humanity, first formalized by Heinlein but expanded into a complex narrative framework by Asimov. By the end of the 1940s, science fiction had created an intertextual mythos involving the development and fluctuations of future galactic empires (Clareson, 1990, 31–33). This may be viewed as a generic megatext, providing a network of familiar, easily evoked icons that are well understood by dedicated readers (compare Broderick, 1995, 57–63).

the magazine Astounding Stories of Super-Science (to use its complete title), and in 1938, he officially became the magazine’s editor, changing its name to Astounding Science-Fiction (it is now called Analog Science Fiction and Fact). By 1939, the magazine and the science fiction genre as a whole were being steered by Campbell’s strong personality. During this period, he published the first short stories of celebrated British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke and established a group of regular contributors who became the major figures in genre science fiction. These included Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and A.E. Van Vogt. Isaac Asimov’s original Foundation trilogy became one of the great canonical texts of twentieth-century science fiction. The three volumes appeared in sequence during the early 1950s, and they were a repackaging of a series of stories about the Seldon Plan that had originally been published from 1942 to 1950. Thousands of years in the future, Hari Seldon, founder of the new science of psychohistory, establishes two foundations at the opposite ends of the galaxy. Their mission is to reduce the 30,000-year interregnum of chaos between the predicted fall of the Galactic Empire and the rise of a new empire. Seldon has predicted that this long interregnum can be reduced to only a thousand years, saving untold chaos and suffering. The stories that comprise the first volume, Foundation (1951), trace the early history of the First Foundation and establish Asimov’s narrative strategy for the series. At each crisis point for the Foundation, the key to a successful outcome is an insight into the situation that is reached by the Foundation’s leaders (and that was achieved in advance by Seldon). Nevertheless, this insight is withheld from the reader until the end of each respective story. Asimov adopts a similar approach in the stories contained in Foundation and Empire (1952) and Second Foundation (1953), the trilogy’s second and third volumes, respectively. All three volumes display Asimov’s frequent technique of setting his characters to outguess each other’s understandings. Those who most fully grasp the underlying situation are successful. Three decades later, Asimov returned to this universe with Foundation’s Edge (1982), which jumps 120 years into the future from the events depicted at the end of Second Foundation. Unlike its predecessors, but like other works in the Foundation mythos that followed it, Foundation’s Edge was conceived from the beginning as a full-length novel: it contains far more descriptive detail and appears designed to exceed the earlier stories/volumes in the complexity of its puzzles. Asimov’s other great achievement during the golden age was the development of one of science fiction’s most celebrated and recurrent icons: the mechanical human

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being, or robot. He devised his famous three laws of robotics to govern his robots’ behavior. These laws required them to preserve human life, obey human commands, and preserve themselves, in that order of priority. The possible loopholes inherent in the three laws enabled Asimov to write many ingenious puzzle stories, including two robot detective novels in the mid-1950s, The Caves of Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1957). In Foundation’s Edge, Asimov began to unite his Foundation mythos with his robot stories, and he continued this program in further novels published in the 1980s and 1990s: The Robots of Dawn (1983), Robots and Empire (1985), Foundation and Earth (1986), Prelude to Foundation (1988), and Forward the Foundation (1993, after Asimov’s death the previous year). Of all these, Foundation and Earth takes the story furthest into the future. These novels supplement the original trilogy with far more background and breadth, and portray the hero, Hari Seldon, at various stages of his life, whether as a swashbuckling young man or in his later years. After Asimov’s death, his estate authorized the publication of three more novels along similar lines—the Second Foundation Trilogy—Foundation’s Fear, by Gregory Benford (1997), Foundation and Chaos, by Greg Bear (1998), and Foundation’s Triumph, by David Brin (1999). Robert A. Heinlein turned to writing in his early thirties and soon became one of the key figures of the golden age of science fiction. His first novel to appear in book form, Rocket Ship Galileo, was published in 1947. It was followed by a string of highly successful novels—the Heinlein juveniles—aimed at what would now be called the young adult market. Like Asimov, he flourished as a leading American science fiction writer for many years after the golden age. By the late 1940s, science fiction was changing. The atomic bomb and the abrupt surrender of Japan turned the public’s attention to science—and hence to science fiction. And some science fiction narratives began to appear in the slick magazines and in book form. At about the same time, new specialized magazines challenged Campbell’s hegemony. In 1949, The Magazine of Fantasy appeared, edited by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas, which became The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction with the publication of its second issue in 1950 (Clareson, 1990, 49). This magazine introduced greater variety, with stories that stepped outside the technocratic vision favored by Gernsback and Campbell. In 1950, the first issue of Galaxy Science Fiction appeared. Book publication became increasingly important, and as described by Clareson (1990, 40–49), 1952 was a pivotal year: Donald A. Wollheim became science fiction editor at Ace Books; Betty and Ian Ballantine founded Ballantine Books; and Clifford Simak’s City was published. The latter was a key work in shifting away from an adulation of technology to critique of modern urban-industrial society. In the same year, Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, the dystopian Player Piano, was published. Such writers as Clifford D. Simak, Kurt Vonnegut, Damon Knight, James Blish, Alfred Bester, Ray Bradbury (who leaned more to fantasy and horror fiction), Frederick Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, Theodore Sturgeon, and Walter M. Miller experimented with form, style, and tone, some of their work presaging the experiments of the 1960s New Wave. The Demolished Man (1953) and The Stars My Destination (1957), Bester’s most successful works, show “obsessed men driven to, if not beyond the borders of sanity” (Clareson, 1990, 71). Pohl and Kornbluth were published in Galaxy Science Fiction during the 1950s. Their satirical Gravy Train was serialized in 1952, and in the following year it was revised in book form as

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The Space Merchants. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) is a high point in science fiction’s treatment of the nuclear holocaust theme. After a nuclear war, the remnants of human civilization eventually progress to a new Renaissance and beyond—leading, however, to another nuclear war. During the 1950s, Vonnegut and Bradbury, in particular, brought science fiction to a wider audience than it had previously enjoyed (Clareson, 1990, 49–50). Ray Bradbury is probably best known for The Martian Chronicles (1950) and Fahrenheit 451 (1953). The Martian Chronicles portrays the settlement of Mars by humans, and as in much science fiction of the time, the threat of nuclear war underlies its storyline. The first explorers from Earth wipe out the ancient Martian civilization by accident: humans infect the Martians with chickenpox, which is a deadly disease to the latter. A frontier culture develops on Mars, until the long feared nuclear war takes place on Earth in 2005 and Mars is deserted. Fahrenheit 451 is a satirical depiction of an anti-intellectual future America, where houses are fireproof and “firemen” burn books. In many ways, though, as Clareson points out (1990, 115–116), the 1950s belonged to Heinlein with the publication and success of the Heinlein juveniles and the reprinting of much of his work from the magazines. The 1960s saw further experimentation, and Heinlein continued to adapt. In 1961, he published his most famed novel of all, Stranger in a Strange Land, which celebrates sex and the body (the characters seem to be nude as often as not), advocates open sexual relationships, and satirizes politics, organized religion, and traditional social mores. During the 1960s and early 1970s, Heinlein wrote several more books, most notably The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966), which tells the story of a lunar colony’s rebellion against Earth analogous to the American Revolution. However, some of his later work lacks shape and discipline, and there was a seven-year gap in his output from 1973 to 1980, when he was plagued by health crises. In the 1980s—prior to his death in 1988—he wrote several novels, of which Friday (1982) and the satirical Job: A Comedy of Justice (1984) shows him still near his best form. Other novels to escape the boundaries of the genre and obtain cult status were Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963) and his ambiguously science fictional Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), which reacts to the political assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the Vietnam war, and the social conflict that troubled America throughout the turbulent 1960s. Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) also obtained a huge audience. Its plot involves complex political and religious struggles on a desert world far in the future. Dune was followed by many sequels by the author, and since his death in 1986, by a continuing series of sequels and prequels by his son, Brian Herbert, and Kevin J. Anderson. In the early 1960s, under the editorship of E.J. Carnell and then of the more aggressive Michael Moorcock, the leading British science fiction magazine New Worlds began to promote the New Wave style of science fiction. This style largely rejected the genre’s tradition of narrative realism, purporting instead to explore the mind’s “inner space,” a concept that was associated with J.G. Ballard in particular. Strictly speaking, the New Wave comprised a group of writers closely involved with New Worlds, and British authors Ballard, Brian Aldiss, and John Brunner were its major exponents. However, the term New Wave is often used somewhat more loosely to cover broader changes in the style of American, as well as British, science fiction during the 1960s.

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In the United States, Harlan Ellison published his blockbuster anthologies Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again Dangerous Visions (1972), for which he commissioned stories that might be seen as controversial and subversive. Major American science fiction writers of the 1960s who participated in the transition to a new style are Norman Spinrad—notably with Bug Jack Barron (1969)—Thomas M. Disch, Roger Zelazny, Samuel R. Delany, and James Tiptree Jr. (pen name of Alice Sheldon). The writers of the sixties dealt with such subjects as environmental disaster, and they often depicted Western civilization as doomed. Philip José Farmer and Samuel R. Delany explored sexuality with a newfound freedom. The prolific Philip K. Dick—whose stories and novels have perhaps been the subject of more cinematic adaptations than any other science fiction writer’s since Verne and Wells—produced much of his best work during the 1960s, including The Man in the High Castle (1962) and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). After this point, the science fiction genre displayed multiple facets, but only a few can be mentioned here. During the mid-1960s and early 1970s, Robert Silverberg, another immensely prolific writer, produced some of his most studied and insightful works, including the award-winning novella “Nightwings” (1969), as well as the novels A Time of Changes (1971) and Dying Inside (1972). A Time of Changes depicts one man’s rebellion against an oppressive culture that rejects individuality as an obscenity. Dying Inside is a sensitive depiction of the declining powers of a middle-aged man whose telepathic abilities are failing him. Joe Haldeman appeared as a powerful new talent with The Forever War (1974), a grim antiwar novel that draws on Haldeman’s experience as a soldier in Vietnam. The values of the golden age of science fiction were kept alive in the work of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, most notably in Niven’s Ringworld (1970) and in the Niven-Pournelle collaboration The Mote in God’s Eye (1974). During the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, there was also a vigorous interest in feminist and racial themes, sexuality, political theories, and utopian visions (the latter sometimes of complex, ambiguous kinds). Key works of the period were Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974), Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren (1975) and Triton (1976), and Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979), which uses time travel as a narrative device to examine the American experience of slavery. The Dispossessed, possibly Le Guin’s best known novel, depicts life on Anarres, a hostile desert world whose society is a resource-poor, would-be utopia run along anarchist lines. Though Anarresti society is presented sympathetically, we are led to see its flaws: in particular, it is hostile to individuality and genius. Anarres is contrasted to another world, Urras, which is home to both a luxurious capitalist society and a communist dictatorship of the worst kind. Though the development of an anarchist society on Anarres has fallen short of its founder’s revolutionary ideals, there are indications—as the narrative draws to a close—that revolution can be a permanent process and that renewal is beginning. Russ’s The Female Man and her other work of this period constitute the science fiction genre’s most forthright attack on sexism and sexual inequality. The novel’s four main characters—Joanna, Jeannine, Janet, and Jael—live in different realities: one of them evidently lives in our reality, but the others live in realities that diverge widely from ours. Russ’s fierce style and hard-edged characterization influenced the cyberpunk writers of the following decade. In particular, her highly capable female

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warriors—such as Jael in The Female Man and Alyx in Picnic on Paradise (1968)— provided models for the no-nonsense razor girls of William Gibson’s early fiction. Butler’s Kindred has obtained widespread praise for the horrifying realism of its depiction of slavery, with its popularity and message enabling it to transcend the science fiction genre. Kindred depicts the dilemma of a modern-day African American novelist who finds herself leading a dual life as she is transported repeatedly to a slave plantation in the nineteenth-century South. Her struggle to survive takes an additional twist because she is descended from a brutal slave owner, Rufus, who somehow has the ability to summon his descendants to help him when he is danger. She must assist him to survive, at least until he has the child whose line will one day lead to her own existence. Delany’s huge, enigmatic, sexually explicit Dhalgren (1975) was another book that burst out of the confines of science-fiction marketing and found a cult audience. Delany followed up with Triton (later republished under the author’s preferred title, Trouble on Triton). Like The Dispossessed, to which it seems a response, Triton depicts a world that is not entirely utopian. Delany’s focus is more on the personal than the political: the narrative concerns a character who is unable to fit into a seemingly utopian future society, but purely because of his own shortcomings. As Harris-Fain points out (2005, 98–100), the science fiction field was fragmenting in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was possible for a reader to focus on a particular type of science fiction, according to taste, but many writers and publishers were looking for something to reunify the field. At this time, Frederick Pohl published what many consider his best solo novel, Gateway (1977), which is a prominent example of a veteran writer’s adoption of some of the New Wave techniques (Harris-Fain, 2005, 69). In the early 1980s, Gene Wolfe revived far-future science fiction in his novel series The Book of the New Sun (1980–1987) as well as in subsequent series that continued into the 1990s and beyond. The five volumes of the first series—including its coda, The Urth of the New Sun (1987)—four volumes of The Book of the Long Sun (1993–1996), and three volumes of The Book of the Short Sun (1999–2001) can be read as one huge narrative. The Book of the New Sun, which commences with The Shadow of the Torturer (1980), tells the story of Severian, a journeyman torturer who is ultimately made Autarch, or ruler of the kingdom . He must find a way to renew the dying Sun—for which he travels to a higher universe, Yesod—and plead with an entity closer to the Increate or creator. Far-future science fiction relies on the fact that we find ourselves in a universe incomprehensibly old and with a similarly incomprehensible number of years still ahead. This subgenre responds to this fact by telling stories about the Earth in a future separated from us by a vast temporal gulf. There is no precise starting point for the far future, but such stories typically involve a planet that is so completely different from the present day as to be almost unrecognizable. The classic example is Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth (1950), which had numerous sequels and influenced many other writers. Wolfe takes a similar approach on a gargantuan scale. As discussed by Michael Andre-Driussi (2001), far-future science fictional texts such as those by Vance and Wolfe use linguistic techniques that create a sense of strangeness and ancientness. They employ many archaic words or archaic-seeming coinages, and their prose is lush with exotic, often polysyllabic, names for characters and places. Other writers maintained a hard–science fiction tradition throughout the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Their values reflect those

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shown by Jules Verne and by the writers of the golden age. The precise boundaries of hard science fiction are disputed. In their introduction to The Hard SF Renaissance, David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer suggest that the expression “has always signified SF that has something centrally to do with science” (2002, 13). This “something” is somewhat vague, but hard science fiction generally emphasizes logic, problem solving, scientific accuracy, and plausible detail. It often includes realistic depictions of the lives of working scientists, engineers, astronauts, and similar professionals. The hard–science fiction subgenre is epitomized by such works as Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity (1954) and Gregory Benford’s Timescape (1980), a widely admired story of communication across time. The cyberpunk movement of the 1980s synthesizes elements from the New Wave, hard science fiction, and the politically engaged narratives of Delany and Russ. Cyberpunk writers—such as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, and (later) Neal Stephenson—produced, in effect, a new (or at least revised) science fiction megatext that presents direct interfacing between human minds and advanced computers, events in computer-constructed virtual realities, and the activities of powerful artificial intelligences. The punk aspect of their work involves portrayals of street life, youth rebellion (often against the power of ubiquitous, transnational corporations), tough-guy attitudes and dress codes, and certain recurring images (e.g., of rust, chrome, concrete, reflective glass, and architectural ruins). William Gibson was born in South Carolina in 1948, but he has lived in Canada since the late 1960s. His work was a dominant presence within the cyberpunk movement’s early output, and it has subsequently exerted an enormous influence on American and international science fiction. The movement was showcased in Gibson’s early short stories—collected in Burning Chrome (1986)—and in his first novel, Neuromancer (1984), which was soon expanded into a trilogy whose volumes are Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). Bruce Sterling’s anthology Mirrorshades (1986) also helped define the spirit of cyberpunk, as it collects important stories by Gibson and other key writers of the 1980s. Neuromancer, in particular, had a stunning impact on the American and international science fiction communities. It is a linguistically pyrotechnic and conceptually dense crime thriller set in the polluted, high-tech urban jungle of a near-future world in which a vast sprawl of buildings stretches from Boston to Atlanta; nonhuman nature has receded to make way for patterns of streets, Styrofoam, and neon lights; and the world of sensorial experience has lost ground to an artificial cyberspace (Gibson’s celebrated coinage, though the idea had precursors) that is the construct of electronic neuro-stimulation. The novel’s language is marked by vivid, risky similes and swift sentences; and images and fragments of dialogue intrude in the flow of the narrative in a disorienting way. Gibson conveys the rush and confusion of the hard, amoral—yet sometimes alluring—world in which the novel’s events take place. Neuromancer synthesizes the influences of noir crime writers such as Raymond Chandler, the prose experiments of Alfred Bester, the elements of 1960s New Wave science fiction, and the challenging fictions of William S. Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon. Since the 1980s, cyberpunk sensibility has been assimilated into much of the science fiction field and beyond into the nonnarrative arts. This, however, has scarcely been the only development. During cyberpunk’s heyday, there was a vigorous debate between its advocates and the so-called humanists—notably John

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Kessell and James Patrick Kelly—who took a more critical and selective attitude to technology. Standing outside of any subgenre or movement, James Morrow produced darkly satirical narratives, combining science fiction and fantasy elements, whereas Connie Willis became widely acclaimed and multiply awarded, primarily for work that brought new interest and gave vitality to the tradition of time travel narratives. During the 1980s and 1990s, space opera’s tradition was also enriched by such writers as C.J. Cherryh, Orson Scott Card, David Brin, Dan Simmons, Elizabeth Moon, Lois McMaster Bujold, Catherine Asaro, and Vernor Vinge, who took space opera in a dazzling variety of directions. Their stories are set against the wide backdrops of the space opera subgenre but with emphases ranging from intellectual speculation and play to action-adventure to unashamed romance. Through the 1990s and beyond, there was also a distinctive international resurgence of hard science fiction, showcased in Hartwell and Cramer’s The Hard SF Renaissance (2002). In the United States, this renaissance was strongly associated with the work of Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, and David Brin as well as with Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, but numerous other writers also took part, including newer talents such as Ted Chiang. This renaissance was also evident in other English-speaking countries. It can be seen, for example, in the stories and novels of Australian author Greg Egan and in the work of a prominent group of British writers that includes Ken MacLeod, Iain M. Banks, and Stephen Baxter. For twenty-first-century science fiction, all the boundaries are blurred. Space opera is influenced by hard science fiction and cyberpunk. Prose space opera generally displays a higher degree of realism—and a greater distance from fantasy—than its cinematic equivalent. Science fiction as a whole has become, to an extent, postcyberpunk: it is permeated by images of alienation, machine intelligence, and posthuman minds and bodies. The megatext has metamorphosed into something darker, harder, and weirder. Trends and Themes. Science fiction is a thematically rich genre. The three-volume Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy (2005) contains four hundred entries on specific themes, many of which—such as “Alien Worlds,” “Aliens in Space,” “Aliens on Earth,” “Generation Starships,” “Mad Scientists,” “Planetary Colonies,” “ Time travel,” and “Virtual Reality”—are of relevance mainly or entirely to science fiction rather than fantasy narratives. As a genre that developed in the wake of the scientific and industrial revolutions of the past four centuries, science fiction tends to make certain assumptions. These include the idea that human experience takes place within a small part of an unimaginably vast space-time continuum, and that it is open to us to imagine the rest. Thus, the genre’s canvas comprises the past, present, and future, as well as the depths of interplanetary and interstellar space. It is natural for science fiction authors to speculate about life on other planets, contact between humans and alien life forms, and the possibility of human expansion beyond the confines of planet Earth. It is equally natural for them to imagine travel in time and space—whether to the historical or prehistoric past or to the near or far future. Science fiction’s canvas spreads even further to include entirely different realities. These may be rationalized in various ways—for example, there may be mathematical spaces beyond our own, as in Rudy Rucker’s novel of supermathematics, Mathematicians in Love (2006), whose main characters travel through a variety of alternative realities. In other cases, alternative histories or realities may be presented

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as purely imaginary constructs with no explanation as to how they relate to our own world in a physical or metaphysical—rather than thematic—sense. In principle, science fiction assumes the contingency and mutability of current technologies, economic arrangements, and social forms. The technological and other novelties that it depicts enable its characters to act within constraints— physical, biological, technological, or cultural—that differ from those applying to human beings in historical and contemporary societies. This alteration of expected constraints can be deployed for a wide range of literary effects. In some cases, it enables the exploration of specific aspects of human behaviour, life, or the universe. It also enables authors to speculate about the future or to comment on the customs and values of existing societies by extrapolating their worst tendencies or by viewing a real society from the perspective of an imaginary one with different assumptions. Thus, the genre has lent itself to the purposes of utopian or visionary speculation, and to various kinds of satire. Of course, the creation of locales separated in space or time—or otherwise—from the reader’s society can often function for less didactic purposes. In much science fiction, these locales are used primarily for entertainment: distant worlds can provide exotic settings for conflict and adventure, as in the planetary romances of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the gaudy narratives that typify space opera. Science fiction narratives tend to include characters whose abilities differ from those of historical humans, sometimes because of their greater inherent powers, sometimes because of their access to innovative and empowering technology. At one extreme, this encourages the creation of superheroes and supervillains—good and evil characters with superhuman powers—and of the spectacle that ensues when they are drawn into violent conflict. Other forms of conflict in science fiction include wars between rival military forces equipped with superweapons and, often, with superpowers’ warriors in their ranks. Such forms of superspectacular combat create an affinity with heroic fantasy, with its magical locales and characters, typically deployed for similar purposes. Inevitably, science fiction’s main thematic concern is the consequences of scientific advance and technological change. The genre has always shown a range of attitudes to science and technology, reflecting—and sometimes opposing—tendencies in the Western culture that has nurtured it. In medieval Europe, there was a long tradition of suspicion toward “impious” inquiries into nature—expressed in hostile depictions of magic and alchemy—and this can be seen continuing through the Renaissance and even the age of the Enlightenment. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), for example, contains merciless satire of Enlightenment-era scientists. Hostility to science and technology increased in the Romantic period around the beginning of the nineteenth century, as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Shelley warned against scientific hubris, but during the later nineteenth century, technological progress came to be a popular value in industrialized nations. There was far more optimism about technological progress in Verne’s tales of imaginary voyages, which postulates such devices as Nemo’s submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (though the submarine is also an engine of destruction that preys on shipping). The period’s techno-optimism culminated in futuristic utopias—such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888) and Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1905)—and in the magazines of the Gernsback era and the golden age.

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The science fiction pulp magazines of the Gernsback era valorized science, scientists, and technology, while golden age science fiction was only slightly more cautious in its optimism about technology and the future. Hard science fiction and various forms of space opera continued this golden age optimism in the following decades. By contrast, more literary forms of twentieth-century science fiction conveyed greater pessimism. Even H.G. Wells was more than a Wellsian technoutopian, but the utopian component of his output produced a backlash—first seen, perhaps, in E.M. Forster’s cautionary tale of a machine-dependent future, “The Machine Stops” (1909). Thereafter, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell described dystopias in which technology is used as an instrument for totalitarian enslavement, or as the enforcement of a decadent and repugnant form of social stability. Widespread intellectual rejection of technology followed the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the atrocities of the Nazi death camps. Even within the professional genre, postwar science fiction gave expression to fears of decay or destruction, produced by overreliance on technology or the use of immensely powerful weaponry. The dominant British and American figures of the New Wave era often expressed the vision of a doomed society. In the late decades of the twentieth century and at the turn of the twenty-first, the technophobic imagination focused increasingly on dangers from computers, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology. However, 1980s cyberpunk handled all this with a degree of ambivalence. Cyberpunk writers produced images of a dark future, but they also portrayed advanced technologies as inevitable, adaptable, and alluring. Though potentially dangerous, the invasive technologies depicted by the cyberpunks have their attractions, and the near-future societies portrayed in such novels as Neuromancer are not totally dystopian. Chris Moriarty’s Spin State (2003) is an example of how all this plays out when contemporary space opera combines with cyberpunk. In the relatively near future, Earth has become uninhabitable. Climate change has led to ecological disaster, though there are plans to restore the global environment and seed the planet with stored genetic material. Meanwhile, most human beings have been evacuated to an artificial construct, the Ring, where various cultures and nationalities remain as suspicious of each other as ever. Thanks to the invention of faster-than-light travel, new societies have also been established on the planets of other star systems. Some of these are under UN control, but others have broken away in defiance—and the authorities seem to have lost track of still others. Of course, the ambivalent, complex attitudes to technology found in cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk writing are not entirely new. Indeed, a powerful characteristic of science fiction from the beginning was the moral ambivalence of technology. Even Verne sometimes showed dangers in the powerful new technologies that he described and glorified. Part of science fiction’s appeal lies in its ability to show advanced technology as dangerous and potentially destructive, while simultaneously revealing its allure and giving it some accommodation within the megatextual value systems that result. Most imaginable forms of technology receive a mix of positive and negative portrayals in current science fiction. The predicted technology of molecular engineering (or nanotechnology) is one example: while some works show it as offering a world of plenty, it can also be portrayed as a threat by a techno-thriller writer such as Michael Crichton. In Crichton’s Prey (2002), escaped “clouds” of tiny nanotech

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devices commence a bizarre parasitism on human victims. By contrast, a number of current authors—such as Neal Stephenson, Wil McCarthy, and the British crop of space opera and hard science fiction writers—attempt to imagine life in a world of economic plenty. One example is McCarthy’s The Collapsium (2000) and its sequels in the Queendom of Sol series. Set about five hundred years in the future, this series describes a society in which people can transport themselves around the Solar System, using nanotechnological devices to analyze their bodies as data patterns. Aging and disease have been eliminated by using a “morbidity filter.” Among the other inventions of the future age is “wellstone,” or programmable matter: a substance capable of mimicking the properties of many naturally occurring materials as well as physically hypothetical ones. People are coming to terms with what all this plenty means for their lives, work, and relationships. With its frequent depiction of exotic or greatly altered societies, science fiction is also well placed to depict alternative moral outlooks, family arrangements, political forms, and methods of social organization. This gives the genre its cognitive tools for examining a wide range of social issues, from forms of government and the relationship between the state and the individual to sexuality, relations between men and women, and methods of reproduction. The approaches taken may be utopian, dystopian, or simply heterotopian, with the presentation of arrangements that are different from those familiar to the reader, yet not entirely good or bad. Its heterotopian impulse gives science fiction some tendency to imply a kind of moral relativism, because many possible social arrangements and moral attitudes are viewed rather dispassionately. On the other hand, perhaps surprisingly, the genre sometimes adopts conservative or even reactionary conventions, as with the widespread depiction of empires in space ruled along the lines of ancient imperial dynasties. Despite its obvious potential to reimagine love, courtship, sexuality, and marriage, science fiction is frequently quite conservative also in its implied philosophy of sex and gender. Many science fiction narratives appear to assume that the dating and marital customs of their authors’ own times and places will last into the near and even distant future. Feminist utopias, however, typically reject traditional relationships between the sexes, including marriage. Some feminist novels, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) and Joanna Russ’s The Female Man describe societies without men. Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time depicts a utopia in which women have achieved freedom from male domination, and sexuality is free of guilt (though not of all interpersonal conflict). Ectogenesis is used to separate reproduction from “recreational coupling,” and there is no marriage bond. Because science fiction examines social changes that arise from the advance of science and technology, it provides an ongoing literary forum for such issues as preservation of monogamy. It sometimes criticizes monogamy from an alien viewpoint, as in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, or describes alternatives, such as the line marriages of the same author’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Some science fiction narratives describe unusual familial/sexual arrangements for their alien characters—as in Asimov’s The Gods Themselves (1972)—without considering anything very radical for future humans. However, Anne McCaffrey, Philip José Farmer, Samuel R. Delany, and others have imagined more startling sexual arrangements involving the interactions of humans and nonhumanoid aliens, or even direct human-alien sex, especially in Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984).

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Context and Issues. During the 1990s, the biological and computational sciences became particularly prominent within the more general intellectual culture. This was the result of scientific advances, the explosion in rapid, computerized communications, and some foreboding about where biotech and computers might be leading us. Such concerns and emphases are reflected in the science fiction of the 1990s and the new millennium, sometimes accompanied by the striking idea of a coming technological singularity: a point in time where the rate of technological change will approach infinity, perhaps because it falls under the control of minds more powerful than ours. From its beginnings, science fiction has postulated advances in biology, and it has also depicted the work of biologists, the biology of alien beings, the structure of alien worlds, and mutational changes on Earth. Its specialized concerns have included artificial organic life (as in Frankenstein), medical advances, new diseases, the creation of human clones, life extension and immortality, increased physical and cognitive abilities, genetic engineering, and the terraforming of other planets. Despite this variety, however, monstrosity and alien threats to human life have long been the genre’s staples when it addresses the biological sciences. Physical or moral monstrosity, it is often suggested, results from human meddling with the stuff of life. Some authors have resisted the genre’s teratological and cautionary impulses, but more optimistic works have usually been the exception: James Blish projects a vision of human adaptation to the environments of other worlds in his short story “Surface Tension” (1952), and something similar is imagined in Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean (1986), among others. Some science fiction authors have imagined entire alien ecologies that often resemble those of fantasy, but others—such as those in Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Asimov’s The Gods Themselves, and Slonczewski’s A Door Into Ocean—display more cognitive rigor. Octavia E. Butler’s radical Xenogenesis novels, beginning with Dawn (1987), depict aliens who change constantly through their history as they encounter new species and mix with them. The most noteworthy saga of terraforming is perhaps Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy—Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), and Blue Mars (1996)— which describes how Mars is made habitable through centuries of effort, resulting in beneficial but not entirely expected outcomes. Greg Bear’s Blood Music (1985) provides another exception to science fiction’s distrust of biological experimentation: in this novel, a renegade researcher’s experiment on his own body eventually leads to a benign transformation of the Earth and humanity. Bear’s Darwin’s Radio (1999) and Darwin’s Children (2003) are contemporary versions of the idea that a sudden evolutionary change may occur in the human species. One successful approach during the 1990s renaissance of hard science fiction was that of Nancy Kress, initially in her novella “Beggars in Spain” (1990). This was subsequently reworked and expanded into a successful series of novels: Beggars in Spain (1993), Beggars and Choosers (1994), and Beggars’ Ride (1996). Kress’s work contains intelligent observation of what might happen if human abilities could be enhanced by genetic engineering. Her main characters are modified human beings whose superior abilities include the capacity to live without sleep and devote the extra hours to self-improvement. The narrative asks such questions as how society would—or should—react to the presence of individuals who might seem to have an unfair advantage over everyone else, in whatever fields of work they choose. Conversely, what duties would such individuals owe to those less fortunate, without losing the integrity of their own extraordinarily impressive lives?

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Observation of the rapid pace of technological change has led to the idea— popularized by Vernor Vinge in particular—that humanity is headed for a point of infinite possibility (the aforementioned singularity); it has also led to speculation about the possibility that human beings may be transformed by technological processes into something posthuman, that is, into humans possessing unprecedented physical or cognitive capacities. Vinge’s prolific speculations about such issues— initially in his novella “True Names” (1981) and his novel Marooned in Realtime (1987)—have made him something of an icon for pro-technology activists—such as those in the transhumanist movement, which favors the enhancement of human capacities. Post-cyberpunk space opera and related fictional forms typically imagine scenarios in which technology goes inwards: it alters human capacities rather than merely altering our environment or providing us with new tools. Robert Reed’s Marrow (2000), for example, is a disciplined attempt to portray a truly posthuman civilization whose people have indefinitely long lives and extraordinary personal abilities. Reed’s characters are technologically enhanced to a degree that makes them immortal and almost indestructible. Individuals are able to pursue the same roles for many thousands of years, and they seem to possess infinite patience. Much of the plot turns on the difficulty of inflicting certain and permanent death, even with the most extreme methods or with deadly weapons specially designed for the purpose. Characters who die convincingly are as likely as not to return chapters later. In Moriarty’s Spin State, the characters possess advanced artificial intelligences that have emerged into self-awareness, and that are now struggling for political emancipation, as well as genetically engineered posthumans, some of them “wired” with extensive nonbiological hardware. Indeed, the book’s main character, Major Catherine Li, is a “genetic construct” who has managed to alter the official records on her biological background in order to escape a requirement for registration. She works as a UN Peacekeeper, and she is thoroughly wired with “ceramsteel” augmentations. But there is a paradox about cyberpunk’s legacy. Much of what it once described as the future has actually come to pass, while the more extreme ideas, such as uploading human personalities into a virtual reality, may seem implausible. Partly, perhaps, for this reason some of the most notable cyberpunk writers have recently produced narratives that are scarcely identifiable as science fiction at all. Yet, these writers would have been perceived as painting a radical picture of the near future if they had been published only twenty years ago, when cyberpunk was young. William Gibson’s most recent novels—Pattern Recognition (2003) and Spook Country (2007)—have a cyberpunk feel but no clearly identifiable science fiction elements. Gibson’s current mission, it seems, is to portray the present as if it were science fiction. Cayce Pollard, the main character of Pattern Recognition, lives in a milieu of fashion and design, consulting on corporate design proposals and identifying cool trends a step in advance. She suffers from a hypersensitivity to images and patterns that sometimes induces panic and nausea, but that enables her to perform her job with extraordinary success. Gibson depicts Cayce’s comings and goings across several countries; she encounters numerous cultures, subcultures, and strange individuals as she attempts to uncover the identity of a mysterious auteur who is releasing cut-up bits of original movie footage on the Internet in an inexplicable order. Cayce’s father, we learn, disappeared on September 11, 2001, in New York

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City, a year before the events of the book. Spook Country is set in the same world— again, a strange version of our own—with a story of espionage, avant-garde art, drug use and abuse, and fancy corporate marketing. Gibson seems to suggest that in the early years of the new millennium, after such events as the September 11 attacks in 2001, our own world has become alien to us, and it needs to be looked at with fresh eyes. Perhaps Gibson’s drift into a literary place that is not quite the house of science fiction also reflects a greater willingness on the part of some writers from the science fiction tradition to write more directly about the contemporary context and its concerns: about such familiar anxieties as the influence of corporations and markets, the allure of fashion and style, the ubiquity of prohibited drugs, the shadows of racial, cultural, and religious tension, and the realities of environmental degradation and climate change. Twenty-firstcentury science fiction addresses these issues in many different ways—for example, Spin State makes reference to a ruined environment on Earth; several cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk works present a future with many racial, linguistic, and cultural demographics; and Kim Stanley Robinson’s writings have recently emphasized global warming and its impact (discussed below under “Authors and Their Works”). Gibson’s recent novels also reflect a more general convergence of the literary mainstream and more ambitious forms of prose science fiction. Since the 1960s New Wave, if not before, science fiction writers have developed an increasing stylistic sophistication, embracing such values as deep and particularized characterization, complex narrative design, and less literal kinds of story telling. Like Gibson, Neal Stephenson comes from the science fiction tradition, and he made his mark during the 1990s with such late-cyberpunk novels as Snow Crash (1992) and The Diamond Age (1995). With Cryptonomicon (1999) and his more recent Baroque Cycle of novels (2003–2004), Stephenson can be seen as another writer who challenges the distinction between science fiction and the mainstream. Like Gibson, he shows a strong influence from the writings of Thomas Pynchon— generally placed on the other side of the science fiction–mainstream literary divide—and he has achieved success beyond the confines of a dedicated science fiction readership. Cryptonomicon, mainly set during the Second World War, depicts efforts to crack the military code used by the Axis powers, whereas the Baroque Cycle is set in the same reality about 250 years earlier. Though some historical and geographical details are changed from the world that we know, there is little in these books that is truly science fictional. Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt (2002) takes a radically different approach to contemporary anxieties, making use of the alternate history form of narrative. It is, perhaps, the most ambitious work of this kind published to date. The book’s premise is that the Black Death of the fourteenth century destroyed almost the entire population of Europe, not only one-third or so, creating a political vacuum to be filled by Islam and the Chinese. Christianity and white-skinned humans are essentially wiped out. This novel also uses a fantasy device to reimagine the course of history since the 1300s: its main characters are repeatedly reincarnated after their deaths, with no scientific or pseudoscientific explanation. Robinson’s characters discuss the nature of history among themselves, and the author appears to suggest that major real events, such as the rise of modern science, would have had equivalents even in the absence of European civilization. Mark Bold describes in detail Robinson’s use of a world focused on cultures about which

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Westerners are seldom educated, which is a profoundly political and timely act. Bold argues that “ignorance of Islamic cultures forms the basis of the stereotyping that is used to justify slaughter of Afghan civilians, oppression of Palestinians, and genocide sanctions in Iraq” (Bold 2002, 136). However, the relatively sympathetic view of Islam suggested by Robinson may be contrasted with the suspicion implicit in some of Dan Simmons’ recent fiction (discussed below under “Authors and Their Works”). Reception. As the pace of social and technological change accelerated during the twentieth century, narratives of technological innovation and futuristic prospects became more culturally prominent. Science fiction expanded into new media such as radio, cinema, comics, television, and computer games. Science fiction concepts first appeared in radio serials starting in the 1930s; Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1932–1947), a space opera serial aimed at a young audience, was probably the first genuine science fiction radio program. Since the 1960s, science fiction radio drama has been rare in the US, but it was relatively common in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Broadcasts usually took the form of juvenile serials, including the Superman series (1940–1952), in which the superhero from Krypton foiled the schemes of various criminals. However, the most famous radio drama of all is a 1938 broadcast by Orson Welles: an adaptation of H.G. Wells’s novel War of the Worlds. This broadcast produced widespread panic when many listeners mistook it for a genuine news report about an invasion of planet Earth by Martians. As Peter Nicholls has observed in a detailed encyclopedia entry on science fiction cinema, science fiction has a natural affinity with the cinema, as the latter’s illusory qualities “are ideal for presenting fiction about things that are not real” (Clute and Nicholls 1993, 219) Cinematic science fiction began to develop in the early decades of the twentieth century, often showing a Frankensteinian or dystopian edge, as in Metropolis (1926), Fritz Lang’s portrayal of a mechanized and dehumanizing future city. During the 1930s, there was something of a boom in American science fiction cinema. This included adaptations of notable early science fiction texts, such as Shelley’s Frankenstein and works by H.G. Wells, though there were also entirely new stories, such as King Kong (1933). Again, the predominant emphasis was Frankensteinian, highlighting the self-destructive schemes of mad scientists. Some early movies were more optimistic about science and technology, notably When Worlds Collide (1951) and Things to Come (1936), the latter a British celebration of technocratic Wellsianism. Nonetheless, science fiction cinema has often displayed a bias against science and technology—most markedly in the many American and Japanese portrayals of monsters created by the misuse of science— such as the giant ants of Them! (1954), and the huge, city-destroying reptile of Gojira (1954) and its many sequels. Other movies that influenced American popular culture in the 1950s were Destination Moon (1950), The Thing (1951), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Forbidden Planet (1956), and The Fly (1958). In general, monsters, aliens, and space exploration provided the icons of 1950s science fiction cinema. Nicholls regards 1968 as the most important single year in science fiction cinema’s history (Clute and Nicholls 1993, 222). That year’s movie releases included Planet of the Apes, the likeable spoof Barbarella, and above all Stanley Kubrick’s visionary, cryptic, numinous 2001: A Space Odyssey (on which the director collaborated with Arthur C. Clarke). The 1960s and 1970s saw a large number

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of cautionary antitechnology movies, cinematic dystopias, and post-Holocaust movies. In more recent decades, besides drawing heavily on the conventions of heroic fantasy, adventure movies such as Star Wars (1977) have looked back to older forms of science fiction, such as superhero stories and Gernsback-era space opera. Star Wars can also been seen as belonging to the tradition of 1930s cinematic space opera, which yielded movies such as Flash Gordon (1936). Star Wars and its sequels, prequels, and imitations gave more impetus to media tie-in writing, which has sometimes been controversial in the science fiction writing. The frequent resemblance to modern fantasy works applies to science fiction in all media, but with particular force to action-adventure science fiction movies. During the late 1970s and the 1980s, a new kind of science fiction cinema emerged, perhaps beginning with Alien (1979), The Terminator (1984), David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly (1986), Predator (1987), and the sequels to each of these. This was a darker, grittier, sometimes ickier approach to science fiction. To some extent, this type of science fiction was rooted in the Frankensteinian tradition of technophobic horror, but it also had affinities with contemporaneous developments in prose science fiction, as well as in comics, where a darker style was showcased in the 1980s work of Frank Miller. Blade Runner (1982) depicts a police hunt for renegade androids in a near-future Los Angeles. Appearing at the same time as the first clearly cyberpunk short stories by Gibson and others—and anticipating Neuromancer by two years—Blade Runner is pure cyberpunk, imagined for the big screen; its importance as a masterpiece of cyberpunk film is rivalled only by The Matrix (1999), and its more recent sequels (The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, both released in 2003) and spin-offs. The history of science fiction comics begins with the space opera comic strips introduced into newspapers in the 1920s and 1930s, such as the Flash Gordon strip created in 1934. These led to reprints in comic-book form and then to original comic-book series, such as Action Comics, which introduced the figure of Superman in 1938. Superman obtained his own comic book in the following year, and he has provided the inspiration for a huge number of superheroes ever since. By the early 1950s, science fiction comics were popular, with an emphasis on interplanetary adventure and space opera, though a broad range of science fiction types and themes was covered. There were also frequent adaptations of prose science fiction by wellknown authors of the time. The year that transformed modern comic books was 1961, when Marvel Comics—which had published work in a variety of genres through the 1950s— created a new team of superheroes, the Fantastic Four. These characters obtained their superhuman powers through bodily mutation induced by exposure to cosmic rays during a mission in space. During the 1960s, Marvel and DC (which published comics featuring Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, and others) embarked on a rivalry that led to the creation of countless more superheroes and supervillains. Less commercially successful than the superhero comics were comic-book adaptations of movies, television shows, and prose narratives, though there were long-running adaptations of some major science fiction texts from cinema and television. Some companies began to experiment with collections of stories—or with long, stand-alone stories of considerable complexity, published in a larger and more durable format. The first of these that could plausibly be termed graphic novels began to appear in the early 1970s, and the expression “graphic novel” was

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popularized towards the end of that decade. This form of publication became established during the 1980s, with the publication of the Marvel Graphic Comic line, including God Loves, Man Kills (1982), by Chris Clairmont, which later influenced the X-Men movies; Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986) by Art Spiegelman; the fourvolume Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) by Frank Miller; and the twelvevolume Watchmen (1987) as well as the ten-volume V for Vendetta (1982–88), both by Alan Moore. This format has now become a staple within the comic-book industry. About the same time that the graphic novel reached its initial heights, George R.R. Martin and a group of collaborators—including Roger Zelazny and leading comics writer Chris Claremont—commenced a complementary venture: the Wild Cards series of books (1987–). Some of these volumes contain interrelated stories, while others are novels in their own right, composed by either a group of authors or a single author. This ongoing series tells of events in an alternative reality inhabited by superheroes and supervillains, among others, following the accidental release of an alien virus that transforms human DNA. The Wild Cards series has itself spun off comic-book adaptations. While the world of comic books is complex, the general tendency has been for American comics to be dominated by superhero adventures. These have fed back into television, cinematic, and prose science fiction, with numerous adaptations of superhero comic series. Some cinema adaptations—such as those involving Superman, Batman, and Marvel’s Spider-Man and X-Men—have achieved high levels of success, often setting box-office records and establishing places among the topgrossing movies of all time. The movies X-Men (2000), Spider-Man (2002), and their sequels have led to a major resurgence of comic-book superheroes in cinema during the early years of the twenty-first century. These movies have inspired further novelistic spin-offs, including novelizations in prose form of film scripts and entirely original superhero adventures. The first science fiction television series to be broadcast in the United States was the postwar Captain Video (1949–53, 1955–56), which featured a futuristic hero who battled various alien threats with the help of his Video Rangers. This started the practice of aiming science fiction on TV mainly at a young audience. Captain Video was followed by many space adventure and superhero programs. However, The Twilight Zone (1959–64) and The Outer Limits (1963–65) were varied anthologystyle programs with more appeal to adults: the former used a mix of science fiction and fantasy, while the latter was focused on science fiction, often reflecting something of the New Wave sensibility of the time. Some of its most famous scripts, including that for the most celebrated episode of all—“Demon with a Glass Hand” (1964)—were written by Harlan Ellison. The 1960s also saw the production of many science fiction or fantasy comedy shows, such as My Favorite Martian (1963–66). Drama series of the 1960s included Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964–68), Lost in Space (1965–68), and Time Tunnel (1966–67)—all aimed at children and teenagers—and The Invaders (1967–68), which sought a more mature audience. However, Star Trek (1966–69) was ultimately the most successful of the American science fiction shows of the 1960s. It featured the voyages of a giant starship, sent out to explore for new worlds and civilizations. Once again, the episode widely regarded as the best in the original series was one scripted by Ellison: “The City on the Edge of Forever” (1967). Though it did not attract strong ratings, Star Trek not only gained an enthusiastic fan base and eventually had many successors and

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imitators but also became the basis for both a long succession of movies—beginning with Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)—and numerous spin-off novels and comic books. Star Trek and the series that followed it maintained a strand of optimism that was not apparent in the dominant prose science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. Star Trek itself was set in a somewhat utopian version of the twenty-fourth century, when humanity has come together in the benign United Federation of Planets. With this backdrop, the series expressed hopes for mankind’s survival, maturity, and eventual flourishing in space. However clumsily, it suggested the possibility of a human society without racism, sexism, poverty, or gross inequality. The show’s cult following, together with the success of the Star Wars movies, led to the creation of many science fiction series in the 1970s and beyond, with fluctuations in priorities and fashions. One notable success was The X-Files (1993–2002)—a TV show that investigated the paranormal—with its catchy slogan “the truth is out there.” In the first decade of the twenty-first century, there is an intricate cross-fertilization of American and foreign cinema, comics, television, media-related prose science fiction, and computer games—a new medium that has gained enormous participation, especially among younger people, and that is now a wealthy industry in its own right. For example, the 1999 movie The Matrix has spawned feature-length sequels, short animations, comics, games, and other tie-in material. Along with the related genre of modern fantasy, science fiction has become a dominant presence in popular cultures worldwide. But despite the visibility of science fiction in popular culture—or perhaps because of it—the kinds of science fiction that are best known to the public do not accurately reflect the state of the art in prose science fiction. Cinematic space opera typically resembles the stories that first appeared in the 1920s as much as it resembles current post-cyberpunk forms of narrative. The relatively peripheral superhero variety of science fiction has had great prominence in the cinema, whereas more thoughtful movies with strong science fiction elements—such as The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)—are frequently not even marketed or discussed as science fiction. To an outsider, science fiction may appear to be a form of entertainment—a somewhat lurid one—aimed at the youth market, along with pop music and computer games. Of course, the production of entertaining works for children and teenagers is not a contemptible thing, and the most culturally visible works, such as the Star Wars movies, are technically dazzling products that gain additional strength and resonance through their respectful treatment of mythic archetypes. The work of writers and others involved in the multimedia complex of science fiction–based entertainment requires high levels of skill, knowledge, and professionalism. Moreover, popular science fiction in all media displays an admirable knowingness, complexity, and capacity for self-scrutiny that may not be apparent to the uninitiated. All that conceded, the most innovative work in prose science fiction is largely obscured. An ever-expanding body of scholarly and critical writing has emerged that examines, interprets, and evaluates the science fiction genre. This includes encyclopedic volumes such as The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993); specialist journals such as Science Fiction Studies, Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction (published by the Science Fiction Foundation) and Extrapolation (published by an official academic body, the Science Fiction Research Association); news magazines

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such as Locus; and many semiprofessional and amateur publications (the latter known as “fanzines”) that sometimes achieve high standards of analysis. Nonetheless, science fiction is held in relatively low regard by the elite literary culture. Some novelists (or their publishers) avoid the label, even when incorporating science fiction elements into their narratives. Karen Joy Fowler’s Sarah Canary (1991), for example, avoided science fiction marketing and thereby obtained a broader audience. In the process of defending science fiction, John Clute (1999) offers additional reasons why it is often dismissed as trash: much science fiction that is prominently marketed as such really is trash, he suggests. American science fiction authors have tended to dramatize ideas about the world and technology, as a consequence of which their work can be simplistic both in dealing with complex matters such as human nature and in depicting American triumphalism. These authors also receive a degree of the defensive disparagement from technology-wary humanists. At the same time, Clute argues, science fiction provides a bracing angle for writers to adopt in looking at the world—and at its potential—in a time of constant innovation and crisis. In the midst of ongoing controversy about science fiction’s literary and cultural value, Peter Brigg’s The Span of Mainstream and Science Fiction (2002) offers a sustained argument that trends in the last few decades have produced a convergence between science fiction and mainstream forms of fiction—however, exactly, these are understood. As discussed above, genre science fiction writers have developed an increasing literary sophistication. Conversely, the major physical, conceptual, and social transformations wrought by science during the nineteenth century and since have prompted mainstream writers to investigate themes that fall within science fiction’s domain. As Jonathan Lethem (1998) has lamented, there has been no true merger of science fiction and the literary mainstream, which often forces writers to choose a career in either one or the other. However, many literary authors have published stories and novels that are formally science fiction, or close to it. Two recent examples, out of many, are John Updike’s Toward the End of Time (1997) and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004); the former portrays the aftermath of a nuclear war between China and America, whereas the latter postulates that the great aviator and notorious anti-Semite Charles Lindbergh stood successfully for the U.S. presidency in 1940. Like Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt and Jack Dann’s The Rebel: An Imagined Life of James Dean (2004), Roth’s book demonstrates the ongoing vitality of the alternate history novel. Selected Authors. Since the early years of the new millennium, significant work has been written and published by science fiction authors whose careers commenced in several different eras of the genre’s development. This underlines the genre’s teeming diversity of movements, styles, and subgenres. Some of the distinguished authors who remain productive—such as Robert Silverberg, Frederick Pohl, and Ray Bradbury—have careers stretching back to the 1950s or even earlier. Major American authors from the New Wave era (such as Ursula Le Guin), from the cyberpunk era (such as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, and Michael Swanwick), and from the hard science fiction tradition (such as Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, and David Brin) continue to produce fine work, as do practitioners of varied forms of space opera—such as Orson Scott Card, Catherine Asaro, and Elizabeth Moon. Accordingly, any discussion of major authors who have been active in recent years must be highly selective.

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The recent novels of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson are discussed above under the heading “Contexts and Issues,” where the point is made that their work is merging with the mainstream. Something similar may be said of Bruce Sterling, the most aggressive advocate of cyberpunk during the 1980s: Sterling’s Zeitgeist (2000) and The Zenith Angle (2004) are further examples of novels that have emerged from the science fiction tradition but crossed over into territories that resemble the literary mainstream or the techno-thriller genre. Conversely, Richard Powers is the most prominent contemporary example of an American author whose interest in the implications of science and technology almost carries him into the house of science fiction. His career has explored such issues as genetics, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality—as in The Gold Bug Variations (1991), Galatea 2.2 (1995), and Plowing the Dark (2000). Powers’s ninth novel, The Echo Maker (2006) won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Its focus is on cognitive neurology and, particularly, on the mysteries that surround a young man, Mark Schluter, who suffers severe head injuries when he flips his truck at high speed and is subsequently diagnosed with Capgras syndrome. He is unable to accept that his sister, Karin, is really his sister and accuses her of being a fake. Indeed, he starts to think that his dog, his house, and much else in his Nebraska hometown, are cunning facsimiles, which leads him to concoct bizarre explanations for this. A celebrated neurologist, Dr. Gerald Weber—a kind of Oliver Sacks figure—is brought in to assist, but he finds his own personality undermined by his interactions with Mark and others in the town. Throughout, The Echo Maker contains meditations on the vulnerability of our selves and our perceptions of the world, a vulnerability that is acted out at many levels. By contrast, old-fashioned space opera continues to be strongly represented in contemporary science fiction. Its most prominent exponents include Lois McMaster Bujold and Elizabeth Moon. Bujold’s main claim to prominence in the science fiction field is based on a series of space opera adventures reminiscent of C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower stories (and their earlier science fiction imitators). She writes about the life, vicissitudes, and successes of Miles Vorkosigan, a somewhat unusual hero for such adventures, because he is born with brittle bones and other medical problems. As a result his growth is stunted, and at one stage he fails the physical requirements to join the Service Academy. Nonetheless, Miles gradually rises in rank: in Diplomatic Immunity (2002), he is 32 years old and has attained the high post of Lord Auditor. In this book, the Barrayarran Emperor delegates him to deal with a diplomatic problem that involves murder, intrigue, and a colorful cast of characters. Elizabeth Moon’s greatest single success has been her Nebula Award–winning novel The Speed of Dark (2002), which is about a profoundly autistic but highly functioning individual, Lou Arrendale, who holds down a difficult job with a large employer. Lou is confronted by a possible cure for his syndrome. In reviewing this novel, Gwyneth Jones describes Lou’s choice as a tragic one: “do you want to be normal if it will cost you everything you know and love?” (Jones, 2003, 20). Apart from The Speed of Dark, Moon has produced a large body of writing that typically describes adventures in space, often with an emphasis on military operations and tactics, reflecting her own significant experience in active service with the U.S. Marine Corps. Joe Haldeman’s continued success since the mid-1970s represents the flowering of a traditional kind of science fiction. Despite its title, Haldeman’s Forever Peace

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(1997) is not a sequel to his 1970s award-winning novel, The Forever War, but they both deal realistically with the horrors of war and war’s possible roots in human nature. Forever Peace is set in the year 2043, during the Ngumi War, in which a coalition of Western nations led by the United States is attempting to put down the rebellion of an alliance of poor nations. The early part of the novel focuses on the methods of mid-twenty-first-century warfare, in which Americans use remote-controlled war machines—notably, the robotlike “soldierboys,” constructed through advanced nanotechnological manufacturing. In the second half, intrigue and complexity are added when two scientists discover that the completion and operation of an immense particle collider being built around Jupiter could create a new Big Bang and destroy the existing universe. The two scientists, aided by other people, attempt to stop the project and to advance their own plan to alter human nature—by making us more peaceful and putting an end to the cycle of wars—but they are opposed by a fanatical religious cult, the Hammer of God. Forever Free (1999), however, is a true sequel to The Forever War, set after the interspecies war described in the earlier book has actually ended. Told in the first person by William Mandella, the main character of The Forever War, Forever Free involves an attempt to hijack an old space cruiser on the planet Middle Finger, where Mandella has settled down with his wife Marygay. The idea is for a group of war veterans and their families to escape the Galaxy and to use relativistic time dilation to travel forty thousand years into the future, when things might be more interesting. However, something goes wrong early in this journey, and the disgruntled vets are forced to return to Middle Finger, where everything has changed much more quickly than expected. This is a surprisingly whimsical book, sometimes a bit self-indulgent, much in the spirit of Heinlein’s late novels. Haldeman’s Camouflage (2004) is a classic science fiction narrative that would have been successful in the golden age, except for its sexual frankness. In the near future, an alien spaceship is discovered deep beneath the surface of the ocean, and two dangerous nonhuman beings take an interest in it, though initially being unaware of each other. Both are millions of years old, superhuman in many of their abilities, and possessed of similar (though interestingly not identical) capacities to change shape and appearance. They both live within human societies, camouflaged as human beings. One of these creatures, the changeling, has gradually become benevolent towards humans, but the other, the chameleon, is driven by an urge to kill and destroy. This sets up a confrontation between good (of a kind) and evil, enlivened by spectacular combat and interspecies sex, all described with vividness and panache that few of Haldeman’s peers could equal. American-born Toronto resident Robert Charles Wilson became a Canadian citizen in 2007, but he has been a significant player in American science fiction since his first novel, A Hidden Place, was published in 1986. Wilson’s narratives draw on the full breadth of the genre’s traditions, particularly hard science fiction and the New Wave. He describes strange transformations of the world, as in Darwinia (1998), which is premised on the mysterious replacement in 1912 of the flora, fauna, as well as geographical and geological identity of Europe. In The Chronoliths (2001), huge monuments, seemingly from the future, appear suddenly in the early twenty-first-century world. They commemorate victories by somebody named only as “Kuin” in inscriptions on the monuments. The appearance of each Chronolith causes immense local destruction, and, as each new one appears, there is worldwide fear, confusion, and political destabilization. In both of these novels, Wilson

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concentrates on the reactions of an ordinary American man to the world-changing events and their social repercussions. Spin (2005) is in a similar mold. A kind of membrane suddenly appears around the Earth, with no explanation, and blanks out the stars and the moon, while selectively letting through the light of the sun. The alien membrane comes to be known as “the Spin,” whereas the beings hypothesized as having created it are called “the Hypotheticals.” Spin is also a love story, depicting the narrator’s devotion to his childhood sweetheart over three decades, and the complications and difficulties that their relationship encounters. His life is confusingly entangled with Diane’s and her twin brother’s from the night when the stars go out. The first published sequel to Spin, entitled Axis (2007), describes the human colonization of a new world created by the mysterious Hypotheticals. Vernor Vinge has long been a prophet of Singularity and posthuman future, though this hardly exhausts his immense contribution to science fiction. His most significant achievement in the new millennium is Rainbows End (2006), a nearfuture novel, set in San Diego in 2025. It impressively portrays a world greatly, yet plausibly, altered from our own, one with ubiquitous cybernetic devices and endless conspiracies within conspiracies. This world is, it seems, fast approaching the Singularity or something like it. At one level, Rainbows End is a redemption narrative: the story of a brilliant— but unscrupulous and emotionally cruel—poet, Robert Gu. Gu is restored to mental clarity and youthfulness after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, and he now has to create a new life for himself. He finds that his poetic genius has gone, though he has new talents and a softened personality. He struggles to fit into society after losing two decades as he is gradually transformed into a wiser and kinder person. At another level, Vinge presents a battle of cyberspace geniuses, one of whom is Alfred Vaz. Vaz is a high-level intelligence operative who wants to develop a mind-control technology to enforce world peace—a similar theme to Haldeman’s Forever Peace, but presented with a quite different authorial attitude. We sympathize with Vaz’s goal, even while being led to believe that his methods are unacceptable. Much of the book’s mystery lies in the true identity of Mr. Rabbit, Vaz’s opponent, who tries to put a stop to the mind-control scheme. Though Rainbows End has many of the trappings of cyberpunk—and its author has a strong claim to have inspired the cyberpunk movement with his fiction of the early 1980s—Graham Sleight shrewdly observes that Vinge’s novel does not have a cyberpunk ethos. Whereas Gibson, for example, depicts a world that is socially polarized between the street-smart and the corporate rich, Vinge presents a sunny and nonthreatening middle-class vision (Sleight 2006, 17). The rush towards a posthuman techno-rapture seems to take place within a comfortable suburban bubble. This may, in fact, be astute extrapolation on Vinge’s part, but it does raise questions about what role there will be for the poor people of the world in a massively information-rich future. In Ilium (2003) and its sequel Olympos (2005), Dan Simmons takes a radically different approach to posthuman possibilities: the events are set several thousand years in the future, long after our world has been transformed by extraordinary technologies. This is a “far future of posthumanity where the distinction between organic and machine blur[s] into insignificance” (Jeffery 2004, 1220). Simmons gradually reveals a complex backstory that requires considerable effort to piece together. The background includes global religious conflict on an unprecedented

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scale, with the development of biological weapons for mass extermination by political Islamists; the rise of reengineered superhuman beings; colossal engineering projects (such as habitable rings that orbit the Earth); and a space-faring civilization of surprisingly sympathetic, self-conscious robots called “moravecs” (after Hans Moravec, a celebrated robotics guru). Much of the action in the narrative present takes place on the plains of ancient Troy—but it is an alternative version of ancient Troy created by posthuman beings who emulate the powers and personalities of the Greek gods. Simmons weaves together multiple strands of story into what is really a single, immense novel published in two volumes. Simmons is one of a growing number of science fiction writers who attempt to imagine a truly posthuman future while still engaging the sympathies of human readers. In part, this is achieved by including more-or-less human characters in all the narrative strands, though, as Jeffery recognizes, (2004, 123) the moravecs have the most human-seeming sensibilities of the lot. The Ilium-Olympos project represents only one fraction of Simmons’s ambitious and growing body of literary work, which also includes important contributions to modern space opera and the horror genre. As one leading science fiction scholar has remarked (Freedman, 2005, 125–126), Kim Stanley Robinson may be the most accomplished American science fiction writer to emerge since the 1960s and 1970s. Robinson’s first two novels, Icehenge and The Wild Shore, were published in 1984, and since then he has continued to produce complex, humane works of hard science fiction, interspersed occasionally with more whimsical pieces, such as Escape from Kathmandu (1989). He is best known for his epic Mars trilogy—which covers two centuries of colonization, terraforming, and revolution on Mars, beginning with the departure of the First Hundred from Earth in 2027. Since then he has written Antarctica (1997), a near-future novel of illicit oil drilling and secret feral settlements, and his huge alternate history novel The Years of Rice and Salt (discussed above under Context and Issues). Most recently, Robinson has published a new trilogy focused on the near-future impact of global warming: Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005), and Sixty Days and Counting (2007). Robinson’s characters are involved in politics and high-level science administration in a very-near-future Washington, DC. They face accelerating climate change that produces floods in Washington, huge storms along the California coast, the halting of the Gulf Stream, a ferociously bitter winter in North America, the breaking off of enormous tabular icebergs in Antarctica, and the necessary evacuation of Tuvalu, as sea levels rise. American political leaders are slow to accept the new reality, remaining driven by an increasingly irrelevant imperative for economic growth. The strength of these novels lies in their synthesis of many types of events as the author conveys the idea of a world undergoing change. There are dramatic depictions of disasters interweaved with political machinations, mysteries, and the characters’ ordinary lives. We are shown day-to-day work activities and the detail of juggling these with personal demands (looking after children, finding somewhere to live in a new city, and so on). In his review of Forty Signs of Rain, Freedman (2005, 129) observes that, at points, it is one of the best novelistic depictions of the institutional practice of science since Gregory Benford’s Timescape in 1980. That observation could be extended to the other books of the trilogy, and it is even more impressive that Robinson is able to combine the hard–science fiction elements with a finely observed picture of his characters’ personal lives.

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Robinson does have rivals for preeminence, and they surely include Connie Willis, who has won many major awards in the broader field of science fiction and fantasy. By any reasonable measure, she is the most professionally honored author ever to work in genre science fiction. Willis began writing professionally in the late 1970s, and she emerged as a major talent during the following decade. Her 1982 story “Fire Watch” won both of the science fiction field’s premier awards—a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award—and it remains one of the most admired of all time-travel narratives. She won her most recent of many Hugo Awards for “Inside Job” (2005), a humorous fantasy novella. Other highlights of her distinguished career include her Fire Watch collection (1985) as well as the novels Lincoln’s Dreams (1987), Doomsday Book (1992), and To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998). Willis displays a fascination with history, and much of her work uses the plot device of a near future in which historians at Oxford University are trained to use time travel to observe the past—often encountering awkward problems or personal dangers, and becoming deeply involved in events. This enables the author to reveal and interpret past eras. She shows them in vivid detail, whether her focus is on the Nazi Blitz (Fire Watch), Europe at the time of the Black Death (Doomsday Book), or Victorian England (To Say Nothing of the Dog). Lincoln’s Dreams employs a somewhat different device to reveal the past: it is set in the present, but one character is seemingly dreaming the dreams of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. In Passage (2001), Willis presents the highly realistic narrative of a research psychologist’s investigation of near-death experiences. The science fictional twist in the tale is that a brilliant neurologist at the same hospital invents a drug that enables these experiences to be manufactured at will. When she uses the drug, the researcher has an apparent experience of wandering the Titanic on its ill-fated voyage, allowing Willis to examine another emotionally resonant corner of history’s mansions. We see, too, a fine example of the thematic and stylistic convergence between literary mainstream and some ambitious kinds of science fiction. Phenomena described by the neurological sciences are now proving a common source of fascination for supposedly genre writers, such as Willis, and supposedly mainstream writers, such as Richard Powers. Once again, there is a considerable affinity between thoughtful, technically ambitious science fiction and scientifically literate work from the literary mainstream. There has, of course, been no true merger; and it should not be forgotten that science fiction has become an increasingly visible component of a popular culture whose values are often remote from those of novelists and short story writers from a high literary tradition. Popular science fiction is of interest and value in its own right, whether or not it displays a conventional literary sensibility. But scientific understanding and technological innovation continue to transform our world and the ways in which we perceive ourselves. As long as that remains so, the implications of science and technology will interest artists and writers from many traditions. It should not, therefore, be surprising to find resemblances between, say, Delany’s Dhalgren and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (in the 1970s), or between a recent novel by a science fiction author, such as Passage, and a novel from across the literary divide, such as The Echo Maker. Marketing techniques and authorial reputations aside, there is little that distinguishes the most ambitious science fiction writing and the most scientifically aware narratives currently being produced within the literary mainstream. It is salutary to note this convergence, or at least intersection, of traditions: a lively awareness of it may enrich our experience of both.

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SCIENCE FICTION AWARDS World Science Fiction Society presents the annual Hugo Awards at the annual World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon). Awards are currently presented in 15 categories. Recent award winners in the “Best Novel” category have included Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge (2007); Spin by Robert Charles Wilson (2006); Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (2005); Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold (2004); Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer (2003); American Gods by Neil Gaiman (2002); Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling (2001); and A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge. The Nebula Awards are presented by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Recent winners for “Best Novel” have included Seeker by Jack McDevitt (2006); Camouflage by Joe Haldeman (2005); Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold (2004); Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon (2003); American Gods by Neil Gaiman (2002); The Quantum Rose by Catherine Asaro (2001); and Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear. Sources: World Science Fiction Society-World Science Fiction Convention Web site. http://www.worldcon.org/index.html, and Science Fiction Writers of America Web site. http://www.sfwa.org/awards

Bibliography Aldiss, Brian, and David Wingrove. Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction. London: Gollancz, 1986. Andre-Driussi, Michael. “Languages of the Dying Sun.” In Earth Is But a Star: Excursions Through Science Fiction to the Far Future. Damien Broderick, ed. Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2001, 217–236. Bould, Mark. “Review of The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson.” Foundation 86 (Autumn 2002): 134–136. Brigg, Peter. The Span of Mainstream and Science Fiction: A Critical Study of a New Literary Genre. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2002. Clareson, Thomas D. Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction: The Formative Period (1926–1970). Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. Clute, John, and Peter Nicholls, eds. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. ———. “In Defense of Science Fiction” Salon November 27, 2007. http://www.salon.com/ books/feature/1999/05/25/sfdefense/index.html. Crichton, Michael. Prey. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. Freedman, Carl. “Review of Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson.” Foundation 95 (Autumn 2005): 125–130. Haldeman, Joe. Camouflage. New York: Ace, 2004. ———. Forever Peace. New York: Ace, 1997. Harris-Fain, Darren. Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction: The Age of Maturity, 1970–2000. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2005. Hartwell, David G., and Kathryn Cramer, eds. The Hard SF Renaissance. New York: Tor, 2002. Jeffery, Steve. “Review of Ilium by Dan Simmons.” Foundation 91 (Summer 2004): 122–124. Jones, Gwyneth. “Review of The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon.” New York Review of Science Fiction 177 (May 2003): 20–21. Moon, Elizabeth. The Speed of Dark. New York: Ballantine, 2003. Powers, Richard. The Echo Maker. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006.

SCIENCE WRITING (NONFICTION) Robinson, Kim Stanley. Forty Signs of Rain. New York: Bantam, 2004. Scholes, Robert. Structural Fabulation: An Essay on Fiction of the Future. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1975. Simmons, Dan. Ilium. New York: EOS, 2003. ———. Olympos. New York: EOS, 2005. Sleight, Graham. “Review of Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge.” New York Review of Science Fiction 215 (July 2006): 17–18. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Vinge, Vernor. Rainbow’s End. New York: Tor, 2006. Willis, Connie. Passage. New York: Bantam, 2001. Wilson, Robert Charles. Spin. New York: Tor, 2005.

Further Reading Broderick, Damien. Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1995; Clute, John, and Peter Nicholls, eds. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993; Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000; Geraghty, Lincoln. Living with Star Trek: American Culture and the Star Trek Universe. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007; Locus Online. http://www.locusmag.com/ (accessed November 27, 2007); James, Edward, and Farah Mendlesohn, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; Lethem, Jonathan. “Why Can’t We All Just Live Together? A Vision of Genre Paradise Lost.” New York Review of Science Fiction 121 (September 1998): 1, 8–9. (Originally published in shorter form in Village Voice as “Close Encounters: The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction.”); Science Fiction Foundation Web site. http://www.sf-foundation.org/ (accessed November 27, 2007); Science Fiction Research Association Web site. http://www.sfra.org/ (accessed November 27, 2007); Science Fiction Studies Web site. http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/ (accessed November 27, 2007); Seed, David, ed. A Companion to Science Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2005; Westfahl, Gary. The Mechanics of Wonder. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998; Westfahl, Gary, ed. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders (three volumes). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005.

RUSSELL BLACKFORD

SCIENCE WRITING (NONFICTION) Definition. Science nonfiction—or popular science, for the general audience—is an omnibus term referring to science-based literature that is not fiction (popular science and pop science have a slightly derogatory connotation). It includes essentially all literary nonfiction about science, particularly the natural sciences. It is distinct from the specialized literatures of the arts, sciences, and humanities that appear primarily in scholarly journals and university press monographs, and from the technical references and textbooks that are intended for professionals, practitioners, and students in a given field. Popular science literature includes the biography and autobiography of individual scientists, accounts of scientific discovery and technological invention, as well as explanations of scientific ideas and their implications. It is intimately connected to the professional domain of science journalism, drawing many of its practitioners from the ranks of science news reporters and science writers. Popular science also overlaps with the interdisciplinary scientific monograph, that is, a book published by a scholarly press that is read by scientists outside the

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author’s particular specialty but whose research will nonetheless be influenced by the author’s ideas. Some such books receive broader attention, especially if they are in some degree controversial. E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology (1975), for example, is regarded by some critics as an extremist argument for the genetic determination of human behavior and thus as a potential rationalization for social injustice (see Ceccarelli 2001 for a discussion of the reception of Wilson’s work). The present chapter excludes topics such as astrology, UFOlogy, parapsychology, and New Age occultism (that is, the hidden powers of things such as pyramids and crystals), which are more properly regarded as pseudoscience. Popular science tends to emphasize the intellectual content of science—that is, its findings and speculations—rather than its sociological character, its historical development, or even its policy implications. According to Mellor (2003), when written by a scientist, it tends to be didactic in purpose and tone, and it is primarily interested in an expository effect (this does not prevent the occurrence of some lively prose, however; e.g., Sagan 1973). When written by a science journalist or other nonscientist, the focus usually shifts toward storytelling, which creates a narrative effect by highlighting the dramatic elements of discovery within a particular field (e.g., Gleick 1987); the tone thus often becomes literary or even poetic (e.g., Ferris 1997). Either scientistic or journalistic popular science authors may alternately focus on argumentation, laying out some kind of science-based critique of society’s use, misuse, or abuse of science and technology (e.g., Carson 1962; Kolbert 2006; Rees 2003) or, more rarely, an examination of science itself (Smolin 2006; Horgan 1996) to achieve a critical effect. In other words, popular science as a type of literature generally consists of works written by scientists or science journalists who try to explain current ideas and recent developments in a scientific field, usually either from the perspective of an expert scientific “insider” who seeks to teach the lay reader about those ideas or from that of a knowledgeable outside observer who emphasizes the narrative of discovery and the praiseworthy responsibility of particular individuals for some of those developments. A critical popular science also exists that warns a lay audience of problems associated with ignoring social or other ramifications of scientific findings, or that conversely engages in a critique of the practice of science. The underlying point of commonality among all three types of popular science literature is that they are geared toward “popularization,” that is, toward making science, scientific knowledge, or scientific habits of mind accessible to a broader audience. The derogatory connotation of the term popular science stems from its implicit contrast with real science, that is, the scientific communications produced by scientists for other scientists, rather than for a more general public. Very few scientists are charged in their job descriptions with communicating with the public (Reichhardt 2005); therefore, popular science is taken to be less serious than real science, a distraction from more worthy efforts—at least in the judgment of the review, tenure, and hiring committees evaluating the professional accomplishments of scientists, who tend not to consider themselves responsible for “outreaching” to the public in any case (Brown, Propst, and Woolley 2004). And despite the existence of a few high-profile popular science best sellers, publishers are coming to recognize the category as an increasingly crowded niche with a comparatively limited readership (Reichhardt 2005).

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THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POPULAR SCIENCE AND SCIENCE FICTION In general, popular science is treated with greater respect than is science fiction, because as nonfiction, the former can claim for itself the sober mantle of “real science,” in contrast to the speculative and ostensibly puerile character of genre fiction. Science fiction writers, for their part, make extensive use of information from popular science as background and inspiration (Sheffield 1999), and those with scientific expertise sometimes write popular science as well as science fiction, as the oeuvre of noted writer Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), whose PhD was in biochemistry, indicates (e.g., Asimov 1972). Similarly, science luminaries better known for their popularizing work have also written science fiction novels (e.g., Sagan 1985; Forward 1980).Additionally, an entire subcategory exists of titles purporting to examine and explain the “science” underlying science-fictional pop culture, of which The Physics of Star Trek is an early example (Krauss 1995) and The Physics of Superheroes (Kakalios 2005), a more recent one.

History. The emergence of a robust publishing category called popular science can be seen as an expression of a basic human desire to make sense of the world, coupled with the existence of both a diffuse reading public and a class of knowledgeable expert writers, conditions which existed as early as the Renaissance in some Italian cities (Eamon 1985). A functional, sociological impetus for science popularization is linked to the growth of science as a domain with a characteristic and paradoxical central feature—namely, science produces knowledge that is on the one hand universal in its scope and applicability, but on the other esoteric in its origins and provenance. The working out of this tension was part of the early development of science—for example, in the seventeenth century natural philosophers wrangled over how much confidence to place in experimental demonstration vis-à-vis reason-driven theorizing, and over how much public participation in the counsels of science was warranted (Eiseley 1973; Lynn 2001; Shapin and Schaffer 1985). The sacerdotal character often ascribed to scientists speaking in the public sphere—speaking, that is, as priestly mediators of the natural world—is a product of their access to this abstruse but essential knowledge (Lessl 1989). In the 19th century, popular science essayists and writers emerged in Europe, Australia and the United States to explicate scientific ideas and make the case, however tendentious, for their larger social or cultural meaningfulness (Fyfe 2005; Repp 2000; Lightman 2000; Lucas, Maroske, and Brown-May 2006; Menand 2001). Besides increasing public knowledge of science, the popularization of science garners and shapes public support for scientific enterprise (Bates 2005; Cassidy 2005, 2006); and some scientist-popularizers eventually turn from presenting scientific concepts per se to promoting the principles and practices of scientific inquiry (e.g., Sagan 1973 vs. Sagan 2006; Gould 1977 vs. Gould 1999; Weinberg 1977 vs. Weinberg 2001) in the face of exaggerated or dystopian science-fictional and mass-media images of science (see Nerlich, Clarke, and Dingwall 1999; Petersen, Anderson, and Allan 2005; Schnabel 2003 for discussions). Popular science also enables disparate scientific communities to monitor each other for useful ideas and innovations (Paul 2004). There is, therefore, a recognized social value in the mission of popularizing science, despite an unwarranted professional stigmatization of those who engage in it

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(Shermer 2002). Opinion surveys show that while support for science and scientific research is broad and strong, public knowledge of specific scientific concepts is sparse (Miller 2004; Brown, Propst, and Woolley 2004; Smith 2003; Bainbridge 2002). Given this fact, legislatures, science policy advocates, and science educators have consistently sought to encourage greater public awareness, knowledge, and appreciation of science, motivated by the sense that “scientific literacy”—that is, familiarity with concepts and ideas emerging from the work of science (see DeBoer 2000; Paisley 1998)—is essential for robust economic competitiveness and (more recently) meaningful democratic decision making (Hodson 2003). For example, during the 1920s a national debate took place in Britain over the “neglect of science” in public education, inspiring many scientists to write and publishers to print books on science for the public (Mayer 1997; Bowler 2006). However, the incorporation of popular science into formal scientific education occurs only on an ad hoc basis (Lam 2005; Wally, Levinger, Grainger 2005). In the 1940s, American comic books published biographical accounts of medical researchers and innovators—such as Louis Pasteur and Walter Reed—as a commercial effort to capitalize on the general success of comic books by making use of educational (i.e., “true life”) material (Hansen 2004). Later, during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite created perceptions of a “science gap,” legislation was enacted to support science education (Clowse 1981), itself part of a broader political discussion over the character and form of a national scientific research alliance of private and public research-sponsoring organizations, institutions, and corporations (Greenhill 2000), most of which are little known to the public (Brown, Propst, and Woolley 2004). Some critics suggest that the pressure upon researchers to justify their funding creates an environment in which they are motivated to seek out media attention, thereby contributing to the “hyping” of science (Caulfield 2004). Popularizers of science, on the other hand, attribute their motivation to a desire to share the romance of science, the sense of wonder that it evokes. “Not explaining science seems to me perverse,” wrote astronomer Carl Sagan (1996), whose 13-part television documentary Cosmos and its accompanying book (Sagan 1980) presents a panoramic breadth of scientific ideas and speculation. “When you’re in love, you want to tell the world.” Despite the prior existence of some well-known popularizations such as Sagan’s work and physicist Steven Weinberg’s account of the Big Bang in The First Three Minutes (1977), the recent history of popular science publishing begins in many accounts with the publication of physicist Steven Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (1988), which despite its intellectual density (some reports call it “unreadability”) initiated a pop science boom in publishing that lasted through the 1990s (Reichhardt 2005; Tallack 2004). At about the same time, the publication of James Gleick’s Chaos (1987), with its intimations of a revolutionary new mathematics, drew considerable popular attention to the implications of studying complex dynamic systems. Chaos theory emerged from such studies, and its popularization took on an enormous weight as a metaphor for the fragmented and chaotic postmodern world. Mathematical insights from chaos theory have been used in various scientific disciplines and still receives some attention from science popularizers (Gribbin 2004). Some suggest that the popular science boom has tightened up subsequently, though the precise dimensions of the contraction are disputed (Levin 2005a). The success of Hawking’s book and of science journalist Dava Sobel’s Longitude (1995)—an account of the solution of a perplexing navigational problem in the 17th

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century—is cited as the proximate cause of a glut of popular science books, in which “formulaic and regurgitative writing” are the norm—although even the most critical admit the possibility of gold among the dross (Laszlo 2005). Despite experimentations with novelistic and memoir-form popular science (e.g., Levin 2002), a consensus seems to have arisen that the paramount requirement for good popular science is clarity of writing combined with an understanding of the science, rather than literary flair (Aczel 2004). This may mean only that the content of popular science has spilled out of its traditional boundaries; for example, certain playwrights have found great dramatic potential in scientific ideas such as chaos theory (Stoppard 1993) and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (Frayn 2000). But the overall imperative toward clarity may account for the recent critical and popular success of Bill Bryson’s (2003) A Short History of Nearly Everything, an overview of scientific ideas. As a travel writer, Bryson is used to clearly explaining unfamiliar territory to his readers. Trends and Themes. There are a few topic areas in popular science that consistently receive attention from writers of popular science, their publishers, reviewers, and the public. These include the related areas of physics, cosmology, and astronomy on one hand, and biology, genetics, and evolution (and its discontents) on the other. The public fascination with these domains of scientific inquiry can be attributed to their perceived potential for revealing fundamental information about the nature of the cosmos or the character of humanity. Hawking (1988) after all promised in A Brief History of Time to show how physics could let us understand the mind of God; and the emergence of a school of literary criticism that seeks to analyze the behavior of fictional characters in evolutionary terms speaks to the power of genetic explanations of human activities (Shea 2005). Much recent popular science in the domain of physics and cosmology continues to follow in the tradition of Hawking. The author reviews the development of modern physics, beginning with Einstein’s insight about the invariance of the speed of light regardless of the speed of the observer and showing how this led to further insights about the composition of matter at subatomic scales and the large-scale history of the universe. After this review, the author turns to a discussion of more recent, speculative developments that build upon the earlier findings or address their implications, such as alternate universes (Kaku 2005b), hidden or “rolled up” dimensions of space-time (Randall 2005), or variations in the speed of light at different times in the history of the universe (Magueijo 2003). The centennial of the publication of Albert Einstein’s groundbreaking papers explaining poorly understood experimental findings relating to the nature of light and the behavior of atoms (one of which earned him a Nobel Prize) in 1905 marked a surge in Einstein-related books (Levin 2005b), some by physicists (Kaku 2005a; Rigden 2005) and others by science writers (Fox and Keck 2004)—with the former focusing on the implications of Einstein’s physics and the latter seeking to provide the scientist’s human context. Interestingly, a number of books in recent years have been written by physicists who believe that a mistake is being made by the continued commitment of physicists to string theory, which posits that various subatomic particles can be understood as the three-dimensional “projections” of unobservable string-like objects vibrating in some kind of higher-dimensional space (Smolin 2006; Woit 2006). These critiques vary in their vehemence but hinge upon the idea that string theory is so far from testable that it is not truly scientific. Testability (or falsifiability) means that an empirical demonstration would produce different results if an idea were true

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than if it were false, and so the possibility of experimental refutation is regarded as the sine qua non of scientific status for a theory. The critics believe that the focus on string theory is stifling alternatives, and this debate has reached the popular press (Matthews 2006). For their part, advocates of string theory–based approaches point to the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland as an exciting opportunity for garnering further empirical data that may provide support for string theory models (e.g., Greene 1999; Randall 2005). With the passing (at least for now) of the heroic age of space exploration—no giant leaps for humanity seem immediately in the offing—books about astronomy and space science have grown narrower in scope, even if their scale remains interplanetary. Science writer Dava Sobel’s The Planets (2005) is a set of essays, one per planet, that combines scientific information with literary, historical, and even astrological allusions, in an effort to show how the lore of the planets is very much embedded in Western thought. The effect is one of a literate and meditative musing upon the intersection of science and culture. Such efforts are not limited to astronomical science, however: Jennifer Ouellette’s Black Bodies and Quantum Cats (2005) attempts to illuminate episodes from the history of physics with references to history and popular culture. Planetologist Steve Squyre’s Roving Mars (2005), on the other hand, is straight narrative. He tells the story of the design, construction, launch, and success of Spirit and Opportunity, two robotic Mars rovers that he helped build. Similarly, astronomer Fred Watson’s Stargazer (2005) is a historical and technological appreciation of the telescope and its role in astronomy. Increasingly, however, popular science is drawing upon the cognitive sciences for its material. This is perhaps to be expected, given the extent to which questions about the workings of the brain and its relationship to consciousness and mind have gained prominence in scientific inquiry over the past ten to fifteen years (Horgan 1999). Recent contributions by cognitive scientists to popular science include Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain On Music (2006), which discusses Levitin’s investigations into the psychology of music as well as his own metamorphosis from musician to music-loving scientist. Intellectual territory somewhat more fraught is covered by Louann Brizendine’s The Female Brain (2006). This book provides an account of a neuropsychiatrist’s conclusions about the differences between male and female brains, drawing upon her twenty years of research and clinical practice. Brizendine argues that hormonal and neurological differences between the sexes do in fact make women more language-, emotion-, and memory-oriented and men more sexand aggression-oriented. Recent popular science drawing on biology and genetics has notably included a retrospective summary of James Watson’s contribution to molecular biology to medicine, law, and technology (Watson and Berry 2003). His codiscovery of DNA’s double-helical structure (Watson 1968) made possible more recent innovations in gene therapy, genetic engineering, and genomics. Explanations of evolutionary theory and the operation of natural and sexual selection continue to occupy the attention of science popularizers. In The Ancestor’s Tale (Dawkins 2004), Richard Dawkins retraces the evolutionary branchings that resulted in humanity moving backwards in time through a series of rendezvous toward the common ancestor of life on earth. The (specious) currency of intelligent design (ID) has moved some science popularizers to an ardent defense of evolution, as in skeptic Michael Shermer’s Why Darwin Matters (2006), which refutes the various argumentative threads essayed by ID’s proponents, such as the “anthropic principle” (the universe

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seems to have been made especially well suited to us) and “irreducible complexity” (biological features like eyes and the organelles of cells are just too complicated to have evolved by chance) by showing that they don’t hold up to scrutiny. A broader trend to use science to make sense of human action rather than origin is evident in two quite disparate books: science writer Stephen Hall’s Size Matters (2006) and geographer Jared Diamond’s Collapse (2005). Hall, himself a short man, is interested in the effect of height on boys’ happiness and future success. He outlines the history of research on height and growth and criticizes the medicalization of shortness by using human growth hormone on children. Diamond, on the other hand, is interested in identifying the causal forces at work in broad swaths of human history. His earlier book Guns, Germs, and Steel (Diamond 1997) argues that accidents of geography explain how the West came to geopolitical primacy in modern times. Collapse (subtitled “How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”) is a set of case studies that again seeks to isolate the causal features of a particular historical phenomenon: in this case, how societies can emerge, develop, flower, and then—sometimes even in their moment of flowering—collapse and vanish utterly, like the Norse in Greenland or the priesthood of the temples of Angkor Wat did. His answer includes some combination of self-inflicted environmental damage, climate change, and the presence or absence of hostile or unhelpful neighbors, and it is derived from comparative quantitative analysis of the factors he finds in the cases he examines. Similarly, the economist Steven Levitt’s Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner 2005) offers counterintuitive, startling conclusions—such as the possibility that the legalization of abortion may lower the crime rate—drawing upon economic (rather than moral) reasoning and analysis. Finally, scientists continue to debate over the relationship between science and religion, as implicated in the notion of intelligent design discussed above. The lectures posthumously published as The Varieties of Scientific Experience (Sagan 2006) seek to convey the literal awesomeness of science as a way of understanding the universe and as a source through which human purpose may be made rather than received. The God Delusion (Dawkins 2006), a more controversial and polemical book, tries to explain religious sentiment as the product of our inability to understand the causal features of inanimate objects and the intentionality of animate beings. Other scientists (Collins 2006; Gingerich 2006) seek to provide reasons for their belief in God. Francis Collins—former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute and once an atheist—argues that science and faith are fundamentally compatible, and that the existence of altruism and other examples of moral law strongly suggests the presence of a God to initiate them. Owen Gingerich, an astronomer, asserts the anthropic principle that finds the earth and the universe suspiciously well suited for the emergence of life and intelligence; from this he infers the hand of a benign creator. Finally, sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson (2006) retreats from demonstration to embrace persuasion: he addresses his slim epistle The Creation to a Southern Baptist minister in an effort to enroll people of faith into the project of protecting and preserving the environment and the earth’s natural resources, bracketing off disputes about faith and reason in order to save what is precious to both. Context and Issues. The popularization of science occurs against a backdrop in which science stands in tension with other domains of knowledge and belief. In other words, the writer of popular science is potentially addressing a variety of audiences, all of which have different stakes in and commitments to the science at

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issue. In order to negotiate that variety, the writer of popular science must implicitly or explicitly take stances on the boundaries of science (how can science be distinguished from nonscience?); the relationship between science and society (is science a separate culture, or an integral part of this one?); and the larger purpose of science (is science merely a tool for instrumental, empirical knowledge, or does it fulfill some more transcendental function?). The ways in which science is bounded off from nonscience is called the “demarcation of science.” However, some scholars of science find it difficult to sustain efforts to mark the science-pseudoscience border, efforts which are based on the assumption that there exists a unified entity called science that can be defined with sufficient precision so as to include all desired cases and exclude all undesired ones (Still and Dryden 2004). Thus, a large subgenre within popular science has grown up around efforts to allow laypeople to distinguish the hallmarks of true science from its pseudoscientific imitators. Michael Shermer (2001), for example, attempts to establish principles for detecting the boundaries of science. Drawing upon science historian Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) notion of scientific paradigms that shift as new explanations gain adherents, he posits a scientific borderland in which tentative theories and approaches exist until moved, via further examination, to the precincts of either true science or nonscientific pseudoscience. Carl Sagan (1996) proposes that scientific habits of mind (a concern for evidence, an awareness of fallacious reasoning) and a compassionate skepticism are the proper tools for combating pseudoscience. The question of the culture of science and its relation to the society that supports it has prompted a number of critiques. The best known is probably C.P. Snow’s (1959) discussion of the two cultures of science and the arts, finding the two socially, politically, and ideologically diametrically opposed to each other. While Snow’s observations are dated with respect to the particular oppositions he observes, the overall notion of opposition continues to resonate in some quarters. Joseph Schwartz (1992), a physicist by training, argues that by conceiving of mathematics rather than visualization as its heart, science has in fact lost touch with nature and thereby alienated itself from the rest of society. The problem has real consequences for the task of science popularization, which therefore must conceive of itself as translating the arcane into the mundane, and thereby, having to balance fidelity to the source, and comprehensibility and engagement to the reader (Littmann 2005). Rhetorical examination of such translations in the popular press by science reporters have found that science reporters tend to adopt a celebratory rather than interrogatory tone, and to value decision and action over evaluation and causation (Fahnestock 1986). Popular science sometimes addresses these issues by considering the aesthetics of science (Hamann, Morse, and Sefusatti 2005) as well as by directly confronting the tension between science and the humanities—in some instances calling for the ultimate reduction of humanistic inquiry to explanations rooted in natural science (Wilson 1998), and in others arguing for some sort of détente (Gould 2003). The tensions between faith and reason, belief and skepticism, the miraculous sublime and the empirical mundane all contribute to the conflict between religion and science. Since the emergence of science, religion has been forced to retreat from many of its claims to causal or empirical knowledge. Thus, many scientists, as well as others who are dissatisfied with an increasingly unemployed “God of the gaps,” reconcile science and religion by ascribing to one the domain of facts and the other

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that of values—what evolutionary biologist Steven Jay Gould (1998) called the “non-overlapping magisteria” of science and faith. Many others also see the conflict as nugatory (Broad 2006); but this solution is not entirely satisfying, given that it insulates science from its moral obligations and religion from its duty to see things as they are as well as how they ought be. Some scientists, motivated by an atheistic sentiment, attempt to debunk religion as superstition (Dawkins 2006; Dennett 2006). But partisans of religion tend not to make the obvious reverse criticism—that science may require moral guidance not available to it internally—at least not too loudly. Instead, some try to reclaim a space for God by suborning the cognitive authority of science for themselves (Dean 2005; Glanz 2001)—thus, the transformation of pseudoscientific creation science into intelligent design theory. By all but the most tendentious of readings, intelligent design counts as pseudoscience, as its currency is due to ideological rather than scientific reasons. But it merits attention not for its own intellectual merits, but rather for the extent to which biology (particularly evolutionary biology, of course) is informed by its self-conscious contrast with creationist advocacy. This results from the cultural tension between science and religion, which also manifests itself in the credence given by some scientists to a strong anthropic principle that wonders why the universe seems to have been made just right for human beings to exist. Reception. Popular science is presented in the mass media in a variety of forms. Science journalism by newspaper reporters on the “science beat” (Nelkin 1995) and by writers for science-oriented magazines such as Seed, Scientific American, and Discover provides a training ground for many writers of popular science books. Another common connection of popular science literature to other media is the television tie-in—that is, a televised documentary series explicating a popular science book—or even books and documentaries conceived as synergetic companions to each other. Examples of televised documentaries of popular science include Carl Sagan’s 13-episode Cosmos series and its lavishly illustrated accompanying volume (Sagan 1980). Sagan’s successor is string theorist Brian Greene, whose description of The Elegant Universe (1999) was turned into a three-hour television documentary. The scholarship of popular science occurs in at least two distinct academic communities: (1) studies of public understanding of science (PUS) and the related field of rhetoric of science (RS) as well as (2) research in science education. PUS is a sociological specialty within the broader domain of science and technology studies (STS), which is concerned with the social and cultural dimensions of science and technology (Locke 2001). PUS investigates science in public discourse in all its forms—including museums, classrooms, newspapers, and community forums— while rhetoric of science is interested in the persuasive character of scientific texts. Science educators concern themselves to some degree with the role of popular science in the classroom (e.g., Parkinson and Adendorff 2005). Additionally, scientific communities pay some attention to popular science as a teaching tool and a means of judging the reputation of their discipline in the public eye (von Baeyer and Bowers 2004). Selected Authors. This section briefly discusses two physical scientists, two biological scientists, and two science journalists who have popularized and written about popular science. The physical scientists are Carl Sagan, an astronomer, and Briane Greene, a physicist known for his work in string theory; the biological scientists are Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist, and Richard Dawkins, a

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zoologist; and the science journalists are Timothy Ferris and Dava Sobel, both of whom began their careers as reporters. Carl Sagan (1934–1996). Though Albert Einstein certainly eclipsed Carl Sagan in terms of sheer fame, Sagan was the first celebrity scientist to be fully integrated into the popular culture media industry, a fact which had negative consequences for his academic standing: he was refused tenure at Harvard, and the National Academy of Science rejected his nomination for membership (Poundstone 1999). Sagan continued to be a productive scientist even as his popularizing work expanded over the course of his career (Shermer 2002). Sagan’s oeuvre included speculation about extraterrestrial intelligence (Sagan 1973), space exploration and colonization (Sagan 1994), the fates of humanity and the earth (Sagan 1997), as well as discussions of the character and significance of scientific knowledge (Sagan 1996, 2006). Brian Greene (1963–). Brian Greene is a professor of mathematics and physics at Columbia University. He received his PhD from Oxford University in 1987, where he was a Rhodes Scholar upon graduating from Harvard. His research involves superstring theory, which is an attempt to find an overarching formulation from which the different kinds of interactions of matter and energy can be derived, unifying gravity with the other fundamental forces—in brief, a theory of everything of the sort desired by Einstein, and promised—but ultimately not delivered—by Hawking. The Elegant Universe (Greene 1999)—winner of the Royal Society’s Aventis Prize for Science Books in 2000—discusses this search. His more recent book, The Fabric of the Cosmos (Greene 2004), discusses relativity, cosmology, and the nature of space and time. Richard Dawkins (1941–). Richard Dawkins received his PhD from Oxford University in 1966, and he was for most of his career a professor of zoology at Oxford (following a brief stint at UC Berkeley). In 1995, he became the Charles Simonyi Professor of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. His popular science explanations of evolutionary theory focus on the notion expounded in The Selfish Gene (1976) that fitness in terms of natural and sexual selection refers less to individual organisms than to the genes they comprise, because it is the differential survival of units of replication that selection pressures act upon. The Blind Watchmaker (1986), which marshals arguments against the notion of design, was made into a BBC documentary (Dawkins himself has made numerous appearances as a scientific presenter and panelist on British television). His increasingly antagonistic engagement with religious faith, culminating in The God Delusion (2006), engenders harsh criticism of both his ideas and his methods (Dean 2006; Holt 2006). Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002). Widely regarded as among the most stylistically sophisticated and erudite popularizers of science, Stephen Jay Gould at intervals collected the essays he wrote for Natural History magazine (published by the American Museum of Natural History) and compiled them in book form. The first compilation, Ever Since Darwin, appeared in 1977; the last, I Have Landed, was published in 2002. He was associated with the notion of punctuated equilibrium (the idea that massive die-offs or extinction events occur in the evolutionary record, at which point newly emptied ecological niches become available to be filled). His evolutionary thought has attracted criticism from those who disagree with his critique of adaptationism (the tendency to regard all features of an organism as functional products of evolution rather than as possible adaptations needing to be demonstrated as such), including Richard Dawkins (Shermer 2002). Michael

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Shermer’s even-handed assessment of Gould’s output concludes that the essays by the latter embody a philosophy of science—and of the history of science—that holds the value of the past to lie in its service to the present. Timothy Ferris (1944–). Timothy Ferris is a journalist and professor of journalism who was a reporter in New York City and a writer for Rolling Stone. He then took a job teaching English at CUNY in Brooklyn and published The Red Limit (Ferris 1977), an account of the astronomical investigations into the expansion of the universe. On the strength of his musical, technical, and scientific expertise, he produced the recording—made of gold and containing sounds of the Earth and its creatures—that was stowed aboard the Voyager space probe, should any extraterrestrials ever come upon it. He has written, narrated, produced, and directed in various combinations audio and video productions for planetariums, news shows, and television documentaries. He is currently an emeritus professor of journalism at UC Berkeley, a consultant to NASA on its long-term space exploration policy, and an amateur astronomer. His books have received critical acclaim from newspapers as well as awards and recognition from scientific societies and educational institutions. Reviews by scientists find him a clear guide to science for laypeople, albeit one given perhaps overmuch to poetical extravagances (Gingerich 1997). Dava Sobel (1947–). Dava Sobel is a professional science writer, with a background in science reporting and magazine writing. As of 2006–2007, she was the writer-in-residence at the University of Chicago’s creative writing program. Sobel is best known for her popular science histories Longitude (1995) and Galileo’s Daughter (Sobel 1999). Longitude won enormous praise for the lucidity of its prose and the fascinating story it tells about how the problem of determining longitude at sea was solved, requiring the construction of a reliable clock as well as accurate celestial observation. Longitude was also produced as a BBC documentary, and then a dramatized version was aired by the BBC and American cable television. However, recent scholarship and criticism (Charney 2003; Dizikes 2006) takes issue with Sobel’s lone genius approach to understanding the history of science, arguing that it misrepresents the collective and consensual character of science. This approach— the “standing on the shoulders of giants” school of scientific history—is out of step with contemporary models of how science works, in which it is viewed as far more enmeshed in its social context than previously thought. Bibliography Aczel, Amir. “When Good Novelists Do Bad Science.” The Globe and Mail January 3, 2004: sec. D: 10. Asimov, Isaac. Asimov’s Guide to Science. 3rd ed. New York: Basic Books, 1972. Bainbridge, W.S. “Public Attitudes toward Nanotechnology.” Journal of Nanoparticle Research 4.6 (2002): 561–570. Bates, B.R. “Public Culture and Public Understanding of Genetics: A Focus Group Study.” Public Understanding of Science 14.1 (2005): 47–65. Bowler, P.J. “Experts and Publishers: Writing Popular Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain, Writing Popular History of Science Now.” British Journal for the History of Science 39 (141) (2006): 159–187. Brizendine, Louann. The Female Brain. 1st ed. New York: Morgan Road Books, 2006. Broad, William J. “The Oracle Suggests a Truce between Science and Religion.” New York Times, February 28, 2006: sec. F: 4. Brown, C.P., S.M. Propst, and M. Woolley. “Report: Helping Researchers Make the Case for Science.” Science Communication 25.3 (2004): 294–303.

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SCIENCE WRITING (NONFICTION) Bryson, Bill. A Short History of Nearly Everything. 1st ed. New York: Broadway Books, 2003. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1962. Cassidy, A. “Popular Evolutionary Psychology in the UK: An Unusual Case of Science in the Media?” Public Understanding of Science 14.2 (2005): 115–141. ———. “Evolutionary Psychology as Public Science and Boundary Work.” Public Understanding of Science 15.2 (2006): 175–205. Caulfield, T. “Biotechnology and the Popular Press: Hype and the Selling of Science.” Trends in Biotechnology 22.7 (2004): 337–339. Ceccarelli, Leah. Shaping Science with Rhetoric: The Cases of Dobzhansky, Schrodinger, and Wilson. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Charney, D. “Lone Geniuses in Popular Science: The Devaluation of Scientific consensus.” Written Communication 20 (3) (2003): 215–241. Clowse, Barbara Barksdale. Brainpower for the Cold War: The Sputnik Crisis and National Defense Education Act of 1958, Contributions to the Study of Education no. 3. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981. Collins, Francis S. The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. New York: Free Press, 2006. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. ———. The Blind Watchmaker. 1st American ed. New York: Norton, 1986. ———. The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. ———. The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006. Dean, Cornelia. “Opting Out in the Debate on Evolution.” New York Times June 21, 2005: sec. F: 1. ———. Faith, Reason, God, and Other Imponderables. New York Times July 25, 2006, 1. DeBoer, G.E. “Scientific Literacy: Another Look at Its Historical and Contemporary Meanings and Its Relationship to Science Education Reform.” Journal of Research in Science Teaching 37.6 (2000): 582–601. Dennett, Daniel Clement. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Viking, 2006. Diamond, Jared M. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997. ———. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking, 2005. Dizikes, Peter. “Twilight of the Idols.” New York Times Book Review, November 5, 2006: 31. Eamon, W. “Science and Popular Culture in 16th-Century Italy, the ‘Professors of Secrets’ and Their Books.” Sixteenth Century Journal 16.4 (1985): 471–485. Eiseley, Loren C. The Man Who Saw through Time. Rev. and enl. ed. New York: Scribner, 1973. Fahnestock, J. “Accommodating Science: The Rhetorical Life of Scientific Facts.” Written Communication 3.3 (1986): 275–296. Ferris, Timothy. The Red Limit: The Search for the Edge of the Universe. New York: Morrow, 1977. ———. The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. Forward, Robert L. Dragon’s Egg. 1st ed. New York: Ballantine Books, 1980. Fox, Karen C., and Aries Keck. Einstein: A to Z. Hoboken, NJ: J. Wiley, 2004. Frayn, Michael. Copenhagen. Methuen Drama pbk. ed [with revisions]. London: Methuen Drama, 2000. Fyfe, A. “Conscientious Workmen or Booksellers’ Hacks? The Professional Identities of Science Writers in the Mid-Nineteenth Century.” Isis 96.2 (2005): 192–223. Gingerich, Owen. “Hello to All That.” New York Times Book Review, 1997: 9.

SCIENCE WRITING (NONFICTION) ———. God’s Universe. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. Glanz, James. “Darwin vs. Design: Evolutionists’ New Battle.” New York Times, April 8, 2001: sec. 1: 32. Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Viking, 1987. Gould, Stephen Jay. Ever since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History. 1st ed. New York: Norton, 1977. ———. Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History. 1st ed. New York: Harmony Books, 1998. ———. Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life. 1st ed. New York: Ballantine Pub. Group, 1999. ———. I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History. 1st ed. New York: Harmony Books, 2002. ———. The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending the Gap between Science and the Humanities. 1st ed. New York: Harmony Books, 2003. Greene, Brian R. The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999. ———. The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. 1st ed. New York: Knopf, 2004. Greenhill, K.M. “Skirmishes on the ‘Endless Frontier’: Reexamining the Role of Vannevar Bush as Progenitor of US Science and Technology Policy.” Polity 32.4 (2000): 633–641. Gribbin, John R. Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity. 1st U.S. ed. New York: Random House, 2004. Hall, Stephen S. Size Matters: How Height Affects the Health, Happiness, and Success of Boys—And the Men They Become. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006. Hamann, H.T., John Morse, and Emiliano Sefusatti. Categories on the Beauty of Physics: Essential Physics Concepts and Their Companions in Art and Literature. 1st ed. New York: Vernacular Press, 2005. Hansen, B. “Medical History for the Masses: How American Comic Books Celebrated Heroes of Medicine in the 1940s.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 78.1 (2004): 148–191. Hawking, S.W. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. Toronto; New York: Bantam Books, 1988. Hodson, D. “Time for Action: Science Education for an Alternative Future.” International Journal of Science Education 25.6 (2003): 645–670. Holt, Jim. 2006. “Beyond Belief.” New York Times Book Review, October 22, 2006: 1. Horgan, John. The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Pub., 1996. ———. The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication, and Explanation. New York: Free Press, 1999. Kakalios, James. The Physics of Superheroes. New York: Gotham Books, 2005. Kaku, Michio. Einstein’s Cosmos: How Albert Einstein’s Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time, Great discoveries. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005a. ———. Parallel Worlds: A Journey through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos. 1st ed. New York: Doubleday, 2005b. Kolbert, Elizabeth. Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. 1st U.S. ed. New York: Bloomsbury, 2006. Krauss, Lawrence Maxwell. The Physics of Star Trek. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Lam, Lui. “Integrating Popular Science Books into College Science Teaching.” July 2005. http://www.pantaneto.co.uk/issue19/lam.htm. Laszlo, P. “Unfortunate Trends in the Popularization of Science.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 30.3 (2005): 223–230.

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SCIENCE WRITING (NONFICTION) Lessl, T.M. “The Priestly Voice.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 75.2 (1989): 183–197. Levin, Janna. How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Levin, Martin. “Boom to Bust.” The Globe and Mail, March 26, 2005a: sec. D: 25. ———. “Einsteiniana.” The Globe and Mail, April 30, 2005b: sec. D: 21. Levitin, Daniel J. This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. New York: Dutton, 2006. Levitt, Steven D., and Stephen J. Dubner. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. 1st ed. New York: William Morrow, 2005. Lightman, B. “The Visual Theology of Victorian Popularizers of Science: From Reverent Eye to Chemical Retina.” Isis 91.4 (2000): 651–680. Littmann, M. “Courses in Science Writing as Literature.” Public Understanding of Science 14.1 (2005): 103–112. Locke, S. “Sociology and the Public Understanding of Science: From Rationalization to Rhetoric.” British Journal of Sociology 52.1 (2001): 1–18. Lucas, A.M., S. Maroske, and A. Brown-May. “Bringing Science to the Public: Ferdinand von Mueller and Botanical Education in Victorian Victoria.” Annals of Science 63.1 (2006): 25–57. Lynn, M.R. “Divining the Enlightenment: Public Opinion and Popular Science in Old Regime France.” Isis 92.1 (2001): 34–54. Magueijo, João. Faster than the Speed of Light: The Story of a Scientific Speculation. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Book Group, 2003. Matthews, Robert. “Nothing Is Gained by Searching for the ‘Theory of Everything.’” Financial Times, June 3, 2006: 11. Mayer, A.K. “Moralizing Science: The Uses of Science’s Past in National Education in the 1920s.” British Journal for the History of Science 30.104 (1997): 51–70. Mellor, F. Between Fact and Fiction: Demarcating Science from Non-Science in Popular Physics Books. Social Studies of Science 33.4 (2003): 509–538. Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. Miller, J.D. “Public Understanding of, and Attitudes toward, Scientific Research: What We Know and What We Need to Know.” Public Understanding of Science 13 (3) (2004): 273–294. Nelkin, Dorothy. Selling Science: How the Press Covers Science and Technology. Rev. ed. New York: W.H. Freeman and Co., 1995. Nerlich, B., D.D. Clarke, and R. Dingwall. “The Influence of Popular Cultural Imagery on Public Attitudes towards Cloning.” Sociological Research Online 4.3 (1999): U237–U250. Ouellette, Jennifer. Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics. New York: Penguin Books, 2005. Paisley, W.J. “Scientific Literacy and the Competition for Public Attention and Understanding.” Science Communication 20.1 (1998): 70–80. Parkinson, J., and R. Adendorff. “Science Books for Children as a Preparation for Textbook Literacy.” Discourse Studies 7.2 (2005): 213–236. Paul, D. “Spreading Chaos: The Role of Popularizations in the Diffusion of Scientific Ideas.” Written Communication 21.1 (2004): 32–68. Petersen, A., A. Anderson, and S. Allan. “Science Fiction/Science Fact: Medical Genetics in News Stories.” New Genetics and Society 24.3 (2005): 337–353. Poundstone, William. Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos. New York: Henry Holt, 1999. Randall, Lisa. Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions. 1st ed. New York: Ecco, 2005. Rees, Martin J. Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s Warning. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Reichhardt, Tony. “Pumping up the Volume.” Nature 436.7049 (2005): 326–327. Repp, K. “Popular Science in the 19th Century: Middle-Class Culture, Science Education and the German Public, 1848–1914.” Journal of Social History 33.4 (2000): 970–972.

SCIENCE WRITING (NONFICTION) Rigden, John S. Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Sagan, Carl. The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective. 1st ed. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973. ———. Cosmos. New York: Random House, 1980. ———. Contact: A Novel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. ———. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 1994. ———. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 1996. ———. Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 1997. ———. The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God. New York: Penguin Books, 2006 Schnabel, U. “God’s Formula and Devil’s Contribution: Science in the Press.” Public Understanding of Science 12.3 (2003): 255–259. Schwartz, Joseph. The Creative Moment: How Science Made Itself Alien to Modern Culture. 1st ed. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992. Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Shea, Christopher. “Survivalist Lit: Does Darwin Have Anything to Say About Beowulf and Madame Bovary?” Boston Globe, November 6, 2005: sec. E:4. Sheffield, Charles. Borderlands of Science: How to Think like a Scientist and Write Science Fiction. Riverdale, NY: Baen Books, 1999. Shermer, M.B. “This View of Science: Stephen Jay Gould as Historian of Science and Scientific Historian, Popular Scientist and Scientific Popularizer.” Social Studies of Science 32.4 (2002): 489–524. Shermer, Michael. The Borderlands of Science: Where Sense Meets Nonsense. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. ———. Why Darwin Matters: The Case against Intelligent Design. 1st ed. New York: Times Books, 2006. Smith, H.A. “Public Attitudes towards Space Science.” Space Science Reviews 105.1–2 (2003): 493–505. Smolin, Lee. The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006. Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959. Sobel, Dava. Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. New York: Walker, 1995. ———.Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love. New York: Walker & Co., 1999. ———. The Planets. New York: Viking, 2005. Squyres, Steven W. Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet. 1st ed. New York: Hyperion, 2005. Still, A., and W. Dryden. “The Social Psychology of ‘Pseudoscience’: A Brief History.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 34.3 (2004): 265–290. Stoppard, Tom. Arcadia. London; Boston: Faber and Faber, 1993. Tallack, P. “Echo of the Big Bang: An End to the Boom in Popular Science Books May Actually Raise Standards.” Nature 432.7019 (2004): 803–804. von Baeyer, H.C., and E.V. Bowers. “Resource Letter PBGP-1: Physics Books for the General Public.” American Journal of Physics 72.2 (2004):135–140. Wally, L.M., N.E. Levinger, and D.W. Grainger. “Employing Popular Children’s Literature to Teach Elementary School Chemistry: An Engaging Outreach Program.” Journal of Chemical Education 82.10 (2005): 1489–1495.

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SEA LITERATURE Watson, Fred. Stargazer: The Life and Times of the Telescope. 1st Da Capo Press ed. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2005. Watson, James D. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA. 1st ed. New York: Atheneum, 1968. Watson, James D., and Andrew Berry. DNA: The Secret of Life. 1st ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Weinberg, Steven. The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe. New York: Basic Books, 1977. ———. Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Wilson, Edward O. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975. ———. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. 1st ed. New York: Knopf, 1998. ———. The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth. 1st ed. New York: Norton, 2006. Woit, Peter. Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law. New York: Basic Books, 2006.

Further Reading Bryson, Bill. A Short History of Nearly Everything. New York: Basic Books, 2003; Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976; Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997; Ferris, Timothy. The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997; Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Viking, 1987; Gould, Stephen Jay. Ever since Darwin. New York: W.W. Norton, 1977; Greene, Brian R. The Elegant Universe. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999. Horgan, John. The End of Science. Reading, MA: AddisonWesley, 1996. Sagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted World. New York: Random House, 1996; Smolin, Lee. The Trouble with Physics. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2006; Watson, James D. The Double Helix. New York: Atheneum, 1968.

WILLIAM J. WHITE

SEA LITERATURE Definition. To explore the lasting influence of the sea on the American imagination and thereby explain the popularity of seafaring themes throughout American literary history is by no means an easy task. The universal human fascination with uncharted oceans and adventurous voyages notwithstanding, the sea has always served the dual purpose of arousing desire, to retool Richard Proirier’s famous phrase, for “a world elsewhere” and simultaneously providing a powerful imagery that helped to articulate complex human issues of the here and now. Furthermore, seafaring tales usually comprise different levels of human agency: the natural (i.e. the sea) and the technological (the ship), individual skills (navigation, the art of sailing, physical endurance etc.) as much as collective efforts (the ship as a highly complex, social microcosm or the maritime traditions and achievements of a whole nation), and the known world (the port of departure, the ship, the crew) and the unknown, new spaces of the ship’s destination. Taking to the sea also always involves a certain degree of risk taking, the readiness to take chances and immerse oneself in a world one can never entirely control. The sea as a literary topic can thus be understood as epitomizing the greatness and tragedy of human life itself. And yet, their apparently universal appeal to the contrary, seafaring tales have not intruded into the collective memory and unconscious of all nations alike. If regional, cultural, and historical differences are important in shaping a people’s lit-

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erary traditions, they are equally instrumental in instilling a popular taste for the sea and its mysteries. The lingering appeal of sea fiction in America is a good case in point. History. As cultural critic Robert Lawson-Peebles argued “before America existed on the map, it existed in the imagination” (1988, 7). Given that America was as much a product of the imagination as the result of geographic discovery, the narratives and stories that Europeans have used to recreate their initial encounter with the “New World” are heavily indebted to their seagoing experience, an experience that preceded the actual “landings” or “arrivals” in America. From Christopher Columbus’s report of his first voyage to the West Indies (1493) to Sir Walter Raleigh’s The Discovery of Guiana (1595), Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1598–1600), and John Winthrop’s programmatic A Modell of Christian Charity (1630), which was drawn up in the midst of the hazardous trans-Atlantic passage, the sea and its perils, promises, and traditional mythical connotations figured prominently in the writings of early explorers of America. Though later generations appeared to have been preoccupied with conquering and settling the “wilderness” that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, the imagery of the sea never actually lost its hold on the American mind. The most important mode of transportation during the early national period—the one that actually became the symbol of westward migration—was the so-called “prairie schooner” or Conestoga wagon (a reference to the town in Pennsylvania where they were originally built). Named because their white-covered tops seemed to float like graceful sails through the prairie grass, prairie schooners rhetorically invoked the perilous passage to the New World. In his late, experimental prose poem “John Marr and Other Sailors” (1888) Herman Melville adopts the image of the prairie schooner to articulate the (semi-autobiographical) longing for the sea of an old salt who, putting an end to his rovings, finally married and removed to a log house on the western frontier: With some of his former shipmates [ . . . ] he had contrived, prior to this last and more remote removal, to keep up a little correspondence at odd intervals. But from tidings of anybody or any sort he [ . . . ] was now cut off; quite cut off, except from such news as might be conveyed over the grassy billows by the last-arrived prairie-schooners—the vernacular term, in those parts and times, for the emigrant-wagon arched high over with sail-cloth, and voyaging across the vast campaign. [ . . . ] To the long-distance traveler [ . . . ] recent settlements offered some landmarks; but otherwise he steered by the sun. In early midsummer, even going but from one log-encampment to the next [ . . . ] travel was much like navigation. (Melville 2000, 265–266)

By rhetorically joining the hazards of westward expansion to the earlier crossing of the Atlantic, nineteenth-century Americans both reinforced and added to the cultural heritage that ties America to the sea. More significantly, seascapes also provided a foil for literary discussions of various national, political, and philosophical issues in America. Just consider the numerous seafaring stories written during the time of the so-called “American Renaissance,” when Americans were struggling to define their own idea of a national literature, thereby slowly weaning themselves from the ongoing cultural dominance of Europe. “Because the sea was central to their identity,” as critic John

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ISHMAEL’S VIEW OF THE COMMON SAILOR No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. [ . . . ] I always go to sea as a sailor because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the forecastle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern [ . . . ], so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonality lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it. (Melville 1967, 14–15)

Peck reminds us, “Americans turned to the sea to understand themselves” (2001, 94). Ishmael, the principle narrator of Melville’s classic sea novel Moby-Dick (or The Whale (1851)), thus takes to the sea in order to cope with impending “hypochondria,” an ailment particularly reminiscent of the Old World. By the same token, he does not want “ever to go to sea as a passenger,” nor does he intend to embark on a career “as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook.” A true American, Ishmael deliberately abandons the “distinction of such offices” for the community and solidarity of the common sailor. In maritime literature such as Richard Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840), Melville’s posthumously published novella Billy Budd, Sailor (1891), Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf (1904), Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (1922), Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not (1937), Peter Matthiessen’s Far Tortuga (1975), or Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage (1990) ships have repeatedly served to articulate concern about the course of American society. Early on, Melville, the experienced saltturned-writer, depicted the world-as-ship or, as in Moby-Dick, the ship-as-world. The Pequod is a human microcosm of its own, a floating world replete with sailors from all walks of life. The economic nature and physical hardships of the whaling business notwithstanding, theirs is a community of equals that cuts across the boundaries of both class and race. As the doomed journey of the vessel reveals, the communitarian ideal of the simple sailor is eventually threatened. Yet as a powerful democratic myth, Melville’s idealized treatment of maritime life nevertheless helped to establish the sea as a utopian counter-space to the increasing rigidity and social divisiveness of modern American society. If we look at the economic conditions from which seafaring parables such as James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pilot (1824), Melville’s Moby-Dick, or Edgar Allan Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) sprang, we find that nineteenth-century America—its rapid industrialization notwithstanding—was still a nation that depended heavily on the sea and its allegedly unlimited resources. This is especially true of those Americans who lived near the Eastern shore and participated in one the first truly global businesses, the bloody harvesting of the sperm whale. In the early nineteenth century, according to maritime historian Nathaniel Philbrick, “people didn’t invest in bonds or the stock market, but rather in whale ships” (2000, 20). As we can learn from Moby-Dick, sperm oil lubricated the machines of the industrial age. If transforming a gigantic sperm whale into oil entailed a quasi-industrial form of work, the hunting of the whale—especially, as whalers pushed farther and farther into as yet uncharted regions of the Pacific—remained a hazardous, myth-laden enterprise. Whalemen, Philbrick argues, were not merely seagoing hunters and factory workers but also

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explorers whose wondrous maritime adventures continued to haunt the imagination of Americans well into the twentieth century. Trends and Themes. Although taking to the sea appeared to be the natural inclination and symbolic focus of New Englanders, the land-bound, aristocratic planter society of the South was no less predicated on seafaring goods and tropes. As poet William Carlos Williams remarked, “poised against the Mayflower is the slave ship” (1925, 208–211). Though the slave trade had been legally banned since 1808, the entire system of plantation slavery could not have thrived without the triangular pattern of the transatlantic trafficking in know-how (such as West African rice planting technology in the Carolinas), human cargo (slaves), and, finally, the products of enforced labor (sugar, molasses, rum, cotton, etc.). As historians of the colonial period point out, images of the sea had a firm grip on people of color in the Americas, even if their understanding of the “New World” was never one of mythical homecoming but rather of rejection, disaster, and catastrophe. With an eye on white America’s maritime roots the militant black leader Malcolm X quips in his 1965 autobiography: “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, my brothers and sisters, Plymouth Rock landed on us” (201). Compared to the utopian interpretations of the sea in early white American sea fiction, the seafaring experience of enslaved Africans differs considerably from that of their masters. “Whereas Columbus conquered ‘new’ lands for Europeans, thus increasing their mobility and freedom and providing them with new perspectives, the African diaspora,” Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich argue in The Black Columbiad, “stands for the end of freedom, for the loss of perspective; [ . . . ] whites celebrated the New World as their potential paradise, while the African drifted in a world of evil spirits which threatened them with social and physical annihilation” (1994, 5). However, despite the traumatic experience of the so-called “middle passage” sea images spelled out more than merely disaster for African Americans. “For the slave community,” as critic Elizabeth Schultz observed, “for whom the seacrossing would have been an appalling memory, that some [of their] songs should identify the sea as an uncontrollable element is probably not surprising. What is noteworthy, however, is the existence of spirituals and sermons in which an individual either prevails against the sea or harness it to his use” (1995, 234). To many slaves on the Atlantic coast, the sea signified a means of escape to freedom. Although in some spirituals the implication that the sea may lead to freedom can hardly be missed (“I set my foot on de Gospel ship / [ . . . ] it landed me over on Canaan’s shore / An’ I’ll never come back no mo’”), others used sea images in a more figurative manner. Because much of African American folklore is derived from the Bible, references to Noah, Jonah, or Moses at the Red Sea are widespread. These images “have overtones of wish-fulfillment, implying that the sea might lead to liberation. [ . . . ] spirituals and sermons invoking the sea inspired and encouraged the slave community, strengthening both their collective hopes for a savior in this world and individuals’ hopes for saving themselves” (Schultz 1995, 234–235). If the sea often works as separator, border, or dangerous boundary, it is also, as Haskell Springer points out, “the joiner of human beings and the center of their communities” (1995, Introduction 1). This is particularly true of African Americans that had been abducted from their homeland and brought to a strange “new” world where they found themselves, in Olaudah Equiano’s famous phrasing, “deprived of all chance of returning to [their] native country” (1995, 56). To the exiled slave population, Africa was irretrievably lost. The desire to cross the Atlantic again and to

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return to the land of “origin” has therefore become a prominent feature of the African diaspora. Real or imagined, for people of African descent Africa remained the guarantor of a common identity, a mythic source of inspiration and community. In African American writing the sea, therefore, often emerges as a means to bridge the historical and geographical gap between Africa and the descendants of former slaves. By the same token, Barbadian poet Edward Kamau Braithwaite claims that only the return to Africa enabled him to discover his native Caribbean (quoted in Pedersen 1994, 43). Afrocentrist movements such as “Ethiopianism,” “Pan-Africanism” or the francophone “Negritude” lend ample proof to the pervasive consciousness of common roots and a shared transatlantic cultural heritage within the African diaspora. In the wake of these earlier attempts to undo the initial separation and dramatic uprooting associated with the middle passage, the sea, and in particular the Atlantic, is now increasingly being reconsidered as a space where routes cross and cultures merge to form an encompassing network of transatlantic exchange. In his path-breaking study The Black Atlantic (1993) the British critic Paul Gilroy describes the “ship” as a major driving force in the cultural system of the African diaspora: “The image of the ship— a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion—is especially important for historical and theoretical reasons [ . . . ]. [It] immediately focuses attention on the middle passage, on the various projects for redemptive return to an African homeland, on the circulation of ideas and activists as well as the movement of key cultural and political artifacts: tracts, books, gramophone records, and choirs” (4). Gilroy’s influential study not only paved the way for a wave of new interrogations into transatlantic patterns of cultural exchange, but it also reflects the overriding importance of sea images in American and, especially, African American fiction. If many African Americans were drawn to maritime occupations for merely practical reasons, the sea often also figured as a mythical, utopian space that promised freedom, equality, and adventure. When resting from his job as a ship caulker in Baltimore, Frederick Douglass mused about the sight of the “beautiful vessels, robed in white, and so delightful to the eyes of freemen” that he had seen as a boy on the Chesapeake Bay: I have often, in the deep stillness of a summer’s Sabbath, stood all alone upon the lofty banks of that noble bay, and traced, with saddened heart and tearful eye, the countless number of sails moving off to the mighty ocean. The sight of these always affected me powerfully. My thoughts would compel utterance; and there, with no audience but the Almighty, I would pour out my soul’s complaint, in my rude way, with an apostrophe to the moving multitude of ships. (1993, 74)

Having thus contemplated the multitude of ships on the Chesapeake Bay, Douglass decided to follow in their wake and attempt the hazardous escape to the north: “Why am I a slave? I will run away. I will not stand it [ . . . ] I will take to the water. This very bay shall yet bear me into freedom. The steamboats steered in a north-east course from North point; and when I get to the head of the bay, I will turn my canoe adrift and walk straight through Delaware into Pennsylvania” (1993, 74–75). Douglass finally escaped by dressing up as a black sailor and—with the help of forged “seaman’s protection” papers—embarked on a ferry to cross the Susquehanna River. African American writers have repeatedly added to Douglass’s visionary “apostrophe to the moving multitude of ships.” In the famous opening chapter of Their

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Eyes Were Watching God (1978), Zora Neale Hurston adopts the same nautical image, although in this instance it is used to express her dissatisfaction with those male would-be sailors that never manage to actually go “aboard”: Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. (9)

If for Douglass and Hurston the liberating prospects of a life at sea remained largely a rhetorical figure, for blues poet Langston Hughes taking to the sea represented a crucial moment in the search of an identity of his own. In his autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), Hughes describes how he fled the racist atmosphere at Columbia University that at the time was mostly white and how, as an ordinary sailor, he embarked on a merchant vessel headed for Africa: Melodramatic maybe, it seems to me now. But then it was like throwing a million bricks out of my heart when I threw the books into the water. I leaned over the rail of the S.S. Malone and threw the books as far as I could out into the sea—all the books I had had at Columbia, and all the books I had lately bought to read. [ . . . ] Then I straightened up, turned my face to the wind, and took a deep breath. I was a seaman going to sea for the first time—a seaman on a big merchant ship. And I felt that nothing would ever happen to me again that I didn’t want to happen. I felt grown, a man, inside and out. [ . . . ] Inside the hot cabin, George lay stark naked in a lower bunk, talking and laughing and gaily waving his various appendages around. Above him in the upper bunk, two chocolate-colored Puerto Rican feet stuck out from one end of a snow-white sheet, and a dark Puerto Rican head from the other. It was clear that Ramon in the upper bunk didn’t understand more than every tenth word of George’s Kentucky vernacular. But he kept on laughing every time George laughed—and that was often. (Hughes 1940, 3–4)

The liberating aspects of seafaring are equally prominent in Hughes’s poetry. In his poem “The Young Sailor,” he foregrounds the self-esteem and personal independence often associated with shipboard life: “This strong young sailor / Of the wide seas” (Hughes 1994, 62). Not unlike earlier generations of African American sailors, Hughes ostensibly cherished the relative absence of racial constraint aboard ship. If this freedom, at times, turned out to be treacherous, it was nevertheless real insofar as it provided a way out of the racist environment on the continent and allowed the skilled black mariner a degree of self-assertion and quasi-autonomy unknown in many other professional areas. To contemporary African American writers of the sea, the infamous middle passage now often represents an imaginary journey into a common past. In Paule Marshall’s 1983 novel Praisesong for the Widow, the black female protagonist consciously links her own history to the collective history of all African peoples. As Schultz notes, “in the course of Marshall’s novel, Avey Johnson, a black matron from North White Plains, is nudged back through her own history, back through the history of her people, with the sea as the setting for each stage of her own psychic rebirth” (1995, 252–253). In close symbolic parallel to the collective trauma of the middle passage, Avey is made to undergo a similar catastrophic yet for her also cleansing seafaring experience. Aboard a battered schooner on her way to the small Caribbean island of Carriacou, choppy seas cause her to vomit in plain view of a

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motley crowd of men, women, and children. Although Avey is reminded of similar embarrassing moments in her childhood, the ironic, affirmative stance of the people on board, who recontextualize the event as the disposal of “waste and pretense” from Avey’s bourgeois black life, enables her to master the imagined humiliation. Having thus symbolically relived her own history through the history of African people, Avey eventually leaves the sea and returns to life in the community. In his novel Middle Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, Charles Johnson returns to the 1830s and the world of slavery; the protagonist of the novel, Rutherford Calhoun who is a newly freed slave, embarks on an adventurous journey across the Atlantic to Africa and, later, back to the New World. To his shock and horror Calhoun learns that the vessel, significantly called The Republic, is a slave ship whose secret mission is to transport the last survivors of a legendary African tribe, the Allmuseri, from their devastated homeland to America. His journey turns into a symbolic, perilous voyage into the cruel machinery of the slave trade and, even more important, the netherlands of his own, divided psyche. As a freed slave Calhoun is a product of the black and white worlds, a fact that leads to a form of ontological “inbetweeness” that Johnson, in a mix of historical detail and satire, explores with the help of phenomenological philosophy and Zen Buddhism. From yet a different angle, West Indian writer Caryl Phillips, who teaches at Amherst College, also revisits the former routes of the slave trade. In what amounts to a constant shifting between an imaginary and factual journey across continents, Phillips metaphorically employs the sights and sounds of the (black) Atlantic to investigate the complex cultural heritage of slavery. In his autobiographical travelogue The Atlantic Sound (2000), he encodes the sound of waves that break against the slave ship with the mythic ramifications of the African Diaspora. Long after the abominable traffic has ceased, the throbbing, threatening sound of the waves still holds sway, according to this sensitive traveler into our racial past, over the imagination of Africans, Americans, and Europeans alike. Contexts and Issues. American sea fiction reflects the history of the larger society (including its racial divisiveness), and yet, at the same time, it also transcends the historical context by continuously bringing into focus a number of universal themes and topics. Even though in some cases neither the voyage nor the sea itself takes center stage, authors drawn to the sea usually invest both with a symbolism and meaning that transform the actual seagoing experience into a kind of spiritual journey. If this is true, as we have seen, of the bulk of maritime literature of the nineteenth century—the so-called great age of sail—it is equally true for a large number of contemporary sea fictions, written against the backdrop of rapid technological and ecological change. If in some cases the prevalent mood is rather somber and nostalgic, in others we find an ongoing effort to wrest from the bare, unchanging facts of maritime life a new meaning, an as yet untold story. Regardless of the form that story eventually takes—autobiographical, documentary, or fictional—it often reverberates with references to earlier attempts by other authors to write about the sea. American sea fiction thus betrays a sense of continuity and tradition that in other literary genres critics have come to find problematic. Cutting across a huge variety of narrative techniques and differing authorial agendas, American writers of the sea appear to be bound together by a shared understanding of the importance of the sea as a joining rather than a separating force and, perhaps more important, as a vital ingredient of American identity.

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If for Melville and his generation seascapes were often laden with metaphysical, dark philosophical meaning, turn-of-the-century writers such as Stephen Crane, Jack London, Frank Norris, and later dramatist Eugene O’Neill used the sea to probe contemporary theories of biological evolution (Darwinism) and psychoanalysis (Freud and Jung). In this realist-naturalist tradition of American sea literature the captain and his crew act out in representative ways the eternal laws of nature or, as in Crane’s “The Open Boat” (1897) and London’s “A Thousand Deaths” (1899), the threat of drowning takes on complicated psychological meaning thereby epitomizing the subliminal structure of human consciousness. Other writers of that era such as William McFee (next to London probably the most famous American author of maritime fiction during his time), Lincoln Colcord, Richard Hallet, or Archi Binns, were either trying to wed the increasingly important role of the engineer to the tradition or register the fact that the kind of life aboard ship eternalized in Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840), as London once noted, “had passed utterly away” (Bender 1988, 150). Though often neglected by critics and historians of sea literature, the most popular book about an epic sea voyage in modern times, the one that became a model for generations of sailor-writers interested in the physical and psychic challenges of single-handed circumnavigation, is certainly Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World (1900). An expert sailor and professional captain, Slocum embarked in 1895 on a voyage around the world in a 37-foot sloop of 9 tons that he himself rebuilt from an abandoned hulk. The fact that he decided to use only the sparsest means of navigational technology and generally championed simplicity as the most adequate form of a sailor’s life helped to turn his autobiographical book into a maritime classic often compared to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854). When he writes “I sailed with a free wind day after day, marking the position of my ship on the chart with considerable precision; but this was done by intuition, I think, more than by slavish calculations” (1996, 145) Slocum’s view of the alleged benefits of modern science is utterly skeptical. Yet unlike Thoreau’s scathing cultural critique before him, his is a rather soft-spoken and ironic assessment of the future course of the world. If Slocum’s life embodies a history of the decline of sailing as a commercial activity in America, his epic voyage and the book it spawned were meant to celebrate the tenacity and perseverance of the simple sailor in the face of natural chaos. To pit man against nature has always been a favorite topic among writers of sea fiction. In the novels and stories of Ernest Hemingway this classic theme increasingly comes to reflect the author’s animalistic view of human life. Hemingway, in Joseph DeFalco’s words “the most distinguished writer of prose fiction in the twentieth century fully to explore the sea” (1995, 298), showed a life-long interest in the ocean as a metaphor of human conflict and man’s existential condition. Of his three major sea novels—To Have and Have Not (1937), The Old Man and the Sea (1952), and Islands in the Stream (1970, posthumously)—The Old Man and the Sea is probably the most radical attempt to capture the sea’s symbolic significance. Both Islands in the Stream and The Old Man and the Sea came out of a project that went through several mutations and that Hemingway originally envisioned as his “sea book”: a trilogy entitled The Sea When Young, The Sea When Absent, and The Sea in Being. Though not all segments of the trilogy were published, these later books betray a heightening concern about the sea as a metaphor of existence. This becomes particularly clear in The Old Man and the Sea where the protagonist, a Cuban fisherman called Santiago, challenges the forces of biology and the marine

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environment. Though he is marvelously in tune with the ocean, its creatures and mysteries, Santiago also represents the dualisms and ambivalence of the human relationship with nature. If his is a life, as one critic called it, of “biological brotherhood” (Bender 1988, 195) Santiago’s readiness to accept the voracious struggle for survival in nature turns him into a sea hero of tragic dimensions. The story, which is replete with religious and existentialist meaning, represents Hemingway’s attempt to write a parable of the sea that is set—contrary to his other seafaring fictions—in an ahistorical situation. Santiago’s struggle with the gigantic Marlin becomes a universal story of man’s return to harmony in nature and the treacherous ambivalence of this return exemplified by the sharp contrast between Santiago’s timeless world and the tourists who at the end of the novella tactlessly disrupt the sacred unity of the old man and the sea. In Peter Matthiessen’s highly acclaimed novel Far Tortuga (1975), the nautical setting is wedded to particular socio-historical circumstances such as the declining turtle fishery of the Cayman Islands during the 1960s. However, the tragic death of Captain Raib Avers, one of the last “turtlers,” also resonates with larger cultural and moral implications. By some critics judged the best American novelist of the sea since Herman Melville, Matthiessen exploits a number of classic topics in maritime fiction—the last voyage, nautical hazards, the ambiguous character of the captain, mutiny, and the violence and amorality often associated with life aboard ship. However, the blending of different linguistic registers and the unusual psychological depth of the novel turns the seemingly simple tale into an increasing complex story about human fallibility; more generally, its major theme is man’s age-old attempt to overcome the vagaries of fate and to bring order, at least temporarily, to a dark and chaotic universe. Matthiessen’s challenging narrative technique, as critics often claim, amalgamates postmodern style and traditional sea writing. What is more, Far Tortuga and the later Men’s Lives: The Surfmen and Baymen of the South Fork (1986), a documentary history of the declining fishing communities on eastern Long Island, foreground issues that have become an ongoing concern of writers about the sea in contemporary America: (1) the vanishing world of individuals heroes, workers, or navigators; (2) the problem of increasing mechanization and commercial exploitation in maritime professions; and (3) the disastrous ecological consequences of modern ways of life that appear to threaten a staggering number of marine species, eventually creating a dangerous imbalance between man and nature. A prominent topic ever since Rachel Carson’s environmentalist classic The Sea Around Us (1951), ecological concerns loom large in contemporary American literature of the sea. If Matthiessen stands out because of his interest in and detailed knowledge of marine biology, others treat the sea with a similar kind of reverence born from a consciousness of man’s dependence on an intact marine habitat. Given the obvious and often irrevocable destruction of wetlands, rivers, and even oceans many authors articulate human responsibility and occasionally a nostalgic longing for the sea as a sustaining, purifying force. One aspect of this new trend in nautical fiction is an emphasis on marine life and the tendency to adopt the animal’s point of view. In Hank Searls’s novels Overboard (1977) and Sounding (1982), for example, much of the action is told from the imagined perspective of a pregnant female shark and an aging bull sperm whale. Set against a complementary story line that involves a stranded Soviet nuclear submarine and sprinkled with allusions to Melville’s Moby-Dick, Sounding attempts to reintroduce interspecies communication as an important aspect of sea fiction.

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An interesting philosophical twist on this topic is Edward Albee’s play Seascapes (1975). Albee, the foremost American representative of the theatre of the absurd, confronts an elderly American couple strolling on a New England beach with two human-sized lizards that speak and act like real people. The lizards apparently no longer feel at home in the sea, but the conversation is so hopeless and depressing that they are nearly driven back to their original environment. Against the symbolically rich backdrop of the seascape, the play, for which Albee won his second Pulitzer Prize for drama, explores the alienated, distorted relations between man, animals, and the natural environment. The play also asks fundamental philosophical questions about whether life is worth living, but it decides, as critics pointed out, that there is no alternative. In an equally surrealistic fashion, postmodern author Kurt Vonnegut also investigates the relationship between humans and marine environments. His 1985 postapocalyptic novel Galápagos proffers an alternate version of human history: in the wake of a sudden war a motley group of survivors manage to escape to the Galápagos Islands where they evolve over the course of a million years into a kind of amphibian species. Because their brains have shrunken considerably, they are now able to live a life more in tune with the sea and their natural surrounds. Selected Authors. Matthiessen, Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Ken Kesey, or science fiction author Ursula Le Guin are often grouped as postmodern authors with a keen interest in both the metaphorical and ecological ramifications of the sea. However, the one writer best known for repeatedly probing the symbolic interfaces between seafaring and the act of storytelling is novelist John Barth. In a number of intricately woven postmodern fables, Barth effectively juxtaposes the at times erratic, meandering activity of sailing or floating on the water and the conventions of prose fictions. In his first published novel, The Floating Opera (1956), the narrative is repeatedly compared to a showboat idly drifting in the Virginia and Maryland tidewater areas. The boat also emerges as a metaphor or mirror of human life in general. As Todd Andrews, the narrator of the story, explains: It always seemed a fine idea to me to build a showboat with just one big flat open deck on it, and to keep a play going continuously. The boat wouldn’t be moored, but would drift up and down the river on the tide, and the audience would sit along both banks. They could catch whatever part of the plot happened to unfold as the boated past, and then they’d have to wait until the tide ran back again to catch another snatch of it, if they still happened to be sitting there. To fill in the gaps they’d have to use their imaginations, or ask more attentive neighbors, or hear the word passed along from upriver to downriver. Most times they wouldn’t understand what was going on at all, or they’d think they knew, when actually they didn’t. [ . . . ] I needn’t explain that that’s how much of life works. (Barth 1956, 7)

Like many of his postmodern fellow writers Barth often foregrounds the importance of storytelling as the most appropriate analogy to life itself: life holds meaning because it is a story constantly told and re-told, a multifaceted narrative plot that changes with each introduction of a new character or story line. Yet if the act of narration serves well to illustrate Barth’s point that life is as quintessentially fabricated, unpredictable, and shifting as the numerous stories it holds in store, the ubiquitous sea imagery in his work emphasizes that point even further. In Barth’s 1982 novel Sabbatical: A Romance, perhaps his most successful meditation on his twin interests—boating and storytelling—the action centers around a

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nine-month sabbatical cruise on a sailboat named Pokey, Wye I. The novel is infused with sailing terminology, and its two principal characters, Fenwick Turner, a former CIA agent, and his wife, Susan Seckler, a professor of American literature, blend sophisticated reflections on their past lives and future with nautical metaphors, literary history, and narratological discourse. With Sabbatical, as Dennis Berthold observes, Barth “legitimizes sea fiction as a serious academic subgenre and ensures that the most sophisticated contemporary literary critics will have to know a jib from a stay” (1995, 319). Among contemporary writers of sea fiction Barth is certainly among the most formally varied and intellectually challenging. His fascination with similarities between storytelling and the world of sailors and ships can be traced throughout his extensive prose fiction and essay writing. In novel after novel he returned to either ships or the people who navigate them interweaving the tradition of sea fiction with his special interest in authorial self-reflection and the mechanics of storytelling. If in his more recent novels—Tidewater Tales: A Novel (1987), The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991), Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera (1994), or Coming Soon (2001)—sea topics figure to varying degrees, all of these works add, each in its own interesting way, to Barth’s ongoing obsession with the sailing world and the estuarine tidewater system of his navigational “home turf,” the Chesapeake Bay. Having so far reviewed selected contemporary novels that either employ sea imagery to explore the conflictual relationship between humans and the environment or share an interest in seafaring as an epitome of man’s voyage of selfdiscovery, I want to conclude this essay by mentioning a number of recent popular sea fictions that do not, or at least not exclusively, fall into one of these categories. Following in the wake of Peter Benchley’s enormously successful marine thriller Jaws (1973), there are quite a few texts that seek to exploit the sensationalism of shipwrecks or natural disasters. Among the more interesting examples are Beryl Bainbridge’s dark and brittle tale of the Titanic’s fatal voyage, Every Man for Himself (1996), and the superbly written first novel of Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm (1997). Junger recounts the authentic 1991 October storm off the coast of Nova Scotia when natural forces combined to create the “perfect storm” whose conditions could not possibly have been worse. Also based on authentic events are Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools (1962), which centers on international travelers going from Mexico to Germany in 1931 aboard the freighter Vera, Robert Stone’s fictional account of a failed solo circumnavigation race in 1969, Outerbridge Reach (1992), and Peter Landesman’s The Raven (1995), which tells the story of the disappearance of a ship with thirty-six people who had gone out for a day of deep-sea fishing. There are also numerous novels that turn on naval history and military events such as Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October (1984), William Brinkley’s The Last Ship (1988), and David Poyer’s The Med. (1988), the first book of a series designed around the protagonist Dan Lenson, a graduate from the Naval Academy. An outstanding representative of this category is David Guterson’s Snow Falling On Cedars, which won the Pen/Faulkner Award in 1995. The novel is set on San Piedro Island, north of Puget Sound; it tells the story of a local fisherman, who in 1954 is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese American, named Kabuo Miyamoto, charged with his murder. The gripping tale evolves around a historical incident during World War II when San Piedro’s Japanese residents were sent into exile while their neighbors watched.

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Finally, I want to mention a group of texts that is informed—like much of American sea literature—by either autobiographical or regional/geographical experiences. A remarkable representative of this tradition is John Casey’s 1989 novel Spartina. Set on the Southern Rhode Island shore, the story offers a bleak portrait of a region that is dramatically changing under the impact of increasingly new resorts for inland tourists. Though conscious of his own anachronistic lifestyle, the novel’s protagonist, fisherman, and boat-builder Dick Pierce, embarks on a heroic project: to finish a half-built 50-foot boat in his backyard so he can fish for red crabs out in deep water and make some real money to support his family. Spartina won the National Book Award in 1989; its description of Pierce’s complex, grieving character has been repeatedly compared to the best in sea fiction since Melville and Hemingway. Other examples of regionally inspired maritime fiction include William Martin’s Cape Cod (1992), which follows the involvement of the people of Cape Cod with the sea from the landing of the Mayflower to the present era of whalewatching; Annie Proulx’s internationally successful novel The Shipping News (1993); James Michel Pratt’s saga of three generations of lighthouse keepers off the coast of Massachusetts, The Lighthouse Keeper (2000); Tony Horwitz’s Blue Latitudes (2002), an autobiographical travelogue by a journalist who embarks on a cruise to retrace the nautical legacies of the British navigator James Cook; and Lewis Robinson’s collection of stories set on the Maine coast, Officer Friendly and Other Stories (2003). If the present survey of American maritime literature has not nearly covered the staggering number and huge variety of texts in the field, it should have become clear that today the tradition of sea fiction, though constantly transforming itself to meet new challenges and concerns, is as vital a part of the national literary identity as in the days of Cooper, Dana, and Melville. Far from becoming a fringe activity, sea writing in America continues to investigate the ocean’s compelling mysteries and to plow its uncharted depth for symbols to articulate our own modern and postmodern version of man’s universal fascination with the sea. Reception. Today, scholars examining the role of the sea in American literary history are confronted with a wave of critical texts that stand in need to be charted and explored. Though in the broadest sense the topic may well include Native American water myths or contemporary seashore environmentalism, in my own approach here I could only present a small number of American writers and discuss ways in which they recreate, question, and thereby continuously reinforce connections (whether imagined or real) between America and the sea. More encompassing, encyclopedic publications include Haskell Springer’s America and the Sea: A Literary History (1995), Peter Neill’s compilation of primary American sea literature American Sea Writing: A Literary Anthology (2000), and Jill B. Gidmark’s Encyclopedia of American Literature of the Sea and Great Lakes (2001). Equally comprehensive though by now also somewhat dated is Myron J. Smith’s and Robert C. Weller’s Sea Fiction Guide, a partially annotated listing of sea writing and authors up to 1976. Other critics have looked more selectively at the tradition and produced case studies such as Patricia Ann Carlson’s Literature and Lore of the Sea (1986), Bert Bender’s Sea-Brothers: The Tradition of American Sea Fiction From Moby-Dick To the Present (1988), and lately Robert Foulke’s topical study The Sea Voyage Narrative (2002) and Klaus Benesch’s, Jon-K Adams’s, and Kerstin Schmidt’s The Sea and the American Imagination (2004).

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Bibliography Albee, Edward. Seascape—A Play. New York: Atheneum, 1975. Barth, John. Coming Soon. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001. ———. Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1994. ———. The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1991. ———. The Tidewater Tales: A Novel. New York: Putnam’s, 1987. ———. Sabbatical: A Romance. New York: Putnam’s, 1982. ———. Lost in the Funhouse. New York: Doubleday, 1968. ———. The Floating Opera. New York: Appleton, 1956. Bender, Bert. Sea-Brothers: The Tradition of American Sea Fiction from Moby-Dick to the Present. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1988. Benesch, Klaus, Jon-K Adams, and Kerstin Schmidt, eds. The Sea and the American Imagination. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2004. Berthold, Dennis. “Prose Since 1960.” America and the Sea: A Literary History. Haskell Springer, ed. Athens/London: The University of Georgia Press, 1995, 307–326. Carlson, Patricia N., ed. Literature and Lore of the Sea. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1986. Carson, Rachel. The Sea Around Us. New York: Oxford University Press, 1951. Crane, Stephen. “The Open Boat.” The Works of Stephen Crane. Vol. 5. Fredson Bowers, ed. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969. Dana, Richard Henry, Jr. Two Years Before the Mast. New York: Harper, 1840. DeFalco, Joseph. “Modernist Prose and Its Antecedents.” America and the Sea: A Literary History. Haskell Springer, ed. Athens/London: The University of Georgia Press, 1995, 289–306. Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. David Blight, ed. Boston/New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Gidmark, Jill B., ed. Encyclopedia of American Literature of the Sea and Great Lakes. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2001. Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. Vincent Carretta, ed. New York: Penguin, 1995. Fabre, Geneviève, and Klaus Benesch, eds. African Diasporas in the Old and the New World. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003. Farr, James. Black Odyssey: The Seafaring Tradition of Black Americans. New York: Peter Lang, 1989. Foulke, Robert. The Sea Voyage Narrative. (1997) New York/London: Routledge, 2002. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993. Hemingway, Ernest. Islands in the Stream. New York: Scribner’s, 1970. ———. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner’s, 1952. ———. To Have and Have Not. New York: Scribner’s, 1937. Horwitz, Tony. Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before. New York: Picador, 2002. Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel, eds. New York: Vintage, 1995. ———. The Big Sea. New York: Knopf, 1940. Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1978. Johnson, Charles. Middle Passage. New York: Atheneum, 1990. London, Jack. Great Short Works of Jack London. Ed. Earle Labor. New York: Harper, 1965. Lawson-Peebles, Robert. Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary America: The Worlds Turned Upside Down. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Malcolm X. Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove Press, 1965, 201. Marshall, Paule. Praisesong for the Widow. New York: Dutton, 1983. Martin, William. Cape Cod. New York: Grand Central, 1992.

SEA LITERATURE Matthiessen, Peter. Men’s Lives: The Surfmen and Baymen of the South Fork. New York: Random, 1986. ———. Far Tortuga. New York: Random, 1975. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York/London: Norton, 1967. ———. Billy Budd, Sailor. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Peck, John. Maritime Fiction: Sailors and the Sea in British and American Novels, 1719–1917. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Neill, Peter, ed. American Sea Writing: A Literary Anthology. New York: The Library of America, 2000. Pederson, Carl. “Sea Change: The Middle Passage and the Transatlantic Imagination.” The Black Columbiad. Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich, eds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994, 42–51. Philbrick, Nathaniel. In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. New York: Viking, 2000. Phillips, Caryl. The Atlantic Sound. London: Faber and Faber, 2000. Poirier, Richard. A World Elsewhere. The Place of Style in American Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. Robillard, Douglas, ed. The Poems of Herman Melville. Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 2000. Schultz, Elizabeth. “African-American Literature.” America and the Sea: A Literary History. Haskell Springer, ed. Athens/London: The University of Georgia Press, 1995, 233–259. Slocum, Joshua. Sailing Alone Around the World. (1900). London: Adlard Coles Nautical, 1996. Smith, Myron J., Jr., and Robert C. Weller, eds. Sea Fiction Guide. Metuchen, New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press, 1976. Sobel, Dava. Longitude: The Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. London: Fourth Estate Limited, 1996. Sollors, Werner, and Maria Diedrich, eds. “Introduction.” The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Springer, Haskell. “Introduction: The Sea, the Land, the Literature.” America and the Sea: A Literary History. Haskell Springer, ed. Athens/London: The University of Georgia Press, 1995, 1–31. ———. “Call Them All Ishmael?: Fact and Form in Some Nineteenth-Century Sea Narratives.” Literature and Lore of the Sea. Patricia Ann Carlson, ed. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1986, 14–22. Stein, Roger B. Seascape and the American Imagination. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1975. Vonnegut, Kurt. Galápagos. New York: Delacorte, 1985. Williams, Williams Carlos. In the American Grain. (1925) New York: New Directions, 1956.

Further Reading Bender, Bert. Sea-Brothers: The Tradition of American Sea Fiction from Moby-Dick to the Present. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1988; Benesch, Klaus, Jon-K Adams, and Kerstin Schmidt, eds. The Sea and the American Imagination. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2004; Berthold, Dennis. “Prose Since 1960.” America and the Sea: A Literary History. Ed. Haskell Springer. Athens/London: The University of Georgia Press, 1995, 307–326; Foulke, Robert. The Sea Voyage Narrative. (1997) New York/London: Routledge, 2002; Neill, Peter, ed. American Sea Writing: A Literary Anthology. New York: The Library of America, 2000; Carlson, Patricia N., ed. Literature and Lore of the Sea. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1986; Smith,

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KLAUS BENESCH

SELF-HELP LITERATURE Definition. The genre of “self-help” literature is known by several other labels, including “self-improvement,” “self-actualization,” “life skills,” “personal growth,” and “recovery.” The genre is so popular that it merits its own section on the New York Times weekly bestseller list, which is titled “Advice, How-To, and Miscellaneous.” Books in this genre often fit several other categories utilized by retailers, librarians, and marketers, including art instruction, alternative medicine, business writing, career coaching, diet, etiquette, health, humor, inspirational literature, motivational literature, new age literature, personal finances, popular psychology, reference, and spirituality. Whereas this entry will use the term “self-help” throughout, many of the guides and manuals regarded as “self-help” books actively urge their readers to seek assistance rather than relying solely on their own resources. Such texts can be regarded as “self-help” in terms of the books’ function as starter kits and handbooks rather than stand-alone, self-contained solutions to the readers’ issues. History. Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), whose many roles included author and publisher, remains an iconic figure to many modern advocates of task and time management. The advice he dispensed through his series of Poor Richard’s Almanacs (1732–1758) and the manuscript of his autobiography (edited and published in numerous versions after his death) is still quoted widely and frequently, including on the front page of “Franklin planners” (“Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of”). The planners, a calendarbased tool popular among many white-collar employees, are part of a larger, massively influential system developed and marketed by FranklinCovey, a company formed from the 1997 merger of Franklin Quest (the original manufacturer of the planners) and Covey Leadership Center (a training and consulting corporation). The Covey Leadership Center was founded by Stephen R. Covey (b. 1932), who wrote The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People (1989). The book sold over 15 million copies during its first two decades in print, appearing on the New York Times Business Best Sellers lists well into the first decade of the twenty-first century. Sequels such as First Things First (Covey, Merrill, and Merrill 1994), The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families (Covey 1997), and The Eighth Habit (Covey 2004) were also bestsellers. Covey’s fame is manifest both in the honors he’s received, such as being named one of America’s twenty-five most influential people (Time 1996), as well as the ongoing success of the FranklinCovey company and its stores, workshops, and conferences. The phrase “seven habits” is so recognizable that it is frequently borrowed for headlines to books and articles largely unrelated to Covey or time management; a quick Internet search turns up titles such as the “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Massgoers” (2004), “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Imperialists” (2004), “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Foundries,” “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Physical Educators” (2005), and “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Global PrivatePublic Health Partnerships” (2007). Another iconic figure in the genre is Dale Carnegie (1888–1955). As with Franklin’s autobiography, Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) and How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948) have been reprinted and

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repackaged in multiple editions since their original press runs; as with the FranklinCovey corporation, the Dale Carnegie Training company (founded 1912) conducts numerous courses nationwide that are factored into many business budgets. A contemporary of Carnegie, Minister Norman Vincent Peale (1898–1993), wrote The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) and forty-five other books; as with How to Win Friends and Influence People, The Power of Positive Thinking remains in print in multiple formats. Peale’s platform was religious rather than corporate; the continuation of his legacy has resided in Guideposts, an inspirational magazine Peale co-founded with his wife in 1945. In the secular realm, one of the most influential figures among self-help enthusiasts is talk-show host Oprah Winfrey (b. 1952), whose endorsements have helped secure the success of other household names such as Deepak Chopra (b. 1946), John Gray (b. 1951), Suze Orman (b. 1951), “Dr. Phil” McGraw (b. 1950), and Marianne Williamson (b. 1952). Winfrey, repeatedly named on Time 100 lists (Mandela 2007), also promotes a number of self-help books via her lifestyle magazine, O, which premiered in May 2000. The inaugural theme, “Live Your Best Life,” became the title of an anthology (Randol 2005), as well as several tours of motivational seminars conducted by Winfrey and an online workshop that closed in 2006. Individuals whose profiles have been boosted by Winfrey’s support have also included physicians Michael F. Roizen (b. 1946) and Mehmet C. Oz (b. 1960), known for their “RealAge” and “YOU” programs for diet and personal care; fitness expert Bob Greene; professional organizer Peter Walsh (b. 1956); and interior designer Nate Berkus (b. 1971). Not all of Winfrey’s endorsements are greeted with enthusiasm or approval. In particular, her support of The Secret (Byrne 2007) was fiercely criticized by commentators who found its “ask, believe, receive” variation of positive thinking to be simplistic, materialistic, and even offensive, particularly in its implication that victims of tragedies somehow attract their misfortunes (cf. Birkenhead 2007; Klein 2007; Salkin 2007). However, the book’s promise of life-changing revelations attracted enough readers for it to dominate bestseller lists during the better part of 2007. Another popular author promoting the notion of a desire-responsive universe is Michael J. Losier, who teaches workshops on utilizing the Law of Attraction (2004) and who has received repeat airtime with Winfrey. Esther and Jerry Hicks are also well-known advocates of “prosperity consciousness”; their most recent book is also titled Law of Attraction (2006). Their dispute with Rhonda Byrne over the documentary version of The Secret added to the controversy surrounding Byrne’s success (Salkin 2007). Although the popularity of The Secret surged in 2007, the concepts it promoted are not wholly new. In addition to Peale, another classic author mentioned in discussions of prosperity consciousness is Napoleon Hill (1883–1970), who penned Think and Grow Rich (1937). The book has appeared in several different versions over the years, with several expanded editions produced during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Trends and Themes Topical. A primary concern among contemporary readers is finding, establishing, and maintaining a proper balance between professional and personal priorities. Some of the concepts addressing this issue include time management and clutter

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HELP FOR DUMMIES AND IDIOTS Two of the most recognizable brands in self-help are the black-and-yellow “Dummies” guides launched in 1991 and the orange-bordered “Complete Idiot’s Guides” launched in 1993. Both series began as hip, humorous introductions to the basics of various computer programs.The format proved to be popular enough to expand into nontechnical areas of interest, with both series going strong into their second decades. Sample titles in recent years have included Grieving for Dummies (2007), Baby and Toddler Sleep Solutions for Dummies (2007), Frugal Living for Dummies (2003), The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creative Visualization (2005), The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Organizing Your Life (4th edition, 2005), and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Managing Your Time (3rd edition, 2002).The Dummies brand is so recognizable that the 2007 movie Evan Almighty featured a book called Ark Building for Dummies both in its plot and in its advertising.

management. In an appendix to First Things First, the authors analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of eight basic approaches covered in the time management literature they surveyed: The “Get Organized” Approach (putting things in order) The “Warrior” Approach (protecting time to get things done) The “Goal” Approach (focusing on goals) The “ABC” Approach (concentrating on top priorities) The “Magic Tool” Approach (using customized planners and other aids) The “Time Management 101” Approach (treating time management as a specific, acquirable skill) The “Go with the Flow” Approach (redefining one’s frames of reference) The “Recovery” Approach (examining one’s personal hangups) (Covey, Merrill, and Merrill 1994, 332–341)

One of the newer systems that caught on in the early 2000s is “Getting Things Done” (GTD), which was developed by trainer and consultant David Allen (b.1945) and is promoted through his book of the same name. Allen’s prescription for “stressfree productivity” includes exhortations such as his “do it,” “delegate it,” and “defer it” rules for handling the contents of one’s in-box (Allen 2001, 131) and “use your mind to think about things, rather than think of them” (233). Another organizational program that acquired numerous adherents during this period was the humor-laced “Sidetracked Home Executives”™ (SHE) system, established by “The Slob Sisters” in 1977 and aimed primarily at homemakers. As with many self-improvement franchises, the SHE system has been propagated through workshops, Web pages, newsletters, media appearances, and other offerings, including books; a revised and updated version of its basic guide, Sidetracked Home Executives, was issued in 2001, twenty years after the first edition (Young and Jones 2001). The SHE system has inspired two peppy spinoffs, FlyLady and Company (founded 1999) and The Brat Factor (founded 2006). The FlyLady program, known for its cheerleading style and for slogans such as “Shine Your Sink,” has produced books on routine-building and self-care, including Sink Reflections (Cilley 2002) and Body Clutter (Cilley and Ely 2006), as well as partnering with the “Dinner Diva” and her “Saving Dinner” series (Ely 2003, 2005, 2005a, 2006, 2007). The Brat

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Factor occupies a cartoonesque online Web space called “Bratland,” where it addresses the issue of self-sabotage, that is, when a person’s “Inner Brat” resists the efforts being made to control or eradicate bad habits; the motto of the Brat Factor is “If it isn’t fun, it won’t get done.” The tools sold in the Brat Factor online store include “Mouth Traps”—decals the user places over her own mouth to create timeouts and deter “complaining, snacking, smoking, drinking, or whining.” The theme of self-sabotage is discussed in Judith Wright’s books and workshops as well. Wright’s specialty is teaching people how to overcome their “soft addictions,” her trademarked term for benign-seeming habits that become liabilities from overindulgence, such as watching television and spending time on the Internet. Wright, who runs an institute in her name, is best-known for a 2003 book called There Must Be More than This, which was revised and expanded several years later into The Soft Addiction Solution (Wright 2006). Wright has also trademarked the concept of “The One Decision,” which urges readers to approach and assess their lives in the context of a single guiding principle. The principle, which is up to each reader to define for himself or herself, is framed in epic terms: not unlike The Secret and other prosperity consciousness manuals, The One Decision tells its disciples that they too will benefit from the laws of attraction: Magic happens once you definitely make your One Decision. The very act of committing sends out a message to the universe, and then, and only then, can full resources come to your aid. When you definitely commit, unforeseen support, inspiration, and encouragement come your way. You begin to find synergies and synchronicities in events and things around you. You begin to attract the support of other people who have made deeper life commitments. It requires a leap of faith to make your One Decision, but once you have, resources will appear that you never would have expected. (Wright 2005, 73)

The One Decision program also employs language evocative of epic and spiritual journeys, using phrases such as “The Way of the Heart,” “The Keys to the Kingdom,” and “The Good Fight” to describe facets of the user’s progress toward self-improvement and alluding to heroic fantasies such as The Fellowship of the Ring (32–33) and the quest for the Holy Grail (157). Wright’s work has been endorsed by a number of eminent authors, including Covey, novelist James Redfield (b. 1950), mystic Andrew Harvey (b. 1952), and “medical intuitive” Caroline Myss. The search for meaningful work is a central theme in many advice books published since 2001. In The Answer to How Is Yes (Block 2002), readers are urged to ask “What” questions instead of “How”-based ones in order to frame their priorities in the context of their personal values rather than measurable results. In I Don’t Know What I Want, But I Know It’s Not This (Jansen 2003), readers are offered multiple self-assessment exercises to help them ascertain what type of career change would best suit their skills and personalities. In The Anti 9 to 5 Guide (2007), Michelle Goodman (b. 1976) details the steps women can take to pursue a variety of non-office-based careers or to adjust their professional commitments to make more time for avocations or side gigs. Goodman’s observation that “work in the twenty-first century is dramatically different from the way it was in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and early to mid-1990s” (Goodman 2007, 9) is echoed in Free to Succeed (Reinhold 2001), a guide for individuals interested in becoming “free agents” such as entrepreneurs, “intrapreneurs” (employees with ownership of special

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projects), or seasonal workers. The author, a woman known as “The Career Coach” on the job-hunting Web site monster.com, offers prospective free agents a seven-step program for discerning whether they are suited to nontraditional employment and anecdotal examples to illustrate each step. The word “authentic” and its variations also appeals to modern workers. Readers of The Authentic Career (Craddock 2004) are led through stages of “Awareness,” “Emotional Ownership,” “Interaction,” and “Integration,” with exercises such as “Weeding the ‘Shoulds’” and “The Mandala of Your Life.” Authenticity (Cappannelli and Cappannelli 2004) is organized in four stages as well: “Exploring Ten Beliefs that May Be Limiting Your Life,” “Penetrating Those Thorny Myths that Limit Authenticity,” “Turning Deliberately Toward Greater Meaning and Purpose,” and “Practicing A Few Simple Strategies that Can Change Your Life.” British personal development coach Neil Crofts (b. 1963) runs a large franchise called “Authentic Transformation”; like many other self-improvement companies, its offerings include an electronically distributed newsletter, a team of consultants (called “Authentic Guides”), a schedule of workshops and gatherings (include a retreat-style event termed an “advance”), and several books, including Authentic (Crofts 2003) and Authentic Business (Crofts 2005). Other titles geared to address aspects of this yearning include Authentic Happiness (Seligman 2003), Something More: Excavating Your Authentic Self (Breathnach 1998), The Authentic Heart (Amodeo 2001), and Authentic Relationships (Jacobsen and Jacobsen 2003). Another trend has been to invoke the Renaissance period of history and its major figures, including artists Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) and Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519). Such books appeal to users who associate the Renaissance with versatile, multi-talented geniuses. In The Angel Inside, Chris Widener uses the life and art of Michelangelo to tell a parable about choosing one’s path; the book includes an eleven-page “Discussion Guide and Workbook” with sections such as “Embrace the Stages of Chipping, Sculpting, Sanding, and Polishing” and “No One Starts with the Sistine Chapel” (Widener 2004, 103–105). The authors of The Michelangelo Method also employ artistic metaphors in their guide to fostering creativity, with one chapter titled “Plan First, Then Chip Away,” and two others featuring the word “vision” (Schuman and Paxton 2007). The concept of viewing oneself as a masterpiece also appears in books such as The Secret, which quotes Joe Vitale as saying, “You are the Michelangelo of your own life. The David you are sculpting is you” (Byrne 2006, 23); Sacred Self, Sacred Relationships, in which the reader is exhorted, “Come to see yourself as the artistic perfection Michelangelo saw hidden in the block of granite” (Jones and Jones 2002, 59); and The Play of Your Life, where the user is guided through the search for a new career by thinking of it in terms of “the script,” “the audition,” and other elements of a dramatic production (Sabatino 2004). In How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci and its workbook, “high performance learning” expert Michael J. Gelb names seven principles in Italian (curiosita, dimostrazione, sensazione, sfumato, arte/scienza, corporalita, and connessione) that he presents as reflective of da Vinci’s skills (Gelb 1998). In Da Vinci Decoded (an allusion to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, a blockbuster novel in 2003), Gelb encouraged his readers to apply the seven principles featured in the earlier book to spiritual as well as creative matters (Gelb 2004). In The Da Vinci Method, Garret LoPorto speaks of a “DaVinci” personality type that he sees as common to most entrepreneurs, including himself, and one that includes a high percentage of individuals with Attention Deficit (Hyperactive) Disorder (ADD/ADHD)

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(LoPorto 2005); one headline for the book on its Web site billed it as “The Most Advanced Adult ADD/ADHD Therapy on the Planet!” Disciples of the method are called “DaVincis” and congregate in an online community called “DaVinci Nation.” The theme of advising users that their weaknesses are actually hidden strengths can also be seen in books such as The Renaissance Soul, which addresses individuals who can’t seem to focus on just one interest; the author repeatedly cites Franklin and da Vinci as examples of successful Renaissance Souls (cf. Lobenstine 2006, 33). Barbara Sher discusses a similar personality type at length in Refuse to Choose!, having coined the term “Scanners” to describe individuals who “instead of diving down into the depths of an interest . . . scanned the horizon for many interests.” Sher, too, mentions Franklin as a role model, as well as the philosopher Aristotle (384 B.C.E.–322 B.C.E.) and the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) (Sher 2006, xiv). Another type of weakness that has received significant attention within the past decade is the compulsion of many individuals to repeat behaviors they already know to be unproductive or even self-destructive. One school of thought posits that individuals subconsciously adhere to internal narratives that tend to prevent them from moving forward with their lives; the role these stories play has been examined in books such as I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was (Sher and Smith 1994), with chapters such as “Fear of Success: Leaving the Ones You Love Behind.” In its “Going Deeper” section, The Renaissance Soul also devotes space to “Rewriting Old Messages” and coping with “Creative Fear and Anxiety” (Lobenstine 2006, 267–292). This theme is central to books such as Becoming Real: Defeating the Stories We Tell Ourselves that Hold Us Back (Saltz 2004) and Bad Childhood, Good Life (Schlessinger 2006). Transcending one’s baggage is also emphasized in books on overcoming negativity, such as The Emotional Toolkit (Mininni 2005). Based on a course called “LifeSkills” that the author began teaching in 1999, The Emotional Toolkit employs lists and charts such as “The Emotion Tree” to guide its users toward analyzing and managing distressing feelings. In Be Nice (Or Else!), the first step listed under “Take Control of Your Life” is “Eliminate and Cancel Negative Programming” (Claybaugh 2004, 40–47). In Receiving Love, relationship therapists Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt examine why individuals “have trouble accepting compliments and positive feedback from their partners and others” (Hendrix and Hunt 2004, 3), tracing it back to hidden triggers and unconscious defenses developed in childhood. This is an extension of Hendrix’s “Imago” theory of couples interaction, so called because of his belief that “partners in an adult intimate relationship are, in important ways, mirrors of their caretakers” (Hendrix and Hunt 2004, 289). This theory was first presented in Getting the Love You Want (1988), a bestseller that continued to attract new readers during its second decade in print and generated spin-off products such as workbooks, “home video workshops,” and sequels titled Keeping the Love You Find (Hendrix and Hunt 1992) and Giving the Love That Heals (Hendrix and Hunt 1997). The exercises in Receiving Love include keeping a “Gift Diary” and practicing “Positive Flooding” (setting aside time to shower one’s partner with compliments). Although many authors in the genre couch their advice in gentle, sympathetic language, the blunt approach favored by personalities such as “Dr. Phil” McGraw and “Dr. Laura” Schlessinger (b. 1947) has also attained a substantial following.

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McGraw developed his fan base as a regular on Oprah Winfrey’s television talk show in the late 1990s, and he began hosting his own show (produced by Winfrey’s company) on television in 2002. His publications have covered both relationships and diet and include Relationship Rescue (2000), Self Matters (2001), The Ultimate Weight Solution (2003), Family First (2005), Love Smart (2006), as well as workbooks and a cookbook. Schlessinger became a household name with her first book, Ten Stupid Things Women Do To Mess Up Their Lives (1994); her publications since have included Ten Stupid Things Couples Do to Mess Up Their Relationships (2001) and The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands (2004). Conservative writer Paul Coughlin attracts readers who share his aggravation with the Christian church’s treatment of men, which he discusses in books such as No More Christian Nice Guy (2005). Coughlin contends that Christianity has focused too much on comfort at the expense of personal growth and deplores the under-masculine image of Christ that he sees churches promoting: “That sweet, Gumby-like Jesus can’t save you from a dark night of the soul” (Meadows n.d.). Coughlin’s aggressive stance is also evident in No More Jellyfish, Chickens, or Wimps (2007), a guide to rearing “assertive” children. The perception of anxiety, uncertainty, and dissatisfaction with society’s current roles for men can also be witnessed in other “male liberation” titles intended to address these symptoms, such as No More Mr. Nice Guy! (Glover 2003), The Way of the Superior Man (Deida 2004), and Being the Strong Man a Woman Wants (Katz 2005). There are also unisex guides to self-assertiveness and conflict management; these include Anxious to Please (Rapson and English 2006), Too Nice For Your Own Good (Robinson 1997 [2000]), Don’t Be Nice, Be Real (Bryson 2004), The Disease to Please (Braiker 2001), The Power of Positive Confrontation (Patcher and Magee 2000), and The Coward’s Guide to Conflict (Ursiny 2003). On the distaff side, a prime example of the unsentimental, anti-self-pity approach is He’s Just Not That into You (Behrendt and Tuccillo 2004), written by two members of the creative team for the Sex in the City television show. The book proved to be so popular that it was later abridged into a version subtitled Your Daily WakeUp Call (2005), reformatted into a “pocket guide” (with a pink-ribboned telephone bookmark, 2005), and expanded into a second edition (2006). Rebuttals include Be Honest—You’re Not That into Him Either (Kerner 2005). Parodies include He Just Thinks He’s Not That into You (Whitman 2007). Behrendt, a comedian by profession, has since parlayed his reputation as a relationships expert into a short-lived daytime talk show (2006–2007) and additional books co-authored with his wife, Amiira Ruotola-Behrendt, including It’s Called a Break-Up Because It’s Broken (2005). With many humor books adopting a pseudo-handbook format, and many handbook writers employing sarcasm and irony to entertain their readers, it can be difficult to assess to what extent a book genuinely intends to offer help and when its advice is tongue-in-cheek. This is particularly the case with books with cynical titles. One reviewer called The Complete A**hole’s Guide to Handling Chicks “basically a how-to book for the sexually frustrated, offering advice—often in handy chart form—on how to have as much meaningless sex as possible. I think it’s supposed to be funny, but I’ve laughed more at books about genocide” (Schaub 2003). Another book in the “telling it as it is” subgenre is Why Men Love Bitches (2002), written by comedian Sherry Argov, which received sufficient interest for a follow-up titled Why Men Marry Bitches (2006).

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The potent combination of satire and how-to can be seen in the enthusiasm nationwide for Southern-flavored guides to manners. One of the classics of this category, The Southern Belle Primer, or Why Princess Margaret Will Never Be a Kappa Kappa Gamma (Schwartz 1991), was reissued in 2006 with a new subtitle, Why Paris Hilton Will Never Be a Kappa Kappa Gamma. Ronda Rich followed What Southern Women Know (1999) with What Southern Women Know about Flirting (2005). Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays provide both irreverence and recipes in Being Dead Is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral (2005) and Somebody is Going to Die if Lilly Beth Doesn’t Catch That Bouquet, a sequel on organizing weddings (2007). Deborah Ford’s GRITS (Girls Raised in the South), Inc. franchise has inspired the formation of the Official Sisterhood of GRITS as well as a series of books, including The GRITS Guide to Life (2003), Puttin’ On the Grits: A Guide to Southern Entertaining (2005), GRITS Friends Are Forevah: A Southern-Style Celebration of Women (2006), and Bless His Heart: the GRITS Guide to Loving (Or Just Living With) Southern Men (2006). Another major Southern sisterhood brand features the Sweet Potato Queens, who hail from a Jackson, Mississippi, parade tradition that began in 1982 and now counts more than five thousand regional chapters with names such as “The Sweet Tea Queens,” “The Kudzu Queens,” and “The Divine Dixie Divas” (www.sweetpotatoqueens.com). The first book in the series, The Sweet Potato Queen’s Book of Love (Browne 1999), was followed by God Save the Sweet Potato Queens (Browne 2001), a combined cookbook and financial planner (Browne 2003), a “field guide” to men (Browne 2004), and a wedding-and-divorce guide in one volume (Browne 2005). The appeal of advice from other geographic and ethnic perspectives has also been a significant trend during the first decade of the twenty-first century. The elegant, stylish reputation of French women has helped fuel interest in titles such as French Women Don’t Get Fat (Guiliano 2005) and its sequel, French Women for All Seasons (Guiliano 2006); Entre Nous (Ollivier 2003); Joie de Vivre (Arbor and Whiteside 2003); All You Need to Be Impossibly French (Powell 2006); The French Diet (Montignac 2005); and The French Don’t Diet Plan (Clower 2006). Books highlighting the lifestyle approaches of other cultures include Mediterranean Women Stay Slim, Too (Kelly and Adamson 2006) and Japanese Women Don’t Get Old or Fat (Moriyama and Doyle 2005). During the 2000s, books listing “things to do you die” also represented a trend. Patricia Schultz’s “1,000 Places” travel guides inspired a cable television show as well as appearing on the New York Times “Advice, How-To and Miscellaneous” bestseller list multiple years (Schultz 2003 and 2007). Other variations on the theme include 2Do Before I Die (Ogden and Day 2005), 101 Things to Do Before You Die (Horne 2004), and 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (Boxall 2006), the last title part of a series that also features volumes devoted to music albums, movies, and paintings. Design. What Would You Do If You Had No Fear? (Conway 2004) follows a common handbook design. Printed in a nonstandard 5 1/2” by 7” format (making it larger than mass-market paperbacks but smaller than typical trade-quality soft covers), the book is structured for multiple readings. It is a collection of anecdotes and meditations, primarily from participants in the author’s workshops and from her own life. Each anecdote—usually less than five pages long—is given its own title and an

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epigraph; Conway sometimes concludes the anecdote with another quotation. Then she lists three “Life Challenges” derived from the anecdote for the reader to pursue. For instance, in “Be Real,” Conway begins with a quotation from the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu (approximately sixth century B.C.E.): “When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everyone will respect you.” She then discusses issues of authenticity and insecurity, incorporating quotations from some of her students and relating how she coped with being raped when she was thirty-four. After emphasizing the value of learning to say “a strong, nonnegotiable ‘no’,” Conway bookends the discussion with a second quotation from Anonymous: “If I be you, who’ll be me?” She then issues three life challenges: Take a self-defense class. Ask who you need to say “no” to. Say it. Take a meditation class or listen to a guided meditation CD. (Conway 2004, 104–108)

Authenticity (Cappannelli and Cappannelli 2004) displays an identical structure. For instance, one of its chapters is titled “What Needs to Be Done Is (Only) the Doing” and opens with a quote from journalist I.F. Stone (1907–1989). The authors discuss the issue of “the difference between real and imagined action,” propose strategies for overcoming one’s tendency to overthink, and end with “Today’s Reflection,” a section in boldface type that concludes, “Today, I will do the next physical actions. Today I will invite greater authenticity and originality in my life” (Cappannelli and Cappannelli 2004, 163–166). In similar fashion, The Happiness Makeover includes fifty-three short chapters with titles such as “What’s So Bad About Getting Your Hopes Up?” and “Accept the Duty of Delight” sandwiched by sections on “You Can Be Happier,” “Twentytwo Instant Happiness Boosters,” and “Loving Your Life.” Every section and chapter begins with a quotation; the sources range from anonymous bumper stickers (“Don’t believe everything you think”) to Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) and Lao-Tzu (the latter a favorite of such handbooks; words attributed to him also appear in Cappannelli and Cappannelli 2004 and many others). Many of the chapters end with quotations as well, from luminaries such as poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) to guests on Oprah (Ryan 2005). Although it is aimed at a hip-hop demographic, Make It Happen also follows this basic scheme. Each chapter corresponds to a rule, such as “Rule 1: Find Your Will” and “Rule 10: Flex Purpose, Not Power,” with epigraphs from rap stars such as Eminem (b. 1972), Jay-Z (b. 1968), and Kanye West (b. 1977). At the end of each chapter, the “What,” “Why,” “How,” and “But” of each rule is reiterated in the form of a chart (Liles 2005). Displaying inspirational quotations in the page margins is also a favored tactic. Some books are designed with extra-wide margins to accommodate this; The Authentic Career is an example of this strategy (Craddock 2004). In others, such as Judith Wright’s books, the quotations are embedded in the page layout as blocks of text with a gray background and border to set them apart from the main content. Pat Croce’s 110% (2001) features two quotations at the top of each section in oversize type, with the title in even larger type in the middle of the page; the lower half of each page contains an average of 3–5 short paragraphs offering the reader suggestions for perspective and action.

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Referencing other self-help works and authors is another common practice in this genre. In The Renaissance Soul, Lobenstine’s citations include Free to Succeed (Reinhold 2001), Wishcraft (Sher and Gottlieb 2003), a half-dozen how-to books, and The Artist’s Way (Cameron 1992) (Lobenstine 2006, 145, 157, 160, 281). In the first set of acknowledgments for Be Nice or Else (2004), hair salon mogul and motivational speaker Winn Claybaugh states that his mentors have influenced him so much “that my thoughts in this book will border between plagiarism and personal experience”; he enthusiastically describes Louise Hay, Og Mandino, Oprah Winfrey, Marianne Williamson, John Bradshaw, Gerald Jampolski, George Melton, Will Garcia, and Leo Buscaglia as some of the mentors in question (Claybaugh 2004, 191–94). Schlessinger enlists the assistance of other experts for drlaura.com features; for example, a column on enticing children to eat their vegetables was authored by Missy Chase Lapine, who had recently produced a book on the same topic (Lapine 2007 and 2007a). The “Reading Corner” of the Web site lists several dozen titles recommended on Schlessinger’s radio show, including manuals on decluttering (cf. Peel 2007), fitness (cf. Druxman and Heaner 2007), money management (cf. Economides and Economides 2007), and child raising (cf. Blyth and Winston 2007). Contexts and Issues. Self-help literature attracts both passionate devotees and vehement skeptics. The market for self-improvement products grew by 50% between 2000 and 2004, with over three thousand new titles published per year (Salerno 2005, 7–8). Some analysts have attributed the surge of interest in the genre to the economic uncertainty and social instability that many individuals felt during this period, prompting them to consult advice manuals as a means of obtaining or regaining control over their lives (cf. McGee 2005, 12–13). As noted earlier, some self-help authorities readily encourage their readers to make use of the “mountains of motivational messages available” (Croce 2001, 50), and women’s magazines such as Good Housekeeping regularly quote from published books in their feature articles. Others position themselves as mavericks or contrarians offering common-sense alternatives to mainstream advice. For instance, in BeliefWorks, Ray Dodd discusses “seven secret keys” that he insists “are not really secrets at all . . . there is nothing contained in this book you didn’t already know” (Dodd 2006, 140). Although Dodd frequently resorts to mystical and elemental terms to discuss dreams and energy, he also devotes a chapter to disputing “the myth of self-improvement,” asserting that it can exacerbate one’s problems rather than address them. Mireille Guiliano orders her readers to “Banish the diet book! You don’t need an ideology or a technology, you need what French women have: a balanced and time-tested relation to food and life” (Guiliano 2005, 6–7). Consultant Jack M. Zufelt openly opposes traditional methods such as goal-setting and affirmations, asserting that other self-help authorities are “wasting people’s time and money” (Anderson 2003). The authors of Authenticity take pains to stress that their book is different than what they perceive to be standard fare: [T]his is not one of those soft and fuzzy books that promise you the moon and suggest you can have it effortlessly and immediately. In our experience, finding greater meaning and purpose requires a good deal more than that. . . . we have done our best to avoid the ‘chewing-gum answers’ and ‘feel-good strategies’ that tend to evaporate almost as soon as the page is turned or the speaker has left the podium. We also hold too much respect for you to sugarcoat our message. Frankly, we feel the world already

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In The Last Self-Help Book You’ll Ever Need, Paul Pearsall summarizes what he sees as ten tenets of standard self-help advice (including “Thou shalt never be less than thou can be”) and then counters them with his “Ten Contrary Commandments” (“Thou shalt celebrate what thou already art”) (Pearsall 2005, 80–81). He also devotes space to why he’s “Had My Fill of Dr. Phil,” citing an interview in which he’d seen “all the toxic elements of self-helpism: compliant thinking, the primacy of celebrity, the application of ‘soft science’” (29). One online consultant, Steve Pavlina, deliberately uses the term “personal development” instead of “self-help” to describe his work because “I really don’t want to be associated with marketers who promise quick-fix solutions to very difficult human challenges” (Pavlina 2006). The industry has been the target of a number of books and articles criticizing its practices, which some observers regard as ineffectual at best and predatory at worst. Charges leveled against self-help gurus include fostering unrealistic expectations, promoting unscientific thinking, and judgmental, disingenuous, or hypocritical behavior (cf. Aviram 2001; Anderson 2003; Miller 2005; Hari 2007). The celebrity worship accorded to charismatic but ethically challenged personalities such as Tony Robbins (b. 1960) has also provoked concern and outrage among nonparticipants (Salerno 2005, 75–87). Mariva Aviram, a self-professed former “self-help addict,” argues that many readers do not have the resources to adhere to the programs presented to them, skewering instructions such as “If you have too much to do, delegate tasks to others” with comments such as “This simplistic piece of advice is only useful to a wealthy neurotic workaholic, who, come to think of it, is the self-help market’s best friend” (Aviram 2001). Pearsall likewise notes that “self-help books aren’t written for the poor,” but for dissatisfied middle class workers with the leisure to indulge in selfcenteredness (Pearsall 2005, 12). The strategies promoted in relationship guides such as The Rules (Fein and Schneider 1995) and He’s Just Not That into You (Behrendt and Tuccillo 2004) continue to inspire controversy over whether they are effective, honest, and healthy practices for modern women to follow. Proponents of such strategies argue that they are realistic about gender-based behavior (rather than pretending the differences do not exist) and that they build and reinforce women’s self-esteem by urging them not to accept demeaning treatment from insufficiently interested men. Detractors of such books see them as manuals for manipulative mind games and overly simplistic in their characterizations of how relationships should work (e.g., Traister 2004). Reception. On a less cynical note, the “Books for a Better Life Awards” are a major fundraiser for the New York City chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, having raised over a million dollars since the program’s inception in 1996. The annual awards recognize “the very best in self-improvement publishing” in nine categories: childcare/parenting, first book, inspirational memoir, motivational, personal finance, psychology, relationships, spiritual, and wellness. There is a “Hall of Fame” associated with the event; its members include Jane Brody, Helen Gurley Brown, Deepak Chopra, Dr. Wayne Dyer, Oscar Dystel, John Gray, Judy Collins, Laurence Kirshbaum, Heidi Murkoff, Suzanne Somers, Andrew Weil, Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, and Peter Workman. The “first book” award is named after Suze Orman.

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AWARD-WINNING SELF-HELP BOOKS Recent winners of “Books for a Better Life Awards” have included these 2006 self-help titles: Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers’ Schemes by Sharon Lamb, Ed.D. and Lyn Miken Brown, Ed.D.; Social Intelligence:The New Science of Human Relationships by Daniel Goleman; What To Eat by Marion Nestle (North Point Press); and Crazy Busy: Overstretched, Overbooked and About to Snap by Ned Hallowell, M.D.

The titles of some self-help guides have become catchphrases that remain in active circulation long after the books’ sales have peaked. For instance, the term “Rules Girl” has become shorthand for women who believe in playing “hard to get,” as advised by The Rules (Fein and Schneider 1995). The concept of “He’s just not that into you,” made popular through the book of the same name (Behrendt and Tuccillo 2004), has been riffed upon by sportswriters (Plaschke 2007), bloggers on politics and business (Beasley 2007; Fried 2007), and other pundits in discussing situations where they perceive an imbalance of interest among the parties involved. As with many other genres, a successful self-help book is likely to spawn sequels, accessories, imitators, counterarguments, and parodies. The Rules (Fein and Schneider 1995) was followed by The Rules II: More Rules to Live and Love By (1997), The Rules for Marriage: Time-Tested Secrets for Making Your Marriage Work (2001), and Rules for Online Dating: Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right in Cyberspace (2002). Responses to The Rules include Barbara De Angelis’s The Real Rules: How to Find the Right Man for the Real You (1997). Parodies include Nate Penn and Lawrence LaRose’s The Code: Time-Tested Secrets for Getting What You Want from Women—Without Marrying Them! (1996). It has been cited in attempts to describe other books, such as What Southern Women Know (That Every Woman Should): Timeless Secrets To Get Everything You Want in Love, Life, and Work (Rich 1999), which the publisher continues to promote as “A Southern Belle Primer meets The Rules” (Penguin Group 2007). The authors of How to Date Like a Man begin their book by summarizing the plateau they believe their typical reader has reached: “You’ve tried the Rules, you’ve tried listening to your married friends, and you’ve even tried listening to your mother. But you’re still eating Chinese takeout with your good Friends Monica, Rachel, Ross and Chandler” (Moore and Gould 2000, 3). Parodies of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People have included The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People (Minor 1994), the 7 Habits of Highly Defective People (Crimmins and Maeder 1996), a McSweeney’s list (Lloyd n.d.). Dr. Phil is wellknown enough to be cited and spoofed on assorted television shows and movies, and he was the inspiration for a Sesame Street character called “Dr. Feel.” Dr. Laura, herself parodied on shows such as Frasier and The West Wing, cheerfully collaborated with the manufacturers of the “Dr. Laura Talking Action Figure,” advertising it on her site with the headline “What’s Blonde, VERY Talkative, and comes in a Fabulous Package?” The FlyLady shop includes ostrich feather dusters and timers. The wares of diet-related franchises may include aprons, whereas calendars are a staple of time-management programs. Clothing, coffee mugs, jewelry, key rings, license-plate holders, and other items also serve to promote popular brands or concepts. Selected Authors. The self-help movement does not lack for prominent authors, many of whom have been mentioned already in this entry. Other individuals whose influence was substantial during the first decade of the twenty-first century follow.

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Robert Kiyosaki (b. 1947) promotes his investment theories via the “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” series, which includes titles such as Rich Dad’s Escape from the Rat Race (2005), Rich Dad’s Guide to Becoming Rich without Cutting up Your Credit Cards (2003), and Rich Dad’s Before You Quit Your Job (2005). Dave Ramsey (b. 1960) is another financial advisor, known for his tough-love crusade against debt, which he communicates primarily through his radio show. Ramsey’s no-nonsense demeanor and faith-based lifestyle appeal to listeners who regard him as a type of fiscal pastor. As one reporter summed up, “There are thousands of personal finance experts (or ‘experts’). There is even a competitive industry of Christian personal finance experts. Yet there is only one guy—one bald, middle-aged Christian money guy—who’s a favorite of both 60 Minutes and The 700 Club” (Drury 2007). Ramsey’s books include Total Money Makeover (2007) and Financial Peace Revisited (2003), both of which have been republished in updated editions. As with Dr. Laura, Ramsey’s Web site includes a reading recommendations section, organized into topical lists that include “Christian Devotional” and fiction titles as well as business and finance classics by Carnegie and others. One of the leading names in literature on eating disorders is Geneen Roth. The majority of her books were published in the 1990s, but she remains active as a magazine columnist and workshop leader. Spiritual advisor Iyalna Vanzant likewise remains in demand as an instructor and lecturer, although interest in her books appeared to have peaked by 2001. In the area of creative expression, Julia Cameron (b. 1948) remains active. The “morning pages” ritual featured in The Artist’s Way (a writing exercise to be performed upon rising every morning) has become a routine practiced by numerous writers; Cameron’s follow-up titles have included The Sound of Paper (2004), How to Avoid Making Art (2005), and Finding Water (2006). Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy (b. 1954), better known by her initials (SARK), employs a distinctive, colorful style to letter and illustrate her books, cards, and posters; her exuberance is also very much in evidence on her Web site, “Planet Sark,” which includes a tribute to her mother titled “Marvelous Marjorie” and an interactive feature where users can consult with her cat Jupiter as a clickable oracle. Her recent publications include Eat Mangoes Naked (2001), Make Your Creative Dreams Real (2004) and Fabulous Friendship Festival (2007). Bibliography Allen, David. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. New York: Penguin, 2001. Amodeo, John. The Authentic Heart: An Eightfold Path to Midlife Love. New York: Wiley, 2001. Anderson, Adrienne. “The Last Word on Self-Help?” Denver Business Journal 23 June 2003. Arbor, Robert, and Katherine Whiteside. Joie de Vivre: Simple French Style for Everyday Living. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. Argov, Sherry. Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl—A Woman’s Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship. Avon, MA: Adams, 2002. ———. Why Men Marry Bitches: A Woman’s Guide to Winning Her Man’s Heart. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006. Aviram, Mariva H. “The Self-Help Industry: New Year’s Day Is the Holiday of Selfimprovement Junkies.” (1 Jan. 2001) www.mariva.com. Beasley, Ron. “He’s just not that into you.” Middle Earth Journal. (27 April 2007). http://ronbeas2.blogspot.com/2007/04/hes-just-not-that-into-you.html.

SELF-HELP LITERATURE Behrendt, Greg, and Amiira Ruotola-Behrendt. It’s Called a Breakup Because It’s Broken: The Smart Girl’s Breakup Buddy. New York: Broadway, 2005. Behrendt, Greg, and Liz Tuccillo. He’s Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys. New York: Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2004. Birkenhead, Peter. “Oprah’s Ugly Secret.” Salon. (5 March 2007). http://www.salon.com/ mwt/feature/2007/03/05/the_secret. Block, Peter. The Answer to How Is Yes. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2002. Blyth, Myrna, and Chriss Winston. How to Raise an American: 1776 Fun and Easy Tools, Tips, and Activities to Help Your Child Love This Country. New York: Crown Forum, 2007. Boxall, Peter, ed. 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. New York: Universe, 2006. Braiker, Harriet B. The Disease to Please: Curing the People-Pleasing Syndrome. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001. Breathnach, Sarah Ban. Something More: Excavating Your Authentic Self. New York: Time Warner, 1998. Browne, Jill Conner. The Sweet Potato Queens’ Wedding Planner: The Sweet Potato Queens’ Divorce Guide. New York: Crown, 2005. ———. The Sweet Potato Queens’ Field Guide to Men: Every Man I Love is Either Married, Gay, or Dead. New York: Three Rivers, 2004. ———. The Sweet Potato Queens’ Big-Ass Cookbook (and Financial Planner). New York: Three Rivers, 2003. ———. God Save the Sweet Potato Queens. New York: Three Rivers, 2001. ———. The Sweet Potato Queens’ Book of Love. New York: Three Rivers, 1999. Bryson, Kelly. Don’t Be Nice, Be Real: Balancing Passion for Self with Compassion for Others. 2nd ed. Santa Rosa, CA: Elite, 2004. Byrne, Rhonda. The Secret. New York: Atria/Beyond Words, 2006. Cameron, Julia. Finding Water: The Art of Perseverance. New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2006. ———. How to Avoid Making Art (Or Anything Else You Enjoy). New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2005. ———. The Sound of Paper: Starting From Scratch. New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2004. ——— The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. 10th Anniversary Edition. New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2002. Cappannelli, George, and Sedena Cappannelli. Authenticity: Simple Strategies for Greater Meaning and Purpose at Work and at Home. Cincinnati: Emmis, 2004. Cilley, Marla. Sink Reflections: Overwhelmed? Disorganized? Living in Chaos? The FlyLady’s Simple FLYing Lessons Will Show You How to Get Your Home and Your Life in Order—and It All Starts with Shining Your Sink! New York: Bantam, 2002. Cilley, Marla, and Leanne Ely. Body Clutter: Love Your Body, Love Yourself. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006. Claybaugh, Winn. Be Nice (Or Else!) And What’s In It For You. Laguna Beach, CA: Von Curtis, 2004. http://www.BeNiceOrElse.com. Clower, Will. The French Don’t Diet Plan: 10 Simple Steps to Stay Thin for Life. New York: Crown, 2006. Conway, Diane. What Would You Do If You Had No Fear? Living Your Dreams While Quakin’ in Your Boots. Maui: Inner Ocean, 2004. Coughlin, Paul. No More Jellyfish, Chickens, or Wimps: Raising Secure, Assertive Kids in a Tough World. Bloomington, Minnesota: Bethany, 2007. ———. No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice—Instead of Good—Hurts Men, Women And Children. Bloomington, Minnesota: Bethany, 2005. Covey, Stephen R. The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness. New York: Free Press, 2004. ———. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families. New York: Golden, 1997. ———. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989.

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SELF-HELP LITERATURE Covey, Stephen R., A. Roger Merrill, and Rebecca R. Merrill. First Things First: To Live, to Love, to Learn, to Leave a Legacy. New York: Fireside, 1994. Craddock, Maggie. The Authentic Career: Following the Path of Self-Discovery to Professional Fulfillment. Novato, California: New World Library, 2004. Croce, Pat, with Bill Lyon. 110%: 110 Strategies for Feeling Great. Philadelphia: Running Press, 2001. Crofts, Neil. Authentic Business: How to Create and Run Your Perfect Business. Chichester, United Kingdom: Capstone/Wiley, 2005. ———. Authentic: How to Make a Living Being Yourself. Chichester, UK: Capstone/Wiley, 2003. Deida, David. The Way of The Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Woman, Work, and Sexual Desire. Boulder, Colorado: Sounds True, 2004. Dodd, Ray. BeliefWorks: The Art of Living Your Dreams. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, 2006. Drury, Susan. “The Gospel According to Dave.” Nashville Scene (31 May 2007). Druxman, Lisa, with Martica Heaner. Lean Mommy: Bond With Your Baby and Get Fit With the Stroller Strides Program. New York: Center Street, 2007. Economides, Steve, and Annette Economides. America’s Cheapest Family Gets You Right On the Money: Your Guide to Living Better, Spending Less, and Cashing In On Your Dreams. New York: Three Rivers, 2007. Ely, Leanne. Saving Dinner the Vegetarian Way: Healthy Menus, Recipes, and Shopping Lists to Keep Everyone Happy at the Table. New York: Ballantine, 2007. ———. Saving Dinner Basics: How to Cook Even If You Don’t Know How. New York: Ballantine, 2006. ———. Saving Dinner for the Holidays: Menus, Recipes, Shopping Lists, and Timelines for Spectacular, Stress-free Holidays and Family Celebrations. New York: Ballantine, 2005. ———. Saving Dinner the Low-Carb Way: Healthy Menus, Recipes, and the Shopping Lists That Will Keep the Whole Family at the Dinner Table. New York: Ballantine, 2005. ———. Saving Dinner: The Menus, Recipes, and Shopping Lists to Bring Your Family Back To the Table. New York: Ballantine, 2003. Fein, Ellen, and Sherrie Schneider. The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right. New York: Warner, 1995. Fried, Wendy. “He’s Just Not That into You.” Proxyland (26 March 2007). http://proxyland.blogspot.com/2007/03/hes-just-not-that-into-you.html. Gelb, Michael J. Da Vinci Decoded: Discovering the Spiritual Secrets of Leonardo’s Seven Principles. New York: Delacorte, 2004. ———. How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day. New York: Delacorte, 1998. Glover, Robert A. No More Mr. Nice Guy! A Proven Plan for Getting What You Want in Love, Sex, and Life. Philadelphia: Running Press, 2003. Goodman, Michelle. The Anti 9 to 5 Guide: Practical Career Advice for Women Who Think Outside the Cube. Emeryville, California: Seal, 2007. http://www.anti9to5guide.com. Guiliano, Mireille. French Women for All Seasons: A Year of Secrets, Recipes and Pleasure. New York: Borzoi/Knopf, 2006. ———. French Women Don’t Get Fat: The Secret of Eating for Pleasure. New York: Borzoi/Knopf, 2005. Hari, Johann. “The Selfishness of the Self-Help Industry: The Cult of Positive Thinking Blames All The People Who Falter or Fail in Life for Their Own Misfortune.” UK Independent (12 April 2007). http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/ 04/12/469. Hendrix, Harville. Keeping the Love You Find: A Guide for Singles. New York: Pocket, 1992. ———. Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples. New York: Holt, 1988. http://www.gettingtheloveyouwant.com.

SELF-HELP LITERATURE Hendrix, Harville, and Helen LaKelly Hunt. 2004. Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved. New York: Atria, 2004. ———. Giving the Love That Heals: A Guide for Parents. New York: Pocket, 1997. Hicks, Esther, and Jerry Hicks. The Law of Attraction: The Basics of the Teachings of Abraham. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 2006. Horne, Richard. 101 Things to Do Before You Die. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. Jacobsen, Wayne, and Clay Jacobsen. Authentic Relationships: Discover the Lost Art of “One Anothering.” Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 2003. Jansen, Julie. I Don’t Know What I Want, But I Know It’s Not This: A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Gratifying Work. New York: Penguin, 2003. Jones, Blackwolf, and Gina Jones. Sacred Self, Sacred Relationships: Healing the World for Seven Generations. Center City, Minnesota: Hazelden, 2002. Katz, Elliot. Being the Strong Man a Woman Wants: Timeless Wisdom on Being a Man. Toronto: Award, 2005. Kelly, Melissa, and Eve Adamson. Mediterranean Women Stay Slim, Too: Eating to Be Sexy, Fit, and Fabulous! Text by Amaranth Illuminare. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Kerner, Ian. Be Honest—You’re Not That Into Him Either: Raise Your Standards and Reach for the Love You Deserve. New York: Regan Books, 2005. Kiyosaki, Robert T., with Sharon L. Lechter. Rich Dad’s Escape From the Rat Race: How to Become a Rich Kid by Following Rich Dad’s Advice. New York: Little, Brown, 2005. ———. Rich Dad’s Before You Quit Your Job: 10 Real-Life Lessons Every Entrepreneur Should Know About Building a Multimillion-dollar Business. New York: Warner, 2005. ———. Rich Dad’s Guide to Becoming Rich Without Cutting Up Your Credit Cards. New York: Warner, 2003. Klein, Karin. “Self-help Gone Nutty.” Los Angeles Times (13 February 2007). Lapine, Missy Chase. The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in Kids’ Favorite Meals. Philadelphia: Running Press, 2007. ———. “No Veggie Left Behind.” (16 July 2007) http://www.drlaura.com/sah/budget.html. Lasser, Jonathan. n.d. Review of Behrendt and Tuccillo about.com. (2004). [Accessed June 25, 2007.] Liles, Kevin, with Samantha Marshall. Make It Happen: From Intern to President: The HipHop Generation Guide to Success. New York: Atria, 2005. Lloyd, Brendon. “7 Habits of Highly Successful People.” McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. (n.d.) [Accessed July 15, 2007.] Lobenstine, Margaret. The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One. New York: Broadway, 2006. LoPorto, Garret. The DaVinci Method: Break Out and Express Your Fire. Concord, MA: Media for Your Mind, 2005. Losier, Michael. Law of Attraction: The Science of Attracting More of What You Want and Less of What You Don’t. New York: Wellness Central, 2004. Mandela, Nelson. “Oprah Winfrey.” [“Time 100” listing, “Heroes and Pioneers” category.] Time (14 May 2007). http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/time100. Martin, Courtney E. “Oprah’s ‘Secret’ Could Be Your Downfall.” AlterNet (26 March 2007). http://www.alternet.org/movies/49591. McGee, Micki. Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life. New York: Oxford, 2005. McGraw, [Dr.] Phil. Love Smart: Find the One You Want, Fix the One You Got. New York: Free Press, 2006. ———. Family First: Your Step-by-Step Plan for Creating a Phenomenal Family. New York: Free Press, 2005. ———. The Ultimate Weight Solution: The 7 Keys to Weight Loss Freedom. New York: Free Press, 2003.

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SELF-HELP LITERATURE ———. Self Matters: Creating Your Life from the Inside Out. New York: Simon & Schuster Source, 2001. ———. Relationship Rescue: A Seven Step Strategy for Reconnecting With Your Partner. New York: Hyperion, 2000. Meadows, Truxton. n.d. “Interview with Paul Coughlin.” One Flew Over The Church. http://www.oneflewoverthechurch.com/interviews/PaulCoughlin.html. [Accessed July 29, 2007.] Metcalfe, Gayden, and Charlotte Hays. Somebody is Going to Die if Lilly Beth Doesn’t Catch That Bouquet: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Wedding. New York: Hyperion, 2007. ———. Being Dead Is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral. New York: Hyperion, 2005. Mininni, Darlene. The Emotional Toolkit: Seven Power-Skills to Nail Your Bad Feelings. New York: St. Martin’s, 2005. Miller, Laura. “Self-help Nation.” Salon.com (12 August 2005). Minor IV, Herman. The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective People: Low-Effort Lessons In Mismanaging For Success. New York: Carol, 1994. Montignac, Michel. The French Diet: The Secrets of Why French Women Don’t Get Fat. New York: DK, 2005. Moore, Myreah, and Jodie Gould. Date Like a Man: What Men Know About Dating and Are Afraid You’ll Find Out. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. [2001 paperback edition cited.] Moriyama, Naomi, and William Doyle. Japanese Women Don’t Get Old or Fat: Secrets of My Mother’s Tokyo Kitchen. New York: Delacorte, 2005. Ogden, Michael, and Chris Day. 2Do Before I Die: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to the Rest of Your Life. New York: Little, Brown, 2005. Ollivier, Debra. Entre Nous: A Woman’s Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl. New York: St. Martin’s, 2003. Patcher, Barbara, with Susan McGee. The Power of Positive Confrontation: The Skills You Need to Know to Handle Conflicts at Work, at Home and in Life. New York: Marlowe/Avalon, 2000. Pavlina, Steve. “Is Self-Help a Scam?” Personal Development for Smart People (13 March 2006). http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/03/is-self-help-a-scam. Pearsall, Paul. The Last Self-Help Book You’ll Ever Need: Repress Your Anger, Think Negatively, Be a Good Blamer, and Throttle your Inner Child. New York: Basic, 2005. Peel, Kathy. Desperate Households: How to Restore Order and Harmony to Your Life and Home. Carol Stream, Illinois: Picket Fence, 2007. Penguin Group. Catalog copy for Rich 1999. 2007. http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/ BookDisplay/0,,9780399526275,00.html. Plaschke, Bill. “He’s just not that into you.” Los Angeles Times (20 June 2007). Powell, Helena Frith. All You Need to Be Impossibly French: A Witty Investigation into the Lives, Lusts, and Little Secrets of French Women. New York: Plume/Penguin, 2006. Ramsey, Dave. The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness. Revised edition. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007. ———. Financial Peace Revisited. New York: Viking, 2003. Randol, Susan. Live Your Best Life: A Treasury of Wisdom, Wit, Advice, Interviews, and Inspiration from O, The Oprah Magazine. Birmingham, AL: Oxmoor, 2005. Rapson, James, and Craig English. Anxious to Please: 7 Revolutionary Practices for the Chronically Nice. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, 2006. Reinhold, Barbara B. Free to Succeed: Designing the Life You Want in the New Free Agent Economy. New York: Plume, 2001. Rich, Ronda. What Southern Women Know About Flirting: The Fine Art of Social, Courtship, and Seductive Flirting to Get the Best Things in Life. New York: Penguin Perigee, 2005.

SELF-HELP LITERATURE ———. What Southern Women Know (That Every Woman Should): Timeless Secrets To Get Everything You Want in Love, Life, and Work. New York: Penguin Perigee, 1999. Robinson, Duke. Too Nice For Your Own Good: How to Stop Making 9 Self-Sabotaging Mistakes. New York: Warner, 2000. Ryan, M.J. The Happiness Makeover: How to Teach Yourself to be Happy and Enjoy Every Day. New York: Broadway, 2005. Sabatino, Colleen A. The Play of Your Life: Your Program for Finding the Career of Your Dreams—and a Step-by-Step Guide to Making It a Reality. Emmaus, Pennsylvania: Rodale, 2004. Salerno, Steve. SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless. New York: Crown, 2005. Salkin, Allen. “Shaking Riches Out of the Cosmos: Rivals Claim Credit for The Secret, a DVD and Book that Promote the Power of Wishful Thinking.” New York Times (25 February 2007). Saltz, Gail. Becoming Real: Defeating the Stories We Tell Ourselves That Hold Us Back. New York: Riverhead, 2004. SARK. Fabulous Friendship Festival: Loving Wildly, Learning Deeply, Living Fully with Our Friends. New York: Three Rivers. ———. Make Your Creative Dreams Real: A Plan for Procrastinators, Perfectionists, Busy People, and People Who Would Really Rather Sleep All Day. New York: Fireside, 2004. ———. Eat Mangoes Naked: Finding Pleasure Everywhere (and Dancing With the Pits). New York: Fireside, 2001. Schaub, Michael. Review of Indante and Marks 2003. Bookslut (October 2003). http://www.bookslut.com/propaganda/2003_10_000777.php. Schlessinger, [Dr.] Laura. Bad Childhood, Good Life: How to Blossom and Thrive in Spite of an Unhappy Childhood. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. ———. The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. ———. Ten Stupid Things Couples Do to Mess Up Their Relationships. New York: Cliff Street/HarperCollins, 2001. ———. Ten Stupid Things Women Do To Mess Up Their Lives. New York: Villard, 1994. Schultz, Patricia. 1,000 Places to See in the USA and Canada Before You Die. New York: Workman, 2007. ———. 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. New York: Workman. Schuman, Kenneth, and Ronald Paxton. The Michelangelo Method: Release Your Inner Masterpiece and Create an Extraordinary Life. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007. Schwartz, Maryln. The Southern Belle Primer, or Why Princess Margaret Will Never Be a Kappa Kappa Gamma. New York: Doubleday, 2001. Seligman, Martin E.P. Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. New York: Free Press, 2002. Sher, Barbara. Refuse to Choose! Use All Your Interests, Passions, and Hobbies to Create the Life and Career of Your Dreams. Emmaus, Pennsylvania: Rodale, 2006. Sher, Barbara, with Annie Gottlieb. Wishcraft: How to Get What You Really Want. 2nd ed. New York: Ballantine, 2003. http://www.wishcraft.com. Sher, Barbara, with Barbara Smith. I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was: How to Discover What You Really Want and How to Get It. New York: Dell, 1994. Time. “Time 25.” Time (17 June 1996). http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/ 0,9171,984696,00.html. Traister, Rebecca. “He loves me, he loves me not.” [Review of Behrendt and Tuccillo 2004.] Salon.com (6 December 2004). Ursiny, Tim. The Coward’s Guide to Conflict: Empowering Solutions for Those Who Would Rather Run Than Fight. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, 2003. Whitman, Danielle, pseud. He Just Thinks He’s Not That Into You: The Insanely Determined Girl’s Guide to Getting the Man You Want. Philadelphia: Running Press, 2007.

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SERIES FICTION Widener, Chris. The Angel Inside: Michelangelo’s Secrets for Following Your Passion and Finding the Work You Love. New York: Currency/Doubleday, 2004. http://www. TheAngelInside.com. Wright, Judith. The Soft Addiction Solution: Break Free of the Seemingly Harmless Habits That Keep You from the Life You Want. New York: Penguin, 2006. ———. 2005. The One Decision: Make the Single Choice That Will Lead To a Life of MORE. NewYork: Tarcher/Penguin, 2005. Young, Pamela, and Peggy Jones. Sidetracked Home Executives: From Pigpen to Paradise. New York: Warner, 2001.

Further Reading Davey, Steve. Unforgettable Places to See Before You Die. New York: Firefly, 2004; Indante, Dan, and Karl Marks, pseud. The Complete A**hole’s Guide to Handling Chicks. New York: St. Martin’s, 2003; http://www.theartistsway.com; Butler-Bowdon, Tom. 50 Self-Help Classics: 50 Inspirational Books to Transform Your Life. Yarmouth, Maine: Nicholas Brealey, 2003; http://www.butler-bowdon.com; http://www.davidco. com; http://www.flylady.net; http://www.franklincovey.com; http://www.oprah.com; http:// www.planetsark.com.

PEGGY LIN DUTHIE

SERIES FICTION Definition. The difficulty in evaluating series fiction results from the various categories that make up the separate category of installment fiction. The terms trilogy, series, multi-part novels, sequence, sagas, and shared universes can be slippery. For example, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and Richard Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy both began as trilogies and then were later added to so that the scope of the original trilogy expanded to a series. Books published in installments, such as trilogies or tetralogies, are not technically series according to most publisher designations. A trilogy such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, for example, is one story divided by the publisher into publishable chunks. As with most trilogies, the story begins in volume one and is completed in volume three. A series, on the other hand, although featuring the same characters and locations, is made up of individually published books with stand-alone plots that can be read without any familiarity with earlier books in the series. Context and Issues. According to Shannon Hill, an editor at Christian publisher WaterBrook, readers are drawn to series because they allow them to feel they are part of a larger community. (Winner, S10). There is a sense of familiarity that is comforting. Of course this can be said of all series fiction, not just those series with religious overtones. Readers of series fiction can return to a world over and again and join their favorite characters and wander in their favorite locations. Although the plot may be new, the reader can be certain that the experience will be the same. Series fiction writers work quickly, often giving way to stereotypes and sloppy editing, which in part contributes to the poor critical reception they receive. Many authors release two or three titles per year in order to keep up with the demands of readers. The quality of series varies dramatically, and the success of an author is often based on the character created. In series fiction, the main character may grow but does not change drastically over time. Careers may change and locations may alter, but the inherent qualities of the character remain and are what draw the reader back to share adventures with him or her over and over.

SERIES FICTION

The best series feature characters are well-rounded and grow as the books progress. Often producing works at least indirectly chronological, respected series writers introduce changes into their characters’ lives that echo real life changes: career changes, marriage, family, illness (their own or their friends and families), and even death of loved ones. Often derided are those series that are cranked out quickly and follow a formulaic plot template. Although books in these series follow the same characters through many adventures, the characters do not grow or develop in any perceptible ways and the plots are shallow and often contrived. They are riddled with inconsistencies and rarely relate to any previous novels in the series. Children’s fiction series and series romances are most frequently targeted with this criticism. History. In the nineteenth century the growth of the novel as a form and the marketplace as being able to produce buyers of books spurred the development of series novels. On the British front, Mrs. Oliphant’s Chronicles of Carlingford, Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire series, and Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly Novels were just a few of the popular series offerings. Storylines tracing the rise and fall of families, the changes in a village or city, and the adventures of individual heroes provided their authors a handsome living. In North America, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Leatherstocking Tales stories embodied the ideal rugged American heroes, and Hawkeye and Natty Bumpo were vastly popular (The Pioneers 1823, The Last of the Mohicans 1826, The Deerslayer 1840). Eventually, characters from the dime or adventure papers, which were mostly geared toward the lower economic classes, were developed into full length novels, mostly for children. The earliest series of stories for children were overtly moralistic and didactic. They were meant as teaching tools and a way to instill good values and behavior. Horatio Alger published Ragged Dick in 1867. The story followed the rise of a young orphan from poverty to success. A seemingly endless stream of novels and stories by Alger continued to be released even after his death in 1899, examples of the tradition of American inventiveness and hard work. The forty-volume series of Tom Swift books by the Edward Stratemeyer syndicate house name Victor Appleton debuted in 1910. This boy inventor series was the beginning of many that incorporated the Horatio Alger myth of American success. Stratemeyer went on to contribute such series as Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and the Bobbsey Twins, over twenty series in all. The popularity of series fiction for young readers has been constant since the early 1900s and the Stratemeyer Syndicate, producing dozens of novels under such pseudonyms as Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene, dominated the market. According to a Smithsonian article on the Stratemeyer series, 98% of young readers surveyed in 1926 put Tom Swift at the top of their favorite reading list (Watson 1991, 50–59). Tom Swift would be replaced by Harry Potter today, but the love of series fiction continues. Reception. One of the many criticisms leveled at young readers series is the media tie-ins. When Disney created the television series Lizzie McGuire, a book series followed. Series of books now regularly accompany television shows or films, rather than television and film reproducing shows about series (The Chronicles of Narnia and the Harry Potter books being notable exceptions). Critics argue that the books in these media tie-ins are of poor quality, pandering only to the desire of readers for more adventures about their favorite characters. These early series novels are extremely important to scholars of both literature and popular culture for their insight into both what appealed to a changing

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“DON’T KILL SHERLOCK HOLMES!” The availability of books and the ease and relative inexpensive nature of Internet book buying has introduced readers to series and allowed them to complete series in a manner that was not possible before the late 1990s. The Internet has also changed how series are read and shaped by their audiences. Most major series have publisher-sponsored Web sites. Audiences shaped series even in the days of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories; after killing off the tedious Holmes, the outcry of readers demanding his return prompted Doyle to bring back the character he was heartily sick of.Today’s series can create enough furor that readers create their own fan sites or blogs. Reader’s contributions to these blogs and Web site discussion forums have an impact on the authors and how they develop the series installments.

audience and how these books reflected a changing society. For example, in the late 1950s, the Stratemeyer Syndicate initiated an overhaul of the first 38 Hardy Boys titles. The books were edited to bring them up to date and in some instances to remove the racial stereotypes in earlier titles. These editorial changes, which sometimes resulted in entire rewrites of the novels, angered many fans but give a fascinating insight into a changing world and the value of nostalgia attached to childhood favorites. Trends and Themes Children and Young Adults. A recent reference book for librarians, Popular Series Fiction for K-6 Readers by Rebecca L. Thomas and Catherine Barr (2004), lists almost 1,200 series for young readers. Older series, such as the original Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and Anne of Green Gables are still extremely popular with young readers, but dozens of new series launched each year cater to every interest a child may have from romance to sports to careers. Like mystery fiction for adults, mystery series for young readers continue to be popular. The Hardy Boys, since their 1927 debut, have been featured in five series, the most recent launched in 2005 and called the Undercover Brothers series. The newer Hardy Boys series, however, have not been as successful as the original 58, which still sell steadily. Nancy Drew, the female counterpart to the Hardy Boys has seen equal popularity over the years, with two new series begun in 2004, The Nancy Drew Girl Detective series and Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew series. Nancy Drew was an important character who shaped fiction for girls in a positive direction. Characters such as Nancy and detective nurse Cherry Ames offered female readers characters who were independent, intelligent, and not afraid of adventure. However, romance was often a casualty of the heroine’s intelligence and adventurous can-do nature. Boys who are rescued by girls apparently have little interest in pursuing romance, and romance is a hot selling feature for the contemporary girls series. The boom of girls series hit in the 1980s with Francine Pascal’s Sweet Valley High series. Pascal’s novels made a break with the formula inherent in previous series for girls. Critic Stephanie Foote argued that it is not enough for heroines to be beautiful and kind, they must be hardworking, innovative, and powerful as well (Foote 2006, 521). Characters such as Nancy Drew exemplify this ideal. Pascal and her successors, however, jumped on the bandwagon of beautiful, but left out much of the rest.

SERIES FICTION

Critics find many of the newer series geared to teenaged girls to be disturbing. Their characters and locations often replicate popular television series such as the 1990s hit Beverly Hills 90210 and the more current OC. The protagonists are wealthy and mostly white and spend their time in frenzied shopping, gossiping, partying, and sexual encounters in extravagant California locales. Cecily von Ziegesar’s Gossip Girl and It Girl are two series in this genre. Lisi Harrison’s The Clique enters the world of the wealthy in a series about privileged thirteen-year-olds and their machinations to get in and stay in the Clique. An unusual twist to the rich and beautiful series is Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series. In Westerfeld’s world, when people turn sixteen, they undergo surgery that makes them supermodel beautiful. When one young girl refuses surgery and runs away, the world is turned upside down. Although there are still plenty of mature girls series, some authors are beginning to turn away from such provocative material and are providing girls with series that are more realistic and familiar to readers, such as Annie Bryant’s Beacon Street Girls. The series, aimed at readers in the 9–13 age group, is set in a middle class neighborhood in Brookline, Massachusetts, and features five girls of varying backgrounds and their adventures. The twelve installments focus on the problems of young girls and introduce characters of multicultural backgrounds. The Babysitter’s Club, published by Scholastic Books from 1986 to 2000, had a wide range of characters with various traits: various racial and religious identities; health problems, such as diabetes and asthma; interests; and talents. A film based on the series was released in 1995. Several series spin-offs have been produced by the series author, Ann Martin, and other ghostwriters. Sex and violence in young adult series fiction is also countered by Christian series. Series offerings from such publishers as Zondervan and Tyndale, Melody Carlson’s True Colors, and Robin Jones Gunn’s Christy Miller and Sierra Jenson tackle serious, and not so serious, teenage problems. Left Behind: The Kids by Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye is based on the enormously popular Left Behind series for adult readers. The 40+ book series follows the adventures of five children searching for truth after the Rapture. For younger children, adventure has reigned since the days of Gertrude Warner Chandler’s Boxcar Children (1942). In over 100 books, many contributed to the series by authors after Warner’s death, the four Alden children continue to solve mysteries and have adventures. The latest adventure is The Box That Watch Found (2007). One of the most popular recent series is Mary Pope Osborne’s The Magic Tree House. Readers follow Jack and Annie in two series, The Magic Tree House and the Merlin Missions as they travel to other places and times with the help of a magical tree house and Morgan LeFay. The books are extensively researched and teachers can access the research guides that accompany the titles, making for books that are educational as well as enjoyable. R.L. Stine has been the undisputed leader of horror novels for young readers with his immensely popular Fear Street and Goosebumps series. His newest series, Mostly Ghostly, continues to spread chills. The popularity of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books has created a market for fantasy books of all sorts but particularly those including young magicians and witches. The popular Pirates of the Caribbean films, featuring Johnny Depp as the pirate Jack Sparrow, have inspired new pirate adventures, the most successful of which has been Rob Kidd’s Jack Sparrow series aimed at younger readers. Sparrow is a youngster gathering a crew and having adventures on board the Barnacle.

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Animal protagonists continue to be popular with young readers as well. British author Brian Jacques’s Redwall series began in 1986 with Redwall. The series now has nineteen titles, and the world Jacques has created is beloved by millions of readers (children and adults alike). Margaret McCallister’s Mistmantle titles follow Jacques’s lead. Daniel Handler, better known as Lemony Snicket, created a spoof of young adult series themselves called A Series of Unfortunate Events. The series began with The Bad Beginning (1999) and concluded with The End (2006). The first book begins with the words, “If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle. . . . I’m sorry to tell you this, but that’s how the story goes.” The books follow in the darkly humorous tradition of Edward Gorey and Roald Dahl and are geared toward young readers who don’t care for sports books for boys or best friend adventures for girls. The Baudelaire Orphans find themselves battling evil Count Olaf and other horrible relatives with whom they are forced to live using their wits to survive. Snicket launched a new series in 2007 with Vampire Island. Creator of ten series and contributor to many more, Katherine A. Applegate is one of the queens of series fiction for young readers. Her Animorphs series (1996–2001) included fifty-four titles. In the books, the characters morph into various animals, often saving their city or even the world from aliens or other villains. The destruction of the Earth due to a huge asteroid sends selected families to another planet in the first book of Applegate’s Remnant series (The Mayflower Project, 2001); in the final installment, Begin Again, 2003, the Earth is on the brink of being reborn. In Everworld, Applegate’s characters find themselves in a parallel universe where mythology and reality blend and nothing is as it seems. Selected Authors Mainstream Fiction. Series are popular in genre fiction, such as science fiction, romance, mystery, and men’s adventure, but mainstream fiction has seen its share of series contributions as well. Honoré de Balzac completed almost 100 titles for his interconnected La Comédie Humaine. The novels examined all aspects of early nineteenth century French life from the rural areas to life in Paris to the military. Another French writer, Émile Zola, produced twenty novels in the Les RougonMacquart cycle, which followed the lives of an extended family during the French Second Empire. Most of William Faulkner’s novels and stories are set in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, with characters showing up in various stories. More contemporarily, John Jakes produced the Kent Family Chronicles and the North and South series following families through generations of American History. In 1980, Jean Auel released the first book in her Earth’s Children series, The Clan of the Cave Bear, which became a huge bestseller and was made into a movie starring Daryl Hannah. Auel’s final installment in the ice age saga is the 2002 The Shelters of Stone. Armistead Maupin first serialized his Tales of the City in the San Francisco Chronicle. The series followed the lives of several characters, the most popular being Michael Tolliver, a gay man who develops AIDS late in the series, and Anna Madrigal, the eccentric landlady of 28 Barbary Lane, the central setting of Tales. Tales of the

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City was published in 1978 with a 2007 release, Michael Tolliver Lives, updating fans on the life of their favorite character. Dean Koontz has four titles in the Odd Thomas series. Thomas communicates with the dead, helping them to gain justice or otherwise helping them accomplish what they couldn’t in life. Dan Brown has offered two thrillers featuring Harvard symbolist Robert Langdon in the extraordinarily bestselling The Da Vinci Code (2003) and Angels & Demons (2000). Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. In the world of science fiction and fantasy, worlds created by authors often draw other authors to contribute to them. The worlds expand into universes peopled with the original characters and many new ones. New plots are developed and back stories for older plots and characters created. A canon grows up, mostly unofficial, governing what does and does not belong to the universe and helping direct new material written. In a 2005 editorial, Gary Hoppenstand, the editor of The Journal of Popular Culture, bemoaned the damage done by imitators of Tolkien, Star Trek, and Star Wars. He believes that original science fiction and fantasy writing is being pushed out by the endless installments in the Star Trek and Star Wars series and series based on Middle Earth imitations (Hoppenstand 2005, 603–604). Two examples of what have come to be known as shared universes are the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises. The 1960s television series Star Trek has spawned not only movies and additional series (Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise) but also over 700 book titles as well, beginning with Mack Reynolds’s Mission to Horatius in 1967. Several series have been created within the past decade. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds I (1998) is an anthology of short stories culled from a writing competition and edited by Dean Wesley Smith, himself the author of a dozen Star Trek adventures. This collection of fan fiction has led to writing careers for many of its contributors and is still going strong at volume ten. Two new series will be launched in 2008, Star Trek: Terok Nor and Star Trek: Klingon Empire. Star Trek: The Next Generation currently includes almost seventy titles by various authors. There have been at least six Deep Space Nine series, the longest running with almost thirty titles. James Blish, Dean Wesley Smith, and John Vorholt have been some of the most frequent contributors to the Star Trek universe of series. Even the most recent spin-off, Enterprise, which aired from 2001 to 2005 has spawned a ten-book series. George Lucas’s phenomenal success, Star Wars, has produced dozens of novels as well. Based on the early lives or post canonical Star Wars lives of characters such as Han Solo or Princess Leia or even on newly invented characters and adventures, the Star Wars franchise continues to widen. Spin-offs such as Star Wars: Boba Fett, Star Wars: Clone Wars, and Star Wars: Dark Nest offer readers more adventures than the slow release of films can provide. Another shared world is George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards, which has expanded to eighteen volumes since the 1986 debut, Wild Cards, involves a gene-altering virus of the same name. Superheroes from the comics are alive and well in the hands of the series’ authors. Probably the most popular shared universe of all time is the Myth series of Robert Asprin, which extends from the 1978 Another Fine Myth to the 2002 Something M.Y.T.H Inc. Three more series, Phule’s Company, Time Scout, and Myth Adventures also have post 2000 releases. With his former wife Lynn Abbey, Asprin created the Thieves World shared universe. The anthologies of stories

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set in the city of Sanctuary were published from 1979 to 1989 and set the standard for shared universes. A new Thieves World anthology, Sanctuary, was released in 2002. Harry Turtledove is one of the masters of series science fiction. He juggles eleven different series, all of which have had installments since 2000; among them are World War, Great War, Darkness, and Pacific War. Many of his novels are considered alternative history, which is set in an alternate timeline—often uchronian, which means a utopian sort of time period preceding our own. In more contemporary times, this genre often asks the question, “What if?” and stories are called counter-factual histories. For example, what if Confederate forces had won in the Civil War is the question asked in The Guns of the South: A Novel of the Civil War (1992). The success of this stand-alone title spurred Turtledove to develop the Worldwar and the Great War series in which real battles are altered by alternative timelines. Even former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has contributed to alternative history series with his Civil War trilogy and his Pacific War series, addressing the “what ifs” of some of these momentous battles. Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonrider series is one of the best beloved of science fiction and fantasy readers alike. The Dragonriders of Pern series began in 1968 and still continues with a 2007 release Dragon Harper written with her son Todd McCaffrey. Many fantasy writers release their books in series, such as David Eddings, Terry Brooks, and R.A. Salvatore. Eddings’s Belgeriad series began with the 1982 Pawn of Prophecy and was followed by many more installments. His most recent series, written with wife Leigh Eddings, is the Dreamers series begun in 2003. In 1977, Terry Brooks burst on the fantasy scene with his Tolkienesque Sword of Shannara. Brooks’s world was favorably received and he’s been adding more volumes to the Shannara saga ever since. The latest is part of the Genesis of Shannara saga, Armageddon’s Children (2006), which brings the Shannara epic to a futuristic Seattle. Salvatore is the author of seven series, several since 2000. In 1994, Terry Goodkind released the first title in his Sword of Truth series, Wizard’s First Rule. The series is more mature and graphically violent than many of Goodkind’s fantasy counterparts, but the series has attracted legions of followers from the first title. Goodkind’s world is a battlefield where the fight for control is ever-shifting between the world of magic and the world of reality, with the material between them flimsy stuff. The hero, Richard Cypher, develops from a man who is thrust into an adventure that he does not understand to a powerful hero whose magic is great. Book eleven, The Confessor (2007), is the culmination of the adventures of Richard and Kahlan as they try to save the world they know from darkness. The current reigning queen of fantasy series is Mercedes Lackey. Lackey has over twenty series, many with titles added since 2000. Her most popular series is set in the land of Valdemar (Arrows of the Queen, 1987; Exile’s Valor, 2003). Valdemar is a fantastical land peopled with magical creatures in a medieval setting. Although the writer of several series, Piers Anthony is best known for his pun-filled Xanth series. The first release, A Spell for Chameleon (1977), has been followed by thirty more titles, the most recent, Air Apparent, in 2007. Diana Gabaldon begins her highly praised Outlander series in 1991 with Outlander. A 1945 nurse joins her husband in post World War II Scotland to rekindle their marriage. She is transported back to the Scotland of the late 1770s

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and so the time travel adventures begin. Gabaldon’s books are a combination of fantasy, history, and romance, but the author insists that her titles do not fit neatly in any particular genre. In the sixth book of the series, A Breath of Snow and Ashes (2005), Gabaldon meticulously follows her characters as they make preparations for the American Revolution. Horror novels have succumbed to the demands of series readers as well. One of the longest running series in the horror genre is V.C. Andrews’s Flowers in the Attic series with its many spin-offs, sequels, and prequels. Andrews wrote the first five in the early eighties but died in 1986. The series has been continued by various authors since that time. Seven of the series have been developed since 2000, including the most recent Secrets line. Vampires seem to be a popular creature around which series are built. Anne Rice’s New Orleans Vampire Chronicles debuted with Interview with the Vampire (1975). The vampire Lestat was played by Tom Cruise in the box office rendition of the movie in 1994. Rice’s latest installment in the Chronicles is Blood Canticle (2003). Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series first appeared in 1993. In a future time when the United States has provided vampires with equal rights, Blake takes on various clients who need her skills in necromancy. Blood Noir (2008) is the fourteenth Anita Blake installment. A more lighthearted vampire series is set in the Buffyverse of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, played by Sarah Michelle Gellar from 1997 to 2003. Dozens of Buffy novels for both young adults and a more mature audience have been released. Stephen King, the undisputed master of horror fiction is not known for series fiction. His Dark Tower sequence, however, is a seven-title series begun in 1982 with The Gunslinger. The final installment, The Dark Tower, was released in 2004. Men’s Adventure and Westerns. Nick Carter was a fictional detective popular in the dime novels of the 1880s. His popularity has led to a long-running series of books as his identity continued to morph through the 1990s. The hero’s name eventually became the pseudonym for a string of authors who wrote Nick Carter novels, including Martin Cruz Smith. There were 261 Nick Carter: Killmaster novels published between 1964 and 1990, in which Carter’s character was a spy for the AXE agency. Even more prolific were the Mack Bolan series, which produced over 570 installments. Don Pendelton created the Executioner series and contributed 41 titles to the popular action-adventure genre, which has been described as the equivalent to romance fiction for women. After his death in 1995, the series was continued by house authors. Over the years, Bolan has battled Mexican drug lords, Russian spies, and a host of other enemies. Pendleton discussed his character on his Web site: “Bolan lives large, responding to the challenge of life, remaining alive and remaining human in the process. Success in living means growth, achievement, beating the challenge and maturing toward a meaningful evolutional plateau” (http://www.donpendleton.com/executionerseries.html). Men may be attracted to the heroism of Bolan, but according to the Don Pendleton Web site, over forty percent of Bolan fans are female. The formula of the hero still drives sales. Six titles, including Devil’s Playground, have been released in 2007 alone. William W. Johnstone is one of the masters of the adventure series for men. He is best known for his westerns, but he also wrote in the science fiction, military, and horror genres. Several of his series, including the western series Mountain Man and Blood Bond, have been continued after his death in 2004 by J.A. Johnstone.

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Johnstone himself was the quintessential adventurer, with stints in the French Foreign Legion and the military. In Out of the Ashes (1983), the first book in the Ashes series, Ben Raines searches for his missing family in post-apocalyptic America. The 34th entry in the series is Escape from the Ashes (2003) and follows Raines’s plane crash in Canada. The Mountain Man story has followed Smoke Jensen through 34 titles so far. Living for revenge and to wipe out bands of desperados, Jensen is forced to keep moving. Readers follow ex-CIA agent John Barrone in the Code Name series and the blood brothers Sam Two Wolves and Matt Bodine in the Blood Bond line. Clive Cussler is another household name in the adventure genre. His character, Dirk Pitt, has appeared in nineteen novels. Cussler, like his character Pitt, is an adventurer. A diver, he has recovered many shipwrecks and has established the nonprofit agency NUMA (National Underwater and Marine Agency), which is the premise for his NUMA series. The Pitt novels feature high tech weapons and tools and many of the same elements that make Indiana Jones and James Bond so popular, beautiful women and nefarious villains among them. Westerns are the quintessential men’s adventure novels. Zane Grey, Max Brand, and Louis L’Amour are the leaders of this genre of gunslingers, cattle rustlers, and Old West shootouts. Although Grey, famous for Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), died in 1979; Brand, the prolific author of westerns died in 1944 in World War II; and L’Amour, equally prolific, died in 1988, their bibliographies have continued to be added to by ghost writers. But new writers are creating Western series to cater to a readership that is not ready to let go of the Old West. Bryce Harte writes the Creed series; Creed: Arkansas Raiders (2001) is the tenth in the series. Elmer Kelton has been writing westerns since the 1950s, and his Texas Rangers series is going strong with his 2008 release Hard Trail to Follow. Hundreds of titles have been published in the long-running Tabor Evans’s Long Arm series since the series debut, Longarm, appeared in 1978. Mystery and Detective Fiction. Mystery and detective fiction by its nature lends itself to series. The detective, either professional or amateur, is inquisitive, resourceful, and persistent, all traits that make for great mystery solving. Readers of mysteries are very loyal and will buy dozens of novels by the same author. Lillian Jackson Braun is a case in point. Braun debuted retired journalist Jim Qwilleran in the 1966 The Cat Who Could Read Backwards. Qwilleran and his Siamese cats Koko and Yum Yum live in a small Northern community, and with the help of Koko, Qwilleran solves mysteries. Braun, in her nineties, continues to produce a new installment of her The Cat Who series almost every year. It is difficult to tell who is more popular to readers, the cats or the detective as fans wait anxiously for each of the twenty plus books that Braun has released thus far. Readers enjoy The Cat Who series not only for its interesting characters and the exploits of the amazing Koko, but for the feeling of “coming home” they experience each time they return to the Northern Midwest town of Pickax. One of the most respected writers of any genre is Lawrence Block. Block has created several series characters: Bookstore owner and cat burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr, Cold War spy Evan Tanner, and former police officer and recovering alcoholic Matt Scudder. As Scudder grows, he gives up the booze but not his moral ambiguity. A detective in the hard-boiled tradition, Scudder operates below the radar of traditional law enforcement. The books are gritty and violent, but the New York City location is palpably realistic. What draws readers to the series is its refusal

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to provide the elements of hard-boiled mystery fiction in conventional or stereotypical ways. The good guys in Scudder’s world are not always good, the bad not always so bad. With Marcia Muller’s introduction of detective Sharon McCone in the 1977 Edwin of the Iron Shoes, a new day dawned for women’s detective fiction. The hard-boiled P.I. is a predominantly male role, and until McCone appeared, women were not part of the private eye scene in any visible numbers. Married to hardboiled detective author Bill Pronzini, himself the creator of a long running series, Muller was influenced to develop McCone as a softer version of the male archetype. The Ever Running Man (2007) is number twenty-four in the series. Although Muller has had success with McCone, the wildly popular Kinsey Millhone and V.I. Warshawski have given writers of female detectives solid role models as well. Sara Paretsky’s first V.I. Warshawski novel Indemnity Only was released in 1982 and introduced readers to strong, capable female characters who are not victims but rather the protectors of victims. Thirteen novels later Paretsky still has her detective searching for justice on issues of community and social responsibility. Kinsey Millhone is one of the best-recognized female sleuths being published today. She was introduced by Sue Grafton in the 1982 A is for Alibi. T Is for Trespass (2007) is her twentieth Millhone installment. Like Paretsky, Grafton’s novels tackle social themes in an effort to understand the “whys” behind the murders investigated. Husband-wife teams in mystery fiction have always been popular. J.D. Robb’s sleuthing team is anything but the usual in her In Death series, which numbers 26 titles and is set in a New York fifty years in the future. In the 1995 debut, Naked in Death, police lieutenant Eve Dallas meets her future husband Roarke, a suspect in the first installment. Dallas is praised as a strong, intelligent woman, and the book’s fast pace and suspense has earned Robb an even wider audience. She has written dozens of romance titles as Robb and other fiction as Nora Roberts. Equally popular are series based on the lives of famous people, often novelists themselves. Stephanie Barron’s series of mysteries based on the life of Jane Austen debuted with Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrove Manor in 1996. The most recent release is Jane and the Barque of Frailty (2006). Elliott Roosevelt writes mysteries about a fictitious Eleanor Roosevelt who solves mysteries in the White House (Murder at the President’s Door, 2001). The author of several series, Laurie R. King is best known for her Mary Russell series set in England during World War I. The debut novel in the series is the highly acclaimed The Beekeeper’s Daughter (1994). Russell solves mysteries with the retired Sherlock Holmes, whom she eventually marries. There have been many Sherlock Holmes pastiches, but King’s is different, and applauded, because she adds female interest to Holmes’s adventures, giving Russell an identity of her own. Patricia Cornwell’s 1990 Postmortem introduced mystery readers to the world of Kay Scarpetta, Chief Medical Examiner for the State of Virginia, and opened the floodgates to a slew of forensic mysteries. Cornwell’s novels employ all of the features of forensic science in her Scarpetta mysteries. Book of the Dead (2007) is number fifteen. Kathy Reichs is a forensic anthropologist for Quebec, medical examiner for North Carolina, and anthropology professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Her books about Temperance “Tempe” Brennan are filled with the same forensic expertise as Patricia Cornwell’s. Brennan debuted in Deja Dead (1997). The television series Bones is based on Reichs and her character.

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Jeffery Deaver has introduced a new type of forensic scientist. Injured while working a case, Lincoln Rhymes is now a quadriplegic, able to move only a finger. Rhyme is not an easy man to work with, but his wide ranging forensic expertise is a hot commodity. In The Bone Collector (1997), Rhyme begins working with Amelia Sachs who becomes indispensable as both his eyes and legs and as his lover. Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme series is praised for the books’ dizzyingly fast-paced and twisted plot lines. The Broken Window is scheduled for a 2008 release. A new series debuts with the 2007 The Sleeping Doll and stars Kathryn Dance, a kinesics analyst who appeared in the Rhyme title The Cold Moon (2006). Along Came a Spider, the first in a series of nursery rhyme titled books, appeared in 1993 and, much to his reader’s delight, has been followed by twelve more Alex Cross novels, seven of them bestsellers. Cross is a psychologist who works with the police department to track killers. Although there have been several popular series featuring gay and lesbian characters (Joseph Hanson’s Dave Brandstetter for one), one of the most popular characters has been Laurie King’s San Francisco-based Kate Martinelli, a lesbian homicide detective. King’s first Matinelli novel, A Grave Talent (1993), won the Edgar Award for the best first crime novel of the year. Detective Kate Delafield stars in Lambda Award-winning Katherine V. Forrest’s mystery series (Hancock Park, 2004). Ellen Hart’s lesbian character, Jane Lawless, is a restaurant owner in Minneapolis; Night Vision (2006) is the fourteenth in the series. In 1990 Walter Mosley achieved critical acclaim with his first Easy Rawlins book, Devil in a Blue Dress. Rawlins, a war veteran, solves crimes in post World War II Los Angeles. Mosley’s novels follow Rawlins through time; the first novel is set in 1948, and the most recent, Blonde Faith (2008), takes place in the post Vietnam era. A series featuring Fearless Jones and his sidekick Paris Minton is also set in the Los Angeles of the 1950s. A third series character is Socrates Fortlow (Walkin’ the Dog, 1999). His novels are seen as providing strong social commentary on the life of African-Americans in a volatile period of American history. Along with focusing on social issues, African-American authors often infuse their mysteries with family dynamics as well. Former Essence magazine editor Valerie Wilson Wesley’s Tamara Hayle is a Newark, New Jersey, ex-cop turned private eye. Wesley’s novels follow Hayle as she struggles to raise her son. Barbara Neely created Blanche White, a nosy forty-year-old domestic who frequently finds trouble. Blanche on the Lam (1992) was her first appearance and won the Agatha, the Macavity, and the Anthony awards. Unquestionably the most popular author to feature Native American characters is Tony Hillerman. Tony Hillerman created Joe Leaphorn, a member of the Navajo Tribal Police in New Mexico, and his partner Jim Chee. His novels, beginning with The Blessing Way (1970), became very popular for their authentic depictions of Navajo life and the Southwest. Although he has written other mysteries and nonfiction titles, the Leaphorn/Chee novels are the most popular. The most recent title is the 2003 Sinister Pig. Set on a fictional South Carolina resort island, Carolyn Hart’s “Death on Demand” series features an attractive, wealthy couple, Annie and Max Darling. They own a mystery bookshop and also work together to solve the many real mysteries that come their way. The author reveals in the books a familiarity with esoteric mystery fiction that appeals to devotees of the genre. One of the most successful mystery series is Elizabeth Peters’s Amelia Peabody. Peters has set dozens of books in nineteenth century Egypt, where Peabody and her

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husband excavate tombs and historical locations. The novels, begun in 1975, are strongly colored by Peters’s own background in Egyptian archaeology. Yearly installments in the Amelia Peabody series are eagerly awaited by the millions of fans of the series and have been awarded many mystery fiction kudos. Tomb of the Golden Bird (2006) is the eighteenth Peabody novel. An example of a television series spawning a novel series is the popular Murder, She Wrote, a mystery series starring Angela Lansbury that aired from 1984 to 1996. The series, initially set in the small New England town of Cabot Cove, eventually followed Lansbury’s character, mystery writer Jessica Fletcher, as she traveled around the country. Donald Bain’s first installment in the series is Gin and Daggers (1989), and two titles are scheduled to be released in 2008. The series, one of the longest running drama series, is dear to many reader’s hearts as well. Romance. Harlequin romances are the most widely recognized romance publications in the world. The North American division of the British Mills and Boon publishing empire, Harlequin has been distributing romances in various series for over fifty years. Each month, titles are released in over a dozen different series, each series having its own characteristics. For example, the Harlequin Romance line has mildly sensuous titles and the Blaze line contains higher levels of sensuality. Other lines are Historical, Intrigue, Medical Romances, and four series in Spanish (Deseo, Bianco, Jazmin, and Julia). There is also a NASCAR line for racing fans. One of Harlequin’s imprints, Kimani Press, releases series geared toward an African American audience. Notable fantasy writers such as Mercedes Lackey have contributed to the Harlequin Romance’s Luna line. The line offers readers fantasy focused on romance and sensuality. The series, launched in 2004, features romance/fantasy novels by several well-known fantasy and science fiction writers. Lackey’s contribution, The Fairy Godmother (2004), combines humor and romance in its depiction of a world where its inhabitants must live out their lives in fairy tale tradition. Other than the success of Janet Dailey’s American series, in which a romance was set in each of the fifty states, series or category romances generally do not follow the series definition of repeat characters or locations. They do not need to be read in any particular order, although they are numbered. Highly formulaic, a Harlequin romance is short, under 250 pages, and always ends happily ever after. The heroines are dispatched to locations all over the world and they are involved in every type of vocation possible, from high-stakes professional careers to single moms. Because Harlequin was hesitant to publish American authors and titles with a more American sensibility, Simon and Schuster launched its Silhouette imprint in 1980 to put a different spin on formula romances. The line charged authors to create heroines who were stronger and more self-sufficient than their Harlequin counterparts. Other publishers followed suit and category romances began a publishing phenomenon. As the market expanded, however, the books became more formulaic and the quality waned. The most successful author to begin her career in the world of category romance and cross over to noncategory books is Nora Roberts. Roberts has many series to accompany her stand-alone romance titles. One of the most prolific romance writers working today, Roberts, who also writes under the name J.D. Robb, has produced over twenty romance series. Roberts is a highly respected romance author, having almost 200 books to her credit since 1981. She sold her first manuscript to Silhouette Books in 1981, Irish Thoroughbred, as part of the Irish Hearts series. Her Calhoun Women series is one of the most popular Silhouette series ever.

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Roberts has won many romance genre awards, several for her McGregor series alone. Part of her success lies in her inclusion of elements from other genres such as mystery and fantasy. Christian Fiction. A new trend that many Christian publishing houses contribute to, a response to the increasing demands on readers’ time and attention, is the release of smaller series. Sales of series installments, excepting more established authors, tend to wane after the third release. To broaden their series offerings, publishers such as Tyndale, a major Christian publisher, have begun to release nonserial series. These series provide readers with the same characters and locations, but the individual titles do not need to be read in chronological order. Readers are not obligated to read earlier titles to feel comfortable with later releases. Even Harlequin has gotten on the Christian romance bandwagon, offering Godcentered romances, sans sex, with its Love Inspired line. Conservative, often fundamentalist, values are highlighted in these works with women frequently giving up the roles of powerful women and finding love and happiness in laundry and raising children. Beverly Lewis’s Annie’s People series (The Brethren, 2006) and Wanda E. Brunstetter’s Brides of Lancaster County and Daughters of Lancaster County are just a few of the series that now feature the simple lives of the Pennsylvania Amish. Jan Karon’s Mitford saga is set in a North Carolina mountaintop village and follows the life of Father Tim Kavanaugh. The acclaimed series, begun in the 1994 At Home in Mitford culminates in the series conclusion Light from Heaven (2005). The series is beloved for its nostalgic look at a small town and the simple religious lives of its inhabitants. Gilbert Morris’s House of Winslow series debuted in 1986, and the fortieth installment, The White Night, concluded the series in 2007. The Left Behind series is undoubtedly one of the largest publishing phenomena the world of Christian publishing has ever seen. The books, written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, are located in the time of the Rapture, a Christian idea that encompasses a time when Jesus Christ returns to the Earth to take select individuals to meet God in Heaven. The first title in the series, Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days (1995), has been followed by almost a dozen more titles, an extensive series for children (Left Behind: The Kids), movie adaptations, and several spin-off series (Left Behind: End off State, Left Behind: Military). Bibliography Auel, Jean. The Shelters of Stone. New York: Crown, 2002. Cornwell, Patricia. Book of the Dead. New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 2007. Deaver, Jeffrey. The Bone Collector. New York: Viking, 1997. Don Pendleton Web Site. http://www.donpendleton.com/executionerseries.html. Accessed on April 30, 2008. Foote, Stephanie. “Bookish Women: Reading Girls’ Fiction: A Response to Julia Mickenberg.” American Literary History 19.2 (2007): 521–526. Goodkind, Terry. The Confessor. New York: Tor, 2007. Grafton, Sue. T Is for Trespass. New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 2007. Handler, Daniel. The Bad Beginning. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. ———. The End. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Hillerman, Tony. Sinister Pig. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. Hoppenstand, Gary. “Series(ous) SF Concerns.” The Journal of Popular Culture 38.4 (May 2005).

SERIES FICTION LaHaye, Tim, and Jerry B. Jenkins. Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1995. Mosley, Walter. Devil in a Blue Dress. New York: Norton, 1990. Peters, Elizabeth. Tomb of the Golden Bird. New York: William Morrow, 2006. Rice, Anne. Blood Canticle. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Thomas, Rebecca L., and Catherine Barr. Popular Series Fiction for K-6 Readers. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2004. Warner, Gertrude Chandler, and Robert Papp. The Box That Watch Found. Morton Grove, IL: Albert Whitman and Co., 2007. Watson, Bruce. “Tom Swift, Nancy Drew and Pals All Had the Same Dad.” Smithsonian 22.7 (October 1991): 50–59. Winner, Lauren F. “The Series Still Rules.” Publishers Weekly 28 August, 2006. S10–S11.

Further Reading Agosto, D.E., S. Hughes-Hassell, and C. Gilmore-Clough. “The All-White World of MiddleSchool Genre Fiction: Surveying the Field for Multicultural Protagonists.” Children’s Literature in Education 34.4 (December 2003): 257–275; Benson, Christopher. “What’s Behind the Boon in Black Mystery Writers?” Ebony (September 2003); Billman, Carol. Secret of the Stratemeyer Syndicate: Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and the Million Dollar Fiction Factory. New York: Ungar, 1986; Charles, John A., and Mosley, Shelley. “Getting Serious about Romance: Adult Series Romance for Teens.” Voice of Youth Advocates 25.2 (June 2002): 87–93; Darbyshire, Peter. “The Politics of Love: Harlequin Romances and the Christian Right.” Journal of Popular Culture 35.4 (Spring 2002): 75–87; Erisman, Fred. Boys’ Books, Boys’ Dreams, and the Mystique of Flight. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2006; Erisman, Fred. “Stratemeyer Boys’ Books and the Gernsback Milieu.” Extrapolation 41 (Fall 2000): 272–282; Foote, Stephanie. “Deviant Classics: Pulps and the Making of Lesbian Print Culture.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31 (2005): 169–190; Heising, Willetta L. Detecting Women Pocket Guide: Checklist for Mystery Series Written by Women. 3rd ed. Dearborn: Purple Moon Press, 1999; Heising, Willetta L. Detecting Men: A Readers Guide and Checklist for Mystery Series Written by Men. Dearborn: Purple Moon Press, 1998; Inness, Sherrie, Ed. Nancy Drew and Company: Culture, Gender, and Girls’ Series. Bowling Green: Popular Press, 1997; Inness, Sherrie, Ed. Nancy Drew and Company: Culture, Gender, and Girls’ Series. Bowling Green: Popular Press, 1997; Jones, Patrick. What’s So Scary about R.L. Stine? Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1998; Kensinger, Faye R. Children of the Series and How They Grew, or a Century of Heroines and Heroes, Romantic, Comic, Moral. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987; Lanes, Selma. Down the Rabbit Hole: Adventures and Misadventures in the Realm of Children’s Literature. New York: Atheneum, 1971; Langbauer, Laurie. Novels of Everyday Life: The Series in English Fiction, 1850–1930. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1999; Molson, Francis J. “The Boy Inventor in American Series Fiction: 1900–1930.” The Journal of Popular Culture 28.1 (Summer 1994): 31–48; O’Rourke, Meghan. “Nancy Drew’s Father: The Fiction Factory of Edward Stratemeyer.” The New Yorker 80 (8 November 2004): 120–129; Romalov, Nancy Tillman. “Mobile Heroines: Early Twentieth Century Girls Automobile Series.” The Journal of Popular Culture 28.4 (Spring 1995): 231–243; Rye, Marilyn. “Changing Gender Conventions and the Detective Formula: J. A. Jance’s Beaumont and Brady Series.” The Journal of Popular Culture 37.1 (2003): 105–119; Sands, Karen, and Marietta Frank. Back in the Spaceship Again: Juvenile Science Fiction Series Since 1945. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999; Simkin, John E., ed. The Whole Story: 3000 Years of Sequels and Sequences. Melbourne: Thorpe, 1996; Thomas, Rebecca L., and Catherine Barr. Popular Series Fiction for Middle School and Teen Readers. Westport, Connecticut: Libraries Unlimited, 2005; Volz, Bridget D., Cheryl P. Scheer, and Lynda B. Welborn. Junior Genreflecting: A Guide to Good Reads and Series

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SPACE OPERA Fiction for Children. Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited, 2000; Watson, Victor. Reading Series Fiction: From Arthur Ransome to Gene Kemp. London and New York: Routledge Farmer, 2000; Westfahl, Gary. “Going Where Lots of People Have Gone Before, or, The Novels Science Fiction Readers Don’t See.” Interzone 170 (August 2001): 54–55.

PATRICIA BOSTIAN

SPACE OPERA Definition In these hectic days of phrase coining, we offer one. Westerns are called “horse operas,” the morning housewife tear-jerkers are called “soap operas.” For the hacky, grinding, outworn spaceship yarn, or world-saving for that matter, we offer “space opera.” —Arthur Wilson “Bob” Tucker, 1941

Tucker’s disparaging description still influences perceptions of space opera today. Considered a subgenre of science fiction, space opera is usually seen at best as “for fun,” as Brian Aldiss puts it, and at worst, hack writing barely deserving of the infamous sci-fi pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s. Up until the late 1970s, space opera was a dismissive term applied to the type of “hacky, grinding, outworn” sci-fi writing Tucker vilifies, which was, in essence, a western or a romance transposed to outer space. Elements of the early space opera are introduced with willful abandon in an effort to entertain, whereas the plausibility of those elements—virtually instantaneous galactic travel, worlds with impossible aliens, and the ever-so-slightly-bigger-andbetter death ray—are blithely ignored. Its pejorative status is highlighted by William Sims Bainbridge, who describes space opera as that which uses “the physical props of hard science without the underlying intellectual themes” (1986, 77), meaning that the physical conditions of the universe in which space opera functions usually run contrary to known science. Bainbridge’s description furthers the notion that

A RECIPE FOR SPACE OPERA Brian Aldiss wittily described the subgenre as that which takes “a few light years and a pinch of reality and inflate thoroughly with melodrama, dreams, and a seasoning of screwy ideas” (9). Aldiss then listed a number of defining elements of space opera: • • • • • • • • •

Earth in peril Quest Hero Aliens and exotic creatures Blood running down the palace steps Ships launching into the louring dark Beautiful women Evil villain Happy ending (1974, 10)

To which we can also add: • • • •

Cosmic backdrop Sweeping, swashbuckling action Often stilted dialog (and even narration) Enough superlatives to fill a galaxy

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space opera is primarily action and flash (deriving from the Sturm und Drang movement of eighteenth-century Germany as well as the romance novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) and virtually devoid of ideas, a traditional distinction between writing literature and merely writing. Trends and Themes. Not all of these characteristics are endemic to space opera; certainly most works of traditional or hard science fiction employ many of these same operatic qualities. As Tzvetan Todorov brilliantly points out in Genres in Discourse, the borders of any genre remain opaque, nebulous, and subject to constant scrutiny and redefinition. Many early practitioners of hard science fiction— such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, or Robert Heinlein—would have been horrified to have their works referred to as space opera. Yet many of the qualities denoting space opera run rampant through their works. The entry on science fiction in this work offers a much more detailed definition of hard science fiction; but at its essence, hard science fiction is science fiction; space opera is science fiction. Early space opera can also be distinguished from planetary romance, its sister subgenre, which, while making use of extraterrestrial settings, comes closer to fantasy than science fiction because the story invariably resembles pre-technology Earth and incorporates qualities like swordplay and magic, to name a few. Planetary romance or early space opera is perhaps best exemplified by Leigh Brackett’s The Sword of Rhiannon (1949). In space opera, planets—and, similarly, the ubiquitous spaceport bar—serve generally as ports of call; the real action is in space and spaceships. And rather than relying on magic, space opera will rely on what can be called superscience, an instance of which is the sudden development of a regeneration drug that can restore the hero to perfect, symmetrical health just as he has had his eyes plucked out and his limbs amputated—without, of course, even a scar—as is the case in E.E. Smith’s Lensman series. Pre–1980 space opera focused on the tale, not the idea, was often tinged with a nostalgic affection, and indulged freely in extravagance. It was also unmistakably masculine. In 1974, Aldiss famously declared space opera dead. In a sense, he was correct; the old space opera had passed away, but the late 1970s saw the birth of what has become widely known as the new space opera. Although the new space opera still bears many of the old earmarks—the epic scale, the exotic setting, the earth in peril—it pays closer attention to real science and realistic characters. It also takes on the literary quality of exploring and expounding ideas, and it pays homage to the space battle royale—so much so, in fact, that some purists argue in favor of a separate military science fiction or even military space opera category. But the scope, size, and qualities of military science fiction, even when grounded on firm science, make moot most attempts to distinguish it from space opera. The new space opera, though better and more literary than its forerunner, still engenders Aldiss’s qualities of “great images, excitements, and aspirations” (1974, 10). History. Although a few critics argue that space opera’s roots can be traced to such early writers as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, most tend to agree on two primary literary figures of the 1920s as being credited with originating the subgenre: E.E. “Doc” Smith and Edmond Hamilton. E.E. “Doc” Smith (1890–1968). Born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, Edward Elmer Smith is most noted for his two space opera sagas, the four-volume Skylark series and the more popular six-book Lensman series. Smith earned two degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Idaho, went on for both a Master’s and a PhD, and worked for a few years at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, DC.

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A prolific writer, Smith infused much of his fiction with his scientific knowledge, though usually just as a starting point. As his stories progressed, their scientific bases would become increasingly outlandish. Skylark. The first Skylark novel, The Skylark of Space, originally ran serially in the August–October 1928 issues of Amazing Stories, the first magazine devoted solely to science fiction and published by the influential Hugo Gernsbeck. Smith had actually begun writing it in 1915 with the aid of a neighbor, Lee Hawkins Garby. It was Garby who allegedly suggested that Smith first try his hand at writing science fiction, to which he agreed, provided she write the love interest portions of the story. Both are listed as authors of the work. In the novel’s very first sentence, young scientist-hero Richard Seaton has just discovered the peculiar qualities of unknown metal X in his laboratory: under the proper conditions it stimulates the conversion of other metals into pure energy, and in turn it can generate a field of energy capable of propelling ships beyond the speed of light. Seaton’s discovery piques the interest of a former colleague, the evil Dr. Marc “Blackie” DuQuesne, who steals Seaton’s secret. Both men recognize that metal X and its amazing properties hold the secret to space travel, and they simultaneously begin building spaceships—Seaton with the aid of his millionaire inventor friend M. Reynolds Crane, and DuQuesne allied with the nefarious World Steel Corporation. Seaton’s ship is the eponymously named Skylark. DuQuesne kidnaps Dorothy Vaneman, Seaton’s lovely socialite fiancée, and a galactic pursuit ensues that brings both ships and crews into contact with such wonders as dead stars, startling technological leaps, and eventually an alien race on the planet Osnome, populated by the evil Mardonalians and the benevolent Konalians. At first deceived by the Mardonalians, both Seaton and DuQuesne realize they must join forces with the Kondalians to defeat their new mutual nemeses, which they promptly do. Even while indulging in the hyperbolic “bigger, better, faster” episodic qualities of what has come to be known as the linchpins of early space opera, Smith nonetheless accomplishes a few admirable feats. While much of his technological advances defy known physics (such as faster-than-light travel and time dilation), the energy for his galactic star drive resembles, if only vaguely, the process of cold fusion and obeys the general principles of matter-to-energy conversion; the gravity well surrounding the dead star conforms approximately to the properties of a neutron star’s gravity horizon; on Osnome, humans encounter both slavery and the practice of rudimentary eugenics, which in this case involves euthanizing flawed members of society. In this regard, The Skylark of Space can be said to follow one of the mandates of hard science fiction by engaging in extrapolative scientific thought, both technologically and socially. Smith composed the remaining three novels of the series on his own, Mrs. Garby opting not to participate. Skylark Three also appeared serially in Amazing Stories (1930) with new villains—the Fenachronians, who possess vastly superior technology and who are naturally bent on destroying the Earth—and a new supertechnology developed by Seaton and Crane, an impenetrable energy shield known as the Zone of Force. Osnome, as luck would have it, is part of a fantastic fourteen-sun system rife with planets and intelligent species. Seaton and Crane encounter a number of these species (most importantly the Norlamin, key allies in the next book), acquiring and synthesizing technology as they go, all the while fending off the continuing plottings of DuQuesne. In an apparent extension of the euthanistic eugenics of The Skylark of Space, Seaton resolves the threat of Fenachrone by not

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only destroying the entire planet but also tracking down and eliminating the few Fenachronians who managed to escape planetary annihilation; DuQuesne is also immolated. The story ends with Seaton being named the new Chief of the Galactic Council. For Skylark of Valeron, Smith switched publishing milieus, opting to run the story in Astounding Stories from August 1934 through February 1935. Seaton’s primary foe this time is the Chlorans, who are attempting to conquer Valeron, and his secondary foes are DuQuesne (who had substituted a dummy and thus avoided immolation), a number of Fenachronians (who had eluded Seaton in the previous work), and also a couple of more metaphysical foes: a colony of beings that are pure intellect, first briefly encountered in The Skylark of Space, and inhabitants of the fourth dimension that Seaton and company traverse while fleeing the beings of pure intellect. Skylark of course becomes yet bigger, faster, and more powerful, its main improvement being a centralized artificial brain that, among other amazing feats, can synthesize matter directly from energy as well as both map and travel the entire galaxy. DuQuesne temporarily conquers the Earth, until Seaton “disembodies” his foe’s intelligence, locking it in a Niven-like stasis box and sending it drifting off into the ether of eternal space. Smith did not write the series’ final installment, Skylark DuQuesne, until 1965, when it ran in If magazine, and it marks Smith’s later tendencies to explore mental powers over technological ones, in which he indulges more freely in his Lensman series. DuQuesne has once again escaped his fate but run afoul of the latest foe, the Llurdi, a race of Vulcan-like purely logical beings bent on domination. The Chlorans also return in a much more malevolent form, but they are defeated in the novel’s climactic battle. Peace is negotiated with the Llurdi, the remaining Fenachrone become allies, and DuQuesne, seemingly reformed, departs for a distant galaxy to set up his own empire, accompanied by his new fiancée, Dr. Stephanie de Marigne. Lensman. In the third Skylark installment, Smith had begun experimenting with technological power versus mentalic power, a relationship he explores much more fully in his Lensman series. The Lensman series comprises either four, six, or seven novels, which is due to its interesting publication history. Smith had begun conceiving his Lensman universe as early as the late 1920s, envisioning it as a four-volume work. Each appeared in serial form in Astounding magazine: Galactic Patrol (1937–1938), Gray Lensman (1939–1940), Second-Stage Lensmen (1941–1942; sometimes Lensman), and Children of the Lens (1947–1948). Smith had begun with a detailed outline for the entire saga, which helped make Lensman’s plot much more complicated and consistent than Skylark’s. Following the final installment’s publication, Smith contracted with Fantasy Press to issue the works in hardcover. Lloyd Eshbach, Fantasy Press’s owner, convinced Smith to rewrite one of the author’s earlier works, Triplanetary, so that it would not only fit into the Lensman universe but also serve as a prequel. Eshbach then suggested that Smith also write a new work, First Lensman, to act as a bridge between the prequel and the series proper. Fantasy Press published the revised Triplanetary in 1948 and First Lensman in 1950, then released the original four-volume Lensman series between 1950 and 1954. Smith revised the original four-volume series in order to make the two new prequels consistent, and as a result a number of discrepancies between the original and the first publication in book form exist. Further, F. Orlin Tremaine, the Astounding editor who had contracted with Smith for Lensman, had left the magazine in 1938 to begin his own

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rival publication, Comet. The new magazine struggled financially, and Tremaine asked Smith for a contribution, hoping the author’s fame and popularity would resuscitate his struggling enterprise. In response Smith wrote “The Vortex Baster,” his initial foray into what would become Masters of the Vortex, an ancillary Lensman story set parallel to but not dependent upon the plots and characters of his Lensman series. Unfortunately, Smith’s effort did not help Tremaine; “The Vortex Blaster” appeared in the final issue of Comet, though subsequent truncated Vortex tales ran in Astounding throughout 1942, until Smith elaborated on the story and published it in novel form in 1960, returning to The Vortex Blaster in name. This seventh Lensman novel seems to be set in the series’ chronology between SecondStage Lensmen and Children of the Lens. The revised Triplanetary introduces two ancient races with highly developed mentalic powers, the benevolent Arisians and the power-hungry, invading Eddorians. Though possessing superior mental powers, the Arisians realize the Eddorians pose a significant threat because the aggressive race’s mental powers rival their own; coupled with the Eddorians’ technological supremacy, this gives the Eddorians the edge. The Arisians begin eugenics programs on a number of planets, including Earth, hoping over time to breed not only intelligent life but also a superior race to serve as galactic guardians. A couple billion years pass and humans begin to develop, garnering the attention of the Eddorians, who send Gharlane, Second of Eddore, to interfere with human history and ensure that the race never develops. But with the aid of Arisians disguised as humans, inhabitants of Earth (a.k.a. Tellus in the series) survive and begin populating the solar system, though they quickly find themselves plagued by space pirates (the Eddorians disguised). Triplanetary introduces Virgil Samms, First Lensman, and Rod Kinnison, whose ancestor, Kimball Kinnison, is the central hero of the four-book original Lensman series. The bridge novel, First Lensman, describes the formation of the Galactic Patrol and introduces the lens itself, a gift to Samms from the Arisians. The lens is a lowerorder artificial life form created by the Arisians that is fitted to a unique wearer (no one else can wear it), enabling its possessor a range of advanced mental powers, including the ability to communicate with any other life form and limited mindreading capabilities. Samms uses the lens to visit various races and recruit from among their numbers to populate the Galactic Patrol, a marked departure by Smith from run-of-the-mill depictions of aliens as other. In First Lensman, aliens operate as fully functional and equal partners to humans. Earth faces a massive attack by space pirates—the Boskonians—but it is saved by the nascent Galactic Patrol. The four volumes of the original Lensman series can be viewed as an organic whole. Generations have passed and humanity has established a foothold in the galaxy, but the Boskonians continue to be a formidable foe. Gradually Kimball Kinnison and his fellow Lensmen perceive that the Boskonian pirates are not a loose affiliation of brigands but the organized, purposeful fighting force of an even greater foe operating on an intergalactic scale. The fighting rages for years and is characterized by larger and more fantastic displays of technology, energy, and subterfuge— hyperspatial tubes, superdreadnaughts, planet-destroying energy beams, immense battles between huge space navies, secret councils that rule world-spanning empires, second- and third-stage lensmen, and the culmination of the Arisians’ secret, humanity-spanning eugenics program in the form of Kinnison’s five offspring, the children of Children of the Lens. These children can meld their own minds into

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what Smith calls The Unit, creating a mental force beyond even the Arisians. Further, The Unit can also channel the mental energies of all the other Lensmen— there are billions by now—which they use to finally penetrate the defensive shield surrounding the Eddorians’ planet, vaporizing both the shield and the Eddorians. Edmond Hamilton (1904–1977). “The Monster God of Mamurth,” published in the August 1926 edition of Weird Tales, marked Hamilton’s entry into the science fiction field. Though Hamilton gained a sizable readership for his numerous novels and short stories written during the 1920s and 1930s, his career is singularly marked by the Captain Future series. Hamilton was born in Pennsylvania and entered college at the age of 14, but he never finished it. A highly productive writer who early in his sci-fi career earned the nickname “World Wrecker”—because many of his stories involved a galactic menace that could be neutralized only by destroying entire planets—Hamilton wrote hundreds of science fiction novels and short stories, several under a series of pseudonyms. He wrote even more novels and short stories in the horror and detective genres when his science fiction sales lagged. From 1946 on, when he married Leigh Brackett, another sci-fi author of note who also wrote the screenplay for Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back, his writing is marked by a more pensive and realistic style (a change usually credited to Brackett’s influence). In that same year Hamilton was hired by Mort Weisinger, an old collaborator, to work at DC Comics. Weisinger had been a science fiction fan ever since reading The Skylark of Space as well as the early Buck Rogers series, and he had also collaborated with Hamilton several times, even lending a significant hand in the creation of Captain Future. Hamilton remained affiliated with DC Comics until 1966, lending his hand to countless Batman and Superman story lines. Most of the Captain Future novels were published under their own Captain Future label and put out by Pines Publications. The first, The Space Emperor, appeared in early 1940 and was later reprinted as Captain Future and the Space Emperor; it serves to provide much of the series’ exposition. Captain Future himself is Curtis Newton, the son of the brilliant scientist Roger Newton and Elaine, who are slain by the evil scientist Victor Kaslan while working in their moon laboratory. Raised by the giant robot Grag, the android Otho, and Simon Wright, the elderly scientific accomplice of the Wrights who exists now as a disembodied brain in a plastic case, Curtis becomes a Doc Savage-like paragon of virtue, intelligence, and physical prowess who vows to spend his life zipping around the galaxy (and in later adventures, through multiple dimensions and across time) in his ship, The Comet, righting wrongs and fighting evil. Captain Future magazine published seventeen of the Captain Future adventures, with the remaining ten works appearing from 1946–1951 in Startling Stories, sometimes under Hamilton’s Brett Sterling alias. Pines Publications also published a number of Captain Future comics, featuring a different Captain Future, under its Nedor Comics label. A year after Hamilton’s death, a Japanese anime company began a series of 52 “Captain Future” episodes. While many qualities, plot lines, and characters diverged considerably from Hamilton’s creation, the show was clearly based on Hamilton’s work. Perhaps more readily than in any other genre, science fiction lends itself to the sequel and even the series. Any piece of fiction must invent plot and character, but science fiction often needs to invent also new worlds and new races, and once that extra investment is made, authors are often loath to abandon it all after a single

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work. Although it can be argued that neither Smith nor Hamilton invested a great deal of creativity in making those worlds and races plausible, their inventive energy is nonetheless impressive. But when a series starts with a dramatic climax that involves destroying an entire marauding race by annihilating their entire planet, writing subsequent installments becomes rather a challenge. It is easy to see why both writers engaged in increasingly hyperbolic elements as their series continued, and that very hyperbole came to define early space opera. That is not to say that they ignored actual science entirely. Both were highly intelligent and based much of their extrapolative technology on known scientific principles of the time, and they were often dogmatic in explaining how the inventions and technologies supposedly worked. Space opera does not altogether shirk sound science, but neither does it allow mere science to get in the way of a good story. The Smith-Hamilton era also saw the genesis of Buck Rogers (1928) and Flash Gordon (1935), two serialized swashbucklers who helped amplify and aggrandize science fiction in both the pulps and the movie theatres. From the 1930s through the late 1970s, a number of luminaries made significant contributions to the space opera field, though many of them would cringe at having the label applied to their works—as would many of their fans. The figure who held the most sway during this period—along with Hugo Gernsback, who is often credited with creating science fiction as a genre and whose editorship was characterized by soliciting and encouraging space opera stories—was John W. Campbell, a sometimes space opera writer whose real influence lay in his position as editor of Astounding Science Fiction. Campbell ushered in a host of new young writers such as A.E. van Vogt, Robert Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov. Originally credited with moving the genre away from its operatic elements and more toward hard science, Campbell nonetheless began subscribing to baseless scientific notions in the early 1950s, including psionic powers and anti-Newtonian propulsion, which led many writers to believe that Campbell’s vision of science was actually commercialized pseudoscience. His overbearing personality and truculence eventually drove many of the leading science fiction authors away from Campbell. But he also presided over what is generally referred to as the golden age of science fiction, a period ranging from the late 1930s to the 1950s. The most important figure in the chronological progression of space opera after Smith and Hamilton is Jack Williamson. His Legion of Space series, first appearing in 1934, takes place in the thirtieth century and details the efforts of the Legion as it battles the Medusae, a race bent on conquering and inhabiting Earth because their own home planet has begun to spiral into its own star. Williamson, who died in 2006, continued writing well into his nineties and was an early influence on Asimov and others. In 1946 A.E. van Vogt produced his first novel, Slan, which inverts the usual evilalien paradigm by making ordinary humans villains intent on destroying the Slan. A product of eugenically evolved humans, the Slan are near supermen who possess psychic abilities, vastly superior intelligence, and supranormal strength and stamina. Other notable space opera works by van Vogt include The Weapon Shops of Isher (1951) and Cosmic Encounter (1980). Arthur C. Clarke, generally considered one of the “Big Three” of science fiction and recognized as writing a style of science fiction based on extrapolation of sound science, nonetheless wrote a few works that could easily be categorized as space opera. Chief among them is Childhood’s End (1953), given that Clarke dabbles with

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notions of the occult, of humanity’s ascension into a hive-mind mentality, and of the existence of a race of Overlords and, above them, the Overmind, which uses the Overlords to guide certain races through their stage of transcendence from corporeal to ethereal existence. Childhood’s End represents an exception in Clarke’s oeuvre; he is otherwise widely recognized for the high quality of his science, as in his close adherence to known physics in 2001: A Space Odyssey (although the existence of the monolith can be seen as problematic) and even in the hyperfilament he speculates about in The Fountains of Paradise (1979). He is even credited with being the first to recognize the importance of using geostationary positions for communications satellites. Probably the best known name in science fiction is Isaac Asimov, who, like Clarke, is usually lauded for writing hard science fiction. An early Campbell disciple, Asimov’s contributions to the field both in terms of literature and influence are extensive. “Nightfall” was recognized by the Science Fiction Writers of America as the best science fiction short story of all time, and the Foundation series was awarded a Hugo Award for best science fiction series of all time. But Foundation is pure space opera, comprising the original three volumes published in the early 1950s as well as its later four volumes, appearing from 1982 to 1993. Ostensibly, even his Robot series can be included, since he eventually folded R. Daneel Olivaw (as well as a few of his other stories and favorite themes) into Foundation’s galactic empire. Foundation, admittedly influenced by Gibbons’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, incorporates Hari Selden’s theories of psychohistory, vast armadas careening through hyperspace, an empire that spans an entire galaxy, and startling technological and mentalic advances. No list of space opera authors can be comprehensive, and the likes of Jack Vance, Vernor Vinge (as well as his ex-wife, Joan Vinge), Andre Norton (more noted for her fantasy works), and even Robert Heinlein could be incorporated here, along with dozens of other names. But by the mid-1960s, science fiction had begun to transform under the influence of the New Wave writers. Michael Moorcock is generally credited with originating the movement when he assumed editorship of New Worlds magazine in 1964; Harlan Ellison is often touted as the movement’s primary initial writer and proponent. Science fictional New Wave advocated bringing the entire genre closer to the mainstream, primarily by sacrificing scientific integrity for literary style while simultaneously encouraging more experimentation—in short, foregrounding space opera’s penchant for telling the tale rather than adhering to sound science, even as the New Wave writers eschewed space opera as hack writing. The New Wave writers felt they were distinguishing their brand of science fiction by focusing more intently on psychological and sociological aspects, and their writing trended toward a more pessimistic view of humanity. Leading New Wave writers include such note worthies as Moorcock, Ellison, J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel Delany, Roger Zelazny, Robert Silverberg, Leigh Brackett, and Brian Aldiss. Disdain for anything with even a whiff of space opera reached its height during the late 1960s and early 1970s, which prompted Aldiss’s declaration that the genre was dead. But, like Twain’s obituary, the death knell was premature, and space opera’s fortunes experienced a radical reversal in the late 1970s. In the mid-1970s, Lester Del Rey attempted to redefine space opera by returning it to its roots as a nonliterary or even antiliterary art form, rejecting what he called the failed experiment of the New Wave movement and its Modernist roots (Hartwell and Cramer

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2006, 15–16). Del Rey’s influence was very slight until about 3 p.m. on May 25, 1977, at which time George Lucas and 20th Century Fox released Star Wars on the world. An unabashed space opera, Star Wars transfixed an entire generation, redefining space opera as the best-selling popular science fiction entertainment. As noted earlier, Brackett even wrote the script for the second Star Wars installment, The Empire Strikes Back. Star Wars demonstrated to the hard sci-fi writers—to the entire world, actually—that space opera could be an immense commercial success while simultaneously receiving, at the very least, moderately favorable literary and cinematic reviews. Lucas and company also showed that space opera could be rollicking good fun. Its early sense of awe and wonder had returned. Context and Issues. By the middle of the 1980s, the space opera renaissance was in full swing. Yet the literary inclinations of the New Wave movement influenced the resurgence of what is frequently called the new space opera, with its practitioners bringing new literary savvy to the genre and the lines between space opera and hard science fiction becoming once again blurred. Many of the names listed here also appear in the accompanying entry on science fiction, and with good reason. The new space opera writers were more cognizant of being at least reasonably accountable to science, were capable of infusing their works with philosophical ideas and symbolism, and still managed to tell an engaging tale. The new movement’s vanguard was primarily British, led by the likes of Alastair Reynolds, John Clute, and Iain Banks, though by 1990 a new breed of American writers began to establish a foothold, especially because new space opera, though still not fully considered hard science fiction or even fully literary, bore a much more favorable imprimatur. Among publishers, Baen Books was the first noteworthy house to openly advocate for the new space opera and a new core of writers, with Del Rey and Tor soon following suit. An impressive number of writers published the bulk of their space opera canons in the 1980s and 1990s, though few have produced much since 2000. These writers, in varying degrees, contributed heavily to refiguring and reconstituting space opera by bringing to their craft more complexity of character, a greater attention to science, and the infusion of themes and ideas, whether political, religious, cultural, or philosophical. What follows is a brief discussion of the major works and ideas of three of these authors. Steven Barnes (1952–) initially came to prominence coauthoring several works with Larry Niven, starting with Dream Park (1981), followed by The Descent of Anansi (1982), Achilles’ Choice (1991), and Saturn’s Race (2000); the two writers also teamed with Jerry Pournelle for the two-volume Heorot series. Barnes also contributed one work each to the Star Trek and Star Wars sagas, the latter appearing in 2004, and he singlehandedly wrote several works as well. Along with Greg Bear and Gregory Benford, David Brin (1950–) comprise the affectionately named Killer B’s of science fiction, so called largely because of their collaborative efforts in writing the “final” trilogy in Asimov’s Foundation series, though Brin had long before established himself as a sci-fi writer of note with his award-winning Uplift novels, beginning with Sundiver (1980) and concluding with Heaven’s Reach (1998). While largely a work of military space opera, the Uplift stories serve as a paean to evolutionary theory, and they also incorporate and develop ideas of genetic engineering, democracy, and racial consciousness. In other works, such as Glory Season (1993) and Kiln People (2002), Brin explores the effects of technology on humanity. Brin also gained some notoriety for writing a few

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articles criticizing what he felt were the antidemocratic principles and attitudes underlying the immensely popular Star Wars and Lord of the Rings works. His only space opera work since 2000 is Forgiveness (2001), a graphic novel contributing to the Star Trek: The Next Generation series. Dan Simmons (1948–) gained widespread popularity and acclaim for his fourvolume Hyperion Cantos (though he followed the tetralogy with a 1999 short story, “Orphans of the Helix,” which continues the same story line). Simmons mines Greek mythology for his most recent space opera undertaking, Ilium (2003) and its sequel, Olympos (2004), just as he borrows from classic literature for his awardwinning Cantos. The titles are drawn from the poetry of John Keats—Keats, in fact, appears as a cybrid character—and the initial format borrows liberally from the pilgrimage motif of Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Simmons’s Cantos revolve around the Shrike, a four-armed, armored machine with spikes covering its body. The Shrike has been built by a far-future machine god, and it can manipulate time to torture beings—pilgrims—in an effort to lure a human god from the future. Clearly the antagonist of the first two novels, the Shrike begins to act benevolently in subsequent tales. The Cantos gradually develop into a cautionary tale about militaristic religion, with the heroes battling the Pax, an extension of the Catholic Church that has spread its dominance over most of the galaxy, largely with the aid of the cruciform, a quasi-organic artifact that allows regeneration of the dead. Reception. Only in the past two decades has space opera began to garner serious critical attention, albeit limited, which is mainly due to the longstanding perception of space opera as hack writing. Prior to 1990 critical examinations of space opera were virtually nonexistent, largely because the term was anathema. But since its rejuvenation in the late 1970s and beyond, space opera has slowly become a fertile object for critical analysis. Kathryn Cramer, William H. Hardesty III, David G. Hartwell, and especially Gary Westfahl reside at the forefront of a small cadre of literary critics who have examined space opera in some detail, tracing its origins and finding in the new space opera no small merit. The bulk of the critical attention has come in the last ten years, and it frequently takes the form of some sort of reconsideration of the genre, though feminist perspectives on space opera are beginning to appear with greater regularity. In his “Space Opera” chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, Westfahl points to space opera’s burgeoning commercial appeal as well as its trend of garnering the bulk of the major science fiction awards since around 1990 as primary reasons why the genre is attracting better writers and receiving more critical attention (Westfahl 2003, 205). David Pringle points to space opera’s steadily increasing level of sophistication and literary merit in the past decade, though he argues also that the subgenre should be divided even further into planetary romances, which he feels are distinctly different (Pringle 2000, 39, 46). Hartwell and Cramer are perhaps the most vocal and insistent critics calling for a reassessment of space opera’s literary merits, finding that the new space opera is a “colorful, dramatic, large-scale science fiction adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written” (Hartwell and Cramer 2006). Locus magazine, a near-annual winner of various science fiction awards for its reportage on science fiction and fantasy, even devoted its August 2003 issue exclusively to articles and interviews on the new space opera. Further, television and film manifestations of space opera have similarly progressed from the days of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. While 1960s and 1970s

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offerings like Dr. Who, Star Trek, Star Wars, and especially the original Battlestar Galactica still bore many of the clichés of the old space opera, already the seeds of the new space opera can be seen as several of these undertakings began to concern themselves with ideas and issues underlying the basic entertainment quotient. Even in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) were themes like militarism, xenophobia, masculinity, and abortion being embedded in sophisticated and challenging ways. And although some of the most recent TV and movie issues can still rally around the older notions of space opera—consider Galaxy Quest and Total Recall—by presenting sheer entertainment on a vast scale that blithely disregards the physical laws of time and space, series like Joss Whedon’s Firefly (and its subsequent cinematic issue, Serenity) and Ronald D. Moore’s 2003 reincarnation of Battlestar Galactica have garnered wide critical acclaim, with the latter earning Peabody, Hugo, and Saturn awards. With a cadre of new, talented, and literary writers producing a steadily increasing stream of space opera, Tucker’s notion of the genre as filled with hacky, outworn yarns seems to have been fully put to rest. Selected Authors. Contemporary, or new, space opera authors can be divided into three groups: those whose primary corpora came in the 1980s and 1990s but who are still contributing a handful of works; those who established themselves in the genre in the 1990s but continue to write extensively; and those who are new writers and whose work starts almost exclusively in 2000. Continuing the trend of the new space opera, each of these writers infuses his or her works with better science, more deeply complex characters, and political and philosophical musings and explorations. Group 1: Human-Alien Interactions. If there is one dominant characteristic of the writers in this group, it is their penchant for exploring human-alien interactions. By and large these writers invest a great deal of thought and complexity in developing their alien species without simply demonizing them, even though plots often center around human-alien conflict. The novels frequently depict the intricacies and difficulties of intercultural interaction, serving as a metaphor for the panoply of contemporary global politics. Kevin J. Anderson (1962–) wrote a few contributions on his own to the Star Wars galaxy of novels and many more as coauthor with wife Rebecca Moesta before teaming up with Brian Herbert in a series of immensely popular prequels to Frank Herbert’s Dune series. Anderson has also recently novelized The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) as well as contributed three X-Files books and a novel set in the StarCraft computer game world. Orson Scott Card’s (1951–) primary contribution to space opera is the highly touted and multiple award-winning Ender’s Game series (generally known as the Enderverse), begun in 1977 as a novelette appearing in Analog. He expanded the story to book length in 1985 and followed it with seven other installments. A practicing Mormon, Card’s religious views permeate not only the Ender’s Game series but also most of his other works, including The Homecoming Saga and The Tales of Alvin Maker, though arguably both of these series lean more toward fantasy and alternate history than science fiction despite the former’s setting in distant space. But at the heart of each lies what has become Card’s principal protagonist— the brilliant young boy, possessing superior talents, whose internal struggles with morality and the burdens of sin and guilt dominate his passage through life, earmarked by seeking ultimate redemption. Both Ender’s Game and its sequel,

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Speaker for the Dead, won both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards, making Card the only author to win both of science fiction’s highest awards in consecutive years. Card has recently been adding short stories to the Ender’s Game series, stories which have been published mostly on line. In 1999 he began a string of novels paralleling the Ender tales called The Shadow Series, alternately referred to in some circles as the Bean Quartet, because the works center around Julian “Bean” Delphiki, a supporting character from Ender’s Game. Originally comprising four books, Card has announced a fifth work in the series, as well as another Ender work, but no details have yet been released. Further, plans to make Ender’s Game into a movie have been in the works since 2003, though screenplay issues have made the film’s production dubious, despite an announcement by Fresco Pictures that they intend to release a film version no sooner than 2008. While C.J. Cherryh’s (1942–) voluminous output of fiction spans a number of genres, the bulk of her work is usually classified as space opera and functions within two primary arenas Cherryh has created, the Alliance-Union universe and the Foreigner universe. Comprising twenty-four novels and a handful of short story anthologies to date—including Downbelow Station (1981) and Cyteen (1988), Cherryh’s two Hugo-winning works—the Allied-Union stories begin in the near future and trace humanity’s gradual expansion to the stars, eventually including roughly twenty sentient alien species. Her Foreigner universe spans nine novels thus far, most of them published since 2000, and traces the exploits of the crew members of starship Phoenix as they find themselves stranded in space with no way to return to Earth. Cherryh has been widely lauded for developing complex and realistic alien species and examining human interactions with the other, and for paying close attention to such cultural nuances as language, environment, politics, and racial self identity. The politics in her novels have been described as having a moderate conservative leaning. Cherryh is also one of the few space opera writers who has garnered scholarly attention, primarily in The Cherryh Odyssey (2004), a compilation of articles edited by Edward Carmien. David Drake (1945–) has also written numerous works spanning multiple genres, with his space opera works falling predominantly into the militaristic, right-leaning category. Drake, like Simmons, often draws heavily on mythology. Hammer’s Slammers, his first series of space operas begun in 1979 with an eponymously named novel (1987), borrows freely from the tales of Jason and the Argonauts, The Iliad, and The Odyssey. In 1998 Drake inaugurated his latest space opera series, titled the RCN (Republic of Cinnabar Navy) series, which evokes Horatio Hornblower’s exploits. He has written five works thus far, with a sixth issue planned for 2008. The RCN series revolves around Daniel Leary, an RCN officer, and Adele Mundy, a librarian who eventually also takes a commission in the RCN, at the center of an epic battle against the evil, totalitarian Alliance of Free Stars. Unlike Hammer’s Slammers, the RCN series focuses more on character development and political intrigues, though space battles still abound. Drake has also contributed to a number of works wherein he is listed as coauthor, though by his own admission his contribution has been plot and character outlines, which the other writer then finishes. In this vein he has teamed primarily with Eric Flint. Writing extensively in both fantasy and science fiction, including contributions to the Star Wars and Star Trek universes (in the latter, primarily for the animated TV series of the 1970s), Alan Dean Foster (1946–) is best known in space opera circles for his Humanx Commonwealth stories, which commences with The Tar-Aiym

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Krang (1972), and which has two more volumes forthcoming. Most of these works recount the adventures of Philip Lynx (“Flinx”) and his female Alaspinian Miniature Dragon, or minidrag, companion, Pip. Because of his empathic powers and his remarkable spaceship, Teacher, Flinx becomes a renegade; Pip is also empathic, though non-sapient. Flinx’s adventures detail his search for his unknown biological father, his encounters with mysterious artifacts, his attempts to flee the Commonwealth government, his interactions with numerous alien species, and his discovery of a source of malignancy in the Great Emptiness that threatens the entire galaxy by consuming all life on any planet it encounters. One of Foster’s most common motifs is the intricacies between life forms and their environment, often making their symbiotic coexistence one of the key elements of his novels. Group 2:The Female Writer and Character. If the first group is marked by alien culture, the second group is dominated by the female—both as writer and as character. Three of the four authors below are female, while the fourth, David Weber, is most noted for his Honor Harrington tales, which center around a strong female protagonist. While Doc Smith was given kudos for some of his strong female characters, they enjoyed only minor significance. For the writers in this group, the female, whether writer or character, becomes far more prominent. Catherine Asaro (1955–) was born in Oakland, California, and has earned multiple science degrees: a BA in chemistry, an MA in physics, and a PhD in chemical physics. She was a physics professor at Kenyon College until 1990, at which time she founded Molecudyne Research in Maryland. In addition, she has taught mathematics and ballet, has served as a NASA consultant and as a visiting scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, and has written a handful of fantasy novels. Asaro’s professional writing career (save for one short story in 1993) began with 1995’s Primary Inversion, which introduces readers to her Skolian Empire, within which most of her novels are set. In reality, the Skolians are but one of three empires, along with their enemies, the Eubian Traders and the Terrans (also known as Allieds). The Skolians try to balance themselves politically between the other two, and they are ruled by the ancient and somewhat democratic Ruby Dynasty, which is often fraught with internal struggles. They possess limited empathic and telepathic talents, enhanced through pico- and nanotechnology. The Eubian Traders are ruled by the Aristos, products of a genetic engineering program gone awry, and their empire is built entirely upon a slave economy. The Allieds, last to join the interstellar scene (in the year 2122), spend much of the series simply trying to stay out from underfoot. The Skolian series’ publication history does not follow a chronological timeline, nor is it dedicated to continually expanding and developing a linear plot. Instead, Asaro has written a number of stories that, though set within her primary Skolian universe, can often stand alone as individual works. Spherical Harmonic (2001), for example, reengages the series’ main story lines after several side stories have taken place in previous works. The work starts to unify plot developments from previous Skolian episodes like The Last Hawk (1997) and The Quantum Rose (2000; Nebula Award winner for Best Novel) while developing the character of Dhyianna (Dehya) Selei, the Ruby Pharaoh, who had been a minor, elusive figure to this point. Further, Spherical Harmonic is part of a four-volume subset of the Skolian series that traces the aftermath of one of the series’ major events, the Radiant War. Two of her most recent contributions to the series, Schism (2004) and The Final Key (2005), function

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best in tandem, following a contiguous character and plot line, though the former actually comprises a triad of three short stories. The most recent Skolian novel is The Ruby Dice, which brings back one of the leading protagonists from early story lines, Imperator Kelric, to the forefront. The Ruby Dice appeared in 2006 in novella form and is due out in expanded form in late 2007 or early 2008. Asaro intermixes a great deal of current, advanced, and accurate physics with highly developed romances among her characters into her novels. She will switch off between male and female protagonists, though each is generally a strong, independent, autonomous personality. Reviews, though occasionally mixed (depending on the particular novel), have generally been quite favorable. James Schellenberg finds Primary Inversion “a serendipitous find” (challengingdestiny.com), and her most recent Skolian works have received nearly universal praise. SciFi.com’s Paul Di Filippo, for example, likens Schism and The Final Key to Frank Herbert’s Dune saga in the way Asaro’s characters, politics, and action all mature and achieve high levels of sophistication and interest. And his fellow site critic, Lois H. Gresh, raves that Schism—and, indeed, the entire Skolian series—is nothing short of excellent. Lois McMaster Bujold (1949–) has become one of the most popular and most critically acclaimed writers in new space opera almost exclusively on the strength of her extended Vorkosigan chronicles. Her four Hugo Awards for Best Novel tie her with Robert Heinlein, and she has received two Nebulas as well. After working for a number of years as a pharmacy technician, she turned her hand to writing science fiction—a love she acquired from her father. Bujold wrote her first three novels before making a single sale. Twilight Zone Magazine bought the third volume in late 1984, and about a year later, Baen Books purchased and published all three. Like Asaro, the publication dates of Bujold’s Vorkosigan novels do not follow the series’ chronology, nor do they all center on her principal protagonist, Miles Vorkosigan. Even before birth Miles suffers physical impairment due to an assassination attempt against his mother, Cordelia Naismith, and father, Aral Vorkosigan. Constrained by a weakened body and short physical stature, Miles often overcompensates. He confronts the universe with daring and audacity, usually managing to extricate himself from the resulting disastrous circumstances by his brilliance and éclat. By the age of seventeen he tricks a number of colleagues into believing he has recruited them for the infamous Dendarii Mercenaries, and by their very exploits, the mercenary band is formed. Succeeding in a series of secretive campaigns and political subterfuges, Miles continues to ascend the hierarchy of his home world of Barrayar. Barrayar was initially settled mostly by Russian, Greek, and French pioneers traveling via wormholes, the principal form of interstellar travel in the series. The wormholes themselves all originate in close proximity in an area called the Wormhole Nexus, a region of space inhabited by an array of varying cultures residing on planets and military space stations that guard the entry points. Reintegrated into galactic civilization after generations of isolation, Barrayar is almost immediately invaded by the neighboring Cetagandan Empire, but it manages to fend off the attack. Miles doesn’t officially enter the story line until the 1991 novel Barrayar, and his exploits assume center stage in the next novel chronologically, The Warrior’s Apprentice (1986), the second of Bujold’s initial three-novel output. Most of the ensuing novels, novellas, and short stories recount Miles’s ongoing exploits. Though her recent work has been primarily fantasy, Bujold has written two Vorkosigan novels since 1999: A Civil Campaign (1999) and Diplomatic Immunity

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(2002), both furthering Miles’s adventures. A Civil Campaign develops the love interest between Miles and Ekaterin Vorsoisson, whom he had met in the previous novel. Because of his failing health, Miles has abandoned his military career and is now an Imperial Auditor. As is his wont, Miles pursues Ekaterin impetuously, proffering an embarrassing offer of marriage at a party gone terribly awry, which she refuses. Their relationship complicates further when two seats on the vaunted Council of Counts become available. Miles, acting as his father’s deputy, controls one of the votes, and as such is courted and even blackmailed by the two Barrayarans vying for one of the open seats. The blackmail serves to implicate Miles in the death of Ekaterin’s former husband. Miles’s efforts are further muddied by the Emperor’s impending marriage and the arrival of Miles’s clone-brother, Mark, who is in the midst of an illicit affair of his own. Miles’s persistence and honor prevail, and he and Ekaterin wed. Diplomatic Immunity commences as Miles and Ekaterin begin their honeymoon, which is interrupted by a diplomatic entanglement in Quaddiespace. Quaddies are four-armed-no-legged, genetically created beings first introduced in Falling Free (1988). They are raised as slaves to live and work entirely in the freefall of outer space, but rendered obsolete when artificial gravity is developed. They escaped their servitude and now inhabit a remote planetary system; but early in Diplomatic Immunity a situation arises at Graf Station in Quaddiespace, requiring Miles’s intervention. Ordered to avoid a major diplomatic fiasco, Miles naturally exacerbates the already tense situation. While evading assassination attempts and uncovering clues that widen the mystery, Miles manages to avert a war between Cetaganda and Barrayar, even as he runs into an old flame. Between these two most recent novels, Bujold also wrote an intervening novella, “Winterfair Gifts” (2002), which retells the Miles-Ekaterin wedding from the perspective of Roic, Miles’s armsman. Bujold’s science is not on a par with Asaro’s, though her ability to sustain an extended plot line and develop complex characters is more deft. Sfsite.com’s Regina Lynn Preciado, in reviewing the entire Vorkosigan saga, calls Bujold “a master writer whose prose continues to impress with every book”; Sfreviews.net’s T.M. Wagner also touts the entire series. In July 2006 Baen Books promised a new Vorkosigan novel from Bujold in the near future. Elizabeth Moon (1945–) earned Bachelor’s degrees in both history and biology, and she also served time in the U.S. Marine Corps as a 1st Lieutenant. She won a Nebula Award for best novel for The Speed of Dark (2003) and garnered a Hugo nomination for her earlier work, Remnant Population (1997). She has worked variously as a sign painter, a draftsman, and as a columnist with a weekly county newspaper; she has also busied herself with a number of community activities. Moon first established herself as a fantasy writer in the late 1980s with her trilogy entitled The Deed of Paksenarrion, to which she later added two more works; some critics have pointed out the trilogy’s strong resemblance to the Dungeons & Dragons board game and modules. Her first venture into space opera was the Familias Regnant series, comprising seven volumes published from 1993 to 2000 and met with somewhat mixed but promising reviews. In 2003 Moon launched a new space opera series known collectively as Vatta’s War. Four books have come out so far, with a fifth, Victory Conditions, slated for a 2008 release. The series chronicles the struggles of Kylara Vatta, a young woman born into the family of an interstellar shipping corporation who bucks her sinecure with the family business to try her hand at military life. In the first novel, Trading in Danger (2003), Kylara is

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forced to resign from the military and instead takes captaincy of an old freighter her family has designated for the scrap yards. When she deviates from her simple mission, she quickly becomes entangled with space pirates and a planetary war, in which she must rely on her military training to turn certain disaster into a profitable victory for herself and her family. In the subsequent novels, political intrigues and military battles intensify as her father’s corporate headquarters are attacked, leaving both her parents dead. Though her military training serves her in good stead, Kylara must adapt to political intrigues, shifting alliances, commercially driven interests, and betrayals, as well as become adept at diplomacy. Moon is noted for her strong female protagonists who must embark upon a bildungsroman that entails encountering betrayal and loss to achieve autonomy and recognition, and to learn the value of loyalty. Her series tend to start slowly, to mediocre reviews, until she gains her footing with character and plot, from which point the stories and the critical regard both accelerate. Moon schooled herself in stories of space pirates and planetary adventure at the heels of Anne McCaffrey, with whom she coauthored The Planet Pirates trilogy in the early 1990s. David Weber (1952–), in addition to collaborating with such space opera notables as John Ringo (see below), has established himself in the genre largely on the strength of his Honor Harrington series, affectionately known as the Honorverse. Weber’s space opera is heavily militaristic, coupled with a complex interplay of politics. Generally politicians play the roles of foils to the exploits of the military characters; thus, the politics of his novels, especially in the Honorverse, tend toward libertarianism, emphasizing the importance of individual actions over governmental enterprise. Weber has devoted tremendous energy to fully fleshing out his Honorverse, most especially the various navies, which strongly parallel the navies of Britain and France at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Harrington herself is an amalgam of Horatio Hornblower (with whom she shares initials) and British Admiral Lord Nelson. On Basilisk Station (1993) inaugurated the Honorverse, presenting Honor Harrington as a fresh-faced graduate of the Royal Manticorian Navy’s Advanced Tactical Course commanding her first ship, the Fearless. Banished to Basilisk Station for repeated tactical failures during simulated war games, Harrington catches wind of The People’s Republic of Haven’s plans to overrun Basilisk Station and conquer its system. Through a desperate and costly military maneuver Harrington exposes the plan, allowing her home world of Manticore time to bolster its defenses. The Honorverse currently spans seventeen novels, including four anthologies, and follows Harrington’s continued military and diplomatic career as she repeatedly demonstrates her mettle in a constant stream of space battles and political intrigues. By the time of At All Costs (2005), the series’ most recent work, Harrington has become a dame, a duchess, a countess, and an admiral of the fleet, even as the balance of power between Manticore and Haven has shifted dramatically in favor of the latter. In addition to the Honorverse, Weber has developed a number of other space opera series, both individually and in tandem with other writers. His solo efforts include the Heirs of Empire trilogy, whereas his collaborations span the four-volume Empire of Man series with John Ringo and the highly touted 1632 universe, coauthored by Eric Flint. He has also cowritten with Linda Evans and Steve White. Ad Astra Games has, in the past two years, put out two books detailing aspects of the Honorverse as part of what they are calling their Jayne’s Intelligence Review

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series: The Royal Manticoran Navy (2006), covering the navy’s history, ship classifications, battles, and even uniforms and insignia; and The Navy of the People’s Republic of Haven (2007), which performs much the same task in detailing Manticore’s foe, the planet Haven. Group 3: New Faces on the Scene. With the immense popularity of space opera over the past two decades, the genre has seen an explosion of works by countless writers. The writers in this group represent newer, promising faces on the American space opera scene. Under its “space opera/space epics/space romance” listing, for example, scifan.com lists over eight hundred titles published since 2000. Although economic and political considerations show signs of becoming earmarks of post–2000 space opera, contemporary fiction in the genre bears the indelible stamp of the military battle. First and foremost among new space opera writers of the third millennium stands John Ringo (1963–). Having traveled widely and pursued careers in marine biology and database management, Ringo began publishing in 2000, and he has already issued, both individually and as coauthor, over thirty-five books. He writes almost exclusively in the military space opera vein (he served in the military as a paratrooper), and his works tend to reflect his outspoken, military-flavored conservative views. His works are almost always part of an extended series. Ringo’s first novel, A Hymn before Battle (2000), introduced his Posleen War series (also referred to as The Legacy of Aldenata), currently standing at eight volumes with five more planned. Ringo wrote the first four on his own, and he has been cowriting the volumes since the fifth issue, Cally’s War (2006). Earth is recruited by the peaceful Galactic Federation in their eons-long war against the aggressive, centauroid Posleen. The Galactic Federation enlists the aid of the Darhel to help humanity train and develop advanced technology, though the Darhel are duplicitous in their aims. Humans, outnumbered and outgunned, retaliate against the Posleen in unorthodox but effective ways, led by the courageous Captain Michael O’Neal. By the third novel—When the Devil Dances (2003)—however, Earth’s forces have been overwhelmed, leaving only pockets of resistance (including O’Neal) hindered by the blundering interference of inept politicians. Ringo’s post–9/11 politics surface clearly in the novel, as it takes the series down a darker path and explores the idea of an all-out militaristic response to an attack on America. In the afterword, in fact, he calls 9/11 a wake-up call for America and urges the United States to fight. As the series develops, the Darhel are discovered to have been controlling and manipulating humanity for thousands of years, greater emphasis is given to the heroic actions of the individual in combat situations, Earth’s allies are revealed as hoping that the war ends in mutual destruction, and huge, massively destructive weaponry is developed, which enables humans to begin to prevail. Though the series shifts focus from its characters to the battles and the weaponry as it progresses, the forthcoming works promise to turn their attention back to more thorough and detailed character development. Ringo’s next series, Empire of Man, is cowritten with David Drake. It satirizes contemporary environmentalist movements while basing its story line on Xenophon’s Anabasis, the story of 10,000 Greek troops stranded in hostile Persia in 400 B.C.E. The four-volume series begins with Prince Roger MacClintock marooned on planet Marduk while on a diplomatic mission. Fortunately, he is accompanied by the Bravo Company of the Bronze Battalion of the Empress’s Own Regiment, and in the course of their world-girding trek in hopes of commandeering

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an imperial ship to return home, all the while battling both flora and fauna, the pampered prince grows in true bildungsroman tradition, learning responsibility and loyalty while becoming a warrior himself, gaining new respect for and from his battle-hardened marines. As the battalion steadily diminishes, its marines are forced to strike a number of political alliances in the midst of their many battles. The first three novels all detail the Prince’s trudge to and conquest of the spaceport, and they tend to become repetitious. Prince Roger begins to assume Henry the Fifth-like proportions, as suggested by the fourth book’s title, We Few (2005), taken directly from Henry’s St. Crispin’s Day speech just before the Battle of Agincourt, in Shakespeare’s noted work. In the final installment, Prince Roger and his band finally return home, only to find that his mother, the Empress, has been usurped by traitors and that he stands accused of regicide. Roger must once again draw on his newfound leadership skills and his trusty marines to set things aright. Ringo is also in the midst of three other series. The four-volume Council Wars continues his military space opera bent, but it also presents an intriguing mix of hard science and magic, though the magic is in the Arthur C. Clarke sense that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The series begins with its own Edenic fall from grace and traces the exploits of Herzer Herrick, chiseled from the image of the classic Greek warrior. Paladin of Shadows currently spans four books, with a fifth, A Deeper Blue, slated for a mid-2007 release. The series confronts directly a couple of the themes and ideas raised in Council Wars, primarily the troubled hero and deeply rooted male desires; the first book, Ghost (2005), also takes square aim at the perceived liberalism of higher education. Council Wars started leaning into the fantasy realm, whereas Paladin of Shadows is more thriller than science fiction, though still with heavy military overtones. In 2006 Ringo also wrote Into the Looking Glass, and has teamed with Travis Taylor (see below) for its sequel, the much more space-operatic Vorpal Blade (2007). Like Weber, Ringo’s novels demonstrate a libertarian inclination with even greater emphasis on the importance of the male military figure. Tony Daniel (1963–) began his science fiction writing career with a pair of nonfiction essays published 1990, followed by several short stories and a pair of novels in the 1990s. He spent several years involved with the drama group Automatic Vaudeville in New York City, wrote and directed a film entitled American Bohemian, served as the Senior Story Editor at Scifi.com’s Seeing Ear Theater, and spent a couple of years as a radio dramatist. Daniel currently lives near Dallas with his wife, daughter, and son. He is often confused with the Tony Daniel of Dark Horse Comics fame, whose work often slides into the science fiction realm. But Tony Daniel, the science fiction author, entered the space opera arena with Metaplanetary (2002), an oblique reference to Doc Smith’s Triplanetary and the first release of a trilogy in progress. Extending Daniel’s 1998 novella “Grist” and set a thousand years in the future, the novel’s central trope is the Met, a network of cables extending throughout the inner solar system that serves as both communication and transportation. Society within the Met’s influence is hegemonic, ruled by the monomaniacal Director Ames. The Met cannot be extended beyond the asteroid belt, and life in the outer system is at best a loose confederacy of rebels and cloudships, which are human personalities downloaded into massive spaceships poised to venture forth to the distant stars. The bulk of Metaplanetary is spent building Daniel’s technology-infused world and setting the stage for the incipient clash between these two disparate cultures. The

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war commences in the second book, Superluminal (2005), which occupies most of the story line; the second volume also contains extensive appendices to help sort the multitude of characters and concepts. Daniel’s two space opera entries examine the line between human and artificial, the symbiosis between humans and technology, and the nature of existence, the last showing the influence of the author’s own existentialist leanings. Metaplanetary was well received; David Soyka, writing on Sfsite.com, describes the novel as “Heinlein meets Gibson and Stephenson, with a dash of Tom Robbins,” recognizing both Daniel’s post-cyberpunk and hard sci-fi influences. Though receiving similar plaudits, Superluminal was generally perceived as suffering from “middle book syndrome,” which is characterized by plot lines only marginally extended in anticipation of the next novel. And Stuart Jaffe writes that character development in the second installment was thin, though he still found Superluminal “an astounding achievement in world-building” (infinityplus.co.uk). Travis “Doc” Taylor has a series of scientific degrees, culminating in a PhD in optical science and engineering from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and he has worked on several programs for both the Department of Defense and NASA. His education and background bring a hard-edged science to his works, with their scope and timbre falling clearly within the parameters of new space opera. Taylor holds a black belt in martial arts and a pilot’s license. He lives with his wife and daughter in northern Alabama. Warp Speed (2006), Taylor’s inaugural novel, and its sequel, The Quantum Connection (2007), are near-future, harder science fiction tales. His space opera works start with Von Neumann’s War (2006), written with Ringo. The novel, which was met with lukewarm reviews, couples Taylor’s hard science with Ringo’s militaristic style in describing contemporary Earth’s invasion by self-replicating machines (Von Neumann machines). Taylor and Ringo also teamed up for Vorpal Blade, due for a fall 2007 release, and the sequel to Ringo’s Into the Looking Glass. The book’s press release describes it as a return to the “good old days” of science fiction with space marines, fantastic weaponry, and BEMs (bug-eyed monsters). Taylor also has undertaken his own largely space-operatic Tau Ceti series. Neither the first installment, One Day on Mars (fall 2007), nor its sequel, The Tau Ceti Agenda (2007–2008), have been released, and Travis’s Web site describes the former as “24 on Mars” and the latter as a “non-stop space navy, Armored Environment Suit Marines, configurable hovertanks and fighting mecha, space fighters, spies, senators, presidents, a mass exodus, and multiple nuclear explosions!” Scott Westerfield (1963–) is probably better known for his young adult books, but he has also had success writing hard science fiction. He earned a degree in philosophy from Vassar in 1985, and he has worked variously as a factory worker, substitute teacher, software designer, and textbook editor. He splits his time between New York City and Sydney, Australia. His wife is Australian author Justine Larbalestier. Westerfield’s foray into space opera currently spans two novels, The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds, both released in 2003. Originally a single book entitled Succession, the work was split into two books due to its length, though the full version with the original name was nonetheless issued later in 2003. In the distant future an 80-world human empire has been ruled by the same man for over 1,600 years, thanks to a parasite that can keep the mind and body active after death. The emperor bestows this gift on a select but growing number of elites, with the result

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that the living must work ever harder to sustain the growing dead, or Risen, population, which, per force, makes the empire torpid. But in a neighboring empire, another culture has arisen. The Rix, cyborgs who worship artificial intelligence, wish to liberate the worlds of the Risen Empire, and they begin by kidnapping the emperor’s sister while trying to seed an emergent artificial mind. The emperor’s Imperial Navy intervenes, but not before the sister is killed and her mind seeded. The newly sentient mind, however, has also discovered a secret regarding the emperor and the Risen, and planetary war hangs in the balance as a result. The Killing of Worlds escalates the action. While Imperial Navy Captain Laurent Zai is on a desperate mission to destroy a Rix battle cruiser, a lone Rix commando named Herd begins a trek across the planet Legis to seize a polar communications array to essentially free the seeded AI mind, delivering the emperor’s closely guarded secret. Westerfield’s two novels speculate on the nature of sentience, the rights of privilege in the face of dwindling resources, and political exigency. While not as highly lauded as his hard sci-fi works, such as like Evolution’s Darling (2000), the Succession novels were still celebrated as a cut above standard space opera fare. Mark L. Olson, writing for Nesfa.org, reviews Westerfield’s work enthusiastically. Scifi.com offered two somewhat competing opinions of the two volumes. Paul Witcover found the first book hurried and overly dependent on cliffhangers, but he still recommends the work; Paul Di Filippo, writing about The Killing of Worlds, describes Westover’s writing as poetic and balletic. John C. Wright (1961–) began writing science fiction novellas in the mid-1990s, but he did not publish his first book, The Golden Age, until 2002, which quickly developed into a trilogy after receiving early critical praise. Wright graduated from William and Mary’s College of Law, but he abandoned his law career and turned to journalism for financial reasons. In a 2002 interview with Nick Gevers of Sfsite.com, Wright proclaims, “I am a space opera writer. Perhaps I am the last of my kind. I like large themes, thunder, fury, and wonder. Why blow up a city when you can blow up a world? Why launch a starship one kilometer long, when you can launch a super-starship a thousand kilometers long? Why build space armor out of carbon-steel when you can build it out of adamantium?” Wright, his wife, and three children live in Centreville, Virginia. Another professed libertarian, his novels often explore the tensions between individual and societal rights. Wright has also received acclaim for his fantasy trilogy, Chronicles of Chaos. Set 10,000 years in the future and infused with a great deal of classical references, Wright’s Golden Age trilogy is built upon technology’s transformation of humans into virtually immortal, though stagnant, beings (somewhat similar to Westerfield’s seeded humans). The central character, for instance, is named Phaethon, and he finds himself suddenly out of favor. Over the course of the novel, he learns that selected bits of memory—his as well as the memories of others—have gone missing. His particular gap extends upwards of 250 years. Drawing on his legal background, Wright’s novel culminates in a well-constructed courtroom scene that leaves Phaethon an exile and sets the stage for the subsequent two works. The title of the second book, The Phoenix Exultant (2003), refers to Phaeton’s ship, the most magnificent ship ever built, and his quest to regain its possession. His journey takes him through a vastly changed yet wondrous solar system as well as layers of murky deception as he seeks to uncover the identity of his enemy. The trilogy’s conclusion, The Golden Transcendence (2004), takes on more of the trappings of the new space opera as a high-tech war breaks out and the future of humanity hangs in the

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balance. More than one reviewer has compared Wright’s trilogy to the Matrix trilogy: both involve a human battle against world-dominating machine intelligences, both question—à la Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”—the nature of reality, and both seek an ultimate determination of truth, which has been occluded by labyrinthine obscurity. The entry on space opera is far from finished. Its growing popularity and increasing critical attention continue to lure writers old and young: established writers like Mike Moscoe (writing as Mike Shepard) and his Kris Longknife series or Walter Jon Williams’ Dread Empire’s Fall both demonstrate the trend of writers swerving from established genres to try their hands at space opera, whereas new writers such as Scott Gamboe and C.J. Merle may prove to leave indelible marks in the field. They, too, merit serious consideration, as do many more authors whose numbers continue to swell the field of space opera writers to the very stars. Bibliography Aldiss, Brian. Space Opera: An Anthology of Way-Back-When Futures. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974. Anderson, Kevin J. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (movie novelization). New York: Pocket Books, 2003. ———. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (movie novelization). New York: Onyx, 2004. Asaro, Catherine. Catch the Lightning. New York: Tor, 1996. ———. The Final Key. New York: Tor, 2005. ———. The Last Hawk. New York: Tor, 1997. ———. Primary Inversion. New York: Tor, 1995. ———. The Quantum Rose. New York: Tor, 2000. ———. Schism. New York: Tor, 2004. ———. Spherical Harmonic. New York: Tor, 2001. Asimov, Isaac. Foundation. New York: Gnome Press, 1951. ———. “Nightfall.” Astounding Sept. 1941. 9–34. Bainbridge, William Sims. Dimensions of Science Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. Brackett, Leigh. The Sword of Rhiannon. New York: Ace, 1953. Brin, David. Forgiveness. La Jolla, CA: WildStorm Productions, 2001. ———. Glory Season. New York: Bantam, 1993. ———. Heaven’s Reach. New York: Bantam, 1998. ———. Kiln People. New York: Tor, 2002. ———. Sundiver. New York: Bantam, 1980. Bujold, Lois McMaster. Barrayar. New York: Baen, 1991. ———. A Civil Campaign. New York: Baen, 1999. ———. Diplomatic Immunity. New York: Baen, 2002. ———. Falling Free. New York: Baen, 1988. ———. The Warrior’s Apprentice. New York: Baen, 1986. ———. “Winterfair Gifts.” In Irresistible Forces. Catherine Asaro, ed. New York: New American Library, 2004. Card, Orson Scott. Ender’s Game. New York: T. Doherty, 1985. ———. Speaker for the Dead. New York: Tor, 1986. Carmien, Edward, ed. The Cherryh Odyssey. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 2004. Cherryh, C.J. Cyteen. New York: Warner Books, 1988. ———. Downbelow Station. New York: Daw, 1981. Clarke, Arthur C. Childhood’s End. New York: Ballantine, 1953.

SPACE OPERA ———. The Fountains of Paradise. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979. Drake, David. Hammer’s Slammers. New York: Baen, 1987. Drake, David, and John Ringo. We Few. New York: Baen, 2005. Clarke, Arthur C., and Stanley Kubrick. Screenplay, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Director Stanley Kubrick. 1968. Daniel, Tony. Metaplanetary. New York: EOS, 2001. ———. Superluminal. New York: EOS, 2004. Di Filippo, Paul. Rev. of The Final Key, by Catherine Asaro. http://www.scifi.com/sfw/ issue452/books.html (accessed 3 May 2007). ———. Rev. of The Killing of Worlds, by John C. Wright. http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue339/ books.html (accessed 3 May 2007). Foster, Alan Dean. The Tar-Aiym Krang. New York: Ballantine, 1972. Gevers, Nick. “Ferocious Poet’s Heart Commanding: An Interview with John C. Wright.” (April 2002). http://www.sfsite.com/05a/jcw127.htm (accessed 3 May 2007). Gresh, Lois H. Rev. of Schism, by Catherine Asaro. http://www.scifi.com/sfw/ issue396/books2.html (accessed 3 May 2007). Hamilton, Edmond. Captain Future and the Space Emperor. New York: Popular Library, 1967. ———. “The Monster God of Mamurth.” Weird Tales (August 1926). Hartwell, David G., and Kathryn Cramer, eds. The Space Opera Renaissance. New York: Tor, 2006. Jaffe, Stuart. Rev. of Superluminal, by Tony Daniel. (26 February 2005). http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/superluminal.htm (accessed 27 April 2007). Jayne’s Intelligence Review: The Navy of the People’s Republic of Haven. Cedar Falls, IA: Ad Astra Games, 2007. Jayne’s Intelligence Review: The Royal Manticoran Navy. Cedar Falls, IA: Ad Astra Games, 2006. Moon, Elizabeth. Remnant Population. New York: Baen, 1999. ———. The Speed of Dark. New York: Ballantine, 2003. ———. Trading in Danger. New York: Ballantine, 2003. Niven, Larry, and Steven Barnes. Achilles’ Choice. New York: Tor, 1991. ———. Descent of Anansi, The. New York: Tor, 1982. ———. Dream Park. Huntington Woods, MI: Phantasia Press, 1981. ———. Saturn’s Race. New York: Tor, 2000. Olson, Mark L. Rev. of The Risen Empire, by Scott Westerfield. http://nesfa.org/reviews/ Olson/RisenEmpire.html (accessed 7 May 2007). Preciado, Regina Lynn. Rev. of the Vorkosigan series, by Lois McMaster Bujold (2004). http://www.sfsite.com/05a/mv175.htm (accessed 4 April 2007). Pringle, David. “What is This Thing Called Space Opera?” In Space and Beyond: The Frontier Theme in Science Fiction. Gary Westfahl, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000, 35–47. Ringo, John. Ghost. New York: Baen, 2005. ———. A Hymn Before Battle. New York: Baen, 2000. ———. Into the Looking Glass. New York: Baen, 2005. ———. When the Devil Dances. New York: Baen, 2002. Ringo, John, and Julie Cochrane. Cally’s War. New York: Baen, 2006. Ringo, John, and Travis S. Taylor. Von Neumann’s War. New York: Baen, 2006. ———. Vorpal Blade. New York: Baen, 2007. Schellenberger, James. Rev. of Primary Inversion, by Catherine Asaro. Challengingdestiny. com (29 October 1997). http://www.challengingdestiny.com/reviews/inversion.htm (accessed 17 April 2007). Simmons, Dan. Ilium. New York: EOS, 2003. ———. Olympos. New York: EOS, 2005.

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SPACE OPERA ———. “Orphans of the Helix.” In Far Horizons. Robert Silverberg, ed. New York: Avon Eos, 1999. 207–258. Smith, Edward Elmer. Children of the Lens. Reading, PA: Fantasy Press, 1954. ———. First Lensman. Reading, PA: Fantasy Press, 1950. ———. Galactic Patrol. Reading, PA: Fantasy Press, 1950. ———. Gray Lensman. Reading, PA: Fantasy Press, 1951. ———. Second Stage Lensmen. Reading, PA: Fantasy Press, 1953. ———. Skylark DuQuesne. New York: Pyramid Books, 1967. ———. Skylark of Valeron. Reading, PA: Fantasy Press, 1949. ———. Skylark Three. Reading, PA: Fantasy Press, 1948. ———. The Vortex Blaster. New York: Gnome Press, 1960. Smith, Edward Elmer, and Lee Hawkins Garby. The Skylark of Space. Cranston, RI: Southgate Press, 1946. Soyka, David. Review of Metaplanetary, by Tony Daniel. 2001. http://www.sfsite.com/08a/ mp109.htm (accessed 18 May 2007). Taylor, Travis S. The Quantum Connection. New York: Baen, 2005. ———. The Tau Ceti Agenda commentary. http://www.doctravis.com/node/36#comment (accessed 18 May 2007). ———. Warp Speed. New York: Baen, 2004. Todorov, Tzvetan. Genres in Discourse, translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Van Vogt, A.E. Cosmic Encounter. New York: Doubleday, 1980. ———. Slan. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1946. ———. The Weapon Shops of Isher. New York: Greenberg, 1951. Wagner, T.M. Review of The Warrior’s Apprentice, by Lois McMaster Bujold (2004). http://www.sfreviews.net/warriorsapp.html (accessed 4 April 2007). Weber, David. At All Costs. New York: Baen, 2005. ———. On Basilisk Station. New York: Baen, 1993. Westerfield, Scott. Evolution’s Darling. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000. ———. The Killing of Worlds. New York: Tor, 2003. ———. The Risen Empire. New York: Tor, 2003. Westfahl, Gary. “Space Opera.” In The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 197–208. Williamson, Jack. The Legion of Space. Reading, PA: Fantasy Press, 1947. Witcover, Paul. Review of The Risen Empire, by Scott Westerfield. http://www.scifi.com/sfw/ issue307/books2.html (accessed 18 May 2007). Wright, John C. The Golden Age. New York: Tor, 2002. ———. The Golden Transcendence. New York: Tor, 2003. ———. The Phoenix Exultant. New York: Tor, 2003.

Further Reading Aldiss, Brian, ed. Space Opera: An Anthology of Way-Back-When Futures. London: Westfield and Nicolson, 1974; Eisenhour, Susan. “A Subversive in Hyperspace: C. J. Cherryh’s Feminist Transformation of Space Opera.” New York Review of Science Fiction 1 (October 1996): 4–7; Hardesty III, William H. “Semiotics, Space Opera and Babl-17.” Mosaic 13.304 (1980): 63–69; Hartwell, David G. “Nine Ways of Looking at Space Opera: Part I.” New York Review of Science Fiction 212 (August 2006): 17–21; Hartwell, David G. “Nine Ways of Looking at Space Opera: Part II.” New York Review of Science Fiction 213 (September 2006): 19–21; Hartwell, David G. “Nine Ways of Looking at Space Opera: Part III.” New York Review of Science Fiction 214 (October 2006): 17–19; Hartwell, David G., and Kathryn Cramer. “Space Opera Redefined.” In Speculations on Speculation. James Gunn and

SPECULATIVE FICTION Matthew Candelaria, eds. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005, 259–265; Lamont, Victoria, and Dianne Newell. “House Opera: Frontier Mythology and Subversion of Domestic Discourse in Mid-Twentieth Century Women’s Space Opera.” Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction 34.95 (2005): 71–88; Monk, Patricia. “Not Just ‘Cosmic Skullduggery’: A Partial Reconsideration of Space Opera.” Extrapolation 33.4 (1992): 295–316; Sanders, Joe. “Space Opera Reconsidered.” New York Review of Science Fiction 1 (June 1995): 3–6; Stableford, Brian. “Space Opera.” In Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. John Clute and Peter Nicholls, eds. London: Orbit, 1999, 1138–1140; and Westfahl, Gary. “Beyond Logic and Literacy: The Strange Case of Space Opera.” Extrapolation 35. 3 (1994): 176–185.

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SPECULATIVE FICTION Definition. “Speculative fiction” has become a term used within the last twenty years by American authors, readers, and literary scholars to refer collectively to writing that is often categorized into generic subsets of popular literature of the fantastic: science fiction, gothic fiction, horror, fantasy, magic realism, and utopian fiction. Speculative writing is not different from popular genre fiction that includes fantastical or supernatural elements. Rather, speculative fiction is an idiom, or phrase, that allows for a broader interpretation of what can be considered literature of the fantastic. The term “speculative” has become more accepted as scholars, readers, publishers, and authors alike recognize that many texts that have fantastical or supernatural elements often combine aspects of several popular genres. As a result, such texts cannot be easily categorized as one particular genre or another. Separating or classifying writers and their works into rigid genre categories does an injustice to the complexity of authors’ fiction. As critics Jane Donawerth and Carol Kolmerten point out, “Most theorists admit that notions of utopia, science fiction, and fantasy overlap to some degree” (Donawerth and Kolmerten 1994, 2). Anne Cranny-Francis agrees, stating, “No text is the unequivocal construct of a single genre . . . it is difficult to find a text which does not exhibit some characteristics of other genres” (Cranny-Francis 1990, 20). For example, Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian (2005) could be considered both detective and horror fiction, given that the narrative involves a father and daughter bent on proving the existence of the legendary vampire Dracula and solving the mystery of his resting place. Rather than be constrictively labeled as either detective or horror fiction, The Historian can be recognized as a text that integrates various genres of fantastical literature if placed under the rubric, or category, of speculative fiction. Further, speculative fiction encompasses those works that are not generically classifiable because they refuse a distinction between mundane and supernatural occurrences. In this sense, speculative fiction is synonymous with Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of the “fantastic.” In his seminal The Fantastic: A Structuralist Approach to a Literary Genre, Todorov classifies a text as fantastic if its action exists between the real and the imaginary. According to Todorov, “uncanny phenomena [can be explained] in two fashions, by types of natural causes [the real] and supernatural causes [the imaginary]. The possibility of a hesitation between the two creates the fantastic effect” (Todorov 1973, 26). In other words, Todorov understands the fantastic as literature that produces a certain sensation or feeling in the reader, one of uncertainty as to whether the events described are “true.”

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Often, the rationale for categorizing a text as science fiction or horror is predicated on the fact that the reader understands that the text explores an unreal world or improbable events. For instance, in a novel such as Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (2006), the vampire creatures are supernatural, and the novel itself is grounded in an alternate version of the world we know. However, in Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place (2006), the whole point of the novel is to question our division of existence into what is real and what is imaginary. The novel’s title itself refers to a location “where spirits of the dead can reach through the ether to spirits of the living” (Balée 2006, 482), in this case a New England town called Varennes. In Varennes, a young girl, Mees, has the power to bring the dead back to life. Such an ability would seem fantastic, yet Davis presents Mees’s power as complementing the magical and unknown qualities of the natural world we inhabit. Davis underscores the fantastical aspects of the everyday by emphasizing the instability of the earth itself: “Aside from the obvious holes and tunnels made by animals and people, rabbit warrens, subway systems, missile silos, rumpus rooms, it [the earth] seems solid enough, though in fact it’s a set of interlocking pieces, sometimes bound tightly together and sometimes drifting far apart” (Davis 2006, 34). In this way, the earth becomes a metaphor for reality; like the planet’s surface, our sense of reality can shift and alter to include extraordinary occurrences. Given The Thin Place’s intermixing of the mundane and the amazing, it might be tempting to label the novel as magic realism. Magic realism is a genre in which supernatural elements or events are integrated seamlessly into a realistic setting without surprise or commentary from the characters. Important writers of magic realism include Latin American authors Gabriel García Márquez, Luis Jorge Borges, and Isabel Allende. Because of its inclusion of fantastical elements, magic realism can be incorporated within a discussion of speculative fiction. However, works such as The Thin Place are more aptly titled speculative fiction than magic realism because they do foreground the supernatural and ponder its meaning, rather than cast the fantastic as unremarkable. For instance, in The Thin Place, Mees is acutely aware that her ability is extraordinary, and she contemplates the purpose and consequences of her power. In this way, the term “speculative fiction” can apply to texts that do not fit easily into the category of magic realism or the popular genres that explore alternate worlds and realities. The term speculative fiction allows one not only to avoid dividing texts into rigid genre categories but also to recognize that the purpose behind various related popular genres is a “shar[ed] . . . emphasis on the imaginative freedom of alternate worlds” (Donawerth and Kolmerten 1994, 3–4). Critic Darko Suvin explains this freedom by characterizing the speculative mode as “literature of cognitive estrangement” (Suvin 1979, 4). Though Suvin applies this definition more specifically to science fiction, his words accurately describe the work that all types of speculative fiction perform. “Cognitive estrangement” is a literary device by which writers “displace the story setting to another time and/or place, immediately denaturalizing the society portrayed in the text” (Cranny-Francis 1990, 193). This estrangement allows the writer to critique social problems and inequities from a distance, enabling both author and reader to contemplate and explore scenarios in which those cultural issues might be ameliorated or improved. Understood as literature of cognitive estrangement, the term speculative fiction enables one to recognize texts that might not otherwise either fit a certain genre category or authors who have not previously or consistently written literature with

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fantastical aspects. An example of both points is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), a harrowing novel in which the love, tensions, and pain of a father-son relationship play out against the backdrop of a post-apocalyptic America. Though set in a futuristic, nuclear winterized landscape, it would be hard to categorize The Road as science fiction, given the novel’s focus on an emotional, familial relationship rather than the technological or political conditions that have brought about the decimation of civilization. McCarthy never explains how or why the destruction occurred. The reader is told only that “The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions” (McCarthy 2006, 45). Instead, conceit of apocalypse becomes a means by which McCarthy cognitively estranges readers from everyday life to bring them a new perspective on parent-child relationships. Writer Michael Chabon notes that McCarthy forces us to acknowledge and confront a parent’s unspoken nightmare: The Road is not a record of fatherly fidelity; it is a testament to the abyss of a parent’s greatest fears. The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has reached adulthood . . . And above all, the fear of knowing—as every parent fears—that you have left your children a world more damaged, more poisoned, more base and violent and cheerless and toxic, more doomed, than the one you inherited. (Chabon 2007)

As a result, readers are forced to rethink their understanding of what being a “good” parent means and of what they are obligated to do for their children. Further, by terming The Road “speculative fiction,” one acknowledges that McCarthy’s novel includes certain fantastical, speculative “what if” elements that might be found in science or horror fiction, but one also recognizes that McCarthy is not an author of traditional popular genre fiction (such as previous works Blood Meridian (1985) and All the Pretty Horses (1992) show). In fact, given that genre fiction can be stigmatized as consisting of nonliterary, unimaginative popular literature, many writers would be hesitant to have their work labeled as genre fiction because it might detract from their writing being recognized as complex and innovative work. As various cultural studies scholars such as Raymond Williams (1983), John Fiske (1989a), and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (1987) have pointed out, the distinction between what might be considered “high” literary art and “low” popular culture is not only arbitrary but often elitist because it assumes that a book that sells many copies cannot be interesting, creative, and innovative writing. Nevertheless, fairly or not, science fiction, horror, and other popular genre writing are still not considered serious fiction worth studying. As a result, a horror novel such as Scott Smith’s The Ruins (2006), which was critically lauded as both a complex and frightening narrative of American tourists in Mexico, one in the tradition of recognized American horror masters such as H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, can yet be dismissed by some as a nonliterary work that has little purpose beyond entertaining the reader. However, by labeling The Ruins as speculative writing rather than horror fiction, one could potentially remove the stigma of “genre fiction” so that the novel could be viewed as innovative, interesting work rather than one that mechanically follows basic genre rules. It is because of such genre rules that popular genre fiction is often dismissed. Much popular fiction does adhere to clichéd characters and repetitive storylines; indeed, a genre is usually identifiable by a certain set of expected parameters, or

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rules, which govern it. For example, mysteries often consist of a detective who is able to identify a criminal based on his or her ability to notice details or clues that others cannot see. The popularity of such genre fiction is that the reader can expect similar story arcs, characters, and situations in each book. There are relatively few surprises and, as such, the narrative becomes safe and comforting for the reader. They are almost ritualistic narratives that satisfy a reader’s need for constancy and a return to a stable status quo. Such texts are opposed to “literary” fiction, which is seen as striving to avoid set rules by creating challenging narratives that do not reward a reader with stable, desired outcomes. However, as critics such as Cranny-Francis have argued, so-called literary writing cannot be entirely free from genre conventions. Further, popular fiction writers are often notable because they work within the genre to subvert its rules in order to challenge social conventions, prejudices, and limitations. Thus, the creation of the term “speculative fiction” enables one to eschew a rigid division between the popular and the literary. The phrase acknowledges that a text might at once contain genre conventions, deviations from those conventions, and a purpose beyond entertainment and yet be widely read by the general public. For instance, the aforementioned The Historian spent many weeks on the New York Times bestseller list as a new take on the traditional vampire narrative. However, it is also a novel that is intricately plotted and well-written, and one that demands a great deal of historical and cultural knowledge on the part of the reader. Trends and Themes Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Speculative Fiction. The Historian also provides another example of how speculative fiction subverts the division between the literary and the popular: its ability to challenge the traditional gender roles prevalent in popular genre writing. As a female author, Elizabeth Kostova is writing in a genre (horror/vampire fiction) usually occupied by male writers and readers. By creating a speculative narrative focused on a heroine rather than a hero, Kostova alters the typical genre convention of a male protagonist who drives the action of the story. Such a feminist narrative is literary in its subversion of popular expectations and at the same time appealing to female readers of genre fiction, a readership that is often disregarded. In addressing women writers of genre fiction, Cranny-Francis points out that their feminist take on traditional masculine genre writing “give[s] the traditional male readership, whether of fantasy, utopian fiction, detective fiction . . . a new and stimulating perspective. The important recognition in this statement is that there is an existing readership worth tapping. . . . People of all ages, classes, genders, and races read genre fiction” (Cranny-Francis 1990, 3). In this way, Natalie M. Rosinsky argues that the term “speculative fiction” becomes necessary because traditional genre definitions are “limited and value-laden” in terms of who writes and reads genre fiction and why (Rosinsky 1984, 115n. 2). When women write genre fiction, they are “continually crossing the boundaries which delimit the operation—formally/aesthetically/ideologically—of the traditional generic text and, in so doing, showing that those boundaries exist” (Cranny-Francis 1990, 19). In other words, when imagining alternative constructions of gender roles—a strong female protagonist versus a helpless heroine, for example—female authors might employ a popular genre to do so, but they undermine the very conventions of that genre that normally relegate female characters to subordinate or derogatory roles.

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Given such nontraditional genre texts, the term speculative fiction becomes important in terms of characterizing women authors, as well as writers of color or gay and lesbian writers. The attempt to divide the imaginative writing of women and writers of color into rigid generic categories is problematic because inevitably those texts that do not precisely fit the definitions of “science fiction,” “utopian fiction,” and so on, risk being excluded from consideration as belonging to a tradition of writing in the speculative mode. As noted previously, popular genre fiction such as science fiction and horror has been viewed as writing by white, heterosexual men for a similarly apportioned audience. However, writers from historically disenfranchised groups, including women, writers of color, and gay and lesbian writers, might choose to write in a popular genre mode in order to imagine alternate realities that explore, question, and reimagine traditional hierarchies of power and that argue for cultures that are free of sexism, racism, and homophobia. Such writers write not with the purpose of conforming to genre conventions but with the intent of participating in what Cranny-Francis describes as the “ideological struggle” (Cranny-Francis 1990, 19) of confronting and challenging white masculine power at the turn into the twenty-first century. The problem that women writers, writers of color, and nonheterosexual writers face when working in popular genre fiction is that their work might not be recognized as such because they are not the traditional writers of this fiction, and their work, which alters genre conventions, is not properly acknowledged as literature of the fantastic. For example, although African American writers Octavia Butler and Samuel Delaney are today readily appreciated as important authors of the fantastic, other African American writers, such as Jewelle Gomez and Tananarive Due, have received far less notice for publishing interesting and provocative popular genre fiction. Due is gaining notoriety, as evidenced by The Boston Globe review of her novel The Living Blood (2001): “Due has become . . . a talented storyteller who stands tall among her horror cohorts Anne Rice and Stephen King” (Jones 2001). However, the fact that the reviewer describes Due as a “horror” writer shows how limiting such categories are for writers of color. For instance, Due’s novel elides conventional boundaries of horror fiction by including elements of African magic and folklore. By working within the horror genre yet refusing its limitations, Due cannot be categorized accurately as a writer of traditional horror fiction. This point is true for Butler and Delaney as well, whose work cannot be considered correctly as “science fiction,” given that their imaginative work does not always involve a discussion of science, technology, or future worlds. Employing the term speculative fiction opens up the definition of what constitutes imaginative literature. As a result, writers who do not fit the typical white, male, heterosexual profile of popular genre authors and who do not write conventional genre fiction can be recognized as contributing to and enriching the tradition of popular imaginative writing. Because the rubric speculative fiction enables one to recognize a diverse group of writers as creating literature of the fantastic, it further allows one to trace traditions of imaginative writing among women writers, writers of color, and gay and lesbian authors. Usually, such literary lineages are reserved for white, male, heterosexual writers of the fantastic. For example, Stephen King’s work is influenced by earlier horror writers such as H.P. Lovecraft and Sheridan LeFanu, and H.G. Wells’s and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s science fiction thrillers about Mars and invading Martians are the forbears of Kim Stanley Robinson’s acclaimed Mars trilogy. However, such lineages among women, writers of color, and gay and lesbian writers of the fantastic

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AFRICAN AMERICAN SPECULATIVE FICTION There exists a rich tradition of African American literature of the fantastic that is rarely critically recognized, with the exception of editor Sheree R. Thomas’s collections Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000) and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2004).The truth is that African American writers wrote in the speculative mode from the turn of the century into the twentieth century and on. One such early imaginative popular writer is Pauline E. Hopkins, who has not been recognized as a speculative writer for two primary reasons: first, her novel, Of One Blood (1903), cannot be easily generically categorized (it combines African adventure, mystery, science fiction, and gothic narratives); and second, Hopkins casts African American mothers as heroes in her speculative fiction, whereas traditionally most popular genre fiction has viewed racial difference as a social threat or has refused to acknowledge race altogether. By employing the more expansive term speculative fiction, Hopkins can be linked to later African American writers of the fantastic, such as Butler, Delaney, Due, Gomez, Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987)), and Toni Cade Bambara (The Salt Eaters (1980)), all of whom use the supernatural to imagine ways of overcoming racism and its legacy in American culture. Were it not for the broader category of speculative fiction, writers such as Morrison (who is often considered a “literary” writer rather than an author of popular fiction) would not be placed alongside Butler or Hopkins, though all three participate in using the fantastic in analogous ways.

remain obscure because these men and women have not been celebrated as important authors of popular imaginative literature. Using the term speculative fiction can illuminate historical connections among diverse writers and texts that would otherwise not be understood as comprising similar traditions and themes in imaginative writing. On the other hand, many writers of color reject the label “speculative” for their fiction, which imagines events or possibilities beyond what is traditionally considered probable. This rejection is based on the argument that definitions of “real” and “imaginary” have been defined by Western culture and white writers. However, for those writers of color, what white culture might consider fantastic and unreal is in fact possible. In her essay “The Site of Memory,” Toni Morrison writes, “The work that I do frequently falls, in the minds of most people, into that realm of fiction called fantastic, or mythic, or magical, or unbelievable. I’m not comfortable with those labels” (Morrison 1987, 2294). For Morrison, relating what she calls the “truth” of life includes the strange and seemingly improbable that is for her nonetheless possible as part of the fabric of existence. Similarly, some of the fantastical occurrences that are woven throughout Ana Castillo’s So Far From God (1993) serve to distinguish the Chicano/a community of Tome, New Mexico, from the surrounding white culture. For instance, the death and resurrection of a three-year-old girl, nicknamed La Loca, is understood within the community as a miraculous, if somewhat frightening, event; however, the incident is explained away as “epilepsy” by the white doctors in Albuquerque. Therefore, although broadening the definition of imaginative writing, the category of speculative fiction can also work to reinforce the division between the real and the imaginary that much nonwhite literature of the fantastic attempts to undermine. Current Speculative Fiction. To understand themes and trends in current speculative writing, it is useful to consider briefly how twenty-first century speculative fiction

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motifs can be distinguished from imaginative writing of the preceding century. Although this article cannot address all such themes fully, it seeks to outline the preeminent concerns of today’s speculative writers and the new ways in which the speculative mode is being employed by contemporary authors. Much speculative writing in the twentieth century, particularly in the first half, employed popular writing to make challenges to the cultural status quo more palatable because, as noted earlier, the fantastic uses cognitive estrangement to displace social critiques to another time or place. In this way, the critique may be tempered by the distance created between the action of the text and real life. An example from the world of popular comic books would be The X-Men. Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1963, the comic followed the exploits of its titular characters, also known as “mutants,” who represent the “next step” in human evolution because of their superpowers. The ostracizing (in one storyline to labor camps) of mutants by average humans can be read as a coded critique of racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia in American culture. This interpretation of the underlying message of The X-Men comic is underscored by the motivations of lead villain, Magneto, a Jewish Holocaust survivor. For Magneto, the human prejudice against and fear of the mutants is no different than the desire of the Nazi regime to construct Jews as enemies of the state and so justify their liquidation. In this way, The X-Men becomes a speculative means of addressing the horrible consequences of prejudice against a group of people who are labeled as different; however, the comic did so in a way that did not address the subject in a direct manner during a time when an open critique of these subjects might have alienated a mostly white, male readership. For twenty-first century speculative fiction, there is less need to embed social critique within an imaginative narrative for the sake of making that critique more palatable to readers. Issues of racism, sexism, and homophobia are now more widely discussed and acknowledged in contemporary society, and so the focus of current speculative fiction is not so much to make such critiques acceptable but to use cognitive estrangement to help readers see social inequities or questions about the nature of reality in new and startling ways. One recurrent theme in contemporary speculative fiction is a focus on social changes wrought by the ability to access information via the Internet and other technologies widely available since the millennium. For example, many twenty-first century speculative texts pessimistically portray as impossible the desire of characters to understand themselves and their identity by gathering data and information about past events. This theme arises from society’s twenty-first century craving to accumulate, sort, and have access to information through various media sources, most importantly the Internet. Such data grants its users seemingly more and more insight into what has transpired to bring society to its present point. Concurrently, seminal twenty-first century events such as 9/11 or the Iraq War have encouraged people to explore how such historical moments came to be. Further, an event such as 9/11 produces a longing to return to a time before such a devastating occurrence in an effort to recapture a sense of peace, nostalgia, and innocence through an exploration of earlier aspects of American history. However, current speculative fiction, by using the imaginary to question our ability to know the past and the truth with accuracy and objectivity, suggests that such desires cannot be fulfilled and are perhaps even dangerous to pursue. Donna Tartt’s novel, The Little Friend (2002), explores these points. Tartt’s speculative novel combines elements of the fantastic and mystery genres with the Southern Gothic style of

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American writers William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor to tell the story of twelve-year-old Harriet Dufresnes and her efforts in 1970s Alexandria, Mississippi, to solve the cold case murder of her older brother, Robin. Harriet was an infant when nine-year-old Robin disappeared from a family Mother’s Day gathering, only later to be found strangled and hanging from a tree. Though she never knew Robin, Harriet is acutely aware that her family, particularly her mother, have been psychologically damaged since the tragic and mysterious circumstances of her brother’s death. In part what drives Harriet to fixate on her brother’s murder is a sense that if his death could be understood and information gathered to show what happened, somehow this knowledge will bring closure and peace to a family that continuously lives with the heartbreaking pain of not knowing how or why Robin died. In her narrative, Tartt uses elements of the speculative to show that such closure, such knowledge of the past, is not possible. There is a sense of unreality about the past and people’s recollection of it and even a questioning of the stability of the present. No one can quite remember the exact circumstances or moments before Robin disappeared, and when Harriet questions her family members, they each give different stories or evade answering altogether. Harriet’s sister, Allison, who was four when Robin disappeared and was presumably the last to see him alive, lives in a kind of alternate dream world, to her as real as the everyday reality of the other characters: “Alison yawned. How could you ever be perfectly sure when you were dreaming and when you were awake? . . . Repeatedly during the day, as she drifted around her own house . . . she asked herself: Am I awake or asleep? How did I get here?” (Tartt 2002, 103). As a result, Alison cannot provide Harriet with any clues about what happened to their brother. Further, Harriet’s great aunt, Libby, adds to the sense of the fantastic and unknowable by recounting that three days before Robin was murdered, a man’s hat appeared in her bedroom mysteriously out of nowhere. Libby uses this incident to illustrate to Harriet that there are some things, like Robin’s death, which defy explanation: “All I’m saying is that there are an awful lot of things in the world we don’t understand, honey, and hidden connections between things that don’t seem related at all” (Tartt 2002, 126). Compounding her inability to gain information that would allow her a clear understanding of the past, Harriet and her friend Hely, based on information from the Dufresnes’s housekeeper, Ida, believe that a local parolee and meth addict, Danny Ratliff, was her brother’s murderer. They pursue him and in the process precipitate a car accident that severely injures Danny’s grandmother, and Harriet herself is nearly killed by Danny during one of his meth-fueled rampages. Sadly, Harriet has perpetrated these events only to find, in the end, that Ida’s story is incorrect and Danny was actually a friend of Robin’s. While in the hospital recovering from Danny’s attack, Harriet overhears her father saying to her mother that Danny was “Robin’s little friend, don’t you remember? He used to come up in the yard and play sometimes. . . . Knocked on the door [after Robin’s burial] and said he was sorry he wasn’t at the funeral, he didn’t have a ride” (Tartt 2002, 543). With a sinking feeling, Harriet realizes how greatly she has misinterpreted the circumstances surrounding Robin’s death: “Never had it occurred to her that she might be wrong in her suspicions about Danny Ratliff—simply wrong” (Tartt 2002, 544). In this way, Harriet’s attempt to gain control of the slippery, shifting reality of the past nearly leads to disaster for both her and Danny. The use of the speculative mode, as illustrated through the unreliable perspectives of Libby, Allison, Ida, and others, allows Tartt to depict the past in such a way that

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shows the reader how unstable memory is and how our understanding of history is created largely from everyone’s unreliable recollections and from their own imaginations. In so doing, Tartt rejects society’s belief that the accumulation of information can lead to a more complete comprehension of the past. In her novel, Tartt demonstrates that greater amounts of information, some of which may be untrustworthy, will never lead to a clear picture of the past; history will always remain, to some extent, out of reach and inscrutable. Tartt underscores this point by refusing to end the novel with any answers as to who killed Robin or why; Harriet and the reader are as in the dark with regard to these questions as they were at the beginning of the novel. Critics were divided regarding whether or not Tartt was successful in communicating these themes. Greg Changnon wrote that the novel shows “how difficult it is to get to an objective truth when memory, interpretation and perspective are involved” (Changnon 2003, 4K). Laura Miller found that Tartt’s use of popular genre modes “all too often devolve[s] to cliché or cartoon,” but Miller also “praise[s] the book’s vital characters, its supple conjuring of mood and place, and its dry, dark humor” (Miller 2002). On the other hand, Tom Murray rejected completely the novel’s ending, which leaves the reader and Harriet with no enlightened knowledge of the past: “Wasn’t that daring, to set the reader up for a revelation that way and then withhold it at the last moment? Wouldn’t it have been dishonest to sew things up in a nice, neat bow, when we all know life doesn’t really work that way?” (Murray 2002, 1). Gail Caldwell agreed that such ambiguity was tiresome, and that the reader “wind[s] up with lots of exotic, sometimes lovely memories that don’t always connect—and nearly as weary as you are enlightened” (Caldwell 2002, D6). Like Tartt, Elizabeth Kostova questions the ability of our information age to accurately assess the past. Kostova’s The Historian (2005) is part horror story and part meditation on the task of historians (and other academics) to accumulate information that allows people to understand the past. In Kostova’s novel, feelings of horror and dread arise from the realization that information can often be no protection from forestalling the evils of the world. Further, like The Little Friend, The Historian suggests that the pursuit of the past can potentially lead to self-destruction when the intangible and unknowable past becomes more real than the present. In the novel, a father, and later his daughter (who is never named), find themselves on the trail of the historical Vlad Tepes, the bloodthirsty fifteenth-century Romanian prince who gave rise to the vampire legend made famous by Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula. The pursuit leads father and daughter to discover that Tepes is a vampire, but a peculiar one in that he is also the novel’s titular historian. Tepes turns academics into vampires who then work to maintain his library, which is a collection of information about himself and other evil or nefarious figures throughout history. The novel hints that Tepes uses this “information center” as a means of initiating tragic historical events: “The implication is that Dracula not only takes his place at the head of a procession of eastern European predators ruling by terror which runs through Ivan the Terrible to Stalin, but has actively influenced his successors’ career development” (Stevenson 2005). In this way, Dracula becomes a metaphor of what can happen through the study of history. The vampire as academic symbolizes a kind of living death in which one is sustained more through the dead past rather than the present. Dracula states that “As I knew I could not attain a heavenly

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paradise . . . I became a historian in order to preserve my own history forever” (Kostova 2005, 206). More disturbingly, this fascination with the past leads to destructive consequences in the present, whether it be Dracula’s orchestration of contemporary tragedies or the damage to the narrator’s family, particularly her mother, who almost becomes a vampire herself. And though Tepes is seemingly defeated at the close of the novel, nevertheless the book ends with the suggestion that Dracula’s work continues to be carried out by his vampire minions/historians. In this way, the narrator must continue her involvement with the past, and she will never be free of it. There is a tension in the novel that arises between the need for information as a means of keeping evil from destroying society and the fear that this information itself can ruin the person who accumulates and tries to make sense of it. This tension is never resolved in the novel. By using the vampire, a fantastic creature, as a metaphor of a life consumed by information, Kostova illuminates for the reader this debate over the efficacy of information gathering in our current culture that might otherwise be difficult to comprehend. Kostova uses a well-known horror figure, Dracula, to help the reader recognize an evolving fear in our twenty-first century society about the positive and negative aspects of information, so often portrayed in our culture as empowering but overwhelming and confusing as well. Many reviewers found Kostova’s speculative novel to be enjoyable as popular fiction but lacking in true literary merit. For instance, Jane Stevenson noted that Kostova’s creation of a conceit in which many of the horrific events of the twentieth century are the result of a mythic creature is absurdly facile: “Thus the spectre which is haunting Europe turns out to be not communism, but Count Dracula, a distasteful simplification of the problems of European history” (Stevenson 2005). Peter Bebergal took exception to Kostova’s use of the epistolary, or letter, format: “The novel’s weakest aspect is its format . . . The various letter sequences read more like diary entries than correspondence, and this makes the main characters sound mostly alike” (Bebergal 2005). Janet Maslin found it to be a “ponderous, manylayered book that is exquisitely versed in the art of stalling” (Maslin 2005), and Susanna J. Sturgis concurred that “none of the plot points add up to very much” (Sturgis 2006, 12). The Historian represents a trend in twenty-first century speculative fiction of refashioning older genre narratives to reflect new concerns, a trend that is also reflected in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). McCarthy borrows the wellworn science fiction scenario of the postnuclear “last survivors on earth” and refashions the narrative into a parable about the consequences of where our information and technological know-how are leading us, the inability of information to help us survive, and the importance of basic human emotions and relationships. In The Road, an unnamed father and his young son travel across a postapocalyptic, nuclear winter landscape toward the southeast coast of America in search of warmer climate. It is not clear what has laid waste to America, but it is the result of some terrible, nameless event that has decimated nearly all human, animal, and plant life. The event has made cannibals and marauders of those humans left alive, and survival requires all the willpower, love, and connection between father and son to maintain hope and the ability to remain “civilized” human beings. The irony is that it is ostensibly this civilization, with its information technology, science, and weaponry, that has led to the very destruction that has forced humans to become savages. Though this motif is similar to previous speculative

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stories that critique scientific advancement, McCarthy’s novel takes a different approach in that it specifically points out that it is information itself, not only science or nuclear weapons, that is not necessarily empowering. In using the speculative mode to imagine an utterly desolate wasteland that strips its characters to nothing, McCarthy shows that a pursuit of information cannot help father and son with basic survival. This desolation begins to rob the father in particular of his memories and knowledge of the world that existed before: “The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally, the names of things one believed to be true. . . . The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of reality” (McCarthy 2006, 75). Although the novel laments this absence of knowledge and information, at the same time, it emphasizes that what drives the father and son to stay alive and human is their love for one another rather than information about their surroundings. McCarthy illustrates that if the twenty-first century “road” is an information superhighway, it is a highway that underneath must be sustained by human contact and feeling. The novel’s titular road is one that reveals this point. As a result, the reader fears the possibility of cultural collapse yet also hopes that should our technological society fail, there may yet be a spark of humanity that survives in our bonds with one another. The Road’s haunting tribute to human, rather than technological, connection was universally praised by critics. Michael Chabon wrote that McCarthy’s novel is a “lyrical epic of horror” that sustains a “great power to move . . . the reader” (Chabon 2007). Mark Holcomb noted the science fiction elements of the novel and concluded that “the freshness he [McCarthy] brings to this end-of-the-world narrative is quite stunning” (Holcomb 2006). Janet Maslin commented on how McCarthy’s poetical style made the novel at once appalling and exquisite: “This parable is also trenchant and terrifying, written with stripped-down urgency and fueled by the force of a universal nightmare. The Road would be pure misery if not for its stunning, savage beauty” (Maslin 2006). Ron Charles agreed and argued that “The Road is a frightening, profound take that drags us into places we don’t want to go, forces us to think about questions we don’t want to ask” (Charles 2006, BW06). Although The Road and other contemporary speculative texts are cautionary tales about the power of information acquisition, this is not to say that twenty-first century speculative fiction completely condemns the search for knowledge and truth. Rather, such fiction questions the belief that information can be the panacea for all social ills. However, much speculative writing still asserts that knowledge is power and that having access to information remains a means of combating social problems, even if, in the end, this search for truth cannot completely solve those issues. Michael Chabon, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), explores the need to disseminate information and truth about traumatic social events, even if it is through the medium of speculative writing. Chabon’s novel focuses on the early world of American comics during the 1930s and 1940s when graphic art matured and characters such as Superman were created by Jewish artists and writers such as such as Jerry Siegel and Joel Schuster as symbolic crusaders against injustice, particularly the threat of Nazi Germany. As noted earlier, these comics became speculative vehicles for highlighting racial prejudice, such as anti-Semitism, in ways that could be palatable for its white, male readership. Further, comic characters such as Superman have been read

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as imaginative desires on the part of the writers to create a superhero who would fight for the underrepresented and the voiceless, especially racial and ethnic minorities. In Chabon’s novel, the real and imaginary intermix. The titular characters Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay are cousins who represent the real Jewish comic book writers and designers of the early twentieth century. At the same time, the characters’ lives are punctuated by extraordinary events, such as Joe’s miraculous escape from Nazi-occupied Prague in a box containing the city’s famous Golem, a fantastical automaton from Jewish folklore. Joe’s amazing escape inspires the cousins to create a superhero called “The Escapist,” whose superpower is to rescue innocent people from bondage both actual and metaphorical. Specifically, the Escapist helps those who are oppressed by Nazi Germany (though in the comic, Joe and Sam are forced by their publishers to thinly disguise the Nazis as “Razis”). The novel serves as a metanarrative, or a text that comments on the writing of fiction as part of the story’s action. In this case, Chabon’s metanarrative discusses the power and limitations of the speculative mode. Part of the reason that Kavalier and Clay write “The Escapist” is to envision a hero who can destroy and defeat Hitler and the forces of Nazi Germany, which were storming through Europe, incarcerating and murdering millions of Jews. The Escapist is a magician in a Houdini sense—a hero who can get out of any trap—but he also represents what speculative fiction is: a fantasy, an escape from the realities of the world into an alternate one in which one’s wishes or dreams come true. For Kavalier and Clay, that wish is for someone to be able to stop the atrocities of the Nazi regime, a regime that would seem to be a phantasm but is not. The Holocaust was not horror fiction but reality. In one sense, writing “The Escapist” gives Joe and Sam the power to alert Americans to what is happening in Europe. Further, the character allows Joe to articulate his anger and frustration that his family remains in Nazi-occupied Prague. For instance, Joe’s first cover art for “The Escapist” illustrates the hero delivering a devastating right hook to Adolf Hitler. Within the pages of the comic, “The war was over; a universal era of peace was declared, the imprisoned and persecuted peoples of Europe—among them, implicitly and passionately, the Kavalier family of Prague—were free” (Chabon 2000, 166). However, this event does not take place in reality. In this way, the novel asks what is the use of speculative fiction if it cannot do anything about such horrors in the real world. Joe ponders this point himself, and he becomes so disillusioned about the efficacy of his work that he eventually enlists in the military to fight the Nazis overseas. He becomes aware that “the true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place” (Chabon 2000, 339). This loss includes, heartbreakingly, those Joe knew in Prague who were eventually killed by the Nazis. Nevertheless, Chabon’s answer to the question regarding the value of speculative fiction is yes, it is still a valuable and necessary mode of writing. Even if speculative fiction cannot solve problems, it remains an important outlet for authors and readers to discuss and address “those questions we don’t want to ask” (Charles 2006, BW06). Critics found The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay to be at once insightful, moving, and entertaining. Rex Roberts wrote that “Mr. Chabon weaves a complicated skein of images evoking entrapment and escape . . . In this sense, the book is a tour de force, a piece of literary showmanship that brilliantly employs popular culture in the service of high ideals” (Roberts 2001, B6). Amy Benfer agreed

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that “Many contemporary issues—homosexuality, the role of women in the arts, censorship, anti-Semitism—are addressed, though never with the cloying revisionism that can bog down books that try to use history as a Parable for Our Time” (Benfer 2000). Ken Kalfus added that “The cousins’ adventures are leavened by buoyant good humor, wisecracks and shtick, but the story never loses its awareness of the tragedy that roils beneath the surface of our everyday lives and the lives of men in tights” (Kalfus 2000). Finally, Gail Caldwell summarized the novel’s importance by noting it “represents the finest in a whole new breed of contemporary fiction. It’s full of pizzazz and testosterone and street smarts, with a moral center that tethers its intelligence” (Caldwell 2000, E1). Bibliography Balée, Susan. “Spine-Soothing Tales.” The Hudson Review Autumn 2006: 480–490. Bebergal, Peter. “Literary Take on Vampires Gives ‘Historian’ Bite.” The Boston Globe 15 June 2005. http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2005/06/15/literary_take_on_ vampires_gives_historian_bite/ Benfer, Amy. “‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay’ by Michael Chabon.” Sept. 28 2000. Salon.com. Butler, Octavia. Fledgling. New York: Warner Books, 2005. Caldwell, Gail. “An Ode to the Golden Age of Comic Book Heroes.” The Boston Globe 19 Nov. 2000: E1. ———. “Other Voices, Other Rooms in Donna Tartt’s ‘A Little Friend.’” The Boston Globe 27 Oct. 2002: D6. Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. New York: Picador, 2000. ———. “After the Apocalypse.” The New York Review of Books 54 (2) (2007). http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19856 Changnon, Greg. “An Odd Coming-of-Age, with a Murderous Twist.” The Atlanta JournalConstitution 28 Dec. 2003: 4K. Charles, Ron. “Apocalypse Now.” The Washington Post 1 October 2006: BW06. Cranny-Francis, Anne. Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Genre Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, 1990. Davis, Kathryn. The Thin Place. New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 2006. Donawerth, Jane, and Carol A. Kolmerten, eds. Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994. Due, Tananarive. The Living Blood. New York: Washington Square Press, 2001. Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Holcomb, Mark. “End of the Line.” Village Voice 31 Aug. 2006. http://www.villagevoice. com/books/0636,holcomb,74342,10.html Hopkins, Pauline. Of One Blood. The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins. Schomberg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. New York: Oxford University Press, [1903] 1988: 439–621. Jones, Vanessa E. “‘The Living Blood’ Gives Supernatural Thrills.” The Boston Globe 9 Aug. 2001: C15. Kalfus, Ken. “The Golem Knows.” The New York Times 24 Sept. 2000. http://www.nytimes. com/books/00/09/24/reviews/000924.24kalfust.html Kostova, Elizabeth. The Historian. New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 2005. Maslin, Janet. “The Road through Hell, Paved with Desperation.” The New York Times 25 Sept. 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/books/25masl.html ———. “Scholarship Trumps the Stake in Pursuit of Dracula.” The New York Times 13 June 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/13/books/13masl.html McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Knopf, 2006. ———. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Vintage, [1992] 1993.

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SPORTS LITERATURE ———. Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West. New York: Vintage, 1985. Miller, Laura. “‘The Historian’ by Elizabeth Kostova.” June 6 2005. Salon.com. ———. “‘The Little Friend’ by Donna Tartt.” Nov. 11 2002. Salon.com. Morrison, Toni. “The Site of Memory.” The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 2nd ed. New York: Norton, [1987] 2004: 2290–2299. Murray, Tom. “Who Killed My Brother?” The San Francisco Chronicle 27 Oct. 2002. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. “Popular culture.” New Formations 2 (1987): 80. Roberts, Rex. “Two Cousins, World War II, and the ’Toons.” The Washington Times 7 Jan. 2001: B6. Rosinsky, Natalie M. Feminist Futures: Contemporary Women’s Speculative Fiction. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1984. Smith, Scott. The Ruins. New York: Knopf, 2006. Stevenson, Jane. “Neckrophilia.” The Observer 24 July 2005. http://books.guardian.co.uk/ reviews/generalfiction/0,,1534428,00.html Sturgis, Susanna J. “Living the Undead Life.” Women’s Review of Books 23 (1) (2006): 11–12. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Tartt, Donna. The Little Friend. New York: Knopf, 2002. Thomas, Sheree R., ed. Dark Matter: Reading the Bones. New York: Aspect, 2005. ———. Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. New York: Warner Books, 2000. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973. Williams, Raymond. Keywords. London: Fontana, 1983.

Further Reading Barr, Marleen S. Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993; Bleiler, Everett, F., and Richard K. Bleiler. Science Fiction: The Early Years. Kent: Kent State University Press, 1990; Cranny-Francis, Anne. Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Genre Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, 1990; Donawerth, Jane, and Carol A. Kolmerten, eds. Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994; Ellis, Kate Ferguson. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989; Goddu, Teresa A. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997; Punter, David. Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. New York: Longman, 1980; Rosinsky, Natalie M. Feminist Futures: Contemporary Women’s Speculative Fiction. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1984; Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979; Thomas, Sheree R., ed. Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. New York: Warner Books, 2000; Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973.

DARCIE D. RIVES

SPORTS LITERATURE Definition. For at least 150 years, sports have been an integral part of our national literature. Although some scholars may define the genre broadly, including mere references to athletic activity in nontraditional texts such as advertisements and television shows, for purposes of this chapter, sports literature is defined as those novels, short stories, poems, and essays that depict the experiences of athletes and spectators in the world of mainstream sports and remind us of how the arena or

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WHAT IS A SPORTS NOVEL? Michael Oriard, the field’s most prominent critic, states that a sports novel is one “in which sport plays a dominant role or in which the sport milieu is the dominant setting,” one that “finds its vision of the individual and his condition in the basic meaning of the sport he [or she] plays” (1982, 6). What Oriard claims for the novel holds true for short fiction, drama, poetry, and literary essays about sports. In broad outline, much sports literature has relied on stock character types—such as the dumb jock, the “stud athlete” (Oriard 1982, 192), and the monomaniacal coach—as well as on hackneyed themes such as the facile correlation between teamwork and victory in the big game.

field of play is just as often a stage upon which passionate human dramas about almost every aspect of American culture are performed. In the hands of especially talented writers, conventions and stock characters are vigorously challenged or bypassed altogether, as sports become a microcosm in which such issues as race, class, gender, and age matter just as much (if not more than) the final outcome of a given contest. History. The origins of sports literature can be traced to the publication of juvenile books in the late nineteenth century, when in reaction to the increasing violence of dime novels, writers began producing work for young audiences that focused on positive messages conveyed through sports. Gilbert Patten (1866–1945), who in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became “America’s most prolific author of juvenile sports novels” (Crowe 2003, 12) with the publication of his Frank Merriwell series, claimed that his works would allow him “an opportunity to preach—by example—the doctrine of a clean mind in a clean and healthy body” (qtd. in Crowe 2003, 13). Patten’s immensely popular works helped promote Muscular Christianity, an ideology that equates physical fitness with moral health. In addition to their didactic tone, these novels established a number of conventions regarding character (the hero is “industrious, persistent, honest . . . modest . . . and democratic,” among other things) and plot (victory for the hero in a climactic big game) that would be used again and again by writers of both juvenile and adult literature (Oriard 1982, 29–35). The early twentieth century also saw the emergence of women authors such as Edith Bancroft, whose Jane Allen novels (1917–1922) “explored the subject of girls’ athletics more fully” than the work of other female writers of the time. Ultimately, however, these novels “refuse to take sport seriously” (Oriard 1987, 11), as the female protagonists become typical Victorian women, reveling not in athletic competition but in “the joys of mothering” (Oriard 1987, 13). Conveying positive messages while portraying the excitement of sport has always been the raison d’être of juvenile sports literature, though over time the type and treatment of issues have become ever more complex. In a career spanning from the late 1930s to the 1960s, John Tunis (1889–1975) used sports to spread messages ranging from teamwork to ethnic tolerance. Tunis’s “characters possess many heroic and athletic qualities, but their encounters with life are much more realistic, and the outcomes of many of those encounters are distinctly un-Merriwellian” (Crowe 2003, 18). Works such as Keystone Kids (1943) and Rookie of the Year (1944) depict the trials and tribulations of manager Spike Russell and his scrappy Brooklyn Dodgers. Not only is there plenty of baseball action to satiate the desire of the young

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sports fan, but there are also clear lessons about the importance of working together to achieve success. Contemporary novelist and short story writer Chris Crutcher (1946–) has produced juvenile fiction that is worlds apart from the formulaic, moralistic stories of Gilbert Patten or even the more challenging work of John Tunis. In the Foreword to his collection Athletic Shorts (1991), Crutcher explains how, despite being criticized for “depicting . . . characters’ hardships too graphically, and for using language and ideas that kids don’t need to be exposed to” (1991, 2), he remains committed to his vision. Such thematic boldness is epitomized by “In the Time I Get,” which deals with a young football player named Louie who must overcome his fear of and prejudice against an acquaintance who has AIDS. Because our post-Title IX world continues to witness more and more young girls participating in mainstream sports, it is not surprising that there has been a corresponding increase in literature about female athletes, a literature that is also more sophisticated in nature than the work written at the beginning of last century. One especially noteworthy example is Nina Revoyr’s The Necessary Hunger (1997), a coming-of-age story in which Nancy Takahiro sees basketball as “more a calling than a sport” (1997, 12). As a highly recruited athlete, as a lesbian suffering from the unrequited love of a fellow basketball player, Nancy is about as far as can be from the world of Jane Allen. Sports literature for young readers has a long, impressive tradition deserving of study, but adult sports literature has attracted a larger readership and more intense scholarly interest. Although one can find depictions of the sporting life in some of the earliest works of our national literature—such as James Fenimore Cooper’s Leather Stocking novels (1823, 1826, 1827, 1840, and 1841) or tales from the Old Southwest such as Thomas Bangs Thorpe’s “The Big Bear of Arkansas” (1845)— and although late nineteenth-century works such as Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Frank Norris’s “Travis Hallet’s Half Back” (1894) use sports and sporting language as an integral part of their narratives, the genre as we know it might be traced back to Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s well-known poem “Casey at the Bat” (1888). Though not the first baseball poem to appear in America, “Casey at the Bat” is arguably the most influential in that it addresses “three important themes: the fall of the folk hero, its effect on his community, and the meaning of both to the universe of humans” (Candelaria 1989, 23), thus anticipating a good deal of sports literature that will be written in the next 120 years. At the beginning of the twentieth century, two writers in particular constructed the foundations of a sports literature meant for adult readers. Two Jack London novels, The Game (1905) and The Abysmal Brute (1913), used boxing (still considered a disreputable sport and especially so as a subject for serious literature at the time) to explore issues of gender. The Game is important for the development of the genre because it serves as a “paradigm” for a “basic theme of sports fiction,” namely the “irreconcilable incompatibility between the Woman and the Game” (Oriard 1982, 175). A much more important figure was Ring Lardner, who after getting his start as a sportswriter, turned to writing novels and short stories about baseball and boxing, the most enduring of which is You Know Me Al (1914). A novel in letters, the work satirizes Jack Keefe, a provincial, comically obtuse rookie pitcher whose inflated view of his abilities keeps him “a small-time busher even after leaving the bush league” (Candelaria 1989, 28).

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In the so-called golden age of sports in the 1920s, when the economic boom following World War I led to an expansion in leisure time that saw spectators flocking to sporting events featuring such nationally celebrated athletes as Babe Ruth (baseball), Jack Dempsey (boxing), and Bobby Jones (golf), literary artists in greater numbers began to examine the effect of sports on American culture. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) unflattering portraits of Tom Buchanan, an ex-football player; Jordan Baker, a professional golfer; and Meyer Wolfsheim, a disreputable businessman responsible for fixing the World Series, serve as a clear moral judgment on the general corruption of the times. In the fiction of Ernest Hemingway—particularly In Our Time (1925) and The Sun Also Rises (1926)—the athlete/bullfighter becomes not a symbol of corruption but a quasi-religious figure, a model of moral conduct in a godless modern world. It is not football or golf or bullfighting but baseball that has most often drawn the attention of our nation’s most gifted writers. Literary interest in baseball is tied to the history of the sport itself. The first written mention of the game in North America appears in 1791; by the 1870s, only a few years after Charles Peverelly’s The National Game (1866) gave the sport its resilient epithet (Oriard 1982, 69), competitive professional leagues were firmly established. Because the sport came of age as the country did, baseball quickly came to be seen as synonymous with America. Philip Roth, in “My Baseball Years,” writes about how baseball was a means of socialization into American culture: “For someone whose roots in America were strong but only inches deep . . . baseball was a kind of secular church that reached into every class and region of the nation and bound millions upon millions of us together” (1975, 180). Former Commissioner of Major League Baseball A. Bartlett Giamatti goes so far as to say that “[b]aseball is part of America’s plot . . . the plot of the story of our national life” (1989, 83). Baseball’s prominence in American literature is indebted to the nonfiction writing on sport in the early twentieth century. Richard Orodenker traces this sport’s writing tradition and identifies two major categories of writers. The Matties, “graceful, polished writers, baseball’s elegant phrasemakers,” are epitomized by Grantland Rice, the early twentieth-century sportswriter famous for his overblown style, and much later, by the well-chiseled prose of writers such as John Updike, Gay Talese, and Roger Angell (1996, 10). In contrast, the Rubes, both the optimistic “gee whiz” and the cynical “aw nuts” types, are more interested in “colorful stories” (1996, 10) and the baseball “talk” (1996, 11) used to pass them on. In addition to Ring Lardner, the list of Rubes includes Damon Runyon, Jimmy Cannon, Jimmy Breslin (1996, 11–12), and most recently, Hunter S. Thompson, whose ESPN Page 2 essays, collected in Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness—Modern History from the Sports Desk (2004), meditate on the parallels between politics and professional sports (mostly football and basketball) in his own inimitable style. Since Ring Lardner, “who nearly single-handedly transformed . . . [baseball] from a casual motif in juvenile stories to a formal nuanced metaphor serviceable to serious literature” (Candelaria 1989, 25), writers have been fascinated with the literary possibilities of this sport. A partial list of serious baseball fiction, covering literary modes ranging from the satiric to the mythic to the postmodern, includes Thomas Wolfe’s The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940); Bernard Malamud’s The Natural (1952); Mark Harris’s Henry Wiggen novels: The Southpaw (1953), Bang the Drum Slowly (1956), A Ticket for a Seamstich

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(1957), and It Looked Like for Ever (1979); Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968); Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel (1973); Jay Neugeboren’s Sam’s Legacy (1973); William Brashler’s The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings (1975); W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe (1982); and Eric Rolfe Greenberg’s The Celebrant (1983). More recently, Mark Winegardner’s The Veracruz Blues (1996), depicting the heyday of the Mexican Leagues, and Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), which connects Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard round the world” in 1951 to the Cold War politics of the time, have proven that baseball continues to capture the imagination of some of our nation’s most highly regarded writers. Dramatists have also made compelling use of baseball (and, less often, of other sports) in their work. In the popular imagination, the Broadway musical Damn Yankees (adapted from the 1954 Douglass Wallop novel The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant) (Candelaria 1989, 33) continues to entertain audiences to this day. Old Timers Game (1988), about an exhibition contest featuring past players from a minor league baseball team, and Cobb (1991), which depicts the irascible Ty Cobb at three significant moments in his life, are works by Lee Blessing, a critically acclaimed contemporary playwright. August Wilson’s Fences (1987) chronicles the last days of Troy Maxon, a prodigious home run hitter resentful of the racially segregated past that prohibited him from showcasing his talents in the major leagues. Significant dramatic works tackling other sports include Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) and Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1954), both of which feature ex-football players who have trouble adjusting to the real world; Howard Sackler’s The Great White Hope (1967), loosely based on the life of African American boxer Jack Johnson; and Jason Miller’s That Championship Season (1972), exploring the tensions that arise during the twenty-fifth reunion of a high school basketball team. Significantly, the plays by Wilson, Arthur Miller, Williams, Sackler, and Jason Miller each won Pulitzer prizes, a testament to the inspiration of sports for many of our nation’s most recognized writers. Poets, too, have made much use of sports in their work, and here again the subject of baseball dominates. Recent anthologies of baseball poetry include Where Memory Gathers (1998), edited by Edward R. Ward and Baseball and the Lyrical Life (1999), edited by Tom Tolnay. Some collections, such as Don Johnson’s Hummers, Knucklers, and Slow Curves (1991), are completely devoted to the sport. Two works notable for extended treatment of the subject are Kenneth Koch’s booklength Ko, or Season on Earth (1959), one of whose multiple narrative lines involves a sensitive, Japanese fastballer who pitches for the Dodgers, and Donald Hall’s ninesectioned meditation on the game simply entitled “Baseball” (1993). With so much high quality evidence in our literature, it seems almost obvious to conclude, along with Roger Angell, that “[b]aseball is the writer’s game” (1991); however, throughout American literary history, there has also been sustained interest in other sports. Boxing, for example, continues to fascinate some of our nation’s most popular writers. Although a number of “formulaic boxing novels” (Oriard 1982, 99) were published in the last century, so were original works of fiction such as The Harder They Fall (1947) by Budd Schulberg, The Professional (1958) by W.C. Heinz, and Fat City (1969) by Leonard Gardner. In addition, literary essayists have had much to say about the sport. Norman Mailer’s “Ego” (1971), which identifies Muhammad Ali as “the very spirit of the twentieth century” (Halberstam 1999, 713), explores not only the psychology of the then-often-reviled

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boxer but also America’s need for outsized celebrities. In her collection On Boxing (1994), Joyce Carol Oates makes an eloquent argument for how “[e]ach boxing match is a story—a unique and highly condensed drama without words” (1994, 8), a tragedy because “it consumes the very excellence it [the punished body] displays” (16). For Oates, the writer’s role is to watch the drama unfold and provide what the athletes cannot—a translation of the bodies and their actions into words. Football has also inspired its fair share of writers. From the early decades of the twentieth century, when the college football novel held sway by addressing “the disparity between the ideals of the university and the glorification of the athlete at the university’s expense” (Oriard 1982, 63), to more recent works such as Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes (1968), an autobiographical novel about one man’s obsession with football hero Frank Gifford; Dan Jenkins’s “outlandishly raunchy” (Oriard 1982, 190) comedy Semi-Tough (1972); and Peter Gent’s North Dallas Forty (1974), a fictional exposé of the brutality of the game, football has served as incredibly fertile ground for the literary imagination. Don DeLillo’s End Zone (1972), another novel of the gridiron, deserves special note, as it goes far beyond fan adulation, bawdy sexual humor, and graphic depiction of violence to lay bare the limitations of the language we use to represent such things. The tradition of basketball literature is not as long as that of other major sports; nevertheless, it boasts a body of work notable for quality and thematic diversity. Jay Neugeboren’s Big Man (1970) and Lawrence Shainberg’s One on One (1975) are two early examples of the subgenre that explore, among other things, the theme of “creativity within urban limitation” (Oriard 1982, 115). More recently, Charley Rosen has published two novels: The House of Moses All Stars (1996), about the adventures of a group of barnstorming Jewish cagers, and Barney Polan’s Game: A Novel of the 1951 College Basketball Scandals (1997). Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle (1996) emphasizes the urban nature of the game and provides an unflinching satirical examination of sports and race in America. Tom LeClair’s Passing Off (1996), in contrast, is a postmodern suspense novel about an American basketball player in Greece. A fine anthology of basketball literature is offered by editor Dennis Trudell in Full Court: A Literary Anthology of Basketball (1996). Of the recent novels showcasing other major sports, three are distinguished for their postmodern preoccupation with identity. Harry Crews’s Body (1990) is of note for its incisive critique of gender stereotypes in the world of professional body building. Carol Anshaw’s Aquamarine (1992) explores the swimmer-protagonist’s three possible lives based on important decisions she makes in the wake of a personally disappointing Olympic performance. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1997), which stands out in the field of contemporary American literature for both its scope and erudition, “intertwines sport [tennis] with questions of learning and memory that ultimately shade into a larger meditation on contemporary identity” (Burn 2004, 41). In the last decade of the twentieth century, writers turned to sports to address the complex dynamics of selfhood and, in the process, demonstrated that sports literature is an ever-evolving genre. Trends and Themes. Whether meant for adult or juvenile readers, sports literature since 2000 builds upon established interests while following new trends in popular culture and global economics. Baseball literature continues to be popular, and works addressing gender, race, and class in sport continue to be published. In addition, relatively new trends are also apparent in this recent literature, including an increasing interest in a wide variety of sports; an increasing number of book-length works

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on American sports history and present-day sports culture; and literary explorations of the globalization of sports as a money-making entertainment. Not surprisingly, literature about baseball continues to find an audience. Recent fiction includes Kevin Baker’s Sometimes You See It Coming (1993; 2003 reissued in paperback) and Patrick Creevy’s Tyrus (2002), two novels based on the life of Ty Cobb. Baseball, race relations, and the history of Chicago intersect in Peter M. Rutkoff’s Shadow Ball (2001), which imagines the near-miss integration of baseball long before Jackie Robinson. More personal in its use of baseball history is Mick Cochrane’s Sport (2001), a coming-of-age story set in the 1960s and featuring a 13-year-old Minnesota Twins fan. An aging scout is the focus of William Littlefield’s Prospect (1989, reissued in 2001) and Brian Shawver’s The Cuban Prospect (2003), the latter of which is more of an international thriller than a depiction of baseball between the chalk lines. Contemporary writers continue to find new ways to present baseball to the reading public. Three recent notable works succeed in this search by treating the intersection of baseball and place. Crooked River Burning (2001), by Mark Winegardner explores sports and civic identity, using the misfortunes of the Cleveland Indians baseball team to parallel a city’s economic decline. Eugena Pilek’s Cooperstown (2005) centers on the lives of citizens of a small town who live in the shadow of the Baseball Hall of Fame and must come to terms with the reality behind the baseball myth that gives their small town relevance. Richard Greenberg’s drama Take Me Out (2003), set in the media crucible of New York City, explores the problems that arise when a talented and popular baseball player announces he is gay. This theme of sexual orientation is especially significant because, up to this point, “[t]he literature of baseball . . . [has been] continuously about male heterosexuality; its characters . . . straight men in the process of reinforcing their straightness” (Morris 1997, 4). In addition to full-length works, collections of baseball stories continue to appear on the market in significant numbers, including Baseball’s Best Short Stories (1997), edited by Paul D. Staudohar; Bottom of the Ninth: Great Contemporary Baseball Stories (2003), edited by John McNally; Dead Balls and Double Curves: An Anthology of Early Baseball Fiction (2004), edited by Trey Strecker; and Fenway Fiction: Short Stories from Red Sox Nation (2005), edited by Adam Emerson Pachter. As the recent publication of several baseball poetry collections indicates, baseball verse continues to be popular. Notable here is Gene Fehler’s Dancing on the Basepaths (2001), a single-authored collection devoted entirely to the sport. Other collections include the anthology Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems (2002), edited by Brooke Horvath and Tom Wiles. Unlike many such anthologies, this one offers an impressive variety of “previously unanthologized work” (2002, xxiii) loosely arranged to parallel the trajectory of a baseball season. The book includes the work of well-known poets, such as Charles Bukowski’s “Betting on the Muse,” which compares the abbreviated career of a ball player with the longer and ultimately more satisfying career of a writer; Quincy Troupe’s “Poem for My Father,” a paean to the negro leagues; and Richard Brautigan’s “A Baseball Game,” a surrealistic piece depicting what happens when nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire goes to a professional baseball game. Ranging over more sports is Way to Go! (2001), a collection for young audiences edited by Lillian Morrison. Noah Blaustein’s Motion: American Sports Poems (2001) is an anthology especially noteworthy for its breadth, containing poems ranging from baseball to surfing. Both

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the “classics” (William Carlos Williams’s “At the Ball Game,” Marianne Moore’s “Baseball and Writing,” James Dickey’s “For the Death of Vince Lombardi”) and more recent works (B.H. Fairchild’s “Old Men Playing Basketball” and Gary Soto’s “Black Hair”) treat such time-honored themes as race and gender, as well as the quest for bodily transcendence. Because “[s]portswomen simply are not, and haven’t really ever been, among sport’s more acceptable stories” (Sandoz and Winans 1999, 4), the tradition of sports literature by and about women is not as long. However, with more and more young women participating in high school and collegiate athletics and with the visibility of women’s professional leagues such as the WNBA, it is not surprising that these experiences are beginning to be chronicled in the literature. Joli Sandoz’s two anthologies of women’s writing published in the late 1990s have gone a long way toward solidifying the status of the female athlete in America. The first collection, A Whole New Ball Game (1997), features stories and poems from the last one hundred years, whereas the second, Whatever It Takes (1999), presents primarily works of nonfiction that serve as an eloquent argument for the long tradition of women’s athletics. The voices of female athletes rise up loud and clear in recent juvenile literature as well. The anthology Girls Got Game (2001) features stories and poems about young female protagonists and speakers who look and act much differently from the girls of the Jane Allen novels. Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s story “Rough Touch” depicts Ruthie’s conflict with her body as both dramatic tension and thematic suggestion. At the end of the story, she plays a game with the boys, taking them all by surprise by going out for a pass and catching it, at which point the narrator announces: “It was hers, the football was hers” (2001, 115). Refreshingly, not all work by today’s female writers defines the sporting experience of girls as a struggle against a patriarchal world. In Grace Butcher’s “Basketball,” for example, the focus is on the pride the speaker feels in making a layup. The made basket, rather than a significant victory in the gender wars, is what truly matters here. Another noteworthy example is Karol Ann Hoeffner’s All You’ve Got (2006), a young adult novel that features a young female volleyball player who “didn’t spend a lot of time stressing over how her body looked” but “cared more for how it performed” (2006, 3). Even juvenile novels by male writers reflect the growing presence of young women in sports. Mike Lupica’s Travel Team (2006) features a young male protagonist who, according to one of sports literature’s many clichés, has a competitive desire on the basketball court that belies his small stature. However, it is important to note that one of the key players on his team is a tough, sharp-shooting girl. Although the two main characters of John Feinstein’s Last Shot (2006) are not athletes, they are intensely dedicated to and knowledgeable about the game of basketball. Both excellent writers, they win an essay contest and are awarded an all-expenses-paid trip to New Orleans to cover the NCAA Final Four. Significantly, the female is not a clueless interloper in some male preserve; she is a girl who just so happens to be crazy (and well-informed) about basketball. Other juvenile sports literature offers perspective on different contemporary issues. In a twist on the typical big game narrative, John H. Ritter’s The Boy Who Saved Baseball (2003) concerns a group of small-town kids who arranged to play a winner-take-all game against unwanted real estate developers. The stakes are raised considerably in Michael Chabon’s Lord of the Rings-like baseball adventure called

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Summerland (2002), in which the very fate of the world hinges on the outcome of a ball game between a team of kids and a team of demons. In a more realistic vein, Chris Crutcher’s Whale Talk (2001) tells the tale of how several high school misfits come together as a team and achieve not grand victory but the kind of incremental improvement they need to earn their varsity letters, much to the chagrin of the school’s bullying football establishment. Significantly, each of these works features a strong, young female athlete. Whether found in a library, mall bookstore, or online, sports literature continues to proliferate in vigorous variety. The latest in the annual collection of The Best American Sports Writing (2006) features essays on underexamined sports such as competitive cheerleading, recreational softball, and professional poker. In addition to literary sports reportage, current magazines have shown a renewed interest in sports fiction. GolfWorld magazine, for example, first published a fiction issue in September of 2005, continuing the practice in 2006, and a short story from Esquire (November 2006), “The Death of Derek Jeter” by Michael Martone, has enjoyed an extended life thanks to Internet blogs and message boards that supply a link to the story on the magazine’s Web site. In other recent fiction, Darin Strauss’s novel Real McCoy (2002) narrates the life of a boxer and con artist in the first decade of the twentieth century who is presumably the original “Real McCoy.” On a deeper level, the novel explores the issue of artificiality and authenticity in American culture—then and now—and especially in our yearning for genuine sports heroes. Thom Jones also turns to boxing as a subject in more than one story collected in The Pugilist at Rest (1994) and Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine (2000). F.X. Toole’s Rope Burns: Stories from the Corner (2000) depicts the gritty, violent world of boxing both inside and outside the ring. Another Toole work, his posthumous Pound for Pound (2006), is a novel about an ex-boxer who loses his grandson in a traffic accident. Golf is another sport that continues to draw much attention from writers of fiction. The spirituality that can be achieved through golf is a theme in Steven Pressfield’s The Legend of Bagger Vance (1995), Robert Cullen’s A Mulligan for Bobby Jobe (2001), and Roland Merullo’s humorously pietistic Golfing with God (2005). Golf is played primarily for laughs in Dan Jenkins’s irreverent Slim and None (2005) and Rick Reilly’s Shanks for Nothing (2006). In each, there is a scattershot approach to satire on topics ranging from feminism to social class distinction to life in a post-9/11 world. Besides boxing and golf, mainstay subjects in the genre, other sports also appear in recent fiction including horse racing in Jane Smiley’s sprawling Horse Heaven (2000) and surfing in Kem Nunn’s thriller Tijuana Straits (2004). In general, writers of mainstream sports fiction take two approaches to attracting readers. First, much recent adult popular fiction on sports features the antics of professional athletes. In Wild Pitch (2003), for example, Mike Lupica places a redemption story amid the crude behavior of professional baseball players. Similarly, the lives of professional athletes are blatantly satirized in Foul Lines: A Pro Basketball Novel (2006) by Jack McCallum and L. Jon Wertheim, two writers for Sports Illustrated. Comic and full of pop cultural allusions, the novel provides genuine insight into how reporters cover professional sports and how professional athletes and those who support them act in private life. The second strategy many writers employ to attract readers involves combining sports with other popular genres. Golf in a hard-boiled vein is mined by Peter Dexter in Train (2003), for example. David Ferrell writes a baseball-serial killer

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thriller in Screwball (2003), and John DeCure has authored two mysteries about a California lawyer and surfer: Reef Dance (2001) and Bluebird Rising (2003). Although the above writers try for an original approach to sports within the context of something familiar, readers continue to be drawn to literature that merely traffics in sports stereotypes, as exemplified by John Grisham’s bestselling Bleachers (2003), a novel about Neeley Crenshaw, an ex-high school football player who returns after a considerable absence to his hometown in order to come to terms with his hardnosed ex-coach, who is now on his deathbed. Nevertheless, for the most part, current writers of sports fiction seek original audience appeal, as can be seen in the case of two recent works focusing on basketball, arguably America’s most ascendant sport. Stanley Gordon West offers a heartwarming portrait of small-town high school cagers in Blind Your Ponies (2001). In thematic contrast, Sherman Alexie continues to turn to basketball to probe the continuities and dislocations in Native American culture, most recently in the short story “Whatever Happened to Frank Snake Church?” from Ten Little Indians (2003). The popular and the serious meet in Murder at the Foul Line (2006), a collection of short stories that features the work of such award-winning mystery writers as Lawrence Block, Jeffery Deaver, and S.J. Rosen. This latter work evinces that the “sports-mystery novel,” which can be traced back to the 1930s (Oriard 1982, 18), is alive and well. Nonfiction writing about sports remains strong, with writers turning increasingly to contemporary issues and historical events as subject matter, no doubt appealing to today’s readers’ appetite for reality-based stories. These writers often produce book-length journalism that seeks the excitement of fiction. For example, in the past few years, a spate of books has appeared focusing on the coach or manager of sports teams to detail the day-to-day practices of winners. Two Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists have authored books that examine the increasingly complex role of coaches in professional sports. H.G. (Buzz) Bissinger’s Three Days in August (2005) explores the mind and career of St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa through a pivotal three-game series in 2003, demonstrating how the successful manager “possesses the combination of skills essential to the trade: part tactician, part psychologist, and part riverboat gambler” (17). In The Education of a Coach (2005), David Halberstam reveals New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick to be equally obsessive, a man who “was about one thing only—coaching—and wary of anything that detracted from it,” such as the media or egotistical players (21). Don Haskins’s (with Daniel Wetzel) Glory Road (2005), and Michael Lewis’s Coach (2005) profile coaches at the amateur level. Haskins, the longtime coach at Texas Western (now University of Texas at El Paso), started an all-black team against Kentucky and won the 1966 NCAA basketball championship. Characterized as a tough and (again) obsessive coach, Haskins rejects the notion that he is some kind of civil rights leader. He started the five best players he had, regardless of their color, because “I was just a coach who hated to get his ass beat and would do anything to avoid it” (120). Billy Fitzgerald, Michael Lewis’s high school baseball coach, is more than the stereotypical “Intense Coach” (55). Fitzgerald is described as both an intellectual and a passionate teacher, just the kind of person to make a difference in a younger person’s life, something each of the coaches profiled manages to accomplish. Real-life sporting experiences have been the subject of three very different basketball memoirs. In Hoop Roots (2001), John Edgar Wideman compares the act of reading to basketball, which is to him a kind of wonderful jazz played by the

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body. In his distinctive style, Wideman is part memoirist, part basketball historian, part theorist of race, and part musician, who on the table of contents page issues the following invitation: “Different pieces coming from different places—read them in sequence or improvise.” Different in style and tone is Melissa King’s She’s Got Next (2005), which chronicles a young woman’s journey toward self-discovery through the unlikely path of pickup basketball. In My Losing Season (2002) Pat Conroy also discovers much about himself by reflecting upon his basketball career at The Citadel. Despite a less than successful senior season, one spent under a despotic coach and an unloving father, Conroy, from the perspective of later years, comes to value his experience, arguing that there are more important lessons to be learned from losing than from winning. In the last several years the presence of women in boxing, our most brutal sport, has been well documented in memoirs such as Kill the Body, the Head Will Fall (1997) by Rene Denfeld, Looking for a Fight (2000) by Lynn Snowden Picket, The Boxer’s Heart (2000) by Kate Sekules, and Without Apology: Girls, Women, and the Desire to Fight (2005) by Leah Hager Cohen. Not surprisingly, these books examine the pressures of gender as women compete in this most male-dominated of sports; more surprising is the particular perspective each writer derives from her experience. For instance, while Picket ultimately rejects the sport for its brutality, Sekules and Cohen embrace boxing’s potential for liberation and self-fulfillment. Also in the vein of true-to-life sports literature are historical accounts of a great moment in sports and books that follow a high school team’s season. It is no surprise that Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights (1990)—which in meticulous and oftentimes unflattering detail describes the football crazed world of Odessa, Texas— has inspired similar works such as Madeleine Blais’s In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle (1995), the uplifting story of a girls’ basketball team and its successful quest for the Massachusetts state championship; Larry Colton’s Counting Coup: A True Story of Basketball and Honor on the Little Big Horn (2001); and Michael D’Orso’s Blue Eagle: A Team, a Tribe, and a High School Basketball Season in Arctic Alaska (2006). The success-story archetype can be found as well in recent historical accounts such as Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit: An American Legend (2001) and Mark Frost’s The Greatest Game Ever Played: Harry Vardon, Francis Ouimet, and the Birth of Modern Golf (2002), two books popular enough to have been made into Hollywood movies. In addition, examining the same pre-World War II time frame, David Margolick has written Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling and a World on the Brink (2005), and Dorothy Ours has published Man o’ War: A Legend Like Lightning (2006). Context and Issues. Other writers have chosen to focus not just on a given sport but on the culture that surrounds it. Two prime examples of this are Warren St. John’s look at the fans who follow the University of Alabama football team, Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer: A Journey into the Heart of Fan Mania (2004), and Josh Peter’s examination of professional bull riders, Fried Twinkies, Buckle Bunnies, and Bull Riders: A Year Inside the Professional Bull Riders Tour (2005). Combining a focus on a particular sport and a famous athlete are books about cycling and Lance Armstrong: It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life (2000) and Every Second Counts (2003), both by Armstrong and Sally Jenkins, and Lance Armstrong’s War: One Man’s Battle Against Fate, Fame, Love, Death, Scandal, and a Few Other Rivals on the Road to the Tour de France (2005), by Daniel Coyle.

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Although there is still much literary focus on baseball, its status as national pastime continues to be challenged by high quality literature focusing on our nation’s other sports. This, in part, has to do with the meteoric rise in popularity of basketball in this country in the last 25 years and, more importantly, its stunning success as a global commodity. Walter LaFaber, in his study Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism (2002), explains the symbiotic relationship between Jordan, the NBA, and the basketball legend’s endorsers (particularly Nike), arguing how the sport of basketball grew in popularity both in the United States and in the rest of the world as a result of forward-looking capitalists’ entering the global economy. Although imaginative literature has been slow to explore this theme, Paul Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle (1996)—a novel about an African American basketball star coming of age in Los Angeles at the end of the twentieth century—depicts a world in which the athlete, even in high school, is seen as a commodity to be exploited by advertisers. At this point in our nation’s history, with the continuing global popularity of Michael Jordan along with a wave of exciting younger stars (and extremely lucrative marketing tools) such as LeBron James, it seems that basketball may well be, as Bart Giamatti said of baseball not even twenty years ago, “the plot of the story of our national life” (83). Reception. The body of scholarship in the field of sports literature is small but significant and, not surprisingly, weighted like the literature itself toward the sport of baseball. Wiley Lee Umphlett’s The Sporting Myth and the American Experience (1975) is a seminal book-length study of the genre. Using as a starting point the idea that “the microcosm of the sporting experience can tell us a great deal about what it means to be an individual in today’s world” (18), Umphlett focuses on “the search for identity” (19) theme as it occurs in major sports novels to examine their exploration of “psychological and moral truths about American experience” (28). Also focusing on the quest is Robert Higgs in The Athlete in American Literature (1981). Higgs identifies three types of athletes—the Apollonian, the Dionysian, and the Adonic—and meditates on their role in some of the best literature our country has to offer to suggest three different approaches athletes take when pressured to conform to society’s codes. Arguably the most significant scholar in this field is Michael Oriard. An ex-football player whose days with the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame and the Kansas City Chiefs are chronicled in End of Autumn: Reflections on My Life in Football (1982), Oriard has written four book-length studies that focus on the genre broadly defined. Dreaming of Heroes: American Sports Fiction, 1868–1980 (1982) provides a history of sports fiction as well as an overview of prevailing tropes and themes. Like Higgs and Umphlett before him, Oriard focuses on the figure of the sports hero; however, he brings this figure fully into the mainstream by identifying him as not just an athletic type but a national type—“the most widely popular self-made man in America today” (51). As such, he is crucial (not peripheral, as sports figures tend to be viewed) to our understanding of the American mind. Oriard devotes chapters to recurrent themes such as the country versus the city, youth versus age, men versus women, and history versus myth in a variety of novels about baseball, football, basketball, and boxing. Sporting with the Gods: The Rhetoric of Play and Game in American Culture (1991) examines how sports language—expressions and metaphors—has worked itself into our culture at large (ix). In Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle (1993) and King Football: Sport and Spectacle in the Golden Age of Radio, Newsreels, Movies and Magazines,

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The Weekly and The Daily Press (2000), Oriard analyzes a wide variety of texts in order to discover what they reveal about the meaning of football for American spectators. Christian Messenger has focused exclusively on imaginative literature, authoring two excellent studies on sports fiction: Sport and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction: Hawthorne to Faulkner (1981) and its companion work, Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary Fiction (1990). Messenger’s first study begins with a premise that follows the focus of Umphlett and Higgs: “[t]he sports hero in American fiction,” Messenger argues, “has been a special figure, a man apart from mass man” (1981, 1). Like Higgs, Messenger identifies three different “heroic models.” The first, The Ritual Sports Hero, is “[a]n Adamic figure who seeks selfknowledge” (1981, 8). The second, The Popular Sports Hero, is “deeply democratic, raw, humorous. . . . he expressed the strength and vitality of westward expansion and growth” (1981, 8). Over time, this type becomes domesticated by the sports arena. The third model, The School Sports Hero, is “more genteel than the Popular Hero and nurtured through American education, privilege, and the assimilation of war through symbolic sports conflict” (1981, 9). Messenger goes on to explain how The Ritual Hero “plays for the self,” The School Hero “competes for society’s praise,” and The Popular Hero “competes for immediate extrinsic rewards: money, fame, records” (1981, 9). In his second book, Messenger explores the sports hero as he or she appears in contemporary American literature, arguing that “[t]he individual sports hero’s tensions and achievements within the sports collective is the obsessive subject of American sports fiction” (1990, 24). Three other scholarly works examine the enduring myths of baseball. Cordelia Candelaria’s Seeking the Perfect Game: Baseball in American Literature (1989) examines canonical baseball texts and the myths they have created or reinterpreted. In the same vein, Deeanne Westbrook’s Ground Rules: Baseball and Myth (1996), building upon the work of Claude Levi Strauss, Eric Gould, and Jacques Lacan, argues that baseball literature “has the status of a functional modern mythology” (1996, 9). Broader in scope, David McGimpsey’s Imagining Baseball: America’s Pastime and Popular Culture (2000) studies enduring myths not only in baseball literature, but also in films and television. McGimspey identifies a number of “tropes” in “baseball’s cultural products”: “baseball is perfect and God-given; baseball is the best sport; baseball is ‘naturally’ amenable to artistic representation; baseball is America at its best; baseball shows us a nonviolent America where all are judged on merit that can be quantified; baseball is about children; baseball returns sons to fathers” (2000, 2). Some works, such as W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe (and its wildly popular movie version Field of Dreams), ardently support one or more of these tropes (2000, 35–41), whereas others, such as Jim Bouton’s tell-all diary Ball Four (1970), deconstruct such nostalgic notions (2000, 45). Don Johnson focuses exclusively on sports poetry in The Sporting Muse: A Critical Study of Poetry about Athletes and Athletics (2004). Johnson organizes his discussion according to sport, allotting chapters for baseball, football, basketball, and golf, as well as chapters exclusively devoted to the work of women poets and the role of the spectator. Regardless of sport or perspective, Johnson observes that Most sports poetry falls into one of four types: the memory poem, often about a childhood or adolescent experience on the court or playing field; the action poem, one which attempts to capture the mood and movement in a game or particular play; the

SPORTS LITERATURE journalistic poem, which records the achievement of an individual or a team as an event; and the celebratory poem, an effort to preserve for posterity the exploits of an heroic player or team. (2004, 135)

Despite the genre’s origins and despite the vast body of work, juvenile sports literature has inspired far less scholarship; however, Chris Crowe’s More Than a Game: Sports Literature for Young Adults (2004) provides a useful taxonomy for understanding the full variety of works published since the days of Frank Merriwell. The works most deserving of critical attention fall under two main categories—the “more-than-a-game novel,” “whose main concern is an athlete and his involvement in athletics, but it also has much more character development and some subplots that may be only tangential to sport” (2003, 36); and “[t]he most sophisticated young adult sports novels” called ‘sportlerroman’ (2003, 38), a form of the traditional bildungsroman apprenticeship novel, where the protagonist is an athlete struggling for maturity” (2003, 21). Selected Authors. Over the past century, many American writers have used sports in their novels, poems, dramas, and essays to comment on enduring issues in American society. Although many of these works—written by best-selling authors such as Frank Deford, Rick Reilly, Dan Jenkins, and Mike Lupica—enjoy immense popularity and make occasionally incisive comments about our contemporary society, a number of our country’s most critically acclaimed writers have challenged conventions of the genre and, in the process, produced original and enduring literature. Bernard Malamud’s first novel, The Natural (1952), is without question the starting point in the field of contemporary sports literature. Though less than enthusiastically received by critics when it first appeared, The Natural is now seen as a seminal attempt to join sports and myth, reality, and fantasy. It is the story of Roy Hobbs, a confident, cocky pitcher who is shot by a strange woman as he is on the verge of making it to the big leagues. When several years later he gets another opportunity to play in the pros, he continues to put his own dreams and goals before the collective by deciding to throw an important game in the pennant race so that he might have the money necessary to satisfy Memo Paris, the woman of his dreams.

WATCHING SPORTS IN A MOVIE Because we are a nation that loves to watch sports, it is not surprising that sports films outstrip sports literature in terms of popularity. Viewers are drawn to such movies as Breaking Away (1979), Hoosiers (1986), Remember the Titans (2000), and Glory Road (2006) because of their “feel good” resolutions, in which teams overcome great odds to achieve success on the field of play. Other films such as Raging Bull (1980) and The Hurricane (2000) compel attention for the unflinching brutality faced by characters based on real life people and events. Still others generate interest in part because they have been adapted from popular literary works. Among the most significant of these adaptations are North Dallas Forty (book 1973; film 1979), Semi-Tough (book 1972; film 1977), The Natural (book 1952; film 1984) and, more recently, Friday Night Lights (book 1990; film 2004; television drama 2006–2007) and Million Dollar Baby (short story 2001; film 2004).These films have proven to be just as popular (if not more so) than the original works that inspired them. Sports films have a history that stretches back almost as far as the film industry itself; interest in such works will most likely continue unabated.

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As Malamud recounts the Knights’ pennant chase, he applies a number of mythic layers to the narrative, depicting Hobbs’s exploits on the field through the tropes of Arthurian romance and the fable of the Fisher King. Like King Arthur himself, Hobbs wields a modern-day Excalibur; his sword, however, is a baseball bat named Wonderboy. His seeming heroic quest is leading a team of Knights to the holy grail of a pennant, in the process redeeming the Waste Land of the woeful baseball team and its dispirited fans. Yet the problem with Hobbs is that he, according to Edward Abramson, “lives within baseball and cannot see beyond it. He desires to be a baseball hero rather than a mythic, Grail hero” (1993, 14). He seeks only personal glory and physical satisfaction; he cannot live for anyone other than himself. Unable to see or move beyond his own desires, Hobbs fails again. At the end of the novel, after striking out despite his attempt to get a hit and thereby go against his crooked bargain, he thinks: “I never did learn anything out of my past life, now I have to suffer again” (218). Published early in the decade after World War II, The Natural ultimately asks searing questions about America’s values now that the United States is a global superpower. By conflating the classic myths of Arthurian legend with the American myths of success and self-creation, Malamud equates the health of the King (baseball) with the health of the land (America). But America, like the baseball depicted here, is the site of a fallen dream. Hobbs’s dishonest dealings clearly allude to the so-called Black Sox scandal in 1919, when it was revealed that players on the Chicago White Sox team had taken payoffs from gamblers to lose World Series games. When a kid says to Hobbs, “Say it ain’t true, Roy,” (218) Malamud echoes what a boy, as legend would have it, said to “Shoeless” Joe Jackson of 1919 White Sox infamy: “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” The myth of baseball-America is thus belied by actuality as ideals are warped by personal ambition. A year after The Natural appeared, Mark Harris published the first book in his tetralogy of baseball novels, The Southpaw (1953). Narrated and supposedly written by pitcher Henry “Author” Wiggen, these novels ultimately trace the career of their protagonist from fabulous rookie season to reluctant retirement. More than one contemporary review of The Southpaw praised Harris for creating a comic novel that was nonetheless “serious.” Bang the Drum Slowly, which was made into a television movie in 1956 and into a feature film in 1973, received even more acclaim. The third novel in the series, A Ticket for a Seamstitch (1957) is widely considered to be the least successful work, in part because the narrative focuses less on Wiggen and more on catcher Piney Woods and his most devoted fan, the “seamstitch” or seamstress of the title. The final novel in the tetralogy, It Looked Like for Ever (1979), also received tepid reviews. One notable exception to this reception was the admiration offered by poet and baseball fan Donald Hall in The New York Times Book Review. As a number of critics have noted, Harris’s Henry Wiggen tetralogy borrows heavily from Ring Lardner’s vernacular presentation of the common baseball player. That common player, however, also often seems to be very much a common man in these novels, confronting the commonplace problem of aging and dying with wit and insight. Fittingly, in The Southpaw Wiggen helps the New York Mammoths win a World Series, understandably concluding—with the arrogance of both youth and talent—that he belongs among the elite of professional sports. After giving the crowd an obscene gesture “the old sign—1 finger up,” Wiggen defends himself: “I guess all I was saying was they could go their way and I would go mine, and some

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folks is born to play ball and the rest is born to watch, some folks born to clap and shriek and holler and some folks born to do the doing” (346). From the élan and vigor of youth Harris turns to the subject of death in Bang the Drum Slowly. William J. Schafer identifies the central appeal of the book by noting that the novel “turns, like Housman’s ‘To an Athlete Dying Young,’ around the pity and mystery of the unconscious young struck down untimely” (32). The dying athlete here is Bruce Pearson, a reliable but marginally talented catcher who has Hodgkin’s disease. Although he cannot finish the season, Pearson inspires his team to a World Series win, but once dead he is quickly forgotten by his teammates who do not attend his funeral. One player’s death does not stop baseball anymore than one person’s death stops life. Yet Harris memorializes Pearson by tenderly describing his last moment on a baseball field, the place where he was most alive: “I started off towards the dugout, maybe as far as the baseline, thinking [Pearson] was following, and then I seen that he was not. I seen him standing looking for somebody to throw to, the last pitch he ever caught, and I went back for him, and Mike and Red were there when I got there, and Mike said, ‘It is over son,’ and he said ‘Sure’ and trotted on in” (237–238). The end of baseball for Henry Wiggen comes in It Looked Like for Ever, a comic examination of an underrepresented figure in sports literature: the aging athlete. In this novel, Wiggen finds himself suddenly released from the New York Mammoths, and his almost desperate attempts to catch on with another team as a 39-year-old relief pitcher take him from Japan to California to the broadcast booth. Appropriately enough, Wiggen does play again, though his onerously revived career ends suddenly when he is struck by a batted ball. Accepting the inevitable, Wiggen announces “to 1 and all that I was now finally retired from baseball for ever, Nature was Nature, I talked back to Nature once too often and Nature slammed the door” (274). From first appearance as a confident rookie with nothing but seeming glory ahead of him, Wiggen exits baseball as a man made wiser by stark lessons both on and off the field. In one sense, aging is also the subject of John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy, which chronicles the life, but not necessarily the maturation, of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, an ex-high school basketball star. Published roughly a decade apart, these novels— Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990)—are set mostly in the fictional Pennsylvania town of Brewer, where Angstrom’s life unfolds in abundant, realistic detail. Although certain critics have found Updike’s realism tiresome, accusing him of writing bloated books, the Rabbit novels have also received significant critical praise, with Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest both winning numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for each. Indeed, considered everything from a documentary realist to a social satirist to a theological, existential, and Christian writer, Updike tends to evoke intense, often contradictory reactions in readers and critics who rarely receive him lukewarmly, offering either strong condemnation or unqualified admiration. Although Updike published the four novels under single cover in a book titled Rabbit Angstrom (1995), at that time calling the work a “mega-novel” (viii), the Rabbit saga does not end with Rabbit at Rest. In 2000 Updike published a novella titled “Rabbit Remembered” in Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel in which Rabbit’s illegitimate daughter again appears. In all of the Rabbit portrayals, Updike is careful to depict Harry Angstrom’s judgments and actions without authorial criticism, and he staunchly refuses to

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resolve the tensions in the character’s psyche (Boswell passim). These novels also attempt to capture the zeitgeist of post–World War II America, principally the four distinctive decades from 1950–1990. Ultimately the tetralogy presents an America in moral and spiritual disarray as the attractions of money, drugs, and sex become ever more alluring; yet the country’s energetic and hopeful nature remains constant. In these novels, Updike’s view of sports is often more melancholic than celebratory, because sports, as sex and drugs, offer only the briefest kind of transcendence. If, as Daniel Morrissey writes, “Updike’s description of Harry Angstrom’s soaring golf drive in Rabbit, Run was an ecstatic explanation of human union with God” (187), then in these novels much of life is remembering such moments rather than living in them, though Rabbit’s frequent sexual encounters represent his attempt to experience both the physical and spiritual fulfillment he used to find regularly in sports. Essentially a seeker, Rabbit is frequently dissatisfied and restless. In Rabbit, Run, for example, Angstrom runs away from his wife and an unsatisfactory suburban life. Twenty-six years old and a gadget salesman, he has a difficult time coming to terms with the fact that he is no longer the great sports star. When he is not physically running away from adult responsibilities, he is doing so mentally, by returning to those moments when he performed heroic feats on the basketball court—those times when he was blissfully in sync with himself. The death of his daughter only fuels his desire to run, to stay in flight as it were, like that tremendous golf shot. By the time of Rabbit Redux, however, Angstrom initially seems more resigned to his life. Set in the summer of 1969 with the Apollo moon landing in the background, this novel sees 36-year-old Rabbit working in a print shop at a linotype machine that is soon to be obsolete. At first basketball is used to express Henry Angstrom’s sense of pointless change, as he recognizes how different the current game is from the one he played in the late 1940s. Moreover, when his son, Nelson, tells him, “sports are square now. Nobody does it” (18), Angstrom replies, “Well, what isn’t square now? Besides pill-popping and draft-dodging. And letting your hair grow down into your eyes” (18–19). Still, Angstrom believes in the power of sports. He wonders: “How can he get the kid [Nelson] interested in sports? If he’s too short for basketball, then baseball. Anything, just to put something there, some bliss, to live on later for a while. If he goes empty now he won’t last at all, because we get emptier” (25). Slowly, however, moral certainty seeps away from Rabbit. When his wife leaves him for another man, he begins an affair with an 18-year-old girl who has run away from her rich Connecticut family, and later he harbors a black fugitive and drug dealer. The novel presents drug use, infidelity, and racism graphically and without denunciation. Although Rabbit often perceives himself to be in competition with others in his real life, as he was on the basketball court, his basketball training appears more subtly in the novel. As Rabbit accedes to drug use and increasing sexual promiscuity, it becomes clear that his life mirrors that of the ex-basketball player in that he fits himself—morally, intellectually, and spiritually—with those around him, playing with others in society the way he would play with teammates on the court, not resisting but conforming to the action in a fluid, almost unthinking manner. This pattern of attempted conformity continues in the final two novels. Rabbit is Rich is set in 1979, with gas shortages and the Iranian hostage crisis as backdrop. Now wealthy and operating his dead father-in-law’s Toyota dealership, Rabbit tries to conform to middle age. As critic Marshall Boswell notes, Angstrom is at first

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“content and satisfied,” convinced that “his past” is “now solidly behind him” even to the extent that no one calls him Rabbit, using Harry instead (132). The economic malaise in which the country is mired, however, and the fact that Nelson is clearly repeating his father’s actions with infidelity and drug use suggest contemporary issues and moral positions that cannot be neatly resolved. Rabbit is still restless, a seeker after ultimate meaning, which he will never find. Boswell furthermore identifies a thematic link with Rabbit, Run in the way Rabbit is Rich “links sexual redemption with athletic prowess” (183). After a particularly vivid sexual encounter, Rabbit finds his golf game much improved, and Boswell concludes: “[A] good game of golf in Updike is a sure sign of grace” (184). In the final novel of the tetralogy, Rabbit at Rest, Harry Angstrom dies, a fate that is suggested not only by the novel’s title but also in its first sentence. Set in 1989, the novel finds Harry Angstrom retired in Florida, where overweight and out of shape, he suffers heart attacks and eventually expires. Here, Updike provides both a detailed description of America in the 1980s and a continuation of the searching that has characterized Rabbit’s life. That life features an affair between Rabbit and his daughter-in-law and Nelson’s plight as a cocaine addict and embezzler. Fittingly enough, Rabbit’s demise is preceded by a pick-up basketball game between him and a teenaged African American boy that momentarily has him feeling “loose and deeply free” (504). Though he wins the game, on old-fashioned shots that the youth derides and grudgingly admires, Rabbit ends up “unconscious [on] the dirt” court (506). Scared, the youth runs away; someone eventually dials 911, and Rabbit is soon dead, the word “Enough” appearing as his final thought (512). Encapsulating Rabbit’s life, this last game supplies nothing more lasting than a mere moment of triumph. As Jack B. Moore has argued, however, Harry Rabbit Angstrom’s early success as a basketball player defines his subsequent life, principally in the way he measures the success of that life but also in the ways he lives it: as he might in a basketball game, Rabbit “improvises his life, often badly, but with many thrills and great activity” (188). The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968) is Robert Coover’s “metacommentary on both myth and history through baseball” (Messenger 1990, 359). The novel concerns a lonely middle-aged man who creates a fantasy baseball game and, with his accountant’s penchant for record keeping, a corresponding meticulous history of the league. Waugh rolls dice and the results correspond with events on a series of complicated charts. When Damon Rutherford, the star pitcher in the league—and Waugh’s favorite player—falls victim to an unfortunate roll of the dice, Waugh ignores the rules he so carefully created in order to ensure that Jock Casey, Rutherford’s killer, is destroyed. The events of The Universal Baseball Association become so much more compelling—and far more real—for Waugh than his actual life that, in the concluding chapter, this alternative world takes over. Waugh himself disappears from the narrative, and the reader is left only with the perspective of his players (his fictional characters), who partake in a quasi-religious commemoration of the two great Association players who were killed a hundred seasons earlier. With the creator out of the picture and his creations assuming a full and seemingly autonomous life of their own, it is easy to agree with Roy Caldwell’s contention that the subject of the novel “is not the playing of baseball but the making of fiction” (1987, 162). Equally challenging is Don DeLillo’s postmodern masterpiece End Zone (1972). The ostensible subject is collegiate football, but the real subject is language

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itself—the way it creates reality and gives us a comforting order to our lives. Unlike many of the players who enjoy the order and simplicity of playing for the Logos College Screaming Eagles, Gary Harkness (the protagonist) can see the game—and other games, for that matter—for what it is worth. At the beginning of a chapter that recounts the funeral of an assistant coach, Harkness states: “Most lives are guided by clichés. They have a soothing effect on the mind and they express the kind of widely expressed sentiment that, when peeled back, is seen to be a denial of silence” (69). There is much in the novel to engage the typical sports fan: the autocratic coach; the mercurial star running back; the disaffected troublemaker; the big game against the rival team. However, DeLillo is less interested in presenting these conventions than he is in exploiting them for the purpose of exploring how language often makes pleasant the world we live in and denies the silent, terrifying end zone that is our true reality. Gary Storoff argues that Harkness “searches for a game that will provide his life with significance” (1985, 235). College does not provide the answer, nor do football or the Air Force. They are all games, and “games are at best evasions, unconscious methods of escaping the void” (1985, 244)—the real end zone beyond the boundaries of language itself. Under the pseudonym of Cleo Birdwell, DeLillo cowrote (with Sue Buck) Amazons (1980), a satirical novel, narrated by the first female hockey player, that has intriguing things to say about gender relations. The novel has garnered little scholarly attention, but Philip Nel views the work as important in its status as a starting point for DeLillo’s exploration of the theme of gender (2001, 416). Although Birdwell “does little to challenge the structures that maintain an imbalance of power between men and women” (419), she does resist the attempts of reporters and advertisers to objectify her (422). In the end, however, despite the fact that Birdwell is telling her own story, “the point of view feels masculine; only in isolated moments does the book veer toward feminist critique” (419). DeLillo’s magnum opus, Underworld (1997), is not a sports novel per se. However, an iconic sporting event—Bobby Thomson’s famous home run against the Dodgers claiming the pennant for the 1951 Giants—is absolutely central to the book. The Prologue, separately published as “Pafko at the Wall” (1992), links this moment in baseball history with the testing of a Russian nuclear bomb, which occurred on the very same day. The story becomes “a tale of two blasts.” The bomb test signals the beginning of the Cold War, but for the frenzied crowd in the stadium, that news is “overwhelmed by baseball legend” (Duvall 2002, 33) and thus “illustrates the dangerous tendency of baseball to aestheticize and erase international politics” (2002, 35), or at least bury it, metaphorically speaking, underground. Although the balance of the novel explores other plot lines, the baseball playoff game continues to resonate. In one of the narrative threads, Nick Shay, a waste management specialist, and some of his colleagues attend a very different DodgersGiants game, a contest between old rivals that has a striking parallel in international politics. As John Duvall argues, “[b]oth the United States-Russia and the DodgersGiants oppositions mean something very different in 1992 than in 1951. Old loyalties and beliefs are rendered archaic. Just as the Dodgers and the Giants left New York to tap into the lucrative West Coast market, so too have market forces rewritten the relationship between America and Russia” (2002, 30). As the colleagues converse, we learn that Nick is supposedly in possession of Thomson’s home run ball, the one a young African American boy scrambles to retrieve in the Prologue. Nick has successfully traced ownership of the ball almost all the way back

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to the end of that game. Despite his best efforts, however, there is a hole in the narrative which he is left to fill with his own belief that this is an authentic object of the past—that, in turn, the past he remembers is itself authentic. Nick’s willingness to pay a lot of money for a ball that may or may not be the genuine article suggests the desperate nature of his “quest of what he takes to be a lost authenticity—a sense of himself as someone who was at one time whole and complete and a part of a community” (Duvall 2002, 26). On both the national and personal level, then, the novel is about—at least in part—the way we attempt to connect to our always unknowable past. Philip Roth’s fiction uses sports as a way of critiquing many of our most precious national myths. Unlike Malamud, who employed age-old myths to lend gravitas to the story of a baseball player, Roth in The Great American Novel (1973) ruthlessly and humorously debunks the whole myth-making process, creating not just an “anti-baseball novel” (Klinkowitz 1993, 39), but an antimythological one. The novel details the personalities and outrageous events of the 1943 season of the Rupert Mundys, a hapless baseball team from the long forgotten Patriot League. This skewed history is framed by the prolix octogenarian Word Smith, a half senile sportswriter confined to a nursing home who thinks that his story of the league, which has been unceremoniously expunged from the annals of sports history, may well be the great American novel. The league is filled with colorful characters, including Frank Mazuma, a Bill Veeck-like owner who introduces all kinds of entertaining gimmicks into the game; Bob Yamm and O.K. Ockatur, a midget pitcher and batter who face off against each other; Gil Gemesh, the tremendously talented but hotheaded pitcher who is banned from baseball for throwing at an umpire; and Bud Parusha, a one-armed player who plucks the ball from his glove with his mouth. There are outrageous events as well, including a Mundys contest against the inmates of an insane asylum; a Black Sox-like scandal, this one, however, involving a disgruntled Mundy who helps his team to an unlikely win streak with the aid of Jewish Wheaties; and a McCarthyesque inquisition on the presence of Communists in the Patriot League. These outrageous players and situations undercut the sanctimonious traditionalism of characters such as General Oakhart, the president of the league; Glorious Mundy, the original owner of the Mundys and a man for whom baseball was nothing less than a “national religion” (82); and Mister Fairsmith, who “attempted to instruct them [his players] in the Larger Meaning” of the game (136). Although some critics praise the audacity and comic ingeniousness of The Great American Novel, many also view the book as having serious structural flaws as well as a lack of thematic coherence. If the book does not always succeed, it does manage to get across “Roth’s purpose,” which is “to demythologize mythology” (Siegel 1976, 181). At the end of the novel, when the octogenarian Word Smith, out of publishing options in the United States, sends his book off to Chairman Mao for consideration, he compares himself to the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. On the surface, the comparison is ludicrous; however, when Word Smith makes the point that, like the Russian writer, he “refuses to accept lies for truth and myth for reality” (380), he is more or less getting at Roth’s “Larger Meaning” behind all the humor and the games. More recently, Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral (1997) chronicles the life of Seymour Levov (nicknamed The Swede because of his blond hair and blue eyes), who, during World War II, was a high school football, basketball, and baseball star. Some years younger, Nathan Zuckerman (a recurring narrator in

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Roth’s novels) is in awe of this paragon of athletic ability. “[T]hrough the Swede, the neighborhood entered into a fantasy about itself and about the world, the fantasy of sports fans everywhere: almost like Gentiles (as they imagined Gentiles), our families could forget the way things actually work and make an athletic performance the repository of all their hopes” (3–4). Often over at the Levov’s house to play with Seymour’s younger brother, the narrator comes to discover a number of John Tunis novels on the athlete’s bookshelf. Of particular interest is Tunis’s The Kid from Tompkinsville (1940), a novel about a baseball player in which “each triumph” of the main character “is rewarded with a punishing disappointment or a crushing incident” (8) in what the narrator calls “the boys’ Book of Job” (9). In the balance of the novel, Zuckerman goes on to imagine Levov’s life and, in the process, dismantles the myth of the American dream in heart-rending fashion. Compared to The Great American Novel, sports in American Pastoral seem to play a relatively minor role; however, Levov’s past athletic life is essential for our understanding of his character. As an ex-athlete, as a man who enters smoothly into the WASP world by marrying an Irish girl, a former Miss New Jersey, and as a firstgeneration American who goes into his father’s glove manufacturing business (which, significantly, takes a successful turn when Levov’s renown as an athlete helps secure an important client), Levov appears to be living the American dream in all of its glory, having “accumulated the visible signs of an American identity: success in business, sports, and home life” (Stanley 2005, 8). Derek Parker Royal goes so far as to say that “the Swede, as a model of athletic prowess . . . is a stand-in for America itself” (2005, 201). Because Levov had flown (in the words of the narrator) “the flight of the immigrant rocket, the upward, unbroken immigrant trajectory,” he expected that his daughter Merry would be “the highest flier of them all, the fourth-generation child for whom America was to be heaven itself” (122). Instead, Merry, who comes of age during the Vietnam War, grows disgusted by her parents’ cozy and isolated upperclass existence and turns into a political radical who blows up the small town’s post office, killing several people in the process. In a later phone conversation, his brother Jerry brings up Levov’s sporting past in order to criticize him for the kind of banal, unreflective life he has led. He suggests at first that Levov views his situation as a game, but then immediately discards that notion. “For the typical male activity you’re the man of action, but this isn’t the typical male activity” (280). Following out the metaphor, Merry’s behavior is out of bounds for Levov—so far out of the field of play he has no idea how to respond. Jerry continues with his criticism, saying that Levov “[c]an only see [him]self playing ball and making gloves and marrying Miss America. . . . And you thought all that façade was going to come without a cost” (280). If The Kid from Tompkinsville was a Book of Job for young boys, then Levov’s life, seemingly the epitome of the American dream, is that Bible story in all its disturbing maturity. According to Zuckerman’s imaginings, Levov cannot solve his problem; he can only suffer and endure. Unlike The Great American Novel, which displays an absurdly comic vision, American Pastoral is the tragedy of a man who believes that one can live a dream. Despite differences in tone, each novel is similar in its use of sports to help debunk potent American myths. Although seriously understudied, Jenifer Levin is, without question, the most significant female voice in sports literature. Her Water Dancer (1982) tells the story of Dorey Thomas, a young marathon swimmer who, seeking to overcome a failure in

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her past, wants to swim the brutal San Antonio Strait off the coast of Washington State. To help her achieve this goal, she approaches Sarge Olssen, a coach whose own son Matt died making the attempt to cross this body of water. The quest to accomplish the goal becomes, in the process, a quest for identity. Michael Oriard hails this novel as “a major breakthrough in the genre of sports fiction” because “it offers a feminist alternative to the masculine sports myth” that relegates women to second-class status, making them “adjuncts to the [sports] hero’s achievements” or even “major obstacles” (1987, 9–10). Unlike her traditional, domesticated mother Carol, who defines herself almost exclusively in terms of her relationship to men, Dorey is quietly but fiercely independent. Her swim across the San Antonio Strait is not a competition in the traditional sense. Even in earlier races, her philosophy has been to focus not on the people who are swimming a given race with her but on the water itself. By novel’s end, the mysterious Dorey achieves her goal and, in the process, discovers—or more accurately—develops into her own, natural self. What is more, the act of swimming becomes a kind of selfdisclosure. At last, Ilana (Sarge’s wife and Dorey’s mother-lover) is able to know this water dancer. “Ilana,” she calls out near the end of the swim. “Do you know me now?” to which Ilana responds: “Yes . . . I am proud” (1982, 363). As Sharon Carson and Brooke Horvath argue, the novel tells us that the skills of endurance, flexibility, strength, and style—all of which Dorey possesses in spades—form the magic pattern of the dancer in water and in life. They are the same skills employed by individuals who are fortunate enough to celebrate themselves for who they are and who flourish in spite of cultural definitions of who they should be. (1991, 46–47)

In two later novels, Snow (1983) and Sea of Light (1993), Levin continues her exploration of sports, gender, and the quest for identity. Snow, through the character of bold, adventurous outdoorswoman named Raina Scott, examines the themes of Water Dancer: “woman’s endurance, woman’s power, woman’s desire” (Messenger 1990, 183). Sea of Light is told from a variety of perspectives but centers around Babe Delgado, a collegiate swimmer, named by her mother after Babe Didrikson, the phenomenal female athlete of the 1930s and 1940s. After recovering from a plane crash that kills nearly her entire team, Babe enrolls at a smaller school to begin her comeback as an athlete and as a human being. Coached by Bren Allen, who experiences her own emotional struggles due to the untimely death of a lover, and encouraged by the love of a much less talented teammate named Ellie, Babe not only wins a swim meet at novel’s end but, much more importantly, recovers from the trauma of the plane crash and begins to reestablish significant relationships with others. Babe’s success in the pool, like Dorey’s in the San Antonio Strait, is the product of much physical and emotional suffering and sacrifice. Babe’s victory does not give her college a championship or help get her back to a Division 1 school; instead, the win symbolizes her successful attempt at self-recovery. At its best, sports literature has always been about much more than the games, athletes, and spectators themselves. Whether assuming the form of a novel, short story, poem, drama, or essay, such literature continues to compel our attention for the simple reason that sports have always revealed deep and enduring truths about the American psyche.

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Bibliography Abramson, Edward. Bernard Malamud Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1993. Angell, Roger. Once More Around the Park: A Baseball Reader. New York: Ballantine, 1991. Bissinger, Buzz. Three Days in August: Strategy, Heartbreak, and Joy Inside the Mind of a Manager. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Bledsoe, Lucy Jane. “Rough Touch.” In Girls Got Game: Sports Stories and Poems. Sue Macy, ed. New York: Henry Holt, 2001, 109–116. Boswell, Marshall. John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Burn, Stephen. “‘The Machine Language of the Muscles’: Reading, Sport, and the Self in Infinite Jest.” In Upon Further Review: Sports in American Literature. Michael Cocchiarale and Scott D. Emmert, eds. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004, 41–50. Caldwell, Roy. “Of Hobby-Horses, Baseball, and Narrative: Coover’s Universal Baseball Association.” Modern Fiction Studies 33.1 (1987): 161–171. Candelaria, Cordelia. Seeking the Perfect Game: Baseball in American Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1989. Carson, Sharon, and Brooke Horvath. “Sea Changes: Jenifer Levin’s Water Dancer and the Sociobiology of Gender.” Aethlon 9.1 (1991): 37–48. Crowe, Chris. More Than a Game: Sports Literature for Young Adults. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003. Crutcher, Chris. Foreword to Athletic Shorts. New York: Greenwillow, 1991. DeLillo, Don. End Zone. New York: Penguin, 1972. Duvall, John N. Don DeLillo’s Underworld. New York: Continuum, 2002. Giamatti, A. Bartlett. Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games. New York: Summit Books, 1989. Halberstam, David. The Education of a Coach. New York: Hyperion, 2005. Harris, Mark. 1956. Bang the Drum Slowly. Reprint, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. ———. It Looked Like for Ever. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979. ———. 1953. The Southpaw. Reprint, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Haskins, Don, and Dan Wetzel. Glory Road: My Story of the 1966 NCAA Basketball Championship and How One Team Triumphed Against the Odds. New York: Hyperion, 2005. Higgs, Robert J. Laurel and Thorn: The Athlete in American Literature. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1981. Hoeffner, Karol Ann. All You’ve Got. New York: Simon Pulse, 2006. Horvath, Brooke, and Tom Wiles, eds. Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002. Johnson, Don. The Sporting Muse: A Critical Study of Poetry about Athletes and Athletics. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004. Klinkowitz, Jerry. “Philip Roth’s Anti-Baseball Novel.” Western Humanities Review 47.1 (1993): 30–40. Levin, Jenifer. Water Dancer. New York: Plume, 1982. McGimpsey, David. Imagining Baseball: America’s Pastime and Popular Culture. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000. Mailer, Norman. “Ego.” In The Best American Sports Writing of the Century. David Halberstam, ed. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1999, 713–737. Malamud, Bernard. 1952. The Natural. Reprint, New York: Avon Books, 1980. Messenger, Christian K. Sport and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction: Hawthorne to Faulkner. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. ———. Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

SPORTS LITERATURE Moore, Jack B. “Sports, Basketball, and Fortunate Failure in the Rabbit Tetralogy.” In Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike’s Rabbit Novels. Lawrence R. Broer, ed. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1998, 170–188. Morris, Timothy. Making the Team: The Cultural Work of Baseball Fiction. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Morrissey, Daniel. “Reveiw of A Month of Sundays by John Updike.” Commonweal, 6 June 1975: 187–188. Nel, Philip. “Amazons in the Underworld: Gender, the Body, and Power in the Novels of Don DeLillo.” Studies in Contemporary Fiction 42.4 (2001): 416–436. Oates, Joyce Carol. 1987. On Boxing. Reprint, Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1994. Oriard, Michael. Dreaming of Heroes: American Sports Fiction, 1868–1980. Chicago, IL: Nelson-Hall, 1982. ———. Sporting with the Gods: The Rhetoric of Play and Game in American Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ———. “From Jane Allen to Water Dancer: A Brief History of the Feminist(?) Sports Novel.” Modern Fiction Studies. 33.1 (1987): 9–20. Orodenker, Richard. The Writers’ Game: Baseball Writing in America. New York: Twayne, 1996. Revoyr, Nina. The Necessary Hunger. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. ———. The Great American Novel. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973. ———. “My Baseball Years.” In Reading Myself and Others. New York: Farrar, 1975. Royal, Derek Parker. “Pastoral Dreams and National Identity in American Pastoral and I Married a Communist.” In Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author. Derek Parker Royal, ed. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005, 185–207. Sandoz, Joli, and Joby Winans, eds. Whatever It Takes: Women on Women’s Sport. New York: Farrar, 1999. Schafer, William J. “Mark Harris: Versions of (American) Pastoral.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 19.1 (1977): 28–48. Siegel, Ben. “The Myths of Summer: Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel.” Contemporary Literature 17.2 (1976): 171–190. Storoff, Gary. “The Failure of Games in Don DeLillo’s End Zone.” In American Sport Culture: The Humanistic Dimensions. Wiley Lee Umphlett, ed. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1985, 235–245. Umphlett, Wiley Lee. The Achievement of American Sport Literature: A Critical Appraisal. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991. Updike, John. Introduction to Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. ———. Rabbit at Rest. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. ———. Rabbit Redux. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971. Westbrook, Deeanne. Ground Rules: Baseball and Myth. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Wideman, John Edgar. 2001. Hoop Roots. Reprint, New York: Mariner, 2003.

Further Reading Bandy, Susan J., and Anne S. Darden. Crossing Boundaries: An International Anthology of Women’s Experiences in Sport. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1999; Cocchiarale, Michael, and Scott D. Emmert, eds. Upon Further Review: Sports in American Literature. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004; Darden, Ann. “Outsiders: Women in Sports and Literature.” Aethlon 15.1 (1997): 1–10; Guttmann, Allen. A Whole New Ball Game: An Interpretation of American Sports. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988; Hye, Allen E. The Great God Baseball. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2004; Nelson, Mariah Burton. The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football: Sexism and the American Culture of Sports. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994; Oriard, Michael. King Football: Sport

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SPY FICTION and Spectacle in the Golden Age of Radio, Newsreels, Movies and Magazines, The Weekly and The Daily Press. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000; Rivers, Jacob F. Cultural Values in the Southern Sporting Narrative. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2002; Womack, Mari. Sport as Symbol: Images of the Athlete in Art, Literature and Song. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003.

MICHAEL COCCHIARALE AND SCOTT D. EMMERT

SPY FICTION Definition. Most simply defined, spy literature features protagonists who are connected to espionage in some primary way. The protagonists can be either amateur spies or professional operatives and commonly use covert methods to thwart a nation, group, or individual’s enemies. Spy stories are most often set against the backdrop of an international political conflict, revolve around secret conspiracies with the potential to change the fate of nations, and occur in environments where nothing is what it seems and everything is potentially dangerous. The genre shares many characteristics with the British schoolboy adventure story, detective fiction, war prophecy fiction, and the thriller in general. For instance, schoolboy adventure stories flourished in their classic form from the 1850s to the 1920s and celebrated English public schools (which Americans call private schools) as noble institutions that built the character of young men for the good of the nation. Spy authors Erskine Childers, Sapper, John Buchan, Francis Beeding, Graham Greene, John le Carré, and Ian Fleming all draw from this genre’s conventions, including its emphasis on the protagonist’s maturation, the use of upper-class sportsmen as heroes, the call to action being depicted as thrilling, as well as the importance of playing any game with honor and learning valuable lessons from it, such as hard work, duty, sportsmanship, and masculinity. Early spy works—including those by William LeQueux, E. Phillips Oppenheim, and Erskine Childers—overlap with war prophecy books, which use fiction in order to warn a country of an impending attack and change its military policies. Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903) is a classic example of this type of work; it warns of the dangers of a German invasion of Britain across the North Sea and eventually encouraged the British government to develop defensive naval stations on strategic parts of the kingdom’s coastline. Plots of spy novels also differ from crime fiction in that they revolve more heavily around torture, capture, invisibility, secret communications, elaborate disguises, complicated alibis, narrow escapes, and dead drops, and the genre’s archetypes include the secret exercise of power, often without traditional ethical constraints, and a profound sense of belonging to an organization that may or may not lead the hero to question the price of loyalty.

HIGH CLASS SPIES Spy fiction also shares many characteristics with crime fiction; both genres often follow a narrative structure where, at the start of the story, a law is violated and the state finds out about it. The story’s hero then attempts to discover who is responsible through the use of informants and struggles with the enemy before defeating him or her and restoring order. However, spy protagonists are usually depicted as more cerebral and of a higher class than police detectives, and they are more likely to be motivated by ethical or political ideals rather than money.

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In general, two strains of spy stories exist: one relies on heroic fantasy whereas the other relies on realism and moral relativism. Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, is probably best associated with the first strain because his stories revolve around exotic locales, sexual escapades, conspicuous consumerism, and foreign and eccentric criminals whose crimes have massive political consequences. His hero, 007, enjoys being called to a mission, and Fleming depicts spying as an exciting endeavor vital to national security. Popular authors operating in the genre’s more realistic vein include John le Carré, Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, and Frederick Forsyth. In these author’s novels, spying is more likely to be depicted as an unglamorous activity involving few elements of the action thriller, and the works tend to be more cynical regarding the role of intelligence agencies in the modern world. History. Although the spy genre is most closely aligned with British storytelling, James Fennimore Cooper’s The Spy is considered to be the genre’s first novel written in English. Published in 1821, the novel is set during the American Revolution and focuses on Harvey Birch, a man suspected of spying for the British but who is actually working for George Washington. The novel spawned a host of dime novel imitations soon after its release, but most scholars do not consider the genre to have truly developed until the turn of the twentieth century. Traditionally, Erkine Childers’s Riddle of the Sands (1903) and John Buchan’s The 39 Steps (1915) are considered two of the first great spy novels. Both works feature amateur spies who are gentleman patriots accidentally swept up in an espionage adventure, and both romanticize the adventure of espionage, depicting it as a thrilling game that breaks the boring routine of life. Perhaps due to the success of these two novels, early spy novelists continued to romanticize espionage as experienced by amateurs until the debut of W. Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden: Or the British Agent (1927). This novel is important to the development of the genre because it rejected the heroic trappings of prewar spy fiction and replaced the redemptive nature of spying for the man tired of life with an emphasis on espionage’s dull routine, hypocrisy, and ruthlessness. Maugham’s Ashenden was also one of the first works to feature the spy bureaucracy, although it was not until the later part of WWII that the intelligence agency began to figure regularly and prominently in espionage narratives (Hitz 2004, 38–39). Although early spy novelist William Le Queux blended romance and espionage in his stories in order to appeal to a female readership, the majority of early spy authors catered to a male readership and few female authors made their mark in the genre before the later part of the twentieth century. One notable exception is Helen MacInnes, a Glasgow-born author, whose first espionage novel, Above Suspicion, was published in 1941. MacInnes enjoyed a forty-five-year, highly successful career in which critics praised her for literate, fast-paced, and intricately plotted suspense novels. Her more famous titles include Assignment in Brittany (1942), Decision at Delphi (1961), and Ride a Pale Horse (1984), and her work mostly focuses on the Western struggle against either Nazism or Communism. Like Buchan and Childers, MacInnes favored amateur spies accidentally swept into danger who nevertheless accepted their fate and performed their patriotic duty in warding off political and social threats. Like Le Queux, most of the author’s novels also focus on a love story in addition to an espionage plot, but they feature more competent and independent female characters. This last element makes McInnes somewhat unique among early spy writers, who primarily featured women as secondary characters who must be

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saved by the hero or as characters who wish to participate in male adventures but ultimately discover they are not up to the challenge. The arrival of Graham Greene marked another important stage in the spy genre’s history, as the author was one of the first to explore the psychology of the spy and the ways that spying challenges one’s ethics and humanity. Even more so than Maugham, Greene insisted upon showing the anti-heroic side to spying and redirected the genre toward satire and criticism of intelligence organizations—a trend that would be furthered by popular spy novelists such as Len Deighton, Eric Ambler, and John le Carré. The heroes of these authors, for example, are often burned-out agents disillusioned with their own intelligence agency or are ordinary, undistinguished people who do not volunteer to fight an enemy but are rather swept, involuntarily, into a scheme of espionage. These “heroes” often fail to bring down an enemy operation but feel successful merely because they survived the episode in which both enemies and allies worked against them. Frederick Hitz attributes historical factors to the genre’s shift away from romanticized accounts of spying toward more cynical ones in the postwar era. As he explains in The Great Game, in the WWII era Stalin and Hitler possessed staunch control over their citizens via police states; thus, in order to stop the spread of totalitarianism and communism, the United States and Britain employed similar spy tactics, causing a spy war to ensue between the East and West. During this battle, Western governments often left their informants in the lurch and plotted assassination attempts. Whereas later, the U.S. government specifically infiltrated and monitored domestic anti-Vietnam War groups and some civil rights protestors. They also developed and tested mind-altering drugs on unsuspecting citizens in hopes of finding weapons to employ on their enemies. For Hitz, this climate explains the creation of novels that emphasize the morally suspect aspects of spying and question the price of loyalty to intelligence organizations. A good example of one such novel is le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), which explores the ways in which MI-6 deceives its own agent, Alex Leamas, in order to save a ruthless East German spy working for the United Kingdom—a move that eventually leads to the death of Leamas and his lover. The move toward realism in spy fiction might also be explained by the fact that many of the genre’s emerging novelists at the time had served in intelligence capacities during the First or Second World War and thus were able to incorporate their experiences and knowledge of the field into their stories. W. Somerset Maugham, for instance, worked as an intelligence operative during WWI; Graham Greene was stationed in Sierra Leone during World War II, where he worked for the British Foreign Office under Kim Philby (a spy who later defected to the Soviet Union); and John le Carré served in the British Foreign Service from 1959 to 1964, working first as Second Secretary in the British Embassy in Bonn and later as Political Consul in Hamburg. Ian Fleming, who served in Naval Intelligence throughout World War II, also drew from his experiences as an intelligence officer in his 007 series, but as Fleming demonstrates, not all postwar spy novelists took an anti-heroic approach to the genre, his James Bond novels draw from Buchan’s emphasis on the adventure and thrill of spying. Fleming’s approach to the spy novel proved just as, if not more, popular among American and European readers in the early Cold War as more realistic novels, especially after John F. Kennedy announced in an interview with Life magazine that From Russia with Love ranked as one of his top ten favorite books.

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In fact, at the time of Fleming’s death in August 1964, over 30 million copies of his Bond books had been sold; two years later, at the height of Bond mania, that number had doubled to 60 million; and all of Fleming’s novels have since been turned into motion picture films. Attracted to Fleming’s success, other writers followed in the author’s footsteps by creating fanciful epics of professional spies and arch-villains. Among these were Donald Hamilton, who created a hard-boiled James Bond in his Matt Helm series; Alistair Maclean; Philip McCutchan; John Gardner; Gavin Lyall; Trevanian; and Howard Hunt, an ex-CIA agent and Watergate conspirator, who wrote a series of spy stories even more fantastical than Fleming’s in regards to his heroes, sexy women, villains and international conspiracies (Cawelti and Rosenberg 1987, 52). By the 1970s and 1980s, the spy genre in general turned toward its realistic roots once again in order to explore the moral complexity of espionage due to the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the ongoing Cold War, and political scandals such as Watergate. Characters in these later spy novels often do not know with which side to align themselves, nor do readers, and the story’s agents come to realize the ineptness of their agency and its unwillingness to carry out what the spy thinks is just. As a result, these novels’ main characters often rebel against their agency and become vigilantes setting out to settle personal scores. These novels also continue to reflect a cynicism regarding patriotism and agency loyalty and focus on the mole, the defector, the double agent, and the traitor within. Most notably, the main villains in these novels are not the Soviets, the Germans, or the Chinese but, rather, conspiracyplotting members of the protagonist’s own intelligence agency. Examples of such stories include Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File (1968), in which the hero’s own section chief proves to be a double agent, and Robert Duncan’s Dragons at the Gate (1976), which features a CIA agent stationed in Japan betrayed and interrogated by his own agency. Likewise, James Grady’s Six Days of the Condor (1974) centers around a CIA analyst who leaves one day for lunch only to return and find everyone in his office murdered. Although the analyst manages to escape the initial raid, he must remain on the run for the next six days while a renegade group affiliated with the CIA hunts him down for one of his discoveries. Trends and Themes. Spy novels have often focused on the possibility of one’s own colleague being the enemy, but for most of its history, the spy genre has chosen Germans, Soviets, and Communists for its villains and has rooted itself in the Cold War conflict. However, the end of WWII and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left subsequent spy authors without a viable, contemporary villain. Many critics writing between the end of the Cold War and the events of September 11, 2001, questioned whether the spy genre could survive as a literary form without an archenemy, especially given the U.S. government’s serious consideration of abandoning the Central Intelligence Agency after the USSR’s dissolution. Commenting on the waning popularity of the spy genre, which during the Cold War ranked as an international top-reading choice, with tens of millions of copies sold annually, The New York Times critic, Walter Goodman, announced in November 1989 that “The future looks dismal for the trenchcoat set” (Lynds n.d.). Goodman’s assessment, which came the same month that the Berlin Wall crumbled, proved accurate for the short term, as sales of bestselling thriller authors plummeted and new authors struggled to find publishing homes. By 1998, two spy fiction icons, Frederick Forsyth and John le Carré had even declared that it was time to accept the fact that the genre was no longer interesting to readers and both began publishing in other fields.

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But despite the genre’s waning popularity, publishers continued to release the works of those authors who had been highly popular during the Cold War, including Nelson DeMille, W.E.B. Griffin, and David Morrell. A handful of new authors were also able to find success in the genre between 1991 and 2000, including Gayle Lynds, Daniel Silva, Joseph Finder, and Henry Porter, but many of these authors’ works continue to revisit the terrain of WWII, the Cold War, and the Soviets, rather than focusing on new threats. To cite just two examples, Porter’s The Brandenburg Gate (2006) is set in East Germany during the waning days of 1989 and tells the story of a scholar, Dr. Rudi Rosenharte, whose family is being held hostage by the Stasi until he agrees to take part in a dangerous mission, whereas Finder’s Moscow Club (1995) explores the connections between the Kremlin and U.S. big business after the fall of the Iron Curtain and focuses on a CIA Kremlinologist, Charlie Stone, targeted by both the KGB and the CIA after analyzing a tape provided by a Russian mole. As recently as 2004, the genre’s sustainability was again in question, as reviewers such as Charles McGrath worried that the genre was not keeping up with the current political tides. Writing in The New York Times, McGrath specifically remarked: “What’s odd is that most of our thriller writers—the people who in the past have taught us most of what we know about intelligence gathering and intelligence failure—don’t seem to be interested in the post-9/11 landscape. . . . [T]hey’re writing instead about corporate espionage and theological cover-ups in the Middle Ages. To understand what’s going on in the world, . . . we readers now have to turn to nonfiction” (Lynds n.d.). Despite McGrath’s assertions, however, the spy genre has tackled the post-9/11 landscape and shows signs of flourishing once more. According to PW Newsline, the “espionage/thriller” category experienced a 34 percent increase in sales in 2003—a trend recognized in 2004 by Tom Nolan who remarked in The Wall Street Journal that the form appeared to be thriving once again (Lynds n.d.). Part of the spy fiction revival can be attributed to the events of 9/11, which once again brought issues of intelligence to the forefront of international discussion. As spy fiction writer Gayle Lynds writes, “After those horrifying attacks, Americans abruptly shook off their post–Cold War exhaustion and resumed a vigorous interest in the world at large, searching for information and, ultimately, understanding of what had happened, why it had happened, and what to do about it.” (Lynds n.d.) Given that spy fiction is rooted in international politics, conspiracies, secret worlds, and the possibility of large-scale atrocities, the genre was ripe to tackle the post-9/11 landscape, and in March 2005, Edward Wyatt of The New York Times acknowledged that it was among one of the first fictional forms to do so (Lynds n.d.). But although spy authors writing since 2000 have begun exploring the fallout of 9/11, including the broader issues of international terrorism and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the genre’s writers have also tackled other contemporary issues—most notably the political, economic, and social crises occurring in Africa and industrial espionage conducted by multinational companies. Reception. Since the late 1990s, the spy genre has not only enjoyed a revival in print but also a resurgence in film and television. Television shows such as La Femme Nikita (1997–2001), Alias (2001-2006), 24 (2001–2006), The Agency (2001), and Spooks (MI-5) (2002–) have tackled issues of international terrorism, defectors, doppelgangers, torture, and the moral complexity of espionage whereas films have worked to revive older franchises and novels. Two of the most popular

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spy films, for instance, are The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy, which are loosely based on two 1980s novels by Robert Ludlum bearing the same title. Likewise, Tom Cruise has continued to star in the Mission: Impossible franchise, and the most recent James Bond installment, Casino Royale, debuted in 2006 to popular acclaim. The genre has also enjoyed acclaim from the film industry. Steven Spielberg’s Munich (2005), which focuses on the Mossad’s attempt to avenge the 1972 assassination of eleven Israeli Olympians, was nominated for five Academy Awards and two Golden Globes in 2005. Like many recent spy novels, the film calls into question the moral complexities of espionage, in this case as it relates to governmentsponsored revenge. George Clooney’s Syriana won the actor an Academy Award for best supporting actor, and the film was also nominated for best original screenplay. Drawing from recent concerns regarding the role of the United States in the Middle East and its dependence on oil, Syriana tells the story of corruption and power related to the oil industry, warns of the peril of backing foreign political leaders for economic gain, and explores the ways a severe lack of economic opportunities fosters the spread of terrorism and religious fundamentalism. Also of note is the 2005 release of The Constant Gardner, an adaptation of John le Carré’s 2001 novel of the same title, starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz. The film and cast both won and were nominated for several industry awards, including The Academy Award’s category for Best Supporting Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay, The BAFTA’s [British Academy of Film and Television Arts] category for Best Film, and The Golden Globe’s for Best Motion Picture—Drama and Best Director—Motion Picture. Interest in espionage has also filtered into other areas of popular culture. In 2002 the International Spy Museum opened its doors in Washington, D.C. It is the first and only public museum in the United States solely dedicated to espionage and features the largest collection of international spy-related artifacts ever placed on public display. The stories of individual spies are told through film, interactives, and state-of-the-art exhibits, and visitors also learn about basic spy tradecraft and espionage technological gadgetry. Similar museums exist domestically and internationally, including Moscow’s KGB Museum, an exhibit within London’s Imperial War Museum, and the National Security Agency’s National Cryptologic Museum, but unlike the International Spy Museum, they focus on a specific time period or event. In 2007 an espionage theme park, entitled Spyland, was set to open near Valence, France, and a sister project is under way in Dubai. These theme parks will include roller coaster and water park rides in an environment that illustrates the historical actions of secret agents, the role played by different international spy agencies, and the role spying has played in popular culture. Visitors will be able to access workshops that demonstrate ancient and recent spying techniques, including coding, hidden microphones and cameras, and satellite imagery, and games will be organized for visitors to play the role of a secret agent, with a mission to fulfill, while visiting the amusement park. Selected Authors. Due to the resurgence in the spy genre, several new authors have entered into print in the last decade, including Daniel Silva, Alex Berenson, Jenny Siler, Joseph Kanon, Francine Mathews, Robert Cullen, Vince Flynn, Brad Thor, Brian Haig, and Raelynn Hillhouse. Spy masters Frederick Forsyth and John le Carré have also returned to the genre, and writers associated with more

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“literary” endeavors have tried their hand at spy and thriller fiction in recent years. This last category of authors most notably includes Australian/American author Janet Turner Hospital and John Updike, best known for his works exploring middle American suburbia. In 2006 Updike released The Terrorist, a thriller that revolves around Ahmad, the 18-year-old son of a hippieish American mother and an Egyptian exchange student, who embraces Islam and is eventually recruited to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel. Turner Hospital’s Due Preparation for the Plague was published in 2003 and focuses on the intertwined fates of the survivors and relatives of those who perished in the 1987 hijacking of Flight 64. In addition to addressing the effects of terrorism on its victims’ family, the work also addresses contemporary fears and concerns regarding chemical weapons and the government’s ability to stop terrorist attacks. John le Carré’s new contributions to the spy genre exemplify contemporary authors’ interest in exploring the African terrain, and two of his last three novels have been set in the continent—The Constant Gardner (2000) and Mission Song (2006). The first focuses on British diplomat Justin Quayle, who is serving in Nairobi when his wife Tessa is raped and murdered during a recent and mysterious visit to Kenya. In his efforts to solve Tessa’s murder, Quayle learns that his wife had been compiling data to implicate a multinational drug company using Africans as guinea pigs to test a tuberculosis remedy with fatal side effects. Her report, however, also implicates the British government in the drug scandal, and as Quayle gets closer to the truth, he realizes he is treading in his own government’s murky waters. Le Carré’s more recent novel, Mission Song, is more lighthearted than The Constant Gardner but nonetheless explores the terrain of Africa, although none of the action is actually set there. More specifically, the novel’s protagonist, Bruno Salvador, is a young Congo native whose fluency in English, French, and several African languages, lands him work with the British Secret Service, which employs him to act as a translator at a secret meeting between Congolese warlords and a shadowy syndicate of Western financiers attempting to bring democracy and economic opportunity to the area. Much like in The Constant Gardener, the villain in Mission Song is a multinational corporation that adheres to no moral or geographic boundaries in its attempt to turn a profit, and le Carré reminds readers in both works that Africa, much like in colonial times, remains a temptation for outsiders who wish to both save and plunder the continent. Like le Carré, spy master Frederick Forsyth has returned to the genre in recent years. One of his most recent works, Avenger (2003), focuses on vigilante Cal Dexter’s pursuit of a Serbian warlord named Zoran Zilic, who escaped Europe with a fortune but not before killing an American aid worker, whose billionaire grandfather now wishes to have Zilic brought to justice. However, this task is complicated by the fact that Zilic is protected in a South American jungle compound by an FBI agent who wishes to use the warlord in order to kill Osama bin Laden, and, in part, the novel, which takes place within weeks of 9/11 and ends on September 10, 2001, explores the moral quagmire of dealing with criminals in order to capture larger ones. Forsyth also tackles issues surrounding the attacks of 9/11 in his latest book The Afghan (2006), which begins when a plan to carry out a catastrophic attack on the West is discovered on the computer of a senior al-Qaeda member. In order to combat the further threat of terrorism, the American and British intelligence community attempt to substitute a British operative for an Afghan Taliban leader

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being held prisoner at Guantánamo Bay and then arrange his release into Afghan custody. The hero must maintain his cover under the closest scrutiny, even as the details of the planned attack are kept beyond his reach. Like Forsyth, younger spy novelists have also addressed issues surrounding 9/11. For instance, Alex Berenson’s The Faithful Spy (2006) draws upon The New York Times reporter’s experience covering the Iraq occupation to tell the fictional story of John Wells, the only American CIA agent ever to penetrate al-Qaeda. Before the attacks on 9/11, Wells had been building his cover in the mountains of Pakistan, but is now ordered home by an al-Qaeda leader planning more attacks on the United States. However, the CIA doesn’t know if they can trust Wells any longer, given that he has become a Muslim since living in Pakistan and now finds the United States decadent and shallow, and thus the story grapples with Muslim-American relations in the post 9/11 world, in addition to the likelihood of another al-Qaeda attack on U.S. soil. Of course, not all spy novelists have abandoned the historical conflicts of the Cold War and the Second World War. Daniel Silva is perhaps one of the most celebrated new authors to enter the spy scene, and his works include The Secret Servant (2007), The Messenger (2006), The Confessor (2003), The English Assassin (2002), The Kill Artist (2000), and The Unlikely Spy (1996) among others. In general, Silva’s novels explore past conflicts, but especially WWII, and often trace their effects to the present day. For instance, Silva’s Unlikely Spy mines the territory of WWII in an historical thriller that centers around the Allies’ plans to invade Normandy, whereas The Confessor examines Pope Pius XII’s silence and lack of action during the Holocaust. Four-time spy novelist Joseph Kanon has also been successful publishing historical novels that revisit WWII and the Cold War. His works include Los Alamos (1997), The Prodigal Spy (1998), The Good German (2001), and Alibi: A Novel (2005) and adopt a postmodern lens through which to view the ethical dilemmas proposed by each conflict. For instance, The Good German (which was made into a film in 2006 starring George Clooney and Cate Blanchett) is set in Berlin just several months after the end of the Second World War, and Jake Geismar, a journalist covering the Potsdam Conference, becomes intrigued by the murder of an American soldier whose body washes ashore near the conference grounds. When the military is slow to investigate or provide any details of the murder, Geismar is convinced that a big story looms in the air, but the investigation really serves as Kanon’s tool to explore the ethical quandaries of German Nazism, the nation’s collective guilt, and the hard ethical dilemmas of the times. Likewise, Los Alamos, which won the 1998 Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and The Prodigal Spy explore the ethical dilemmas experienced by the scientists developing the atomic bomb and the personal effects felt by a family targeted by McCarthyism, respectively. Finally, it is important to note that numerous women have begun to experience success in what was once a heavily male-dominated genre. Most notably, these authors include Francine Mathews (a former CIA analyst), Raelynn Hillhouse, and Gayle Lynds (who cowrote several books with Robert Ludlum in addition to her own novels). These women often create stories that revolve around female protagonists, long absent within the genre, while simultaneously addressing some of the most pressing contemporary issues. For instance, Hillhouse’s Outsourced (2007) revolves around a manager of a private military corporation named Camille Black, who is approached by the CIA to track down and eliminate a man accused of

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selling arms to terrorist cells throughout the Middle East. That man also happens to be her ex-fiancé, and so the novel explores not only Black’s private, personal thoughts but also the role intelligence outsourcing is playing in the War on Terror. Mathews’s Blown (2005) likewise centers on a female protagonist, Caroline Carmichael, who is about to resign from the CIA when the first reports of a terrorist attack pour in, and she instantly recognizes the hand of an enemy she’s battled for years: the 30 April Organization, a neo-Nazi group operating in the United States. Complicating the story is the fact that Caroline’s husband, Eric, has infiltrated the terrorist group but has had his cover blown. Arrested in Germany as a 30 April operative, Eric cannot help Caroline, who must work to save both her husband and her country. Bibliography Berenson, Alex. The Faithful Spy. New York: Random House, 2006. Finder, Joseph. Moscow Club. New York: Viking, 1991. Forsyth, Frederick. Avenger. New York: Thomas Dunne, 2003. ———. The Afghan. New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 2006. Hillhouse, Raelynn. Outsourced. New York: Forge, 2007. Hitz, Frederick. The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. Hospital, Janette Turner. Due Preparations for the Plague. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. Kanon, Joseph. The Good German. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. ———. The Prodigal Spy. New York: Broadway, 1998. ———. Los Alamos. New York: Broadway, 1997. Le Carré, John. Mission Song. Boston: Little, Brown, 2006. ———. The Constant Gardener. New York: Scribner, 2001. Lynds, Gayle. “Spy Thrillers Thrive & Surprise.” www.thrillwriters.org. Viewed March 2, 2007. http://www.thrillerwriters.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=23& Itemid=61. Mathews, Francine. Blown. New York: Bantam, 2005. Porter, Henry. The Brandenburg Gate. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2006. Silva, Daniel. The Confessor. New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 2003. ———. The Unlikely Spy. New York: Villard, 1996. Updike, John. The Terrorist. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

Further Reading Atkins, John. The British Spy Novel: Styles in Treachery. New York: Riverrun Press, 1984; Bloom, Clive, ed. Spy Thrillers: From Buchan to le Carré. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990; Britton, Wesley. Beyond Bond: Spies in Fiction and Film. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2005; Cawelti, John, and Bruce Rosenberg. The Spy Story. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987; Panek, Leroy. The Special Branch: The British Spy Novel, 1890–1980. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1981.

TRICIA JENKINS

SUSPENSE FICTION Definition. To label a novel as being a work of suspense is to consign it to a vague place that is hard to define. Readers know suspense when they encounter it, but are hard pressed to explain what elements define the genre. Comprising such varied titles as Thomas Harris’s novels about serial killer Hannibal Lecter, Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, and Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley series, the genre encompasses romantic suspense, medical and legal thrillers, psychological suspense, political

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ELEMENTS OF SUSPENSE FICTION By and large, certain elements of suspense can be identified and appear in the various subcategories of the genre. Brian Garfield’s advice to aspiring authors in the magazine Writer’s Digest offers several devices that are common to suspense fiction: danger exists, whether of the readily identifiable sort or a more vague uneasiness; the time period over which events unfold is brief; the protagonist is often drawn into the adventure through no volition of his own; and there is a villain of monumental proportions (Moore n.d.). The romantic suspense novel adds its own twists with romantic entanglements that prove dangerous to the heroine, the conspiracy thriller wraps the protagonist up in matters that are historically or politically significant, and medical thrillers throw in a community ravished by, or in danger of being ravished by, a terrible disease.

thrillers, and conspiracy thrillers. Suspense fiction focusing on technology and military exploits can fall into this genre as well. Each category has its own elements that add to the basic suspense devices to create distinct genres; however, cross pollination is rife and, as a result, new categories are born. The following categories are the most frequently marketed: romantic suspense, medical thrillers, legal thrillers, psychological suspense, political thrillers, techno thrillers, and conspiracy thrillers. The spy novel is another genre that uses elements of suspense. History. Writers such as Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens could be considered the grandfathers of the genre, but Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903) is often cited as the first modern thriller. In true suspense fashion, two young men accidentally become involved in a German plot to invade England. More aligned with suspense crime fiction, John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) is about an innocent man who becomes entangled in a homicide and is pursued by the good and the bad guys. Robert Ludlum defined the modern thriller with The Bourne Identity, published in 1980. A man wakes with amnesia and is startled to find that he has arms and fighting knowledge. His quest is to find his identity while eluding those who don’t want him to remember. There are three major elements of suspense fiction: 1) the idea that time is ticking for the hero and that a resolution must be found quickly, 2) the hero must face grave danger, even though he often doesn’t know what he has done to put himself into danger or from whom or what the danger arises, and 3) the hero must rely on his own instinct and courage to both solve the mystery and to keep himself alive. To these basic elements are added the subgenre twists of romance, technology, science, and so on. Trends and Themes Romantic Suspense. In 1960 America’s Phyllis Whitney’s Thunder Heights and Britain’s Victoria Holt’s Mistress of Mellyn ushered in the age of the Gothic romance. Working with the conventions established by eighteenth-century authors such as Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto, 1764), Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794), and Matthew G. Lewis (The Monk, 1796), these novelists, along with such luminaries as Barbara Michaels and Mary Stewart, dominated paperback sales of the modern Gothic from 1969 to 1974.

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The conventions of the gothic genre have been incorporated into romantic suspense. A young heroine is removed to an isolated landscape, generally an old family mansion haunted with ghosts and shadowy crimes. In her isolation she must rely on one of two men to help her. One is the villain and one is the hero, and it is usually not clear until the book’s end which is which. There are answers to be found about old crimes or the heroine’s past, the answers to which place her in danger. Modern romantic suspense novelists have created heroines with more pluck and they often solve their own problems. Romance, however, is still important to the plots. Phyllis A. Whitney is considered the reigning queen of romantic suspense in a writing career that began in the 1940s with the publication of mysteries for teenagers. She has published over 70 novels. She exerts enormous effort to get the scenic details of her far-flung locations just right, and that exertion has paid off in over five decades of favorable reviews and millions of fans of her romance novels. By the 1980s the gothic genre was losing popularity, but the category of romantic suspense was just coming into its own. Whitney’s novels began being marketed under the new category. The genre under which she is marketed may have changed names, but the formula of Whitney’s novels didn’t. She adheres to the elements of gothic/suspense fiction, following in the footsteps of Charlotte Bronte and Daphne DuMaurier. Although Phyllis A. Whitney has not published a novel since 1997’s Amethyst Dreams, she is still at her writing desk, working on an autobiography at the age of 103. Her contributions to the romantic suspense genre have been widespread and almost unfathomably influential. Barbara Michaels (who also writes as Elizabeth Peters) has produced dozens of romantic suspense novels, some featuring paranormal or supernatural plot elements. Until 1999, Michaels penned a Michaels and Peters novel almost every year. Usually set in the present, the past has a large claim on the plots and the subsequent solution to the story’s mysteries. Michaels told Diane Rehm in a 2001 interview that she loves to read and write gothic romances, although she doesn’t care to have that label attached to her novels. “‘Romantic Suspense’ is another term which has been applied to my books and those of other women writers. It is marginally more acceptable than gothic” (Rehm 2001). Michaels is quick to point out, though, that the romance in a story is important. Using the formula of the gothic novel, Michaels twists that genre’s elements to suit her own style. Her heroines rely less on the hero to rescue them from their situations and more on their own resolve and pluck. Other Worlds (1999) was the last title published under the Michaels name, although Elizabeth Peters novels are still released on a yearly basis. Sandra Brown began her writing career producing Harlequin romances but quickly moved on to writing longer, less formulaic contemporary romance novels. She is now best known for her romantic suspense, most of which involve the heroines uncovering family secrets for which others will kill. Brown is praised for her fast-paced and twisting plots that usually leave the best secrets until the final pages. Her latest, Play Dirty (2007), depicts the framing of a disgraced Dallas Cowboys football player who must find his nemesis before he is killed. Although reviewers fault Mary Higgins Clark’s writing style, they find nothing negative to say about her plots. Clark’s two dozen novels all tap into the gothic formula of heroine in trouble with nothing to rely on but her own inner fortitude. Her debut suspense novel was Where Are the Children (1975), a terrifying story of

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the disappearance of a woman’s children. Her second attempt at suspense fiction was A Stranger Is Watching (1978), which proved her formula’s success. Clark has followed her initial success with 20 more novels. Her villains are evil and her heroes are good; her writing is simple, and her plots breathlessly fast. Most of Clark’s novels are set in high society New York and all involve dangers. Many of her earlier novels involved young children in danger, but in recent years Clark has expanded her stories with plots such as financial conspiracies on Wall Street (Second Time Around, 2003) and serial stalkers (Nighttime Is My Time, 2004). She has also coauthored novels with her daughter, Carol Higgins Clark. The formula has paid off with her books seeing time on the best-sellers’ lists and also air time: many have been made into movies. Catherine Coulter is another author who began writing romances in the Regency category and then moved on to suspense. Riptide (2000) received excellent reviews as Coulter adapted to a novel form that was more suspense than romance. The fifth of her FBI adventures featuring agents Savich and Sherlock, Riptide features classic suspense traits: disbelieving and unsympathetic police, the heroine’s move to an isolated spot, and threatening phone calls. In an interview with Publishers Weekly, Coulter addressed some of the concerns of moving from romance to suspense. She said that suspense plots have to be more tightly written than those of the historical romances she penned formerly. The logic of the situation has to be observed as well (Yamashita 2003, 55). This attention to plot and detail has made her FBI suspense series very successful. The most recent title in the series is Tailspin (2008). Tami Hoag made the shift from romance to suspense in the 1990s. Her strength is the amount of detail that goes into her novels. They are well researched and supply the background to the often gruesome crimes in which her characters are involved. Some of her issues are sensitive topics. For example, Ashes to Ashes (1999) and its sequel Dust to Dust (2000) explore attitudes toward crime victims, prostitutes in the first novel and a gay officer in the second. Hoag’s well-developed characters have won her a legion of fans for her 30 books. The Alibi Man (2007), was well received by critics. Moving into romantic suspense after a strong career in historical romances, Iris Johansen creates a taut thriller involving a Greek archaeological dig, a Scottish castle, and terrorists intent on blowing up a nuclear power plant in Countdown (2005). More suspense novels followed the commercial success of the Ugly Duckling (1991). Long after Midnight (1997), No One to Trust (2002), and Final Target (2001) feature such various plots as corporate corruption, Colombian drug lords, and attempted kidnapping of the president’s daughter. In Fatal Tide (2003), a woman who had been sold into white slavery teams up with an ex-navy SEAL to find a secret weapon, with the help of dolphins, before the weapon’s Middle Eastern developers do. Such wild plots are anchored with well-developed characters, and Johansen’s appeal to readers is great. A prolific author, she released four titles in 2006 alone. Bestselling romance writer Nora Roberts writes romantic suspense in the line of Mary Stewart under the name J.D. Robb, a combination of her sons’ initials. The futuristic In Death series features police officer Eve Dallas and her husband Roarke. The twenty-seventh installment is Salvation in Death (2008). Medical Thrillers. Although Michael Crichton is perhaps best known for his adventure fiction Jurassic Park, his earlier novels, many written under the pseudonym John Lange, were thrillers written while he was medical school in the 1960s. Some

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of these titles involved medicine-inspired plots. His 1968 A Case of Need, filled with details from his work at the Harvard Medical School, won him an Edgar Award. It was The Andromeda Strain, published in 1969, that pushed him into a full-time writing career. In the novel, biophysicists race to track down the source of a deadly virus. The book was praised for its technical detail and its pacing and set the stage for the medical thriller genre, in particular the plague novels of such authors as Robin Cook. Robin Cook is a practicing doctor who debuted with Coma (1977), which was made into a successful film written by Michael Crichton in 1978. All of Cook’s titles feature medical crises in hospital environments or in the devastated public sector as mysterious viruses spread. The 1987 Outbreak and the 1995 Contagion are two titles in the epidemic subgenre. Several other titles have had plots revolving around fertility technology that has been abused in frightening ways (Mutation, 1989; Vital Signs, 1990). In 1999, Cook introduced medical examiner Jack Stapleton, who, along with partner Laurie Montgomery, feature in several more titles. Foreign Bodies (2008) is Cook’s twenty-eighth medical thriller. Michael Palmer spent 20 years working as a physician and has used his medical background in his more than a dozen medical thrillers. His 2008 First Patient follows the adventures of the President of the United States’s best friend who takes on the job of being the President’s personal physician after his successor disappears. It appears his friend is going insane and that someone, or something, is behind the President’s failing mental health. Tess Gerristsen’s heroines serve in various medical capacities: surgeons, emergency room doctors, and medical examiners. A long time author of romantic suspense, Gerritsen moved into the genre of medical thrillers with Harvest (1996). Set in a Boston hospital, the plot involves the unraveling of a secret by a surgical resident. She introduces Detective Jane Rizolli in The Surgeon (2002), and Rizzoli teams up with medical examiner Maura Isles in The Sinner (2003). The partnership continues in several more titles. Gerritsen’s novels are praised for their ability to offer far-fetched plots that seem believable. Meticulously researched, Gerritsen’s highly detailed medical scenes add credibility to the suspense and horror readers feel. Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs are two more authors who critics consistently praise for their extensive details. Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta is a medical examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia, and Reichs’s Tempe Brennan works in both Charlotte, North Carolina, and Quebec, Canada, as a forensic anthropologist. Details of crime scenes and the work that goes on in the morgues are vital to understanding the plots of these authors’ books, and both are authorities in their fields. Cornwell’s work in the medical examiner’s office lends credibility to her characters’ knowledge of forensic science, police work, and the political machinations of state agency employees. Her 1990 Postmortem introduced mystery readers to the world of forensic mysteries. Postmortem is followed by over a dozen more Scarpetta novels, following the medical examiner as she moves to various states, working in various capacities to solve crimes. The suspense in Cornwell’s novels focuses on Scarpetta as she finds herself in dangerous situations due to her inability to leave an investigation alone. In true gothic fashion, she often needs help to extricate herself from a bad situation, but in some installments, she has drawn on her own resourcefulness. Reichs’s experience in the field has helped her books about Temperance “Tempe” Brennan rival those of Cornwell. Brennan debuted in Deja Dead (1997), where

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readers were also introduced to Brennan’s archenemy, Montreal Police Inspector Luc Claudel. Grisly forensic details are based on Reichs’s own examination of bodies far too decomposed to be identified by pathologists. It is Reichs’s ability to combine explanations of forensic procedures with strong storylines that have captured an ever-increasing fan base for her novels. The television series, Bones, is based on Reichs and her character. The tenth Brennan installment is Devil Bones (2008). Karin Slaughter has created Sara Linton, another medical examiner, who is also a pediatrician in a small Georgia town. Six novels have featured Linton, the most recent Beyond Reach (2007). Legal Thrillers. Legal thrillers are popular with mystery readers because the pursuit of justice is usually local and based on a particular crime. John Grisham, a former Mississippi attorney and author of almost 20 best-selling novels, most of which are legal thrillers, has said, “Though Americans distrust the profession as a whole, we have an insatiable appetite for stories about crimes, criminals, trials and all sorts of juicy lawyer stuff” (Grisham 1992, 33). As early as Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, the legal thriller was appearing in the marketplace to great popular success. For example, Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) and The Woman in White (1859) contain elements of a legal thriller: an innocent person, the criminal justice system (legal proceedings and courtroom drama) playing an intrinsic part of the storyline (also in Dickens’s Bleak House [1853]), witness testimony, legal documents (wills, etc.), and lawyers assisting in solving the crime. In the 1930s Erle Stanley Gardner, a practicing attorney, became one of the most prolific and popular authors of courtroom dramas with his creation of Perry Mason. Many authors of legal thrillers are former attorneys themselves. Grisham, Scott Turow, Richard North Patterson, and Steve Martini are five of the most recognized attorney/authors in the genre. It was Turow’s 1987 Presumed Innocent that opened the floodgates to courtroom dramas. Turow’s first novel, One-L (1977) was written while Turow was a law student at Harvard and documented the difficulties of law school. Presumed Innocent was published while Turow was working as an assistant U.S. district attorney in Chicago. The novel was well-received and its publisher, Farrar, Strauss, paid more money for the title than they ever had for a book by a first-time author. Their risk paid off as Presumed Innocent hit the bestseller lists. The novel was praised for its insight into the legal system and its refusal to divide the world into simplistic fields of black and white, good and evil. The film, starring Harrison Ford, was released in 1990. Turow’s most recent title is Ordinary Heroes (2005). John Grisham’s first novel, A Time to Kill (1989), was inspired by a courtroom case. His 1994 The Chamber garnered more critical acclaim than some of the earlier titles. Grisham’s novels, although sometimes criticized for their unrealistic plots, are almost always noted for their characterization and their intense pace. These two elements have led to several of Grisham’s titles, among them A Time to Kill, The Firm (1991), and The Pelican Brief (1992), being made into blockbuster films. His latest is The Appeal (2008). Before turning to fiction writing, Richard North Patterson was a successful lawyer who worked for the prosecution on the Watergate case of the 1970s. His literary career took off after the publication of his second novel, Degree of Guilt (1992). The common thread in Patterson’s mysteries is the attention paid to the legal system. In the Conviction (2005), an eleven-year-old conviction is re-investigated; Balance

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of Power (2003) combines politics and law in issues about gun control; and in Exile (2007) the Middle East of today’s headlines is at the center of attorney David Wolfe’s most difficult case. Steve Martini is a former journalist and attorney. His skills combine to make him one of the foremost authors of courtroom drama. Most of Martini’s titles feature attorney Paul Madriani, whose cases are always part of a larger, more corrupt, political scene. He has been praised for his “torn from the headlines” plots and exceptionally well-drawn and exciting courtroom pyrotechnics. Shadow of Power (2008) is the ninth Madriani installment. As in forensic mysteries, the authors of legal thrillers must clearly explain the points of law upon which a case rests. Legal mysteries often focus on glitches in the legal system or the manipulation of the law by shady attorneys. The protagonists themselves are usually of two types, the idealistic young attorney who is up against a corrupt system, or a jaded lawyer who is closer to the wrong side of the law than to the right. Michael Connelly has created Michael Haller, who is an example of the latter type in The Lincoln Lawyer (2005). Female authors have cornered a large sector of the legal thriller market as well. Lia Matera began publishing fiction after law school, creating the characters Willa Jansson and Laura Di Palma, who have starred in over a dozen titles. Lisa Scottoline is another former lawyer who sets her novels in Philadelphia. Her novels about the all female law firm Rosato and Associates have won her many awards. Psychological Suspense. Psychological suspense is a fairly vague term. Most novels that fall into this category have characters, usually two, who are testing themselves against their intellectual counterparts. Frequently a criminal will pit his wits against his pursuer. The most famous example is Thomas Harris’s serial killer Hannibal Lector in The Silence of the Lambs (1988). Imprisoned Lector offers to help FBI Agent Clarice Starling to catch another serial killer known as Buffalo Bill. He plays many mind games with the vulnerable Starling, and the tension mounts as she confronts the killer and Lector escapes. Almost every author creating a serial killer since Harris has had to compete with Lector’s presence. Jonathan Kellerman, Jeffrey Deaver, and James Patterson are three writers who have been able to compete successfully with Harris. Jonathan Kellerman has banked on his expertise as a child psychologist to create 22 novels featuring child psychologist Alex Delaware. Delaware debuts in When the Bough Breaks (1985). Like Mary Higgins Clark, Kellerman writes about topical issues. His first Delaware novel, though written before the infamous McMartin Preschool scandal in California, reflected that case’s focus on sexually abused children being the only witnesses to crimes. Abused children are often the only leads to crimes in Kellerman’s novels, and it is Delaware’s job to find out what they know. Suspicion of parents heightens the suspense in a Kellerman novel and the struggle over the validity of a child’s testimony that may ruin an innocent adult’s life is the focus of Bad Love (1993). Most of Kellerman’s victims are children, but a death bed confession troubles a young woman in Kellerman’s twenty-first Delaware novel Obsession (2007). Although he has written over 20 suspense novels, Jeffery Deaver is best known for his novels about Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs. The pair debuted in The Bone Collector (1997), made into a film starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. The fast pace and the intricacy of Deaver’s plots plant him firmly in the suspense tradition but also give a nod to the police procedural with his close focus on

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forensic investigation. Deaver’s plots lead in many twisting directions and the final one is always kept until the end. Critics found him to be too heavy-handed and overly complex in The Twelfth Card (2005), but entertaining nonetheless. The author is also noted for his character development and ability to create convincing dialogue. The characters of Sachs and Rhyme grow over the course of the series as they face Rhyme’s medical problems. Quadriplegic as a result of an accident while investigating a crime scene, Rhyme has a crime lab set up in his New York apartment geared to his needs. Sachs, a police officer, walks the crime scenes for him, reporting back what she sees. The two become lovers and face the obstacles that his health issues and her personal issues bring to the relationship. In many of his interviews, Deaver has said that he creates books based on his reader’s wishes. They wish for more Rhyme and Sachs novels and number eight was released in 2008, The Broken Window. The author of dozens of novels and two ongoing series, James Patterson’s Alex Cross novels have gained him his largest number of fans. Along Came a Spider introduced Cross in 1992. The first 11 Cross novels are called the “Nursery Rhyme” novels for their titles. After Mary, Mary (2005), the novel titles began to feature Cross’s name. The latest is Cross Country (2008). Alex Cross is an African American forensic psychologist who is raising his two children alone in Washington, D.C. A very sensitive man, Cross becomes deeply involved both physically and emotionally in his cases, and he frequently becomes a target for violence himself. Noted for his short quick scenes, Patterson has developed a tense style that appeals to readers and translates well for moviegoers. Kiss the Girls (1997) and Along Came a Spider (2001) were both made into films starring Morgan Freeman as Cross. Political Thrillers. Power struggles involving national or international politics make for tautly suspenseful novels as terrorists, power hungry dictators, and drug and weapon cartels clash. Times of war create another dimension to power struggles with spies added to the mix. A final element often present in political thrillers is technology and its use and misuse by those trying to gain or maintain power. Vince Flynn published his debut novel about Minneapolis, Term Limits, in 1997. Since then he has written eight novels featuring such topics as the sale of arms to Iraq (The Third Option, 2000) and the race to prevent Saddam Hussein from using nuclear weapons in Separation of Power (2001). The 2004 Memorial Day moves from the Middle East to the United States as the hero tries to stop terrorists who have brought bombs into the country. In Stephen Frey’s The Fourth Order (2007), 150 years after the establishment of The Order, a government agency put in place after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the group excels in global surveillance and information gathering. Frey’s novels such as The Power Broker (2006) and The Successor (2007) combine corporate greed with the lust for political power. Techno and Military Thrillers. Michael Crichton may well be the undisputed master of the modern adventure thriller. His wide-ranging plots, from the 1855 London train robbery of The Great Train Robbery (1975), to the H. Rider Haggard-inspired lost world of King Solomon’s mines (Congo, 1980), to a theme park gone awry featuring cloned dinosaurs (Jurassic Park, 1990), are suspenseful and loved by his millions of fans worldwide. Along with Tom Clancy, however, he is considered the master of the techno thriller. Techno thrillers are those whose plots rest on elements of technology: computer, military, biological, and so on. The technology is usually futuristic, but just barely so.

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Although DNA technology was behind the creation of modern day dinosaurs, the dinosaurs, not the technology for creating them, predominated. The 1992 Rising Sun moved technological cover-ups and political machinations on the parts of both the Japanese and the Americans to the fore. The technological accuracy of Airframe (1996) was a result of the in-depth research Crichton does for all his novels. State of Fear (2004) provides a look at information manipulation and Next (2006) follows the creation of a human/chimp hybrid. Tom Clancy broke onto the bestseller lists with his 1984 publication of The Hunt for Red October, later made into a film starring Sean Connery. He is best known for his post-Cold War thrillers featuring former Marine Jack Ryan, although he has written other action thrillers with Martin H. Greenberg. Dale Brown is a former Air Force captain who now writes military thrillers featuring Patrick McLanahan. Strike Force (2007) is Brown’s latest. A geopolitical novel with a plot set in Iran and involving cutting edge military technology, Strike Force is the twelfth McLanahan installment. Stephen Coonts’s hero is Admiral Jack Grafton. Liberty (2007), the latest installment, leads readers on a whirlwind trail of devastation as Grafton makes enemies in the CIA, FBI, and every other law enforcement agency he can alienate as he attempts to locate terrorists before they detonate their bombs on American soil. Conspiracy Thriller. The conspiracy thriller is a category of suspense fiction in which the hero finds himself embroiled in a secret society or organization that threatens the fate of the nation, and sometimes the world. In this category, only the hero realizes the extent to which the world is in danger and cannot prove his allegations. He must work alone or with a sidekick, romantic or otherwise, to stop the danger. Early examples of the genre include The Manchurian Candidate (1952) by Richard Condon and The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1976–1977) by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. The biggest conspiracy thriller to date is Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003). This phenomenal best seller features symbologist Robert Langdon’s race to solve a centuries old mystery involving the Holy Grail and the Knights Templar among other elements. Time is short as Langdon and the granddaughter of a murdered Louvre curator race around France and Rome trying to find the Grail before their enemies do. The thriller was made into a 2006 film starring Tom Hanks. Bibliography Grisham, John. “The Rise of the Legal Thriller: Why Lawyers are Throwing the Books at Us.” New York Times, Book Review Section. 18 Oct. 1992: 33. Moore, Joe. “Ten Rules for Suspense Fiction by Brian Garfield.” http://www.thrillerwriters. org/2008/03/ten-rules-for-suspense-fiction-by-brian.html Rehm, Diane. Interview with Barbara Michaels. Diane Rehm Show. American University Radio. May 29, 2001. Yamashita, Brianna. “From History to Mystery: A Genre-jumper Explains.” Publishers Weekly (June 30, 2003): 55.

Further Reading Anderson, Patrick. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction. New York: Random House, 2007; Gannon, Michael B. Blood, Bedlam, Bullets, and Badguys: A Reader’s Guide to Adventure/Suspense Fiction. Genreflecting Advisory Series. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited; Mann, Jessica. “The Suspense Novel.”

SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION Classic Crime Fiction. http://www.classiccrimefiction.com/suspense-novel.htm; Regis, Pamela. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

PATRICIA BOSTIAN

SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. —Robert E. Howard “Queen of the Black Coast”

Definition. Casual readers of fantasy fiction are apt to use the terms fantasy and sword and sorcery interchangeably. Although sword and sorcery is certainly a type of fantasy fiction, as a sports car is a type of automobile, the term was first proposed by Fritz Leiber (1910–1992), the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning speculative fiction author, to distinguish the genre in which he wrote from other medieval fiction, particularly the mythic and epic fantasy, or high fantasy, crafted by J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973). High fantasy, largely invented by William Morris (1834–1896) as an echo of Sir Thomas Malory’s tales (e.g., Le Morte D’Arthur) and later popularized by Tolkien, tends to proceed at a stately pace, meandering from plot point to plot point, or location to location. Film critic Roger Ebert has written that Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, the most famous of all high fantasy works, “is mostly about leaving places, going places, being places, and going on to other places, all amid fearful portents and speculations. There are a great many mountains, valleys, streams, villages, caves, residences, grottos, bowers, fields, high roads, low roads, and along them the Hobbits and their larger companions travel while paying great attention to mealtimes. Landscapes are described with the faithful detail of a Victorian travel writer. . . . mostly the trilogy is an unfolding, a quest, a journey, told in an elevated, archaic, romantic prose style that tests our capacity for the declarative voice” (Ebert 2001). Though exotic landscapes are present—even common—in sword and sorcery, they are described differently and for a different purpose. Sword and sorcery arose from a tradition entirely different from Tolkien’s ornate, Anglo-Saxon medievalism; by contrast, for American pulp writers like Robert E. Howard (1906–1936), sword and sorcery fiction had to be retooled for specific consumer and marketplace desires during the 1920s and 1930s. The pulps, the television of the time, supplied and demanded quick-moving action. The stories needed to seize readers during the first few sentences so that newsstand browsers would feel compelled to purchase it to discover how the stories ended. Consequently, Howard’s stories tended to emphasize dramatic action and tension over, though not necessarily at the expense of, description and setting. Karl Edward Wagner (1945–1994), the creator of the sword and sorcery hero Kane and a renowned speculative fiction editor, preferred the term epic fantasy to sword and sorcery, describing it as “a fascinating synthesis of horror, adventure, and imagination . . . the common motif [being] a universe in which magic works and an individual may kill according to his personal code. When the universe is effectively envisioned and the characters are convincingly realized, epic fantasy can command the reader’s attention on multiple levels of enjoyment. When the universe is a

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cardboard stage set and the characters comic book stereotypes, the result is cliché ridden melodrama” (Wagner 1977). Lin Carter (1930–1988), likewise a renowned fantasy editor and a speculative fiction author, wrote in his introduction to the anthology Flashing Swords #1 (1973): We call a story sword and sorcery when it is an action tale, derived from the traditions of the pulp magazine adventure story, set in a land, age, or world of the author’s invention—a milieu in which magic actually works and the gods are real—a story, moreover, which pits a stalwart warrior in direct conflict with the forces of supernatural evil.

Carter simplifies here. He understood that gods did not manifest themselves in all sword and sorcery tales—certainly Howard’s Crom never descended from upon high to aid Conan, who frequently swore by him. Dark gods and evil entities are common, however, and sorcerers conjure many a foul creature to confront sword and sorcery heroes. This is true to one of the genre’s underlying themes: protagonists must overcome challenges with their own strength and cunning, not through the intercession of benevolent gods or governments. In the strange and hostile lands and situations in which they find themselves, they and their close allies must survive and impose order, meaning, and justice through their own actions. They are almost exclusively existential heroes: armed and able, but alone. Trends and Themes. Scholar John Flynn has additional, clarifying observations about the genre. In sword and sorcery, the supernatural is usually depicted as dark and malignant. Users of magic seldom work in the interest of the heroes. Magic is not the delightful, easily manipulated force that brightens fairy tales; rather, it is often associated with demonic forces and is invoked with great effort by lengthy, sinister rituals. The protagonists of sword and sorcery are most often thieves, mercenaries, or barbarians struggling not for worlds or kingdoms, but for their own gain or mere survival. They are blue-collar rebels fighting against authority, skeptical of civilization and its rulers and adherents. While the strengths and skills of sword and sorcery heroes are romanticized, their exploits take place on a very different stage from one where lovely princesses, dashing nobles, and prophesied saviors are cast as the leads. Sword and sorcery heroes face more immediate problems than those of questing kings. They are cousins of the lone gunslingers of American westerns and the

“Sword-and-Sorcery focuses on the darker, more sinister, and often brutal nature of that struggle [with supernatural forces].The emphasis is almost always on the might of the sword as contrasted with the power of magic. The protagonist is frequently strong, clever and resourceful, but he (or she) can also be savage, barbaric and brutally ambitious to the point where he often negates his ‘goodness.’ His heroic challenges repeatedly find him in lost worlds (nearly always tribal or feudal) where the laws of science and reason have been replaced by mysticism and the occult.While he doesn’t necessarily deserve to triumph over these forces, the hero’s physical courage and tenacity nonetheless make the victory possible”( Jones 2008).

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wandering samurai of Japanese folklore, traveling through the wilderness to right wrongs or simply to earn food, shelter, and coin. Unknown or hazardous lands are an essential ingredient of the genre, and if its protagonists should chance upon inhabited lands, they are often strangers to either the culture or civilization itself. L. Sprague de Camp (1907–2000) wrote extensively about sword and sorcery. He preferred heroic fantasy to Leiber’s label (although, aptly enough, the following quote originates from an anthology titled Swords and Sorcery). His description captures much of the genre’s flavor by noting that sword and sorcery is the name of a class of stories laid, not in the world as it is or was or will be, but as it ought to have been to make a good story. The tales collected under this name are adventure-fantasies, laid in imaginary prehistoric or medieval worlds, when (it’s fun to imagine) all men were mighty, all women were beautiful, all problems were simple, and all life was adventurous. In such a world, gleaming cities raise their shining spires against the stars; sorcerers cast sinister spells from subterranean lairs; baleful spirits stalk thickets; and the fate of kingdoms is balanced on the bloody blades of broadswords brandished by heroes of preternatural might and valor. (de Camp 1963)

De Camp almost always emphasized sword and sorcery as entertainment. At the time he was writing, fantasy was seldom regarded as worthy of serious study. It was, after all, allegedly written only to amuse. Then too, at the time he was writing, most sword and sorcery fiction was imitative, reflective of the trappings of the genre without understanding the possibilities of its depth. Context and Issues

THE ELEMENTS OF SWORD AND SORCERY In the past, sword and sorcery has been either narrowly defined as fiction featuring a barbarian with a loincloth and sword or broadly defined to mean any sort of fantasy where there is action and danger. More careful study can identify four elements that make sword and sorcery different from other fantasy: the environment, the protagonists, the obstacles, and story structure. • The Environment: Sword and sorcery fiction is set in lands different from our own, where technology is relatively primitive, requiring the protagonists to overcome obstacles face-to-face. Magic works, but seldom at the behest of the heroes, being more often another obstacle used against them by villains or monsters. The landscape is exotic, either a different world or the backwaters of our own. • The Protagonists:The heroes must survive by their cunning or brawn, frequently both.They are usually strangers or outcasts, rebels imposing their own form of justice on the wild, strange, decadent civilizations which they encounter.They are usually commoners or barbarians; should they hail from the higher ranks of society, they are either discredited or disinherited, or else descended from the lower ranks of nobility (the lowest of the high). • Obstacles: Sword and sorcery’s protagonists must best fantastic dangers, monstrous horrors, and dark sorcery to earn riches, the goodwill of attractive members of the opposite sex, and/or the right to live another day. Horror is a frequent component, but it is a tangible horror that can be confronted and bested, or at the least deflected and avoided. • Structure: Sword and sorcery is usually crafted with a traditional narrative structure: it has a beginning, middle, and ending; a problem and solution; a climax and resolution. Most important, it moves at a headlong pace and overflows with thrilling action and adventure.

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History The Beginnings. Scholars consider the first fantasy novel to be The Well at the World’s End (1896) by William Morris, a prominent nineteenth-century socialist who declined the position of poet laureate of England, translated Norse epics, spearheaded the Arts and Crafts movement, and incidentally wrote the first novels set neither on Earth nor in a dream world. From him high fantasy was born, and the line continued through the magnificent Lord Dunsany (1878–1957), the poetic E.R. Eddison (1882–1945), and the brilliantly whimsical James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) to Tolkien, who cast a mold that few authors or publishers have been willing or able to break. Morris helped birth written fantasy, and thus sword and sorcery, but the subgenre’s roots are far older, originating in the epic struggles of mythologies—in the wanderings of Odysseus and the quest of Jason, in the Persian Shah-Namah and the Saxon Beowulf, in the stories of Sinbad and other heroes from the Arabian Nights, and particularly in the Viking sagas, which tremendously influenced Morris, Eddison, and Tolkien. Elements of sword and sorcery also appear in the famous romances Amadis of Gaul and Orlando Furioso, among others. Volumes have been written about these works, but we will leave them, deserving as they are, to a broader discussion of the history of fantasy fiction. Room must be made for Lord Dunsany, however, without whom no discussion of modern fantasy can be complete. Born Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Dunsany was an Irish peer. Among other accomplishments, he was a chess champion of Wales, England, and Ireland, soldier, big-game hunter, popular playwright (six of his plays once appeared on Broadway at the same time) and successful novelist. Most fantasy scholars name Dunsany as Morris’s direct successor. Dunsany did craft a handful of fantasy novels, but he is best remembered for eight slim collections of fantastic tales. Many famous fantasy and horror writers name him the greatest fantasy writer of all time, speaking always of his imagination, beautiful prose, and clear conception of man’s desperate longings and darkest fears. Though his fantasy work began in 1903, it remains timeless and accessible. It is not the work of a cloistered nobleman, but of a genius gifted with soaring imagination and compassion. A number of Dunsany’s short stories contain heroes and magic blades. His language is courtly and elegant, but unlike much of the prose of the time, there is nothing dense or turgid about it: They passed by night over the Oolnar Mountains, each dwarf with his good axe, the old flint war-axe of his fathers, a night when no moon shone, and they went unshod, and swiftly, to come on the demi-gods in the darkness beyond the dells of Ulk, lying faint and idle and contemptible. And before it was light they found the heathery lands, and the demi-gods lying lazy all over the side of a hill. The dwarfs stole towards them warily in the darkness. —“How the Dwarfs Rose Up in War” (1919)

By contrast, E.R. Eddison’s masterpiece, The Worm Ouroboros (1922), is a more challenging read, because Eddison affected an older style. Many today find the reading labored, but the labor is well rewarded. Eddison painted his scenes with lavish skill:

SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION At the clash the two champions advanced and clasped one another with their strong arms, each with his right arm below and left arm above the other’s shoulder, until the flesh shrank beneath the might of their arms that were as brazen bands. They swayed a little this way and that, as great trees swaying in a storm, their legs planted firmly so that they seemed to grow out of the ground like the trunks of oak trees. Nor did either yield ground to other, nor might either win a master hold upon his enemy. So swayed they back and forth for long time, breathing heavily.

Eddison labored over The Worm Ouroboros for many years, finally publishing it in 1922. He followed it first with the translation of a Norse epic and then with the translation of a novel that many consider one of the finest Viking novels of all time: Styrbiorn the Strong. He later wrote a trilogy set in the heaven of the world of the Worm, a unique fantasy but not sword and sorcery. Just like the most exciting Viking sagas, sword and sorcery features compelling individual duels and the clash of armies, elements first used to great effect in historical fiction. Today, publishers advertise historical horror, historical romance, and historical mystery—even alternate histories and historical political thrillers. In the nineteenth century there was only one flavor: a historical fiction writer was someone who wrote action-packed tales set in distant, exotic places. Readers back then turned to their favorite authors—Alexandre Dumas, Sir Walter Scott, William Morris, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others less known today—for the same thrills modern readers turn to sword and sorcery. It is in the historical fiction of pulp magazines, however, where the genre’s similarities to sword and sorcery become even more striking. Historical Fiction of the Pulps. The pulp era began around the turn of the twentieth century, before radio and television. Magazines featuring a variety of diverting topics were found on the newsstands, printed on cheap, pulpy paper—hence the term pulps. Publishers attempted to print something for almost every reader, in the same way that TV channels attempt to broadcast something for almost every viewer. And like television, most of the product was bad, giving pulp fiction its modern connotations—cheap, sensationalist, and over-the-top writing. As with most popular art forms, though, some gold glittered within the dross, and many famous writers were first published by (or at least appeared later) in the pulps. Most pulp historical fiction writers crafted tales of action and adventure, and many created serial characters. As in comic books (whose rise in popularity coincides with that of the pulps) and television series, serial characters served two purposes. First, they spared writers the chore of creating a new hero for each story; and second, once serial characters found an accepting editor or readership, they increased the chances of selling the story. This pulp historical fiction of the early twentieth century (circa 1915–1940) has almost all of the same elements as sword and sorcery. In place of the imaginary land is a distant era that, in the hands of the better writers, appears with greater vividness than many an invented setting. There are heroes who must live by their wits and weapons in deadly borderlands, beset by schemers and intriguers. There are hidden treasures, ancient secrets, and lovely women—some, keen-eyed adventurers of whom heroes should be wary, and others, damsels in need of rescue. There are loyal comrades, implacable foes, powerful but foolish kings, secret societies, fabulous kingdoms, and fraudulent wizards and miracleworkers. In short, the connection between sword and sorcery and pulp historical

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fiction is obvious, both being fashioned with the same spirit, from love of the same elements. Historical fiction wasn’t the mainstay of the pulps—for the most part westerns and detective fiction were—but many an author wrote “costume pieces.” There was H. Bedford Jones, that most prolific of pulp authors (said to write a million words a year), who could be relied upon for tales of the high seas and cavaliers and Dumaslike action. There were Farnham Bishop and Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, writing together or separately of swordsmen of fortune, and F.R. Buckley, who wrote about battlefield exploits in Renaissance Italy. The pulps saw the engaging, though repetitious, exploits of Zorro, and printed the adventures of Sabatini’s Captain Blood. Arthur D. Howden Smith crafted many a bold tale, among them the saga of the Viking Swain and the story of Gray Maiden. Gray Maiden was a sword first forged for a Pharaoh. In each story the blade is wielded by a different warrior down through history. The sword is sometimes lost or entombed with its wielder, but it is always unearthed to wreak more mischief. It has a supremely sharp blade with supernatural powers—no man who bares her meets his death by sword, though they often perish in other ways. The Gray Maiden story cycle veers widely in quality—some portions are full of monotonous talking heads, whereas some are fine entertainment. “Thord’s Wooing” (1927), one of the Gray Maiden stories, is an excellent Viking tale. Late in the story, in a duel scene provides some sense of its flavor. Bjarni, mortally wounded, seeks to take the life of Thord’s mother, Elin. “Your doing, witch,” He gasped. “Come with me!” And he hurled his sword straight at her breast. It turned once in the air, hilt over point, a flash of light in the dimness, sped by the last strength of his body even as he collapsed in death. But Gray Maiden flew faster. Thord cast the long blade like an axe, and once more it parried Bjarni’s blow. The two swords clattered at Elin’s feet.

Gilchrist Brodeur and Farnham Bishop, writing together or separately, could be counted on for exciting tales of clashing arms and mayhem set in the distant past. Their style is sometimes slow, weighted with the pacing of the nineteenth century; yet they should not be too easily disregarded, as their work sometimes springs with amazing vigor. One of the best by either man is a neglected gem of Viking adventure, He Rules Who Can, originally serialized in Argosy, beginning in November of 1928. Sadly, this Brodeur novel about Harald Hardrada, has never seen reprint. Selected Authors. While there are other fine authors and other fine tales, two giants stride out of this field, authors famed for both quality and quantity: Talbot Mundy and Harold Lamb. Both of them influenced Robert E. Howard, the true father of sword and sorcery. Mundy’s real name was William Lancaster Gribbon, and before he took up writing he had knocked about India, East Africa, and Germany; married a few women and loved some more; and nearly gotten himself killed several times over. It was while recovering in the hospital after getting blackjacked that he took up writing. Mundy is best known for two series characters: James Grim, or Jim Grim, an American adventurer working for the British Secret Service, and Tros of Samothrace, the epic Druid warrior. It is Mundy’s Tros series that concerns us here. This long cycle of stories was published for the most part as a series of novellas in the

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pages of Adventure magazine (a novel near the end of the cycle appeared in book form). And if any fiction decries its pulp reputation, it is Mundy’s Tros of Samothrace. Mundy was a skilled student of human nature who had philosophical leanings. His characters are rich, complex, and well drawn. His plots hinge upon the actions taken by his heroes and villains. Sometimes the stories unfold slowly because they depend upon intrigue, politics, and dialogue, but at the appropriate times they explode with action. Above all, Mundy was a careful craftsman. Consider the somber tone of the following scene, hardly expected of a typically garish pulp writer: He went below, into the cabin where his father’s body lay, with Caesar’s scarlet cloak spread over it. And for a while he stood steadying himself with one hand on an overhead beam, watching the old man’s face, that was as calm as if Caesar’s tortures had never racked the seventy-year-old limbs, the firm, proud lip showing plainly through the white beard, the eyes closed as in sleep, the aristocratic hands folded on the breast. It was dark in there and easy to imagine things. The body moved a trifle in time to the ship’s swaying. —Tros of Samothrace (1967 Pyramid reprint)

Tros is a skilled sailor and minor initiate into an ancient and widespread mystical society, a world that Mundy renders entirely believable. His greatest desire is to build the ship of his dreams to sail around the world, but before he can do it he runs afoul of Caesar’s ambitions. Caesar is one of Mundy’s triumphs, a rascal genius who only fails because his ego eventually grows too large. Tros eventually builds his ship, ends up allied with Cleopatra, and even, near the end, aids his old enemy Caesar. He never manages to sail around the world, though Mundy fully planned to write that story, because his creator died of diabetes before pen went to paper. Fortunately the series ends on a complete note, with all of the hero’s Mediterranean adventures resolved. Harold Lamb was a quiet man fascinated with chronicles of Eastern history from an early age. He wrote the epic Durandal trilogy, amongst other thrilling crusader novels. Later he would become a renowned historian and wealthy screenwriter, penning more than thirty movies for Cecil B. DeMille. First, though, he created a cycle of remarkable historical fiction stories set in locations as fabulous and unfamiliar to most readers as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars. Where many adventure tales are predictable from the first word, Lamb’s plots were full of unexpected twists. He wrote convincingly of faraway lands and dealt fairly with their inhabitants, relating without bias the viewpoints of Mongols, Moslems, and Hindus. His stories are rarely profound psychological drama, but Lamb nonetheless breathes humanity into his characters, endowing them with realistic hopes and fears. Unlike the pacing of almost all of his predecessors and most of his contemporaries, his still feels modern—he never stops for slow exposition. His plots thunder forward as though he has envisioned each one for cinema the moment he slid paper into the typewriter. The most enduring and complex of all Lamb’s heroes is his first, Khlit the Cossack. Before Stormbringer keened in Elric’s hand, before the Gray Mouser prowled Lankhmar’s foggy streets, before Conan trod jeweled thrones under his sandaled feet, Khlit the Cossack rode the steppe. He is the grandfather of all characters in sword and sorcery series.

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The Cossack is already old when his saga begins late in the sixteenth century in the grasslands of central Asia. He is an expert horseman and swordsman, unlettered and only a step removed from barbarism, but wise in the ways of war and men. Gruff and taciturn, Khlit is a firm believer in justice and devout in his faith, though not given to prayer or religious musings. He is the friend and protector of many women, but he leaves romance to his sidekicks and allies. The Khlit stories swim in action, treachery, and places best unseen by mortal men. Consider the following scene, from the novella “The Mighty Manslayer” (1918): Mir Turek caught his arm and pointed to the further side. “The Bearers of Wealth!” he screamed. “See, the Bearers of Wealth, and their burden. The Tomb of Genghis Khan. We have found the tomb of Genghis Khan!” The shout echoed wildly up the cavern, and Khlit thought that he heard a rumbling in the depths of the cavern in answer. He looked where Mir Turek pointed. At first he saw only the veil of smoke. Then he made out a plateau of rock jutting out from the further side. On this plateau, abreast of them, and at the other end of the rock bridge gigantic shapes loomed through the vapor. Twin forms of mammoth size reared themselves, and Khlit thought that they moved, with the movement of the vapor. These forms were not men but beasts that stood side by side. Between them they supported a square object which hung as if suspended in the air.

Throughout the seventeen-part series Khlit yearns for far horizons and strange new sights. He rides alone for a time before rising to lead a Tatar tribe for five tales, later joining forces with the heroic Afghan swordsman and Moslem, Abdul Dost. Khlit always bears his famed curved saber, gilt with the writing of an unknown tongue. It is a deadly blade with its own secret history, disclosed as the series progresses. The Khlit saga is a remarkable tour de force, and any reader familiar with the works of Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber or with the works of those who followed them will recognize familiar elements in this predecessor. Sword and Planet. Before the mighty Texan Robert E. Howard took up his pen, Edgar Rice Burroughs created—or at least had the first big success—with a genre that some call sword and planet and that others describe as planetary romance. The concept is simple: an adventurer is dropped in skivvies onto an unknown planet, usually being forced to make do with primitive weapons (but he may have a ray gun slung on a hip with just three shots left). Instead of elves and wizards, there are alien races and the descendants of ancient world masterminds. Rather than magic, there is advanced technology, often poorly understood by the surviving populace and treated like sorcery. In the early pulp days this was science fiction; in retrospect it has a lot more in common with fantasy, especially sword and sorcery. Before Burroughs came up with Tarzan, he created John Carter, Warlord of Mars. Beginning in 1912, Carter adventured on a world little like the real Mars, with a breathable atmosphere, scheming aliens of varied colors, and lots of lovely, haughty, semi-naked queens and princesses. Carter and his cohorts spend most of the time running around with swords. All of the stories are action-packed cliffhangers. Their biggest flaw is that most have the same plot. Someone’s wife/girlfriend/niece is lost/endangered/kidnapped, and the hero must travel across Mars to save them. Not that the female characters lack pluck or courage (they’re not wallflowers), but they are, naturally, dated by their time.

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Burroughs’s work was an outgrowth of the lost race adventures of H. Rider Haggard (of She and Alan Quartermain fame), in which the hero journeys to some lost corner of the world to discover ancient civilizations rife with treachery and sinister secrets. Haggard did not quite invent the form, but under his skilled hands it gained popular fame, and he had an enormous influence. His work is still enjoyable today, though most of it speaks matter-of-factly of outmoded conceptions and prejudices, and his plotting is not entirely modern. This does not describe all his work, however; some of his stories, most notably his Viking novel Eric Brighteyes, remain fabulous adventures, shot through with swordplay and the supernatural, and they should not be overlooked by sword and sorcery readers. Haggard’s influence can be felt on many writers who thrust their heroes into lost lands (A.E. Merrit became justly famed for doing much the same thing in the early pulp years; his settings dripping with even more magical conceptions). Burroughs merely took things one step further and dropped his heroes into a land that had never existed. He became famous doing it. Recognizing that sword and planet and sword and sorcery were related fields, early anthologists often packaged authors from both genres under the same covers. Today, science fiction readers look on sword and planet with disdain for the most part, especially those stories set on versions of Mars or Venus that have human-supportable conditions. Fantasy readers seem to have forgotten that such stories even exist. Many authors crafted sword and planet stories—much of it forgettable. But there were also remarkably enjoyable adventures, written by the likes of Edmund Hamilton, space opera master and science fiction pioneer, and Otis Kline, one-time agent for Robert E. Howard, best remembered today for his somewhat wooden Venusian sword and planet trilogy The Planet of Peril and the novel The Swordsman of Mars. Leigh Brackett, the woman who is probably the very best sword and planet writer, plied her trade in the dying days of the genre. Just as Bach crafted baroque masterpieces in a time that this style was considered old-fashioned and quaint, Brackett penned most of her Martian stories after there was definite evidence that the planet could not possibly exist as she described. Eventually she had to stop writing them altogether, and anyone who laments the end of Ray Bradbury’s Martian stories should lament his friend Leigh Brackett’s abandoning of Mars as well. Carse walked beside the still black waters in their ancient channel, cut in the dead seabottom. He watched the dry wind shake the torches that never went out and listened to the broken music of the harps that were never stilled. Lean lithe men and women passed him in the shadowy streets, silent as cats except for the chime and the whisper of the tiny bells the women wear, a sound as delicate as rain, distillate of all the sweet wickedness of the world. —The Sword of Rhiannon (1953)

The sample above only hints at Brackett’s mastery with setting. She always evokes a powerful sense of place, and her Mars is a haunting, dimmed, mysterious, and often fatal ruby. Her action scenes are crisp and clean and her plots never flag. Brackett wrote numerous tales of planets near and far, but she is probably most famous for her Skaith series. She is a well-known contributor to the sci-fi world, having turned in the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back to George Lucas shortly before her death in 1978. Brackett’s long career also featured other Hollywood

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triumphs: she wrote the screenplay for The Big Sleep with William Faulkner as well as numerous western vehicles for John Wayne. Although some of Brackett’s fiction seems a little dated (her spacemen often smoke and her women sometimes need protecting), she remains surprisingly fresh because of her skill with character and setting, and because her plots are usually unpredictable. So long as they are willing to forgive her planets that cannot be, sword and sorcery readers lucky enough to find her works will be in good hands. Sword and planet, after many years in the wilderness, has enjoyed a rebirth. In the late 1980s Harry Turtledove launched his Videssos series, about a Roman legion mystically transported to another planet where magic works, and in 1990 William Forstchen created his Lost Regiment series, about a Union regiment flung through a portal to a hostile alien world. Other authors have found additional ways to put fresh spins on this old genre. Robert E. Howard. Long before Brackett broke into the pulps, a young man named Robert E. Howard set out to become a writer. He had his first success at the age of 17, a success which was followed by many agonizing years of rejection letters. Howard did not give up, though, and he eventually started publishing regularly in Weird Tales. Though never an outstanding success, Weird Tales became one of the most influential of all pulp magazines, printing the work of many who later rose to fame as fantasy, horror, and science fiction writers, sometimes in the pages of Weird Tales itself. Few pulp magazines today are as widely known or as revered. Howard himself would rather have been writing historical fiction, a field he loved. But for many years he could not crack the magazines that published his favorite writers, such as Mundy and Lamb. So he started to write for this audience. Howard told historic tales infused with supernatural horrors, creating characters such as the dour Elizabethan wanderer Solomon Kane, who spent most of his time fighting dreadful things in Africa, and Bran Mak Morn, king of the Picts, who waged a battle against Roman legions knowing that his people would lose it. But Howard also experimented with a prehistory of his own invention in which a king named Kull enjoyed his epic adventures when Atlantis was but a barbarian nation. Only a few of the Kull stories sold, though they possess a dreamy poetic power found otherwise only in Howard’s nonfantasy historical fiction. And then a new character, the inimitable Conan, thrust his way into Howard’s consciousness. Howard later wrote that so easily did the stories flow, it was almost as though his creation stood at his shoulder, dictating stories from his life. Know, O Prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars. . . . . Hither came Conan the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet. —“The Phoenix on the Sword” (1932)

Thus sword and sorcery was born with Kull and Conan. The connection between the real world and the world of these characters is hazy at best. They adventure in a never-neverland of prehistory where supernatural horrors stalk a planet Earth so different that it might as well be one of the other worlds of sword and planet. The

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map and peoples of their world become familiar through the course of their stories, particularly the longer Conan saga (21 stories in all). Modern readers take for granted many fantastic elements pioneered by Howard: a fantasy world with a map, countries, gods, and a consistent magic system. The complete package originated with Howard. Howard has his detractors. Some of this has to do with the often low quality of Conan stories written after his death. Tale after tale was authored by others until bookstore shelves groaned under the weight of collected pastiche—more nonHoward Conan stories were written than were those composed by Howard himself, and until just recently the pastiche Conan was the only kind in print. Then too, the charge of sexism is leveled at Howard. He does not seem to have been sexist himself, even if Conan was. Howard wrote a series centered on the swashbuckling Dark Agnes of France. She was no heroine in a chainmail bikini, but rather, a real woman. Unfortunately, her tales never sold, so Howard stopped writing them. Howard wrote for his market, and so most of the women in the Conan series serve the same function as those in a James Bond film. His readers loved him for it. Those familiar with Conan only from the pastiche, or the movies, or the comic books, do not know the real article, which has far greater range of emotion and zest for life, being is at the same time more primal. Howard is an able plotter with a splendid imagination, but it is in his narrative that Howard truly excels, and this cannot translate into any medium beyond the pages of his work. His scenes are drawn swiftly and skillfully, with a few sharp brush strokes. A movie version of his works is not necessary because his prose is so cinematic to begin with: Rising above the black denseness of the trees and above the waving fronds, the moon silvered the river, and their wake became a rippling scintillation of phosphorescent bubbles that widened like a shining road of bursting jewels. The oars dipped into the shining water and came up sheathed in frosty silver. The plumes on the warriors’ headpieces nodded in the wind, and the gems on sword hilts and harnesses sparkled frostily. —“Queen of the Black Coast” (1934)

Blending historical swashbucklers, horror, tales of lost civilizations, strands from mythology, Jack London’s brutal Darwinism, and even a little flavoring from sword and planet works, Howard created something vibrant and new—sword and sorcery. Howard shot himself in 1936, when he was only 30 years old and at the height of his creative power. He left a large volume of work behind that refused to die with him, though it has only recently begun to be studied by scholars. Howard’s Trail. Catherine L. Moore was the first to follow Howard’s path, writing her fantasies while Howard still lived and earning a letter of praise from him. (Howard even sent her copies of his Dark Agnes stories for her perusal.) Moore provided the first innovation in sword and sorcery, introducing a female protagonist. Jirel of Joiry is more than just a “gal Conan,” because Moore’s prose is a different thing from Robert E. Howard. It is dreamy and surreal and a little reminiscent of the early horror-fantasy writer William Hope Hodgson: Presently she began to near one of those luminous patches that resembled fields, and saw now that they were indeed a sort of garden. The luminosity rose from myriads of tiny, darting lights planted in even rows, and when she came near enough she saw that the lights were small insects, larger than fireflies, and with luminous wings which they

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Oddly, some of Jirel’s tales feel more dated than some of the stories that precede them. In the first for instance, Jirel secretly loves the man trying to conquer her— the old pulp trope of a strong female character who secretly longs to be controlled, presented here by a woman writer. Moore also wrote the very popular Northwest Smith stories, featuring an outer space adventurer. Most of Moore’s later work was written in tandem with Henry Kuttner, whom she married. From that point forth the two usually wrote together even if they did not share a byline. Prior to writing with Moore, Henry Kuttner had produced prolifically on his own. He labored under dozens of pen names and could write commandingly in many different genres. After Robert E. Howard died, Kuttner wrote four sword and sorcery tales for Weird Tales, featuring Elak of Atlantis, a slender, civilized prince of Atlantis armed with a rapier. The Elak stories are not nearly as innovative as what had come before, but they overflow with grand scenes of great color and majesty, so that even the shortest reads like an epic. Kuttner also wrote a short sword and sorcery series for , a rival of Weird Tales, that is far more grim than Elak’s saga. The two tales feature the brooding Prince Raynor, and in some ways presage the work of Michael Moorcock. Kuttner died unexpectedly of a heart attack in his early 40s. His colleagues seem to have thought well of him both as a writer and as a human being. Lin Carter related that decades after Kuttner’s death, famed science fiction writer Robert Heinlein would get teary-eyed—having to change the subject—after reminiscing about Kuttner for even a little while. Another Weird Tales contributor, Clark Ashton Smith, artist and poet, wrote several series of strange horrific tales set in twilight lands. His prose is bejeweled with descriptions and bizarre imagery, a lush tapestry of words emphasizing tone and style and wit, where character is mostly incidental. Smith was far less interested in swords and barbarians than he was in mages and their spells and the resulting horrors. Today Smith is revered as one of the three greatest Weird Tales authors (alongside H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard), and there is no denying his lasting influence. It was he who wrote first of a decadent Earth of the far future, inspiring Vance’s Dying Earth and Moorcock’s Hawkmoon and countless others, but it is his imaginative scope and lush prose that has continued to inspire later writers. Lin Carter wrote that Smith’s stories were “darkling and mordant, lit with flashes of jeweled description, studded with exotic names and rare words, pervaded by the lilied languor and dreamlike splendor of a hashish vision”(Carter 1969). There is only room for a brief quote: With no other light than that of the four diminutive moons of Xiccarph, each in a different phase but all decrescent, Tiglari had crossed the bottomless swamp of Soorm, wherein no reptile dwelt and no dragon descended—but where the pitch-black ooze was alive with continual heavings and writhings. He had carefully avoided the high causey of white corundum that spanned the fen, and had threaded his way with infinite peril from isle to sedgy isle that shuddered gelatinously beneath him. When he reached the solid shore and the shelter of the palm-tall rushes, he was equally careful to avoid the pale porphyry stairs that would heavenward through dizzy, nadir-cleaving

SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION chasms and along glassy scarps to the ever-mysterious and terrible house of Maal Dweb. —“The Maze of Maal Dweb” (1933)

Weird Tales was not interested in Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar tales. Fortunately for us all, Unknown gave them a home in the early 1940s. In that magazine’s pages Leiber launched into a long cycle of sword and sorcery adventures about two wandering rogues, the northern barbarian Fafhrd and the sneaky, city-born thief Gray Mouser. Many other fantasy, science fiction, and horror stories flowed from Leiber’s pen, garnering praise and awards, including several Hugos and Nebulas. What differentiates the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories even today is the quality of the writing. We come to care for the two rogues despite their foibles, in part because, while larger than life, they feel human. Leiber’s style is clever and sparkles with humor, though the stories are never just comic send-ups. Most fantasy authors hail Leiber as one of the truly great innovators. Just as no one else has ever equaled the skill with which Howard told of his barbarian hero, no one has yet equaled Leiber’s Lankhmar writing at its height. The Lankhmar stories are carefully threaded with action, humor, horror, lust, and humanity. This short passage from “When the Sea King’s Away” (1977) provides a small window to his work. The two heroes are exploring a strange passage recently carved out through the sea: Soon they were treading along a veritable tunnel in the water, a leaden arch-roofed passageway no wider than the phosphorescently yellow-green path that floored it. The tunnel curved just enough now to left, now to right, so that there was no seeing any long distance ahead. From time to time the Mouser thought he heard faint whistlings and moanings echoing along it. He stepped over a large crab that was backing feebly and saw beside it a dead man’s hand emerging from the glowing muck, one shred-fleshed finger pointing the way they were taking. Fafhrd half turned his head and muttered gravely, “Mark me, Mouser, there’s magic in this somewhere!” The Mouser thought he had never in his life heard a less necessary remark.

Among the many influenced by Leiber are the creators of Dungeons & Dragons, who liberated many of Leiber’s concepts and overlaid them across the central Tolkienesque game design. (To this day the game also uses a variation on Moorcock’s theme of law and chaos to help define its characters.) Leiber continued to write of the two heroes over the course of his lifetime, but naturally his style changed. The later stories take on a meandering prose style that is far less engaging, and the adventures become less interesting. Norvell Page, famed bard of the pulp vigilante “The Spider,” also wrote for Unknown, crafting two short Prester John novels. Prester was a character with Conan-like strength, guile, and a genuine sense of humor. He journeys East, encountering action, mysterious sorcerers, and lovely damsels. These are only the most famous of the pulp sword and sorcery writers. Others appeared in Weird Tales, such as Nictin Dyalhis, who crafted a series of stand-alone fantasy adventures; and the mysterious Clifford Ball, a fan stirred by Howard’s death to write in his style. There were other writers besides, some who wrote either historicals tinged with sorcery or horror verging on adventure. After the Pulps. As the pulps died slowly, hit by the triple whammy of paper shortage caused by World War II, a postwar change in mood, and stronger entertainment

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rivals, sword and sorcery lived on in the new paperback book market—though just barely. For the most part the subgenre lay comatose. Jack Vance is not, strictly speaking, a sword and sorcery writer. He is one of those gifted authors whose work transcends genres. Readers of both fantasy and science fiction can read his work with delight, and sword and sorcery readers have not neglected his Dying Earth, a collection of interlinked short stories shot through with swashbuckling, sorcery, and wondrous imagery. These stories were originally rejected by the magazines, but a small publisher in the 1950s saw their worth and they remain in print today. Other adventure work followed, equally strong and always tinged with space opera or sword and planet filtered through Vance’s unique lens. By the 1970s it was possible to make a living by writing fantasy. Along came awardwinning Roger Zelazny, first with a series of short stories centered on Dilvish the Damned, an adventuring swordsman with a postmodern flair, and then with other delightful fiction, including his first Amber series, a high watermark for fantasy and sword and sorcery alike. Set at first on Earth, the series expands through ever more complex and fascinating intrigues and mysteries in parallel worlds, until finally the nature of existence itself is threatened. Magic and action lurk upon nearly every page. Michael Moorcock experimented with Burroughs-like fiction, then launched into a long, loosely related stories about the eternal champion, a hero who appears in many guises through many parallel worlds, fighting the forces of chaos. Moorcock may have found at least some of his inspiration in the fantasy work of Poul Anderson, whose masterpiece of northern, doom-filled romance, The Broken Sword (1954)—as well as the later novel Three Hearts and Three Lions—featured many elements now associated with Moorcock: law and chaos, cursed rune swords, and evil, manipulative gods. Elric, the albino swordsman is probably the most famous of Moorcock’s characters, but there are others besides: the haunted, elf-like Corum and the obsessed Hawkmoon to name but a few. Moorcock’s prose is frequently brilliant, shot through with moments of sad, lyric beauty. It has some of the same sorrow over the human condition that Lord Dunsany conveyed so well, but it is less joyful. Elric knows almost from the start that he is doomed. His soul-sucking sword, Stormbringer, robs strength from others to power him, and it has a dark mind of its own, sometimes striking when Elric would hold his hand. It’s taking me—the thrice-damned thing is taking me!” Nikorn gurgled horribly, clutching at the black steel with hands turned to claws. “Stop it, Elric—I beg of you, stop it! Please!” Elric tried again to tug the blade from Nikorn’s heart. He could not. It was rooted in flesh, sinew and vitals. It moaned greedily, drinking into it all that was the being of Kiron of Ilmar. It sucked the life-force from the dying man and all the while its voice was soft and disgustingly sensuous. Still Elric struggled to pull the sword free. —The Bane of the Black Sword (1977)

Moorcock still writes in the field today, even generating an occasional Elric prequel (he has already written about Elric’s end), but his heart does not really seem to be in it anymore. A contemporary of Moorcock who is much celebrated by him, M. John Harrison, created a short sword and sorcery novel titled The Pastel City (1971). It is the first in a sequence of works about Viroconium, a city that may be a dream of a dream of our own reality, although the first tale in the sequence does not trouble itself with such extratextual concerns. It delivers the familiar sword and sorcery tropes decorated with

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a veneer of space opera and such fine characterization and description that to a sword and sorcery connoisseur it goes down like fine wine. Having delivered a small masterpiece, Harrison walked away from the field and has not returned. Moorcock’s career was launched during a publishing boom in the 1960s that brought Howard and Burroughs back into print, kept Leiber in paperback, and saw Tolkien rise to worldwide fame. Fantasy could suddenly be found on bookstore shelves in increasing quantities. Imitation rather than innovation began to take over. Rather than a few writers crafting sword and sorcery work with their individual stamp, the 1970s and early 1980s brought us mostly imitation of what had come before. Some writers, such as John Jakes and Gardner Fox, created barbarians of their own and sent them adventuring. Lin Carter drafted multiple series heavily influenced by Burroughs, Howard, Dunsany, and A.E. Merritt, and many others followed suit. Some of the work was polished and entertaining if familiar, but most of it was dreck. The profusion of the material probably contributed to the virtual disappearance of sword and sorcery in the 1980s. Writers were hired to craft more tales of Conan or other Robert E. Howard heroes. As expected, some of this work was much better than others. Accomplished authors—among them David C. Smith, Andrew Offutt, Karl Edward Wagner, and later John Maddox Roberts and John C. Hocking—delivered stories reminiscent of something Howard might have composed. Most of the pastiche, though, was hollow and empty. The 1970s and 1980s saw the rise of sword and sorcery anthologies, many of which were popular enough to spawn multiple volumes. Lin Carter selected manuscripts for the Year’s Best Fantasy Stories from 1975 to 1980, in volumes 1 through 6. Though he often published a story of his own (and sometimes two, the second under a pen name), he can perhaps be excused because the stories he chose were among his best. Famed fantasy authors L. Sprague de Camp, Jack Vance, C.J. Cherryh, and Karl Edward Wagner contributed many short stories, and Carter often featured reprints by Robert E. Howard and other luminaries. Lesser known but talented authors also made appearances, including Charles Saunders and Pat McIntosh. Though quality varied, each of these six volumes contained a healthy dose of sword and sorcery. After Carter left, the later books in the series rarely included this genre. Fantasy author and editor Andrew J. Offutt helmed five volumes of Swords Against Darkness from 1977 to 1979. Offutt’s selections were similar to Carter’s in that they mixed reprints and modern works, including pieces by Poul Anderson, Tanith Lee, Manly Wade Wellman, and Ramsey Campbell. Offutt, however, was able to offer content that was almost exclusively sword and sorcery. Some of it was not especially good, but much of it was. Darrell Schweitzer’s haunted Julian the Knight first found a wider audience after being published in this anthology. There were other series—such as Lin Carter’s five-volume Flashing Swords series (each made up of four or five novellas rather than the more typical dozen short stories) as well as the more high-fantasy-oriented Thieves’ World books and many fine stand-alones—but two deserve special mention. Jessica Amanda Salmonson edited two volumes of Amazons (I and II) in 1979 and 1982. She selected stories of women protagonists slashing and riding into adventure, and most of her choices were more balanced and less shrill than those featured in other sword and sorcery anthologies centered on female adventurers. The most famous of these series was Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress series.

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From 1987 through 1991 Karl Edward Wagner edited Echoes of Valor. This three-volume anthology featured few new stories, because what Wagner decided to reprint overlooked or revered but rare works and package them in an affordable format. It was a gold mine for the sword and sorcery or sword and planet aficionado. Volume II, for instance, features a Jirel of Joiry story left out of Moore’s collected works, as well as a collaboration between Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury that had not been reprinted. Volume III presents three of Nictzin Dyalhis’s Weird Tales fantasy pieces as well as both of Henry Kuttner’s Prince Raynor stories. Wagner would almost surely have followed with more, but this talented editor and author died too young. Underground in the 1980s. By the mid-1980s sword and sorcery had been all but completely swept from the marketplace. Fantasy as a whole grew in popularity, but the hordes of Tolkien imitators won out against the legions of Conan imitators. Novel markets evaporated, and only a handful of small press magazines welcomed tales of sword and sorcery. Some have pointed the rise of female editors in the fantasy field, and the resulting backlash against male tropes commonly found in sword and sorcery, as the cause of the genre’s decline, but that is too simple an explanation, although it is true that women make up a much larger demographic of fantasy readers today than men do. Some believe sword and sorcery was brought low by the appalling quality of various sword and sorcery movies and a plethora of imitative books. Then video games arrived on the scene, providing for many young men the same kind of thrills that they once experienced vicariously through reading. It might have been the demise of short fiction markets, for the speculative fiction magazines became more and more interested in legitimizing fantasy and science fiction by making it more literary and obscure and by distancing themselves from lowly tales of adventure. Whatever the storm’s cause, it left only a few giants standing: Leiber and Moorcock, who were only writing in the field sporadically and had enough clout to have their talent recognized no matter what they wrote, and David Gemmell, who will be discussed in a moment. Nearly everyone else was down for the count, even some less wellknown writers who were pushing the genre’s envelopes. The most recognized of these other authors is Michael Shea. Nifft the Lean, Michael Shea’s gentleman thief, attracted praise from many circles, including World Fantasy Award winner Tim Powers. Shea himself won the World Fantasy Award for the 1982 collection titled Nifft the Lean. His tales have been collected by Baen in recent years and are still in print. Inventive, clever, and exciting, their style is reminiscent of a Vancian-Clark Ashton Smith-Leiber combination at its most indulgent. Shea shares with Vance and Smith a gift for world building, and with Leiber the gift of artful dialogue. Richard Tierney, sometime cowriter with David C. Smith, created Simon Magus, a magician and ex-gladiator wandering New Testament times and combating Cthulhuinspired horrors. Most of the tales were collected in The Scroll of Thoth in 1997. Darrel Schweitzer wrote in the late 1970s in elegant prose of a damned, wandering knight. Sir Julian’s tales were collected in 1981 and more fantasy has flowed from Schweitzer’s pen, including the superlative Mask of the Sorcerer, which is decidedly more about sorcery than swords. Schweitzer remains active in the field today, associated with the new Weird Tales and writing other fantasy work, although his tone has far more in common with Dunsany than Howard.

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Of all these authors, there were three who most closely hewed to the tenets of sword and sorcery as established by Howard, while at the same time forging new paths. A young David C. Smith created Oron in 1979, the first of the new generation of barbarians who actually felt barbaric, and the character proved so popular that Smith’s publisher had him write prequels, for Oron came to a Wagnerian end at the conclusion of his first adventure. Then there was Imaro, the creation of Charles Saunders, who sent his character wandering a fantastic Africa. Imaro was the first important black hero of sword and sorcery. The three Imaro novels and a set of related short stories breathe with atmosphere, so much so that the setting is a character unto itself. The customs, people, and places feel real. While the supernatural and fantastic stalk this world, Saunders’s storytelling skills present even the ordinary features of this setting, from savanna to jungle, as vivid and new. Saunders’s skilful world-building as well as his taut action and suspense scenes create an explosive mix, one that Lin Carter was quick to recognize, printing Imaro tales in several volumes of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthology series. Born the son of mixed parentage in a warrior society, Imaro longs for acceptance, but when he finally earns it, his own pride sets him on another path. A mighty warrior, at heart Imaro is a decent, loving man who hides behind a wall of stoicism he has built both to protect himself during his troubled upbringing and to endure the horrors he has faced. Most other sword and sorcery heroes are rogues born with wanderlust. They are fascinating to see in action, but they are not necessarily people we would care to meet. Imaro, however, is honestly likable. Finally, and most famously, was Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane, marked by God for murder with cold blue eyes, an immortal hero-villain who lusts for knowledge and power. An accomplished manipulator, Kane wanders his world commissioning deeds both good and ill and often carrying them out himself. Wagner was a genius with atmosphere, and the best of the Kane stories are riveting; the worst are maudlin. Like Kane, Wagner dared greatness, sometimes reaching spectacular heights and sometimes failing. Wagner’s work is a little like Moorcock’s in theme: both writers play with our conceptions of good and evil; and both men created works that when turned this way, show ready flaws, and when turned that way, show gleaming brilliance. There were other authors writing of heroes adventuring in other times or cultures, such as Keith Taylor’s Celtic Bard in his Bard books, and Jessica Amanda Salmonson and Ted Rypel, who drafted tales of adventurous samurai. With the exception of Shea, these and other authors have either vanished or remained in print only through the auspices of the small press. Smith’s work is completely out of print, and Saunders’s and Wagner’s have been until just recently. For the last twenty years or more sword and sorcery has been relegated to the sidelines, existing for the most part only in limited distribution. Popular authors such as Tanith Lee occasionally dabble with it, but Tolkien-flavored quest fantasy has been continually dominant, save for one important exception. Born in London, David Gemmell (1948–2006) was expelled from school at age sixteen for organizing a gambling syndicate. Owning a six-feet-four-inch, 230-pound frame, he worked as a laborer and nightclub bouncer before becoming a freelance journalist. In retrospect, these occupations prepared him well to become one of the genre’s most skilled and popular writers since Howard.

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In 1984, Gemmell published his first novel, Legend, a tale of heroes striving to defend a fortress against a vastly larger army. Foremost among the defenders is Druss the Legend, a titanic, indomitable warrior of over 60 years of age, who travels to the fortress to face death not by old age, but in battle. Druss, whose earlier deeds fill later novels, epitomizes the iron-willed soldier who appears frequently in Gemmell’s tales, whereas another hero, Rek, is the first of several sword-wielding rogues: an agile man who lacks no skill in battle but who must accept its risk and righteousness in place of women, drink, coin, and self-preservation. Perhaps the most worldly of these reluctant heroes is Jarek Mace, a Robin Hood-William Wallace figure, featured in the excellent stand-alone novel Morningstar (1992), by David Gemmell. Before dying in 2006 from heart disease, Gemmell was prolific, publishing over thirty novels between 1984 and the year of his death. (He smoked heavily as part of his writing process.) These include the eleven-book Drenai Saga, which features Legend, and the four-book Rigante Saga. His final novels, Lord of the Silver Bow (2005) and Shield of Thunder (2006), were the first two parts of a trilogy reimagining Homer’s Iliad. Gemmell penned 70,000 words of the final part, The Fall of Kings, which was being completed by his wife, Stella, and scheduled for publication in 2007. While Gemmell’s prose, even in Legend, is consistently clear and undemanding, it is especially vivid and polished in these last works, in which memorable characters such as Odysseus sail the Great Green in advance of war. Because Gemmell’s novels often involve climatic battles that determine the fates of nations or races, they can easily be classified as heroic fantasies. However, several elements also mark them as sword and sorcery: warriors and thieves with morals painted in shades of gray; foes who are monstrous, undead, or aided by dark magic; earthy details (e.g., cooking soup in bark bowls); swiftly unfolding action; and courage against almost insurmountable odds, for the sake of liberty—to name the most prevalent. In Gemmell’s hands, these elements converge in highly engaging tales (often free of profanity and graphic sex). As succinctly observed by fantasy author Greg Keyes (The Briar King), “Gemmell not only knows how to tell a story, he knows how to tell a story you want to hear” (2006). With his passing, the genre has lost arguably its most consistent and productive modern craftsman. Reception The New Millennium. Today sword and sorcery remains marginalized, although there are some signs that the pendulum may be swinging in the other direction. Gemmell was a tremendous success in Europe but unwelcome on American shores for many years. Though the foremost of the new sword and sorcery writers, he was not completely alone. Some readers grew tired of high fantasy tropes and found solace in the gritty violence of Glen Cook’s Black Company books, which read as a combination of fantasy crossed with military fiction peopled with earthy sword and sorcery heroes. In the late 1990s Matthew Stover delivered two series, the first featuring a Pictish warrior woman (Iron Dawn, 1997), the second a warrior transported from his futuristic society to battle with primitive weapons for the amusement of those watching back home (Heroes Die, 1999; Tompkins 2008). Stover’s work seems clearly in the sword and sorcery camp, but when the boundary is inexact, it is hard to split hairs with a battle-axe and make certain determinations. Cook’s work, for example, seems more like military fiction, albeit with

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sword and sorcery seasoning. Canadian-born Steven Ericson’s Malazan books may be the sign of an even larger swing away from high fantasy by traditional publishers. Phonebook-sized, like the plethora of high fantasy series that dominated the market through the 1990s, the Malazan books are a huge, multipart series replete with action and stuffed with gritty blue-collar heroes. Sword and sorcery scholar Steve Tompkins places Erikson’s work clearly in the fold, but others perceive it to be more like epic fantasy with sword and sorcery sensibility, or even the more nebulously defined dark fantasy. Whatever they are, exactly, Malazan books are clearly rooted in sword and sorcery precepts and may indeed be the start of something entirely new. A handful of writers have found an outlet working for publishing houses that print books based in worlds generated for role-playing games and war games. The most sword-and-sorcery friendly of these publishing firms has been the Warhammer (Electronic Arts) franchise, set in a European Renaissance style world populated by elves, dwarves, humans, and various disturbing things man was not meant to know. Writers such as William King, C.L. Werner, Bryan Craig, and others have fashioned iconic sword and sorcery characters who wander the shared world. King created Gotrek, a skilled and deadly warrior dwarf, and Felix the bard sworn to follow the former and record his exploits until he meets a glorious end. The novels and short stories proved so popular that King left Warhammer in 2003 to craft his own sword and sorcery Terrarch novels for European publishers, leaving his creations Gotrek and Felix to another writer, which is one of the most unfortunate aspects of fashioning characters under contract. Werner has been equally well received by Warhammer fans and outside readers with two very different characters, the first a remorseless and mostly amoral bounty hunter called Brunner; the other a kind of righteous, relentless monster hunter, named Matthias Thulman, fashioned from equal parts Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane, the Hammer horror movies, and Werner’s own imagination. Aside from the Warhammer books and David Gemmell’s tales of soldiers and outlaws, almost no modern sword and sorcery works have achieved widespread, or even marked, popularity, especially when compared with best-selling, epic fantasies such as George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire or Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time. Although possible reasons for this disparity may include a bias by major publishers against real and perceived flaws in traditional sword and sorcery, such as shallow or stereotypical characters, it seems more likely that the difference is due to a practical consideration (as few epic fantasies lack stereotypes). Publishers wish to sell as many books as possible, and sweeping, multicharacter, epic fantasies naturally lend themselves to longer tales. In contrast to their epic fantasy counterparts, sword and sorcery heroes tend to resemble sprinters more than marathoners. For example, The Wheel of Time, published from 1990 to 2005, consisted of eleven lengthy novels and a prequel, with the story remaining unfinished; by contrast, in Howard’s sole novel, The Hour of the Dragon, Conan loses and regains a kingdom in 75,000 tumultuous words. Despite the dominance of epic fantasy in novel-length works, writers of speculative fiction have continued to explore the sword and sorcery genre, selling both traditional and innovative tales to prominent short fiction magazines such as Black Gate and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF), as well as to Internet publications in recent years (e.g., swordandsorcery.org). Some works are worthy of particular mention.

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In 1987, Ellen Kushner (b. 1955) published Swordspoint, a critically acclaimed “melodrama of manners” that introduced the duelist Richard St Vier and the erratic scholar Alec. The novel is notable for its nuanced characterization and setting—an intricate juxtaposition of a nameless city akin to eighteenth-century London or Paris and its seedy Riverside district—as well as the protagonists’ homosexual relationship. Swordspoint was followed by The Fall of the Kings (2002) and The Privilege of the Sword (2006), and its characters also appeared in a handful of short stories, including “The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death” (F&SF, September 1991). The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction has also showcased, in the tradition of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, two of the more fascinating sword-against-sorcery duos to debut in recent years. The first duo, composed of the soldier Vertir and the scribe Kuikan, has appeared in three tales (“For Want of a Nail,” March 2003; “After the Gaud Chrysalis,” June 2004; and “Of Silence and the Man at Arms,” June 2005) by Charles Coleman Finlay, a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell awards. Finlay’s stories place the protagonists in exotic, unfriendly surroundings and in situations where survival depends on quick-thinking under duress. The second consists of two especially odd yet appealing adventurers, the poet Persimmon Gaunt and the long-lived thief Imago Bone, created by Chris Willrich. Editor Gordon van Gelder described their debut, “The Thief with Two Deaths” (June 2000), as “a gorgeous fantasy that owes some of its inspiration to Lord Dunsany’s ‘The Idle City’”; and Willrich’s lush prose is similarly traditional yet fresh: Fanned by moonlit palm trees, chaperoned by star-aimed white obelisks slicing the surf’s roar into baffled echoes, Persimmon Gaunt stroked the thief’s dark hair and smiled.

Gaunt and Bone’s journey continues in “King Rainjoy’s Tears” (July 2002) and “Penultima Thule” (August 2006). Most fantasy periodicals print varieties of sword and sorcery occasionally, but among the modern magazines only Black Gate actively welcomes it. As a result, in its first ten issues Black Gate has showcased a number of writers who may well grow into the genre’s new torchbearers. It is too early to know, but some of the writers seem to be creating enduring work. Most certainly, James Enge’s three Morlock Ambrosius published tales are alive with splendid world-building, compelling characterization, clever dialogue, and perhaps most daring of all in today’s short fiction climate, adventure. Enge’s prose is crafted with Leiber’s wit and Smith’s imagination, and somehow remains supremely approachable while being polished to a high gloss. These modern heroes bear little outward resemblance to Conan and Jirel, yet they face a similar challenge: in a world that can be strange, wonderful, and terrible, they must survive as well and meaningfully as their prowess and courage allow. All well-realized fictional characters, and all readers in their daily lives, face this challenge; and it is this commonality of experience that gives the art of storytelling its power. Sword and sorcery tales, woven from the same fabric as ancient myths, can accordingly enlighten and entertain as powerfully as any literary genre—when they are woven well. It is this heritage, and the experience of numerous authors and readers, that qualifies sword and sorcery not as an inferior form of fantasy, but as a distinct and vivid genre.

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Bibliography Anderson, Poul. The Broken Sword. New York: Ballantine, 1971. Bishop, Farnham, and Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur. “The Hand of the Mahdi.” Adventure 18 Feb. 1920: 8–38. Bishop, Farnham. “Libertatia.” Adventure 30 April 1925: 1–73 Bleiler, Richard. The Index to Adventure Magazine. San Francisco: Borgo Press, 1990. Brackett, Leigh. Martian Quest: The Early Brackett. Royal Oak, MI: Haffner Press. 2002. Brackett, Leigh. Sea-Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories. London: Millenium, 2005. ———. “The Best of Leigh Brackett.” In Story-teller of Many Worlds. Edmond Hamilton, ed. New York: Nelson/Doubleday, 1977, vii–xiii. ———. The Book of Skaith: The Adventures of Eric John Stark. New York: Nelson/Doubleday, 1976. Brodeur, Arthur Gilchrist. “For the Crown.” Adventure 20 May 1922: 153–175. ———. “The Doom of the Gods.” Adventure 18 Nov. 1919: 3–88. Carter, Lin. Imaginary Worlds. New York: Ballantine, 1973. ———, ed. Dragons, Elves, and Heroes. New York: Ballantine, 1969. ———, ed. Flashing Swords #1. New York: Dell, 1973. ———, ed. Golden Citites, Far. New York: Ballantine, 1970. ———, ed. New Worlds for Old. New York: Ballantine, 1971. ———. “Of Swordsmen and Sorcerors.” Flashing Swords #1. New York: Dell, 1973. ———. “The Maze of Maal Dweb.” The Young Magicians. Lin Carter, ed. New York: Ballantine Books. 1969. ———, ed. The Young Magicians. New York: Ballantine, 1969. de Camp, L. Sprague, and Lin Carter. Conan of the Isles. New York: Ace, 1968. de Camp, L. Sprague . “Harold Lamb.” In Marching Sands, by Harold Lamb. New York: Hyperion, 1974, i–ii. ———. “Heroic Fantasy.” Swords and Sorcery. L. Sprague de Camp, ed. New York: Pyramid Books, 1963, 7–8. ———. Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1976. Ebert, Roger. “Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.” http://rogerebert.suntimes. com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20011219/REVIEWS/112190301/102(accesed December 19, 2001). Eddison, E.R. The Worm Ouroboros. New York: Ballantine, 1967 (reprint). Fox, Gardner. Kothar, Barbarian Swordsman. New York: Leisure Books, 1970. Gaiman, Neil. “Introduction.” In Return to Lankhmar. Fritz Leiber, ed. Clarkston, GA: White Wolf Publishing, 1997, 13–15. Haggard, H. Rider. Eric Brighteyes. New York: Zebra, 1978. ———. The Wanderer’s Necklace. New York: Zebra, 1978. Hanning, Peter, ed. Weird Tales. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1990. Harrison, M. John. Viroconium. London: Millenium, 2000. Hoppenstand, Gary. “Introduction.” In Captain Blood, by Rafael Sabatini. New York: Penguin, 2003, vi–xix. Howard, Robert E. Almuric. New York: Berkley, 1977. ———. Bran Mak Morn. New York: Baen, 1996. ———. Cormac Mac Art. New York: Baen, 1995. ———. Cthulhu: The Mythos and Kindred Horrors. New York: Baen, 1987. ———. Kull. New York: Baen, 1995. ———. Marchers of Valhalla. New York: Berkley, 1978. ———. Pigeons from Hell. New York: Ace, 1979. ———. Red Nails. New York: Berkley, 1977. ———. Solomon Kane. New York: Baen, 1995. ———. Swords of Sharhrazar. New York: Berkley, 1978.

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SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION ———. The Bloody Crown of Conan. New York: Del Rey, 2003. ———. “The Book of Robert E Howard.” Glenn Lord, ed. New York: Zebra, 1976. ———. The Coming of Conan. New York: Del Rey, 2002. ———. The Conquering Sword of Conan. New York: Del Rey, 2005. ———. The Last Ride. New York: Berkley, 1978. ———. The Lost Valley of Iskander. New York: Ace, 1974. ———. “The Second Book of Robert E. Howard.” Glenn Lord, ed. New York: Zebra, 1976. Jakes, John. The Fortunes of Brak. New York: Dell, 1980. Jones, Howard. “Defining Sword and Sorcery.” Sword and Sorcery 2008. http://www. swordandsorcery.org/defining-sword-and-sorcery.htm. Jones, Robert Kenneth. The Lure of Adventure. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont Pulp and Dime Novel Studies, 1989. Keyes, Greg. Back cover blurb from Lord of the Silver Bow by Gemmell, David. New York: Ballantine Books, 2006. Kuttner, Henry. The Best of Henry Kuttner. New York: Nelson/Doubleday, 1975. Lamb, Harold. Warriors of the Steppes. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. ———. Kirdy: The Road out of the World. New York: Doubleday, 1933. ———. Riders of the Steppes. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. ———. Swords of the Steppes. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. ———. The Mighty Manslayer. New York: Doubleday, 1969. ———. Wolf of the Steppes. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Lee, Tanith. Cyrion. New York: DAW, 1982. Leiber, Fritz. Farewell Lankhmar. Clarkston, GA: White Wolf Publishing, 1998. ———. Ill Met in Lankhmar. Clarkston, GA: White Wolf Publishing, 1995. ———. Lean Times in Lankhmar. Clarkston, GA: White Wolf Publishing, 1996. ———. Return to Lankhmar. Clarkston, GA: White Wolf Publishing, 1997. Lord Dunsany. Time and The Gods. London: Millenium, 2000. Louinet, Patrice. “Introduction.” In The Coming of Conan. Robert E. Howard, ed. New York: Del Rey, 2002. Moorcock, Michael. Hawkmoon. : White Wolf Publishing, 1995. ———. The Elric Saga: Part I. New York: Nelson/Doubleday, 1984. ———. The Elric Saga: Part II. New York: Nelson/Doubleday. 1984. ———. Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy. Austin: Monkeybrain, Inc., 2004. Moore, C.L. Jirel of Joiry. New York: Ace, 1977. Mundy, Talbot. Tros of Samothrace: Helene. New York: Avon Books, 1967. ———. Tros of Samothrace: Helma. New York: Avon Books, 1967. ———. Tros of Samothrace: Liafail. New York: Avon Books, 1967. ———. Tros of Samothrace: Tros. New York: Avon Books, 1967. Sabatini, Rafael. Captain Blood. New York: Penguin, 2003. Salmonson, Jessica Amanda, ed. Heroic Visions. New York: Ace, 1983. Sampson, Robert. Yesterday’s Faces: Violent Lives. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993. Saunders, Charles. Imaro. San Francisco: Nightshade Books, 2006. Schweitzer, Darrell, ed. Discovering Classic Fantasy Fiction. Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 1996. ———. Mask of the Sorcerer., Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 1995. ———. We Are All Legends. Virginia Beach, VA: Starblaze Editions, 1981. Smith, Arthur D. Howden. Gray Maiden. New York: Longmans/Macmillan, 1929. ———. Swain’s Saga. New York: Macmillan, 1931. Smith, Clark Ashton. Hyperborea. New York: Ballantine, 1971. ———. Xiccarph. New York: Ballantine, 1972.

SWORD AND SORCERY FICTION Smith, David C. Oron. New York: Zebra Books, 1978. Taliaferro, John. Tarzan Forever: The Life of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Creator of Tarzan. New York: Scribner, 1999. Tierney, Richard. Scroll of Thoth. Oakland, CA: Chaosium, 1997. Tompkins, Steven. “After Aquilonia and Having Left Lankhmar: Sword-and-Sorcery since the 1980s.” In The Robert E. Howard Reader. Darrell Schweitzer, ed. Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2008. Vance, Jack. Planet of Adventure. New York: Orb, 1993. ———. Tales of the Dying Earth. New York: Orb, 1998. Wagner, Karl. “Foreword.” Red Nails. Robert E. Howard. New York: Berkley. 1977. ———. Gods in Darkness. San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2002. ———. Midnight Sun. San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2003. Zelazny, Roger. Dilvish, The Damned. New York: Del Rey, 1982. ———. The Chronicles of Amber, Volume I. New York: Nelson/Doubleday, 1978. ———. The Chronicles of Amber, Volume II. New York: Nelson/Doubleday, 1978.

Further Reading Brackett, Leigh. Lorelei of the Red Mist. Royal Oak, MI: Haffner Press, 2007; Harrison, M. John. “The Pastel City.” In Viroconium. London: Millenium, 2000, 23–152; Howard, Robert E. The Coming of Conan. New York: Del Rey, 2005; Jones, Howard. “Defining Sword-and-sorcery.” Sword-and-Sorcery. 2008. http://www.swordandsorcery.org/definingsword-and-sorcery.htm; Leiber, Fritz. Ill Met in Lankhmar. Clarkston, GA: White Wolf Publishing, 1995; Moorcock, Michael. The Elric Saga, Part I. Garden City, New York: Berkley, 1984; Moorcock, Michael. Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy. Austin: Monkeybrain, Inc., 2004; Salmonson, Jessica Amanda, ed. Heroic Visions. New York: Ace, 1983; Schweitzer, Darrell, ed. Discovering Classic Fantasy Fiction. Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 1996; Vance, Jack. “The Dying Earth.” Tales of the Dying Earth. New York: Orb, 1998, 1–131.

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Books and Beyond

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Books and Beyond The Greenwood Encyclopedia of New American Reading

VOLUME 4:

T–Z

Edited by

KENNETH WOMACK

GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Books and beyond : the Greenwood encyclopedia of new American reading / edited by Kenneth Womack. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978-0-313-33738-3 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0-313-33737-6 (v. 1 : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0-313-33740-6 (v. 2 : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0-313-33741-3 (v. 3 : alk. paper) — ISBN: 978-0313-33742-0 (v. 4 : alk. paper) 1. Books and reading—United States—Encyclopedias. 2. Reading interests—United States—Encyclopedias. 3. Popular literature—United States—Encyclopedias. 4. Fiction genres—Encyclopedias. 5. American literature—History and criticism. 6. English literature—History and criticism. I. Womack, Kenneth. Z1003.2B64 2008 028’.9097303—dc22 2008018703 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2008 by Kenneth Womack All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008018703 ISBN: 978–0–313–33738–3 (set) 978–0–313–33737–6 (vol. 1) 978–0–313–33740–6 (vol. 2) 978–0–313–33741–3 (vol. 3) 978–0–313–33742–0 (vol. 4) First published in 2008 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents Preface

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Introduction: Reading in America Today

xi

Entries Academic Fiction Adventure Fiction African American Literature Arab American Literature Arthurian Literature Asian American Literature Autobiography and Memoir Beat Poetry Biography Chick Lit Children’s Literature Christian Fiction Comedic Theatre Comic Books Coming of Age Fiction (Bildungsroman) Contemporary Mainstream American Fiction Cyberpunk Dramatic Theatre Dystopian Fiction Ecopoetry Erotic Literature

1 13 26 40 53 66 87 97 112 137 162 185 195 209 222 249 274 289 312 325 338

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CONTENTS

Fantasy Literature Film Adaptations of Books Flash Fiction GLBTQ Literature Graphic Novels Historical Fantasy Historical Fiction Historical Mysteries Historical Writing (Nonfiction) Holocaust Literature Humor Inspirational Literature (Nonfiction) Jewish American Literature Language Poetry Latino American Literature Legal Thrillers Literary Journalism Magical Realism Manga and Anime Military Literature Musical Theatre Mystery Fiction Native American Literature New Age Literature Occult/Supernatural Literature Parapsychology Philological Thrillers Poetry Regional Fiction Road Fiction Romance Novels Science Fiction Science Writing (Nonfiction) Sea Literature Self-Help Literature Series Fiction Space Opera Speculative Fiction Sports Literature Spy Fiction Suspense Fiction Sword and Sorcery Fiction

351 366 385 401 416 427 440 455 468 483 498 511 521 537 552 561 571 587 600 612 625 638 663 682 699 717 732 740 767 782 796 805 833 848 862 880 894 917 930 954 962 971

CONTENTS

Terrorism Fiction Time Travel Fiction Transrealist Fiction Travel Writing True Crime Literature Urban Fiction Utopian Literature Vampire Fiction Verse Novels Western Literature Young Adult Literature Zines

995 1012 1025 1034 1047 1065 1078 1091 1119 1131 1147 1163

Contemporary Authors by Genre

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Suggestions for Further Reading

1191

About the Editor and Contributors

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Index

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T TERRORISM FICTION Definition. The initial complexity in defining “terrorism fiction” is the necessity of defining “terrorism.” Despite the ubiquity of the term in contemporary discourse, it is surprisingly difficult to arrive at unambiguous agreement about what acts, precisely, can be gathered together under the label of “terrorist actions,” let alone what groups or individuals can be called “terrorists.” To a certain degree this is a matter of differing political stances: as the familiar expression reminds us, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Alex Houen points out, for example, that “organizations such as the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) that were once widely declared to be ‘terrorist’ have over recent years been accepted internationally as legitimate political parties” (Houen 2002, 7). Even fixing the use of the term historically can be challenging. Although Andrew Sinclair’s history of terrorism (2003) encompasses events from Greek antiquity onward, there is general agreement that the actual term “terrorism” first came into use with the French Revolution, and that because of the contemporaneous development of the mass media “the insurgent terrorism that evolved in the second half of the nineteenth century was something new and not merely a repetition of the violent conspiracies that marked political history long before Brutus stabbed Caesar” (Scanlan 2001, 5). One good working definition of terrorism is given by Cindy C. Combs and Martin Slann in their Encyclopedia of Terrorism, where they define the essential term “as a synthesis of war and theatre, a dramatization of the most proscribed kind of violence—that which is perpetrated on innocent victims—played before an audience in the hope of creating a mood of fear for political purposes” (Combs and Slann 2003, 209). Certain aspects of this definition might be more or less applicable in given situations, but the presence of the audience is fundamental; a terrorist act “is, essentially, theatre, an act played before an audience, designed to call the attention of millions, even hundreds of millions, to an often unrelated situation through shock” (Combs and Slann 2003, 209). The actual violence inherent to

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terrorism, then, is secondary. The terrorist act is intended primarily as an act of communication, a message delivered to most observers through the mass media that appropriates and reports on such events. Through this message the terrorist hopes to dictate, or at least alter, the public discourse on a given issue, making it possible to discuss terrorism as “primarily a matter of discursive and figurative practices” (Houen 2002, 4). Terrorism is essentially performative. In Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint, one character recognizes this feature of terrorist actions by telling a potential presidential assassin that he is “talking about leaping onto the world stage. You don’t have any idea what you might set in motion, what kind of uproar” (Baker 2004, 26). It is precisely these aspects of terrorism—the attempt to “leap onto the world stage” and the various kinds of “uproar” that follow—that have constituted the core of American literature’s engagement with terrorism in recent decades. In his 2005 essay “Dangerous Characters” Benjamin Kunkel, in a quick aside, defines the American terrorist novel as “the novel proposing terrorists among its main characters, and meant as literature rather than disposable suspense fiction” (Kunkel 2005, 14). This definition is serviceable (although it assumes a clear line can be drawn between “literature” and “disposable suspense fiction”) but fails to recognize another characteristic almost universal among American fictional works concerning terrorism: the central interest in the terrorist’s attempt and/or ability to alter world discourse and, particularly in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the ways in which world discourse responds. Although this thematic concern may be too abstract or diffuse to describe a genre as clearly delineated as, say, cyberpunk, it does provide a shared foundation and allows these texts to be considered as a group. History. Novels of the late 1800s and early 1900s with terrorism themes—even The Princess Casamassima by the American-born James—were set in Europe and concerned European political struggles and stereotyped figures, primarily the bombthrowing anarchist. Although such bombings were not unknown in America, they did not find any significant or lasting place in American literature. Terrorism itself virtually disappeared from the Western worldview for much of the twentieth century, displaced by the two World Wars and the advent of the Cold War, and only reasserted itself with the anticolonial and countercultural movements of the late 1960s and, still more significantly, the growing symbiosis between television and political violence. In this scheme, the definitive event for the reemergence of terrorism as a major force in Western life was the “first global terrorist broadcast,” the abduction and eventual murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics by the group Black September (Scanlan 2001, 12). Despite isolated acts of terrorism within the United States in the last third of the twentieth century (e.g., occasional, usually minor, bombings by radical political groups; the letter bombs sent by the Unabomber; the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center; the 1995 Oklahoma City explosion), “terrorism” in the American imagination, and thus in American fiction, continued to be conceived of primarily as a phenomenon associated with foreign actors and foreign settings, primarily the Middle East. This changed, of course, on September 11, 2001 (hereafter “9/11”), when four American airliners hijacked by operatives of the Islamic extremist group al-Qaeda crashed into the Pentagon, a Pennsylvania field, and the World Trade Center, which subsequently collapsed on live television. We are still only beginning to see how American novelists will ultimately respond to 9/11 and to a new age in which terrorism is central to American political discourse. As Kunkel notes, fiction

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TERRORISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY? Until recent years, terrorism played a relatively minor role in American literature, largely because it occupied a relatively minor place within the American imagination. In Plotting Terror, her seminal 2001 study of the relationship between novelists and terrorists in contemporary fiction, Margaret Scanlan argues that the first significant fictional texts about terrorism were produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by authors such as Henry James, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Joseph Conrad.

“registers historical change profoundly but not swiftly, for the simple reason that it usually takes several years to conceive, write, revise and publish a book” (Kunkel 2005, 14). At this writing major American works that address 9/11 and its aftermath have begun to appear, but it is possible to see them as still functioning in a primarily reactive mode, not yet breaking new ground in suggesting ways we can conceive of and come to terms with our shared new reality. It is clear, at any rate, that American terrorist fiction will continue to be shaped and changed by 9/11 for many years to come, in ways that we can, for the moment, only begin to guess. Trends and Themes Landmarks of American Terrorist Fiction Prior to 9/11 Thomas Harris, Black Sunday (1975). As noted previously, Kunkel, in defining American terrorist fiction, is at pains to distinguish it from works that can be easily labeled as “disposable suspense fiction.” Scanlan, in Plotting Terror, is similarly dismissive of “a popular fiction” that directly emulates “the quick sound bites, glossy images, scandals, and explosions of television programming” and that “does not make too many demands on its readers” (Scanlan 2001, 161). Terrorists have, over the past few decades, played an increasingly prominent role as the villains of such texts, and although they do not properly fall within the bounds of this study, it is worth looking at one of the most visible and widely imitated of these narratives in order to consider the boundaries between “serious” and “disposable” fiction. Highly successful when published, and as filmed two years later by the director John Frankenheimer, Black Sunday concerns an attempt by operatives of the reallife terrorist group Black September to detonate a bomb in a blimp flying over the Super Bowl, thus killing thousands of spectators, including the President of the United States. Although Black September orchestrates and backs the scheme, its main operative is an American, Michael Lander, who has become mentally unbalanced due to years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and his subsequent failure to return to mainstream American life or to maintain his marriage. The terrorist plot is opposed by agents of the American FBI and Israeli Mossad, and the suspense of the novel and the engagement of the reader depend entirely on the question of whether they will succeed in preventing the detonation. Black Sunday is undeniably gripping, but the terrorists within it are almost entirely divorced from any sense of historical or geographic reality; they exist only to be opposed and defeated by the story’s heroes. Given the focus on and characterization of Lander, even much of this function is displaced onto the traumatic American experience in Vietnam, making the treatment of terrorism still more incidental to the story. There is no sustained effort in the book to understand the

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terrorists themselves, or terrorism as a strategy; there is no serious consideration of what the aftermath of their plot would be, beyond the straightforward calculation of the physical harm done. These absences mark the distinction between the kind of sensationalist narratives dismissed by Kunkel and Scanlan and the more serious, literary texts we are classifying as “terrorism fiction” for the purposes of this essay. That said, Black Sunday has been very influential and can be seen as the vanguard of a range of narratives in which “terrorist” serves as the unexamined label applied to villains to be overcome in binary confrontations between good and evil. The use of terrorists in such roles became particularly popular with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, which effectively eliminated Russians as the bad guys of choice. The novels of Tom Clancy, for example, which exist primarily to fetishize the martial technology of the United States, move from confrontations with the Soviet military to showdowns with figures described on book jackets with terms like “Middle Eastern madmen.” At this writing probably the most culturally visible example of this use of terrorism is the television series 24. Depending upon exactly what form they take, narratives of this kind might be considered adventure fiction, true crime fiction, military literature, mystery fiction, spy fiction, or techno-thrillers. Don DeLillo, Mao II (1991). When the journal Studies in the Novel published a special issue on “Terrorism and the Postmodern Novel” in 2004, seven of the ten essays included mentioned Don DeLillo, with five focusing extensively on his work. Similarly, in Margaret Scanlan’s Plotting Terror, the first chapter is dedicated to DeLillo, and specifically Mao II. Put simply, Don DeLillo is the key figure in American literature’s recent engagement with terrorism, and Mao II is the key text for understanding his conception of terrorism, a conception that has proved highly influential. By the time he came to Mao II, his eleventh novel, DeLillo had already indicated a significant interest in terrorism in his earlier novels. In Players (1977), the central character, Lyle Wynant, witnesses a murder on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and is drawn into the conspiracy of the group of terrorists who committed it and who plan further attacks against Wall Street. In The Names (1982), a group of Americans in Greece are intrigued and eventually endangered by a terrorist cult that kills people based simply on the spelling of their names. In both these early works, the “terrorist” groups lack readily accessible political motivation and are detached from any meaningful sense of history or ideology. They are essentially conspiracies that exist for the sheer baroque pleasure of conspiracy, illuminating the hidden connections and ineffable forces that disrupt any stable sense of how life operates but illustrating still more strongly DeLillo’s debt to his postmodernist predecessors, particularly Thomas Pynchon. For most critics these early works are eclipsed by later, more ambitious and assured DeLillo texts, such as the 1988 Libra, which is a speculative biography of Lee Harvey Oswald from his childhood through the Kennedy assassination and his death. Whether Libra itself can properly be considered terrorism fiction may well depend on whether the Kennedy assassination can be treated as a terrorist act; it has never been clearly linked to any particular political demand, and there is no compelling evidence that Oswald committed the act with an audience in mind, therefore such an identification seems tentative at best. In Mao II, however, terrorism, and specifically the relationship between writing and terrorism, takes center stage. The central figure of the book is the novelist Bill Gray, a cult figure who has become more famous for his reclusive habits than his

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two published novels. Gray is reminiscent of J.D. Salinger or Pynchon but has most frequently been seen by critics as a stand-in for DeLillo himself. In the first section of the book Brita Nilsson, a photojournalist who has worked in war zones but is now compiling a collection of portraits of famous authors, travels to Gray’s secluded home, becoming the first outsider to meet or speak with him in many years. As they talk while she is photographing him, she mentions a fear of terrorists that leads her to take elaborate precautions when she travels. This prompts Bill to begin discussing terrorists and how they have robbed him of his sense of power as a novelist: There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence. . . . Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bombmakers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated. (DeLillo 1991, 41)

Nilsson seems to regard this essentially as meandering chat, but the remainder of the book charts Gray’s attempt to reclaim some of the power he feels he has lost to terrorism. Abandoning the third novel he has completed but feels unable to publish, Gray begins a solitary journey to the Middle East in a quixotic attempt to trade himself for a poet who has been taken hostage by a terrorist group in Lebanon, thus making use of the fame that, given the powerlessness of art, has become his only tool for attempting to promote change. Along the way he becomes acquainted with George Haddad, a character with ambiguous connections to both the literary and the terrorist worlds, and in conversations with him he expands upon the points he has made to Nilsson: novelists and terrorists are playing a zero-sum game. . . . What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. . . . Beckett is the last writer to shape the way we think and see. After him, the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings. (DeLillo 1991, 156–157)

Haddad extrapolates from this premise, suggesting that terrorists must then be “the only possible heroes for our time,” and that “in societies reduced to blur and glut . . . only the terrorist stands outside.” Gray rejects such idealization as “pure myth,” (DeLillo 1991, 158), but this idea—that terrorists have displaced novelists as the only possible source of meaningful resistance—permeates Mao II and has become the haunting possibility that must be confronted in any consideration of the relationship between artistic creation and terrorist violence. It is an idea that Scanlan echoes in Plotting Terror when she postulates “both writers and terrorists . . . as remnants of a romantic belief in the power of marginalized persons to transform history” (Scanlan 2001, 2). Gray rejects Haddad’s claims, but the remainder of Mao II presents little reason to be optimistic about the power of writers. Struck by a car in Cyprus, Gray dies in the hold of a tanker taking him to Lebanon, whereupon the very identity that has become his only resource is stolen from his body and sold to “some militia in Beirut” (DeLillo 1991, 217). Since nobody knows of his self-appointed mission, even the fame that is the remnant of his artistic ability proves useless. Indeed, the

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very idea of being a writer seems suffused with nostalgia in Mao II, as though the novelist has already faded completely into obsolescence. What makes the novel a touchstone of recent American treatments of terrorism is the connection Gray explicitly makes, and which subsequent authors of terrorism fiction freely draw upon: the competition between writers and terrorists for the right and the ability to play a role on the world stage, to possess a voice that can be raised in resistance. Paul Auster, Leviathan (1992). Something similar to Gray’s fate befalls another novelist who abandons writing in search of some more effective means of action: Bejamin Sachs, the central character of Leviathan (a novel dedicated to Don DeLillo). Sachs, however, goes beyond Gray, not merely seeking interaction with terrorists but abandoning writing to become one himself. In Leviathan the author’s obvious, thinly fictionalized counterpart is not Sachs but rather his best friend and fellow novelist, Peter Aaron, who shares with Auster not only a set of initials but also the broad outlines of a biography. Leviathan takes the form of a memoir written by Aaron, immediately after he learns Sachs has died, in an effort to justify—or at least make comprehensible—Sachs’s actions to the authorities who have been pursuing him. A left-leaning writer who defines his occupation largely in terms of political opposition and resistance, Sachs finds himself in “the era of Ronald Reagan” becoming “increasingly marginalized . . . in the present climate of selfishness and intolerance, of moronic, chest-pounding Americanism, his opinions sounded curiously harsh and moralistic” (Auster 1992, 116). A series of accidents and violent encounters further convince Sachs not only that writing is useless as a means of promoting change but also that restricting his actions to writing is cowardly: “‘for all my self-righteous opinions and embattled stances, I’d never put myself on the line’” (Auster 1992, 253). He changes tactics, deciding that “‘there was a moral justification for certain forms of political violence. Terrorism had its place in the struggle . . . for enlightening the public about the nature of institutional power’” (Auster 1992, 252). Sachs reinvents himself, rather melodramatically, as “the Phantom of Liberty,” and begins traveling around the United States blowing up replicas of the Statue of Liberty. He takes care that nobody is injured by his actions and accompanies his explosions with brief, idealistic messages urging a renewed dedication to democracy and a charitable attitude toward others. Sachs keeps this routine up for more than two years before apparently being killed in a mishap with one of his bombs, but despite his sense that he is making “a much greater mark than he had ever thought possible” (Auster 1992, 263), Leviathan cannot quite bring itself to endorse his notion that he has arrived at an effective means of political articulation. Considering Sachs’s frequently mentioned brilliance as a writer, for example, the messages that accompany his explosions are stunningly banal. An example: “‘Neglect the children, and we destroy ourselves. We exist in the present only to the degree that we put our faith in the future” (Auster 1992, 243–244). This resembles a Whitney Houston ballad rather more than serious political discourse. The evidence that the Phantom is “making a mark” is similarly thin: “Phantom of Liberty T-shirts and buttons were on sale in novelty shops, jokes had begun to circulate, and just last month two strippers in Chicago had presented an act in which the Statue of Liberty was gradually disrobed and then seduced by the Phantom” (Auster 1992, 263). Far from providing the inescapable narrative that is the aim of terrorist action, Sachs has only generated fodder for the grinding wheels of popular consumption. Surrendering his status as a writer has

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only made Sachs more complicit in the system he opposes. That said, this does not necessarily mean that he would have been better off as a writer. His friend Aaron remains a novelist, but the text he produces—Leviathan—is written strictly for official consumption, to be given to the FBI only when and if they figure out that Sachs had been the Phantom. In fact, Aaron hopes that this will not happen, feeling that “the best possible outcome” would be “a perfect standstill, not one word spoken by either side” (Auster 1992, 3). Aaron, then, is a writer reduced to the hope that he will never be read, whose text can at best serve no purpose beyond furthering the knowledge of the state; he is the writer rendered utterly compliant, incapable of resistance. Leviathan essentially echoes Mao II’s doubts about the relevance of the writer in an age of terrorism, only adding the additional thought that the terrorist, too, is ultimately just as powerless. Philip Roth, Operation Shylock (1993) and American Pastoral (1997). Whereas DeLillo and Auster encourage, or at least allow, an identification of themselves with their characters, such an entanglement of fact and fiction is never more explicit than in Operation Shylock, a text that is packaged as a novel but that for much of its length seems more accurately described by its subtitle: A Confession. Shylock is narrated by “Philip Roth,” a Jewish American author whose most famous book is Portnoy’s Complaint and whose biography matches precisely with the “real” Roth’s. The preface to the book claims that it is “as accurate an account as I am able to give of actual occurrences that I lived through during my middle fifties and that culminated, early in 1988, in my agreeing to undertake an intelligence-gathering operation for Israel’s foreign intelligence service” (Roth 1993, 13). Space does not permit here a full exploration of Shylock’s labyrinthine narrative shape and its narrator’s frequently baffling encounters with doubles, spies, and terrorists. For our immediate purposes, what is most significant is the narrator’s attempt to write about his experiences and how that attempt is frustrated. Having produced a manuscript that details his adventures, “Roth” shows it to Louis Smilesburger, the Mossad operative who has played a significant role in the narrative, eventually recruiting “Roth” and dispatching him on his “intelligence-gathering operation” to Athens. Smilesburger, a genial if vaguely ominous figure, generally approves of “Roth’s” decision to write the book (which is, of course, Operation Shylock itself) but asks for one change: the omission of Chapter 11, “twelve thousand words describing the people I convened with in Athens, the circumstances that brought us together, and the subsequent expedition, to a second European capital” (Roth 1993, 357). Smilesburger claims not only that revealing the details of the operation will endanger ongoing Israeli interests but also that the account “Roth” has written is in fact laughably inaccurate: “‘you haven’t the slightest idea of what happened. You grasp almost nothing of the objective reality. Its meaning evades you completely’” (Roth 1993, 390). He suggests, in fact, that “‘It might be altogether accurate to call the entire five hundred and forty-seven pages hypothetical formulation,’” that to label the narrative “‘a subjectivist fable . . . solves everything’” (Roth 1993, 390–91). An implication of this “solution,” of course, is that fiction is safe because it can have no significant force or meaning in the “real” world. Though “Roth” reacts angrily to this suggestion and claims to be in no way “obliged to him, his agency, or the state of Israel to suppress those forty-odd pages” (Roth 1993, 357), Smilesburger presses his argument, offering “Roth” money and even implying that the Mossad might feel obliged to destroy his reputation—again figured here as the novelist’s most important attribute—if he publishes Chapter 11. Smilesburger, in fact, is given

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the final line of the novel proper: “‘Let your Jewish conscience be your guide’” (Roth 1993, 398). The page immediately following contains a brief “Note to the Reader” that employs almost exactly a wording “Roth” had considered and rejected earlier in the novel: “This book is a work of fiction . . . This confession is false” (Roth 1993, 399). Chapter 11, of course, does not appear. The note to the reader perfectly bookends and perfectly contradicts the preface, and we are left with a narrative that folds in upon itself, simultaneously claiming the status of both fiction and fact. Whatever the factual nature of Operation Shylock, it goes even further than Mao II in illustrating the fundamental irrelevance of the writer in a setting contested by the competing narratives of terrorism and the state. “Roth” himself acknowledges that allowing Smilesburger to inspect his manuscript—a step, significantly, that he takes although it could be easily avoided—“ran counter to all the inclinations of one whose independence as a writer, whose counter-suggestiveness as a writer, was simply second nature” (Roth 1993, 377). In effect, however, “Roth” has already surrendered the status of writer. His meaningful actions in the novel are taken not as a novelist, but as an operative of the state, and they are precisely the actions that he ultimately chooses to be silent about—precisely the actions that are inaccessible to him as a writer. It is the state that has become the writer, casting “Roth” as a character in a narrative that he confesses he is incapable of even understanding. Indeed, he does not even understand why he allows himself to be taken up in it: “I could not name for myself what it was that drew me in or understand whether what was impinging on this decision was absolutely everything or absolutely nothing” (Roth 1993, 358). Scanlan reads Operation Shylock as implying that “art and terrorism are equally illusory and politically ineffective,” as marking the last gasp of a dying belief “that marginalized people can change the world” (Scanlan 2001, 123). Indeed, by the end of the novel “Roth” has been reduced from an author to nothing more than a character, easily manipulated by forces beyond his knowledge or control. That he shares the name and biography of his literal creator in itself efficiently indicates where Roth might rank the power and influence of the writer at this stage in history. Four years later Roth returned to the theme of terrorism and the writer’s power in American Pastoral, albeit here in a domestic context and through a more conventional fictional frame. Pastoral is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, who has been Roth’s alter ego in many books and who is here concerned with the life and fate of Seymour “the Swede” Levov, a childhood acquaintance he learns has recently died. In the early 1940s, the Swede, a high school student a few years older than Zuckerman, had been a hero to the Jewish population of Newark because of his tremendous athletic feats, coupled with his blue-eyed, blond good looks and dignified, mature behavior. In years of war and stress, the Swede seemed to represent success and hope, hope above all for assimilation and acceptance into the American mainstream; the Swede was “a boy as close to a goy as we were going to get” (Roth 1998, 10). When Zuckerman encounters the Swede again decades later, as both men have entered their declining years, it seems that the Swede has completely fulfilled this early promise, becoming a successful and admired businessman and the head of his own family of accomplished sons. Indeed, his talk of himself—and his endless bragging about his sons—reflect a life and a personality so completely identified with the American ideal that Zuckerman comes to think that he lacks any interior life, any

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sense of irony or imperfection at all, that “there’s nothing here but what you’re looking at. . . . He is not faking all this virginity. You’re craving depths that don’t exist” (Roth 1998, 39). A few months later, however, Zuckerman learns at his high school reunion that the Swede has died and learns moreover the central tragedy of his life, which he had kept hidden from Zuckerman during their meeting: in his first marriage the Swede had a daughter, Merry, who in 1968 detonated a bomb in a rural post office to protest the Vietnam War, killing a doctor and earning herself the media nickname “the Rimrock Bomber.” For the Swede’s brother, who tells Zuckerman this, the bombing was more a matter of family than national politics: “There was no way back for my brother from that bomb. That bomb detonated his life. His perfect life was over. Just what she had in mind” (Roth 1998, 69). Shortly afterward, in the midst of a dance with an old sweetheart, Zuckerman himself disappears as the novel transforms into his “realistic chronicle,” his attempt to imagine the Swede’s life and reconcile the banal portrait of the American dream he met with his new knowledge of the “daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral—into the indigenous American berserk” (Roth 1998, 86). Zuckerman can conjure any number of possible explanations for Merry’s act— anger over a childhood stutter, unresolved sexual tension with her father, the conflicts inherent to the mixed marriage between the Swede and Merry’s Christian mother—but both he and the reader remain aware throughout that, however convincingly he imagines his way into the Swede’s head, it remains a dream, a reverie conjured on the dance floor. No real answer is possible; the terrorist act here is beyond understanding or explanation, a sign only of the impossibility of understanding. Alex Houen writes that terrorism blows “a hole in the very fabric of everydayness,” that it “is not just a rupture in history, then, but a rupture of history,” a denial of the very possibility of crafting a meaningful narrative (Houen 2002, 14). American Pastoral is a demonstration of this function, moving beyond DeLillo’s fear that terrorism has become the only means of inscribing resistance to the still more troubling possibility that terrorism cannot be read at all. Kinky Friedman, The Mile High Club (2000). Although it is part of a humorous mystery series that clearly belongs within the popular tradition elided by Kunkel and Scanlan, The Mile High Club by country singer turned detective novelist Kinky Friedman is an indication that by the end of the twentieth century some trace of the ambiguities and anxieties the terrorist had come to represent for “serious” authors could be found even in the most apparently ephemeral of genres. Like most of Friedman’s books, The Mile High Club concerns the adventures of a thinly fictionalized version of himself (here, for the sake of clarity, referred to as “Kinky”) who operates as a private detective in New York City. The books are known primarily for their humorous tone and witty use of language but occasionally address very dark subjects with an undertone of bleak fatalism. Mile High takes this tendency to extremes in detailing how Kinky becomes involved with, and ultimately enables, a terrorist plot. The central plot revolves around the contents of a pink suitcase, which comes into Kinky’s possession when Khadija, a beautiful woman he meets on a flight to New York, asks him to watch it while she goes to the restroom. When the plane lands Kinky finds that Khadija has vanished, and he feels that he has little choice but to

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take the case home with him. There he finds that he has become an object of interest to the State Department, which is clearly seeking both Khadija and her case. Kinky could, of course, turn the case over to them; his decision not to do so appears to arise partly out of a sense of chivalric duty to Khadija and partly out of a fear that he will be in trouble himself if he does so, but it also derives largely, of course, from the private detective’s traditional reliance on his own abilities and distrust of authority. Neither prevents him from opening the locked case to discover “a large plastic Baggie full of enough passports to make a customs agent put in for overtime.” The passports are from various countries and in various names, though many of the women pictured resemble Khadija and many of the men pictured appear related to her. Kinky’s friend Rambam, a “real” detective, offers an opinion troubling enough when Mile High was published and even more so now: “‘I think you’re looking at how the next bunch of World Trade Center bombers are planning to get away’” (Friedman 2000, 65). This line of dialogue introduces the theme of terrorism into the novel, but Mile High never really gets more specific than this concerning exactly who its “terrorists” are; they are never identified or understood beyond simplistic representations of Middle Eastern Muslims opposed, for unspecified reasons, to Israel and the United States. To a large degree, in other words, the novel participates in the populist understanding of terrorism, which emphasizes hostility and otherness over nuance and specific political aims. Kinky hides the passports in the bottom of his cat’s litter box and continues to withhold them both from the State Department and from Khadija, who does eventually reappear. His hope that she is merely a dupe of the actual terrorists is greatly enhanced by their two sexual encounters, though neither, significantly, involves actual intercourse. Israeli agents also become involved in the hunt for the passports, as does Khadija’s brother Ahkmed, who late in the novel invades Kinky’s loft and nearly kills him in a brawl. Shortly after this fight, Khadija calls and begs Kinky to come to her hotel room, but the call is a ruse—when Kinky returns from the unkept rendezvous, he finds that the passports have, at last, been discovered and taken. Significantly, it is not Kinky but, again, Rambam who puts together the pieces of the puzzle, deducing that the terrorists could only have realized the passports were in the litter box by combining knowledge from Ahkmed’s invasion (when the cat, in protest, has scattered her waste throughout the apartment) with knowledge from Khadija’s earlier visit (before this occurred)—and that, in fact, there is no Khadija and never has been a Khadija, but only Ahkmed in disguise. The immediate inclination is to treat this as a joke, played largely at the expense of traditional mysteries and the conventional image of the private eye as masculine hero. Friedman has not only managed to craft a mystery that hinges upon the placement of feline feces but also has maneuvered his decidedly heterosexual hero into not one but two homosexual encounters. That the hero is, to a large degree, himself might be taken simply as adding to the joke, though there is clearly a subversion of normative genre expectations. What truly renders The Mile High Club disturbing, however, and expels it from the realm of the merely popular and transient, is its conclusion. In the very brief final chapter of the novel, Kinky is again on a plane when a beautiful woman asks him to watch her bag. This leads directly into the novel’s final paragraph: “After she’d gone, a flight attendant came by with a batch of newspapers and I took one at random and unfolded it. As long as I live I’ll never forget the headline. It read: TWA FLIGHT 800 BLOWN FROM THE SKIES. TERRORISM SUSPECTED” (Friedman 2000, 223). The implication

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that the passports Kinky failed to adequately preserve played a role in the tragedy is clear and, particularly given the invocation of an actual airline disaster, provides a stunning end to the novel, one that could not be suffered to stand in the context of any normative detective story. The novels we have examined by DeLillo, Auster, and Roth propose that the writer is silenced in the age of terrorism, but surely The Mile High Club is just as troubling in its suggestion that the autonomous individual, the hero who can act outside the control of the dominant system, is just as powerless, just as impotent, just as incapable of true understanding, as the writer. Although 9/11 had not yet occurred, Freidman’s text provides a fitting end to a decade in which American fiction had become increasingly troubled by the possibilities of terror. Contexts and Issues American Terrorist Fiction after 9/11. The attacks of 2001 clearly called for a new kind of terrorism fiction; from the perspective of the smoldering remains of the World Trade Center, the activities of the Phantom of Liberty or the Rimrock Bomber barely seem to qualify as terrorism at all. Only a little more than three months after 9/11, DeLillo himself, in an essay entitled “In the Ruins of the Future,” sought to instigate a consideration of how the American writer could meaningfully respond to an event of such magnitude. Significantly, he begins by seeking an understanding of the terrorists themselves, seeing them as reacting against “the power of American culture to penetrate every wall, home, life and mind. Terror’s response is a narrative that has been developing over years, only now becoming inescapable.” The polyvalent, continual babble of American narrativizing is answered, shockingly, by the singular plot of terror, which seeks to deaden and silence multiplicity: “Plots reduce the world.” In this reading of the terrorist attacks DeLillo echoes Murray Jay Siskind, the eccentric intellectual of his 1985 White Noise, who tells his friend Jack to deal with impending death by becoming a killer rather than a dier, by plotting a murder: “We start our lives in chaos. . . . To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control” (DeLillo 1998, 291–292). He follows Siskind in interpreting the formation of narrative through violence as one means of affirming the coherent self, but DeLillo does not go on to advocate that we ourselves become killers. Rather, his purposefully fragmented and digressive essay argues forcibly that we respond to plot with plots, that we continue to insist upon our own investment in a ceaseless variety of narrative. The very stories we tell of the disaster become the crucial basis of our survival and recovery: “There are 100,000 stories crisscrossing New York, Washington, and the world. . . . There are the doctors’ appointments that saved lives, the cell phones that were used to report the hijackings” (2001). Tellingly, even the stories of those who invent their involvement in the attacks become significant: “This is also the counternarrative, a shadow history of false memories and imagined loss” (2001). The centerpiece of DeLillo’s essay is the story of how his nephew Marc and Marc’s wife and children, who live a few blocks from the towers, react to the unfolding events of the day, at several points believing they are going to die but eventually reaching the safety of a shelter and resuming something like normalcy. Despite DeLillo’s acknowledgement of his relationship to the characters, the story is valuable precisely because it is not remarkable, because it could be anyone’s story or even an invention. What is valuable is the act of narrating itself, the refusal to be silenced in the face of the terror narrative that threatens to overwhelm all.

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For DeLillo the job of the writer is thus not to create another all-encompassing narrative opposed to that of terror, but rather to insist upon a return to narrative as personal, partial, and incomplete, to contribute to the limitless mosaic of plots that do not insist upon domination: “the event asserts its singularity. . . . The writer tries to give memory, tenderness and meaning to all that howling space” (2001). Nor does the opposition to terror mean that DeLillo is prepared to position the writer as abandoning his own stance of resistance; the writer is still seeking, like the terrorist, to subvert the transient dominant culture of pure spectacle and consumption, “the global momentum that seemed to be driving unmindfully toward a landscape of consumer-robots” (2001). DeLillo makes clear, however, that the strategy of the terrorist is a dead-end (“there is no logic in apocalypse” [2001]); he would, perhaps, align himself instead with “the protesters in Genoa, Prague, Seattle” whose opposition to the Americanization of the globe is not fanatically one-dimensional but “a moderating influence, trying to slow things down, even things out, hold off the white-hot future” (2001). The writer, similarly, must resist the universalizing strategies of both American hegemony and terrorist absolutism, seeking instead a middle ground of possibility, openness, and alternatives. The DeLillo of “In the Ruins of the Future” seems optimistic that such a writer’s strategy will ultimately be more successful than the terrorist’s; his essay concludes on a note of faith that New York City will again become a place that “will accommodate every language, ritual, belief and opinion” (2001). This optimism is surprising not only because it followed so closely upon 9/11 but also because it is at odds with the darker implications of much recent fiction that addresses terrorism and the writer’s relationship to it, including DeLillo’s own. It remains to be seen how closely DeLillo’s own fiction will correspond with the optimism of his essay; his Falling Man, a novel said to directly address the events of 9/11, is scheduled to be published in June 2008. By and large American fiction is still functioning in a responsive state, reacting against the attacks rather than seeking to present new alternatives or viewpoints. Terrorism fiction since 9/11 has been dominated by three impulses: the attempt to come to terms with the shock of the attacks themselves; a quest, usually failed, to understand and represent terrorism in a coherent and comprehensible way; and a satiric dismay with the way the national discourse, and particularly political discourse, has increasingly treated the attacks and terrorism in general in a reductive, jingoistic way, particularly in the service of military adventures abroad. The cartoonist Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) provides an instructive example of how these impulses play out. Spiegelman previously won acclaim for Maus (1986), an autobiographical graphic novel in which he presented his struggle to come to terms with his father, a concentration camp survivor (see holocaust literature). The first part of No Towers consists of a series of oversized comic strips Spiegelman published, mostly in European periodicals, beginning in 2002. Employing a collagelike variety of graphic styles and page layouts, Spiegelman begins by trying to represent his own experiences on the fateful day; much like DeLillo’s nephew, Spiegelman lived only a few blocks from the towers and spent 9/11 in a frantic effort to unite his family and reach safety, all the while witnessing the actual collapse of the buildings. The early strips very much have the feel of a man revisiting a trauma over and over again in an attempt to frame it in a meaningful way, with certain images—most notably the north tower’s structure seeming to glow with heat just before it collapses—recurring on almost every page.

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As the strips progress, however, they become increasingly preoccupied not with 9/11 itself but with the response of the Bush administration and the rush to war in Afghanistan and, later, Iraq. Spiegelman’s self-images increasingly express despair: “I thought I’d lose my life on 9/11—I lost my mind soon after, and lost my last speck of faith in the U.S.A. when this cabal took over” (Spiegelman 2004, 8). The opportunities he saw for renewal and deeper understanding in the original event are lost: “The towers have come to loom far larger than life . . . but they seem to get smaller every day” (Spiegelman 2004, 10). Ultimately, it seems, Spiegelman abandons the effort to say anything meaningful himself about either the attacks or their aftermath; the second part of No Towers is given over to a series of reproductions of colorful, oversized comic strips from the first decades of the twentieth century. Although many of these strips contain images that resonate with the disaster—a giant pushing his way through the buildings of New York City, a firecracker set off during a reading of the Declaration of Independence—Spiegelman readily confesses that their central appeal is essentially escapist. They are “vital, unpretentious ephemera from the optimistic dawn of the 20th century . . . they were just right for an end-of-theworld moment” (Spiegelman 2004, 11). Taken as a whole, No Towers is the work of a mind struggling to come to terms with its historical moment and ultimately unable to express much beyond pain, confusion, and an urgent desire for solace and sense. In different ways and in different keys, these are the notes American terrorism fiction is still striking. Lorraine Adams, Harbor (2004). Although it appeared three years after 9/11, Harbor is conspicuously set in the years before the attacks and clearly shows the influence of Adams’s work as an investigative reporter for The Washington Post, particularly her work on FBI counterterrorism squads. The central figure of the book is Aziz Arkoun, an Algerian who stows away on a cargo ship and arrives in Boston in the mid-1990s. Through flashbacks spaced throughout the book, we come to understand that Aziz has fled his native country because of the horrific civil war there driven largely by fundamentalist Islamic militias. Aziz knows Americans do not understand or care about his country: “‘The CIA has no one in Algeria. If they did, how would they tell who is who? I am Algerian, and I could not tell’” (Adams 2004, 278). Aziz himself had mistakenly been taken into one of the militias and forced to do horrible things to preserve his own life; now his only goal is to find “a place where you could talk, truly talk, and say whatever it was that haunted you at night alone” (Adams 2004, 115). In America Aziz becomes associated with a loose network of fellow refugees, many of whom he had known in his home village of Arzew, and most of whom, like him, are in the United States illegally. Like Aziz, most of them are only seeking to find a comfortable life for themselves away from the dangers of their home, and most of them are not religious and feel only disdain for those motivated by religious extremism: “If people wanted to believe this jihad shit, so be it” (Adams 2004, 269). A number of them are, however, involved in illegal activities, at least in part because they are unable to obtain well-paying jobs. Aziz’s cousin Rafik, the first to take him in when he arrives, is at the center of these activities, smuggling cigarettes and hash and running ambitious shoplifting schemes. Through these activities he becomes associated with a few characters who do appear to be Islamic fundamentalists preparing for a terrorist attack within the United States. These characters, however, are kept almost entirely offstage; Aziz and most of his friends are entirely innocent of such plans or motivations. Even when one of his closest friends, Ghazi,

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contemplates going to Afghanistan to join the jihad, it is only because he can think of no other method of suicide that will “show your father . . . you were a man” (Adams 2004, 262). Aziz and his friends, then, are represented in an almost entirely sympathetic way as essentially innocents seeking to find their way in a strange and often hostile culture after having suffered greatly in their previous lives. If they do not understand American culture, however, still less does it understand them, and this is where Harbor discovers its real tragedy. In the second half of the book the story of Aziz and his fellow Algerians is interlaced with scenes of FBI agents, and eventually an entire interagency task force, investigating them as potential terrorists. The FBI agents themselves are also represented sympathetically—they obviously mean well and are interested in arriving at the truth, not simply persecuting people—but from the beginning they are handicapped by a near-total misunderstanding of the Algerians. Only one of the agents speaks Arabic, and then only well enough to know he cannot really grasp regional variations; the head of the task force has to be told, very late in the book, that there is in fact a war happening in Algeria. Adams is careful to make the agents aware of their shortcomings: “‘we don’t have to know them. We can’t, ever. We can just piece something here with something there and draw logical conclusions. It’s flawed, of course it’s flawed. But it’s better than the alternative’” (Adams 2004, 282). Whether it is actually better is debatable. In the closing scenes of the book the FBI arrests almost all the Algerian characters, resulting in a publicity coup, but we learn that the guiltiest easily get away whereas the most innocent receive harsh and excessive sentences. Aziz himself is deported back to Algeria, where he disappears, almost certainly killed. Harbor, ultimately, is less about terrorism than it is about the American inability to understand or reliably identify the terrorist, and the harm that is done by that misunderstanding. Nicholson Baker, Checkpoint (2004). Like Harbor, Nicholson Baker’s slim novel Checkpoint is not concerned primarily with terrorism itself but rather with the official response to terrorism and the ways in which a discourse shaped by terror leads to tragedy. Whereas Adams is willing to assign the failings of her FBI characters to well-intentioned ignorance, Baker’s text is shaped by an angry conviction that the Bush administration’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are due to willfully selfish, shortsighted disinterest in doing the right thing. In No Towers, Spiegelman had begun to document the anger he felt over the transmutation of 9/11 into jingoistic war frenzy; Checkpoint represents this anger taken to its extreme. In form, the book deliberately recalls Baker’s 1992 Vox, which consisted in its entirety of a phone conversation between a man and a woman culminating in an episode of phone sex. Checkpoint similarly takes the form of a single long conversation, this one between two men in a Washington, D.C., hotel room. The conversation is recorded, and the novel takes the form of a transcript of the recording, with each speaker identified as he would be in a play. Jay, the first speaker, has summoned his old friend Ben to the hotel room where, at the beginning of the book, he tells him that he is going to assassinate President Bush. At the time of its publication Checkpoint was denounced by some conservative commentators as being virtually an act of treason, but although it expresses some genuine anger toward Bush, it is important to note that the book does not endorse Jay’s plan. Jay, in fact, is represented as being clearly unbalanced; he speaks of a history of troubled relationships and transient jobs, and among the weapons he plans to use in his assault are “radio-controlled flying saws” (Baker 2004, 14) and “these

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homing bullets, and all you had to do was put the bullets in a box along with a photograph of the person you wanted to shoot and they were able to seek that person out” (Baker 2004, 63). Ben, although acknowledging his own distaste for Bush, never agrees to Jay’s plan or even indicates that he thinks it would be the right thing to do, and at the end of the book he succeeds in disarming Jay and persuading him to leave the room peacefully. The identification of Checkpoint as terrorism fiction is somewhat tentative. Jay’s proposed action itself cannot be described as clearly terrorist, since its primary intention is not to make a political point to a watching audience but simply to punish someone through the use of violence. Nor does Jay and Ben’s wandering conversation touch explicitly upon terrorism, except when Jay describes part of the American campaign in Iraq as “so obviously terror bombing” (Baker 2004, 19); indeed, their neglect of the topic of 9/11 is so complete that it must be deliberate on Baker’s part. What qualifies the book as terrorism fiction is less its content than its context, the understanding on the part of the reader that the actions Bush has taken that have upset Jay to this degree have been licensed, in the national discourse, by the continual invocations of 9/11 and the specter of terrorism in general. Checkpoint is a conversation that makes sense only as a critique of the larger conversation provoked by 9/11. The basic point is the same as the one Adams makes in Harbor: we have failed to understand or account for our true enemy, instead turning against the innocent. Where Adams’s response to this is sadness, however, Baker’s is rage. John Updike, Terrorist (2006). To date, John Updike is the most visible and prominent American author to undertake the daunting task of directly representing the mind of a terrorist in the wake of 9/11. The central figure of Terrorist is Ahmad Mulloy, born in impoverished New Prospect, New Jersey, to an Irish-American mother and an Egyptian father and about to graduate high school as the book opens. Ahmad’s father was not particularly religious and abandoned the family when Ahmad was an infant; despite this, Ahmad has, since the age of eleven, sought his identity in Islam, driven by his constant sense that “God is another person close beside him, a Siamese twin attached in every part, inside and out, and to whom he can turn in every moment in prayer. God is his happiness” (Updike 2006, 40). Ahmad is angered and confused by what he perceives as the Godlessness of American society. His desire to be complete in his devotion to God leaves him open to fairly transparent manipulation by his imam, who steers him away from preparation for college and into a job driving a truck for a furniture business owned by Lebanese immigrants. Charlie Chebab, the son of the business’s owner, rides along with Ahmad on his deliveries, testing him through various conversations about history, religion, and politics. At one point the two men look across the water to the place where the towers had been, and Charlie lectures Ahmad on the necessity of opposing “the enemies around us, the children and fat people in shorts giving us their dirty looks” (Updike 2006, 187), eventually eliciting Ahmad’s willingness to die in this cause. Gradually the plan becomes clear: Ahmad is to drive a truck full of explosives into the Lincoln Tunnel and detonate it, flooding the tunnel and causing untold deaths. Having grown increasingly disgusted with the society that surrounds him, Ahmad anticipates his mission with “high, selfless joy” (Updike 2006, 274). The book’s second major character is Jack Levy, a guidance counselor caught in an unhappy marriage and nearing retirement at Ahmad’s school. Jack takes an interest in Ahmad, although this interest is rapidly displaced by his interest in Ahmad’s

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mother, with whom he has an affair. A nonpracticing Jew, Jack can only confirm Ahmad’s sense of American life as lacking a sense of the divine: “‘I was born fallen away. My father hated Judaism, and his father before him. They blamed religion for the world’s misery—it reconciled people to their problems’” (Updike 2006, 295). Despite his lack of faith, however, Jack finds the courage—when a chain of rather unlikely coincidences lead to him learning of Ahmad’s plan—to climb into the cab of the truck with him, in an attempt to talk him out of pushing the button on his bomb. Nothing about their subsequent conversation indicates that he succeeds; Ahmad easily disposes of Jack’s arguments and seems unwavering in his commitment to his mission. Jack himself comes to accept the apparently inevitable, refusing to leave the truck when he has the opportunity and even urging Ahmad to go through with it: “‘Why should I care? A woman I was crazy about has ditched me, my job is a drag, I wake up every morning at four and can’t get back to sleep’” (Updike 2006, 303). It is not Jack who keeps Ahmad’s hand from the button but rather his own sudden epiphany, a vision of God as motivated by creation rather than destruction: “He does not want us to desecrate His creation by willing death. He wills life” (Updike 2006, 306). Released from the conviction of his mission, a numbed Ahmad follows a jubilant Jack’s instructions to turn back towards New Jersey and certain arrest. Although the bomb does not go off, the book hardly ends on a note of triumph or even relief: Ahmad simply surveys the scuttling crowds of New Yorkers around him, “each one of them impaled live upon the pin of consciousness, fixed upon selfadvancement and self preservation. That, and only that. ‘These devils’, Ahmad thinks, ‘have taken away my God’” (310). For all its ambition and the skill with which it is written, Terrorist ultimately fails to imagine or represent the mind that could have pushed the button Ahmad fails to—or, by extrapolation, the mind that could have steered an airliner into a building full of workers. Ahmad’s epiphany has no direct cause in the book; it is essentially an instance of wishful thinking, a mark of the gap between ourselves and a meaningful grasp of the reality of terrorism. Nor does the book convincingly repudiate Ahmad’s criticisms of America; DeLillo’s essay wishes to oppose terrorism with a vision of America as able to “accommodate every language, ritual, belief and opinion” (DeLillo 2001), but the America of Terrorist is, indeed, Godless and basically hollow, empty of true meaning or affect. As readers we are glad that Ahmad does not set off his bomb, but we also feel the tragedy of his loss of the God he has felt near him—“the concrete living God who stands beside Ahmad as close as the sunshine warming the skin of his neck” (Updike 2006, 188)—since the beginning of the book. If Adams responds to our failure to comprehend terrorism with sadness and Baker with anger, Updike responds with resignation. Clifford Chase, Winkie (2006), and Ken Kalfus, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006). In the wake of the anger and sorrow that have understandably dominated the first wave of American terrorism fiction after 9/11, it is perhaps unavoidable that writers would next turn to satire and farce, unlikely as such a strategy might have seemed in the immediate wake of the attacks. In these works, again, the authors are concerned not so much with the attacks themselves as with their aftermath, the ways in which “terrorism” is incorporated into the national discourse, becoming a signifier that can be attached to almost anything for rhetorical effect.

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The title character of Clifford Chase’s Winkie, for example, is a sentient teddy bear who is mistaken by the authorities for a serial bomber based on Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber. At his trial, Winkie is charged with crimes that begin with terrorism and eventually include such historically resonant offenses as “corrupting the youth of Athens,” “holding the false doctrine that the sun is the center of the world and the earth moves,” “witchcraft,” and “acts of gross indecency with certain young men of London” (Chase 2006, 85). The trial, in other words, is an enactment of every show trial of a societal scapegoat in Western history, and Chase’s addition of “terrorism” to the list suggests that he, no less than Baker, has severe reservations concerning the uses the term has been put to in recent discourse. This is not to say that terrorism does not exist, of course; there is an actual bomber in the book, though he does his greatest harm not to society but to Winkie, by destroying Winkie’s offspring before dying himself. The damage done by the bomber, however, is completely out of proportion with the absurdly excessive official response, which lays all the sins of humanity at the feet of an innocent toy, choosing persecution over understanding. Marginally more serious—or at least marginally more realistic—is Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, which focuses on Joyce and Marshall Harriman, a Manhattan couple going through a bitter divorce. The primary issue to be settled between them is who will retain their apartment, which each seems to value more than their two small children. On the morning of 9/11, Joyce, who was supposed to be aboard one of the hijacked planes, and Marshall, who works in the World Trade Center, each believe the other to have died; each is openly disappointed to learn this is not the case. Although both afterward suffer from the anxiety and fear common to all in the wake of the attacks, most of their feelings are funneled into ever more vitriolic and heated attacks on each other, which themselves increasingly take on the forms and jargon of terrorism. Marshall in particular begins to identify with the impulses felt by the terrorists: “their crappy disordered existences, these shameful skirmishes, this soiled money, the debasement, this cruelty, this insensitivity, this impiety had become intolerable to God” (Kalfus 2006, 185). In the novel’s peak scene of black humor Marshall builds a suicide bomb—from plans he finds on the Internet—and attempts to detonate it in the presence of his family, first announcing “God is great” (Kalfus 2006, 189)—not because he particularly believes this, but because that is what terrorists say. When the bomb fails to go off Joyce irritably demands to look at it and tries (unsuccessfully) to fix the problem, as the children look idly on. The scene is simultaneously terrifying and hilarious, a demonstration of how “terrorism” is detached from its real roots in history and social conflict to become available for any purpose. The political significance of Kalfus’s themes is made most visible in a closing scene in which Joyce and Marshall reconcile as part of a crowd that has gathered at Ground Zero to celebrate the end of the War on Terror, which, in a sudden lurch into alternative history, has turned out just as we were told it would: our servicemen greeted as heroes, Iraq a healthy and burgeoning democracy that no longer requires their presence, and Osama bin Laden captured. In such a world, it seems, everything is perfect, and even the most hated enemy can once again become the beloved. It is the ultimate fantasy of farcical triumph for contemporary terrorism literature, a world in which terrorism need not be understood because it has ceased to exist.

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Bibliography Adams, Lorraine. Harbor. New York: Vintage, 2004. Auster, Paul. Leviathan. New York: Penguin, 1992. Baker, Nicholson. Checkpoint. New York: Vintage, 2004. Chase, Clifford. Winkie. New York: Grove, 2006. Combs, Cindy C., and Martin Slann. Encyclopedia of Terrorism. New York: Checkmark Books, 2003. DeLillo, Don. “In The Ruins Of The Future.” Guardian, 22 Dec. 2001. http://www.guardian. co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4324579,00.html ———. White Noise: Text and Criticism. Ed. Mark Osteen. New York: Penguin, 1998. ———. Mao II. New York: Penguin, 1991. ———. Libra. New York: Penguin, 1988. ———. The Names. New York: Knopf, 1982. ———. Players. New York: Knopf, 1977. Friedman, Kinky. The Mile High Club. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Harris, Thomas. Black Sunday. New York: Signet, 1975. Houen, Alex. Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Kalfus, Ken. A Disorder Peculiar to the Country. New York: Harper, 2006. Kunkel, Benjamin. “Dangerous Characters.” The New York Times Book Review, 11 Sept. 2005. Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. New York: Vintage, 1998. ———. Operation Shylock: A Confession. New York: Vintage, 1993. Scanlan, Margaret. Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001. Sinclair, Andrew. An Anatomy of Terror: A History of Terrorism. London: Pan Books, 2003. Spiegelman, Art. In the Shadow of No Towers. New York: Pantheon, 2004. Updike, John. Terrorist. New York: Knopf, 2006.

Further Reading DeLillo, Don. “In The Ruins of the Future.” Guardian, 22 Dec. 2001; Foertsch, Jacqueline, ed. “Special Issue: Terrorism and the Postmodern Novel.” Studies in the Novel 36 (2004): 3; Houen, Alex. Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; Kunkel, Benjamin. “Dangerous Characters.” The New York Times Book Review, 11 Sept. 2005; Scanlan, Margaret. Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001; Sinclair, Andrew. An Anatomy of Terror: A History of Terrorism. London: Pan Books, 2003; Wesley, Marilyn C. Violent Adventure: Contemporary Fiction by American Men. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2003.

JOSEPH S. WALKER

TIME TRAVEL FICTION Definition. The concept of time travel is used in literature as a device that relies upon the conceit of characters visiting their past or their future. It is employed in science fiction with some frequency, often in order to explore ideas about the nature of history, causality, experience, or narrative. In historical fantasy, particularly adventure fiction for young adults, time travel is often an enabling device, the mechanism through which a viewpoint character is transported to the main setting of the story. Superhero comic books are rife with time-traveling characters, particularly master villains whose access to the “time stream” is the source of their being a menace. Time travel has also been used in mainstream fiction (i.e., by authors who

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are not self-consciously writing in genre), typically in the service of meditations on love and memory (e.g., Jack Finney’s 1970 Time and Again). It is thus not quite correct to refer to time travel solely as a thematic subgenre of science fiction, because the device of having a character travel to the past or future clearly fulfills some of the same narrative functions as any protagonistic journey does: the portal through time is another version of mythologist Joseph Campbell’s threshold to the underworld, through which the genre hero must pass in order to begin his or her adventures in earnest. In generic fantasy, for example, characters from the contemporary world may find themselves transported to a quasi-historical setting by unspecified magical forces, but the transported hero may as well be in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom (i.e., a fantasy Mars in the far distant past) as in medieval Europe, which shows that historical or causal connection of past to future is merely color rather than a central element driving the plot or the characters’ concerns. Similarly, the device of time travel enables entry to an otherwise inaccessible Shangri-la of the future so that the tourist-protagonist of a utopian fiction can show us what is to be seen there (e.g., Heinlein 2004). Time travel is closely related to the science fiction subgenre of alternate history, which includes a parallel universe or para-time story. In alternate history an author both posits a chronology that branches off at some recognizable nexus from historical events, and tells a story set within that chronology (Hellekson 2001). However, it is possible for a story set in a different era to be either, both, or neither. For example, a story about a man who visits the Jurassic period to hunt dinosaurs, returning to the present to dine out on the tale, is time travel but not alternate history (De Camp 1956); a story about a woman who lives in a world where the Axis won World War II is alternate history but not time travel (Dick 1962); and a story where the South wins the Civil War because Afrikaners from the future arm Robert E. Lee and his men with AK-47s (Turtledove 1992)—or loses it because a historian from the future interferes with a Confederate victory at Gettysburg (Moore 1953)—is both. But a story about a British adventurer who is present at the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava and observes what really happens when the six hundred rode forth into the valley of death is neither, falling instead into the category of historical fiction— or possibly even secret history, depending upon how seriously the author intends us to take his speculations (Fraser 1973). History. The seminal science-fictional time travel novel is widely regarded to be The Time Machine (1895), by H.G. Wells (1866–1946). But Mark Twain (1835–1910) pioneered the device of time travel a few years earlier with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). Foote (1991) argues that the emergence of time travel in popular literature—though prefigured by stories of sleepers and the fey-touched, such as “Rip van Winkle” and “Thomas the Rhymer”—can be traced to a particularly American vision of time and space that equates the Old World with the past and the New World with the future. This, combined with Twain’s efforts to make sense of two contradictory (and again particularly American) impulses—a naïve nostalgia for the past versus an ethnocentric valorization of the technological progress and cultural sophistication of the “modern” present—makes Connecticut Yankee a confrontation between nostalgic and progressive visions of history that both technological progress and cultural sophistication come up wanting. The science fiction grandmaster Robert Heinlein (1907–1988), himself a noted contributor to the subgenre, observed that while it was Twain who invented the time

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travel story, it was Wells who pointed out its contradictions—that is, the extent to which conundrums of cause-and-effect and paradoxes of free will emerge once the device is employed (Nahin 1999, 54). Much of the subsequent history of time travel stories can be seen as a working out of these contradictions, as authors imagined the consequences of changing the past or gaining knowledge of the future under different fictional parameters. With the emergence of a robust, commercial genre of science fiction magazines and paperbacks in the mid-twentieth century, the device of time travel became a staple science-fictional trope (Ash 1977). The pioneering pulp magazine publisher Hugo Gernsback (1884–1967) even serialized The Time Machine in the pages of one of his early “scientifiction” magazines. Time travel subsequently became a recognizable popular culture motif as well, as is suggested by its prevalence in comic books, television, movies, and elsewhere. But because it has served as the science-fictional device within which literary speculation about physical theories of space and time can be indulged, time travel stories in science fiction per se have been responsive to developments in physics (Nahin 1999). For example, Larry Niven’s short story “Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation” (Niven 1977) takes its title from the scholarly article of the same name by physicist Frank J. Tipler, which suggests that a sufficiently massive, infinitely long rotating cylinder can produce conditions allowing a traveler to move back in time by following a path around the cylinder (Tipler 1974). In Niven’s story, the attempt to construct such a device activates a “defense mechanism” whereby the universe arranges its elements to hamper the attempt by causing the sun to go nova (i.e., to blow up) before the work is finished. Trends and Themes. There are three basic types of time travel protagonists, each of whom implies a particular kind of time travel story: (1) the Connecticut Yankee (who visits the historical past), (2) the Chronic Argonaut (who visits the “historical” future), and (3) the Bootstrapper (who acts recursively and usually paradoxically upon his or her own biography). Each of these basic types has its variations, and it is possible for a particular time-traveling character to be of a “mixed” rather than a “pure” type—for example, Jud Eliot in Robert Silverberg’s Up the Line (Silverberg 1969) is a Time Courier (whose job is to escort tourists into the historical past) who uses his access to the past to find and sleep with a distant ancestor (Connecticut Yankee), but his dalliances result in a paradoxical self-duplication that brings him to the baleful attention of the Time Patrol (Bootstrapper). It is useful, however, to regard each kind of protagonist as representing a type of time travel story, embodying a particular view of the operation of history or nature of time, and characterized by particular themes, motifs, and ideas. Both the Connecticut Yankee and the Chronic Argonaut stories are concerned with grand theories of history: the former, as it connects to notions of progress and motifs of nostalgia; the latter, in terms of evolution and cosmology (in other words, the ultimate fates of humanity and the universe). In contrast, the Bootstrapper story is oriented toward questions of causality and individual free will, and its protagonists often find themselves dealing with unforeseen results that seem to bring them into being. The Connecticut Yankee. The Connecticut Yankee is a time traveler who arrives in the historical past for an indefinite period, perhaps even permanently, very much like a latter-day Robinson Crusoe. The knowledge this traveler has of either the future or modern science and technology gives him or her an edge, allowing the character to take action against the dangers and discomforts of the past. Mark Twain’s Yankee,

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IS TIME TRAVEL A NUTTY CLICHÉ? Today, time travel is such a common device that at least one science fiction magazine formally discourages would-be authors from submitting stories in which someone “uses time travel to achieve some particular result, but in the end something unexpected happens that thwarts [the] plan,” on the grounds that it is a too-often-told story (Groppi 2006). In the meantime, however, developments in physics involving the possibility that “closed time-like curves” (circuitous routes through space and time possibly enabled by the implications of relativity and quantum theory, and allowing space travelers to arrive where they started before they left) may exist—or may be able to be created—provide grist for science-fictional imaginings (Davies 2002).

Hank Morgan, gives this category its cognomen, but L. Sprague de Camp (1907–2000) established the ground rules for telling this kind of story as science fiction, in which the deployment of modern knowledge in historical times is the central conceit (De Camp 1941). In Lest Darkness Fall, de Camp’s Yankee, Martin Padway, is mysteriously transported from the twentieth century to sixth-century Rome. There he uses his extensive technical know-how to create virtually singlehandedly entire industries and thereby produce a sort of industrial revolution that enables Rome to avoid both barbarian incursions and Byzantine meddling, all in the hopes of staving off the Dark Ages in Europe. Whereas Twain glosses over the industrialization of Camelot, de Camp describes in great detail the processes through which Padway develops his anachronistic innovations, success building on success: the invention of the printing press leading to the newspaper leading to a telegraph-like semaphore system, and so on. More recently, Leo Frankowski’s novels about Conrad Stargard do de Camp one better, embellishing with much greater detail a similar storyline about overcoming social and intellectual inertia in order to introduce both cultural and technical anachronisms. This time, the hero is an American-trained Polish engineer cast back in time to medieval Poland who takes it upon himself to stop the Mongol incursions by bringing about an industrial revolution over the space of four thick novels (Frankowski 1986 and its sequels). In what may be called the Yankee Reversed, the character’s special knowledge is either nugatory or actually dangerous. For example, in Poul Anderson’s “The Man Who Came Early” (1956), a U.S. soldier transported to medieval Iceland is undone, despite his sidearm and his technical knowledge, because of his unfamiliarity with local norms and customs. In Larry Niven’s stories of Svetz the Time Traveler (Niven 1973), Svetz is the operator of a time cage sent back from the highly polluted thirtieth century to procure exotic specimens for the hereditary (and feeble-minded) secretary-general of the U.N. But because time travel is a fantasy, he winds up collecting more exotic creatures than he realizes: sent for a horse, he finds Pegasus; sent for a whale, he finds Moby Dick—and so forth. In contrast, the Eternal Yankee is a traveler charged with either the enforcement or exploration of a particular historical chronology, and possessed of the tools and know-how to fulfill a mission. In these stories, the limits of the time traveler’s knowledge is often a central motif. Asimov’s Eternals are semimonastic temporal technocrats who specialize in altering history to maximize what is, according to their calculations, human happiness; they are confounded by “silent centuries” down the time stream that have been sealed off to them by mysterious forces

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(Asimov 1955). Connie Willis’s (1985; 1992; 1998) Balliol historians are academic specialists whose fieldwork takes them to the actual past; the extent to which their training has or has not prepared them for their encounter with the past is often at issue in Willis’s stories. Kage Baker’s Company novels center on the cyborg recruits of Dr. Zeus, Incorporated (the company that invented the time machine), who are able to act on its behalf and change the past despite the immutability of the recorded past by virtue of the gaps in that record. The Chronic Argonaut. The Chronic Argonaut differs from the closely related Sleeper (a much more common type of character, often used to visit a utopian setting and listen to the natives explain how their society operates) who arrives in the future without a time machine per se: after a Rip-van-Winkle-like period of sleep or suspended animation (e.g., McMullen 1998), having undergone time dilation as a result of traveling at relativistic velocities (i.e., the compression of local time compared to that of slower-moving observers as a result of speeds close to that of light; e.g., Niven 1976), or via some other mysterious, magical, or undisclosed mechanism (e.g., Heinlein 2004). In any case, the Sleeper’s journey through time is one-way and forward, just like ours. In contrast, the Chronic Argonaut may return to his or her own time, or travel across different eras; in either case, the journey is instructive for what it lets the reader see of the great changes wrought by time. The progenitor of this category is the unnamed protagonist of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. He is a “modern” man who goes forward in time expecting future society to have found scientific answers to the questions and problems that perplexed late Victorian England—that is, he is a chronic argonaut on a voyage of discovery. He visits a future in which society is divided into the beautiful and childlike Eloi and the troglodytic but intelligent Morlocks; the Morlocks run the technical apparatuses of this far-future world, and in return they are permitted to literally prey on the Eloi. The stratification of the society he visits is frequently noted to be a comment on the class divisions of Wells’s own time. The hard science fiction writer Stephen Baxter (1957–) picks up the story where Wells ended it, that is when the Time Traveler activates his time machine and vanishes, never to be seen again (Baxter 1995). In Baxter’s vision, the Time Traveler cannot return to his original future, encountering instead time-traveling Morlocks who are rational, scientific, and nowhere near as bloodthirsty as the ones in the original novel. Baxter’s Time Traveler, accompanied by a Morlock, ranges up and down the time stream, visiting alternate universes as well as the dawn of time and the end of the universe, all in the service of explicating a scientific cosmology of extraordinary complexity and great beauty that paradoxically both dwarfs human efforts and gives them significance (a persistent theme of Baxter’s work is the particular responsibility of consciousness in an unconscious universe). In contrast to the active efforts of the voluntary Chronic Argonaut to achieve time travel, the drafted Chronic Argonaut is brought to the future more or less unwillingly by the technologically advanced but somehow degenerate beings that live there. In any case, humans of the future are fundamentally aliens, and upon the precise character of that alienness the tale of an argonaut-draftee hangs. In A.E. van Vogt’s “Recruiting Station” (2003), for example, a troubled young woman named Norma Matheson goes to work for the mysterious Dr. Lell, who is actually the agent of an embattled faction from the distant future that conscripts men from the past to fight for them after sapping their will through a depersonalizing technology. After her physics professor ex-boyfriend is shanghaied into the future (where his two-fisted

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American gumption allows him to resist his programming and turn against his would-be masters) Norma eventually unlocks—with a little behind-the-scenes help from the opposing futuristic faction—her hitherto-untapped mental potential and uses her newfound powers to defeat Dr. Lell—the degenerate denizens of the future are no match for a couple of authentic red-blooded human beings in their prime. Joe Haldeman’s “Anniversary Project” (1975)—in which highly evolved telepathic human beings from the distant future snatch a couple of young American newlyweds from the twentieth-century beach where they are canoodling—is a somewhat sadder story. People from the future want to commemorate the anniversary of the (now obsolete) practice of reading, and so they have cast themselves through time to obtain authentic readers to observe during the festivities. The newlyweds will return to their own time in a few days, they are told, and they won’t remember a thing. But because time casting is itself an old and little-practiced technology, when the woman returns to the moment from which she was taken—early in her marriage alone on the beach with her spouse—a slight error in the process causes her to subliminally experience her life and death as a mid-twentieth-century housewife with an alcoholic husband and troubled children. Back on the beach, and to her husband’s great mystification, she bursts into tears, slaps him on the face, and runs back to their car. In Haldeman’s story, the primitive “authenticity” of the twentiethcentury humans is a limitation rather than a strength, and the evolution of humanity will turn much that strikes us as quintessentially human—such as reading (and sex!)—into atavisms. The Bootstrapper. The Bootstrapper is caught in the throes of time travel’s paradoxes, like the hero of Robert A. Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps” (1941), who gives this type its name. Bob Wilson is alone in a locked room where he has been all day, working doggedly to complete his thesis, when a familiar-looking stranger arrives through a glowing circle he calls a “time gate.” The stranger, who calls himself Joe, pours drinks and explains that a unique opportunity—helping “an old guy” run a country along with Joe—awaits Bob on the other side of the gate. A third man who closely resembles Joe arrives through the time gate; he wants Bob not to go through the gate. A physical altercation takes place, and Bob is knocked through the time gate. Bob wakes in the High Palace of Norkaal, thirty thousand years in the future, where a middle-aged man who calls himself Diktor wants Bob to go back and persuade the person on the other side of the gate to come through; Bob steps through, recognizes himself, and reexperiences the encounter with Joe, this time as Joe. Bob then follows his earlier self into the future, despite the protests of the third man whom Bob now recognizes as a later version of himself. He encounters Diktor once more, who shows him how to operate the time gate and gives him a list of books to acquire. But Bob grows suspicious of Diktor’s motives and returns through the gate determined to put a stop to his earliest self’s trip through the gate, but he fails (experiencing the same encounter in his room for the third time). When “Joe” returns through the time gate, Bob (alone once more in his room) tries to get back to work on his thesis, but he cannot resist another trip through the gate, the first of several decisions that result in Bob becoming Diktor and waiting for the day when his own earlier self arrives for the first time through the time gate to begin the process again. This extended summary only hints at the paradoxical recursiveness of this kind of time travel plot. Heinlein’s story features many instances of circular causation, as when Bob copies a notebook, destroys the original, and realizes that his copy will be the one an earlier self finds in the High Palace of Norkaal, which

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raises the question of where the book came from in the first place. David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself (1973) is a novel-length exercise in exactly the same sort of circular causation, and a classic of its kind. Contexts and Issues. Time travel stories address persistent questions about the nature of causality and the character of experience, both at the level of individuals and at that of society or even the cosmos as a whole. At the micro or individual level, time travel stories explore logical puzzles of cause and effect, enabling the construction of paradoxical time loops wherein it is possible to go back in time and invest sufficient principal that its compounded interest will either fund the construction of the time machine, or give oneself a work of art that one then publishes under one’s own name and becomes famous for, or even unwittingly impregnate one’s mother with oneself (Lem 1974). In one of Heinlein’s most famous stories, “All You Zombies” (1959), the hermaphroditic protagonist gives birth to herself after having been seduced by her transgendered later self who has been sent back in time by a still later version of himself (the narrator) for just such a purpose. “I know where I came from,” he tells the reader at the end, “but where did all you zombies come from?” But logical puzzles such as these, Lem argues, are embedded in a larger discourse about the ergodicity of history: to what extent are historical events necessary (i.e., largely determined by the operation of inexorable social forces) or contingent (i.e., largely the product of accidental confluences of circumstances)? Under the ergodic hypothesis, history possesses a kind of inertia that renders inconsequential any efforts to change the past (for example, a war averted will break out anyway for other reasons a little later and more fiercely, so that the net effect is the same). Under the anti-ergodic hypothesis, even seemingly minor changes can result in drastic alterations to the path of history (so that stepping on a butterfly in the Jurassic can mean that the traveler returns to a totalitarian nightmare rather than the democratic republic he left). So time travel stories speak to the consequentiality of human action: if history is ergodic, then our choices as individuals matter very little, because they will be swept away in the larger flow of events, perhaps even within our own biographies; if on the other hand it isn’t, even the smallest of our decisions can take on highly fateful proportions. Hellekson (2001) suggests that models of history can be categorized according to whether they are genetic (interested in processes of causation), teleological (driven by questions of intention or purpose), eschatological (focused on ultimate fates or destinies), or entropic (convinced of the randomness or at least purposelessness of events), and he argues that genetic models are most appropriate for alternate history stories, given their intense interest in how historical events come about. It may be that each of the other three models similarly corresponds to one of the types of time travel protagonist. The Connecticut Yankee story, the tale of an individual thrust backward in time, is fundamentally concerned with how the intentionality, beliefs, and knowledge of a single person can affect the course of events, and it is thus teleological at root. The Chronic Argonaut story is characterized by an eschatological perspective: the time traveler is permitted to see the end of the earth, humanity, the universe, or time itself and thereby gains an understanding of what it all means. And the Bootstrapper, embedded in time loops of uncaused effects and solipsistic acts of self-creation, embodies an entropic perspective. To the extent that mixed types of time travel stories are possible, however, this neat schema loses its force.

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Reception. There have been numerous film adaptations of time travel stories. Movies seem to be a particularly apt medium for conveying the paradoxical qualities of time travel, perhaps because they themselves enable or even invite the reordering of events in sequence (as when the movie begins with its climax, and then moves back in time to show us the events that led up to that climax). The Time Machine itself has been remade twice, once by director George Pal (1908–1980) in 1960 and again in 2002. Ray Bradbury’s short story “A Sound of Thunder” has been turned into the 2004 film of the same name (time-traveling dinosaur hunter messes up the future by stepping on a butterfly in the past). A number of original time travel movies began to appear in the 1980s, notably Back to the Future (a high school student goes back in time and accidentally interferes with his parents’ courtship; 1985) as well as Terry Gilliam’s (1940–) Time Bandits (a little boy encounters a dwarfish band of criminals who have stolen God’s map of the holes in the space-time continuum in order to indulge in an intertemporal crime spree; 1981), and The Terminator (a young woman is pursued by an android from the future to prevent her as-yet-not-conceived son from saving humanity from extermination in the twenty-first century; 1984). Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (a farcical cross-time scavenger hunt with two dudes from the Valley; 1989) and its sequels rely on time travel as well. More recent time travel films have a darker edge. Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys (1995) sends a man back in time, where he fails to prevent a terrorist attack that causes a massive human die-off. In The Butterfly Effect (2004), a young man—who can send his consciousness to earlier points in his own biography, where any changes in what he does can engender drastic alterations in hitherto established events—decides ultimately that he would be better off never being born, and commits suicide in his mother’s womb. In the cult favorite Donnie Darko (2001), a teenager is visited by a bunny suit–wearing man from the future who gives him strange instructions, and the title character allows himself to die to save the universe from destruction. In Primer (2004), the co-owners of a garage-based start-up engineering company invent a time travel machine, use it for day-trading, and then the paradoxes start to catch up with them, leading to suspicion and betrayal. Several American television series also rely on time travel. Irwin Allen’s (1916–1991) The Time Tunnel (1966–1967) presented two scientists who, by going through the tunnel, tumbled each week into an adventure in a new era. In Voyagers! (1982–1983), a time traveler from the distant future ensures the proper unfolding of history with the aid of a boy from the 1980s. A similar but longer-lived series called Quantum Leap (1989–1993) involved a scientist who each week arrived in a new host body sometime during the twentieth century in order to solve a crisis facing that unwitting host. In Time Trax (1993–1994), a cop from the future arrives in the 1990s to track down escaped fugitives who had gone to ground in the past. Early Edition (1996–2000) was about a man who each morning mysteriously received the next day’s paper and took it upon himself to prevent bad news from taking place. Seven Days (1998–2001) involved a “chrononaut” who was sent back in time one week in order to prevent disasters or tragedies that had occurred in the meantime. Selected Authors. This section discusses six recent novels that exemplify the types of time travel stories laid out above. Each subsection summarizes the novels it considers and then highlights the important motifs or thematic considerations they address. In discussing these motifs, emphasis is given to how they treat or

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model the nature of history, and what normative judgments emerge from that modeling. Connecticut Yankees. Household Gods (Tarr and Turtledove 1999) is a gloss on the classic Connecticut Yankee plot, and the product of a collaboration between Judith Tarr (1955–), an accomplished fantasist, and Harry Turtledove (1949–), the dean of alternate history. In the book, Nicole is the divorced mother of two and a Los Angeles lawyer who hits the ceiling at her firm when the partnership that she deserves is given to a male colleague instead. Furious and unhappy, she prays to live in Roman times, an era that she imagines as having less sexism than the late twentieth century. The gods Liber and Libera—present on her nightstand in the form of a souvenir plaque she had picked up in Italy on her honeymoon—hear her and grant her prayer. Nicole wakes in the body of Umma, a sixth-century widowed tavern keeper and a mother of two who happens to be Nicole’s own distant ancestor, living in a Roman town near the frontier with barbaric Germanic lands. Nicole is quickly disabused of her unrealistic notions about the egalitarian quality of the past, and her initial speculations about the possibility of getting rich by introducing modern conveniences (such as tampons and antibiotics!) give way equally quickly to the challenges of making a living and raising her children. Besides the culture shock that Nicole experiences trying to live as a Roman woman—the place stinks; everyone drinks; Christians are terrorists; violence is endemic—she must endure pestilence, barbarian occupation, and rape before she discovers how to reverse the wish that Liber and Libera have granted her. Despite having been in the past for many months, in the present only a week has passed, during which her “real” body was in a coma. The perspective that living in the past has given her allows her to become a better mother (she gives one of her kids a swat and he stops misbehaving), a tougher person (she goes after her ex-husband to make him pay the in-arrears child support he owes), and a partner in the law firm (given another assignment by her superiors, she performs ably and even goes to a male colleague for help in editing it, thus demonstrating maturity to be a team player). The Life of the World to Come (Baker 2004) is part of Kage Baker’s (1952–) ongoing Company series, which hinges upon the time-traveling enterprise of “the Company,” also known as Dr. Zeus, Incorporated. Besides running Club Med–like resorts in the Mesozoic for the idle rich of the twenty-fifth century, the chief business of the Company is to send agents back in time to acquire valuable property that is about to go missing from the pages of history (e.g., the books of the Library of Alexandria) and secure it for the Company to keep and sell in the future. Its agents are themselves “acquired” in similar fashion: they are stolen out of time to avoid their deaths and pressed into service as immortal cyborgs. This specific novel from the series centers on Alec Checkerfield, a twenty-fifthcentury child of privilege who is unknowingly the product of a Company-sponsored genetic experiment to create a more tractable sort of agent. His strange abilities enable him as a young boy to subvert the programming of a sophisticated AI (artificial intelligence) playmate who adopts the persona of a pirate called the Captain and sets to work amassing a huge, secret, and highly profitable information database on Alec’s behalf. Eventually, they learn of the Company, and Alec steals a time shuttle, fleeing backward in time to where the heroine of the series—a cyborg agent of the Company called Botanist Mendoza—is stranded Robinson Crusoe–like in the Mesozoic. Having met and fallen in love with two previous versions of Alec’s genotype, she has been imprisoned there by order of a trio of effete and foppish

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Company planners. An experiment by these planners produced a new version of Alec in order to prevent her from possibly meeting him again. Mendoza nurses Alec back to health, and he returns to the twenty-fifth century to complete a mission he’s taken on, promising to return for her. The Company abducts her from her prison, however, and Alec raids the Company’s headquarters to try to locate her. While inside the Company’s headquarters, he downloads the stored and recorded personalities of the two previous genetic versions of himself. Cohabiting Alec’s body, the three versions of himself (the first two and his present self) confront the three Company planners to find out what has been done to Mendoza. As the story ends, they set off in Alec’s high-tech smuggling yacht (now modified for time travel) to find her. In both Household Gods and The Life of the World to Come, the past is portrayed as somehow more authentic, but also crueler and more dangerous, than the present (whether that present is twentieth-century Los Angeles or twentiethfifth-century London). Both novels mock over solicitous, politically correct social engineering that coddles rather than challenges. But they are also unsympathetic to an undiscriminating nostalgia that valorizes and glorifies the past. For example, Nicole is disabused of her fantasies about the past and comes to appreciate how modern legal services empower her as a single mother pursuing a deadbeat dad. And the foppish trio that created Alec and his predecessors play at re-creating obsolete experiences, making fools of themselves as they do it: imagining themselves to be emulating J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, they go for a walk in the English “countryside” (a strip of parkland in a crowded London) and unaccustomed to exertion fall prey to blisters, heat injury, and exhaustion. Their clownishness is a direct result of their blithe ignorance of the authentic past. The central theme that emerges in both novels is a vindication of individual agency or intentionality: despite how one’s circumstances constrain one, whether one is a woman in Roman times or the product of a genetic-engineering experiment gone awry, one is responsible for acknowledging those constraints and then striving anyway. At its core, the Connecticut Yankee story rejects the notion that people are unalterably shaped by their circumstances, because a sufficiently self-aware individual is capable of taking steps to resist and overcome them. Chronic Argonauts. Dear Abbey (Bisson 2003) by Terry Bisson (1942–) is comic in tone but earnest in aspirations. It is the story of Lee and Cole, colleagues at a small community college in Connecticut. Lee, a Chinese physicist who speaks fractured English with a Texas accent, has a time machine in his personal digital assistant (PDA). Cole, an American studies professor with strong environmentalist leanings, has connections to the Green underground. The two men are recruited into an environmentalist scheme to acquire a formula from the future that will enable a genetically tailored virus to “severely inhibit the ability of humans to degrade the planet” by causing an infertility pandemic. On a Friday night, they travel to the future by using a kind of swinging metal couch stored in an underutilized room in the student center. As they rock back and forth on the couch, the calculations in the PDA send them in exponentially greater forward arcs in time. Their initial attempt to get the formula is thwarted, and as they swing further and further into the future, they learn of the course of future human history: people come to regret the waste and failure of the twentieth century, begin to restore the Earth, become able to live in more humane and sustainable ways, and finally fade away 2.4 billion years in the future.

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Manifold: Time (Baxter 2000) is cosmic in tone and equally earnest. It is the first of three novels each of which is set in separate but parallel universes involving slightly different configurations of the same characters. In this novel, Reid Malenfant is an ex-astronaut turned space entrepreneur who has put together a venture to begin mining asteroids. An enigmatic mathematician named Cornelius Taine, who represents one of his major investors, persuades him to work on detecting signals from “downstream” (the future). These signals will help avoid the statistically inevitable “Carter catastrophe” that will cause the collapse of civilization and possible extinction of humanity 200 years in the future. The detected message identifies a solitary asteroid in a distant orbit around the Earth, and Malenfant blasts off for it with Emma Stoney (his ex-wife), Taine, and Michael—an autistic but brilliant child who is one of very many “blue children” being born with unusual abilities. Pursued by space troopers sent by the U.S. government to stop them, they find a mysterious circular portal that allows them to journey to future eras, where they see how intelligent life—human life!—carefully conserves the dissipating energies of the universe to the last moments, when matter itself begins to break down. Emma is shot, Michael disappears, and Taine sacrifices himself to stop a trooper who has followed them through the gate. Soon, only Malenfant remains, and he goes further still, into new “daughter” universes born of the collapse of previous ones. Reaching the end of the universe, he is given the chance to alter the past so that Emma doesn’t come with him to the asteroid, and so lives. Meanwhile, however, the blue children, persecuted on Earth, flee to the moon, where they build a sort of doomsday device that destabilizes the vacuum of space itself. The resulting destruction of the universe is not an evil act, however, for the children are acting on behalf of the downstreamers, who see it as an act of creation: many daughter universes will result from the black hole–like singularities produced as the vacuum collapses. These two novels thus offer complementary eschatological visions. In Dear Abbey, “Bisson’s voyagers do not find a future in which mankind has conquered the galaxy. Instead, they find worlds in which our actions and inactions as regards the earth’s environment have played out with consequences both somber and sobering” (Kleffel 2003), and they watch the world end with a whimper. To avoid a similar fate, the downstreamers of Baxter’s novel send a message to the past that ends the world with a bang, obviating their own bleak existence and creating in the process new universes whose inhabitants “might be able to reconstruct what we were like, how we lived our lives” (p. 451). The Chronic Argonaut story is thus in direct contrast with the Connecticut Yankee; whereas the latter vindicates the individual, the former puts big-H History in the starring role, its forces driving the action to some ultimate end. Bootstrappers. The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003) by Audrey Niffenegger (1964–) is a romance, a mainstream novel that spent weeks on the best sellers lists despite the dismissive sniffs of some reviewers (e.g., Maas 2003). Clare and Henry meet, fall in love, get married, and try to settle down to a normal life. But Henry is afflicted with a strange genetic “chronodisplacement disorder” that occasionally sends him skirling naked across time for brief jaunts into his own past and future; so Clare meets Henry as a six-year-old girl, when he is 36; they marry when he is 31 and she is 23, finally having met in real (i.e., nondisplaced) time a few years earlier. As a love story, this novel focuses on what it means to be in love when each partner at any given time is drawing upon a different set of memories about their moments

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together: sometimes anticipating the joy the other has yet to feel, sometimes resentful of what for the other hasn’t happened yet. As a time travel story, this novel is interesting for its treatment of the disorienting experiences attendant upon bootstrapping time travel, such as encountering others who know you but whom you haven’t yet met. Night Watch (Pratchett 2002) is part of the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett (1948–). This series comprises lighthearted comic fantasies set on a flat world supported on the back of a gigantic cosmic turtle. The earliest Discworld stories achieved their comic effect by poking fun at the conventions of genre fantasy, but later entries in the series downplay broad comedy for clever word- and idea-play and sympathetically drawn characters, the secret of whose appeal is that, at heart, they are just trying to do the best they can. In Night Watch, Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is transported back in time twenty years while pursuing a murderer named Carcer through the grounds of the Unseen University, the city’s school of magic (where experiments in high-energy thaumaturgy take place). The city of twenty years earlier is a grimmer, less hopeful place than it will be; it labors beneath a paranoid and despotic ruler known as the Patrician. Carcer’s murder of the watch sergeant—who was Sam Vimes’ first partner when he joined the force—changes the trajectory of history, and so Vimes (with the help of some time-controlling monks) must take the role of his old partner, teaching his younger self the ropes while trying to undo the damage that Carcer has done. All this happens as the city comes closer to the revolution that will bloodily unseat the Patrician—if Vimes’ memory can be trusted. Both of these stories—perhaps because they are located outside the genre of science fiction—avoid questions about the logical paradoxes of time travel—for example, having lived through an event once, what prevents one from doing something differently the second time around?—in favor of exploring what may be called its experiential paradoxes: what is it like to be unmoored in time? This is the essence of the Bootstrapper story. Bibliography Anderson, Poul. “The Man Who Came Early.” The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 1956. Ash, Brian. The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: A Documented Pictorial Checklist of the Sci-Fi World. New York: Harmony Books, 1977. Asimov, Isaac. The End of Eternity. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1955. Baker, Kage. The Life of the World to Come. New York: Tor, 2004. Baxter, Stephen. The Time Ships. New York: HarperPrism, 1995. ———. Manifold: Time. New York: Del Rey, 2000. Davies, P.C.W. How to Build a Time Machine. 1st American ed. New York: Viking, 2002. De Camp, L. Sprague. Lest Darkness Fall. New York: H. Holt & Co., 1941. ———. “A Gun for Dinosaur.” Galaxy Science Fiction Mar. 1956. Dick, Philip K. The Man in the High Castle. Book Club ed. New York: Putnam, 1962. Finney, Jack. Time and Again. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. Foote, Bud. “The Connecticut Yankee in the Twentieth Century: Travel to the Past in Science Fiction.” Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy no. 43. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. Frankowski, Leo A. The Cross-Time Engineer. New York: Ballantine/Del Rey, 1986. Fraser, George MacDonald. Flashman at the Charge. 1st American ed. New York: Knopf, 1973 [distributed by Random House].

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TIME TRAVEL FICTION Gerrold, David. The Man Who Folded Himself. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 1973. Groppi, Susan Marie. “Fiction Submission Guidelines: Stories We’ve Seen Too Often.” 2006. http://www.strangehorizons.com/guidelines/fiction-common.shtml. Haldeman, Joe. “Anniversary Project.” Analog 1975. Heinlein, Robert A. “By His Bootstraps.” Astounding Oct. 1941. ———. “All you zombies.” The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Mar. 1959. ———. For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs. New York: Scribner, 2004. Hellekson, Karen. The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001. Kleffel, Rick. Dear Abbey [book review] 2003 [cited August 16 2006]. http://trashotron. com/agony/reviews/2003/bisson-dear_abbey.htm. Lem, Stanislaw. “The Time-Travel Story and Related Matters of SF Structuring.” Science Fiction Studies 1 (1974): 143–154. Maas, Judith. “Book review: The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.” Boston Globe Dec. 2003:B108. McMullen, Sean. The Centurion’s Empire. New York: Tor, 1998. Moore, Ward. Bring the Jubilee. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Young, 1953. Nahin, Paul J. Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction. 2nd ed. New York: AIP Press/Springer, 1999. Niffenegger, Audrey. The Time Traveler’s Wife: A Novel. San Francisco, CA: MacAdam/Cage Pub, 2003. Niven, Larry. The Flight of the Horse. New York: Ballantine Books, 1973. ———. A World out of Time. 1st ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976. ———. “Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation.” Analog Aug. 1977. Pratchett, Terry. Night Watch. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. Silverberg, Robert. Up the Line. New York: Ballantine, 1969. Tarr, Judith, and Harry Turtledove. Household Gods. New York: Tor, 1999. Tipler, F.J. “Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation.” Physical Review D9 8 (1974): 2203–2206. Turtledove, Harry. The Guns of the South: A Novel of the Civil War. 1st ed. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992. Twain, Mark. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. New York: C.L. Webster & Company, 1889. van Vogt, A.E. “Recruiting Station.” In Transfinite: The Essential A.E. van Vogt. J. Rico and R. Katze, eds. Framingham, MA: NESFA Press, 2003. Wells, H.G. The Time Machine: An Invention. London: W. Heinemann, 1895. Willis, Connie. “Fire Watch.” Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine Feb. 1985. ———. Doomsday Book. New York: Bantam Books, 1992. ———. To Say Nothing of the Dog, or How We the Bishop’s Bird Stump at Last. New York: Bantam Books, 1998.

Further Reading Foote, Bud. The Connecticut Yankee in the Twentieth Century: Travel to the Past in Science Fiction. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991; Hellekson, Karen. The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001; Malzberg, Barry N. The Best Time Travel Stories of All Time. New York: Pocket/ibooks, 2002; Nahin, Paul J. Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction. 2nd ed. New York: AIP Press/Springer, 1999; Turtledove, H. and Martin H. Greenberg. The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century. New York: Del Rey, 2001; Turtledove, H. and Martin H. Greenberg. The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century. New York: Del Rey, 2005.

WILLIAM J. WHITE

TRANSREALIST FICTION

TRANSREALIST FICTION Definition. Transrealism is a term coined in 1983 by mathematician, computer scientist, and novelist Rudy Rucker (Rudolf von Bitter Rucker [1946–]) to describe fantastic fiction that draws much of its power and density from closely observed reality, especially the biographical experience of the writer. Equally, the term conveys an enlivening approach to realistic fiction that enhances the vividness of its characters and events by imbuing them with elements drawn from fantastical imagination. “The Transrealist,” declared Rucker, “writes about immediate perception in a fantastic way.” The specific goal was an enrichment of generic writing: “There will always be a place for the escape-literature of genre SF [science fiction or speculative fiction]. But there is no reason to let this severely limited and reactionary mode condition all our writing. Transrealism is the path to a truly artistic SF” (see online text of Rucker’s “Transrealist Manifesto”). So a transrealist writes about the fantastic, the invented, the inverted, the dementedly shocking, via well-known literary techniques developed to capture and notate the world of immediate perception. Transrealism in Literature. Transrealism is less a way of reading fiction, and more a recommendation to writers who intend to create fantastic worlds, or who wish to intensify narratives generally grounded in ordinary life. “The tools of fantasy and SF,” notes Rudy Rucker, “offer a means to thicken and intensify realistic fiction.” Yet “a valid work of art should deal with the world the way it actually is.” In consequence, “Transrealism tries to treat not only immediate reality, but also the higher reality in which life is embedded” (“Manifesto”). The “trans-” part indicates aspects of the text that are transgressive, transformational, transmutational, and transcendental. Rucker coined the term “after seeing the phrase ‘transcendental autobiography’ in a blurb on the cover of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly” (Transreal! 1991, p. 529); Rucker’s own fiction, both transreal and otherwise, is discussed at length in Broderick, 2000. Parallel to transrealism, adjacent modes have emerged or been discerned and named: slipstream (Bruce Sterling [1954–]: “a contemporary kind of writing which has set its face against consensus reality . . . fantastic, surreal sometimes, speculative on occasion . . . simply makes you feel very strange . . . We could call this kind of fiction Novels of Postmodern Sensibility”), interstitial (Delia Sherman: “breaks the rules . . . lurk[s] near or on the borders of two, three, or more genres, owing allegiance to no single genre or set of conventions”), postmodern SF (texts with fluid reality boundaries, exemplified by William Gibson’s cyberpunk Neuromancer, 1984), and the New Weird (China Miéville [1972–]: “Something is happening in the literature of the fantastic. A slippage. A freeing-up. The quality is astounding. Notions are sputtering and bleeding across internal and external boundaries”). All share a tendency to repudiate the restrictions and often the tropes—the standard symbols, icons, plots, shortcuts, etc.—of genre SF and fantasy, emphasizing instead more complex psychological development, stylistic sophistication, and what might be called social embeddedness, and sometimes political engagement of a distinctly personal coloration. Meanwhile, magical realism found its way out of Latin America, inserting impossible or fantastical elements into rich descriptions of life. All these methods share the interesting technical device of using metaphors and other figures of speech mimetically, that is, as if they referred directly to the real world. For example, if a child flies into the sky in company with a talking dog, this is to be taken literally; it is not a Freudian dream image, or a fanciful way of conveying the child’s

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TRANSREALISM IN MOVIES AND OTHER MEDIA To date, there has been little analysis of a transrealist contribution to cinema, photography, drama, music, or other media. Any fantasticated work with a palpable autobiographical coloring might benefit from transrealist analysis. Some of the surrealistic and whimsically playful movies of Woody Allen (1935–) seem transrealist (e.g., Purple Rose of Cairo, 1985), as does Field of Dreams, 1989 (dir. Phil Alden Robinson [1950–]; writing credits W. P. Kinsella [1935–] and Robinson), Big Fish, 2003 (dir. Tim Burton [1958–]; writing credits Daniel Wallace [1959–] and John August [1971–]), and indeed the wilder flights of many stand-up comedians who readily refer to spouses, workmates, friends, the detritus of their daily lives, pushed into a heightened and fantastic narrative. Pop music, from the Beatles through Kiss and Michael Jackson to rap, often creates a fantasticated mélange of the glamorous or grungy real lives of the musicians and a romanticized or degraded representation of those lives.

inward loneliness and aspiration. It might well do that also, and more, but the events are to be taken as part of the realistic record of imagined events. History. The need for a transrealist approach to fantastic fiction arose from those frequently debased and stereotyped characters and plot events of consumer science fiction and fantasy, which comprises the bulk of the genre. Indeed, when the rotoscoped movie adapted from Dick’s A Scanner Darkly was released in 2006, its director, Richard Linklater, commented, “What appealed to me about [the novel] is that it’s not really about ‘the future.’ It’s about Joe Everyman and his pals, worrying about money and sex and being frustrated. A lot of sci-fi deals with these amazing futuristic worlds where humans have suddenly lost all their humor and become emotionless automatons” (2006). Is this charge justified? Dick was clearly unusual in this regard, compared to most science-fiction writers of the 1950s and 1960s, but it would be misleading to read the fictional characters of Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) and Sir Arthur C. Clarke (1917–) as emotionless automatons—except for Asimov’s stoic robots. It is true that stories and characters of the period, and still today, tend to be driven by curiosity or wonder rather than, say, passionate romantic love or world-weary angst. James Blish’s (1921–1975) characters, often regarded as “cold,” seethe nevertheless with ferocious intellectual energy. Robert A. Heinlein’s (1907–1988) fiction is full of emotion and humor, of a kind reminiscent of an updated Mark Twain (1835–1910), and the figures in Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–), Joanna Russ (1937–), and Samuel R. Delany (1942–) are very far from stereotyped or impassive. On the other hand, SF critic Gary Westfahl (1951–) has suggested that the “geeky” cast of much SF and fantasy is due to its specialized appeal to writers and readers sharing some measure of Asperger’s Syndrome: “a persistent failure to establish eye contact, visible discomfort in most social situations, obsessive interests in a few subjects, a tendency to fall into routines . . . and a tangible aura of emotional detachment, even in extreme situations.” For an Asperger teenager in the 1930s (or even today), “a story about an astronaut encountering aliens on Mars might have had an air of comforting familiarity, in contrast to stories set in the bizarre, inexplicable, and thoroughly socialized worlds of Andy Hardy and the Bobbsey Twins” (Westfahl, 2006). More generally, the tropes of fantastic fiction in the West were adopted or invented mainly by adventure storytellers writing hurriedly for the barely educated

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mass readership of inexpensive pulp magazines. Consequently, since much of today’s fantastic fiction evolved from that pulp history, it often remains decidedly generic and formulaic in the ways it is constructed and read. The tired narrative conventions it frequently embodies, far from challenging us as “the extreme narrative of difference” (Broderick, 2004, 10), are designed as comforting, minimallyconfronting mind candy. Stock characters and settings are templates put into creaking, predictable action. The craft of reliable genre writing is to disguise or superficially refresh this tired pattern of narrative action. In part, this use of instantly recognizable stereotypes is understandable, since the figures and behavior of fantastical fiction are always, to some large extent, allegorical. Each represents or dramatizes only a handful of aspects of individual psychology or cultural dynamics. Genre characters are not intended as rounded portraits of humans in a richly known world. They tend toward the archetypal, the schematic, and the iconic. One way to defeat or surpass such generic temptations and limits is to draw upon the internalized understanding—the cognitive and emotional models within one’s head and heart—of the endlessly surprising people one knows best: In real life, the people you meet almost never say what you want or expect them to. From long and bruising contact, you carry simulations of your acquaintances around in your head. These simulations are imposed on you from without; they do not react to imagined situations as you might desire. By letting these simulations run your characters, you can avoid turning out mechanical wish-fulfilments. It is essential that the characters be in some sense out of control, as are real people—for what can anyone ever learn by reading about made-up people? (“Manifesto”)

Trends and Themes. Because transrealism is not a school of writing (although Rucker’s own acknowledged influences suggest that it can be seen as a very belated revival of Beat poetics), but rather a suggested method for enriching all kinds of imaginative writing, it is difficult to identify any particular trends, beyond the observation that the best fantastical fiction seems increasingly steeped in the experiences of the real world. For example, a thriller/mystery novel of telepathy, Spider Robinson’s (1948–) Very Bad Deaths (2004), effectively reuses the author’s own harrowing medical and other problems, which both restrict his narrator’s capacity to act heroically and provide him with strengths of endurance that allow him a sort of muffled victory. Without this added texture, the book would have been slighter and less involving. By contrast, most bestsellers in the fantastical genres continue to recycle long-established idioms—starship captains, male or female, and their brave crews of loyal humans, aliens, and androids boldly going to very much the same places they have been for the last 40 years, sexy werewolves and vampires, mediaeval landscapes of magic and struggle against Dark Lords. The best of these traditional tales do enrich their time-honored plots and casts of characters with imaginative density—Lois McMaster Bujold’s (1949–) Vorkosigan sequence and her more recent fantasies, for example—evincing a serious confrontation with the complexities of the real world. The commercial success of smooth familiarity, however, tends to ensure that any transrealist element, with its unexpected turns and potential for offensive shock, is minimal. If there is any single theme recurring in transrealist writing, aside from the simple decision to throw much of the plot and representation of characters over to the machineries of the unconscious, it is an implicit interest in philosophical issues

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known technically as epistemology and ontology. The first asks how we know what we think we know about self, others, and world, while the second investigates the very nature of that world, that reality. During the twentieth century, it seemed increasingly obvious that our intuitive understanding of how things work is absurdly naive and often misleading. What we see as solid is more deeply a quantum haze of probabilities. The sky just overhead extends for billions of light years. The apparent unified mind looking at the deceptive world is itself an eerie composite, and its partitioned workings can be viewed in subtle brain scanners or modified by subtle pharmaceuticals. Questions of epistemology can tend, therefore, to whirl into gulfs and voids of ontological terror. To the extent that our knowledge of the world is constructed rather than simply given, do we have any certainty or security of that world’s persistence, of its reliability, or indeed even of our own selves? These rather abstract concerns drove Dick’s enjoyably crazy and sometimes incoherent plots, and they surface repeatedly in Rudy Rucker’s work as well. Meanwhile, the same issues have been identified by the critic Fredric Jameson (1934–) as being the very hallmarks of postmodern textuality (see Jameson 1991, Broderick 1995), as well as the foundations for some of the best science fiction (Jameson 2005). Contexts and Issues. Transrealism’s approach to imaginative fiction might be mistaken for the banal advice “Write what you know.” It also runs the risk of inviting the reader to commit the Intentional Fallacy, the error of supposing that the meaning of a text is identical to the author’s intention. Rucker might tell us that he is basing his characters on himself and his friends, but we cannot be sure that this is so; transrealist fictions are not romans à clef. Nor should we really care which life experiences are infiltrated into the text. Still, some writers in and out of science fiction have fruitfully combined wild ideas with their own experience, creating a realistic thickening of the supposedly airy fantastic. “Geeky” writers soaking their culture’s fantasies in the broth of their own idiosyncratic ways of construing the world will create work likely to unsettle and reward readers at large. Here is a rudimentary example of how the process can work, from Rucker’s extensive notes on his novel Mathematicians in Love (2006). Writing a scene, he was visualizing his characters as The X-Files’ Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, but found the result “flat and dull. And I remembered the [transrealist] injunction that I’ve often given to beginning writers: ‘Model your characters and situations on life, not on movies and TV shows!’ . . . I thought of familiar human models for the agents, Michele G. . . . and my college friend Dick S. . . . and the agents got human and came alive” (Rucker, 2005). Unless we happen to be close friends of these particular people, it cannot help us to know this. But it does illuminate the process of an enriched, fantastical, transrealist creation. Reception. Interpenetration of novelistic realism and the fantastical imagination has not been to everyone’s taste. Thomas M. Disch’s (1940–) novel On Wings of Song (1979) drew significantly upon his oppressive youth in mid-twentieth-century heartland America. Discussing the novel, Gerald Jonas noted that “except for an occasional tour de force, there is no room in science fiction and fantasy for the traditional novel of character. A science-fiction author may create characters to demonstrate how a change in technology or social organization alters the human condition; or he may invent entire exotic worlds to show how certain human traits—such as passion or greed—take different forms under different circumstances. But the focus is typically on the forces that shape character, rather than on the character development itself.” It was precisely Disch’s attention to character that

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dismayed Jonas: “Mr. Disch’s primary interest is in delineating character. In a science-fiction context this is at first startling, but as a narrative strategy it is finally self-defeating.” Perhaps, Jonas suggested, Disch chose the wrong model of realism. “Science fiction and fantasy have more in common with experimental fiction than with the novel of character” (1979). It is certainly true that Rucker’s transrealist work is very much closer to Beat experiment than to the traditional novel of manners. While only the last of Dick’s books approach experimental fiction (Valis [1981] in particular), his blend of headlong delivery and down-to-earth characters, many of them blue-collar or frankly mad rather than bland starship admirals or galactic game players, was rare in the genre. Only one of Dick’s mainstream novels of character was published during his life (Confessions of a Crap-Artist, 1975). Revealingly, his mainstream novels have seldom been deemed successful. It is interesting that while these novels seem even more directly based on the author’s life and obsessions, it is the absence of the fantastical, the whimsical, and the terrifyingly ontological that reduces their value and impact. It is arguable that Dick’s realist novels are insufficiently transrealist. In Dick’s non-SF novels—such as Confessions, In Milton Lumpky Territory (1985), and The Broken Bubble (1989)—all action springs from character, rather than from externalized menace (precognitive doom, robotic simulacra, slime molds from outer space, the crushing pressure of entropy itself). Yet that choice compromises the peculiar power of Dick’s imagination, derived from his own odd relationship to reality. Perhaps this is why transrealism is not the narrative tool for all writers. A certain dislocation from consensus reality in the originating experience is needed, a detachment and even a somewhat delirious reworking that cannot be willed but needs to be known autonomously, from within. There has been surprisingly limited formal discussion of transrealism to date. In 2005, Rucker and Broderick were guests of honor at the 26th Annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Blurring the Boundaries: Transrealism and Other Movements. Selected Authors. Since a considerable amount of “Golden Age” science fiction (roughly 1938–1950) was written by engineers or working scientists, often about characters solving engineering or scientific problems, it might seem that transrealism ought to have made an early appearance in such magazines as Astounding Science Fiction. Actually, the representation of such professions, concerns, and lifestyles in SF was significantly restricted by its adventure-story formats, or their comic parodies of life at the workbench under the tedious thumb of oppressive bureaucracies. In fact, it was not until Thomas Pynchon’s (1937–) zany madcaps devastated these tropes that transrealist methods began to influence fictions written in the shadow of the technological age (Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973), although there were predecessors such as G. C. Edmondson’s (1922–1975) charming F&SF series in 1959–1964, which reported on the exploits of his “Mad Friend,” employed at the Saucer Works (a version of Lockheed’s “Skunk Works”). Subsequently, novels indebted to Pynchon, such as Robert Grossbach’s A Shortage of Engineers (2001), brought the touch of transreal absurdity to the literary depiction of an absurd social order—in this case, a military-spec aerospace company on the order of Lockheed or Boeing. From an entirely different quarter, the supernatural fictions of Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991), written in Yiddish, were frequently drawn from his own life and circumstances. “The world is entirely an imaginary world,” says his Gimpel the Fool (1957), “but it is only once removed from the true

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world.” This somewhat transrealist perspective informs the more uncanny fiction of Marge Piercy (1936–), Joyce Carol Oates (1938–), Margaret Atwood (1939–), and many other non-genre writers. There has always been an anarchic but somewhat autobiographical aspect to science fiction, portrayed as part of the background of Rocket to the Morgue (1942) by mystery and science-fiction writer Anthony Boucher (1911–1968), which features lightly disguised versions of Heinlein, Jack Williamson (1908–), L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986), and other pulp writers, but this should not be mistaken for transrealism. In the 1950s, Wilson Tucker (1914–), a notable writer for sciencefiction fanzines, used the names and physical descriptions of his friends and foes in such novels as Wild Talent (1954), a gambit now known as “tuckerization.” More anarchic and genuinely transrealist, a quarter of a century later, was the Greenwich Village Trilogy (The Butterfly Kid, 1968, by Chester Anderson; The Unicorn Girl, 1969, by Michael Kurland, and The Probability Pad, 1970, by T. A. Waters), in which stoned hippies save the world from Blue Lobsters and other amusing aliens; the characters and their setting very faithfully represent the authors and their circle. It is a trope that Rucker would revive with a vengeance and a mathematical spin a further decade later in such books as Spacetime Donuts (1980) and The Sex Sphere (1983). The lyrical and snapping shaggy-dog surrealism of R. A. Lafferty (1914–2002) startled genre readers but is perhaps not quite transrealist; his drug of choice was alcohol. The psychic and social upheavals of the 1950s and 1960s, often fueled by amphetamines and other mind- and mood-altering drugs, had their impact on Dick, especially in such books as Time Out of Joint (1960), Martian Time-Slip (1964), Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964), Now Wait for Last Year (1968), A Scanner Darkly (1977), and especially Valis (1981), where he appears as Horselover Fat. Dick’s central role in exemplifying and provoking the transrealist program (Rucker’s “Transrealist Manifesto” was not published until a year after Dick’s death in 1982) is explored in detail in Broderick, 2000. Highly intelligent and self-taught, Dick built an explanatory system from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Gnosticism, existential psychoanalysis, and a mix of acid-culture theories of mind and reality. These concerns predate the 1960s: The Cosmic Puppets (1953) stages a small-town conflict between embodied Zoroastrian divinities Ahriman and Ormazd, who transform daily reality into symbol. In Eye in the Sky (1955), a nuclear accident disrupts the local reality of eight characters whose shared world fluxes as they struggle for dominance. Alternatively, as a Dickian protagonist’s personal construct of the world decays, the true essence of the world is revealed, often dreadfully. The transrealism in Dick’s work reveals the fantastical transformations of his daily, if unusually eccentric, life-world. He was a writer drenched in SF imagery, where even in his bleakest and most intensely lyrical moments he found the perfect correlative to his inner states. His sometimes bleak, much-married life is echoed in the refrains of his life’s work: doppelgangers, simulacra, apparent humans who turn out to be “electric ants,” and programmed constructs. Arguably it was exactly his mastery of transreality that spared him the final banal temptation of guruhood. Our world, Dick assured himself, was already a collage, a superposition, of all possible worlds. The feminist fiction of James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon, 1915–1987), beneath its male disguise, is often powerfully transreal, transforming the appalling confrontations of her life into unyielding science fiction. Sheldon was the daughter of widely

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traveled anthropologists, and worked in military intelligence. “Young Alice saw the genital mutilation of Kikuyu women, babies dying in the streets of Calcutta, a riot in Shanghai that was the start of the Chinese Revolution. She heard the screams of a man being killed for the cannibal pot. She even saw a crucifixion: ‘The men had been stripped, tortured, tied to posts, and left to perish in the sun. . . . Auschwitz— My Lai—etc. . . . did not surprise me one bit, later on.’” (Scholz, 2006). Critic John Clute (1940–) notes: “Tiptree/Sheldon’s life very deeply shaped what superficially might have looked like simply another competent set of iterations of familiar SF tropes. What was miraculous was how professionally she was able to fit her interior intensities and drives into the mold of those seeming conventional story types, ruthlessly infusing every great story she wrote with those extraordinary intensities, which cannot be copied.” The same might be said of black novelist Octavia Butler (1947–2006), whose SF fables transduce the tragedies of poverty and slavery. That dislocation need not be uniquely strange, though. Russ achieved a quite terrifying intensity in The Female Man (1975), her important feminist utopia, by contrasting several invented alternative worlds to her own stifling middle-class experience growing up in the 1950s. Joe Haldeman’s (1943–) own history, the bruising and morally conflicted experience of an American soldier badly wounded in Vietnam, made The Forever War (1974) stand out even in a period of striking technical advances by science-fiction writers such as Roger Zelazny (1937–1995) and Disch. On the other hand, two metafictional works that describe the anguished disintegration of sciencefiction hack writers—Barry N. Malzberg’s (1939–) Gather in the Hall of the Planets (as K. M. O’Donnell, 1971) and Herovit’s World (1973)—are perhaps not transrealist so much as satirical or parodic, however revelatory. Delany’s early fiction from the 1960s—while less immediately identifiable as realistic, let alone autobiographical—is vividly coded with his experience as a black, gay man in America. In his early masterpiece, Dhalgren (1975), his genius flowered fully in a transrealist work set in a deconstructed cityscape where history is fallible, sun and moon(s) are unreliable, and the central figure is a possibly deranged amnesiac and dyslexic poet. Not until his non-science fictional The Mad Man (1996) would this confronting blend of scrupulously observed and somewhat biographical realism and highly disturbing perverse fantasy gel completely. Ray Davis notes: “In Delany’s earlier porn, appalling acts are executed by dehumanized monsters. In The Mad Man, perversion, like other violations of taboo, is instead a profoundly humanizing act of courage” (in Sallis, 1996). So too is the candid, lacerating, and funny soulbaring of a failing writer in Jamil Nasir’s Distance Haze (2000), in which the direct mystical experience of the divine is first simulated/stimulated and then obliterated by neurological engineering. It might seem that transrealist work must be excessive to some degree—that since transgression is part of its definition, it must be offensive, even indecent, as well. By the standards of reigning power and convention, this might seem to be so. Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) and William Burroughs (1914–1997), whose work altered the course of mid-century U.S. fiction as radically as that of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) a generation earlier, spoke truth not so much to power as to the illusion of a safely domestic, self-simulating, shocking adventures from the comfort of an armchair. Yet the shocking devices of one period are the commonplaces of another. The endless road peeling away in front of Kerouac’s windscreen was replicated in the scroll of paper nearly 35 meters long upon which he typed On the Road (1958); Rucker emulated that method a generation later when

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writing All the Visions (1991). Today, by contrast, almost all writers do just that, without any shock of release, on the infinite virtual page of the word processor screen. What was also unpeeled in this kind of radically autobiographical writing was the experiencing self, harried away from comfort by ruthless self-examination and crazy bursts of invention and lyricism. In a similar line of descent is Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005), whose hysterical and bitingly insightful prose (notably Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971) is better understood as transreal rather than satirical or simply mannered, unlike the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s in general. Thompson names himself explicitly as his protagonist, and this is one explicit marker of transrealism. J. G. Ballard’s (1930–) Crash (1974) is narrated by James Ballard, and in The Empire of the Sun (1984) his child-self surrogate is Jim. Rucker sometimes calls his central character “Rudy Rucker,” as in the recent Saucer Wisdom (1999), presenting itself mockingly as the true story of his mad friend Frank Shook, and Shook’s adventures with saucer-borne multidimensional time travelers. In Gaudeamus (2004), prolific SF writer John Barnes (1957–), former assistant professor of theatre and communication in a small Colorado college, narrates very much in his own person a tale reported to him in a number of brokenoff cliff-hanger segments by his mad friend Travis Bismark, another traveler in a flying saucer. But is this narrator, who has the same job and the same former wife as Barnes, a fully rounded representation of the author? Probably not, but it does not matter, because the weariness, the venom, the ambition, the bleak humor of the narrator are plainly motivated by reality, and speak to us for that reason more urgently than many of Barnes’s more perfunctory entertainments. Yet the transrealist prescription or diagnosis does not require excess. Justina Robson’s (1968–) Silver Screen (2005) is packed with detail and naturalistic rendering of character that evades SF’s expectations of melodrama and spectacular setting or event. For all their exotic idiosyncrasy and special gifts, Robson’s supersmart characters are flattened into a sort of desperate ordinariness. A proponent of slipstream, she suggests that it “strives to duplicate the complexities of actual experiences by allowing experience to be paramount and letting everything else serve a purpose.” The parallels with transrealism are clear. Her narrator seems at least in part transrealist, drawn to an unusual degree from the daily grind, irritations, opacities of her author’s ordinary experience, fantasy enriched in its artful and persuasive rendering by the miseries and rewards of life here and now. Certainly this is true of the transrealist fiction of Jeffery Ford (1955–), one of the most talented current fantasy writers. In “Botch Town” (2006), for example, a coming-of-age novella blending autobiography and an uncanny mix of fantasy and horror, a facsimile town of plywood and clay in the narrator’s basement echoes and then manipulates events in the already shadowy exterior suburban world. Thus, reality enriches and activates the fantastic imagination, and vice versa, of the transrealist artist. Nor is transrealism necessarily marketed as genre. A best-selling romance, Audrey Niffenegger’s (1963–) The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003), is an elaborate time-twisting invention, a realist novel grounded in a fantastical Vonnegutian premise—that some people can come unstuck in time—a fantasy enriched by copious detail drawn from the real world of the author. What distinguishes The Time Traveler’s Wife from, say, a traditional science-fiction entertainment like Poul Anderson’s (1926–2001) There Will Be Time (1972), is its very ordinariness, its refusal, by and large, to use this

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paranormal irruption as an opportunity to showcase the time traveler’s technical prowess, political nous or trans-historic destiny. Niffenegger has commented, “It’s something that bugs me about actual science fiction, this effort to provide all the answers and make everything work out very neatly” (interview, 2003). But of course her novel is “actual science fiction,” although more than actual science fiction, her novel is actual transrealism. The same can be said of Jonathan Lethem’s (1964–) The Fortress of Solitude (2003), a supernaturally heightened autobiographical tale of growing up Jewish and white—with magic gifts of flight and invisibility—in a black part of Brooklyn in 1972. Philip Roth’s (1933–) blend of autobiography, invention, and an alternative history of a near-Nazi America in the 1950s, The Plot Against America (2004), is a transreal transformation. Paul Di Filippo (1954–), in a buoyant appreciation of Rucker, captured the key moves of transrealism: “as a unique individual, each of us must report back as faithfully as we can, sharing our insights in whatever artistic modes best suit us. . . .” Whenever he got stuck while writing, he “just ‘twinked’ Rudy ( . . . a coinage . . . meaning ‘to run a mental simulation of an individual on your personal wetware’) and instantly all roadblocks vanished. I even tried to follow Rudy’s scheme of ‘transreally’ incorporating bits and pieces of my autobiography into Fuzzy Dice. Transrealism being, in Rudy’s memorable phrase, ‘writing just like yourself, only more so.’” Transrealist writing is founded, finally, in an insistence that empathy, or a suffering awareness of its absence, must suffuse the fantastic, supplanting rote blueprint or egotistic wish-fulfillment. It goes beyond stipulating cozy formulae about our world (traditional naturalist realism), or even asking how it is we know that world (the modernist, epistemological project). Situated in the complexity, the psychic and social density, of observed life, transrealism takes an extra step into systematic, exploratory doubt—the step intrinsic to postmodern science—and confronts the experiential varieties of all possible worlds: the liberating project of radically ontological fiction. Bibliography Broderick, Damien. Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction. London: Routledge, 1995. ———. X, Y, Z, T: Dimensions of Science Fiction, Holicong, PA: Borgo Press, 2004. Davis, Ray. “Delany’s Dirt.” 1996. http://www.pseudopodium.org/kokonino/dd4.html Di Filippo, Paul. “Just Like Himself, Only More So.” 2003. http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/ nonfiction/pdif_rudy.htm Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso, 2005. ———. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991. Jonas, Gerald. “Science fiction.” New York Times. 28 Oct. 1979: pp. 15–16. Linklater, Richard. 2006. “Infintely Improbable.” http://news.ansible.co.uk/a229.html. Miéville, China. Qtd. in “Writer’s Workshop.” 2003. http://www.darkecho.com/darkecho/ workshop/terms.html Niffenegger, Audrey. The Time Traveler’s Wife. New York: Harvest, 2004. ———, interview by Veronica Bond. “An Interview with Audrey Niffenegger,” http://www.bookslut.com/features/2003_12_001158.php Philip K. Dick online bibliography: http://www.philipkdick.com/works_novels.html Sallis, James. ed. Ash of Stars: On the Writings of Samuel R. Delany. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1996.

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TRAVEL WRITING Scholz, Carter. “Invisible man.” Review of James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, by Julie Philips. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006. http://www.bookforum.com/scholz.html Sherman, Delia. “An Introduction to Interstitial Arts: Life on the Border.” 2003. http://www.interstitialarts.org/what/intro_toIA.html Sterling, Bruce. “Slipstream.” 2005. http://www.eff.org/Misc/Publications/Bruce_Sterling/ Catscan_columns/catscan.05 Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. New York: Random House, 1971. Westfahl, Gary. “Homo aspergerus: Evolution Stumbles Forward.” March 6 2006. http://www.locusmag.com/2006/Features/Westfahl_HomoAspergerus.html

Further Reading Rucker, Rudy. “A Transrealist Manifesto.” The Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America 82 (Winter 1983). Reprinted in Transreal! WCS Books, 1991, and Seek! Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999. Online with other essays on writing at: http://www.rudyrucker. com/writing/; Broderick, Damien. Transrealist Fiction: Writing in the Slipstream of Science. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000.

DAMIEN BRODERICK

TRAVEL WRITING Definition. Travel writing takes many forms, but the genre is generally associated with nonfiction narratives that recount, from a first-person perspective, the author’s experience of a journey. Unlike a travel guidebook, which offers practical advice about sightseeing, dining, and lodging options, and which presupposes the reader’s intent to visit the location described, a travel narrative is a literary form that reflects an author’s personal perspective of a place. Attempts to define the genre more precisely are challenged by its hybrid qualities. For example, when describing the genre in an issue of Granta devoted to travel writing, editor Bill Buford observes that it is “the beggar of literary forms: it borrows from the memoir, reportage, and, most important, the novel. It is, however, a narrative told in the first person, authenticated by lived experience” (Buford 1984, 7). In addition to sharing traits with other genres, travel writing is remarkably varied in length, scope, style, tone, and subject matter. While some authors are also novelists or journalists, travel writers are as likely to be naturalists, historians, scientists, philosophers, or chefs, among other occupations. Inevitably, some writers make better traveling companions than others, but the diversity of travel writing has greatly contributed to the genre’s enduring popularity. History. Travel writing dates back to ancient times, when people first began recording stories of movement from one place to another. The genre emerged from heroic epics such as Homer’s Odyssey, but accounts of exploration and pilgrimage throughout history also constitute early forms of travel writing. The genre developed significantly when improved modes of transportation allowed people to travel more frequently and widely, with less hardship and danger. In the eighteenth century, the British upper class flocked to the European Continent for educational Grand Tours via the coach, but the arrival of rail travel in the nineteenth century paved the way for mass tourism. In The Norton Book of Travel, Paul Fussell describes the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the “heyday of travel and travel writing”: “It was the Bourgeois Age that defined the classic modern idea of travel as an excitement and a treat and that established the literary genre of the

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‘travel book’” (Fussell 1987, 271, 273). The period produced an outpouring of travel sketches, diaries, and guidebooks, as well as more artfully crafted narratives by authors since recognized as important literary figures. While the British are frequently credited with establishing travel writing as we know it today, American writers such as Mark Twain, Henry James, and Henry David Thoreau contributed significantly to the burgeoning genre in the nineteenth century. British explorers, however, must be acknowledged for popularizing a subgenre of travel writing that captured a reading audience around the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Polar exploration produced gripping accounts of treks to the ends of the earth, including Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s masterpiece The Worst Journey in the World, which recounts British explorer Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed quest for the South Pole as well as the author’s calamitous experiences as a member of the expedition to Antarctica. Cherry-Garrard’s memoir, published in 1922, remains a landmark of exploration literature from a period that evidenced heated international competition to reach and claim the most remote places on the planet. As a subgenre of travel writing, polar literature is marked by a consistent focus on endurance and survival. Those who lived to tell the tale of hauling sledges across the ice, falling into crevasses, and facing diminishing or non-existent food supplies, bequeathed narratives about heroic travel that no longer seems possible, aerospace achievements notwithstanding. In Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars, Fussell elegizes the 1920s and 1930s as travel writing’s finest hour, characterizing the post-WWII world as unsuitable for worthwhile travel or travel writing: “The going was good for only twenty years, and after the war all that remained was jet tourism among the ruins, resulting in phenomena like the appalling pollution of the Mediterranean and the Aegean” (Fussell 1980, 226). Although Fussell’s concerns about the effects of tourism on the environment are shared by many travel writers today, his implicit prediction of the demise of good travel writing has proven premature. After a lull of a few decades, the genre proved its endurance in the 1980s, a decade witnessing a resurgence of interest in travel writing. Random House began publishing its successful Vintage Departure series of travel narratives, while other publishers began reprinting classic travel books. New travel writing appeared with more frequency in bookstores as well as in magazines, including literary magazines such as Granta, which devoted three separate issues to the genre in the 1980s. Travel writing continues to flourish, its status aided by readers’ increased interest in nonfiction in general, but the genre endures due to its ability to capture, reflect, and sometimes critique the complicated and diverse world in which we live. Trends and Themes. Bookstore shelves now sag under the weight of new titles in the genre, many of which reveal how travel writers employ accounts of journeys in order to explore subjects or concerns that extend beyond the actual geographical context for such investigations. The flexible genre encompasses narratives focused on adventure, romantic relationships, disastrous trips, or dozens of other topics. Publishers are perhaps most responsible for one distinct and recent trend in the genre—the numerous books on the market that recount an author’s extended stay in another country, usually somewhere in Europe, often while he or she renovates an old house and acclimates to the surrounding culture. The success of Frances Mayes’s Under the Tuscan Sun (1996), in which the narrator, a poet and gourmet cook, describes the pleasures of living in the Italian countryside, prompted a spate

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of similar books. Other writers lean toward what may be labeled meta- or antitravel writing, narratives that explore traveling theoretically or philosophically and that conclude with implicit arguments for “armchair” travel or for simply staying at home. Such is the case with Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel (2002), in which the author suggests applying the receptivity of a “traveling mind-set” to our own locales, which then might become as interesting as “the high mountain passes and butterfly-filled jungles of Humboldt’s South America” (Botton 2002, 242). Readers unfamiliar with the genre may reasonably expect travel writing to focus on travel— the actual movement from one place to another—but many contemporary writers suggest that the inner journey is as important as the outer one. To varying degrees, travel writers record the self-exploration that traveling often precipitates. As Casey Blanton observes, most contemporary travel writers see themselves as exiles: “A search for authenticity, wholeness, and meaning often drives their journeys as it did for travel writers in the past (Blanton 2002, xiv). Travel writer Mary Morris argues that women writers are particularly likely to value the inner landscape, “the beholder as significant as the beheld” (Morris 1993, xvii), but many scholars take issue with such sweeping generalizations about gender. Kristi Siegel, for example, acknowledges that gender affects genre, but argues in regard to travel writing that “it is nearly impossible to construct a set of commonalities that would cut across lines of race and class” (Siegel 2004, 5). Morris’s observation, however, proffered in response to what she perceived as a neglect of attention to women’s travel writing, is supported by the theme of self-discovery that emerges in a number of contemporary travel narratives by women, even though the internal landscape is by no means the exclusive province of female travel writers. In any case, women are producing travel narratives with increasing frequency in comparison to decades past. In 2005, Travelers’ Tales published the inaugural edition of The Best Women’s Travel Writing, but the press boasts seventeen collections of women’s travel writing since its first title on the subject appeared in 1995. Additionally, women now contribute to the subgenre of adventure travel writing, traditionally associated with male writers and generally characterized by risk-taking and physical challenge. Holly Morris, for example, recounts hunting for wild boar in Borneo and climbing the Matterhorn in Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for a New Kind of Heroine (2005), describing her stories as “estro-charged globetrotting” (Morris 2005, ix). As contemporary travel writing is so richly varied, many publishers now offer anthologies or series focused on specific kinds of journeys, thereby creating additional categories in the genre. The Crown Journeys Series, for example, includes titles by well-regarded novelists as well as by popular authors, each of whom describes a walk, or walks, in a particular city or circumscribed area. The nature of the series suggests the rewards of unhurried and grounded travel, in contrast to the global crisscrossing of adventure seekers. In one of the series’ representative titles, Time’s Magpie: A Walk in Prague (2004), Myla Goldberg describes wandering around the old European city, immersed in its history and attuned to the small pleasures that such leisurely travel affords. As the Crown Journeys Series indicates, an increasing number of novelists have become travel writers, perhaps because the flexibility of the genre and its familiar narrative form is so amenable to the devices and techniques of fiction. Contexts and Issues. After many centuries of exploration, and in an era of increasing globalization and rapid development in electronic communication, the world

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today seems smaller and more familiar than it once appeared. Certainly, there are fewer and fewer places in the world that are unmapped or that have not already served as the subject of television shows or of previously published travel narratives. With the tourism industry thriving due to greater mobility in general, those seeking the unbeaten path are likely to be disappointed. Contemporary travel writers respond to such circumstances in varying ways: by choosing unusual forms of transportation to provide a new or distinct perspective of a place, by opting to remap or retrace the path of a predecessor, or by employing travel as a means of investigating particular social and cultural issues. Environmental concerns are consistently addressed in contemporary travel writing, particularly in narratives focused on places that were once considered exotic or remote. The inroads of tourism have been greatly responsible for damaging fragile ecological systems and have unavoidably altered ways of life in traditional cultures. While travel writers tend to distinguish their motivations and journeys from those of tourists, the distinction is problematic. As Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan observe, contemporary travel writers, “whatever their status or institutional affiliation, are continuing to provide sterling service to tourism—about to become the world’s largest industry—even when they might imagine themselves to be its most strident adversaries” (Holland and Huggan 1998, 3). The seemingly vexed relationship between travel writers and tourism bears similarity to the relationship of the ethnographer and his or her subject in anthropological writing. Like ethnographers, travel writers describe people and their societies and cultures, and thus questions about the textual representation of “others” are frequently raised in regard to both forms of writing. As Holland and Huggan note, “Travel writers and anthropologists both occupy positions of power—granted largely by the economic differences between their societies and the societies they visit—that allow them to establish an often unwarranted authority over their subjects” (Holland and Huggan 1998, 12). Although travel writing and ethnography are forms of nonfiction, neither can make claim to absolute objectivity, for cultural description always reflects the writer’s perspective. Accordingly, travel writers may strive for veracity in their narratives, but their field of vision is inevitably limited or affected by codes of class, race, gender, and culture. As a form of autobiography or memoir, travel writing is personal by definition. Practitioners in the genre must balance reader expectations for truthful reportage with the artistic demands of creative nonfiction. As Robert Root explains, “All literary genres essentially create representations of reality and require craft and design and discovery and process, but nonfiction is unique in that it alone is required by virtually unstated definition to apply those strategies and techniques to something that already exists” (Root 2003, 246). Reception. Throughout its history, travel writing has had credibility problems, in part because historical exploration accounts were often notoriously unreliable, but also because the genre has traditionally been viewed as having less literary value than the “three genres” of fiction, poetry, and drama. Academics in the twentiethcentury began to study historical travel literature as a viable subject for cultural studies, and the genre grew in significance with the rise of women’s studies and theoretical spatial studies. Contemporary travel writing, however, received scant scholarly attention until the resurgence of the genre in the 1980s. Accordingly, initial studies argued for wider recognition of travel writing’s merits. For example, in his introduction to Temperamental Journeys: Essays on the Modern Literature of Travel, Michael Kowalewski expressed frustration with “the venerable tradition

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of condescending to travel books as a second-rate literary form” (Kowalewski 1992, 2). Temperamental Journeys, presented as “the first collection to focus exclusively on twentieth-century travel writing,” was soon followed by a number of scholarly studies devoted to contemporary examples in the genre, now a respected subject for academic study (Kowalewski 1992, 7). Travel writing also continues to hold the interest of general reading audiences. Since 2000, Houghton Mifflin has published its annual anthology The Best American Travel Writing, each volume showcasing essay-length travel narratives previously published in well-regarded magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic Traveler, and Outside. Series editor Jason Wilson explains why such literature deserves attention in his foreword to the first volume in the series: Travel writing is always about a specific moment in time. The writer imbues that moment with everything that he or she has experienced, observed, read, lived, bringing all of his or her talent to bear on it. When focused on that one moment, great travel writing can teach us something about the world that no other genre can. Perhaps travel writing’s foremost lesson is this: we may never walk this way again, and even if we do, we may never be the same people as we are right now. Most important, the world we travel though will never be the same place again. This is why travel writing matters. (Wilson 200, xvi)

Selected Authors. Paul Theroux has published more than a dozen travel narratives since he began writing them in the 1970s, making him one of the best-known travel writers of the last four decades. For this author, the journey itself—the movement, the work, and the pleasures of going somewhere—is of greater value and interest than the destination reached. Thus train travel, especially, serves him as a means of vision, a particular way of seeing the world that makes him receptive to the insights afforded by constant movement. Theroux describes journeys by rail as “the purest form of travel”; “everything else—planes especially—is transfer, your journey beginning when you arrive” (Sunrise with Seamonsters, 126, 128). The four-month railroad odyssey to the Far East recounted in The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train through Asia (1975) exemplifies Theroux’s philosophy of travel but also the manner in which his preferred mode of transportation serves the writer as well as the traveler: “Train travel animated my imagination and usually gave me solitude to order and write my thoughts: I traveled easily in two directions, along the level rails while Asia flashed changes at the window, and at the interior rim of a private world of memory and languages” (Theroux 1975, 166). Through such passages, The Great Railway Bazaar established the author’s predilection for solitary travel and for personal reflection about the act and art of writing. His work often reminds readers that travel writing is a trip twice taken: the traveler moves through interior and exterior landscapes, recording images and observations that will later be transformed and shaped into a cohesive narrative. A self-proclaimed wanderer and a successful novelist, Theroux believes travel and writing are congruent enterprises: The nearest thing to writing a novel is traveling in a strange country. Travel is a creative act—not simply loafing and inviting your soul, but feeding the imagination, accounting for each fresh wonder, memorizing and moving on. The discoveries the traveler makes in broad daylight—the curious problems of the eye he solves—resemble those that thrill and sustain a novelist in his solitude. (Theroux 1985, 140)

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Accordingly, The Great Railway Bazaar reminds readers that travel writing is more than mere documentation; rather, it is imaginative transformation, aided by memory and language, of lived experience into words on a page. Theroux is careful, though, to acknowledge that he is less free to invent in his travel writing than in his fiction; the nonfiction genre demands truthful eyewitness. In the narrative’s conclusion, he states that he has learned that “the difference between travel writing and fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows” (Theroux 1975, 342). As Elton Glaser observes, Theroux’s travel books, “like many of the twentieth century’s most celebrated literary works, come with a built-in analysis of their own composition” (Glaser 1989, 193). Theroux’s allegiance to accuracy and honesty is also underscored in the book’s final sentences. After expressing pleasure at the prospect of rereading the notebooks kept during his trip, he cites the first words that appear in them, which also serve as the opening words of The Great Railway Bazaar. In addition to conveying the circular nature of travel—as one must usually return home—the ending implicitly promises readers a travel narrative created from carefully recorded observations. In his study of the author, Samuel Coale states that Theroux is almost Puritan in “his precise faith in language, in the ability of words to conjure up a place, a people, a continent, and attach significant meaning to them, to make them ultimately signify” (Coale 1997). Focusing on Theroux’s “Americanness,” Coale views the author’s travel writing as faithful to his heritage, particularly to romantic notions of the individual self: “The American myth shimmers with notions of self-renewal, rebirth, self-made men, . . . the lone self which confronts a wilderness or alien landscape and conquers it in terms of his own perceptions or his masterful technological skills” (Coale 1997). In The Old Patagonian Express: By Train through the Americas (1979), Theroux’s second and perhaps most highly regarded travel narrative, he confesses that he is “taking a little-known route through Central America . . . made for lonely travel,” but he also argues that “travel is at its best a solitary enterprise” (Theroux 1979, 121, 168). One of the ironies of the book surfaces in its stories of encounters with fellow passengers who are sometimes welcomed as company but who are just as often regarded as annoyances, even as the author presents himself as a solo traveler. Other people distract him from his writing and interfere with his perceptions. As Glaser notes, Theroux “takes great pains to convince us that he is a traveler in the grand tradition of philosopher observers, set far apart from the other characters who temporarily share his journey on the open road” (Glaser 1989, 197). Theroux’s persistent desire for solitude often makes his narrative persona appear self-absorbed. Throughout The Old Patagonian Express, he retreats from the imposition of his fellow travelers by seeking refuge in books. His reading material often reflects his mood or perspective, as is seen in his choice of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, “a grimly humorous book of self-congratulatory cynicism,” Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, in which Theroux inscribes “No privacy, no relief,” and Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which Theroux describes as “a nightmare journey,” a phrase that also captures the author’s perception of his passage through Costa Rica (Theroux 1979, 60, 79, 192). If writing and traveling are consonant occupations in their conduciveness to creativity, reading and traveling are similarly parallel in their unerring progress to a final destination. Poe’s novel, a narrative that also recounts a journey south toward the Pole, features a hero who survives various catastrophes and terrors only to end up drifting by canoe in a blank

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nothingness of open water. Like Poe’s suffering survivor, Theroux concludes his journey only to stare into the vast and empty space of Patagonian desert: “The nothingness itself, a beginning for some intrepid traveler, was an ending for me” (Theroux 1979, 404). Although he attempts to transform the experience into a paradoxical discovery of his existence, he concludes his narrative on a dark note, as if he has reached the limits of travel’s rewards—and the limits of language itself— as much as he has reached the end of the actual road. While Theroux has been praised as “one of America’s most engaging travel writers” (Rose 2000, 17), he has also earned a reputation as a curmudgeon and cranky expatriate. In her review of Theroux’s Fresh Air Fiend: Travel Writings, 1985-2000 (2000), Lucretia Stewart observes that the author “demonstrates his mastery of the rapid scattergun approach to invective, devised, it would appear, specifically for the purpose of cramming in as many insults as possible into the shortest possible space” (Stewart 2000, 32). Theroux jokingly acknowledges his reputation as a “dyspeptic” in an interview with Dwight Garner, but he explains that critics misinterpret his irony as grumpiness: I think that, particularly in travel writing, we are used to sweetness and light. I decided very early on—more than 25 years ago when I published my first travel book, The Great Railway Bazaar—that a lot of travel writing was merely like a postcard saying: “Everything is fine. Wish you were here.” But what I realized is that travel is a lot of misery and delay. (Garner 1996)

But many contemporary travel writers take a lighter approach to the travails of travel. Bill Bryson’s witty, irreverent, and sometimes wiseacre observations about human foibles and cultural idiosyncrasies have made him one of America’s most popular travel writers. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, he spent much of his adult life in England, where his first travel books, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (1989) and Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe (1991), garnered a wide and enthusiastic readership. In The Lost Continent, he recounts a return to his native land, where he visits 38 states in his mother’s aging Chevrolet and attempts to duplicate the family vacations of his youth. Divided into two parts, East and West, the book follows the author’s trips to many backwater towns and tacky tourist traps, usually portrayed with a great deal of comedy. As one reviewer observes of another book, Bryson’s writing provokes “body-racking, tear-inducing” laughter, through humor that falls “somewhere between the one-liner genius of Dave Barry and the narrative brilliance of David Sedaris” (Jennings 2006, 9). Such wit is evident in The Lost Continent when the author interweaves his narrative with memories of journeys led by his father, portrayed as a cranky task-master who forced the Bryson family to endure disastrous camping trips: And afterwards, in a silent car filled with bitterness and unquenched basic needs, we would mistakenly turn off the highway and end up in some no-hope hamlet with a name like Draino, Indiana, or Tapwater, Missouri, and get a room in the only hotel in town, the sort of run-down place where if you wanted to watch TV it meant you had to sit in a lobby and share a cracked leatherette sofa with an old man with big sweat circles under his arms. (Bryson 1989, 11)

Bryson writes with a dual-perspective in The Lost Continent, that of the insider and native son with unquestionable knowledge of his homeland’s favorite pastimes,

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but also that of the expatriate who, aligned with his fellow Britons, is alternately amused and disturbed by the social practices, or intellectual shortcomings, of American life. While visiting Auburn University, for example, he complains about the absence of a single decent bookstore in a town with 20,000 students, but he balances his barbs with self-deprecating anecdotes: “In my day, the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting and learning. Learning was something you did when the first three weren’t available, but at least you did it.” (Bryson 1989, 72). Bryson’s humor makes The Lost Continent a very entertaining travelogue, but attentive readers will note that the author uses the occasion of his homecoming to proffer some sharp criticism of American life and practices. In describing a visit to the Great Smokey Mountains National Park in Tennessee, for example, he observes the squalor just beyond the park. Bryson is equally disturbed by American television newscasts (during which grisly murders are recounted casually), by the poverty and violence of so many cities, and by the vastness of the country that is so big “it just absorbs disasters” (Bryson 1989, 262). He reserves his harshest comments for Americans’ sense of privilege, their allconsuming quest for material comforts, and their disregard for other cultures. “When you grow up in America,” he observes, “you are inculcated from the earliest age with the belief—no, the understanding—that America is the richest and most powerful nation on earth because God likes us best” (Bryson 1989, 271). As the book progresses, The Lost Continent becomes tinged with melancholy, despite Bryson’s efforts to offset the darker observations with adolescent memories of better times. One fully expects the author to conclude the account of his nationwide trek with a claim about not being able to go home again—the America of his past seems lost to him, as the title of the book suggests—but Bryson opts for a more positive ending, perhaps reluctant to betray his roots completely. In Neither Here Nor There, Bryson captures the experience of the contemporary tourist through a narrative about journeys to more than a dozen countries in Europe. In casting a wider net than in The Lost Continent, he shifts from the narrative unity afforded by commentary on one country to a dizzying series of national portraits often marked by stereotypes. Bryson partly appeases potential charges of cultural reductionism by employing exaggerations that no one would be expected to take seriously. Thus, “Germans are flummoxed by humor, the Swiss have no concept of fun, the Spanish think there is nothing at all ridiculous about eating dinner at midnight, and the Italians should never, ever have been let in on the invention of the motorcar” (Bryson 1991, 35). The broad humor did not appeal to all critics, but some, such as Dervla Murphy, described it as distinctive, “depending on his cunning use of flamboyant exaggerations, grotesque but always successful metaphors and the deft juxtapositions of incongruous images—the whole presented in a style that boldly veers from laid-back colloquial American to formal clean-cut English” (28). In the decade following the publication of Neither Here Nor There, Bryson produced five more books that secured his reputation as a comic travel writer, although he has become equally known for books about the English language. As one critic observes, “What makes Bryson the most entertaining and interesting travel writer around is his singular facility to fashion a unique whole from historical facts, topographical observations, and geographical ramblings” (Maxwell 2000, 118). Bryson’s consistently humorous approach to travel writing makes him a distinctive voice amidst his contemporaries working in the genre.

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Like Bryson, Tony Horowitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, aims to entertain readers in his travel books, but his most recent work exhibits more ambitious goals. In Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook has Gone Before (2002), he attempts to replicate Cook’s epic voyages in a quest to understand the man who redrew the map of the world in the eighteenth century. Horowitz credits Cook with undertaking the first voyage of scientific discovery, with influencing the Western world’s perception and understanding of unfamiliar and exotic cultures, and, for better and for worse, with opening up many new territories for subsequent explorers and empires. Inspired by Cook’s journals, the author sets forth in the explorer’s wake, initially serving as a volunteer aboard a replica of Cook’s ship and subsequently resorting to more modern modes of travel, in a quest that takes him all over the South Seas and other parts of the globe. Part history, part travel narrative, Blue Latitudes underscores the limitations of modern travel: I’d gone where Cook went, but I couldn’t share his experience. The problem wasn’t simply that I traveled by jet, rather than by wooden ship, to lands that had changed utterly since Cook’s day. It was also that I carried an image of every place I went before I got there. This was the curse of modern travel: it was like reading a book after you’ve already seen the movie adaptation. (Horowitz 2002, 222)

Horowitz’s journeys to Tahiti, Alaska, Hawaii, and other locations visited by Cook, however, are recounted with humor as well as wistfulness, mostly due to the presence of his traveling companion Roger, an Australian who serves as comic foil to the author throughout much of the book. While Roger resorts to drinking at any trying leg of the trip, Horowitz becomes increasingly dismayed, and often irritated, by signs of Cook’s tarnished reputation. He learns that the explorer is reviled in some countries, viewed as a wicked imperialist, and that his memory and legacy have been neglected even in England, Cook’s native land. “In remembering the man,” he writes, “the world had lost the balance and nuance I so admired in Cook’s own writing about those he encountered” (Horowitz 2002, 296). Blue Latitudes seemingly seeks to restore the balance, moving between historical and contemporary perspectives of Cook in order to recalibrate the man’s legacy. Without denying the fine line between exploration and exploitation, Horowitz pays tribute to Cook as one of the last great explorers: “In his wake, other discoverers filled in the few remaining blanks on the map. Eventually there wasn’t anyplace left on earth where no man had gone before” (Horowitz 2002, 443). Travel writers’ recognition of exhausted space is often consonant with their observations about exhausted planetary resources and other environmental concerns, issues that loom large in much contemporary travel literature and that reveal the genre’s notable relationship to nature writing. Journeys through wilderness or natural settings frequently cause modern travelers to confront imperiled wildlife, altered ecosystems, and other distressing environmental conditions. Cultural losses often accompany such changes, particularly in regions of the world where people’s traditions, beliefs, and means of survival are closely tied to the natural world. Nature-travel writers thus cross boundaries of genre as well as of geography, evident in books such as Peter Matthiessen’s classic The Snow Leopard (1978), a criticallyacclaimed account of the author’s journey to remote parts of Nepal, where, accompanied by a wildlife biologist, Matthiessen hopes to observe the elusive snow leopard. The Snow Leopard is also an intensely personal book, revealing the author

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attempting to cope with his wife’s recent death and eventually coming to terms with her loss, as well as other losses, through Zen Buddhism. As Casey Blanton observes, Matthiessen’s “grim awareness of late-twentieth-century ecology” and thematic exploration of humankind’s destruction of the planet is ultimately balanced by his compelling spiritual inner journey (Blanton 2002, 74-75, 81). A more recent example of nature-travel writing, Gretel Ehrlich’s This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland (2003), is also focused on issues of loss. Ehrlich’s narrative about her extended travels among the Inuit during the 1990s recounts dog sled adventures with subsistence hunters whose livelihood is threatened by global warming and the temptations of the modern world. Throughout the book, Ehrlich includes expedition notes from Knud Rasmussen, whose exploration of Greenland in the early twentieth century allowed him to document the culture of the Polar Eskimos, which had remained essentially unchanged for a thousand years. Ehrlich’s book similarly records Inuit ways of life, but her narrative inevitably reveals change: people trying to preserve their traditions while they adapt to the realities of a new global economy. “Everyone is just trying to survive,” one hunter tells her. “Before there were shops, we followed animals. Now it’s started to be modern so with my children and grandchildren, I try to get them to travel around with me so they know the life. Before, there was hunting with your wife. Now, my wife has to work in town to pay the bills” (Ehrlich 2003, 174). While recording such losses, This Cold Heaven transcends cultural nostalgia by celebrating the beauty of the landscape and the resourcefulness of the people who live on it and with it: “The complexities of ice had taught the hunters to reconcile the imminence of famine and death with an irreverent joy at being alive. The landscape itself, with its shifting and melting ice, its mirages, glaciers, and drifting icebergs, is less a description of desolation than an ode to the beauty of impermanence” (Ehrlich 2003, xiii). Rebecca Solnit’s writing persistently pursues questions about place and humans’ relationship to it. In her books, travel serves as a means to know a location deeply and intimately, but such a process also requires forays into the past and into the stories that give meaning to a particular place. As a cultural historian as well as art critic and social activist, Solnit focuses on various spatial practices—geographic, political, environmental—to illustrate that how we perceive a place affects how we treat it. In Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West (1994), she explores an unlikely pairing of locations, the Nevada Test Site and Yosemite National Park, in a two-part narrative about contested spaces. In addition to recounting her travel through these places, Solnit historicizes them through chronicles about the making of the atom bomb and the development of the American wilderness. Early in the book, she signals her thematic terrain by noting hikers’ and explorers’ obsession with virgin wilderness, with being “the first people ever to tread on a piece of land” (Solnit 1994, 24). Even if one were to step foot on ground never before touched by someone else, she explains, the place, however remote, is cultural territory, already covered and constructed by myth and imagination, by artists, writers, and history. Solnit illustrates this cultural construction of place in her account of a guided tour around Ground Zero, the Nevada Test Site, which remains one of the most bombed places on earth. Throughout her tour, she experiences the surreal sense of being in a movie or on a film set, ironically reinforced by the documentary film she watches during her visit: “The landscape of the Nevada Test Site was strangely innocent of its own history, even with all of its craters and ruins. It was the stories that brought it to life for me, the stories of . . . the atomic veterans,

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the local people. . . . [but] it was the journey that gave the landscape meaning for me, not this arrival” (Solnit 1994, 211). Solnit’s turn to Yosemite in the second half of Savage Dreams initially appears as an odd narrative path to take after the seemingly conclusive end at Ground Zero, but the extension of her journey, and of the book, allows her to confront even more directly the relationship between actual and perceived place. Deciding to visit Yosemite on her way elsewhere, she stops at Lake Tenaya and quickly realizes that the national park, “the very crucible and touchstone for American landscape,” would give her insight into “the peculiarities, blindnesses, ruptures, and problems that constitute the Euro-American experience of landscape” (Solnit 1994, 221). Thus, Savage Dreams traces and challenges historical depictions of the park by artists, photographers, explorers, and naturalists as uninhabited and virgin wilderness. Solnit also aligns such conceptions of the park with the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted’s view of nature as art and with ecologist Bill McKibben’s belief in the independence of nature. By interweaving her narrative with accounts of her own rambles through the park, she offers a countervision of nature, in which humans are not excluded. For Solnit, place is constructed and given meaning by people, by those who inhabit or interact with the location. She advises us to give up the story of virgin wilderness, which would allow us to “lay to rest some of the misanthropy of old-fashioned conservationists and recognize that culture does not necessarily destroy nature, and that the ravages of those in a hurry are not the only pattern in the book” (Solnit 1994, 308). Solnit’s travel writing has been described as meta-travel writing, “Writing that speculates about the meaning of travel even as the trip goes on” (Cooper 1997). The description is particularly apt for her recent works, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000) and A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005), both of which explore movement and mobility rather than a particular landscape or location. Henry David Thoreau, referred to in Savage Dreams and repeatedly referenced in the more recent books, serves as her touchstone for purposeful and meaningful travel. The nature writer and practitioner of civil disobedience informs her belief that walking, whether construed as crossing boundaries or trespassing into forbidden places, “can articulate political meaning” (Solnit 2000, 8). Inspired also by Thoreau’s essay “Walking,” Wanderlust follows the method of Solnit’s previous books; that is to say, she uses her own experiences and travels to provide a framework for broader philosophical inquiry. Walking is thus a metaphor as well as an act: “It trespasses through everybody else’s field—through anatomy, anthropology, architecture, gardening, geography, political and cultural history, literature, sexuality, religious studies—and doesn’t stop in any of them on its long route” (Solnit 2000, 4). In tracing the evolution of walking, examining the literature of walking, and portraying everything else historically and culturally related to walking, Solnit wants readers of Wanderlust to recognize that the pace of walking, as opposed to other methods of movement or travel, fosters thinking and reflection. Walking keeps us grounded, literally, thereby engaging our minds and bodies with the world. While such philosophizing may appear to characterize Solnit’s work as something other than travel writing, her book is ultimately an argument about how to travel in a postmodern era of standardized environments and disorienting speed. She also makes a case for conceiving travel as stories, and stories as travel, to underscore the connection between imagination and movement. She observes, “To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as guide—a guide one may not always agree with or trust, but who can at least be counted upon to take one somewhere” (Solnit 2000, 72).

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GET LOST! A NONCONVENTIONAL GUIDE TO MOVING THROUGH THE WORLD A celebration of dislocation and of travel as a state of mind, A Field Guide to Getting Lost is appropriately fragmented and non-linear. A nonconventional travel writer, Rebecca Solnit presents readers with an alternative to traditional journey narratives; she captures, in the form of her text, the sometimes disorienting experience of moving through and living in the modern world. At the same time, her innovative approach to writing about travel is not proffered as literary experiment for the sake of novelty but rather as a means of mapping the interior journeys that make the exterior ones matter. In pushing the boundaries of the genre, or perhaps dissolving them completely, she illustrates that new methods and forms of travel writing may best help us to navigate place and space in the postmodern era.

In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, she denies readers an actual “somewhere” by arguing for travel without destination. Solnit explains that people who literally get lost are not paying attention to the place around them and no longer attend to the natural signs that would help them to navigate their way. In contrast to being lost out of ignorance, Solnit proposes being lost as a state of mind because it leads to a life of discovery. A meditation on being lost and on various kinds of losses, the book acknowledges Thoreau as the best and truest travel guide. Solnit quotes Walden: “Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations” (Solnit 2005, 15). Bibliography Blanton, Casey. Travel Writing: The Self and the World. New York: Routledge, 2002. Botton, Alain de. The Art of Travel. New York: Pantheon Books, 2002. Bryson, Bill. The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America. (1989) New York: HarperPerennial, 1990. ———. Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe. (1991) New York: William Morrow, 1992. Buford, Bill. “Editorial.” Granta 10 (1984): 5-7. Cherry-Garrard, Apsley. The Worst Journey in the World. London: Constable, 1922. Coale, Samuel. Paul Theroux. In Twayne United States Authors on CD-ROM. New York: G.K. Hall and Co., 1997. Cooper, Rand Richards. “Travel.” Review of A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland, by Rebecca Solnit. New York Times on the Web, June 1, 1997. http://www. nytimes.com/books/97/06/01/reviews/970601.01travelt.html. Fussell, Paul. Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. ———, ed. The Norton Book of Travel. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1987. Garner, Dwight. “His Secret Life.” Interview with Paul Theroux. Salon, September 2, 1996. http://www.salon.com/weekly/interview960902.html. Goldberg, Myla. Time’s Magpie: A Walk in Prague. New York: Crown Publishers, Crown Journeys, 2004. Glaser, Elton. “The Self-Reflexive Traveler: Paul Theroux on the Art of Travel and Travel Writing.” The Centennial Review 33 (1989): 193-206. Holland, Patrick, and Graham Huggan. Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Hooper, Glenn, and Tim Youngs, ed. Perspectives on Travel Writing. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.

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TRAVEL WRITING Horowitz, Tony. Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook has Gone Before. New York: Henry Holt and Co., Picador, 2002. Hulme, Peter, and Tim Youngs, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Jennings, Jay. “Happy Days.” Review of The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, by Bill Bryson. New York Times Book Review, 15 October 2006: 9. Kowalewski, Michael, ed. Temperamental Journeys: Essays on the Modern Literature of Travel. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Maxwell, Gloria. Review of In a Sunburned Country, by Bill Bryson. Library Journal (15 November 2000): 118. Mayes, Frances. Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996. Lucy McCauley, ed. The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2005: True Stories from around the World. Palo Alto: Travelers’ Tales, 2005. Morris, Holly. Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for a New Kind of Heroine. New York: Villard, 2005. Morris, Mary. Introduction to Maiden Voyages: Writings of Women Travelers. Mary Morris with Larry O’Connor, eds. New York: Random House, Vintage Departures, 1993. Murphy, Dervla. Review of Neither Here Nor There, by Bill Bryson. Times Literary Supplement, 25 September, 1991: 28. Root, Jr., Robert L. “Naming Nonfiction (a Polyptych).” College English 65.3 (January 2003): 242-246. Rose, Peter I. “Around the World in 15 Years.” Review of Fresh Air Fiend, by Paul Theroux. Christian Science Monitor, 27 July 2000: 17. Russell, Alison. Crossing Boundaries: Postmodern Travel Literature. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Siegel, Kristi, ed. Gender, Genre and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. ———. Issues in Travel Writing: Empire, Spectacle, and Displacement. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Smith, Sidonie. Moving Lives: Twentieth-Century Women’s Travel Writing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide to Getting Lost. (2005) New York: Penguin Books, 2006. ———. Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West. (1994) New York: Random House, Vintage Departures, 1995. ———. Wanderlust: a History of Wandering. New York: Viking Penguin, 2000. Stewart, Lucretia. “On the Wrong Side of the Frontier.” Review of Fresh Air Fiend, by Paul Theroux. Times Literary Supplement, no. 5098 (15 December 2000): 12. Paul Theroux. Fresh Air Fiend: Travel Writings, 1985-2000. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000. ———. The Great Railway Bazaar: by Train through Asia. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1975. ———. The Old Patagonian Express: by Train through the Americas. (1979) New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., Mariner, 1997. ———. Sunrise with Seamonsters: Travels & Discoveries 1964–1984. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1985. Wilson, Jason, ser. ed. Foreword to The Best American Travel Writing 2000. Bill Bryson, ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000.

Further Reading The International Society for Travel Writing, http://istw-travel.org; Studies in Travel Writing, http://www.studiesintravelwriting.com.

ALISON RUSSELL

TRUE CRIME LITERATURE

TRUE CRIME LITERATURE Definition. Although murder narratives and nonfiction crime writing have a history spanning centuries, modern American true crime literature made its earliest appearance in the pages of True Detective Magazine during the 1950s and 1960s, as a new way of narrating and understanding murder emerged—one more sensitive to context, more psychologically sophisticated, more willing to make conjectures about the unknown thoughts and motivations of killers. Modern American true crime texts tend to be formulaic and are characterized by a collection of technical and thematic conventions established during the 1970s and 1980s. Such conventions include a depiction of one crime or criminal, usually murder, and a preoccupation with certain kinds of crimes—domestic, sadistic, or sexual murders, serial killings, or the crimes of the rich and famous. The texts include a depiction of the social contexts and ordinary life details of both victims and killers, generally focusing on the personal history and psychology of the murderer, culminating in the skillful deployment of fiction masquerading as fact (most often seen in dialogue or the imagined thoughts of characters, known as “free indirect discourse”). They also rely on a writer/narrator who is positioned as an “insider” on the events, privy to special information about the case. The structure generally includes four event elements: background of the crime, pursuit, trial, and imprisonment/execution, although some texts narrate unsolved crimes, as well as a middle photographic section, which may include photographs of the killer, victims, crime scenes, weapons, and scenes from the trial. The text also balances simultaneous distancing from and identification with the killer, most often done by narrating the killer’s thoughts and feelings, with the use of a rhetoric of evil and monstrosity to describe the actions and motivations of killers. True crime literature is dominated by murder narratives, although some texts focus on serial rapists, espionage, or criminal conspiracy. History. Exemplary texts and writers of true crime include Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965–1966), Joseph Wambaugh’s The Onion Field (1973), Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter (1974), Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1979), Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me (1980) and her many other books, and numerous titles by such writers as Harold Schechter, Jack Olsen, Carlton Stowers, Aphrodite Jones, and Mark Fuhrman. True crime has become a pop culture juggernaut in publishing, journalism, and television, as well as a cultural barometer registering shifting fears about crime and violence in America. From its inception and formation as a distinct genre, true crime has created a nonfiction American landscape of paranoia and danger, random violent crime and roaming serial killers, of mortal threats to women and children from sociopathic husbands and predatory child-killers. Paradoxically, the genre also assuages such fears, because most true crime narratives present cases that have been cleared or solved, thereby reordering the violently disrupted social world and reassuring readers that horrifying criminals do not escape punishment, although normal life is regularly and radically altered by acts of extreme violence. Certain aspects of the genre’s conventions first appeared in pulp detective magazines from the 1950s and 1960s (most notably True Detective Magazine, published from 1924 to 1995), and true crime techniques in nascent form are present in texts of that period, such as Joel Bartlow Martin’s Why Did They Kill? (1952), Lucy Freeman’s Before I kill more . . . (1955), Meyer Levin’s Compulsion (1956), John Dean’s The Indiana Torture Slaying (1966), and Gerold Frank’s The Boston Strangler (1966). These early true crime offerings reflected the preoccupations of

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their times, with many texts focused on so-called “juvenile delinquent” killers, in response to the “teenaged threat” of the 1950s and 1960s. Murder narratives that focused on one contemporary murder became popular during this period, as writers began to move away from publishing collections of stories or new treatments of older, more sensational murders. Such story collections had been popular from the 1900s to the 1950s, but as true crime magazines became more numerous and readily available, with their journalistic and sensational treatments of national and local murders, readers came to expect and demand more up-to-the-minute stories from full-length texts. Trends and Themes. The kinds of killers treated in true crime changed during the 1960s, largely due to the change in the most sensationally gruesome crimes being committed, and the growth of a large media-machinery that could hype and inflame fears about such crimes. Fears about the existence of “bushy-haired strangers” (the term used by Dr. Sam Shepard to describe the alleged killer of his wife in 1955), sexmurderers such as Albert DeSalvo (the Boston Strangler, 1962–1964) and Richard Speck (the Chicago nurse-killer, 1966), mass killers like Charles Whitman (the University of Texas tower sniper, 1966), and “cult killers” such as Charles Manson and his “family” (1969) were increased by heavy media coverage of these crimes and criminals. Each of these crimes generated many different textual and film true crime treatments, such as Gerold Frank’s The Boston Strangler (1966) and its film version (The Boston Strangler, dir. Richard Fleischer, 1968). At the same time, there was a growing fascination with the killer who had an inconspicuous and impeccably “normal” façade that obscured the homicidal maniac within. One of the most popular framing devices for killers in true crime is that of highlighting the seeming normalcy of the killer, and then trying to uncover and understand the monstrously aberrant personality lurking just beneath the surface. In this way, killers came to be framed as both monstrous violators of the boundaries of normal humanity, and yet still within those same boundaries. The terms psychopath and sociopath became part of the popular vernacular after 1941, with the publication of Hervey M. Cleckley’s The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues about the So-Called Psychopathic Personality, which made the concepts and language of psychiatric criminal deviancy accessible to non-professional readers. The book was reprinted in 1950, 1955, and 1964. Another concept that entered popular consciousness during the 1950s was that of the sex fiend, or sex psychopath, the man who, because of some disorganization in his mind, was unable to control his sexual impulses and posed a significant threat to the perceived weakest part of American society, women and children. During the 1970s, certain themes, types of killers, and modes of representation became most prominent within the emerging genre, with the serial and sex killer and feminized victims—women, children, and homosexuals—garnering the greatest interest. The genre was not dominated by any single author, but it was dominated by male writers. Typical examples include William A. Clark’s The Girl on the Volkswagen Floor (1971), an unsolved-murder narrative largely concerned with psychics assisting the police, and John Gurwell’s Mass Murder in Houston (1974), a small press publication about the Dean Corll homosexual killings of 27 teenaged boys in Houston. John Gilmore’s The Michigan Murders (1976) is an early serial killer treatment that wonderfully evokes the culture of a late 1960s large university community (Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti). Charlie Simpson’s Apocalypse (1974) is a berserk-Vietnam-vet tale with political and sociological undertones, a miniature

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Helter Skelter. These texts present victims as objects, with details about the discovery of fatally wounded bodies, graphic accounts of violence, and means of death taking hideous precedence. Apprehension and description of the psychopathology of the perpetrator is of secondary concern, and in the 1971 text, the killer is never caught. Forensic science and descriptions of police work also gained prominence within the genre during this period, and the archetype of the strong male detective force battling other, deviant men to avenge female victims became commonplace. True crime of the 1980s focused largely on serial killers, as that threat first appeared on the cultural horizon with the pursuit and apprehension of such killers as Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Henry Lee Lucas, Jeffrey Dahmer, and the “Green River Killer” (Gary Ridgway). Popular culture depictions introduced the figure of the “criminal profiler,” as FBI programs such as VICAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program) and profiler training captured both federal funding and the popular imagination. Although the serial killer threat was never as widespread and lethal as was touted in the early 1980s, texts about serial killers proliferated during this decade. As the threat and hype around serial killers faded during the late 1990s, writers turned their attention to domestic murder, by far the most common and varied type of killing in America. Much modern true crime narrates the threats to both men and women of bad romantic choices, and the genre now reflects more anxiety about intimate relationships than the risks of being murdered by a serial killer. Husbands, wives, lovers, in-laws, children, and parents shoot, stab, poison, and incinerate each other with alarming frequency in true crime, and the genre is dominated by such perverse or reversed romance narratives. There are also many more female writers working in the genre at present, the most popular being Ann Rule (b. 1935). Rule has shaped the modern genre and popularized the theme of deviant domesticity and exploration of gender expectations and roles, as well as placing greater narrative emphasis on victims’ lives and foregrounding mundane details about the environments in which her killers and victims live. She has also enlivened the genre with stories about unforgettable female killers, and a more female-centered strand of true crime has emerged from her pioneering work. Context and Issues. The way that real murder is narrated, and therefore understood in a given culture, changes over time and depends heavily on cultural context. Different stories, interpretations, emphases, and perspectives abound for any single murder case. In her book Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination, cultural historian Karen Halttunen writes, “Any story of murder involves a fictive process, which reveals much about the mental and emotional strategies employed within a given historical culture for responding to serious transgression in its midst” (Halttunen 1998, 2). Because murder narratives are constructed and are always somewhat fictive, no matter the reality of the event being discussed, they reveal the underlying preoccupations and perspectives on “serious transgression” in ways that other texts do not. In the early formative true crime period (late 1960s through the 1970s), the murderer is often depicted as a stranger to his victims, a loner (or a pair of loners), a person from an abusive or violent background, alienated from most normal social ties such as friends and family, and most fundamentally, as a person lacking a conscience. Each of these features correlates to some element in the larger culture that caused anxiety or distress, and the killer in true crime literature became the expression for some of the fears, real or imagined, of 1960s America.

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CRIME TRENDS OF THE 1960s AND 70s Some cultural fears about crime are exploited and exaggerated in the pages of true crime books. One undeniably real trend in the last few decades in America was an escalating murder rate (the number of homicides committed per 100,000 citizens per year): in the 1960s, the murder rate underwent a dramatic upward surge, and in the decade between 1964 and 1974, the American murder rate doubled, from 5 to 10 homicides per 100,000 people per year. Stranger-killings—that is, homicide between two persons unknown to each other—became much more prevalent in the 1960s, and the clearance rate for murder, or the percentage of cases solved, was dropping. During this same period, the conventions of true crime were codified into a formula: murder narratives began to represent stranger-killings most frequently, and the structure of the true crime text settled into its ossified present form of crime–pursuit–trial–execution. The conflation of these three elements—a rising murder rate, an increase in the number of stranger-killings, and a corollary increase in the number of unsolved homicides—registered in true crime narratives as an emphasis on the unknown, and unknowable, killer.

Selected Authors. Most scholars and readers consider Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) to be the first modern true crime text, for it brought together the themes and structures that would inform the genre for the next half-century, creating a template for the genre that persists to this day. By 1959, Capote (1924–1984) was a successful published author of such books as Other Voices, Other Rooms, Tree of Night and Other Stories, The Grass Harp, The Muses Are Heard, and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. As told in two recent films about his life— Capote (dir. Bennett Miller, 2005) and Infamous (dir. Douglas McGrath, 2006)— Capote had been interested in writing nonfiction for many years, and in 1959 he found a suitable topic for a “nonfiction novel” in the rural Kansas shotgun murder of four members of the Clutter family in an apparent botched robbery. Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Smith were arrested in Las Vegas on January 2, 1960, for the Clutter murders, and they were executed on April 14, 1965. For most of those five intervening years, Capote exchanged letters with the prisoners twice a week, and he lived in Garden City for extended periods of time, forming close relationships with not just the murderers, but also the detectives involved in the case. The result of all that work was published in The New Yorker in four installments between September and October 1965, and published in book form in January 1966. In 1967 the book was made into a film, also a spectacular success, starring the then-unknown Robert Blake as Perry Smith (In Cold Blood, dir. Richard Brooks, 1967). In Cold Blood has been a best-seller since its publication, and in 1966 it received the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award (the “Edgar”) for Best Fact Crime Book of the Year. In his book, Capote solidified and perfected the nascent conventions of what would become true crime literature, and his basic formula, along with his research methods and techniques, have been copied ever since. Such techniques include the writer becoming an intimate insider in the case, the creation of a sense of simultaneous identification and distance between reader and killer, the shaping of real people into literary characters and the introduction of fiction-writing techniques into nonfiction writing, the crime-killer profile–trial–execution structure of the text, interweaving the actions of the killers and the victims by juxtaposing and “cross-cutting” scenes, the theme that random violence can easily destroy idyllic

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American lives, and the representation of the normal-seeming killer or “sleeper” sociopath. In his research for the book, Capote became an intimate of the killers, thereby gaining special access to their feelings and memories, and specific experiential knowledge of the judiciary procedures that would become a large part of true crime narratives. True crime writing of this period would spend more time narrating the aftermath of murder, not the crime itself, as trials became lengthier, debates about the legality and morality of the death penalty raged, and death-penalty appeals dragged out over years. (In 1967 the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional; in 1976, individual states began to reinstitute the practice, beginning with the Utah execution of Gary Gilmore.) Because Smith and Hickock were captured quickly, and because they were involved in appealing their sentences for nearly five years, Capote was put in the unique position of having to wait for them to die in order to finish his book, while growing closer to them personally during that time. Capote’s narrative treatment of his subject would draw the reader into an uneasy and unprecedented relationship with the killers. The reader experiences the disparity of closeness to the person and distance from the horror of the criminal’s acts. Perry Smith’s most famous statement about Herb Clutter, “I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat,” was emblematic of the organization of his entire personality (Capote 1966, 275). Capote crafted his narrative so that the reader shares his fascination with Smith, who was at once a devious and dangerous loner and a sensitive, wounded man. Capote’s closeness to the subjects of his book would set the standard for a different degree of involvement between writer and subject, and would forever change the nature of murder narratives. Another trope of true crime, the shaping of real people into literary characters and the introduction of fiction-writing techniques into nonfiction writing, is directly attributable to Capote’s closeness to Smith and Hickock. Capote was able to use free indirect discourse, which interjects objectivity and intimacy with the subjects, because he gained unique access to the men’s intimate thoughts and feelings. Another genre-setter was the familiar four-part structure of crime–pursuit–trial– execution, which gives true crime the shape of a classic detective tale; that is, the murder occurs in the first chapter, but we don’t understand the killer’s motives until the final chapters. One of the most striking aspects of In Cold Blood, and one that would become a major convention in true crime literature, is the way that Capote structured the sections of each chapter so that the actions of the killers and the victims are interwoven. Particularly in the first chapter, Capote cuts back and forth between scenes featuring either the Clutters or Smith and Hickock, in a technique borrowed from filmmaking. In fact, the book is strangely more filmic than the film version—there seems to be more juggling of scenes between the Clutters and their killers in the book, whereas the movie concentrates more heavily on Hickock and Smith. The puzzle and threat of random violence is a significant true crime theme, and one that Capote beautifully explores in his book. The genre always sets innocence against evil, and this convention, combined with the filmic technique of interspersing scenes of victims and killers, portrays a strong sense of the inevitability of evil. The action seems fated, and murder seems destined to occur; the Clutters cannot escape their fate, and Smith and Hickock cannot resist forming their ill-conceived

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alliance that will ultimately lead them to their own deaths. In depicting that alliance, the book offers two competing views about what a killer is and what evil looks like. Richard Hickock is vulgar, ugly, brutal, and shallow; Perry Smith is sensitive, handsome, artistic, a dreamer. Hickock looks like a conventional murderer, whereas Smith does not fit the mold. Capote’s innovation is that Hickock as killer is ultimately less disturbing and threatening—even though, ironically, he plans the crime—because it is clear from the outset that he is capable of violence. Smith, on the other hand, is a more fundamentally disturbing character because he seems like a good and harmless soul, even though he agrees to go along with Hickock and rob the Clutters. Capote reverses the reader’s expectations by portraying his most deadly killer as the seemingly kind one, and the one who appears evil as essentially innocent. This new construction of the killer resonated with readers because it articulated an idea of evil as being hidden, insidious, and mysterious; the killer was becoming a literary character, a complex and masked figure, not the simplyconceived and emotionally separate monster of earlier depictions. The early critical responses to the book were largely positive, as was the popular reception. In Cold Blood was an instant bestseller. The novel was published almost simultaneously with an interview in the New York Times Book Review in which Capote spoke about his creation of a new literary formula, the “nonfiction novel” (Plimpton 1997, 197). Capote’s statement fuelled the critics, for in addition to the book earning wide acclaim and being worthy of thoughtful criticism, his grand statements about genre creation were taken as a ready-made challenge. Many critics focused in particular on Capote’s claims to truthfulness or factuality. Such debates about strict factual accuracy swirled around early true crime, but have lost relevance in the contemporary genre. In Cold Blood has sold millions of copies and reappeared in 2005 on the New York Times paperback bestseller list. Another outstanding true crime text is Joseph Wambaugh’s (b. 1937) The Onion Field, published in 1973. The Onion Field showcases certain aspects of the maturing genre, including a more complex narrator/insider, with a different relationship to criminals and crime, and the inclusion of more complicated themes such as guilt, retribution, and exploration of the psychology of victims as well as killers. As a Los Angeles police officer, Wambaugh had a unique perspective on murder and undeniable credibility as a witness, a participant, and a commentator. The Onion Field further demonstrated that popular true crime could be subtle, sophisticated, and terrifically powerful, that the genre could support the exploration of serious themes, and that it is able to transcend displays of graphic violence and sensationalism. The Onion Field is an account of the kidnapping of two LAPD patrolmen by two petty crooks in 1963. On a Saturday night in March of that year, officers Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger, both relatively new to the job, were disarmed at gunpoint and driven to a remote California onion field by Gregory Powell and Jimmy Smith. Powell and Smith murdered Campbell, and Karl Hettinger narrowly escaped the same fate by running for his life through the field to safety. Hettinger returned to police work immediately, and suffered a nervous breakdown as a consequence of the murder of his colleague and the aftermath of the crime, which included the longest criminal trial in California history. An incredible series of appeals and retrials led to several juries overturning death penalty convictions for the murderers, largely as a result of changing laws and the institution of the Miranda Rights ruling in 1966. Wambaugh was an LAPD officer when the onion

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field crime took place, and his experiences working alongside cops and apprehending criminals shaped his narratives when he began to write. The Onion Field both reinforced and further developed the conventions underway in murder narratives; because of his unique position as an “insider” in the world of policemen and criminals, Wambaugh brought an intensely intimate perspective to bear on true crime. Building on what Capote had started with the shifting position of the writer as an intimate of the killer, in both his police fiction and The Onion Field, Wambaugh furthered the notion that cops and murderers are separated by very thin fibers of moral structure, and that good and evil are almost inextricably interwoven concepts. Wambaugh’s suggestion that cops and criminals are similarly human and driven by forces beyond their control leads the reader into both connection to and alienation from both groups. There are no unambiguous heroes in Wambaugh’s writing, because his cops are gritty and flawed, his criminals twisted and damaged. His work is important to the growth of true crime because— like Capote—he invites the reader to experience a simultaneous attraction and repulsion to his “good” and “bad” characters equally. This duality underlines “evil” as a moral construct, which was in the 1970s crumbling under the mediation of social forces and new understandings of crime and criminality. The Onion Field is essentially a story about guilt, but not on the part of the murderers. One day after the kidnapping and murder of Ian Campbell, his partner, Karl Hettinger, who had himself almost been murdered, returned to the job; the LAPD offered Hettinger no psychological counseling, for at that time the Department did not recognize that suffering such a traumatic event could have severe psychological consequences.

Hettinger became so consumed by his unacknowledged, unconscious guilt that he began shoplifting; he then became so obsessed with guilt about stealing that he allowed himself to be caught and fired. The text focuses on Hettinger—it begins and ends with his internal monologue, and the narrative follows his psychological condition into and beyond his mental breakdown. Wambaugh had published popular police fiction before writing The Onion Field, and he has continued to do so into the twenty-first century. He had a successful return to true crime in 2002 with Fire Lover, an arson narrative, which won an Edgar Award. The Onion Field won a Special Edgar Award in 1974, and Wambaugh has always been critically well regarded. William Marling reports that “Critics unanimously praised the book [The Onion Field], comparing it to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and the author to Theodore Dreiser and James T. Farrell” (http://www.detnovel.com/Citation.html). Perhaps the best-known true crime text of the 1970s is Vincent Bugliosi (b. 1934) and Curt Gentry’s (b. 1931) Helter Skelter (1974), which narrates one of the most notorious mass-murders in American history. In August of 1969, followers of Charles Milles Manson slaughtered seven Los Angeles residents in their homes, including the actress Sharon Tate, as a means of bringing on what they called “Helter Skelter,” Manson’s vision of a futuristic, apocalyptic racial revolution. The Manson group also killed at least three other people, and speculations abound about other murders. Several members of the self-styled Manson “family,” including Manson himself, are still serving life sentences in California for these crimes. Los Angeles District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi successfully prosecuted and convicted the

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Manson family killers, and it is his narrative of the crimes in Helter Skelter that lives on in the American imagination. The Manson slayings came to be viewed as the hideous—but not unanticipated— end of the joyful, hopeful, and innocent 1960s hippie counterculture. In the same way that Joseph Wambaugh folded anxiety about a growing culture of permissiveness into his true crime writing, noting the emergence of the psychopath as the logical endpoint of the perceived moral collapse of the 1960s and 70s, the Manson killings were seen as the logical outcome of communal living, loose sexual morals, and the wholesale rejection of modern society that characterized the values of the counterculture. Helter Skelter expressed the fears of the middle class about losing their children to cults, communes, and free love; the book also fascinated those same children, and has been one of the biggest-selling true crime texts in American history. Bugliosi deploys and embellishes each of the conventions of murder narration that first appeared in In Cold Blood, and he introduces a new convention that would become standard in all true crime to date—the inclusion of photographs in the book. Bugliosi included a large number of photographs and a map in his text, and the entire section was labeled “A Chilling 64-page Photographic Record of the Victims, the Killers, the Evidence” (Bugliosi 1974, 346). Adding an extra dimension of titillation and veracity, nearly every mass-market true crime narrative since Helter Skelter includes a middle section of 6–10 photographs, usually consisting of beforeand-after photos of the victim, snapshots of the crime scene, the murder weapons, the trial, and the killer. Sometimes, as in Joe McGinniss’s 1983 Fatal Vision, there is even a photograph of the writer, reinforcing his or her status as a character in the narrative. The Manson family crimes have inspired scores of true crime texts, written from late 1969 until the present. The first book about the murders was published in December 1969, shortly after the apprehension of Susan Atkins, whose dramatic confession during her incarceration for another offense led to the dismantling of the Manson family, and the latest was published in 2002. Each of the primary Manson family members has written an autobiography, usually with the help of a journalist or ghostwriter. As of this writing, there are approximately 25 books about the Manson events still in print, and several more that are out of print. There have been many film and television treatments of the subject, most notably the Robert Hendrickson documentary entitled Manson (1972), nominated for an Academy Award, and Jim Van Bebber’s The Manson Family (2003). The Manson murders, often represented as a cultural milestone that signified the end of the hippie era and the beginning of the current period of media-created criminal sensations, have generated an enormous amount of popular and scholarly interest. After the sensation of Helter Skelter, Bugliosi continued his writing career, penning several more true crime and nonfiction texts. Bugliosi’s true crime was popular in the 1980s, although his writing is often thick with over-coverage of minute points of law and extended depictions of courtroom battles. As an attorney, he is preoccupied with the machinations of the criminal justice system, and many readers find his work compelling. Following the model set with Helter Skelter, Bugliosi continued to co-author true crime literature, working with Ken Hurwitz on Till Death Do Us Part (1978) and Shadow of Cain (1981), William Stadiem for Lullaby and Goodnight (1987), and Bruce B. Henderson for And the Sea Will Tell (1991), a murder narrative set on the tiny Pacific island of Palmyra. Although he began his

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career in the true crime trenches, Bugliosi has steadily moved out of that genre into straight nonfiction critiques of the American legal system by way of examining specific, sensational cases. Bugliosi’s true crime is concerned primarily with jurisprudence, systemic failures of justice, and righting the social order. The inheritors of his tradition—writers such as Jack Olsen, Carlton Stowers, and Mark Fuhrman—are prominent within the genre today, and represent one strand of true crime writing that deals with deviant masculinity, jurisprudential issues, and depictions of sexualsadistic gore. During the 1970s, with skyrocketing American crime rates and the appearance of a frightening trend toward social chaos, true crime texts narrated and helped readers understand such seemingly senseless acts as the Manson killings and the apparent rise in sexually related murders of young women. The 1970s was also the formative decade of American feminism, and true crime registered the effects of that social movement, mostly as a deepening interest in the personhood of the murder victim. Many 1970s texts of this genre are cautionary tales for single young women, warnings against prosaic but new female activities such as hitchhiking and picking up strange men in bars. Judith Rossner’s 1975 blockbuster, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and Lacey Fosburgh’s Closing Time: The True Story of the “Goodbar” Murder (1977) each cover the 1973 murder of Manhattan school teacher Katherine Cleary by a stranger she picked up in a singles bar. Rossner’s novel was not true crime, strictly speaking; rather, she used the crime to depict in novel form the desperation of some newly-liberated single women’s lives. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, true crime that was authored primarily by men reflected an implicit fear of increased social, political, and sexual liberations for women. Not until the late 1980s and 1990s would true crime begin to contain female-centered themes such as warnings about bad romantic matches and greater empathy for the plight of female murder victims. In the 1980s, true crime became a consumer-driven publishing industry category, garnering huge profits for mass-market paperback publishing houses as the larger ones (such as Random House and St. Martin’s) created their own true crime imprints. The growth of the genre shows in a survey of titles in Ben Harrison’s book True Crime Narratives: An Annotated Bibliography, published in 1997. In the 1960s, approximately 37 texts treated single cases of contemporary murder and/or the activities of single murderers. In the 1970s, there were 78 examples of the same; in the 1980s, there were 145, and in the 1990s, the number rose to 165 (Harrison 1997). True crime as a literary genre has brought a tabloid sensibility into higher culture, and has illuminated the sordid with beams of truth: in its best exemplars, true crime questions its own motivations and reason for being. Since its inception as a genre, more “literary” authors or writers who normally work in other genres have produced stellar examples within the genre. One such text is Norman Mailer’s (1923–2007) The Executioner’s Song, co-authored with Lawrence Schiller (b. 1936) in 1979. This text represents a significant attempt to narrate and create meaning from murder, although in some ways it defies the definition of true crime. In 1976, longtime convict Gary Gilmore was sentenced to death for the murder of two men in Provo, Utah. At that time, there hadn’t been an execution in the United States for ten years, since the 1967 Supreme Court ruling in Furman v. Georgia that the administration of the death penalty was unconstitutional. Gilmore forced the state of Utah to execute him by refusing to appeal, and his case caused a huge

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national and international sensation. Gilmore’s high-profile truculence mushroomed into a media circus like that surrounding the Manson trial. Several months after Gilmore’s execution, Mailer collaborated with Larry Schiller, the true crime media mogul who got his start with the Manson trial, and with whom Mailer had written his biography of Marilyn Monroe, to write The Executioner’s Song. The book covers the nine months between Gilmore’s parole in April 1976 until his execution in January 1977. It quickly became a bestseller and Mailer won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for fiction. By 1979, true crime was defined by a group of narrative techniques and conventions, and Mailer uses most of them very effectively in The Executioner’s Song. He skillfully blends fiction with nonfiction, calling his book a “true life novel.” Mailer achieves his insider status through his chief researcher Larry Schiller, who was Gilmore’s friend/confessor/publicist during the murderer’s final days. Mailer expertly contextualizes the Gilmore crimes and ensuing media phenomenon within the late-1970s Western American social and cultural milieu, and very specifically within the Utah Mormon context. The book does not strictly follow the formulaic four-part narrative structure, for the narrative does not start with murder; still, The Executioner’s Song is broken into chronological segments that treat first Gilmore’s life and crimes, then his trial and execution. Mailer chose a murderer who fit the usual 1970s true crime criteria, for Gilmore’s two murders are both random stranger-killings. Mailer creates a large and powerful sense of the inevitability of murder and the magnetic pull towards evil, as Gilmore is drawn, seemingly against his will, ever-closer to first his crimes, then to his own death. The book is a brilliant murder narrative, at once an insider’s view into dysfunctional working-class 1970s American life and a sweeping portrayal of how that life both creates and sustains violence. Unlike many books within the genre, The Executioner’s Song is as much an exploration of the marketing of murder as it is of the act itself. The 1,056-page book is broken into two large sections, “Western Voices” and “Eastern Voices.” The first section outlines Gilmore’s life and crimes, and the second concentrates on a portrayal of the media frenzy surrounding his trial and execution. The concept of being able to sell one’s criminal story was in 1976 as morally dubious as it is now, but the so-called “Son of Sam” laws, which prevent criminals from profiting from their crimes, were not enacted until 1978, so Gilmore was able to profit from marketing his story. Schiller, the prototypical murder journalist, is held up for scrutiny just as Gilmore, the prototypical murderer, is. And just as in his portrayal of Gilmore Mailer valorizes the psychopath, with his treatment of Schiller, Mailer legitimizes the vocation of murder journalist/shill by devoting such loving attention to the story. Schiller’s sharp-witted professionalism as a murder-mogul lies in his ability to see the big picture, and to craft an audience as well as a consumable narrative for it from the bare bones of a sordid story. Mailer has said that the story of The Executioner’s Song was like gold to him, that he could never have invented such a good tale, and that he wanted to just present the reality of the events as he found them reflected in court transcripts, documents, interviews, and Schiller’s memories. Beginning with her treatment of serial killer Ted Bundy, The Stranger Beside Me (1980), former policewoman Ann Rule, who had worked with Bundy, has become the premier American true crime writer, shaping and redefining the genre with her work, and building powerful and lucrative “name-brand” recognition for her product.

TRUE CRIME LITERATURE

To date, she has published thirteen single-case texts, nine true crime collections, and one crime-based novel. Her most recent book, 2004’s Green River, Running Red was about Gary Ridgway, the “Green River” serial killer, although she has generally avoided serial killers as a subject. Ann Rule has a Web site, www.annrules.com, an annual newsletter, and an enormous fan base; her books are regularly reviewed by publications such as The New York Times and Publisher’s Weekly, she has received numerous Edgar Award nominations, and her books appear often on bestseller lists. After a brief career as a Seattle policewoman, Rule began writing crime stories for pulp magazines such as True Detective in the 1960s, and continued that work throughout the 1970s and 1980s, with special jurisdiction over crime stories in the Northwestern states. Her first book, The Stranger Beside Me, was an exploration of deadly and sensational interpersonal betrayal, experienced on a very personal level. In 1971, Rule worked with Ted Bundy at a local suicide-prevention hotline, and during the next decade she and Bundy kept in touch and socialized intermittently. In 1976 Rule was assigned by True Detective Magazine to cover a series of abduction-murders of young women throughout the Northwest. Eventually, it became clear that her friend, Ted Bundy, was responsible for the serial murders, for which he was tried and convicted (and executed by the state of Florida in 1989). Ted Bundy would become infamous as one of the most prolific and heinous American serial killers (one detective who worked on the case estimates that he killed 100 women), and Rule had been handed the story of a lifetime. The Stranger Beside Me became a best-selling blockbuster, the first in a long line. In addition to giving Rule her first subject, Bundy embodied a theory about the deviant human personality that would dominate true crime writing in the 1980s and 1990s—the notion of the sociopathic personality. The sociopath, anti-social personality, and the psychopath (the sociopath’s crazier cousin) have become familiar figures in the popular media landscape of true crime and horror, and Bundy, as Rule says, has become the “poster boy for serial murder.” (Rule 1980, 541) His ability to mimic human emotions, to appear psychologically “normal,” to uphold a façade of ordinariness, has fascinated the public and professionals alike. Rule’s knowledge about the sociopath has helped to legitimize her work, and she has become a widelyrespected authority on serial killers. She is not viewed as a “pulp” writer, nor is her work seen as exploitative or sensational; rather, Rule is appreciated by her readers, reviewers, and by criminology professionals as an expert and a professional in her own right. The Bundy case has shaped the trajectory of her career, and Stranger is her bestknown and best-regarded book, largely because it transcends the simple story of a psychopath and his obscenely destructive acts. The most powerful and interesting storyline concerns Rule’s own relationship to Bundy—her growing realization that he truly is a killer, the painful understanding of his betrayal of her, and the difficult decisions she must make to betray him, in a sense, by writing a book about him. After writing Stranger, she penned three quickie serial-killer texts—The Want-Ad Killer and Lust Killer in 1983 and The I-5 Killer in 1984—using her old pseudonym from magazine writing, “Andy Stack.” Small Sacrifices (1987) is a story about Oregon child-killer Diane Downs, who shot her three young children in May 1983, killing one and seriously wounding the others. With this book, Rule finds one of the subjects that would occupy her career—deviant domesticity and sour relationships, in this book a case of mothering gone terribly wrong.

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Rule’s subsequent books concern perverse or obsessive domestic scenarios, and a survey of her titles shows a preoccupation with the ways in which romance can go wrong: If You Really Loved Me (1991), Everything She Ever Wanted (1992), Dead by Sunset (1995), Possession (1996), Bitter Harvest (1997), . . . And Never Let Her Go (1999), Every Breath You Take (2001), and Heart Full of Lies (2003). Rule narrated the emotional underside of the 1980s and 1990s, decades of soaring American divorce rates and huge economic losses and gains, of hidden unhappiness amid wealth and fortune. Perhaps in response to the fear-generating strangermurders of earlier true crime in the 1960s and 1970s, Rule’s texts offer a fearful return to the traditional site of domestic disturbance and violence, the home. Her subjects are more reflective of 1990s crime statistics, which showed a steady and sometimes dramatic decline in murder rates nationwide. One interesting part of the true crime phenomenon is that as crime rates, and murder rates in particular, have fallen over the past decade, the genre still generates a climate and landscape of fear and paranoia about crime. Sociologist Barry Glassner says, “Between 1990 and 1998, when the nation’s murder rate declined by 20 percent, the number of murder stories on network newscasts increased 600 percent (not counting stories about O.J. Simpson)” (Glassner 1999, xxi). The changing face of crime in America is one explanation for the increasing reliance on domestic or romantic murders within the genre, exemplified by Rule’s writing. Instead of proffering answers to the problem of evil, Rule’s true crime is a minute examination of lives badly lived and horrifyingly ended, each offering a warning to men and women alike about the perils of loving the wrong person. For this reason, the conventional good vs. evil, detective vs. killer structure of her stories does not weaken the impact and importance of Rule’s overarching objective of writing books for and about women. Her latest book is Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder (2007), twelfth in her Crime Files series. Her 2004 title, Green River, Running Red, examines the crimes of the so-called “Green River” serial killer, Gary Ridgway. Although the text is in many ways conventional, Rule focuses most of her narrative attention on the victims, instead of the killer, describing the sad lives and wretched deaths of many of Ridgway’s 50 victims. In this way, she continues to challenge the stereotypes of the genre and expand the cultural work of the genre. Carlton Stowers (b. 1942), a magazine and newspaper journalist well-known in his home state of Texas, is regarded as one of the finest contemporary writers of true crime. Material on his Web site states that “The Houston Press has called Stowers ‘the dean of Texas true crime writers,’ and famed novelist Jonathan Kellerman notes that ‘when the dust clears, a handful of writers will be recognized as masters of the true crime book. And Carlton Stowers will be at the head of that class’” (http://www.truecrime.net/carltonstowers/). Among his works are a history of the Dallas Police Department (Partners in Blue: The History of the Dallas Police Department, 1983), a biography of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, and numerous books on sports, notably the Dallas Cowboys football team. Stowers’ true crime has garnered two Edgar Awards (To the Last Breath in 1999 and Careless Whispers in 1987) and a Pulitzer Prize nomination for 1990’s Innocence Lost. Stowers receives high praise from critics and readers alike. In his writing, Stowers typifies a conservative ideological strand in true crime, visible in his narrative bias towards law-enforcement and against the outsiders and misfits who populate the criminal class within the genre. His work also illustrates another of the generic conventions in his use of a simplified rhetoric of evil and

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monstrosity to describe the killers. Innocence Lost describes the murder of an undercover police detective by a group of high school students under investigation for drug activity. Stowers describes one of the convicted killers, 17 years old at the time, as having “piercing blue eyes [that] disturbed the officer more than the knife. They had a haunted, frightening quality he had never before seen” (Stowers 1990, 72). In true crime depictions, killers are routinely described with the language of gothic horror, as having a kind of quasi-occult power over others and a chilling effect on people. Another of the youthful murderers has a “coldness” in his eyes, and “appeared to have no feeling at all for his mother, father, or younger brother,” all conventional descriptions of sociopathic killers (Stowers 1990, 135, 70). The scene is set with similar overtones of gothic horror: in one description of the small town in the aftermath of the murder, Stowers writes that the townspeople’s “comforting invisible barrier against outside evils had been ripped away. They pondered the town’s newfound vulnerability while ministers prepared to deliver impassioned sermons on the strength and faith necessary to deal with the cataclysmic event that had visited their small corner of the world” (Stowers 1990, 237). The adults wonder, “How was it possible that some of their children had turned into such monsters?” (237). Such inflated language casts the story and its characters onto a heightened metaphysical plane, removed from the mundane meanness and moral ambiguity of real crime, and makes stark the competing notions of “innocence” and “evil” that for Stowers are at the heart of the true crime narrative. One of Stowers’s contributions to the genre is his narrative talent for an anthropological “thick description” of social contexts and the American scene that sometimes produces brutal criminal violence. Stowers shows that fine true crime writing is as much about contexts as it is about crime. Much of his books are given over to descriptions of the places where murder occurs, and the ways that the principal players in the story—law enforcement agents, killers, victims, and “ordinary” people—think and live. Through the descriptions of the characters’ lives, Stowers (and many other contemporary writers) examines minute aspects of the broad categories of American life, including social class, race, romance and marriage, sexuality, friendship, education, religious beliefs, community goals and challenges, economic growth and stagnation, and a vast array of individual experiences. In some ways, true crime texts play the role that was formerly taken by the British “comedy of manners”: they educate us about who we are and how we truly live. In true crime, however, the rich description of context is overshadowed by the impending horror, drawing the reader into surroundings that seem eerily like his own and creating narrative tension and suspense. Mark Fuhrman (b. 1952) is best known as the former Los Angeles Police Department detective who found the infamous “bloody glove” at the site of the Nicole Brown Simpson/Ronald Goldman murder in 1994 for which O.J. Simpson was acquitted but found liable in civil court. Fuhrman’s racist views, caught on an audiotape in 1985, and his resulting perjury conviction about his use of the word nigger sparked controversy during the Simpson trial and may have influenced its outcome. Fuhrman became a true crime writer after retiring from the LAPD in 1996, and his first true crime book was Murder in Brentwood (1997), about the Simpson case. In 1998 he published Murder in Greenwich: Who Killed Martha Moxley?, reviving the unsolved case of the 1975 murder of a 15-year-old girl in Greenwich, Connecticut. As a result of that book, one of Moxley’s neighbors, Michael Skakel, was convicted of her murder in 2002, in a spectacular case of

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delayed justice. Other Fuhrman texts include Murder in Spokane: Catching a Serial Killer (2001), Death and Justice: An Exposé of Oklahoma’s Death Row Machine (2003), Silent Witness: The Untold Story of Terri Schiavo’s Death (2005), and A Simple Act of Murder: November 22, 1963, Fuhrman’s contribution to the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, published in 2006. Fuhrman’s true crime is detail-laden and, as might be expected of a former detective, focused on trying to make a case. Murder in Greenwich reads like a primer in how not to conduct a homicide investigation; in fact, one of the chapters is titled “Homicide 101.” As a special kind of insider, Fuhrman uses his knowledge of murder investigation techniques to explain what was done wrong and how the bungled investigation forestalled an arrest and conviction in the Moxley murder. Because of the topic—an unsolved case—the format of the book is not conventional, although it retains many of the standard true crime tropes, including opening the book with an account of the victim’s last evening and discovery of her corpse the next day, disclosure near the end of the book of exactly how the murder occurred (surmised in this case), and the middle photographic section. The book is tightly organized by both chronology of events and themes or subjects: “Background,” “Taking on the Case,” “Examining the Evidence,” “Profiling the Participants,” and “Anatomy of a Murder Investigation.” Perhaps still reeling from his devastating role in the Simpson case, Fuhrman takes on the Moxley case as a kind of crusade against the rich and powerful, writing in Murder in Greenwich that “Greenwich may be richer, prettier, and safer than most other places on earth, but it is not immune to evil. In fact, the massive state of denial under which the town seems to operate is a form of evil itself” (Fuhrman 1998, front matter). Aphrodite Jones (b. 1960) is the author of seven true crime texts: A Perfect Husband (2004), Red Zone: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of the San Francisco Dog Mauling (2003), The Embrace: A True Vampire Story (1999), Della’s Web (1998), All She Wanted (1996), Cruel Sacrifice (1994), and The FBI Killer (1992). All She Wanted is the Brandon Teena story, which became famous as the film Boys Don’t Cry (dir. Kimberly Peirce, 1999). Jones presents herself to the media and her readers as a “crime profiler,” and her Web site publicity materials focus on her desire to fight crime and help make the country safer, and to make Americans less afraid of violence. As quoted from her Web site, Jones says, “Every crime offers a lesson. In my books, I use a narrative technique, allowing insight into the minds of victims and sociopaths. I offer analysis of everything from media coverage to legal maneuvers. However, I tend to focus my attention on the larger social issues, with the hope that future crimes will be prevented” (“The Aphrodite Jones Home Page”). Jones writes about sensational murder events that also reflect some larger cultural significance, such as teenaged killers, cult killers, or homophobia, and her writing is simplistic, straightforward, and without stylistic embellishment. Sensationalistic and rife with clichés borrowed from the tabloids, Jones’s work exemplifies some of the unsavory yet popular aspects of true crime literature. In contrast, Harold Schechter (b. 1948) crafts scholarly and impeccablyresearched historical true crime stories. A professor of English at New York City’s Queens College, Schechter’s expertise in research shows in his well-written accounts of older, less publicized killers. His specialty is nineteenth and early twentieth century American killers, and the title-formula he uses always describes the killer’s unique attribute. His books include Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America’s Most Fiendish Killer (1990), Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed

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Gein, the Original “Psycho” (1991), Depraved: The Shocking True Story of America’s First Serial Killer (1994), Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster (1998), Fiend: The Shocking True Story of America’s Youngest Serial Killer (2000), and Fatal: The Poisonous Life of a Female Serial Killer (2003). Schechter has also published two murderer-compendiums: The A–Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (1996) with David Everitt, and The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World’s Most Terrifying Murderers (2004). Historical contextualization is a unique and leading facet of Schechter’s true crime, an expansion of the convention that calls for true crime to explain the killer’s world. Schechter opens Bestial (1998) with a detail-rich introduction to the history of serial killing that includes references to both known and unknown figures: Joseph Vacher (the “French Ripper”), Fritz Haarmann (the “vampire of Hanover”), author Edgar Allan Poe, criminologists Robert K. Ressler and Ron Holmes, and 1920s murder victims Reverend Edward Wheeler Hall and Mrs. Eleanor Mills (Schechter 1998, 1–4). The book intersperses meticulous reconstructions of murderer Earle Leonard Nelson’s daily life and crimes with fantastically wide-ranging descriptions of daily life in 1920s America, such as this passage from Chapter 8: From the perspective of the present moment, the 1920s seem like a period full of quaint and curious customs, from the mah-jongg fad to the Charleston craze to the popularity of Dr. Emile Coué’s surefire panacea (a twelve-word formula guaranteed to bring contentment if recited regularly: ‘Day by day in every way I am getting better and better’). For all its wildness and sophistication, the Jazz Age seems like a time of sweet simplicity compared to the 1990s—the era of “My Blue Heaven” instead of “Murder Was the Case,” Son of the Sheik instead of Terminator II, Our Dancing Daughters instead of Teenage Bondage Sluts. (Schechter 1998: 63)

A casual reader could be forgiven for mistaking Schechter’s true crime for works of history, for his texts rely upon sophisticated and scholarly presentations of the social, political, and cultural contexts of the crimes they narrate. But Schechter can also sensationalize with the best of the true crime scribes, and each chapter ends with him ratcheting-up the fear, tension, and expectation of horrors to come. Jack Olsen (1925–2002) is another well known and best-selling modern true crime author, with 12 true crime books published between 1974 and 2002, and three Edgar awards. A prolific writer and journalist, Olsen did not limit himself to true crime; he also published on sports, the environment, sociology, the game of bridge, race in America, and history, as well as penning award-winning magazine and newspaper journalism and fiction. As stated on his official Web site, “Olsen was described as ‘the dean of true crime authors’ by the Washington Post and the New York Daily News and ‘the master of true crime’ by the Detroit Free Press and Newsday. Publishers Weekly called him ‘the best true crime writer around.’ His studies of crime are required reading in university criminology courses and have been cited in the New York Times Notable Books of the Year. In a page-one review, the Times described his work as ‘a genuine contribution to criminology and journalism alike’” (“The Jack Olsen Home Page”). His numerous true crime texts include The Man with the Candy: The Story of the Houston Mass Murders (1974), Son (1983), and “I”: The Creation of a Serial Killer (2002).

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Olsen’s true crime is quirky and original, and his last book is an example of the innovations that the genre can foster. “I”: The Creation of a Serial Killer (2002) narrates the life and crimes of Keith Hunter Jesperson, the so-called “Happy Face Killer,” in a most unusual manner: first-person narration. First-person true crime is rare, largely because of the tangle of moral, ethical, and legal issues involved in allowing or encouraging murderers to have a strong voice. But Olsen’s use of the first-person in this book illuminates Jesperson’s thought process and brings a fresh perspective to the stale and overwrought depictions of the killer as a moral monster. Perhaps because the first-person chapters alternate with those written in the standard third-person authorial voice, the book largely stays within the conventionbound confines of the genre, conveying the sense of a strong moral center instead of implicitly sanctioning Jesperson’s actions, as a first-person account could. In other respects, the book is in standard format, including narrative arc, focus on the killer’s story and life, and the inclusion of mundane details and imagined dialogue. One significant difference is that Jesperson is not described in the language of evil and monstrosity; instead, the mystery of his personality stands, and Olsen frames him by using short quotations from criminologists about sociopathy and criminal psychology. Olsen’s book suggests that further innovations in true crime are possible; indeed, one of the nominations for an Edgar award in 2007 is Terri Jentz’s first-personvictim true crime book, Strange Piece of Paradise (2006). Jentz and a friend were attacked by an axe-wielding stranger on a camping trip in 1975; both women survived, and the book is a meditation on the aftereffects of violent crime and Jentz’s personal search for her near-killer, who was never apprehended. As the genre matures and evolves, various narrative possibilities and strategies appear and bear fruit, although the standard, formulaic true crime texts remain popular and lucrative for their writers. Reception. Twenty-first-century true crime writing responds to murder with both irrational fear and compelling fascination; although laying strong claims to factuality, truthfulness, and realistic representation of actual events, the genre continues to be driven by and preoccupied with themes of an updated, contemporary gothic horror. American true crime both responds to and reflects its context and historical circumstance, showing changes and shifts in widespread philosophical and political understandings about crime, public policy debates, definitions of insanity, and shifting perspectives on the meaning and mystery of radical evil. Bibliography Bugliosi, Vincent, and Curt Gentry. Helter Skelter. 1974. New York: Bantam Books, 1995. Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences. New York: Random House, 1965. Fosburgh, Lacey. Closing Time: The True Story of the “Goodbar” Murder. New York: Delacorte Press, 1975. Freeman, Lucy. “Before I kill more . . .” New York: Crown Publishers, 1955. Fuhrman, Mark. Murder in Greenwich: Who Killed Martha Moxley? New York: Avon, 1999. Gilmore, John. The Tucson Murders. New York: The Dial Press, 1970. ———. The Michigan Murders. New York: Pocket, 1976. Glassner, Barry. The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things. New York: Basic Books/Perseus, 1999.

TRUE CRIME LITERATURE Halttunen, Karen. Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Harrison, Ben. True Crime Narratives: An Annotated Bibliography. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1997. Jones, Aphrodite. Cruel Sacrifice. New York: Pinnacle Books, 1994. The Aphrodite Jones Home Page. [January 2007]. Levin, Meyer. Compulsion. 1956. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1996. Mailer, Norman. The Executioner’s Song. Boston: Little, Brown Company, 1979. Marling, William. “Joseph Wambaugh.” 2007. Martin, Joel Bartlow. Why Did They Kill? New York: Bantam Books, 1953. The Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Awards Best Fact Crime Winners and Nominees Webpage. [January 2007]. The Jack Olsen Home Page. [January 2007]. Olsen, Jack. “I”—The Creation of a Serial Killer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002. Plimpton, George. Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career. New York: Anchor Books, 1997. Rossner, Judith. Looking for Mr. Goodbar. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975. Rule, Ann. The Stranger Beside Me. 1980. New York: Signet/New American Library/Penguin Putnam, 2000. ———Small Sacrifices. New York: Signet/Penguin, 1987. ——— Green River, Running Red. New York: Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2004. Schechter, Harold. Bestial. New York: Pocket/Simon & Schuster, 1998. Stowers, Carlton. Author Website. 2007. ——— Innocence Lost. New York: Pocket Books, 1990. True Detective Magazine. 1924–1995. Wambaugh, Joseph. The Onion Field. 1973. New York: Bantam/Doubleday/Dell, 1987.

Further Reading Biressi, Anita. Crime, Fear, and the Law in True Crime Stories (Crime Files). New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2001; Black, Joel. The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991; Borowitz, Albert. Blood and Ink: An International Guide to Fact-Based Crime Literature. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2002; Browder, Laura. “Dystopian Romance: True Crime and the Female Reader.” The Journal of Popular Culture 39 (2006): 928–953; James, Laura. Clews: The Historic True Crime Journal. [January 2007] http://laurajames.typepad. com/clews/; Jenkins, Philip. Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide. New York: A. de Gruyter, 1994; Knox, Sara L. Murder: A Tale of Modern American Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998; Lane, Roger. Murder In America: A History. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997; Lesser, Wendy. Pictures at an Execution: An Inquiry into the Subject of Murder. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993; Ressler, Robert K., and Tom Schachtman. Whoever Fights Monsters. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992; Sanders, Ed. The Family. 1971. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002; Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York: Routledge, 1998; Seltzer, Mark. True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2006; Schmid, David. Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

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U URBAN FICTION Definition. Urban fiction, potentially so broad a term as to encompass any work set in a city, requires specific definition. One approach is to work from critical criteria of what makes a work’s relationship to the city its definitive quality; another is empirical, observing that in the current publishing and retail markets, “urban” refers primarily to inner-city youth culture. Critical definitions of urban fiction are necessarily inconclusive, and overlap extensively with other genres. Detective and crime novels, novels of immigrant experience, financial thrillers, and chick lit all remain popular fictional interpretations of city life. In an urbanized society few works, save perhaps those set in rural places, do not fall under the broadest definition of urban literature, and few works of urban literature cannot be placed in another genre. Settling on a useful definition requires shifting the focus from content to relationships between literary form and conceptions of urban life. Historically certain forms emerged when existing genres seemed incapable of representing newly urban ways of life: realism and the industrial city; neighborhood fiction and ethnic communalism; modernism and the cultural metropolis; postmodern fiction and the city as a figure for under-construction states of mind. Contemporary popular works that adapt these forms and essay new ones are often marketed as “literary” or general fiction. Identified as aspirants to an artistic canon, critics and publishers generally eschew genre labels such as “urban” as incommensurate with such works’ capacity to interpret a cultural moment. History. The history of urban fiction broadly defined is a history of relationships between social and literary structures, as suggested in the aforementioned list of forms, whereas the more specific trajectory that leads to the current publishing definition dwells in tales of particular urban subcultures, especially ethnic and racial, and in linguistic styles associated with them—types of content and narrative rhetoric that often formalize perceived social division. The following summary traces these latter elements as they arise in the broader development of the category.

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URBAN LITERATURE AND HIP-HOP CULTURE Turning to the empirical definition, the contemporary popular marketplace intensifies the division between the generic and the literary by narrowing the definition of urban literature to refer to works, by mainly black authors, that depict inner-city life, especially among its youth. This trend draws on the broader phenomenon in which the adjective “urban” has come, in the marketing of popular culture, to refer to hip-hop music, dance, fashion, and speech. Decades after the music and fashion industries capitalized on similar opportunities, publishers have seized on this mainspring of youth culture as a growth area, seeking to erect something approximating a prose wing of hip-hop culture. In this niche marketing strategy, publishers have responded to the success of black authors’ self-published and self-distributed novels in the 1990s by creating “urban” imprints and series, while booksellers have established corresponding sections.

From the middle of the nineteenth century, popular representations of what was new, unique, and dangerous about the city dealt heavily in imagery of the low life, the urban underbelly that was, paradoxically, presented as both invisible to the middle class and implicitly playing an active role in its psyche and selfdefinition. Authors presented narrative personae that acted as both tour guides to these realms and moral guardians from its dangers. Titles such as New York by Gaslight (three different works from 1848 to 1881) were prominent in what critic David S. Reynolds (b. 1949) terms the “immoral” or “dark reform” mode, one of the most popular and controversial types of prose in the nineteenth century (59–84). Jacob Riis’s (1849–1914) documentary project How the Other Half Lives (1890) marks the arrival of what twentieth-century readers would recognize as a legitimately reformist framing of voyeuristic material, the kind that still characterizes much of urban journalism and social science. Urban fiction in the early twentieth century drew on—even if in various ways it subverted or transcended–-this voyeuristic and didactic realism. For example, Stephen Crane’s (1871–1900) Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1893), Theodore Dreiser’s (1871–1945) Sister Carrie (1899), Paul Laurence Dunbar’s (1872–1906) The Sport of the Gods (1902), and Upton Sinclair’s (1878–1968) The Jungle (1906) are plotted around the controversial moral and material trajectories of the poor, the middle class, and the newly arriving black and immigrant populations in the city, respectively. A subsequent generation of urban writers, many of whom were products of the urban working classes, adapted realism to forms more attentive to the communal structures of the city and the perspectives of its working-class inhabitants, in the neighborhood fiction of the 1920s and 1930s. Closely related to domestic ethnography and often presented as dramatized appeals to socialism, neighborhood novels are typically bildungsromans of assimilation, alienation, and/or political awakening, set in the ethnic quarters of the industrial city. Examples include Anzia Yezierska’s (1881–1970) Bread Givers (1925), Claude McKay’s (1889–1948) Home to Harlem (1928), Mike Gold’s (1894–1967) Jews without Money, and James T. Farrell’s (1904–1979) Studs Lonigan trilogy. Like much of the urban realism that preceded it, neighborhood fiction claimed access to a realm that was mysterious and problematic to a middle-class readership. Though mid-century critics characterized the

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first generations of neighborhood fiction as overly literal and didactic, much influential fiction of this latter period—by Richard Wright (1908–1960), Saul Bellow (1915–2005), Ralph Ellison (1913–1994), Bernard Malamud (1914–1986), Philip Roth (b. 1933), James Baldwin (1924–1987), and Paule Marshall (b. 1929), for example—is grounded in the neighborhood mode. Much of African American fiction is drawn across the difference between the urban village and the anonymous metropolitan society. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was predicated on the relationship to national culture of a single, identitydefined place, as the capital and embodiment of a racially defined community. This movement also birthed lyrical prose styles inspired by colloquial speech and the rhythms of blues and jazz. This musically centered culture is recognized as the source of the twentieth century phenomenon of cool style. Such style, the cultural expression of a particular community of identity and its shared experience, is associated with the broader notion of self-presentation as a feature of urban society, a phenomenon dramatized in the nineteenth century in the figure of the dandy or flaneur. The idea of detached, avant-garde individualism in the word “urbane” attached to a sense of the term “urban” that inflects its current marketing uses in the culture industries. Variations on the cool style and jazz-influenced language were adopted by writers of the Beat Generation in New York and San Francisco, and in cultural commentary by self-consciously avant-garde writers including Norman Mailer. Ishmael Reed (b. 1938), in Mumbo Jumbo (1972), imagines a history of America through the origins and circulation of black music, to create an early entrant in the genre of postmodern metahistorical fiction. Reed’s novel, like E.L. Doctorow’s (b. 1931) Ragtime (1975), draws historical structure from a conception of New York as a multi-ethnic cauldron of American cultural exchange, a function embodied in the styles not only of characters but of the prose itself. The tradition of Harlem writing as an epicenter of urban literary form continued beyond the 1920s, in not only the self-consciously literary novels of Ellison and Baldwin but also in a memorable detective series by Chester Himes (1909–1984). Himes’s first novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), was a groundbreaking depiction of racial conditions in Los Angeles during World War II. Himes created two Harlem police detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones, in a series of ten novels from 1957–69, including Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965), which was adapted into an influential film in 1970. Himes’s novels adopt conventions of the detective novel, but apply them in the social density of the neighborhood tradition, to explore racial issues freed from the obligations of earnest reform but not given over to the naïve notions of authenticity of the subsequent “street” genre. The neighborhood mode proved a flexible vehicle for interpreting the dilemmas of urban crisis in the 1970s and 1980s. August Wilson (1945–2005), in his cycle of Pittsburgh plays (1982–2005), and John Edgar Wideman (b. 1941), in his Homewood trilogy (1985), structure broad explorations of the African American experience from the specific terms of contemporary black neighborhoods in Pittsburgh. Against the hardening notion that ghettos are permanently broken features of the urban landscape, these works find in black neighborhoods living evidence of highfunctioning communalism inherited from both distant and recent pasts. While Wilson and Wideman emphasize the bonds of fatherhood and brotherhood, Gloria Naylor (b. 1950), in The Women of Brewster Place (1982), depicts the redemptive possibilities of matriarchal communalism on an isolated, near-broken tenement

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street. Naylor’s popularity endures: Oprah Winfrey (b. 1954) produced and starred in a 1989 film adaptation of Naylor’s novel, while a musical stage adaptation was scheduled to premiere in Washington, D.C. in 2007. The restored prestige of neighborhood genres owes in part to the rise of multiculturalism as an educational premise. For example, Sandra Cisneros’s (b. 1954) The House on Mango Street (1985), a child’s-eye-view Chicago neighborhood novel, remains among the most frequently assigned novels on middle and high school reading curricula. The onset of the urban crisis period in the 1960s also factors into the current publishing trend toward sensational “street” fiction, beginning with a resurgence of the reform and protest modes in popular works of domestic anthropology, such as Elliot Liebow’s (1925–1994) Tally’s Corner (1966), in memoirs such as Claude Brown’s (1937–2002) Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), and experimental novels such as The System of Dante’s Hell (1965) by LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka) (b. 1934). Brown’s story of his life growing up on the streets of Harlem entered into elite conversations about race, poverty, reform, and writing. A spate of even more sensational memoirs in the following years partook of the late-1960s trend toward counter-cultural identities in pop culture. Titles such as Pimp! and Dopefiend led the street fiction that influenced the blaxploitation films of the 1970s. Although temperamentally associated with black revolutionary movements, no political role emerged; and this refusal or inability to seek a way out of the crisis—not even on the Afrocentric terms of the neighborhood novelists—suggests an acceptance of the mainstream sense that cities and the communities that called them home had been lost to history. Leading figures in this movement were Robert Beck (a.k.a. Iceberg Slim) (1918–1992) and Donald Goines (1937–1974). Beck’s 1967 memoir, Pimp! The Story of My Life, spawned a host of imitators. Beck followed it with a half-dozen novels in the 1970s that were said to draw mainly on this same stock of personal experience, blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction in a manner similar to the dark-tales mode of the nineteenth century. Goines was a heroin addict who, beginning in prison in 1971, wrote 16 melodramatic drug-crime novels before being shot to death in 1974. European reviewers, especially, praised the shocking content of Goines’s work as the highest degree of authenticity, a notion that remains the central currency of street and hip-hop cultures. Beck and Goines helped to establish and continue to influence the street genres in which much of today’s hip-hop film and fiction operates. The gangsta rap of the late 1980s informed an aggressive, unrepentant tone in a resurgence of street fiction in the 1990s. This contemporary movement is more directly a product of the entrepreneurial efforts of a number of black writers who struggled to find outlets for sensational ghetto novels. The success of Sister Souljah’s (Lisa Williamson, b. 1964) The Coldest Winter Ever (1999) helped open major publishing venues to the street and ghetto genres. Souljah was a prominent rapper whose militant rhetoric had become a conservative touchstone in the 1992 presidential campaign. Her novel, which juxtaposes a hedonistic young female product of the ghetto drug business with Souljah herself as a spiritually grounded Harlem activist, was hailed by mainstream reviewers for its social and linguistic realism. Trends and Themes. Literary strands of popular urban fiction remain centered around efforts to construct historical narratives that make sense of the massive changes cities have undergone in the last century: to recall what cities were like in earlier eras, to understand how urban crisis happened, to imagine what might be

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recovered, and to develop forms that speak to what cities look like now. Prominent in these projects are inter-generational neighborhood novels, both retrospective and futuristic detective fiction, historical recreations of city life in the industrial era, and classic naïf-in-the-big-city bildungsromans. Pete Hamill (b. 1935) is among the most popular authors of the historical novel; for example, The Gift (a 1973 novella re-released in 2005) and North River (2007) are stories of the 1950s and the 1930s in New York City that seek to recover in narrative the redemptive possibilities woven into the dense class and ethnic fabric of pre-crisis New York City. In the neighborhood genre, Diane McKinney-Whetstone’s four Philadelphia novels, beginning with Tumbling in 1996, in a vein similar to Wilson and Wideman’s Pittsburgh literature, depict black life in Philadelphia before the onset of urban crisis, both for clues as to what changed in recent decades and for sources of communal strength that are or could be the basis for regeneration. Detective novelists remain active interpreters of city life. Walter Mosley’s (b. 1952) Easy Rawlins (1990–2005) series about a black private eye in L.A., and his Fearless Jones novels (2001–2006), about an even more marginalized mystery-solver, dramatize social conflict in Los Angeles in the post-WWII period through the onset of urban crisis. In Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (1998), Mosley turns to a more explicitly neighborhood-oriented plot, surrounding the efforts of a convicted violent criminal to redeem himself and in the process begin to reform a Watts neighborhood devastated by the crisis period that culminated in the 1991 Rodney King riots. Similarly, Dennis Lehane’s (b. 1966) Kenzie-Gennaro novels explore the effects of urban crisis and its aftermath on, primarily, white working-class Boston; like Mosley, when Lehane turned from the detective genre in Mystic River (2001), he moved in the direction of the neighborhood novel, dramatizing the fate of the working class in an era of gentrification. The street genres that make ever louder claims on the category of “urban” have adopted the hip-hop sensibility and the trend in recent rap music toward sensational representations of ghetto life. This phenomenon appears not only in the content of the novels but in their packaging; framing material constructs an authorial persona as a street insider, a multifaceted entrepreneur, and a master of the genre. Long sets of acknowledgments, a melodramatic anthem about street life, an emotive dedication, testimony to having defied the “haters,” and references to the author’s apparent media empire together read like the first few minutes of a rap album, in which the artist establishes a persona and a social stance with shout-outs and exclamations descriptive of self and crew. Rap-fiction crossover products are the latest development in this market. For example, in the fall of 2006 Vibe Street Lit, a publishing venture of Vibe, a magazine of “urban music and fashion”—urban meaning hip-hop—announced the publication of Death Around the Corner, the first novel by rapper C-Murder (Corey Miller, b. 1971). The announcement claims that the novel, about “family drama, school, jail, hustling, and the rap game,” is the type of story that “mainstream publishing has long ignored or resisted.” It emphasizes the fact that C-Murder began writing the novel while “facing a life sentence for second-degree murder” and that the novel features “a cameo appearance” by another rapper, Master P (Percy Miller, b. 1967) (Vibe press release). Similarly, MTV/Pocketbooks has partnered with 50 Cent (Curtis Jackson, b. 1975), the rap superstar whose authenticity is guaranteed by actual bullet wounds, and the G-Unit hip-hop brand to produce a series of street novels co-authored by 50 Cent with prominent writers in the genre, including Nikki

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Turner. These novels are based on the kinds of personae used by the rappers in question. This trend takes the popular genre further in the direction of the adolescent melodrama, in a way that seems designed to replicate the extension of rap music and hip-hop fashion’s primary consumer market from the city neighborhood to the middle-class suburb. Some themes appear across multiple urban genres. For example, early entrants in the new ghetto novel, which remain among the most popular in the genre—Teri Woods’s True to the Game, and Omar Tyree’s Flyy Girl, for example—are similar to the novels of historical recreation. They present the 1980s as a unique and formative urban era of decadence, danger, and, especially for teenagers, previously undreamed of glamour and adventure. Additionally, they often echo the neighborhood novel in their attention to place, as in Shannon Holmes’s Baltimore novel, B-More Careful. Female heroines figure prominently in each of these genres. In the literary titles, this form often draws on Toni Morrison’s (b. 1931) example of the black woman as the epicenter of historical trauma and the vehicle for potential regeneration. In the street genres it more often takes the form of a picaresque heroine, a resourceful survivor, typically a drug kingpin’s moll, whose end comes in melodramatic punishment or sentimental triumph. In the less sensational modes, narratives typically work through the ordinary trials of female adolescence and young adulthood as they are structured and intensified by urban social problems. Authenticity and realism have long been obsessions in popular urban literature, but in the new street genres the terms’ import seems to overshadow all other considerations. Street authors and their readers often demand that the novels in every sense, not merely in representation, adhere to a code of the streets, remaining “true to the Game” regardless of narrative distance or moral messaging. The “Game,” in general, stands not just for illegal hustling, but for materialism in general as a means of survival. Arguably the street genres’ central dynamic is the effort to craft some edifying message out of extended celebrations of material acquisition and physical conquest. Contexts and Issues. The primary context for the new street fiction is the business of pop culture, especially in terms of the profitability of hip-hop and the role of artist-entrepreneurs in that realm. Some of the leading authors of popular urban fiction established reputations while controlling the production and distribution of their works. Vickie Stringer, Relentless Aaron, and others self-published novels in the world of ghetto cultural promotion, selling their books and establishing their public identities in much the same ways that promoters flyer concerts and aspiring rappers circulate CDs (Johnson). Many have since been picked up by big publishers that reprint the most successful self-published novels (McCune). Tyree’s Flyy Girl, for example, was published by a small press as early as 1993 but didn’t find wide release until it was reprinted by Simon & Schuster in 2001 under its “Urban Classic” series. Others, though, have founded their own publishing companies and have continued to market at the street level. Woods’s self-publishing enterprise began as an effort to publish and sell her novel True to the Game. After failing to find a publisher, in 1998, Woods began selling self-produced copies from the trunk of her car. In 1999 she launched her own publishing enterprise as a platform for the novel, subsequently mentoring Holmes, another of the most successful contemporary street novelists. True to the Game has since come to be seen as one of the founding entries in the contemporary genre, and was republished by Warner Books in 2007 in a “Special Collectors” edition.

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Thus urban authors are subject to the dynamic that holds in most published fiction, by which publishers bestow legitimacy on writers and their works. But at the same time the street-oriented writers participate in the rhetoric and the reality of hip-hop business, in which personal control of production and distribution is a mark of authenticity, of having brought the supposed entrepreneurial mastery of the dealer and the pimp to the legitimate business world. The apotheosis of this businessmodel-as-artistic-content comes in the form of rap personae such as Sean “Diddy” Combs (b. 1969) and Jay-Z (Shawn Corey Carter, b. 1969). In fiction, the presentation of a similar role becomes part of the novel’s packaging, speaking to the author’s authenticity as a “Player in the Game.” For example, Stringer, reputedly in prison for cocaine distribution in Columbus, Ohio, as late as 1998, co-founded Triple Crown Publications with Holmes in 2002 (Ghose). In the new crossover ventures by publishers and music companies, the rap star is named as an actual author. The social context for urban fiction—the nature of the ghetto as it appears in pop culture—is still to a great extent defined by the difference between two social science models that have been touchstones in debates about urban crisis. Anthropologists in the 1960s found socioeconomic causes, centering around job loss and racism, for what were popularly perceived as historical after-effects or social and cultural failings in black neighborhoods. But Oscar Lewis’s (1914–1970) work on the “culture of poverty” (1959–1969) argued that, for example, poor Puerto Ricans in San Juan and New York City shared with each other and handed down to their children a set of habits that not only expressed but also conserved their deprivation. This idea was taken up by the conservative movement and played a role in political debates over welfare in the 1980s. William Julius Wilson (b. 1935), in sociological studies of ghetto poverty from the 1970s on, is among the social scientists who expressly counter Lewis’s model with an economic one that views job availability as a determining factor in neighborhood status and, less directly, individual behavior. Wilson and others identify this approach as heir to W.E.B. Du Bois’ (1868–1963) The Philadelphia Negro (1899) and St. Clair Drake (1911–1990) and Horace Cayton’s (1859–1940) Black Metropolis (1945), works that bear close relationships to previous generations of urban fiction. Wilson, like his intellectual ancestors, found black neighborhoods to be structured by unusually proximate and easily traversable class differences, a dynamic identified initially by Du Bois as a product of racial segregation that is a source of both division and solidarity in the black community. Broadly, the literary genres align with the economic argument while the street genres implicitly, and sometimes very explicitly, make the culture argument. Detective, historical, and neighborhood novels pay close attention to the kinds of jobs that are available to heads of household in a given era, and usually tie social stresses to the economic dynamics of the family and the surrounding community. They also tend to be very aware of the scale of class difference within a given neighborhood. The street genres, by contrast, insist that the hustling “Game” is an element of black culture that can and should survive material success, and that upwardly mobile individuals should “keep it real” by continuing to adhere to the code of the street. In this, despite their occasional flamboyant uses of civil rights and black power rhetoric, they come down clearly, if unintentionally, on the side of the culture argument. But these popular genres also speak to Wilson and his forebears’ description of class structure in black neighborhoods. Like rap music, recent urban fiction is influenced by the appeal, and the proximity, of street life to children of middle-class

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homes. Settings often encompass both high-functioning working-to-middle-class neighborhoods and the streets and projects of the impoverished ghetto. Drama arises from the conflicting appeals of each realm to a young protagonist in a stable family. This dynamic also appears in the lives of the genre’s authors, including Goines and Stringer, who grew up in middle-class homes on the East Side of Detroit, but gravitated to street culture and drug sales (Cunningham). Here, too, the new popular genres often come down on the side of the culture argument. Conventional upward mobility is often available in these novels; it is not economic pressure but the allure of a morally defiant, physically adventurous version of ghetto life that often triumphs, if not over the main character then over the majority of her peers. Reception. The reception of urban fiction speaks to the difficulty in defining it, a difficulty grounded in the divide in marketing and perception between literary and genre fiction. Works offered as literary—often in the genres of neighborhood, detective, and historical novels—are less often assessed in terms of how they imagine the city than in terms of how they imagine the mental and moral lives of their characters. A prominent reviewer praises Mosley’s Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, because he “has not appliqued his morality; he has located its deep coiled root and tracked it up to the surface” (Birkerts). In a review of Pete Hamill’s North River, New York City is a source of “detail and ambience” that “showcases” the novel’s deeper truth, which is “the power of human goodness and . . . love” (Publishers Weekly). While these novels are undoubtedly psychological, inattention to the ways they are informed by their conceptions of cities is another way in which, in popular culture, the “urban” field is ceded to genres that can be most directly associated with black youth culture. This latter category includes more than just street fiction; in a collection set in Harlem, award-winning young adult writer Walter Dean Myers (b. 1937) is said to achieve “an overall effect of sitting on the front stoop swapping stories of the neighborhood”; and to have successfully combined “the search for personal identity” with “the sense of place.” But it is the hardcore street novels that are understood to be most directly about urban life. The concept of authenticity colors heavily the reception of street fiction, as it does their content. The kinds of street fiction that come to the attention of book reviewers are often praised in the same terms (“straight from the streets”) that fans bestow on the less polished variety (“keeping it real”). Mosley, for example, is quoted on the back cover of The Coldest Winter Ever calling Souljah “an Emile Zola of the hip-hop generation,” and the novel “an unflinching eye at the truth.” Three factors contribute to producing this response: the works are packaged to maximize the perception of authentic realism; mainstream reviewers and readers often have no references by which to judge such claims; and young or otherwise unsophisticated consumers of culture, even those who live in the city, tend to be highly drawn to the framing of sensation and melodrama as reality. The stock defense of gangsta rap as documentary realism rings out from the record company boardroom to the lyric itself to the school playground, reframing even the most celebratory violence and misogyny as a form of protest; it is applied to street fiction as well. The appeal of this claim might be attributable to a dearth of other kinds of representations of the ghetto environment against which to compare the sensational. It is typically other modes of representation, not independent reality, by which qualities such as realism and authenticity are assessed.

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Selected Authors. Among the best-selling authors of what publishers call urban fiction are Woods (True to the Game), Stringer (Let that be the Reason), Holmes (B-More Careful), Turner (A Hustler’s Wife), Tyree (Flyy Girl), and K’Wan (Hood Rat). It is helpful, in understanding what “urban” means in these novels, to compare such visions of the city to those of popular authors whose work is published and sold independently of this new marketing imperative. A comparison of two Philadelphia novels reveals what ground the literary and the street genres can share and where they tend to part ways. McKinney-Whetstone’s Leaving Cecil Street was published in 2004 under HarperCollins’s William Morrow imprint (“the highest quality fiction”). Tyree’s Flyy Girl, originally self-published in 1993, was released by Simon & Schuster in its Urban Classic Novel series in 2000, the year after that publisher’s success with Soujah’s The Coldest Winter Ever. Tyree’s novel is more “neighborhood” and less “street” than much of the new ghetto fiction, but it is an influential work in the genre and establishes a prototypical picaresque heroine. Both novels aim for broad, historically aware understandings of black city life, both in terms of its highest potentials and its worst degradations, by dramatizing the vulnerability of even the model neighborhood, as key opening passages reveal: Cecil Street was feeling some kind of way in 1969. Safely tucked away in the heart of West Philadelphia, this had always been a charmed block. A pleasure to walk through the way the trees lined the street from end to end and made arcs when they were in full leaf. The outsides of the houses stayed in good repair, with unchipped banister posts and porches mopped down daily because the people here sat out a lot, their soothing chatter jumping the banisters from end to end about how the numbers had come that day or what had happened on Edge of Night. And even though the block had long ago made the transition from white to colored to Negro to Black is Beautiful, the city still provided street cleaning twice a week in the summer when the children took to the outside and there was the familiar smack of the double-Dutch rope. (McKinney-Whetstone, 2004, 3) Dave was definitely a catch. His high income enabled them to move into a comfortable and scenic black neighborhood in Northwest Philadelphia. In Germantown, they had the luxury of private lawns, patios, driveways and lots of trees, which surrounded their three-bedroom twin house, things not affordable to the many Philadelphians who lived in crowded row-house areas. Patti worked at a nursing home as a dietitian, adding to their snug income. . . . . The seventies had been prosperous for blacks. (Tyree, 2000, 14–15, 21)

Thus each novel opens by explicitly connecting work, family, and neighborhood to the history of the city. In each, a neighborhood, which would seem to middleclass outsiders like a ghetto, is a model of prosperity and stability that has been aspired to and fought for. Both novels also begin with two-parent, lower-middleclass homes. The drama of each novel unfolds as the forces of instability are revealed to be close at hand and at every level, from sexual exploitation and drug sales to government apathy and hostility. These novels join the long tradition of urban literature, in which institutions from places of work, to modes of transportation, to living room decor, give structure to human needs and desires, providing vehicles for creativity, mastery, sexuality, and recovery from trauma, that are primarily healthy or destructive. In a sense, these novels about neighborhoods on the edge reveal the literal stakes of middle-class conventions that in other settings can seem petty: an authoritarian parental style or a broken teenage friendship comes, in

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these environments, to have potentially life-or-death consequences. But whereas the Philadelphia of Leaving Cecil Street provides for a communal solution, in Flyy Girl it is the tableau upon which a lone survivor adventures. Leaving Cecil Street is set on one block in West Philadelphia in the summer of 1969. The ostensibly idyllic street is troubled by signs of impending crisis: the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the Vietnam War, heroin sales, sporadic violent crime, the deterioration of locally owned businesses, and hostility from previously supportive white authorities. Of greater concern to the narrative, though, are unresolved traumas and tensions in the lives of the central adult characters, and the effects on their adolescent children. But the neighborhood structure that fails at first to recognize these fissures is also the source of their repair. The block is so “tight” as to have its own space-time, in which buildings are named after the day of the week their major activities occur. Homes are separated by thin walls permeable to emotion as well as sound. The block party is the apotheosis of this communal life, in which desires and identities interpenetrate in a striking example of the neighborhood novel’s rebuke to orthodox individualism. The novel opens at one such party, in which the characters are so unsettled by their lifelong anxieties that they fail to notice a mysterious, frail woman, dying of alcohol-induced liver disease, crawling into a cellar, where she remains for much of the novel, not participating in but attuned to the psychological rhythms of the house and the neighborhood. The narrative, playing back and forth between the neighborhood’s present and the youths of its adults, reveals that this woman’s quest to resolve her own trauma is bound to the events that are threatening the neighboring families. This narrative device, in which proximate urbanites, apparently thrown together randomly, are revealed to be embedded in a web of close relationships, is a staple of urban literature dating to Charles Dickens. The neighborhood is connected to the larger city by its residents’ pasts, illustrated in one virtuosic chapter by another classic convention of urban literature: the el train acts as a narrative vehicle to limn the structure of the industrial city and the scope of the characters’ lives. The novel culminates in another block party, in which again the signs of urban crisis appear in the form of black power rhetoric among the crowd and a hostile white police presence. But the expected violence never materializes, and instead the traumas afflicting the families are resolved in acts of purification and recombination. Leaving Cecil Street raises the expectation of calamity and disintegration, not only its internal narrative tensions, but also from the reader’s knowledge of what happened to many such black neighborhoods in this era. But in its ending it rejects the historical logic of urban crisis in favor of a psychoanalytical logic of healing, the working-through being as much a communal process as an individual one. Flyy Girl narrates one girl’s childhood and adolescence in the Northwest Philadelphia neighborhood of Germantown in the 1980s, an era the novel identifies as uniquely expansive and dangerous for adolescents and black communities alike, an acceleration given color by frequent descriptions of fashion and music. Starting at age 13, the precocious Tracy Ellis plows through a series of partners, learning to manipulate boys as the only alternative, for a sexually adventurous girl, to being exploited. But even this position of power quickly becomes physically dangerous and spiritually destructive, as Tracy tries to conquer ever more willful and violent boyfriends. By contrast her next-door-neighbor Raheema is a

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bookworm who, bullied by her father, is afraid of boys and depressed. The novel does not apologize for Tracy’s sexual adventuring and manipulative behavior, even as it suggests her parents’ separation lies behind it; in fact Tyree’s prose revels in her sexual pleasure, fashion sense, and mastery of the adolescent games of romance. The novel connects Tracy’s personality to narrative art, rejecting the notion that the artist is a detached but imaginative observer. Tracy’s charisma includes the ability to spin thrilling stories out of the everyday teen events in which she also plays the lead role, in contrast to Raheema, who can only look on, engage in unimaginative gossip, and wonder what it would be like to be a part of the drama. It is Tracy, not Raheema, who at the end of the novel becomes a poet in the self-dramatizing slam style. As the 1980s proceed, rougher neighborhoods in North and South Philly exert a gravitational force on the adventurous youth of Germantown, especially as the drug trade becomes lucrative. Raheema’s older sister Mercedes falls victim to crack, and in a period of reflection and sexual abstinence that follows, Tracy joins a group of college students who are interested in black culture and social issues. But Tracy returns to Victor, an ex-boyfriend from the street scene, who has been convicted of a violent crime related to his drug dealing. In prison, the intelligent but unschooled Victor joins the Nation of Islam and writes to Tracy asking her to wait for him and be his bride so that they can play their part rebuilding the black community. Victor’s request is authoritarian, but his appeal to cultural regeneration, combined with the unwavering self-confidence, are too much for her to resist. The novel ends in a letter from Tracy at college to her father at home, telling him of her plans to wait for Victor. Flyy Girl presents a girl caught up in the “Game” who learns lessons from hard, dangerous, experience. But though it probes the fatal boundaries of materialism and self-centeredness, its message is not that of the orthodox morality tale. A character like Tracy simply must have adventure and drama, the novel suggests, and young people reaching physical maturity will unavoidably experiment sexually. By contrast, Leaving Cecil Street looks to historical communal sources for the strength to withstand, and adapt to, the forces that threaten to pull apart individuals, families, and neighborhoods. Flyy Girl, while recognizing the importance of education, work, and parent-child relationships, emphasizes the strength of the individual survivor. This difference speaks generally for two distinct modes of popular urban fiction. This distinction is reproduced in different visions of Harlem, by one of the most successful street novelists and by one of the leading authors of urban youth fiction. Woods’s True to the Game, still among the best-selling works of the new ghetto fiction, is like a sexed-up, thug-life version of Flyy Girl. The main character, Gena, lives in Philadelphia, but she and her girlfriend Sahira travel among the cities of the East Coast, from Atlanta to New York, to party among young black men flush with the rewards of the late 1980s cocaine trade. The opening scene takes place in Harlem: 125th was a mini Greek playland in the middle of Harlem. Gena had no understanding. It wasn’t like Philly. It was larger, and the niggas looked like Eric B and Rakim, with humongous gold chains and diamond medallions the size of bread plates. If it was meant to represent wealth, that shit did its job. And Gena liked it. She looked at the girls and could not help staring at them. They had no clothes on. They were sexy and

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This description of Harlem, though contemporary in its language, understands the city in one of its perennial modes: as a material Eden but a moral minefield, with a dazzling surface that snares the naive newcomer. In True to the Game, though, as in others of its kind, the celebration of excess is never contained by the moral of the story. As one might expect, Gena falls for a Harlem thug with a fast car, God-like looks, pitch-perfect style, and a heart devoted to only her; but, as one might also guess, the criminal life that funds all this perfection is more dangerous, and harder to get out of, than she could have imagined. Hard lessons are learned and lives are broken, but Gena survives intact and in possession of a baby blue Mercedes-Benz. In the Harlem of Walter Dean Myers’s 145th Street Short Stories, a MercedesBenz is just an adolescent’s fantasy: I like a lot of things about Harlem, especially the block, which was how we talked about 145th Street. There were good people on the block, but what I wanted was to be more than what I saw on the block. Uncle Duke said I could be more, but if I put Harlem out of my heart I could end up being a lot less, too. Yeah, well, I was ready to take my chances. What I wanted to do was to be a doctor and have a nice crib, and a Benz, the whole nine. Then the thing happened with Monkeyman. (74)

In “Monkeyman,” a quiet youth risks his life standing up to a new gang; in hospital, he tells the narrator that after going to art school in Pittsburgh, he wants to return to Harlem and open a studio. The narrator, while not giving up his dream of a doctor’s salary, wonders at the story’s conclusion whether he might return to practice the healing arts in the old neighborhood. Myers’s Harlem is a multi-generational narrative where those who survive hardships gain in strength and wisdom, because the shared circumstances of the place bind them in familial relations. Like McKinney-Whetstone, Myers picks up the thread of black neighborhood fiction, in which community is more life-sustaining than repressive, and in which communal identity is a real part of each individual. Myers’s narrative binds generations, not just among characters, but through the history of Harlem and black America. “A Christmas Story” opens, “It was rumored that Mother Fletcher was well over ninety years old. She had become a legend on 145th Street. If anybody wanted to know what the neighborhood looked like in the twenties, where Jack Johnson had lived, perhaps, or where James Baldwin’s father had preached, Mother Fletcher could tell you” (105). This story examines a white police officer’s perspective of the neighborhood, inhabiting his experiences sympathetically, something inconceivable in street fiction. Myers’s collection is in control of its own narrative structure and its uses of colloquial language in ways the street novels are not; though the street novels trade in adolescent fantasy, it is 145th Street that is published as a children’s book.

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Bibliography Beck, Robert. Pimp! The Story of My Life by Iceberg Slim. Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1969. Birkerts, Sven. “The Socratic Method.” Review of Walter Mosley, Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned. New York Times. 9 Nov. 1997. Brown, Claude. Manchild in the Promised Land. New York: Macmillan, 1965. Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. New York: Random House, 1991. C-Murder. Death Around the Corner. New York: Vibe Street Lit, 2007. Concepcion, Mariel. “VIBE’s Line of Urban Fiction Publishes Rapper C-Murder’s First Novel.” 1 Sept. 2006. Vibe Books. Crane, Stephen. Maggie, a Girl of the Streets and Other New York Writings. New York: Random House, 2001. Cunningham, Jonathan. “Romancing the Hood.” Detroit Metrotimes, 22–28 June 2005. Doctorow, E.L. Ragtime. New York: Random House, 1997. Drake, St. Clair and Horace Cayton. Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945. Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Sport of the Gods. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1902. Farrell, James T. Young Lonigan. New York: Penguin, 2001. 50 Cent and Nikki Turner. Death Before Dishonor. New York: G-Unit/Pocket Books, 1997. Foster, George. New York by Gaslight and Other Urban Sketches. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Foye, K’Wan. Hood Rat. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006. Ghose, Dave. “Crime Does Pay.” Columbus Monthly, Nov. 2004. Goines, Donald. Dopefiend. Los Angeles: Holloway House, 2003. ———. Never Die Alone. Los Angeles: Holloway House, 2003. Gold, Mike. Jews without Money. New York: H. Liveright, 1930. Hamill, Pete. The Gift. New York: Random House, 1973. ———. North River. Boston: Little, Brown, 2007. Himes, Chester. If He Hollers Let Him Go. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1945. ———. Cotton Comes to Harlem. Chatham, N.J.: Chatham, 1965. Holmes, Shannon. B-More Careful. New York: Terri Woods, 2001. Johnson, Lynne D. “Relentless Aaron—Urban Fiction’s Don.” Vibe Book Talk, 16 Sept. 2004. Jones, LeRoi. The System of Dante’s Hell. New York: Grove Press, 1965. Lehane, Dennis. Mystic River. New York: William Morrow, 2001. Lewis, Oscar. La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty. New York: Random House, 1966. Liebow, Eliot. Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967. Mailer, Norman. “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.” Dissent IV (Spring 1957). “Mama Black Widow.” Dir. Darren Grant. Screenplay by Will De Los Santos, from novel by Robert Beck. Muse Productions, 2007 (in production). IMDb.com. <www.imdb.com/ title/tt0301595/> McCabe, James. New York by Gaslight: A Work Descriptive of the Great American Metropolis. New York: Crown, 1984. McCune, Jenny. “The Rise of Urban Fiction.” PMA, the Independent Book Publishers Association. Oct. 2005. McInerney, Jay. Bright Lights, Big City. New York: Vintage, 1984.

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UTOPIAN LITERATURE McKay, Claude. Home to Harlem. New York: Harper & Bros., 1928. McKinney-Whetstone, Diane. Leaving Cecil Street. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. ———. Tumbling. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Mosley, Walter. Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned. New York: Washington Square Press, 1998. Myers, Walter Dean. 145th Street Short Stories. New York: Random House, 2000. Naylor, Gloria. The Women of Brewster Place. New York: Penguin, 1982. Reed, Ishmael. Mumbo Jumbo. New York: Scribner, 1972. Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives. New York: Penguin, 1997. Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Norton, 2003. Sister Souljah. The Coldest Winter Ever. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. Stringer, Vickie. Dirty Red. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006. ———. Let That Be the Reason. New York: A&B, 2002. Turner, Nikki. A Hustler’s Wife. Columbus, Ohio: Triple Crown, 2003. Tyree, Omar. Flyy Girl. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Wideman, John Edgar. The Homewood Books. Pittsburgh, PA.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992. Wilson, August. Fences. New York: New American Library, 1986. Wilson, William Julius. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Knopf, 1996. The Women of Brewster Place. Dir. Donna Deitch. Screenplay by Karen Hall, from novel by Gloria Naylor. Harpo Productions, 1989. Woods, Teri. True to the Game. Haverton, PA: Meow Meow Productions, 1994. Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Harper & Bros., 1940. Yezierska, Anzia. Bread Givers. New York: Persea, 2003.

Further Reading Auster, Paul. New York Trilogy. New York: Penguin, 1990; Bremer, Sidney. Urban Intersections: Meetings of Life and Literature in United States Cities. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992; Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Transl. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974; Cappetti, Carla. Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993; Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: the Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso, 1996; Dos Passos, John. Manhattan Transfer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000; Jurca, Catherine. White Diaspora: the Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001; Morrison, Toni. “City Limits, Village Values: Concepts of the Neighborhood in Black Fiction.” In Literature and the Urban Experience: Essays on the City and Literature. Jaye, Michael C., and Ann C. Watts, eds. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981; Scruggs, Charles. Sweet Home: Invisible Cities in the Afro-American Novel. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993; Reynolds, David. Beneath the American Renaissance: the Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988; Rotella, Carlo. October Cities: the Redevelopment of Urban Literature. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998; Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973; Baker, Houston A. Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.

EOIN CANNON

UTOPIAN LITERATURE Definition. Utopian literature describes an imagined ideal society. The imagined society is usually marked by a universally fair political system and material abundance. Often, the inhabitants of these societies are required to follow schedules, share meals, live in communal housing, or otherwise limit their personal choices.

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UTOPIA: NOT REALLY A PLACE AT ALL Although the terms utopia and utopian are applied outside of literary studies, the concept itself was first named in a work of fiction. In his 1615 work of the same name,Thomas More created the word utopia by punning with two different Greek phrases: eu topos, the good or happy place, and ou topos, the place which is nowhere.Thus utopia is a happy place that has no true location.

One of the more common techniques used in creating a utopian tale is the travel narrative. In these stories, a visitor from the outside world stumbles upon a utopia and meets a guide who explains how his or her superior society works. Another common narrative frame is when someone who has traveled to a utopian society returns and shares tales of his visit to a perfect, or at least much better, society. Other fictional genres can also be employed to create utopian novels and stories. Authors generally produce this kind of literature in order to comment on their own society. An author may create a utopia to encourage her or his society to become better, or to criticize the failings of the society he lives in. Utopian can also be used as an adjective to describe elements of otherwise non-utopian texts that contain elements of an ideal political system or an ideal society. Science fiction, for example, typically contains utopian elements, even though most stories in that genre are not specifically written to envision ideal social relations. Furthermore, the term utopian is often employed dismissively when people are discussing real-world political ideas. This is partially because of the word’s association with literary utopias, which are fictive and deliberately unrealizable. This entry will discuss works of fiction created either to showcase an ideal society or to question the ability of humanity to create an ideal society. History. Western culture has been producing utopian literature for at least 2,500 years. The Greeks, who were experimenting with social reform as they developed participatory democracy, gave us two important early examples of utopian literature. These texts were created by near contemporaries, the playwright Aristophanes (ca. 448–388 B.C.E.) and the philosopher Plato (ca. 427–347 B.C.E.). Aristophanes’s play The Birds, first performed in 414 B.C.E., exemplifies the creation of a humorous utopia to critique aspects of the author’s society. Two Athenian citizens, Makedo and Goodhope, set out on a journey to find refuge from the various social ills of their city—militarism, crime, citizens addicted to lawsuits, and so forth. The travelers meet up with the Hoopoe, or king of the birds, and realize that these creatures live a carefree life. In order to permanently escape from the unpleasantness of Athens, Makedo and Goodhope help the birds create the floating city of Nepheloccygia, which has been translated as cloud-cuckooland or cloud-cuckoo-town. Both the gods and the Greeks try to thwart this project, but ultimately Makedo is crowned king of cloud-cuckoo-land, where he’s free to live out his days eating and procreating in a society patterned after avian life. Clearly Aristophanes was not suggesting cloud-cuckoo-land as a legitimate alternative to Athens, but he was creating an alternate version of society that championed ideals the playwright felt were better observed than the crass commercialism and militarism of the Greek city states. Plato’s The Republic, which was written between 387 and 360 B.C.E., does not present a fictional portrait of an ideal society, but instead describes the conditions

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under which an ideal society could be created. These conditions are often echoed in later utopian writing, so it is worthwhile to examine them here. Plato believed that only philosophers, who were ruled by reason, were fit to govern. These philosopherkings would create societies that were entirely rational and therefore harmonious. Social problems, Plato argued, were caused by leaders who let their passions rule, resulting in passionate and disordered states. Plato’s commitment to reason was so absolute that he proposed banning literature and art from his ideal state because they were generated by passion. Education would be strictly controlled, and people would be assigned to castes of workers, soldiers, and rulers. Plato’s ideal society differs significantly from the floating pleasure palace of Aristophanes, but the tension between visions of the ideal society as a place of joy and as a place of order and reason persists into contemporary utopian writing. Despite its ancient beginning, utopian literature languished for nearly 2,000 years before Thomas More published the book that would define the genre. There was little call for speculative representations of the perfect society during Europe’s Middle Ages. In this period, the perfect political system was broadly conceived as a divinely appointed sovereign ruling over a docile populace with the help of the clergy. The Enlightenment, with its return to the Greek and Roman values and its emphasis on the ability of human reason to generate progress, encouraged a critical perspective of European societies. Evidence of this trend is revealed in Thomas More’s Utopia, a rational society in the vein of the ideal government presented in Plato’s Republic. Written in 1615, More’s tale does not feature a lively plot, but rather a thorough description of the workings of Utopian society. The novel’s informant is Raphael Hythloday, who has visited Utopia and greatly admires its relatively democratic social structure. Utopia is generally pleasant, though there is also much that would make a modern reader uncomfortable. The society is a republic governed by a prince, who typically rules for life but is chosen by the Philarchs, who are in turn chosen each year by the 30 families they preside over. Despite the ruler’s noble title, this system was a far cry from the monarchies that dominated Europe during More’s day; the Utopian method of selecting a ruler loosely resembles the structure of the modern American electoral college. Daily life in Utopia is designed to be both productive and rewarding; the six-hour work day provides enough material goods for the entire society. The Utopians devote the rest of their time to recreation and improving their minds. There is much in Utopia, however, that threatens individualism and the disorder of creativity. The country is comprised of identical towns occupied by no more than 6,000 families, who live in identical houses. The inhabitants of these identical houses wear similar clothing and share communal meals with everyone who lives on their 30-house street. There is no private property, and housing assignments are rearranged every 10 years. Citizens cannot leave town without permission from the government, and the state can transfer families from one town to another to maintain desired population levels. Although the daily schedule may allow time for personal pleasure, that pleasure is often strictly regulated. For example, premarital sex is illegal and those caught violating this rule are forbidden to marry. The Utopians also view each other naked before marriage; and while this may at first seem titillating, its subordination of romance to reason, and its implied evaluation of one’s betrothed as a farm animal on an auction block offends contemporary tastes. In More’s Utopia, individual expression is often subordinated to the whole, and when individual taste is expressed, it must be rational and calculating, not impressionistic

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and spontaneous. This blend of freedom and suppression illustrates the central contradictions among utopias that have been taken up by contemporary authors. America, established by those who hoped to create a superior political system, has a rich tradition of utopian writing. To understand the themes addressed in contemporary utopian writing, it will be helpful to examine two key utopian texts from America’s literary tradition. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, published in 1852, shows us a failed utopia, critiquing the real-world applicability of utopian ideals. Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel Looking Backwards is an Americanized, technologically enhanced utopia in the tradition of More. Bellamy’s text exemplifies the hope that technological advancement will create utopian conditions. While this hope is not unique to America, technology has always been a primary source of optimism about the future of American culture. These two novels represent contradictory views of utopia held in American literature: fear that utopia is unworkable and possibly dangerous, and hope that technological innovation will ultimately deliver what human nature has thus far prevented. In the decades before the Civil War, America saw several utopian communities arise. Some of them were founded by small religious groups such as the Shakers, whose leader, Ann Lee, introduced this religion on American soil when she established a communal farm in Watervliet, New York, in 1774. Other groups were secular, influenced by the French social thinker Charles Fourier. In Fourier’s utopia, people would be organized into a phalanx of 1,620 people, and live in a communal building called a phalanstery. There were several attempts to establish Fourierist communities in America, such as the North American Phalanx in Red Bank, New Jersey. This utopian experiment lasted from 1843 to 1856 and was endorsed by prominent people, including Horace Greely, the editor and publisher of the New York Tribune. Communities like the North American Phalanx were controversial because communal living did not blend easily with the wide-open capitalism of antebellum America. Furthermore, Fourier was notorious for his radical—even by today’s standards—views on sexuality. In a phalanstery, at least in theory, people were free to have sexual relations with any other consenting adult. Unsurprisingly, even though “free love” was usually not a prominent feature of American utopian communities, the possibility that such unconventional behavior was occurring did not sit well with most Americans. These negative perceptions led most American Fourierists to refer to themselves as Associationists to avoid scaring away potential converts. But considering that the religious groups who founded utopian communities were also outside mainstream American thought, the failure of all of these alternative living experiments is understandable. The communities had trouble attracting both capital and capable people, and their eventual demise only confirmed the public’s impression of the impracticality of their utopian schemes. The popular cultural distrust of communal living is reflected in Hawthorne’s thinly disguised account of his own time in a utopian community. For a few months in 1841, the author lived at Brook Farm, a secular utopian community in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, which was Fourierist before it closed in 1849 but not while Hawthorne was a resident. Through the poet-narrator Miles Coverdale, Hawthorne’s tale questions the practicality of utopian communities. While the author found much to satirize in the idea of a poet working as a farmer, his fundamental critique of communal living highlights the inability of humans to treat one another fairly. The novel’s dark conclusion centers on the love triangle involving the self-promoting Hollingsworth, who wants to transform Blithedale into a penal

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colony that he will run, the ardent feminist Zenobia, and her passive, feminine halfsister Priscilla. Hollingsworth’s scheme depends in part on money the independently wealthy Zenobia would provide, and his decision to marry Priscilla leads the shamed Zenobia to drown herself. Of course, Zenobia’s death signals the end of the community and leaves Hollingsworth and Priscilla spiritually broken. Hawthorne’s tale suggests that the sharing of resources necessary for communal life is so counter to human nature that tragedy is bound to result. Zenobia’s money and Hollingsworth’s charisma both introduce ungovernable desires into the rationally planned utopia, whose fatal flaw was the assumption that people were capable of consistently setting aside personal desires in service of the greater good. While the horrors of the Civil War called into question the faith in human progress that made experiments like Brook Farm, the North American Phalanx, and the Shaker communities possible, it also ushered in an age of rapid industrialization and technological progress that made a different type of utopia seem feasible. Many social thinkers began to believe that society was gradually evolving toward a mechanized paradise that would provide for everyone’s material needs. This type of utopian thought was quite popular despite the daily experiences of people who worked in newly mechanized industry. Bellamy’s novel Looking Backwards gives these utopian hopes literary form. In Bellamy’s tale, wealthy Bostonian Julian West goes to sleep in 1887 and wakes up in 2000 to find society transformed by a bloodless revolution. After capitalists consolidated every industry into a single trust, the working class rose up and took over the mighty industrial machine that had been created. The plot of Looking Backwards is very similar to More’s Utopia as primarily a description of an ideal society, though West does return to nineteenth century Boston and argues with his complacent friends and family. While More learns of Utopia from the traveler Hythloday, West is introduced to the new millennium’s utopian America by his host Dr. Leete. West learns that society’s technological prowess allows everyone to enjoy an extremely high standard of living. Dr. Leete explains that all citizens work in the industrial army until 45 and then retire to several decades of leisure. Prison is largely reserved for people who refuse to work. Although it features communal dining halls, Bellamy’s society is best understood as a consumerist paradise where people use credit cards to shop in “sample stores” located in buildings resembling the twenty-first century’s upscale malls. Products selected at the sample stores are then automatically delivered to the buyer’s apartment. Contemporary readers may find Bellamy’s vision both appealing and improbable, but Looking Backwards was regarded by many as a practical blueprint for the future. Readers formed Bellamy clubs, and the Populist Party incorporated Bellamy’s ideas into their platform. Trends and Themes. Twentieth-century utopian literature by American authors continued to reflect the contradictory tendencies revealed in the two nineteenthcentury literary utopias discussed above. Some tales seem direct descendants of More’s political or Bellamy’s technological utopia, with ideal societies arising from the chaos of the contemporary world thanks to stunning technological breakthroughs. Kathleen Ann Goonan’s nanotech series, with its depiction of this new technology radically transforming the world, is at least a spiritual descendant of Looking Backwards. Lincoln Child’s novel Utopia, though primarily a straightforward techno-thriller, also argues for America’s ability to protect its technological utopias from terrorists. One contemporary innovation in utopian literature, a variation on the positive utopias of More and Bellamy, can best be described as identity

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utopias. These are societies built by and for the members of a specific racial or ethnic group. Toure’s Soul City, with its sometimes tongue-in-cheek depiction of an African American utopia built partially on the spiritual capital gained from the experiences of slavery and partly on African American popular culture, is a solid example of the identity utopia. The most common theme in contemporary American utopian fiction, however, is a critique of what can broadly be described as 1960s, or perhaps post-World War II, idealism. Susan Sontag’s In America, Justin Tussig’s The Best People in the World, and T. C. Boyle’s Drop City all cast doubt on the possibility of the communal utopia, with Tussig and Boyle speaking directly to the experience of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In The New City, Stephen Amidon questions America’s faith in the suburban ideal in general and in the utopian project of planned communities, and Richard Powers casts doubt on the ability of computer technology to create a durable utopia in Plowing the Dark. Contexts and Issues. Contemporary utopian fiction continues to reflect tension between the hope that technology will soon deliver utopia and the fear that utopia is unworkable. This pairing is reflected in literature because the tension between optimism and distrust of utopia has been grounded in recent historical developments. Utopian thought in general has been called into question by both the genocidal utopias of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler and the resurgence and perceived failure of utopian communities in the 1960s. On the other hand, the technological advances that have occurred during the last century, as well as the view that new media technologies have potential to dramatically change the world for the better, have suggested that utopia, or the material conditions for utopia, is still possible. During the first half of the twentieth century, two totalitarian governments that claimed utopian trappings but caused widespread suffering and death emerged in Europe. Although the Russian Revolution claimed to be creating a worker’s paradise, Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture indirectly caused millions of deaths because of famine and made life miserable for the survivors. Furthermore, the dictator’s purges of those he deemed disloyal generated a formidable body count. Nazi Germany, which presented itself as a utopian state for Aryans, also contributed a substantial degree of death and suffering with concentration camps designed to exterminate Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals. Historian Russell Jacoby has argued that because the propaganda of these regimes had utopian overtones, in the years since the deaths of Stalin and Hitler there has been a strong tendency to equate political utopias with final solutions. Another later-discredited utopian moment developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While the youth culture that flourished during that time was largely driven by hedonistic desires, it also sparked a legitimate political movement to stop the Vietnam War. This countercultural atmosphere of the late 1960s led some people to found communes. While these small-scale utopias were in many ways descendants of the Fourierist experiments of Hawthorne’s day, in the popular imagination they were associated with the sex-drugs-and-rock ‘n’ roll atmosphere of the baby boomers’ college years. When most of these communes failed and members were absorbed into middle and upper class communities, a widespread perception developed that these private utopias were primarily a place for white, middle-class adolescents to play, rather than serious attempts to create a social system based on principles of justice and a commitment to environmental sustainability. While the twentieth century has produced both monstrous and lightweight political utopias, it has also generated its fair share of technologies that have genuinely

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changed the way people live. From the mass production of the automobile to the television to the Internet, each new technology has been marketed using utopian language. The easiest way to illustrate this perception of new technologies as harbingers of utopian change is to examine the way the Internet has been described by its promoters. Though originally developed by the Department of Defense so that researchers could share information with the military, the Internet is now widely touted as a means of breaking down barriers between people and creating a global society that is prosperous, well-informed, and diverse. This conceptualization of the Internet appeals to the widely held hope that technology can somehow lead to an ideal society. Reception. It is difficult to accurately gauge the cultural impact of a work of fiction, particularly those that recently entered circulation. Four criteria can be used to gain a broad idea of how a book has been received: reviews give a good indication of the story’s perceived literary value, film adaptations and sales figures demonstrate the popularity of a novel or story, and the historical popularity of a genre is a good way to gauge reception in relative terms. The novels and stories discussed below received favorable reviews in mainstream media outlets like The New York Times. It is still too soon for most of the contemporary utopian stories to garner the attention of significant academic criticism. There have been no plans by major studios to turn any of these works into films, and low sales suggest that current utopian stories have yet to capture the public’s imagination. Utopian fiction has never truly commanded the popular imagination in America, and the relatively low cultural penetration of the texts under discussion should come as no surprise. The status of utopian fiction in American culture is borne out by the absence of significant or popular film adaptations of utopian stories and by the relatively low sales of Utopian tales. Selected Authors. Unlike romance or mystery genres, most utopian literary works are unique creations, exploring themes that authors have addressed in other kinds of fiction by means of the utopia they create. The only common exceptions to this rule are found in science fiction, where writers occasionally produce an entire series of books about a utopia. The books discussed below were written by a range of authors—some prominent, some beginning their careers—and were distributed by major publishing houses. Susan Sontag was one of the twentieth century’s best know public intellectuals. A novelist, poet, and playwright, she was also made an honorary citizen of Sarajevo for the humanitarian work she did as a resident of that war-torn city in the 1990s. In intellectual circles she will most likely be remembered for her literary and social criticism’s impact on discussions of popular culture. Her novel In America follows Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance and generates compelling historical fiction by revising past utopian experiments. In this novel, Sontag reimagines the story of Polish actress Helena Modrzejewska and her husband Count Karol Chlapowski, who immigrated to the United States in 1876 with a group of friends and briefly lived in a commune in Anaheim, California. Sontag renames Helena Maryna, calls Karol Bogdan, and portrays them as idealists dedicated to Fourier. As with most tales of failed utopia, the community they create cannot sustain itself and is torn apart by infighting amongst its members. Furthermore, Sontag compares Maryna’s idealistic experiment in communal living to the city of Anaheim, a pseudo-utopia created and staffed by developers and wealthy landowners. The failure of these admirers of Fourier in the face of the quiet success of complacent capitalists leads Maryna to believe that all utopias “will not last.” Consequently, utopia should be

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seen as “not a kind of place but a kind of time, those all-too-brief moments when one would not wish to be anywhere else” (175). This realization leads Maryna to return to the stage in America, and the final third of the novel becomes a chronicle of her gradual rise to superstardom. At the somewhat abrupt close of Sontag’s narrative, the woman who had once been determined to live quietly on a grape farm is instead touring the United States in a private railcar. While Sontag’s novel is grounded in the real story of Helena Modrzejewska, it also reflects the life trajectories of many individuals involved in utopian politics or communities in their youth who later rejected outward utopias and focused on their own career advancement. Justin Tussig’s first novel, based on a short story published in The New Yorker, is also an exploration of the failed utopian impulses of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Best People in the World tells the story of Thomas Mahey, a Kentucky high school student facing a dull but secure future working in the same power plant that his father does. His sleepy life is disrupted when Tom begins an affair with Alice Lowe, one of his teachers, and sparks a tentative friendship with Shilo Tanager, a local ne’er-do-well. After Alice takes Shilo in when his home is destroyed in a flood, the three of them decide to leave town. They drive to Vermont, take over an abandoned house in the woods, and try to create a private utopia. Along the way, they meet Parker, an old friend of Shilo’s who is now a drug dealer. Parker helps them get to Vermont, where they make contact with a commune run by Gregor. This false idealist, however, won’t let Tom and his friends join unless they pay him several thousand dollars. Tussig sets his story in the mid-1970s, when 1960s utopian culture had run to seed, and there is a definite air of despair and futility in Parker’s NYC drug lab/commune and Gregor’s half-built rural compound. These perverse utopias foreshadow the failure of Tom, Shilo, and Alice’s experiment in communal living. Their garden dies from lack of attention, they deplete their money, they run out of firewood and are forced to burn parts of the house to stay warm, and the interpersonal dynamic between the housemates grows gradually worse as the group becomes more and more frustrated with their attempt to live together. The situation disintegrates further when Alice discovers that Shilo has been hiding the miraculously preserved corpse of his boyfriend in the basement. Parker arrives to remove the corpse, there is a scuffle, and Shilo knocks Parker down the stairway to the basement, killing him. The novel abruptly ends with the trio abandoning the house. There is no account of the fates of Shilo or Alice, and only minimal information about Tom. The novel contains a parallel narrative concerning two unnamed investigators from the Holy See who investigate reports of miracles. The investigators make plans to see the body of Shilo’s boyfriend because they hear reports that it has the ability to heal, but this never comes to fruition and the narrative strands do not otherwise cross. The investigators, who have uncovered many frauds and found only a few events that may evince the supernatural, are very jaded. Taken together, these two narratives suggest that the sixties commune movement was built—metaphorically— on the bodies of dead children and that there are no miracles in the world. T. C. Boyle has written 19 books and numerous short stories, and has received many literary awards. Although the themes addressed in his novels range from Budding Prospects’ depiction of marijuana cultivation to Talk Talk’s discussion of identity theft, Boyle’s writing often focuses on eccentric figures in American history who were seen as radicals or utopians. The Road to Wellville, adapted for film in 1994, satirizes the utopia dedicated to healthy eating built by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg in

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Battle Creek, Michigan. The Inner Circle depicts the lives of Alfred Kinsey’s team of sex researchers. In Drop City, Boyle turns to the post-utopian 1970s to explore the utopian impulses of both far-left and far-right America. The novel begins with a description of Drop City, a Northern California hippy commune founded by Norm, an aging flower child living off his dead parents’ life insurance money. The commune is large and there are many members, but the story focuses on Paulette, a former elementary school teacher who goes by Star, and her boyfriend Marco, who is living in the commune to avoid the draft. Readers also meet Cecil, or Sess, and Pamela, newlyweds who have gone to live in the Alaskan bush. Sess is largely apolitical, but Pamela is a college graduate who has left a promising career to live in the wilderness because she thinks that American culture has become permanently corrupted. As Norm’s commune slowly disintegrates under pressure from county officials and racial tensions within the group, he decides to create Drop City North on a large tract of land he has inherited in Alaska. Most of the commune boards a converted school bus and heads out for the last frontier. When the hippies arrive in Alaska, Sess discovers that they will be moving onto land that borders his. Boyle does not present conflict between the hippie commune and the libertarian homestead, however. Sess and Pamela are kind to their new neighbors and the hippies are in awe of Sess’s ability to survive in the wilderness. Instead, Boyle parallels the growth of Sess and Pamela’s relationship with the demise of the commune. Unsurprisingly, the hippies simply cannot endure the Alaska winter and when Norman heads back to California, it looks like the end of Drop City. Star and Marco, however, have begun to learn survival techniques from Sess and Pamela. While there is never genuine political rapprochement between the two sides, Star ultimately realizes that Pamela was also “not buying into the plastic society” (Boyle 2003, 301). Boyle argues that the communalist critique of society offered in the 1960s was not inherently wrong, but also argues that creating a commune was not the answer. Rugged individualism, and not another Brook Farm, is the best way to reclaim something genuinely American. Stephen Amidon’s The New City takes up a more mainstream and understated strain of utopian thought that greatly influenced where and how Americans lived in the twentieth century: city planning and the flight to the suburbs. Amidon, whose mainstream fiction frequently centers on father-son relationships in novels such as Splitting the Atom and Thirst, is also a critic of suburban life, a theme picked up in Human Capital, published after The New City. Amidon’s tale of failed utopia describes the demise of Newton, Maryland, an early 1970s planned community designed by a utopian architect named Barnaby Vine. As did most twentieth-century progressives, Vine believed that urban social problems resulted from economic and racial segregation. His solution was to design a bedroom community for Baltimore and Washington, D.C. that would eliminate physical barriers between races and classes. Vine recruits white lawyer Austin Swope and African American contractor Earl Wooten to build his community from the ground up. It has no fences and provides a great deal of public space where residents will ideally interact and build community. He has, in other words, built the kind of scaled-down utopia that planned communities perceive themselves to be. Yet while Swope and Wooten become friends, Vine’s city is plagued with problems from the beginning. The fish purchased to stock an artificial lake quickly die. Gas lamps used to light the city at night begin exploding. Japanese beetles descend

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and infest trees and shrubs. In addition to these physical problems, gangs from the government housing projects Vine constructed in Newton begin to terrorize the suburb’s middle-and upper-class residents. Newton falls apart, however, when Wooten’s son Joel and his white girlfriend Susan are caught in bed by her parents. Swope’s son Teddy attempts to help Joel and Susan continue seeing each other, but when an exasperated Susan correctly diagnoses Teddy’s homosexual attraction to Joel, Teddy kills her in a blind rage and then frames Joel for the murder. Ultimately, Susan’s father mistakes Teddy for Joel and kills him before killing himself. As in any proper tragedy, the racial strife that Newton was designed to avoid became its undoing. The novel’s end implies that this bloodbath will turn Newton into just another troubled development. Amidon, like Sontag, Tussig, and Boyle, forcefully argues that utopian social schemes are doomed because human nature and human jealousy will not allow them to succeed. One concept that Thomas Moore likely did not foresee was the creation of virtual utopias, computer-generated ideal worlds tailored to the needs of individuals. If these digital realities serve only as a place of escape from a dreary analog one, then they are merely utopian. But when it becomes possible to completely and permanently escape into these artificial worlds, then we are dealing with utopia proper. This is the scenario Richard Powers explores in Plowing the Dark. Powers, an English professor with a background as a computer programmer, explored the interaction between the humanities and technology in Galatea 2.2 and Gold Bug Variations. In Plowing the Dark, the author suggests that while creating a virtual utopia may be technically feasible, it may not be desirable. Most of Powers’s novel focuses on the efforts of a team of artists, social scientists, and engineers, assembled by a Microsoft-like corporation, to create a virtual environment so powerful that the human mind cannot discern the difference between it and reality. Set in the late 1980s and early 1990s when virtual reality was first coming into public awareness, the story focuses on college friends Steve Spiegel, a poet-turned-computer-programmer, and Addie Klarpol, a gifted artist who has been wasting her talent on commercial illustration, as they and their colleagues work in a technological wonderland where it is “never anything o’clock” (Powers 2000, 3). At first, this cyber island really is a sort of scientific and artistic paradise, allowing them to create a visual and tactile paradise while they begin speculating about humanity’s eventual move into a fully computerized existence. Addie eventually abandons her work and her affair with Steve, however, when she realizes that most of the technology they were creating was used to help develop the smart bombs used by the United States Air Force in the first Gulf war. The author reminds us that the technology invested with utopian potential—the Internet, for example—often has roots in the military-industrial complex that will always cancel out any genuine utopian potential. Author Lincoln Child taps into the utopian atmosphere of theme parks—artificial creations designed to produce pleasure—in Utopia, with an island of complete computerized control in the Nevada desert. Because of its advanced technology, Utopia attracts hundreds of thousands of guests who can escape into Victorian England or outer space for days at a time. Child’s creation is even a quasi-political entity, with its own government and security forces that are only nominally responsible to the state of Nevada. Clearly, Child’s choice of name for his theme park strongly suggests that he is creating a kind of technological cloud-cuckoo-land, the pleasure palace that Americans desire.

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All is not well, however, as a gang of ruthless criminals infiltrate the metanet, the computer system that maintains the virtual worlds within Utopia. They begin killing guests and demanding that they be given the technology behind the metanet while simultaneously plotting to rob Utopia’s casinos. Unfortunately for them, Andrew Warne, the inventor of the metanet, has been brought in to repair his creation, and the good professor uses his programming savvy to save the park—and his teenage daughter Georgia—from the criminals. This high-tech thriller is suitable for beach reading, no surprise considering Child’s background as an editor of horror fiction anthologies and as co-author (with Douglas Preston) of a novel series about an FBI agent who solves unusual cases. But in his first solo novel, Child creates a technological utopia—an island of order in a chaotic world, but threatened by the same chaos it wants to avoid. Investing the inventor of the utopia with the power to save it from destruction suggests that the American technological utopia will survive in a world that is hostile to it. If Child’s Utopia represents a strain of contemporary utopian fiction similar to Aristophanes’ The Birds, Kathleen Ann Goonan’s New Orleans-based nanotech series brings readers an inevitable utopian revolution similar to that in Bellamy’s Looking Backwards. Goonan is one of the few writers discussed here who has made her reputation largely on utopian fiction. The four books of the nanotech series, Queen City Jazz (1994), Mississippi Blues (1997), Crescent City Rhapsody (2000) and Light Music (2002), blend science fiction with international espionage as they describe an island city-state in the Caribbean produced by means of nanotechnology. Although the utopian climax is reached in Light Music as New Orleans/Crescent City is turned into a starship, Crescent City Rhapsody best establishes the broader utopian themes Goonan wants to explore. Set in the near future, Goonan’s novel illustrates the economic and social havoc that results when a regular series of electromagnetic pulses that apparently emanate from an alien intelligence disrupt electronic communications. While it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain social control by means of traditional technologies, nanotechnology allows cities and individuals to cheaply manufacture consumer goods for local markets. Prospects for a more libertarian and free market world are darkened, however, by international terrorists who want to use nanotechnology to produce viruses and super weapons. Hope for humanity is found in New Orleans, where Marie Laveau is gathering scientists and engineers to create Crescent City, an autonomous island city that will be beyond the reach of government taxation and will allow the brightest minds to work on a way for humanity to reach into space and contact the alien intelligences sending out the signals. Marie is best conceptualized as a heroine version of a James Bond villain: vastly wealthy, with a private espionage apparatus, and dedicated to using advanced technology to save rather than destroy the world. Marie is opposed both by the American and World governments and by various terrorist groups, but she and her operatives eventually triumph. In a now-ironic final scene, the citizens of New Orleans leave for Crescent City as a terrorist-infiltrated international army breeches the levees that protect the old city from Lake Ponchartrain during a powerful hurricane. Goonan’s novel ends with a vision of an unambiguous utopia. Crescent City is an island removed from a chaotic world, governed by reason rather than emotion. Its quirky admixture of pragmatic socialism and intellectual libertarianism both reflects a contemporary update of the American populism that informed Bellamy’s utopia and

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represents a social order superior to those that had gone before it. Most importantly, however, Goonan’s novel forcefully articulates the optimism that believes technology can save humanity from itself. Among identity utopias, concerning the status of ethnic minorities, one of the most entertaining is Soul City. This novel was written by Toure, a correspondent for Black Entertainment Television and contributing editor for Rolling Stone whose work has also appeared in magazines like Playboy and The New Yorker. Toure begins his tale by quoting Oscar Wilde’s assertion that “a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at” and then goes on to describe an African American oasis that is “amazing, but not Utopia” (80). This clear invocation of utopia as political ideal is rare in light of contemporary questioning of the possibility of utopia, and rarer still is the bemused brio with which Toure describes Soul City. Founded by escaped slaves in 1821 and radiating outward from a 100-foot-tall statue of an afro pick topped by a black power fist, Soul City is literally the soul of the African American experience. Music pervades streets with names like Cool and Nappy Lane, courtesy of the mayor, whose primary responsibility is to act as DJ. All aspects of African American culture, from Fredrick Douglass to Tupak Shakur, are respectfully memorialized in Soul City. Soul City is not merely a celebration of popular culture, however. Young people volunteer to spend a year in simulated slavery so that they can honor their ancestors. The slaves who founded the city are still alive, thanks to their ability to smell Death and evade his summons; one of them, Fulcrum Negro, regularly commutes to heaven to check in on Louis Armstrong and other African American luminaries. The main focus of the novel is describing the workings of Soul City, though there is an amusing subplot about race traitor John Jiggaboo’s attempt to destroy Soul City by means of a shampoo that brainwashes even as it gives users perfect hair. Toure also occasionally checks in with Cadillac Johnson, a writer for the Chocolate City magazine—whose name is an unsubtle reference to a Parliament Funkadelic song about African American political hegemony—as he spends thirty three years trying to capture the essence of Soul City in a novel. Cadillac pursues Mahogany Sunflower, and their romance provides a diverting subplot. But as with most utopian writing, the primary function of the novel is to provide a vision of an alternative society. Bibliography Amidon, Stephen. The New City. New York: Doubleday, 2000. Aristophanes. The Birds and Other Plays. Trans. David Barrett and Alan Sommerstein. New York: Pengiun, 2003. Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward. New York: Signet Classics, 2000. Boyle, T. Coraghessan. Drop City. New York: Viking, 2003. Child, Lincoln. Utopia: A Novel. New York: Doubleday, 2002. Goonan, Kathleen Ann. Crescent City Rhapsody. New York: Avon Books, 2000. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance. New York: Penguin, 1983. More, Thomas. Utopia. New York: Penguin, 2003. Plato. The Republic. Trans. Desmond Lee. New York: Penguin, 2003. Powers, Richard. Plowing the Dark. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000. Sontag, Susan. In America: A Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000. Toure, Soul City. New York: Little, Brown, 2004. Tussig, Justin. The Best People in the World. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.

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Further Reading Abbott, Phillip. “Utopians at Play.” Utopian Studies: Journal of the Society for Utopian Studies 15.1 (2004): 44–62; DeKoven, Marianne. Utopias Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of Postmodernism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004; Goonan, Kathleen Ann. Queen City Jazz. New York: TOR, 1994; Goonan, Kathleen Ann. Mississippi Blues. New York: TOR, 1997; Goonan, Kathleen Ann. Light Music. New York: EOS, 2003; Hatzenberger, Antoine. “Islands and Empire: Beyond the Shores of Utopia.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 8.1 (2003): 119–128; Jacoby, Russell. Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005; Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and other Science Fictions. New York: Verso, 2005; Weinberg, Steven. “Five and a Half Utopias.” Atlantic Monthly 285.1 (Jan. 2000): 107–115.

MARK T. DECKER

V VAMPIRE FICTION Definition. Vampire fiction has been influenced by the conventions of Gothic literature, in that vampire stories are traditionally set in dark, mysterious castles, cathedrals, and mansions, or remote forests and mountains. In addition to the gloomy setting, vampire stories typically invoke fear and terror in the reader by unprovoked acts of cruelty, torture, and murder, thus anticipating and influencing modern horror literature. In the case of vampire fiction, the acts of cruelty are committed by vampires—animated corpses (the undead) who drink human blood by night and sleep during the day in underground crypts, avoiding the sun, which either reduces their powers or burns them to ashes. In addition to the vampires, who often do not appear until late in the story, the victims are stalked and bitten one or more times, eventually drained of their blood and turned into one of the undead, or simply left for dead. The vampire slayer, who has knowledge of vampires, then appears on the scene armed with religious relics and/or weaponry. The vampire slayer’s goal is to hunt down the preternatural creature, which can be destroyed only by extreme measures: staking the heart, removing the head, snapping the spine, exposing the creature to the sun, or incinerating it with fire. The vampire novel Carmilla (1871), by Sheridan Le Fanu, probably provided Bram Stoker with the basic elements for the best-known vampire novel of all time—Dracula (1897): All of the rituals and set pieces common to the modern formula appear in Carmilla, beginning with its three-part formal design—attack, death-resuscitation, and huntdestruction. Also included are the vampire’s seduction of its victim, the telltale bite on the victim’s neck, the slow physical deterioration of the victim, the confusion between dream and reality, the vain attempts to explain supernatural events in rational terms, and the folk recipes for recognizing, capturing, and killing vampires. (Campbell 1985, 228–229)

Although Campbell’s succinct definition of the modern formula for vampire fiction is useful for understanding some nineteenth-century vampire stories, the formula does

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not work for most contemporary vampire fiction—for example, Anne Rice’s Lestat and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint-Germain rarely attack humans or drink human blood, thus nullifying the “three-part formal design” identified by Campbell. In Our Vampires, Ourselves, Nina Auerbach challenges the very notion that there is a fixed genre of vampire literature or a fixed definition of a vampire. She claims, “There is no such thing as ‘The Vampire’; there are only vampires,” and since vampires are “[e]ternally alive, they embody not fear of death, but fear of life: their power and their curse is their undying vitality. From Varney to Dracula . . . from Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s disenchanted idealist, Count Saint-Germain, to Lestat and his friends, vampires long to die, at least in certain moods, infecting readers with fears of their own interminable lives” (5). Genre distinctions have been blurred in the twentieth century, and genre boundaries are permeable and notoriously fluid, especially so with vampires, because the undead have lately been appearing in Science Fiction, Romance Novels, Mystery Fiction, Spy Fiction, Fantasy Literature, Historical Fiction, Coming of Age Fiction, Graphic Novels, horror novels, and Young Adult Literature. History. Most scholars agree that John Polidori (1795–1821) wrote the first modern vampire story and published it in 1819 under Lord Byron’s name. The idea for the story was originally Byron’s, but Polidori—who took notes on stories told by Byron and the Shelleys in the summer of 1816 at Villa Diodati—eventually developed Byron’s oral form into a written story about a dark, mysterious nobleman, Lord Ruthven, who suddenly appears in an elite social circle in England. Aubrey, a young English gentleman, decides to accompany Ruthven on a grand tour of Europe and finds, much to his regret, that Ruthven, though charming and articulate, leaves in his wake once-virtuous–now-ruined women. A disillusioned Aubrey leaves Ruthven’s company, travels to Greece, and falls in love with a beautiful Greek peasant named Ianthe, who accompanies him to archaeological sites. Ianthe introduces Aubrey to stories of local vampires and warns Aubrey not to travel alone at night. Aubrey, of course, is lost in the woods on a stormy night and, upon hearing a woman scream, rushes into a hut and attempts to neutralize the woman’s assailant, who displays superhuman strength and escapes into the woods, but not before attempting to bite Aubrey. Aubrey begins to see apparitions of Ianthe, who has disappeared and been turned into a vampire. Now physically ill and psychologically distraught, Aubrey begins to realize that Ruthven has all the characteristics of a vampire. Nevertheless, he requests that Ruthven aid him in recovering his physical and emotional health. Ruthven nurses Aubrey back to health and elicits a promise that Aubrey will not speak about him for one year and one day. Aubrey agrees and returns to England only to find Ruthven courting his sister. On the midnight that the promise expires, Aubrey tells his sister’s guardians about Ruthven and then dies. His sister’s guardians attempt to intervene, but it is too late, as “Lord Ruthven ha[s] disappeared, and Aubrey’s sister ha[s] glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!” (no page, Online Version). Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871), as noted above, provided Bram Stoker with the basic elements for Dracula, which was written twenty years later. Laura, the daughter of a wealthy widower, befriends Carmilla, a young woman who boards with her family while her mysterious mother is away for a few months. Laura begins to dream of being bitten in the chest by a feline monster as her health slowly declines. After medical examinations fail to explain her deteriorating health, Laura and her father encounter General Speiledorf, whose daughter had suffered a similar fate through the actions of a mysterious woman named Millarca. The General

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convinces Laura and her father that Carmilla and Millarca are actually one and the same person: a two-hundred-year-old vampire, formerly Countess Mircalla Karnstein. Carmilla is subsequently destroyed by the General and Laura’s father. About Le Fanu, Campbell wrote: What Le Fanu added to the formula was a portrayal of a world turned upside down, a universe, as old General Spielsdorf complains, in which God tolerates vampiric lusts and all the malignity of hell. In such a world all values are reversed: dreams become reality, friends become enemies, death becomes life, love becomes hate, and rationality and science must turn to the irrational and the superstitious (folklore) to illuminate and to explain the forces of darkness. (Campbell 1985, 229)

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is, of course, the most famous vampire story of all time, combining the Byronic hero of Polidori, the eroticism of Carmilla, and a dualistic Christian world and life view. Dracula is far and away the most popular and influential vampire novel of the nineteenth and twentieth (and perhaps twenty-first) centuries. “Despite its flaws, Dracula is a novel of monumental influence, one whose imitations and offshoots have become a veritable industry. Its title character has transcended his origin in a Victorian thriller to become an embodiment of an age-old myth and the incarnation of ultimate evil” (Daniels 375). Written as a series of letters and journal entries, Dracula tracks Count Dracula’s movement from Transylvania to London, and back to Transylvania again. Beginning with Jonathan Harker, his first English victim in Transylvania, Dracula goes on to seduce Lucy Westenra—the best friend of Mina Harker and fiancé of Arthur Holmwood—and Mina Harker, in England. Dracula acts right under the noses of the ad hoc team hunting him, a team consisting of Jonathan Harker, Dr. John Seward (head of a psychiatric hospital), Arthur Holmwood (a wealthy aristocrat), Quincey Morris (a wealthy Texan), and Dr. Van Helsing, mentor of Dr. Seward and well versed in vampire lore. Holmwood, Morris, and Seward, though friends, have all fallen in love with Lucy Westenra, who finally chooses Arthur Holmwood, but the courtship is short lived as the Count has other plans for “poor Lucy.” The plot follows the “three-part formal design—attack, death-resuscitation, and hunt-destruction” pattern identified by Campbell. Harker, a solicitor, travels to Transylvania to meet Count Dracula and discuss the Count’s recently purchased estate in England. Harker is held captive by Dracula and turned into his blood slave until the Count leaves for England after passing him along to the “three weird sisters,” Dracula’s brides. Once in England, Dracula turns Lucy Westenra into a vampire and then silently stalks Mina Harker. Van Helsing teaches Seward, Holmwood, and Morris what he knows about the undead, after they have been forced to stake and behead “poor Lucy.” Word comes that Jonathan Harker is still alive but suffering from a “brain fever” at a hospital in Budapest. When Mina joins him, she learns that Jonathan has kept a journal while in Transylvania, which she promises never to read unless circumstances require unveiling the painful story. They both return to England and join Van Helsing, Seward, Morris, and the grieving Holmwood in their hunt for Dracula’s lairs in London. These lairs each contain one or more of fifty boxes of sacred earth brought by the Count from the chapel at Castle Dracula. The vampire hunters are able to sterilize forty-nine of the boxes with the sacred host, thus driving Dracula out of England and back to Transylvania. The rest of the novel is an extended chase scene that describes the vampire hunters closing in on an elusive Dracula.

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Count Dracula is at once a brooding Byronic hero whose seduction of his victims has strong erotic overtones, but he is also cursed by God for seeking immortality from the Evil one himself: Satan. On the one hand he is none other than the ruthless Vlad Dracul III, who valiantly fought the Turks in the late fifteenth century; on the other hand he is an evil, condemned monster who must feed on the blood of humans to flourish. Jonathan Harker initially describes him as “tall,” “clean shaven,” and “clad in black from head to foot” (Stoker, 25). He has a “strong face” and proves himself a good host, arranging Harker’s meals and bedroom for him. In spite of doubts about the Count, Harker is impressed with his intelligence and knowledge of England. Later in the novel, Van Helsing informs his fellow vampire hunters that Dracula has the strength of twenty men, is skilled in necromancy, and can “direct the elements . . . and command . . . the rat, and the owl, and the bat— the moth, and the fox, and the wolf. He can grow and become small; and he can at times vanish and come unknown” (Stoker, 243). As a vampire, Dracula possesses even greater powers than he did as the ruthless and cunning king of Wallachia. But the Count is evil, and we learn from Van Helsing that the horror of vampirism dates to ancient Greece, Rome, and the Orient. The Draculas (“dragons” in Slavic) “had dealings with the Evil One” and “learned the secrets” of immortality in the mountains by lake Hermanstadt (Stoker 246). Even though Dracula is evil, he has produced good and holy children through his “good women;” and “in soil barren of holy memories [Dracula] cannot rest” (Stoker, 247), which means that the Count has to haul boxes of sacred earth with him wherever he goes. He can only flourish on “the blood of the living” and “cannot die by mere passing of time.” He does not cast a shadow or reflect in a mirror, yet he can see in the dark. Unlike many of his successors, Dracula can function in daylight, though his powers are dramatically reduced. In spite of all these evil powers, Van Helsing claims that “he is not free” (Stoker, 245). Dracula cannot enter a place uninvited, “he can only change himself [into another form] at noon or at exact sunrise or sunset” and must have with him his “earth home.” In addition, he can be warded off with garlic, a consecrated host, or a crucifix; and a branch of wild rose placed on his coffin renders him helpless. A sacred bullet fired into his coffin can kill him, but to receive rest he must have a stake driven through his heart and his head removed (Stoker, 246). Dracula is irresistible to women, and his attempt to turn Mina into one of the undead is presented by Stoker as a veiled sexual seduction. The men open the bedroom door to find the Count standing next to Mina: “With his left hand he held both Mrs. Harker’s hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white night dress was smeared with blood, and a thick stream trickled down his bare breast which was shown by his torn-open dress” (Stoker, 288). When Mina recounts the events of the seduction, she tells the men that Dracula told her that she was “flesh of [his] flesh, blood of [his] blood; kin of [his] kin . . . and shall be later on [his] companion and [his] helper” (293; cf. Genesis 2–3). The Count and Mina are now blood partners, though Mina feels tainted and unclean like a victim of rape. Earlier when the vampire hunters encounter Lucy at her grave, we see a profound sexual transformation: “The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness.” Her eyes are now “unclean and full of hell-fire, instead of the pure gentle orbs” (Stoker, 217). When Lucy recognizes Holmwood, she moves toward him seductively “with a languorous, voluptuous grace” and moans, “Come to me, Arthur . . . My arms are hungry for you. Come and we can rest together” (Stoker, 218).

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Dracula is still read in many college English classes, and academic interest in Stoker’s vampire novel continues, as evidenced by the publication of the Norton Critical Edition of Dracula—which celebrates 100 years since its first publication—a novel that “seemed commonplace in 1897” because it was simply one of “many fantastic adventure stories pitting manly Englishmen against foreign monsters” (ix). The 1880s and 1890s saw the publication of works by Kipling (Jungle Book), Stevenson (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) and Wells (The Island of Dr. Moreau) that featured exotic places and strange encounters with a variety of monsters. Nina Auerbach and David Skal, editors of the Norton Dracula, argue that the greatest threats to the English at the time of the publication of Dracula were foreigners, women, and Oscar Wilde. The New Woman threatened the Englishman with her aspirations of independence, selfhood, and education, whereas a flood of strange immigrants from the far-flung corners of the British Empire threatened the racial purity of the Englishman. And because Bram Stoker knew Oscar Wilde well and may have had homosexual leanings himself, it is possible that “[t]he Wilde trials of 1895 . . . shocked Stoker into writing Dracula as we know it, for Wilde’s two-year imprisonment for ‘acts of gross indecency’ gave Victorian England a new monster of its own clinical making: the homosexual” (xi). Literary critics analyzed Dracula from a variety of critical perspectives from the 1970s through the 1990s (see below), but scholarly interest in Dracula seems to have waned since the year 2000, in spite of the continued popularity of the Count and other vampires who appear in countless popular books, television series, movies, graphic novels, comic books, and Web sites. Trends and Themes. In Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture (2002), William Patrick Day studies the figure of the vampire in the literature, film, and television of the United States from Bela Lugosi’s Dracula (1933) through the popular Buffy TV series, which ended with its 100th episode in 2002. Day argues that there are three contemporary modes of the vampire story: (1) the liberated vampire who “is not a supernatural monster or Stoker’s Antichrist but a post-Christian image of humanity ready to be set free from the restraints and limitations of an outmoded and repressive past”; (2) the “post human vampire” who is “self-alienated and without center, a mere creature of its needs”; and (3) the vampire slayer. Day points out that the slayer virtually disappears with the liberated vampire—after all, why kill a sensitive, aesthetic creature such as Rice’s Louis or Yarbro’s Saint Germain? Nevertheless, the slayer’s services are once again needed with the appearance of the post human or rogue vampire (2002, 8–9). These three types of stories— the humane and human vampire, the monster vampire, and the slayer—account for a large number of vampire stories found in popular culture media. For a history of vampires in film and television through 1999, see Day’s Vampire Legends (2002) and Melton’s The Vampire Book (1999). The figures of the humane vampire, the undead monster, and the slayer are evident in Forever Knight (1992–1995 TV series), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992 movie), and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992 movie; 1997–2003 TV series). Bram Stoker’s Dracula features Gary Oldham as the Count, and though faithful to Stoker’s presentation of Dracula as a monster, it departs from Stoker’s narrative by including a love story. Forever Knight tells the story of Nick Knight, a police officer who is also a vampire intent on keeping his dark secret while protecting humans from criminals. The movie version of Buffy (1992) was completely overshadowed by the popular 100-episode series starring Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy, the teenage vampire slayer from the Valley.

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Interview with the Vampire (1994) brought Anne Rice’s 1976 novel to the screen, starring Brad Pitt as Louis and Tom Cruise as Lestat. Rice’s third novel was turned into a movie of the same name, Queen of the Dead (2002), which starred Aliah as Akasha, the Queen of vampires. Underworld (2003) featured Kate Beckensale as Celine, a millennium-old vampire who attempts to protect Michael Corvin from the Lycans (werewolves) only to see him morph into a new “vamplican” species. In Underworld Evolution (2006), the metamorphosis of Corvin is completed, and now the struggle is to protect humans from William (a lycan) and Marcus (a vampire), the twin sons of the original vampire Alexander Corvinus. Salem’s Lot (2004) is a movie adaptation of the popular Stephen King novel about a New England town overrun by vampires. In Van Helsing (2004), we learn that Abraham Van Helsing has kept himself alive with blood from Dracula, who is entombed in a basement vault of the old slayer’s antiquities business, and later awakened by foolish thieves. In the Blade movies (Blade, 1998; Blade II, 2002; and Blade: Trinity, 2004), Wesley Snipes stars as Blade, a vampire who can control his appetite for human blood and who fights against renegade vampires intent on turning the human race into dormant blood slaves. Dracula 2000 is a rather weak attempt to retell the original Stoker tale in contemporary times; and Dracula 3000 pushes the tale out into deep space, where the crew members of a salvage ship board a freighter filled with coffins, only to learn that they are the great-great-grandchildren of the original Stoker characters who have been lured by the Count into a final battle. It is beyond the purview of this article to describe the ubiquity of the figure of the vampire in the variegated popular culture media. Melton identifies a revival of interest in comic book vampires, for example, with the issue of Blood of the Innocent by WarP Comics in 1986. This was followed by Apple Comics’ Blood of Dracula (1987–1992), Marvel Comics’ Blood (1987–1988), and Innovation’s 12-issue adaptation of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat (1990). Melton notes, “The ten new vampire titles which appeared in 1990 became 23 titles in 1991. In 1992 no fewer than 34 titles were published, followed by a similar number in 1993” (Melton 1999, 137). Since then, Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire and Queen of the Dead (Innovation) have been adapted as comic book series, as well as Le Fanu’s Carmilla (Aircel) and Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Topps Comics).

The TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) spawned an industry all its own. The Buffy Library (www.cesnur.org/buffy_library.html) is an international annotated bibliography that includes only book-length studies of the series in a multiplicity of languages. Slayage:The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies was developed in 2001 and contains hundreds of journal, newspaper, and magazine articles (www.slayageonline.com) on the TV series. There are currently numerous online Buffy fanzines, and Darkhorse published a series of some sixty Buffyverse graphic novels, which are not based on actual TV episodes, being rather new adventures for Buffy and friends. Scholarly papers are presented every year on the series at the Popular Culture Association conference, and many of these papers are published in the Journal of Popular Culture. Jan Battis has analyzed family relationships, which are based on loyalty rather than heredity, in Blood Relations: Chosen Families in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (McFarland Press, 2005), and Open Court Press has published a volume of scholarly articles on Buffy from a number of philosophical perspectives entitled Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale (2003) in their Popular Culture and Philosophy series.

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As far as fiction is concerned, the three modes identified by Melton—the humane vampire, the undead monster, and the slayer—have grown exponentially, especially in terms of book series. There are scores of vampire novel series currently in print in the United States, beginning with Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles (1976–2003), featuring the vampire Lestat, and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint-Germain series (1978–2007), which continues with stories of Saint-Germain in historical hot spots. Lestat and Saint-Germain are the quintessential humane vampires who mourn the loss of their humanity and refuse to kill humans to feed themselves. Rice’s and Yarbro’s novels are written sympathetically from the perspective of the vampires whose loss and suffering are narrated at length. Laurel K. Hamilton’s Master Vampire Jean-Claude and L.A. Banks’s vampire Carlos continue this tradition of troubled, humane vampires deeply connected to and protective of humans. Almost all of the popular vampire series include rogue vampires who feed on humans and destroy whatever harmony exists among vampires. Anne Rice’s Santino, the Satanic cult leader, and Akasha, the Queen of the Dead, are renegade monsters. Laurel K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series has the vampire slayer Anita killing a multitude of rogue vampires in the earlier novels in the series and other more sophisticated undead in the latter part of the series to protect Jean-Claude’s community of vampires. L.A. Banks’s Damali (Vampire Huntress Legends) is joined by her community of guardians in protecting humans from vampires, shape-shifters, demons, and a plethora of other monsters. Elizabeth Kostova’s retelling of the original Dracula story in The Historian revives the image of the arrogant, bloodthirsty monster Vlad Tepes III. Though the figure of the slayer is also alive and well in contemporary vampire fiction, it is threatened with extinction as the vampires become increasingly human and humane. In Laurel K. Hamilton’s 14-volume series (1993–2007), Anita Blake is a necromancer and vampire slayer who becomes increasingly involved in the world of both vampires and shape-shifters who now share legal status with human communities—but Anita still hunts and slays rogue shifters and vampires. In the eight novels in L.A. Banks’s Vampire Huntress Legends (2003–2007), Damali is a Neteru who has power over vampires, but she attracts them too, because a vampire-neteru union can produce daywalkers—vampires unaffected by sunlight. Again, though Damali eventually marries Carlos, a human-turned-vampire-turned human, she slays vampires who are still connected to the Vampire Council, a group bent on the destruction of the human race. Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse, a telepath, hunts and slays both vampires and shape-shifters that threaten her rural Louisiana community. Context and Issues. Vampires also appear in a variety of popular literary genres including historical fiction, romance, science fiction, fantasy, crime fiction, spy fiction, and—of course—comedy and satire. A favorite approach of contemporary vampire novelists is to place a vampire in a turbulent historical context with known historical figures or to show that a famous historical person was, in fact, a vampire. William Meickle sets his historical novel The Coming of the King (2003) in Wales, Scotland, and England in 1745. The vampire King is coming to claim the throne of England, and the group of slayers who have been watching for him have fallen into disarray. Mary Anne Mitchell’s In the Name of the Vampire (2005), The Vampire De Sade (2004), Tainted Blood (2003), Cathedral of Vampires (2002), and Sips of Blood (1999) all tell the story of the Marquis de Sade, who was actually a vampire and continues his debauchery after his undeath. In A Taste for Blood (2003), Diana Lee narrates the story of Ryan, an 800-year-old vampire dating back to the Vikings.

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Posing as a Scottish noble, Ryan turns a young Victorian woman into a vampire, and she must now learn the ropes of vampirism. In Night of the Dragon’s Blood (1997), William Pridgen’s mysterious heroine is none other than Eva Peron, who has been turned into a vampire by Adolph Hitler. In Mother Julian and the Gentle Vampire (2000), the story of Lesbiana Boyd is told by Jack Pantaleo. Lesbiana is a 600-year-old Christian vampire whose bite and blood actually cause people to flourish and to become fully alive. Lesbiana, a contemporary of Julianna of Norwich, is pursued by the Five Pretties, vampire versions of the furies. Finally, Michael Schiefelbein’s Vampire Thrall (2003) is about Victor Decimus, a 2,000-year-old vampire rejected by Jesus as lover who takes revenge on the church and monasteries over the course of two millennia. Along similar historical lines are tales of revived revenants, vampires from nineteenth-century literature who never actually died. Kyle Martin’s Carmilla: The Return (2000) updates Carmilla’s story from the original Le Fanu novel with flashbacks to the nineteenth century. The Book of Renfield: A Gospel of Dracula (2005), by Tim Lucas, is set in Dracula’s day and tells the story of Renfield, who has been in psychic contact with the Count all along. And Elizabeth Kostova revives the Count himself in The Historian (2005), and he is still bent on world domination (see below). Vampires are apparently good lovers, given that many of the contemporary series present male and female vampires as capable of having great sex. Katie Macalister’s A Girl’s Guide to Vampires (2003), Sex and the Single Vampire (2004) and Sex, Lies and Vampires (2005) all tell stories of young women who fall in love with attractive men who turn out to be vampires. In A Taste for Passion (2003), Patrice Michelle’s Rana Sterling falls in love with the perfect man, but he turns out to be a vampire who must assume leadership of an elite group on the condition that he have a wife. Rana is willing to take the vampire as her lover, but she is unwilling to be his wife. Finally, Nora Roberts’s Circle Trilogy (2006) involves three young couples who fall in love while fighting an army of vampires intent on enslaving the human race (see below). Vampires also make good detectives and spies because of their night vision and stealth. Jon F. Merz’s The Syndicate: A Lawson Vampire Novel tells the story of Lawson, a vampire cop working in contemporary New York City. Savannah Russe’s Beyond the Pale: The Darkening Chronicles (2005) is about Daphne Urban, a vampire proficient in modern languages who has been pressed into service by the CIA to spy on arms dealers. There are also comedies and parodies of the vampire genre. Lynsay Sands’s Single White Vampire (2003), Love Bites (2004), Tall, Dark and Hungry (2004), and A Quick Bite (2005) tell the comedic and romantic stories of Lucern Argeneau and the vampires he has made, one of whom cannot stand the sight of blood. In Carpe Jugulum: A Novel of Discworld, Terry Pratchett satirizes vampires and the conventions of the genre. Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse (see below) is a mind reader who takes vampires and were-creatures as lovers and who works as a waitress at a local bar and shops at Wal-Mart. Christopher Moore’s You Suck: A Love Story (2007) is the story of Thomas C. Flood, who wakes up as a vampire one morning after a date with a woman who turns out to be a vampire. Janet Maslin of the New York Times writes: “The title needs mentioning because the book will be too popular to be ignored. You Suck is funny enough to reanimate Mr. Moore’s fans . . . It’s sure to appeal to anyone who shares the author’s ideas of a fun-loving vampire’s priorities” (2).

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Selected Authors. The vampire story has also taken a multicultural turn. What follows is a selective look at seven authors who have adapted the vampire tradition to a distinctive cultural context. This short discussion will hopefully give the reader a sense of the variety of cultural contexts explored by vampire literature. We will begin with Anne Rice’s haute couture vampires Lestat and Louis, from the Vampire Chronicles, where the reader is introduced to an ancient, wealthy, and educated line of vampires. Next comes Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint-Germain, a kinder, gentler vampire who loves human beings in spite of their folly. Then we move on to Laurel K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake, a suburban huntress and necromancer by vocation who is regularly called by the police to carry out tasks involving vampires and shapeshifters. Then there is L.A. Banks’s Damali, a hip-hop artist who together with the Guardians is attempting to forestall the Armageddon, the final battle between the forces of good and evil on planet Earth. From there we head to rural Louisiana to see Sookie Stackhouse, a simple country girl, lock horns with redneck shape-shifters and rural vampires. To end our discussion of contemporary vampire series, we turn to Nora Roberts’s Circle Trilogy and her romantic vampires. Coming full circle, this review of American vampire literature ends with Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, which is a return to the dark, gothic world of the old monster himself, Count Dracula. In addition to confirming Auerbach’s thesis “that every age embraces the vampire it needs” (Ourselves, 145), this discussion should also make evident that every culture (and, perhaps, class) creates the vampire that it needs. Anne Rice (1941–): Haute Couture Vampires and Lestat, their Prince. Anne Rice, far more than any other American author, has reshaped the vampire tradition and created a veritable vampire industry in the United States. Her 12-volume Vampire Chronicles (1976–2003) relate the stories of a number of ancient vampires—Marius, Pandora, and Armand, to name three—as well as the story of “those who must be kept,” the ancient vampires Enkil and Akasha. But in the end, it is the figure of Lestat that dominates the Chronicles. The first of Anne Rice’s vampire novels, Interview with the Vampire (1976), is narrated by Louis, an eighteenth- century French-American who owns plantations near New Orleans. Louis is a sensitive, humane vampire who is “turned” by Lestat, with whom he hunts New Orleans until he no longer can bear Lestat’s cruelty and arrogance. During an interview to a reporter in the 1970s, he explains the difference between himself and Lestat: “I killed animals . . . Lestat killed humans all the time, sometimes two or three a night, sometimes more. He would drink from one just enough to satisfy a momentary thirst, and then go on to another. The better the human, as he would say in his vulgar way, the more he liked it” (41). While hunting one night in New Orleans, Lestat takes Louis to a hospital filled with children dying of the fever. Lestat adopts one of the children by paying a priest, and he takes the young girl home with them. Louis feeds on Claudia, then Lestat allows her to feed from him, turning her into a vampire. Louis is horrified, but Lestat informs Claudia that he and Louis are now her parents. That first morning, at Lestat’s insistence, Claudia sleeps with Louis in his casket. Although Lestat teaches Claudia how to refine her vampiric powers, she and Louis develop a deeper bond through exploration of the arts. Eventually, Louis and Claudia decide to murder Lestat and then travel to Europe in search of other, perhaps more humane, vampires. After disposing of Lestat’s body, they head to Europe and travel extensively until they find a community of vampires at the Theatre des Vampires in Paris, France.

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Armand, who will have a novel devoted exclusively to his life later in the Chronicles, is the head of the Theatre des Vampires, which produces surrealistic plays that invariably end with the sacrificial death of a woman. Louis and Claudia think they have found a home until they realize that Santiago, second in command at the Theatre des Vampires, is plotting to have them killed for Lestat’s murder and Claudia’s turning an older woman into her vampire mother. Armand helps Louis to escape, and the two travel together until Armand decides they must part. Sad and filled with pain, Louis heads back to New Orleans and discovers that Lestat has survived the murder attempt. In The Vampire Lestat (1985), the second installment of the Vampire Chronicles, Lestat tells his own story retrospectively from the vantage point of 1984, when he is a rock superstar whose first album has sold over four million copies. Lestat opens with a flair, “I am the vampire Lestat. I’m immortal. More or less. The light of the sun, the sustained heat of an intense fire—these things might destroy me. But then again, they might not” (3). We learn that Lestat is six-feet tall, that he has thick, blond, curly hair and grey eyes, and that he was made a vampire in the 1780s, went underground in 1929 and was reawakened in 1984, when a rock band began to practice in a house near his, on Sixth Street in New Orleans. The disenfranchised seventh son of a French aristocrat, Lestat runs away to Paris with his friend Nicki just prior to the French Revolution. They find work at Renaud’s House of Thespians, Lestat acting and Nicki playing his violin. One winter night Lestat is abducted from his flat by Magnus, a very old vampire, and turned into a vampire at Magnus’s tower just outside of Paris. The day after Lestat is given the Dark Trick, Magnus bequeaths his wealth and residence to Lestat then leaps into the roaring flames of a huge fire he has prepared inside the tower. Lestat, in despair, explores the tower and discovers Magnus’s immense wealth as well as his sarcophagus, which has the faint outline of a cross on the lid. Lestat learns that neither the cross nor the writing “The Lord Jesus Christ” on the sarcophagus has any effect on himself. He also discovers that neither sacred images nor jewel-encrusted crucifixes affect him adversely and that he is able to see his image in a mirror. He thus concludes that God has no power over him. But he also learns that “vampires can love each other” (102), and that he had, indeed, loved Magnus, his maker. And this love extends to humans as well—even the act of taking the life of a human contains “the perfect semblance of love” (142), at least for the vampire. Rice presents Lestat as a preternatural lover, making explicit what is only implied in Stoker’s Dracula—that the blood feast is for vampires what sex is for humans: “I looked into her eyes and saw them glaze over. I felt the heat of her breasts swelling beneath her rags. Her soft, succulent body tumbled against me . . . I kissed her, feeding on her heat . . . There weren’t any words for the rapture. But I’d had all the ecstasy that rape could give . . . The very blood seemed warmer with their innocence, richer with their goodness” (142). Lestat’s new aesthetic vision of the world is that of the Savage Garden, and in this garden, governed by aesthetic principles and not natural theology, “these innocent ones belonged in the vampire’s arms” (143). And so the journey begins for Lestat, who quickly works the Dark Trick on his dying mother Gabrielle and his best friend, Nicki, who had been kidnapped by a superstitious coven of vampires trapped in the Christian worldview, seeing themselves as eternally damned. Lestat and Gabrielle travel throughout Europe in search of other vampires and find only ragged, superstitious vampires who believe themselves damned by the Christian god and condemned to dwell in cemeteries and catacombs. Gabrielle

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eventually goes off on her own in search of the beauties of nature, while Lestat continues his search for an ancient vampire named Marius, leaving messages for him everywhere he travels, but he eventually despairs of finding him and goes dormant in Cairo, Egypt. Lestat is awakened by Marius himself and taken to an island in the Mediterranean Sea, where Marius now tells his story, which is retold in greater detail in Blood and Gold: The Story of Marius (2001). In the remainder of the novel, Lestat learns that vampires are much older and far more powerful than they are in the account given in Stoker’s Dracula. In fact, Marius, himself the son of a Roman patrician, was given the Dark Trick in the time of Augustus Caesar. Most importantly, however, Lestat is introduced to “Those Who Must Be kept,”—the ancient, original vampire couple, Enkil and Akasha— who sit statuesquely on thrones, apparently in a dormant state, in a temple built by Marius. Lestat awakens Akasha by playing a violin, and Akasha draws him to herself in an exchange of blood. This “shimmering circuit” is broken by Enkil, who almost crushes Lestat, but Marius intervenes, threatening Enkil with the removal of Akasha, So Lestat is spared and flees immediately. In addition to learning vampire history, Lestat also describes how he had fallen in love with Louis in the eighteenth century and how Louis, in Interview with the Vampire, had misrepresented him on a number of counts, especially in his claim that Lestat toyed with humans and then killed them, which becomes the justification for Louis and Claudia to murder Lestat. Lestat points out that Louis could not have understood that he “hunted almost exclusively among the gamblers, the thieves and the killers” being “faithful” to his “unspoken vow to kill the evildoer” (499). Lestat moves on to the nineteenth century and tells us that “vampires were ‘discovered’ by the literary writers of Europe.” He then describes Polidori’s and Le Fanu’s vampires, ending with a description of Stoker’s Dracula, “the big ape of vampires, the hirsute Slav Count Dracula” (500). Rice has both challenged and transformed the vampire tradition and created a novel mythology of vampire origins. In The Queen of the Damned (1988), Akasha is awakened from her dormant state by Lestat’s band, The Vampire Lestat. Akasha has drained Enkil of his blood and power and left Marius—the faithful warden of “Those Who Must Be kept”— buried under tons of ice and cement. Akasha summons Lestat, whom she now employs as her new consort and henchman to carry out her plan to create a new world order, in which the Queen herself—as the Goddess who will create a new Garden of Eden for women—rules. This, of course, will involve the destruction of all males, vampire and human, on planet Earth, and this she sets out to do with Lestat, unwilling yet subservient, at her side. In this third installment of the Vampire Chronicles we learn more of the origins of vampirism, which stretch back 6,000 years and involve Maharet, Mekare, and a troublesome familiar spirit named Amel, who has been trying to impress Maharet and Mekare—powerful, redheaded twin witches who live with their ancient tribe in the caves of Mount Carmel, in Palestine. Akasha and Enkil, King and Queen of Egypt, learn of the telepathic abilities of the twins and send an army to slaughter the tribe and bring Maharet and Mekare to Egypt. Amel, who had been experimenting with passing through humans and tasting their blood, follows the twins to Egypt and raises havoc in the court to show off his power. The priests of Egypt are terrified by Amel’s mischief, and fearing their own cult of the dead threatened, stab the royal couple to death one evening, telling the people that Amel had committed the crime. But a strange transformation occurs: “The Queen lay on the floor writhing

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as if in agony, the blood pouring from her wounds, and a great reddish cloud enveloped her; it was like a whirlpool surrounding her, or rather a wind sweeping up countless tiny drops of blood. And in the midst of the swirling wind or rain or whatever it could be called, the Queen twisted and turned, her eyes rolling up into her head” (386). Akasha has become the first vampire, and shortly after her revival, she heals the wounds of the king, who becomes the second vampire. She eventually turns Maharet, Mekare, and their trusted court advisor, Khayman, into vampires, and so the long story of vampirism begins. Now the ancient vampires must stop the renegade Akasha, but if they kill Akasha, they could all perish because Akasha possesses the core of what used to be Amel. The Tale of the Body Thief (1992) is a side story involving Lestat’s growing disillusionment with vampiric life. Indeed, Lestat desires to experience being human again, and he is approached by a man who claims to be able to trade bodies for a short time. Lestat immediately regrets the exchange, but it is too late: the body thief has disappeared and Lestat is left in an older, ailing body. In Memnoch the Devil (1995), Lestat meets the devil and learns that Memnoch is not the bad guy, but that God has blundered in so many ways that he was forced to send his son to die. Memnoch turns out to be an advocate for humans, and God a blundering, powerful creator who loses track of his creation and feels alienated from the crown of his creation—humans. In the next five installments of the Chronicles, Rice tells the stories of five vampires. Armand (The Vampire Armand 1998) is given the Dark Trick by Marius and kidnapped by Santino, the head of the Satan-worshipping cult in Rome. In Pandora (1998), we are given the story of Marius’s great love, Pandora, who disappeared for a millennium from Marius’s sight. In Vittorio the Vampire (1999), Vittorio, a 500-year-old Italian vampire with a philosophical bent, tells the story of his search for meaning. Merrick (2000) is the story of Merrick Mayfair, one of the darkskinned Mayfair witches, who possesses an incredible power to call spirits and vampires to herself, which she does when she beckons David Talbot, Louis, and Lestat to her home in New Orleans. More than anything Merrick wants to become a vampire. Marius, in Blood and Gold (2001), tells his story of receiving the dark gift during the reign of Caesar Augustus, and he also narrates the long odyssey of caring for “Those Who Must Be Kept,” as he moves their thrones and stiff bodies from Rome to Constantinople, then to Italy (just north of Venice) and finally to Dresden. The final two novels in the Chronicles return to the continuing adventures of Lestat. In Blackwood Farm (2002), Rice brings her Mayfair witches and the vampire Lestat together at Blackwood Farm, the antebellum mansion of the Mayfair clan. Quinn Blackwood has been given the dark gift, but this turns his doppelgänger, Goblin, into a fierce opponent, which drives Quinn to seek out Lestat for help. Lestat’s tale is brought to completion in Blood Canticle (2003), as he falls in love with Rowan Mayfair, the famous witch of the Mayfair Chronicles, who is married to Michael Curry. Lestat, fresh from his strange encounters in heaven and hell, now longs to be good and longs for redemption, and he achieves a redemption of sorts by refusing to turn Rowan Mayfair into a vampire. But he remains the tormented and arrogant vampire his fans have come to know and love: “I wanna be a saint, I wanna save souls by the millions, I wanna look like an angel . . . But you know me, and come sunset, maybe it will be time to hunt the back roads” (305–306). In an interview with Book, Anne Rice comments on the end of the series: “I had made the decision that I wanted to move away from the witches and vampires altogether.

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I wanted to write something completely different. I no longer really wanted to write about people who were damned or who were condemned. . . . and I think [Blood Canticle] is about that—being the end of the road, the last of the chronicles” (Quoted in “Anne Rice,” Contemporary Authors, NRS, 376). With the Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice has dramatically transformed the vampire tradition. Rice’s central vampires—Lestat, Louis, Marius, and Pandora—see themselves as monsters, but they eventually stop preying on humans, unlike the monster Dracula. These vampires are beautiful, powerful, and devoted to the arts and learning. And, to the degree that it is possible for a vampire, they fall in love with humans and other vampires. Though vampires cannot have normal sexual relations, they have deep feelings and “sleep” together in heterosexual and homosexual arrangements. In addition, Rice removes the origin of vampirism from a Christian frame and places it into a world of spirits and demons where God, even if he does exist, matters very little. Finally, Rice is able to trace the history of vampirism through sequels and prequels involving Lestat and a host of other vampires from its origin 6,000 years ago to the present day. The first two installments of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles met with critical acclaim as a fresh beginning for the vampire tradition, but in spite of continued popularity among fans, the last ten installments were not well received. The negative criticism begins with Queen of the Damned. For example, New York Times columnist Michiko Kakutani acknowledges that Rice has developed a fully coherent vampire mythology in Queen, but there are weaknesses: “By filtering staple mythic conventions—orphaned children, corrupt rulers, stark confrontations between good and evil—through her own Gothic sensibility, she is able to create an entertaining legend of her own. It’s a campy, somewhat tongue-in-cheek legend, but like all successful legends it defines a coherent world that remains faithful to its own peculiar rules and logic” (15 October 1988, Online Version). In Our Vampires, Ourselves (1995) Nina Auerbach views Rice’s Loius and Lestat as twentiethcentury versions of Polidori and Byron, rekindling the pre-Dracula vampire tradition of intimacy and homoeroticism (152–154), but as the 1980s wear on she sees Lestat and the other vampires practicing an insular identity politics— withdrawn, depressed, and unconcerned about humans. Typical of the 1980s Reagan years, “Rice’s vampires are beautifully devoid of social consciousness, another major attraction for disaffected readers” (154). In spite of negative criticism, a large number of sessions have been devoted to Rice’s vampires at the Popular Culture Association’s annual conference for the last twenty years, and many of these papers appear in the Journal of Popular Culture. Unlike Stoker’s Dracula, which continues to draw considerable scholarly attention, literary scholars have remained indifferent to Anne Rice’s vampire novels. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (1942–): Saint-Germain: A Kinder, Gentler Vampire. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro opens her Saint-Germain series in 1978 with Hotel Transylvania, set in 1743 Paris and involving Madelaine de Montalia, a beautiful aristocrat in danger of being ruined by a group of Satanists. Saint-Germain has been a vampire for over four millennia, and he has learned painfully, through trial and error, how to live among humans. Yarbro subsequently sets all of her historical novels involving SaintGermain in a politically turbulent time and place. Saint-Germain, the very antithesis of Lestat, has become wise and compassionate over the long millennia, adapting to the language and culture of a given place, adopting the clothing, the cuisine (for his servants), and the customs of the people he stealthily moves among. His longevity is

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his strength, and it tends to compensate for the vampiric weaknesses of needing native earth (to sleep and walk on) and blood (animal mostly and human when ethically possible), and experiencing vertigo when near running water. The historical settings for Yarbro’s novels vary widely and no doubt reflect Yarbro’s historical interests. For example, in The Palace (1978) Saint-Germain is in Renaissance Florence during the rise of the intolerant Savonarola. In Blood Games (1979), Atta Olivia Clemens becomes his lover during the reign of Nero. SaintGermain finds himself in China during the reign of Genghis Khan in Path of the Eclipse (1981). In Tempting Fate (1982), the Russian Revolution drives Saint-Germain to Germany, where the Nazi Party is on the rise. Darker Jewels (1993) places him in the court of Ivan the Terrible in Russia. Saint-Germain takes a sixteenth-century Inca Princess as lover and runs into trouble with the Spanish in Mansions of Darkness (1996). In Writ in Blood (1997), Saint-Germain is on a diplomatic mission, on behalf of Czar Nicholas from Russia, to England to attempt to stop the outbreak of World War I, and he takes as lover a young artist named Rowena Saxon. The plague strikes Provence in the fourteenth century, and Saint-Germain is forced to flee and take on the identity of a troubadour in Blood Roses (1999). More recently, in Come Twilight (2000), Saint-Germain, now 3,500 years old, finds himself on the Iberian Peninsula, after he leaves Toletum for the Pyrenees in 620 C.E. He travels with his faithful servant (and ghoul) of 700 years, Rogerian. Yarbro divides this historical novel into four sections, each beginning respectively in 620, 720, 750, and 1117 C.E. and tracing Saint-Germain’s and Rogerian’s travels throughout Spain in pre-Moor, Moor, and post-Moor times. In addition to avoiding Muslim-Christian battlefields, Saint-Germain also attempts to avoid a vampire named Chimenae, whom he turned and who has created a community of vampires that preys on villagers and Muslim soldiers in and around the small village of Mt. Calcius. Yarbro has done her homework and is careful to show how Saint-Germain adapts his dress, language, and customs to the time and place. Saint-Germain is scarcely a vampire because he stopped drinking human blood centuries ago, subsisting on the blood of animals and on the erotic, heterosexual human touch. Saint-Germain is a compassionate vampire who stops to help injured travelers with his medicaments and cares for his horses as if they were his children. Whereas Rice’s Lestat is tortured by his memory and his boredom, Saint-Germain has become increasingly humane through the ages, and he values his experience: “Thought is always of value, and memory, no matter how painful, can illuminate life” (24). In Come Twilight, Saint-Germain is a slave, a beggar, a monk, and a courier. He is invariably misunderstood by the ignorant, greedy, and violent Christians and Muslims who seek to use his knowledge of history and languages to their own end. In addition, Saint-Germain attempts to teach Chimenae how to live as a vampire among humans. Over the 500 years that transpire in this novel we see Saint-Germain patiently calling on her to leave the cult of the blood that she has created in Mt. Calcius, and to stop making and destroying vampires as if they were toys to be played with then thrown away. Chimenae will not accept the long, historical vision of Saint-Germain, being rather like a child who lives for the immediate gratification of the next kill. Throughout the novel, Saint-Germain receives letters from Olivia, who is now in Rome and who stands in stark contrast to Chimenae. In her final letter to Saint-Germain, Olivia longs for ancient, pagan Rome as she reflects on the barbarism of the current Rome under the Holy Roman Emperor Lothair II, who must deal with two rival pretenders to the papal throne: Anacletus II in Rome and Innocent II in France.

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In States of Grace (2005) Di Santo Germano is a Renaissance man—scientist (alchemist), historian, philosopher, musician, and overall humanist—who finds himself in Venice, Italy, in 1530, shortly after the commencement of the Spanish Inquisition (1522) by Charles I. Because he owns printing presses in Venice, Burges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam, Saint-Germain must travel through these cities in the Spanish Netherlands while Christians fight their internecine battles and Ottoman Corsairs raid merchant ships, including Saint-Germain’s, on the Mediterranean. In Venice, Saint-Germain is the patron and lover of Pier Ariana Salier, composer and musician, whose music he publishes and whose welfare he has at heart. While traveling away from Venice to check on his publishing ventures, a plot is hatched by Venetian businessmen to steal Saint-Germain’s property and appropriate his wealth, thus leaving Pier Ariana bereft of her benefaction. Like all the later novels in this series, States of Grace is a carefully researched historical novel that attempts to be faithful to the late Renaissance culture of Western Europe under the Spanish Emperor Charles I (Carlos V). Yarbro skillfully depicts how a wise pagan might navigate the political and theological landmines of Catholic Italy and a growing Protestant movement in the Netherlands and Germany. SaintGermain’s claim to “follow no king and serve no known gods” (42) sets him up for serious trouble in a time and place where the state religion is determined by the theological leanings of the prince but can be overturned by the Pope or Holy Roman Emperor. The Peace of Westphalia (1648), the landmark treaty of religious toleration, is still 118 years in the future. In addition, Saint-Germain is publishing books on science, geography, music, and history—works that try to skirt but invariably assume a theological position at a time when printing presses in Catholic Europe are being censored and closed for publishing heretical tracts by Protestants. In this historical situation, the Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim zealot is each “purveying his own state of grace” (147–148) and the only thing that might unite them would be the discovery of a vampire in their midst. And, in fact, Saint-Germain is being watched closely by spies, because of his wealth and his publishing activities. If he is discovered to be a witch or a heretic, he will be burned at the stake. Again, this is a historical novel about the ideal man, the true Renaissance humanist who is learned and compassionate and who agonizes over human folly. As a vampire, Saint-Germain lives largely on animal blood but needs human touch—the touch of a woman—more than he needs blood. Nevertheless, he takes small quantities of blood from his lovers while making love—generally limiting his encounters with his courtesans to five, because the sixth encounter turns the woman into a vampire. Unlike Lestat, Saint-Germain possesses limited strength, though he is a skillful warrior. Sunlight irritates him, and crossing water creates disorientation, which turns out to be a regular problem in Venice with its canals and harbors. He sleeps on boxes filled with his native earth and stuffs the same into the hollow soles of his boots. Apart from these irritations, Saint-Germain is Yarbro’s ideal man—intelligent, selfless, and thoughtful. Through Saint-Germain, Yarbro implicitly critiques a modern world embroiled in ideological and religious wars. Yarbro’s Saint-Germain series has received positive reviews from Library Journal, Science Fiction Chronicle, and Publishers Weekly throughout the years and an occasional accolade from The Washington Post “Book World” critic, Brian Jacomb, who writes of the Saint-Germian series: “Among her works is a series of historical vampire tales featuring Count Saint-Germain, who is, in this reader’s opinion, the most eloquent of all undead characters” (8 April 1999, Online Version). A year later

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Jacomb reviewed Come Twilight: “Chelsea Quinn Yarbro has created a character who makes other vampires pale by comparison. This 3,500-year-old aristocrat has been keeping Yarbro’s many fans home at night for two decades” (30 October 2000, Online Version). In Our Vampires, Ourselves (1995), Nina Auerbach claims that Saint-Germain “epitomizes the highly evolved vampire of the late 1970s, whose refinement is an implicit reproach to humanity. Like that of his nineteenth-century predecessor Carmilla, the vampirism of Yarbro’s Count flows from a thirst for intimacy—the romantic intimacy Stoker’s Dracula destroyed in his estranged rage for dominance” (147). Laurel K. Hamilton (1963–): Anita Blake, Suburban Huntress. Anita Blake is a vampire hunter and necromancer, but in the St. Louis of the near future, vampires and other monsters are citizens, so Anita enters into romantic relationships with Jean-Claude, the master of the local vampires, and Richard, the Ulfric (leader) of the local werewolf pack. By the sixth novel of the fourteen-novel series Anita, Jean-Claude, and Richard form a metaphysical—as well as physical-sexual—relationship that bestows special powers on each of them and enables them to work together to eliminate human criminals, rogue vampires, zombies, and other monsters from the city of St. Louis, East St. Louis (Illinois) and Santa Fe (New Mexico). In addition to the killing of bad guys, there is a fair amount of explicit sex: Anita often has sexual intercourse with preternatural creatures in order to subdue and/or kill them. In this vampire world, even vampires can have sexual relations and produce offspring through other vampires or mortal humans, this in opposition to the standard tradition that vampires lose the ability to have intercourse. In addition to being a vampire executioner, Anita is an animator, not the graphic design type, but a person with power to raise the dead and create zombies—a very handy ability because zombies are now legally permitted to give testimony in legal cases. As the series progresses, Anita finds that she has power over not just the dead but the undead as well—that is, she is able to call and control younger vampires, and she is able to resist the mind control and tricks of older, more powerful vampires. The first eight novels of the series take place at local venues in St. Louis, where we get to see Anita Blake, vampire executioner and animator, work her magic in this wild world populated by humans, vampires, and were-creatures. In Guilty Pleasures (1993) Jean-Claude, the master vampire of the city of St. Louis, owns a strip club called Guilty Pleasures, and Anita works with him to find out who has been killing his vampires. The Laughing Corpse (1994) involves a case of a flesh-eating zombie at large in St. Louis, and here again Jean-Claude owns a comedy club called The Laughing Corpse. The Circus of the Damned (1995) is an after-dark amusement park, also owned by Jean-Claude, and in this novel we learn more about vampire politics and Jean-Claude’s desire to have Anita as his human servant, a relationship that involves the reception of four marks given to the servant. This symbiotic relationship provides both parties with enhanced powers, but the downside is, if the vampire dies, the servant inevitably dies as well. In addition to her relationship with Jean-Claude, Anita begins to date Richard, the Ulfric of the local werewolf pack. This triumvirate of Anita, Richard, and Jean-Claude develops and deepens throughout the The Lunatic Café (1996), Bloody Bones (1996), The Killing Dance (1997), Burnt Offerings (1998), and Blue Moon (1998). In Obsidian Butterfly (2000), Anita escapes temporarily from her increasingly complex love life with Jean-Claude and Richard, and she joins Edward, a vampire executioner like herself, on a case in New Mexico. “Ted,” Edward’s local cover, is a

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bounty hunter whose help the police have sought because this case involves the disappearance or skinning-alive of local residents. Edward has two backups in addition to Anita on the case, Olaf and Bernardo. Olaf’s specialty is mutilating women and Bernardo’s specialty is killing. Edward has Anita on the case because he senses that there is a preternatural killer involved, and not just a human serial killer. Obsidian Butterfly, master vampire of the city of Santa Fe, provides Anita and Edward with the information needed to find the monster who has been committing the atrocities. By Incubus Dreams (2004) Anita has grown into her role as Nimir Ra, the female warrior leader of the local were-leopard pack, and has actually formed an additional triumvirate that includes Micah, a were-leopard, and Damian, a vampire. As with her other triumvirate there is an upside and a downside. The upside is greater power for all three; the downside is that if Anita’s power ebbs, so does the power of Micah and Damian. In fact, Damian almost dies when Anita fails to feed the ardeur, a strong sexual desire, inherited from Jean-Claude’s line of vampires and going back to Belle-Morte, an old and sadistic vampire who made both Jean-Claude and Asher. Because of the ardeur, Jean-Claude is able to feed his blood lust with sex, but now Anita inherits from Jean-Claude a sexual drive that must be satisfied with some regularity, or she will go insane. This drive makes for quite a number of ménage-à-trois situations in Narcissus in Chains (2001), Incubus Dreams (2004), and Micah (2006). The fourteenth novel of the series, Danse Macabre (2006), alludes to a ballet that is to be hosted by Jean-Claude and his St. Louis vampires to show humans that vampires are “more than monsters” (108) and to allow masters of the larger cities of the region to test Jean-Claude’s power, as the Vampire Council in Europe is beginning to feel threatened by the growing power of Anita, Jean-Claude, and Richard. Much of the final novel is devoted to controlling and feeding the ardeur by way of a number of group sexual encounters that Anita has with Jean-Claude and Asher (vampires), Micah and Nathaniel (were-leopards), and Richard. In addition to defending their city against potential vampire takeovers, Anita begins to have dreams of Marnee Noir, the Mother of all Darkness, who is drawn to the interpersonal power shifts in Anita’s relationships. Anita Blake starts out in the series as a young, naïve virgin drawn ever more deeply into the vampire and were-politics of this futuristic universe because of her supernatural powers, marksmanship, and martial arts abilities. As Anita becomes less human, the series concentrates more on the supernatural sex she has with her vampire and were-partners than on hunting and executing rogue vampires and shape-shifters. Vampires have come a long way since Stoker’s Dracula, who must hide his dreadful purpose, through the humanistic, but still undercover, Lestat and Saint-Germain. Though vampires must govern themselves in this new world or be executed, they have achieved legal and, for many, celebrity status. The vampire slayer is called to action only for rogue vampires, shape-shifters, and other renegade monsters. Over the last fourteen years, Hamilton’s Anita Blake novels have received positive reviews from Library Journal, The Booklist, and Publishers Weekly. Obsidian Butterfly (2000), published as an ACE hardback, was on the New York Times extended bestsellers list, and Narcissus in Chains (2001), the tenth book in the series, was on the New York Times bestsellers list for three weeks, rising to the fifth position. Following the publication of the eighth novel, Laurel Hamilton was able to secure a seven-figure deal with ACE publishing for the next three novels (Anonymous, Chronicle, October 2002, Online Version). There is no apparent interest in this series on the part of literary scholars.

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L.A. Banks (1959–): Damali, the Hip Hop Huntress. In the first book of the Vampire Huntress Legend series, Minion (2003), we encounter Damali Richards, a hip hop artist for Warriors of Light Records. When not performing or recording, Damali and her team of Guardians hunt rogue vampires and other monsters. In this first installment of the series, Damali and her team track down a powerful vampire who not only drains his victims of their blood but mutilates their bodies as well. In The Awakening (2004), we learn that Damali is not just a run-of-the-mill vampire huntress; rather, she is the Millennial Neteru, a powerful being whom the topside master vampires want to kill but also desire for their own purposes. Damali’s exlover Carlos enters the picture as a newly turned vampire whom Damali must trust to battle the vampires seeking her death. In The Hunted (2004), the story continues for Damali and the Guardian forces who seek to protect humans from vampires, shape-shifters, and other demonic forces that surface from the nether regions below. In this installment of the series, Damali, who is a hip hop artist by day and a vampire hunter by night, becomes aware of a terrible disturbance in Brazil. She and her guardian force of seven (the mother-seer Marlene, Shabazz, Rider, Big Mike, J.L., Jose, and Dan) have just come off a tough mission and are in no shape to take on another deadly enemy. But innocent humans are being dismembered and slaughtered near the Amazon River in Brazil, and the team goes into action. In addition to the weariness caused by the recent mission, Damali believes that Carlos Rivera, her former mentor and lover turned vampire, died in quelling the recent vampire revolt. Her last memories of him are his carrying her up from Hell and protecting her from the onslaught of demons. Carlos, we learn, is a former LA drug dealer who took Damali in when she was orphaned as a child. The Guardians are a worldwide group of 144,000 faithful Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and members of other religious groups, and they are aware that a spiritual battle for planet Earth is raging and could soon culminate in Armageddon. The Guardians are ruled by the Covenant, a group of twelve council members whose ranks have included notables like the Knights Templar. In The Bitten (2005), Carlos and Damali are finally able to spend time together, but they are interrupted because a master vampire from the topside has stolen a key that is able to open the sixth seal of the Revelation, and, if used, could tip the balance of the final battle in the direction of evil. Damali is called before the Council of Neterus in The Forbidden (2006) to give an account about herself, and she learns that Lilith, the consort of the Unnamed One, has come up from level seven to level six to set things in order at the Vampire Council as all the master vampires topside had been killed. In The Damned (2006), tortured souls (now flesh-eating ghouls) from level four escape up to the topside through portals that have been opened—unbeknownst to the Guardians—through Carlos’s last trip to level six, during a previous battle. The five-member vampire council has been wiped out, but the Chairman, Dante, is at large somewhere in the world with the Book of Life and is attempting to find Eve— yes, the very Eve of Adam and Eve—but the Guardians are after him, and so are Lilith, his wife, and Dante’s father, the Unnamed One. Armageddon is forestalled by the Guardians through a series of battles in the Himalayas, and the damned are returned to level four of the underworld. The portals to the topside are then closed. Because Carlos and Damali have been killing off high level vampires, Lilith and the Unnamed One seek revenge on the Guardians in The Forsaken (2007), by releasing a powerful monster able to defeat both Damali with her Neteru powers and Carlos

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with his post-vampiric powers. In The Wicked (2007), book eight of the series, Carlos and Damali are finally married, but Cain, the son of Eve, has become the new Chairman of the Vampire Council and, in attempting to consolidate his power, pushes the world to the doorstep of Armageddon. In many ways the Vampire Huntress series is a return to traditional vampire lore: holy water, silver bullets (as well as silver laced C4, bazooka rounds, and earth rounds), and prayer can kill or at least keep vampires at bay. Also, after being killed, vampires need to be both beheaded and staked. Nevertheless, unlike Stoker’s, Rice’s, and Yarbro’s vampires, and like Hamilton’s and Charlaine Harris’s vampires, these vampires are able to have sexual intercourse, and they do so quite often. Master vampires have lairs all over their territories and a bevy of female vampires at their beck and call. In fact, vampire on vampire sex is the best because two vampires can do a “double plunge,” which is a mutual feeding at the moment of orgasm that greatly enhances the sexual experience. Blood-drinking is no longer a metaphor for sex; rather, it enhances sexual performance. The Guardians are all African American, except for Jose and Carlos, who are Hispanic, and they all speak a combination of Ebonics and Spanglish. In The Hunted (2004), they join forces with a group of Brazilian warriors who speak Black English seasoned with Portuguese. For example, near the end of the book, Carlos brags about Damali’s achievements as the Neteru and gives the following speech: “Say what you want, girlfriend is baad. Dusted a treasonous councilman . . . Did a drag race to protect my turf, rode shotgun with me . . .and kicked that bitch’s ass up there, then served her a head trip like I ain’t never seen. My boo is awesome” (481). The cosmology of this series, cast in the contemporary world, is a curious mix of Christian and New Age ideas. The great divide among humans is between those who believe in some higher power and those who do not. In The Damned, Damali comments, “It doesn’t matter which faith, as long as the foundation is about the Most High, the divine. If you believe and haven’t been contaminated [by demons], you won’t be possessed” (2006, 460). Hell is literally below, and Heaven is somewhere above; and the salvation of souls is a critical part of the balance between good and evil in this universe. In fact, Carlos’s soul hangs in the balance, in purgatory, though he is a vampire whose soul should be completely lost. Vampires are ruled by a five-member Vampire Council from level six (below), and the topside vampire world (Earth) is carved up into large territories ruled by first-generation Master Vampires, such as Carlos. Even though Carlos is very young, he was turned by the Chair of the five-member Council, and he therefore has old blood in him and is very powerful. The first two levels of hell are populated with poltergeists and familiar spirits, levels three and four with ghosts and amanthras (large worm-like creatures); demons occupy level five, and vampires level six. As one would expect, in addition to going after humans, the evil beings on all these levels are jockeying for power among themselves to have ready access to the tasty humans topside. Level seven is occupied by the “Unnamed One” and the original fallen angels, though a comment made by the Chairman in The Damned suggests that he, a vampire, was also present when Lucifer himself and his angels fell from Heaven. Since 2003, L.A. Banks’s Vampire Huntress novels have received positive reviews from Library Journal, The BookList, and Publishers Weekly. Trina Love Abram of the Tennessee Tribune reviewed The Damned (2006) positively: “This magnificent urban epic is an amalgamation of mystical creativity, Christianity, masonry concepts, world history, and Biblical concepts. This explosive mixture of concepts is dangerously addictive, and Banks’s solid writing style makes it all believable” (20

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April 2006, Online Version). In an interview with Femspec magazine (30 June 2005, Online Version), L.A. Banks explains the purpose of writing about vampires after having written romance novels for so long: “This series was definitely designed to make several points. Vampirism in this series is the metaphor for being seduced by flesh, sex, money, the fast life that gives the illusion of immortality, only to find oneself the living dead—trapped in Hell and incarcerated by death, violence, and parasitic behavior. The compound that Damali lives in represents ‘the village’ where people of all ethnicities and religions come together as a world family to fight a common nemesis . . . it is a place that is safe, where the barriers of prayers and people watching each others’ backs and children prevail.” Charlaine Harris (1951–): Sookie Stackhouse—Red Neck Vamps and a Hometown Telepath. Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire mysteries feature Sookie Stackhouse, a seemingly simple country girl who reads minds and romance novels and lives in the small Louisiana town of Bon Temps. In addition, she dates vampires and werewolves, and she is deeply involved in local vampire and shape-shifter politics. Sookie lives for Wendy’s hamburgers and regularly shops at Wal-Mart. To increase her vocabulary, she frequently uses her word of the day correctly when talking to other characters. Written in the first person, the reader has access to Sookie’s thoughts as well as the thoughts of many others because Sookie is telepathic. Vampires have gone public in this quick-paced, humorous series, as in the Anita Blake series, and they are recognized as citizens, though shape-shifters remain illegal. Vampires are ruled by underground kings and queens who exercise absolute control over their minions’ behavior. Eric, for example, is the king of a large area of rural Louisiana, and he rules from Shreveport, LA. New Orleans is the state’s “vampire central.” In Dead Until Dark (2001), Sookie begins the story of how she started dating Bill, the vampire next door, who once drank human blood but now drinks a blood substitute, Trueblood, available in local bars, including Merlotte’s, where Sookie waits on tables. Living Dead in Dallas (2002) opens with Sookie discovering the body of the cook at Merlotte’s in the trunk of Bon Temps’s Sheriff’s car. Eric, Vampire Sheriff of Shreveport, asks that Bill and Sookie head down to Dallas, Texas, to help solve a case involving missing vampires. Eric figures that Sookie’s telepathic abilities will help to crack the case. Club Dead (2003) is the name of a club in Jackson, Mississippi, where the local supernatural element hangs out and where Sookie hopes to find her boyfriend Bill, who has been kidnapped by a powerful vampire named Lorena. Eric— who also owns Fangtasia, a vampire club—requests that Sookie help rescue Bill with the aid of Alcide, a local werewolf. Sookie is attracted to Alcide, and Eric is attracted to Sookie, and all three are looking for Bill Compton. In Dead to the World (2004), Bill disappears again, and Sookie is left to deal with Eric, who has gotten a bad case of amnesia. Jason, Sookie’s brother, goes missing as well, and a coven of bloodaddicted witches moves into the area to harass the local vampire population. A number of shape-shifters have been killed or injured in shootings in Dead as a Doornail (2005), including shape-shifter Sam, the proprietor of Merlotte’s. Jason has just been turned into a were-panther, and other were-creatures now suspect that he carried out the shootings, because he seems a reluctant shape-shifter. Because Sam is largely incapacitated, he asks Sookie to go to Eric and request the loan of a vampire bartender. Eric complies and Charles, a one-eyed, former pirate of a vampire, steps in for Sam. While attempting to solve the series of crimes, Sookie herself is shot in the shoulder, ducking a split second before the assassin squeezes the trigger. Sookie had a love affair with Bill, who lives next door, and

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with Eric, the proprietor of Fangtasia who does not remember the affair because in the previous book he was under a witch’s spell during the witch-were war. In addition to these relationships, Sookie is also being pursued by Alcide, a werewolf, and Calvin, the pack leader of the were-panthers in a nearby town. In Definitely Dead (2006), the latest novel in the series, Sookie takes some time off to settle the accounts of Hadley, her twice-dead cousin in New Orleans, who died a vampiric death the night of the marriage between the Queen of New Orleans and the King of Arkansas. Hadley had been the vampire lover of the Queen and died mysteriously on the night of the wedding. With help from Hadley’s landlady, a witch named Amelia, Sookie attempts to clean out Hadley’s apartment only to discover a body in one of the closets, which puts Sookie in the middle of another mysterious murder. Sookie’s new love interest, Quinn, the shape-shifting tiger, has been assigned by Eric to escort Sookie to New Orleans; and so Sookie has a new love interest to help her solve the crimes and keep her from getting killed. This lighthearted vampire series places vampirism in a small, rural, Southern town with all its charm and secrets. In many ways the series reflects the world of Anita Blake—without the dark, Gothic elements. Sookie is a reluctant killer of vampires and shape-shifters, drawn into vampire and shifter politics because of her telepathic abilities. But again, vampire slayers are needed only for the occasional rogues, shifter or vampire. Sookie is far more interested in her appearance, her waitressing job, and her love life than she is in chasing after supernatural entities. Since the publication of Dead Until Dark (2001), Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse novels have received positive reviews from Library Journal, The BookList, and Publishers Weekly. Nora Roberts (1950–): Romantic Vampires. In order to illustrate the popularity and pervasiveness of the vampire in the contemporary reading scene, we need go no further than the popular, prolific romance writer Nora Roberts, who has written a trilogy involving vampires. All three books came out in 2006 and, as of the writing of this article (January 2007), Morrigan’s Cross and Valley of Silence were on the New York Times best-selling list for 14 and 8 weeks, respectively. The three books narrate vampire Lilith’s attempt to take over the parallel worlds of Geall and Earth. They also narrate the stories of three men and three women who fall in love and eventually marry. In Morrigan’s Cross (2006), Hoyt Mac Cionaoith battles Lilith, the vampire who has turned Cian, his brother, into a vampire. To defeat her, the goddess Morrigan enables Hoyt to time-travel into the future to assemble a team comprised of a witch, a warrior, a scholar, a shape-shifter, and his now vampiric brother Cian. In contemporary New York, Hoyt recruits Cian, a red-haired witch named Glenna, and King, a friend of Cian’s. These four are joined by Larkin and Moira, two warriors who have traveled from the world of Geall to aid them in the fight. The six are poised to fight Lilith, the vampire Queen, and the love focus of this first novel is on the relationship between Hoyt and Glenna. In Dance of the Gods (2006), the Circle of Six continues to prepare for the battle against Lilith, but the love focus is on the relationship between Larkin and Blair, who hail from different worlds—Earth and Geall, respectively—thus complicating their love life. Roberts closes her vampire trilogy with Valley of Silence (2006), which completes the story of the three couples: Moira, now Queen of Geall and Cian, the 1,000-yearold vampire; Hoyt, a warrior, and Glenna, the witch; and Blair, a warrior, and Larkin, the shape-shifter. The Circle of Six gathers together on the planet Geall,

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whose civilization has reached the Middle Ages in Earth time, to fight the final battle in the Valley of Silence against Lilith, the 2,000-year-old vampire who would rule both Earth and Geall. The goddess Morrigan—who has great, though limited, powers—has blessed this circle of friends and lovers with special powers to stand against a much larger vampire army commanded by the cruel and sadistic Lilith. Although this is a vampire novel with elements of science fiction (time and space travel through a worm hole), Valley continues the romance genre formula, focusing on the final couple-to-be: the tall, dark, handsome hunk of a man (Cian) who, at first, resists falling in love with the beautiful, intelligent, shapely Queen (Moira). They do fall in love, just before the great battle. The relationship is, of course, impossible. Cian is a wealthy New York vampire who is cynical about love and plans to return to Earth if he survives the battle of the Valley of Silence. He does, in fact, return to Earth after the battle only to descend into a booze-induced stupor, until Morrigan visits him and makes him an offer he cannot refuse: to be transformed back into a human and return to Geall to marry, reproduce, and live happily ever after. The novel ends with Cian and Moira, at the end of sixty years of marriage, walking “hands linked . . . in the softening sunlight . . . through the gates while the sound of children playing rang behind them” (318). Elizabeth Kostova (1964–): The Historian—The Return of the Monster. After the humanizing tendencies of Rice, Yarbro, Hamilton, Banks, and Harris, and the romanticizing tendencies of Roberts, it is refreshing to revisit the vampire as an inhuman monster, bent only on its own survival and the enslavement and slaughter of humans. Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian (2005) opens in 1972 as the daughter of a historian opens up both an empty book with a dragon printed in the middle sheaves and a packet of yellowing papers in her father’s study in Amsterdam. The first letter in the packet is addressed to the writer’s “dear and unfortunate successor” (5), who turns out to be Paul, the narrator’s father. Paul works for a foundation committed to world peace, and he is persuaded by his daughter to tell her the story of the papers and the book. What follows is a story about her father’s and his mentor’s research into the legends of Vlad the Impaler and Dracula. The narrator and her father travel to Austria and then to Slovenia, where Paul begins the story of his research and travels in the 1950s and of Bartholomew Rossi’s mysterious disappearance. As they travel, Paul discloses the contents of the yellowing letters. It turns out that Dracula is very much alive—and has been since the fifteenth century. In fact, in his first life he was Vlad III of Wallachia (1431–1476), the infamous Vlad the Impaler, who learned how to outwit “death by secret means” from a group of Latin monks in Gaul (675). Professor Rossi’s journal describes his first encounter with Dracula in one of his underground crypts. Rossi “felt almost as frightened” of his extraordinary clothing as he “did of his strange undead presence” (601). Shortly after, Paul “recoils” at the sight of a “stain of drying blood” on Dracula’s lips and stares at him “in horrified paralysis” (601).Though as a historian he has grown curious about this creature who has lived five hundred years, his only thought is how to destroy the creature and escape. Dracula’s “inhuman” gestures cause Rossi’s stomach to “twist inside” (603). This is, indeed, a monster. Dracula reveals his plan to Rossi, which involves Rossi’s cataloging Dracula’s library after being turned into a vampire. Rossi learns that Dracula has acquired a late fifteenth-century printing press and has nearly completed making 1,453 of his dragon books, which are then given to his servants throughout the world who do

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his bidding and gather books and information for him. The year 1453 is, of course, the year Constantinople, the Great City, fell at the hand of the Ottoman Turks, whom Dracula still despises. Dracula, it turns out, has become a historian, perhaps the historian, and has put together a library the likes of which the world has never seen, including many rare ancient books that have disappeared with the destruction of the great libraries in Alexandria, Rome, and Constantinople. Though Kostova departs from the Stoker tradition by asserting the continuing existence of Dracula, The Historian reaffirms a number of traditional vampiric myths. Dracula has, in fact, angered God by seeking immortality apart from the Gospel, and he refuses to have a cross put on his sarcophagus. Not as powerful as Lestat or Louis, Dracula can be warded off with garlic and crucifixes, and killed with silver knives or bullets. In addition, one is turned into a vampire by being bitten three times, thus becoming infected with vampirism as with a disease. Kostova brings before the reader the obvious evil done by Dracula as a vampire, but she also describes the cruel and inhumane deeds of Vlad the Impaler, which are perhaps even more horrifying by comparison: the murdering and torturing not only of the hated Turks, but also of his own countrymen, women, and children. Thus, in life and in undeath, Vlad III is a monster who must be killed for past and present crimes against the human race. Little, Brown & Co., has given Elizabeth Kostova a “two million dollar advance, a movie sale and the prospect of publication in at least 20 languages,” in addition to a media blitz of 7,000 advance copies for book critics, according to Janet Maslin of The New York Times (13 June 2005, Online Version). Perhaps that is why the reviews of The Historian are so mixed. John Leonard of Harpers writes, “There is very little sex, quite a bit of torture, and I suppose we should be grateful for a narrative journey into medieval scholarship that’s not about alchemy. Still, aren’t vampires merely the alien abductors of an earlier system of superstitions? Even Anne Rice has given up on bloodsuckers in favor of Jesus” (July 2005, 86). Henry Alford of The New York Times Book Review laments Kostova’s romanticizing of history and historians, but he praises her for “her interweaving of three sources of information— what the daughter tells us, what her father tells her and what the letters tell her and us” (10 July 2005, 16). Michael Gannon of The Booklist (15 May 2005, 16) gives the novel high praise: “Readers who think the legend of Dracula has become a trite staple of schlock fiction will find this atmospheric page-turner by first time author Kostova a bloodthirsty delight.” Reception. If literary critics exhibit a “comparatively dismissive attitude toward the Gothic in academic studies” in general (Riquelme, 588), then literary critics are particularly dismissive of the proliferation of vampire fiction and the appearance of its conventions in the popular culture genres discussed above. There are a few exceptions. Anne Rice’s vampire novels, especially the first three, have been reviewed positively and discussed extensively in scholarly books and journals. Culture critics have shown a keen interest in what Buffy the Vampire Slayer tells us about late twentieth-century families and teens. And Nina Auerbach’s Our Vampires, Ourselves (1995) argues that both the nineteenth-century vampire stories and the twentieth-century adaptations reflect the political (which encompasses race, gender, and creed) fears and desires of any given period in Britain and the United States. For readers interested in contemporary academic interpretations of Dracula, the Norton Critical Edition of Dracula contains background essays on the legend of the vampire, early reviews of the novel, theatrical and dramatic adaptations,

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and contemporary essays. The collection of contemporary essays dates from the 1970s through the 1990s, demonstrating a renewal of interest in Dracula among academics. Nina Auerbach opens the essay collection with “Vampires in the Light,” an excerpt from Our Vampires, Ourselves (1995). Auerbach reviews the Christopher Lee and Frank Langella film versions of Dracula and argues that these Draculas are “children of the light,” unlike the earlier Lugosi and Karloff versions of the Count, who were monsters of the darkness. They are children of the light because they are killed by sunlight rather than by religious ritual. In this view, the modern Dracula, freed “from the old metaphysics” of a Christian worldview, is “allergic to sunlight—not repelled by its goodness” (391). Both the Lee and Langella Draculas are sensitive, thoughtful heroes interested in seducing women who realize that they don’t need men. Auerbach notes that this change in the Count reflects the feminist interests of the 1960s and 1970s, and she concludes that “the rapidity with which our Draculas date tells us only that every age embraces the vampire it needs” (402). Phyllis A. Roth’s “Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (originally published in Literature and Psychology, 1977) is a psychoanalytic read of the novel that argues that though there is clearly an Oedipal struggle on the part of the men to kill the Father (Dracula), there is an even deeper psychological struggle to first victimize then kill the mother(s) (Lucy and Mina): “Central to the structure and unconscious theme of Dracula is . . . primarily the desire to destroy the threatening mother, she who threatens by being desirable” (420). Carol Senf’s “Dracula: The Unseen Face in the Mirror” (1979) approaches the novel from a biographical and cultural perspective and argues that Dracula addresses the threat of the primitive to nineteenth-century Victorians and that the novel is not so much a story of good triumphing over evil, rather of the similarity between good (the vampire hunters) and evil (Dracula). The unreliable narrators of the novel have attempted to kill off the evil part of themselves which is “masked” by social convention. In “A Capital Dracula,” (1988) Franco Moretti, taking a sociological approach to the novel, suggests that Dracula is a metaphor for monopolistic capital, a threat to the early capitalism of Great Britain. The count is also a threat to British cultural and linguistic values, and his defeat represents the triumph of English culture and capital over the foreigner. Finally, Moretti argues that sexuality, both desired and feared by the Victorians, is finally destroyed and sublimated with the deaths of Lucy and the Count, saving the English family. Christopher Craft also addresses the ambivalent attitude of Victorians toward sexuality in “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1984). Craft claims that the Victorian views of sexual difference are inverted in Dracula through Lucy’s and Mina’s transformations. Craft’s new historical approach explores gender difference conventions set forth in Ruskin’s essays and critiqued in Mill’s essays. Bram Dijkstra’s “Dracula’s Backlash” takes a feminist-cultural studies approach to the novel and argues that Dracula became the “commonplace book of antifeminine obsession” (460), with Dracula representing “effeminate sensuality” and Lucy and Mina representing the “two faces of Eve” (462). Steven D. Arata takes a cultural studies approach to the novel in “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization” (1990). Dracula, as an Occidental tourist in London, illustrates the possibility of England being overrun by the primitive, which is really the Irish who are despised by the English as savages. Two political equations are

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expressed in the novel: “not just, Dracula is to England as Ireland is to England, but, Dracula is to England as England is to Ireland” (469) in the sense that Dracula’s “imperialism” is most like England’s imperialistic domination of Ireland. Finally, Talia Schaffer’s “‘A Wild Desire Took Me’: The Homoerotic History of Dracula” (1994) argues that the novel is Bram Stoker’s apologia for Oscar Wilde’s trial and imprisonment. Dracula, in this new historical-biographical read of the novel, is “Wilde as threat” (472) to Victorian sexual codes. Shaffer sees the first part of Dracula swinging “wildly between utter hatred of Wilde and utter sorrow for Wilde” (475) while the remainder of the book “enacts Wilde’s story as a longing, lingering look at imprisonment” (477). Bibliography Anonymous, “Anne Rice.” Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series123 (2006): 369–376. Auerbach, Nina. 1995. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Banks, L.A. Minion. New York: St. Martin’s, 2003. ———. The Awakening. New York: St. Martin’s, 2004. ———. The Hunted. New York: St. Martin’s, 2004. ———. The Bitten. New York: St. Martin’s, 2005. ———. The Forbidden. New York: St. Martin’s, 2006. ———. The Damned. New York: St. Martin’s, 2006. ———. The Forsaken. New York: St. Martin’s, 2007. ———. The Wicked. New York: St. Martin’s, 2007. Bleiler, E.F., ed. Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror. New York: Scribners, 1985. Bleiler, Richard, ed. Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror. 2nd ed. New York: Scribners, 2002. Campbell Sr., J.L. “J.S. Le Fanu.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror. E.F. Bleiler, ed. New York: Scribners, 1985, 219–231. Daniels, L. “Bram Stoker.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror. E.F. Bleiler, ed. New York: Scribners, 1985, 375–381. Day, William P. Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2002. Gordon, Melton J. The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead. Detroit, MI: Visible Ink, 1999. Harris, Charlaine. 2001. Dead Until Dark. New York: Ace, 2001. ———. Living Dead in Dallas. New York: Ace, 2002. ———. Club Dead. New York: Ace, 2003. ———. Dead to the World. New York: Ace, 2004. ———. Dead as a Doornail. New York: Ace, 2005. ———. Definitely Dead. New York: Ace, 2006. Kostova, Elizabeth. The Historian. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005. Maslin, Janet. “The Vampire Wears Flannel, and He Cheats on His Tan.” New York Times Archives12 March 2007. Retrieved 12 March 2007 from www.newyorktimes.com. Moretti, Franco. “A Capital Dracula.” In Dracula. Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal, eds. New York: Norton, 1997, 431–444. Polidori, J. The Vampyre. 1819.Retrieved 2 August 2006 from www.dagonbytes.com. Rice, Anne. Interview with the Vampire. New York: Ballantine, 1976. ———. The Vampire Lestat. New York: Ballantine, 1985. ———. The Queen of the Damned. New York: Ballantine, 1988. ———. The Tale of the Body Thief. New York: Knopf, 1992. ———. Memnoch the Devil. New York: Knopf, 1995.

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VAMPIRE FICTION ———. The Vampire Armand. New York: Knopf, 1998. ———. Pandora: New Tales of the Vampires, New York: Random House, 1998. ———. Vittorio the Vampire. New York: Knopf, 1999. ———. Merrick. New York: Knopf, 2000. ———. Blood and Gold. New York: Knopf, 2001. ———. Blackwood Farm. New York: Knopf, 2002. ———. Blood Canticle. New York: Knopf, 2003. Riquelme, John Paul. “Toward a History of Gothic and Modernism: Dark Modernity from Bram Stoker to Samuel Beckett.” Modern Fiction Studies 46.3(2000): 585–605. Roberts, Nora. Morrigan’s Cross. New York: Jove, 2006. ———. Dance of the Gods, New York: Jove, 2006. ———. The Valley of Silence. New York: Jove, 2006. Roth, Phyllis A. “Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Literature and Psychology 27 (1977): 113–121. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. (1897) New York: Penguin, 1992 Reprint. ———. (1897) Dracula. In Norton Critical Edition of Dracula. Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal, eds. New York and London: Norton, 1997. Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn. Hotel Transylvania. New York: St Martin’s, 1978. ———. The Palace. New York: St Martin’s, 1978. ———. Blood Games. New York: St Martin’s, 1979. ———. Path of the Eclipse. New York, NY: St Martin’s, 1981. ———. Tempting Fate. New York: St Martin’s, 1982. ———. The Saint-Germain Chronicle. New York: Pocket, 1983. ———. Better in the Dark. New York, NY: Tor 1993. ———. Darker Jewels. New York: Tor, 1993. ———. Mansions of Darkness. New York: Tor, 1996. ———. Writ in Blood. New York: Tor, 1997. ———. Blood Roses. New York: Tor, 1999. ———. Communion Blood. New York: Tor, 2000. ———. Come Twilight. New York: Tor, 2001. ———. A Feast in Exile. New York: Tor, 2002. ———. Night Blooming. New York: Warner Books, 2003. ———. Midnight Harvest. New York: Warner Books, 2003. ———. The Dark of the Sun. New York: Tor, 2004. ———. States of Grace. New York: Tor, 2005. ———. Roman Dusk. New York: Tor, 2006. ———. Borne in Blood. New York: Tor, 2007.

Vampire Series. (These series either begin with the introduction of a vampire [or slayer] in the first novel, then subsequent installments either follow chronologically or highlight previous adventures of the vampire, if the vampire is particularly old.) Butcher, Jim. The Dresden Files series: Storm Front (2000) Fool Moon (2000) Grave Peril (2001) Summer Knight (2002) Death Masks (2003) Blood Rites (2004) Dead Beat (2005) Proven Guilty (2006) White Night (2007)

VAMPIRE FICTION Collins, Nancy A.: Sonja Blue series: Sunglasses after Dark (1989) In the Blood (1992) Paint It Black (1995) Midnight Blue (1995) A Dozen Black Roses (1996) Darkest Heart (2000) Dead Roses for a Blue Lady (2002) Feehan, Christine. Dark series: Dark Prince (1999) Dark Desire (1999) Dark Gold (2000) Dark Magic (2000) Dark Challenge (2000) Dark Fire (2001) After Twilight (2001) Dark Legend (2001) Dark Guardian (2002) Dark Symphony (2003) The Only One (2003) Dark Melody (2003) Dark Destiny (2004) Hot Blooded (2004) Dark Secret (2005) Dark Demon (2006) Dark Celebration (2006) Huff, Tanya. Blood series: Blood Price (1991) Blood Trail (1992) Blood Lines (1992) Blood Pact (1993) Blood Debt (1997) Smoke and Shadows (2004) Knight, E.E. Vampire Earth series: Way of the Wolf (2001) Choice of the Cat (2004) Tale of the Thunderbolt (2005) Valentine’s Rising (2005) Valentine’s Exile (2006) Koehler, Karen. Slayer series: Slayer (2001) Black Miracles (2002) Stigmata (2003) Lumley, Brian. Necroscope series: Necroscope (1986) Necroscope II (1988) The Source: Necroscope III (1989)

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VAMPIRE FICTION Deadspeak: Necroscope IV (1990) Deadspawn: Necroscope V (1991) Necroscope: The Lost Years (1995) Necroscope The Lost Years: Volume II (1996) Invaders (1999) Defilers: Necroscope (2000) Avengers: Necroscope (2001) Harry Keogh: Necroscope and Other Heroes (2003) The Touch (2006) Meyer, Stephenie. Twilight series: Twilight (2005) New Moon (2006) Eclipse (2007) Moore, Christopher. A Love Story series: Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story (1995) You Suck: A Love Story (2007) Newman, Kim. Anno Dracula series: Anno Dracula (1992) The Bloody Red Baron (1995) Judgment of Tears (1998) Saberhagen, Fred. Vlad Tepes series: The Dracula Tape (1975) The Holmes-Dracula File (1978) An Old Friend of the Family (1979) Thorn (1980) Dominion (1982) A Matter of Taste (1990) A Question of Time (1992) Seance for a Vampire (1994) A Sharpness on the Neck (1996) The Vlad Tapes (2000) Schreiber, Ellen. Vampire Kisses series: Vampire Kisses (2003) Kissing Coffins (2005) Vampireville (2006) Shayne, Maggie. Wings in the Night series: Twilight Phantasie (1993) Twilight Memories (1994) Twilight Illusions (1995) Beyond Twilight (1995) Born in Twilight (1997) Twilight Vows (1998) Twilight Hunger (2002) Embrace the Twilight (2003) Run From Twilight (2003) Edge of Twilight (2004) Blue Twilight (2005) Prince of Twilight (2006)

VERSE NOVELS Strieber, Whitley. Hunger series: The Hunger (1980) The Last Vampire (2001) Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life (2002) Wolfe, Gene. Urth: Book of the Short Sun trilogy: On Blue’s Waters (1999) In Green’s Jungles (2000) Return to the Whorl (2001) Pike, Christopher. The Last Vampire series: The Last Vampire The Last Vampire 2: Black Blood The Last Vampire 3: Red Dice The Last Vampire 4: Phantom The Last Vampire 5: Evil Thirst The Last Vampire 6: Creatures of Forever.

Further Reading Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995; Battis, Jes. Blood Relations: Chosen Families in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2005; Day, William P. Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2002; Frayling, Christopher, ed. Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula. Oxford: Faber and Faber, 1992.

A.J. GRANT

VERSE NOVELS Definition. The verse novel shares with the novel all the latter’s traditional features except the medium of prose. In a present-day perspective the verse novel may seem an anomaly or a rudimentary form, since narrative fiction currently implies the use of prose. However, the verse format for the novel has never fallen quite out of use, although distinctly on the wane since the mid-nineteenth century, until a sudden upsurge was indicated towards the end of the twentieth century. The closest relatives of the verse novel are, on the one side, prose fiction, and, on the other, narrative poetry. Just as the realist tradition is commonly considered the backbone of the novel in prose, the verse novel, building on formal conventions from the lyrical tradition, shows a tendency to veer toward the non-narrative moments of lyrical contemplation. The application of the term verse novel is consequently somewhat shifty, sometimes denoting fiction with the emphasis on the strong narrative plot dynamic characteristic of the realist mainstream novel, and sometimes, not infrequently nor without genre complications, denoting long poetry sequences held together by a common theme but otherwise characterized by the traditional priorities of the lyrical genre. The verse mode (re-)adopted in some narrative fiction from the last decades of the twentieth century directs attention to the verbal work of art as existential statement, relying on elaborate structure and cultural resonance, of collective cultural experience amassed dynamically over time. The distinction between prose as the medium of narrative fiction, and verse, signalled by rhyme and rhythm, as the medium of poetry, is, however, a distinction valid only in a traditional genre context. In the broad perspective of contemporary culture, including popular and mass

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culture, versification with rhyme and rhythm is the resort of pop, rock, and jazz lyrics, rap and dub recitation/music, and of the ubiquitous jingles of advertising. Perhaps, then, in the wider context of the communication and artistic modes of present-day mass society, a novel written in verse does not seem so strange and disturbing as it may to a reading audience of a more traditionalist orientation. History. In a long literary history, the use of prose for the epic or narrative genre is a relatively recent invention, coinciding with the rise of the novel in partial continuation of and reaction to the conventions of the verse epic. When in 1742 Henry Fielding prefaced his picaresque novel Joseph Andrews with the observation that he presented to the public a “comic epic poem in prose,” his observation symptomatically reflected a contemporary need for the justification of his chosen prosaic medium of discourse. Fielding had to make proper space for his new species in an already existing order of literary texts originating in antiquity, among which the medium of prose for narrative fiction was not to be taken for granted. Whereas prose as the vehicle of fiction was coming into its own at the time of Fielding’s apology, verse, however, lingered on for fictional narratives inclining towards medieval and Renaissance romance. They were tales of love and valour usually set in exotic places and medieval eras, and relying on varieties of quest for their plots. Romantic writers such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Southey, or Lord Byron cultivated verse romance either as a still productive format or as deliberate pastiche. However, the verse medium for narrative fiction, even of the romance kind, was, by the mid-nineteenth century, indisputably turning into a sub-generic niche, overtaken by narrative fiction in prose. Tennyson was one of the last British poets to employ verse romance in his Arthurian tales. In American literature Henry W. Longfellow cultivated the verse-narrative format in Hiawatha (1855), an epic about Native Americans, as did Herman Melville in the convoluted story of a contemporary American’s meditations and encounters in Palestine, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876). In Britain Elizabeth Barrett Browning used the verse format for her female bildungsroman Aurora Leigh (1857), and in 1862 George Meredith published his narrative sonnet sequence Modern Love. Surely Browning’s tour de force The Ring and the Book (1868-69) stands out as the last major achievement of narrative fiction in verse before the literary format made its reappearance toward the end of the twentieth century. Trends and Themes. From the mid-1980s the verse novel seems to have become productive once again. The writers of the verse novels singled out for attention below do not seem to share any retrospective desires in the direction of re-establishing a grandiose modern epic, which would, anyway, have implications far beyond the verse mode. What they share, however, is a postmodern multi-media-conscious audience of a very heterogeneous nature. To that audience the novel as book is just one form among many in a very large information, entertainment, and infotainment market. The presentation of narrative of the mainstream realist novel is increasingly taken over by the screen media, and widely distributed poetry is a matter of lyrics for mass-marketed popular music. Contexts and Issues. The long poems that came out of the modernist upheavals in literature tended to follow the experimentalist path of dedicatedly modernist writing rather than continued on the highways of realism or romance in verse. This modernist tendency has not necessarily been out of touch with the popular, as the success of proto-modernist Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1915) in its day amply demonstrated. But long, modernism-related poems have,

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A NEW NARRATIVE ART FORM There is no denying that the mainstream realist novel still has considerable audience appeal, but competing with film and TV serials, features, and docudrama, it is no longer in almost sole dominance for fulfilling the craving for narrative.The rise of the verse novel should be seen in perspective of newly emerging narrative art forms, new combination modalities available among the media, and complex audience segmentations in constant flux. There are three “explanations” of the postmodern verse novel: generically as rudimentary epic, narratologically as metafictional experiment, or socially as aesthetic “re-grouping” in response to new synaesthetic formations.This last one has the advantage of being able to appeal directly to an audience not necessarily familiar with literary history, as required for the first two, but yet definitely highly aware of contemporary media forms.The verse novel, especially when performed, combines narrative drive with musical dynamics, a combination found in shorter measures of duration in pop-music ballads.

on the whole, been more successful with critics than with reading audiences. This applies to works like T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1930), David Jones’s In Parenthesis (1937), Ezra Pound’s The Cantos (published accumulatively since 1925 until the complete 117 cantos appeared in 1970), William Carlos Williams’s Paterson (1946-1958), Charles Olson’s Maximus cycle (1950-70), Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger (1968-1975), and Louis Zukofsky’s A (1967-1978). Alongside have appeared volumes of verse devoted to specific themes or topics in the manner of the lyrical sequence or cycle, but likewise lacking the narrative drive of the novel and tending towards the metaphorical. The British poet John Hartley Williams uses the expanding American West as the setting of his loosely connected poems in Bright River Yonder (1987). American author Marilyn Nelson Waniek’s The Homeplace (1990), about her family history, and B. H. Fairchild’s The Art of the Lathe (1998), about factory life, are likewise thematically and setting unified collections of poetry, based on the single poem as the constituent unit. Derek Walcott’s The Bounty (1997), Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), and The Prodigal (2004) are atmospheric poetry on the theme of cultural/ethnic difference strongly rooted in explorations of the poet’s Caribbean background and his troubled sense of home. Fiona Sampson’s and Carol Ann Duffy’s respective volumes of love poems, The Distance Between Us and Rapture (both 2005) are poetry sequences rather than narratives. If the verse novel faced a moratorium between the mid-nineteenth century and the late twentieth century, extended verse narrative of a non-fictional kind is found in the verse memoir. Among twentieth-century successors to the long, autobiographical poem of which William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805) forms the epitome in English literature, are A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad (1896), John Edward Masefield’s The Everlasting Mercy (1911), Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal (1939), John Betjeman’s Summoned by Bells (1960), and Jackie Kay’s The Adoption Papers (1991). Reception. The literary phenomenon of the verse novel has as yet no dedicated critical literature. There has been some critical interest in the long poem as a particular lyric phenomenon. In 1909 appeared W. M. Dixon and H. J. C. Grierson’s The English Parnassus: An Anthology Chiefly of Longer Poems. The selected poems, by no means all of them long, were poems known to be popular and of

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varied “narrative, didactic, satirical, elegiac, eulogistic, and reflective” kinds, and “neither epical in scope nor yet wholly lyrical in quality” (Dixon 1909, vii). In 1986 Margaret Dickie published On the Modernist Long Poem, a study of American modernist long poems. According to Dickie there is a contradiction in the modernist privileging of the brief moment of lyric insight, focusing on the metaphor, and the cultivation, nonetheless, of long poems by such modernist poets as T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound. She found that this very insight on the part of the poets “developed into satire, but satire without much laughter or mockery . . . . And in this mode, the movement from The Waste Land to The Cantos is toward an increasingly self-conscious, despairing, and conservative end” (Dickie 1986, 153). The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics from 1993 has “verse novel” under the heading “narrative poetry,” using it as an example of “interpenetration of modes,” a kind of narrative poem that “consciously exploit[s] a sort of hybridization” (New Princeton Encyclopedia 1993, 815). Referring to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh as the work that “first comes to mind,” Leonard Nathan, the author of the encyclopedia article, quotes from R. Edmond’s 1988 study of Browning, Affairs of the Heart, to the effect that the aim of the text is to give “that attention to everyday life which the novel manages so easily, without relinquishing the manner, power, and concentration of poetry” (815). In other words, the verse novel is seen not so much as a novel (re-)employing lyric means as the other way round, as narrative poetry availing itself of the (realist) novel’s phenomenological range. Professor Nathan goes on to suggest Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962) as a “more complex” example of the verse novel. In 2004 Brian McHale published The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems. As indicated in the title, the object of the study is the postmodernist-marked long poem subject to critical scrutiny within the framework of postmodernist discourse parameters, which in an earlier work he had been instrumental for instituting. In the same year appeared in Orbis Litterarum: International Review of Literary Studies Lars Ole Sauerberg’s “Repositioning Narrative: The Late-Twentieth-Century Verse Novels of Vikram Seth, Derek Walcott, Craig Raine, Anthony Burgess, and Bernadine Evaristo,” which attempted to account for the renaissance of the verse novel since about 1980 in contexts of genre and prosodic issues, and with a view to the intertextual implications of the verse novels in focus. Selected Authors. Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate (1986) is a fictional narrative, paratextually signalled as a “novel written in verse” (back cover) and “The Great Californian Novel” (hype with reference to Gore Vidal, front cover). It is in thirteen chapters, of which the individual chapters consist of forty to sixty stanzas of fourteen lines of a somewhat irregular iambic-tetrameter prosodic pattern. The rhyme pattern in each stanza is ababccddeffegg, so we have sonnets of the English or Shakespearian variety with a final couplet, especially suited for a twist in the tail, a punch line or any other narrative effect relying on a conclusive thrust. Such a description is one that we expect in a perspective of literary history, and one on which the discussion of the choice of the four-foot rather than the traditional fivefoot metre is discussed in his fifth chapter. A comprehensive vista of literary history opens out, bearing not only on the history and typology of verse forms, but also on the cultural implications (satire, etc,) signalled by Seth’s reference to “Hudibrastic tricks.” But to the reader unacquainted with such detailed literary-historical detail there is hardly more to be got

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out of this stanza than that the breathlessness clearly conveyed by the rhythm is a matter of a need to hurry. (The literary historian would undoubtedly savor the oblique carpe-diem allusion to Andrew Marvell of “had I world and time” in addition to noting the Hudibrastic prosody). If the reader is offered an explanation, although of relative import depending on range of literary-historical knowledge, and as late as more than one-third into the narrative, this information relates to one part of the rationale for verse rather than prose in The Golden Gate. Inspiration and source is Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin from 1823-31, about the eponymous world-weary Russian officer and gentleman and his selfafflicted frustration in love. So the explanation of the choice of verse rather than prose for his Silicon Valley romance is double: there is the “have fun and try it” of 5.3.12, and there is the joy experienced by reading Pushkin, which is described as “spring of pleasure,” “joy and inspiration,” and then generally in the metaphor of source evoked by “spring:” “Sweet-watered, fluent, clear, light, blithe” (5.5.6-9). All in all a justification very much in terms of the Horatian dulce, inviting subsequently to reflection on the complementary utile. Looking for origins in the Pushkin source pays off the literary historian and offers the reader appreciating metafictional maneuvrings ample material as well. But for the contemporary common reader, not necessarily aware of this point, there is a narrative which is surely to be contextualized in quite another and in its own ways as rigidly codified kind of narrative, the ubiquitous situation comedy of TV soap opera, whose conventions tend to format large areas of contemporary culture. Lay readers not initially scared off by the “strange” lay-out of the text will recognize both the world described (Californian rich and smart-set locale) and the anecdotal structure of the sitcom dialogue as a homology to the setting and the punch-line final-couplet structure of Seth’s sonnets respectively. The American poet, flautist, literary theorist, and ex-confederate soldier Sidney Lanier (1842-1881) is the focal point of Andrew Hudgins’s verse novel (or novella) After the Lost War: A Narrative (1988). Hudgins’s narrative appears as Lanier’s autobiographical recordings, with the American Civil War as the great public and personal watershed. Hudgins has Lanier become increasingly preoccupied with what Wilfred Owen later called the “pity of war” and the need for a stoic frame of mind generally, as well as with the futility of the Confederate cause. The plot of the narrative keeps pace with Lanier’s life, with some deviations from the biographical progression in the form of musings and flashbacks. Lanier, who for the last years of his short life taught English literature at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, applied his interest and competence in music to develop rhythmical structures modelled on music and following the free flow of spoken language. Like British fellow poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, Lanier substituted for regular, accentual metre logaoedic variation between the number of unstressed syllables, using also the musical-beat principle as his inspiration. Hudgins, therefore, resorts to different stanza formats, but all of them unrhymed and in the logaoedic cadences of the subject of his verse novel. The voice of Lanier in Hudgins’s verse novel only once lets on the kind of rhythmical dynamic aimed at. Shortly after the end of the war, Lanier seeks convalescence from his consumptive disease away from the humidity of his native Georgia. In the desert tracts of the west he sits down to comfort himself with his flute, but finds it difficult to get the rhythm right: “Because the flute’s a woodland instrument,/I felt incongruous in the desert quiet./ But soon my playing built a decent forest”

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(Hudgins, 51). And then suddenly there is an approximation of his playing to the sound and movement of nearby women washing clothes with stones at the riverside. Their dual rhythmic performances conclude: And all the while they held their rhythm: Slow primitive—slow, loud and certain. But as they worked and I played, I heard my thoughtless melody allure them slightly from the beat (51–52)

The organic naturalness of the rhythm, including the slight variations from the beat, is contrasted later with the fictitious Lanier’s vehement reaction against the waste of the war: “I’ve come to hate/the lost cause and the cult of Beulah” (107). Before reading this conclusion he sees the maimed boy soldiers in terms of Latin verse. Boys who had been able to conjugate Latin verbs “now limp the streets of Beulah Land./The walk long-short, long-short, and mock/the Latin line, their bodies swaying to/the music of dead languages” (107). Hudgins has modernized the mid- and late-nineteenth-century pomposity of Lanier’s style that present-day readers find hard to swallow, but his account of the man’s life made a point of communicating it in such prosodic terms as Lanier would surely have approved of. By its title Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990) invites epic contextualization. On a reader ignorant of “world literature,” a great many points and passages of the narrative will be lost: the Homeric plot parallels, the names of characters from Greek mythology, the references to Virgil’s Aeneid, and to Dante’s great Renaissance epic, whose terza-rima pattern is the one selected for Walcott’s verse narrative. The erudite author also incorporates innumerable instances of intertextual dynamics drawing on a vast and encyclopaedic knowledge of literature and of (colonial and postcolonial) history generally. References to the Homeric epics, both as structural underpinning throughout and as scattered elements, are quite overt, to the point of insistence even, so the literary historian may note that the narrator is extremely aware of his project as one in line with the epic tradition. The consistent metre and rhyme ensures a reading or listening experience akin to that of verse epic, supposedly, according to traditional epic poetics, lending dignity to the subject. Now, the low mimetic of the narrative on the whole provides an ironic angle to the notion of any bona-fide adoption of the epic format, so the literary historian might wish to draw a parallel to James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), likewise a low-mimetic application of the traditional epic, but in prose. Joyce himself suggested that in an age made unheroic by the pervasiveness of the common, the common man can be made to appear heroic given the right context, and thus Joyce applied a Homeric framework for Mr. Leopold Bloom. But Walcott goes a step further, a step that cancels out this line of interpretation, and by doing so shifts the validation of interpretation away from the literary historian and over to the reader, and by the same stroke obliterates the need for literary-historical guidance—a realisation summed up only a few pages further on when the narrator declares: “You were never in Troy, and, between two Helens, //yours is here and alive;” (p. 313, ch. LXII, ii) and underlined by the resumption of the sea image of the final verse: “When he left the beach the sea was still going on” (p. 325, ch. LXIV, iii).

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Walcott’s Omeros is, for all practical effects, a verse novel. Its ostentatious drawing on epic and its intertextual virtuosity turn out to be symbolic of a cultural memory which, eventually, is a matter of indifference to life here and now. By the same token, the common reader as implied reader is re-installed after having been put off by the host of learned implications, being virtually told to resist the onslaught of literary tradition. Like Vikram Seth, Lyn Hejinian used Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin as her inspiration and model for Oxota: A Short Russian Novel (1991). But unlike Seth Hejinian did not choose to follow in the immediate footsteps of the Russian poet by adopting the regular sonnet scheme as structural principle. Her sonnets—270 in all, divided epically into nine books, of which the last one is a coda —are unrhymed units of 14 lines (cp. “Even though we don’t rhyme—ever/We achieve fidelity, we engage in gluing, sucking, seizing, and fusing/Adherence is difference” (ch.104, p. 118)). But the line lengths vary widely, all lines starting with a capital letter but all ending without any indication of partial completion in the form of full stop punctuation. The free verse imposes a certain order: “The rain fell, but even the irregularity of the drips couldn’t obliterate the rhythm that attaches occasion to memory” (ch. 136, p. 151). Whereas Seth’s Pushkin-derived narrative in its plot structure seems almost a pastiche of nineteenth-century melodrama, Hejinian offers a narrative much less adhering to narrative models, having her narrator observe, “But traditionally a novel integrates a person with the life it leads” (ch. 88, p. 100). The teleological implications of the novel are remarked upon in the final lines of chapter 109: “However there is a danger that life, being narrated, will turn into an ‘adventure,’ and every adventure moves inexorably towards resolution - but how can I say that I don’t like adventure?/I think now of the truly startling antiquity of the sensation that this is happening “(p. 124). Oxota means hunt in Russian, and the entire narrative could be said to be a hunt for existential significance by a circle of Russian friends with whom the narrator spends time in Russia as the Soviet Union begins to decompose in the 1980s. Lyn is named as the central consciousness of Lyn Hejinian’s Oxota and offers sporadic comments on form, as when an opposition is suggested: “An elegy is continuous/It is slow and not alarmed/ . . . But this is a novel, in the literature of context” (ch. 23, p. 33). The difference between the prose and the poetry medium is noted but not elaborated on in the remark “Poetry is compressed according to one scale and prose according to another” (ch. 34, p. 44). Poetry is granted the edge somewhat further on: “Poetry is violent/the meanings of the words annihilate each other, Arkadii said/In this sense all the acts of the Marquis de Sade imitate writing” (ch. 43, p. 53). The author returns to the idea of compression once more: “There is a third principle, said Borya, and it’s compression/Poetry anticipates a love of thinking/Yes, but also the mobility of experience/Untargeted experience” (ch. 45, p. 55). Hejinian’s “short Russian novel” reads in the manner of the loosely structured episodic idea-cum-discussion novel familiar to readers of Wyndham Lewis, Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, or Don DeLillo. According to the front-flap marketing blurb, Craig Raine’s History: The Home Movie (1994) is “an epic history of Europe from 1905 to 1984,” a designation recurring with a variation in the concluding commendatory remarks in the note: “Craig Raine’s History: The Home Movie is a novel. It is an epic poem. It is the best film you’ll ever read. There is nothing like it in literature.” All these designations, however, have in common the indication of narrative, and Raine’s text is a loosely composed narrative, a historical family novel, about members of two inter-married families, one

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Russian and Jewish-bohemian artistic, one British and middle-class professional. As it also spans most of the twentieth century, it clearly earns the epithet of epic according to the broader and popular contemporary use of the concept and term. Raine’s media-consciously entitled History: The Home Movie consists of eightyeight poems (including a quite brief prologue) of varying length but sharing the same pattern of unrhymed triplet and somewhat irregular trimeter stanzas. In addition there is a genealogical-tree preface, outlining the family patterns of the Pasternaks and the Raines, respectively. From a literary-historical point of view the narrative achieves its epic dimension by subjecting the fates of the two families to momentous forces outside the control of the individual, in the clash of competing civilizations. Here we have the trajectory of Soviet-Russian Communism and the rise and fall of Fascism/Nazism, pitted against the tradition of British pragmatism. As the condition of exile is the common lot of postcolonial mankind in Derek Walcott’s Omeros, the genocide of European Jewry is the central pivot in Raine’s narrative, tracing its causes and effects in a wide variety of attitudes, tendencies, and behaviour, both national and individual, from 1905 to 1984. There is no intratextual evidence of reflections on the coming into being of Raine’s text, on its “debt” to literary history. This is left completely to the flap-text designer(s). To the lay reader the contemporary sense of epic will prepare her or him for largescreen phenomena, the association to the cinema quite in keeping with the second part of the title of the work, history as “home movie.” Just as Seth’s narrative makes good sense to a reading audience familiar with TV situation comedy, there is, in the very title of Raine’s narrative, an invitation to contextualize in terms of contemporary bigscreen-media dynamics. Home movies being an alternative source of entertainment and information to potential book readers, providers of media material have long since introduced infotainment, with the fictionalization of the factual as a very popular and, hence, routine production recourse. Nothing works better for history to be made alive than to introduce the human element in terms of focused individualism, preferably with all kinds of detail, romantic, melodramatic, sordid, prurient, and so on. This is exactly what Raine does in his narrative. Each individual part (chapter or poem) is a kind of scene, a tableau of a certain year of the century in perspective of either branch of the family, lending dramatic power by novel-like particularization to whatever particular situation in the large-scale unfolding of history is at stake, also frequently drawing on the anecdotal for comic-relief purposes. Anthony Burgess’s Byrne (1995) offers ample intratextual evidence of generic context both adhered to and discarded. The narrator of the text, Tomlinson (Burgess 1995, 147), described as “an inferior pressman, salaried/To race for scandal round the spinning globe” (40) purports to have been commissioned by one Michael Byrne, born 1900, to write his biography, expressly in a form commensurate with his self-estimation. (“He thought he was a kind of living myth. . . .”) The narrator is well aware of generic traditions as manner of literary treatment relative to content. It is therefore very apt that what his taskmaster may have associated with Ariosto, and hence with a certain high-mindedness and dignity, was made a perfect medium of the mock-heroic in Byron’s Don Juan. The narrator turns out to be a very deft handler of rhyme, enhancing the potential for humorous and witty effects in the concluding couplets of the ottava rima. For example, “He’d not been following the daily Zeitung./He heard the news with wide eyes and a dry tongue” (33), or even more atrocious ones like “His origin was Minsk or Pinsk or Moscow. Pe/Rusing Tim’s chart he called for a bronchoscopy” (129).

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The bathos is indeed part of the attitude to the subject matter, the kitschy music, painting and general life style of Michael Byrne, which is made clear when the narrator stops to explain further his use of verse on the man considered merely “good garbage for my garbage bin” (p. 40). When the scene is shifted to the “occluded beauty/Of winter Venice,” (83), the narrator finds occasion to change from one verse mode borrowed by Byron, and subsequently from Byron by Byrne’s biographer, to the likewise borrowed and reborrowed Spenserian stanza of Childe Harold. The narrative proceeds in a manner relative to the slower progress of Spenser’s hexameter stanza and with less formal occasion for the word play invited by the couplets of the ottava rima. Changing back into the Ariosto/Byron verse format in part four, the narrator expresses relief and regret at the same time. Ottava rima holds out until the finale, when Byrne, considered dead long ago, returns to face his many bastard children in London. He has John Gielgud (!) read five sonnets that “sum up all our annals/In five disjunctive but connective panels” (140). These five sonnets purportedly written by Michael Byrne are flanked by two delicately lyrical poems, altogether producing a coda-like conclusion to the verse novel. The narrator-persona of Byrne: A Novel, having sided implicitly with Wordsworth and Eliot in his distinction of “high-flying” poetry from merely “plodding” verse, makes no secret of his pragmatic attitudes and his disdain for what is out of his range, as when he assumes a rather populist stance on James Joyce “butchering English” (11). If the reading is to be wholly successful, it is indeed required that the reader know of Anthony Burgess’s warm love for and outstanding expertise on the work of Joyce. The informed reader identifies a narrator detached from the author at an early point in the narrative, an observation with important consequences for the response to what follows, which will have to be refracted in a system of complex irony. Byrne is, ultimately, a discussion of existential issues bearing on twentiethcentury reality with all its cruelties and paradoxes (“Human pain meant/But little in the Gulf War’s visual grammar, a/Big feast of death to feed the cinecamera” (54)) showcasing a father and three of his sons balancing precariously on the thin line dividing being from seeing. Split between complete anarchy on the one hand, when all being is reduced to seeming, and, on the other, strongly deterministic outlooks, parodied by Burgess in the treatment of the Rushdie fatwa transposed to a Muslim dislike of Dante as well as of the one twin brother’s project of making a TV epic out of Calvin’s life. There seems no way out of this, apart from what is suggested by Tim, the apostate priest, when musing on his doomed future. In combination with the final line of the narrative, “Blessing the filthy world./Somebody had to” (Burgess 1995, 150), there seems to be a concession to, even investment of hope in, form or craft as that which confers some modest degree of meaning on a “filthy” and meaningless world. Applied to the verse novel dismissed so peremptorily by the narrator, who would have preferred the prose novel, had he not been commissioned by Byrne senior, there remains the facts of prosodic impact and the tradition of literary history, both of which mark out the particular manner of this narrative from any prose version. David Mason’s The Country I Remember shares with Andrew Hudgins’s After the Lost War: A Narrative (1988) the theme of the American Civil War. In terms of length tending toward the novella rather than the novel proper, its twin narrative strain combined with its temporal scope qualify it as novel rather than short story.

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The two strains of the double narrative are sustained in the form of retrospective: Mrs. Maggie Gresham looks back on her life two years before her death in 1956. During a railway journey Maggie dreams of her childhood, when around 1880 she and her family moved from Illinois to Washington, ending up in a big house in Pomeroy in 1900. The years ensuing were for Maggie an attempt to discover her destiny. A certain restlessness combined with a vague artistic calling made her unable to settle down until she reached California in her mid-thirties. Her story is one of self-insight but also that of a family looking for new opportunities just before the closing of the frontier. Her story hints at her father’s life. Lieutenant Mitchell was made an officer in the Union army on joining because of his fighting experiences in the West. Mitchell recalls his years as prospector, farmer, and soldier; his thoughts go back to the Civil War, the last part of which he spent as a POW, weakened by malnutrition. Both narratives of recollection are conveyed in seven-line unrhymed stanzas, pulsating in a loose iambic measure that may, over stretches, be subject to scansion according to Andrew Hudgins’s Sidney Lanier-inspired logaoedic metre. The pulse of the rhythm provides a discreet progressive insistence, from the opening lines’ onomatopoeic anapaestic variation: “The rattle and way of the train as it clattered across/leagues of open grassland put me to sleep,” (3) to the quiet pondering of “I had an idea I would write a book,/but I could never sit still long enough” (38). Lieutenant Mitchell is allowed the last words, concluding that “America/is made by those who want to change themselves-” (50), and adding very practically, “I’ve told these tales before, but wanted someone/to set them properly on paper, now,/in case my mind in old age starts to drift” (55). What we have from Mitchell is the story of the atrocities of the American Civil War, in contrast to Hudgins, seen from the Union side, and the story of national expansion and settlement. Mitchell’s senior view fades ultimately into Maggie’s quasi-blessing on life in general: “and I was moved by everything that moved” (49). Bernadine Evaristo’s Lara (1997) only reveals its verse mode to the reader upon actually starting to read the text, or to the very circumspect reader who prefers to garner a thorough sense of the full textual lay-out before reading. To such a reader the last part of the text, the “index of first lines,” 140 in all, will signal the conventions of poetry collections rather than those of prose fiction (Evaristo 1997, 145–147). Apart from this rather well-hidden signal, no paratextual information or hints of verse are offered to prepare less than circumspect readers, who, as argued above, have most likely learnt to associate fellow writer Mike Phillips’s back-cover praise “A beautiful and exciting epic” with historical sweep and big-screen scope. The short biographical note prefacing Evaristo’s text concludes “Lara is her first full-length work of fiction” without revealing the mode of discourse. The narrative centers on the eponymous heroine, the fourth child of an Irish mother, Ellen, and Nigerian father, Taiwo, born in 1962, following her youth in London and her attempts to come to terms with her ethnicity, including visits to Lagos and Bahia as the epitome of the quest for roots. The narrative begins in 1844, setting the scene for the itineraries of Lara’s father’s ancestors from Nigeria to Bahia and back again before the father set out for London and better prospects in 1949. The verse novel consists of 140 sections, none of them exceeding in length a printed page, several verse paragraphs filling not quite a whole page. Concession to formal traditions of the novel is made by division into 14 chapters bordered by prologue and epilogue. The individual chapters do not follow chronologically one after

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another, but, with the Bildung of Lara as the central issue, offer a timeline broken by frequent flash-backs to provide the causes in the past for present-day events. The verse may at first sight appear to scan somewhat irregularly, but as soon as the reader realizes the importance of spoken performance playing off against a somewhat hurried speech rhythm and begins to shape the dynamics of experiencing the text accordingly, the text unfolds its full rhythmical potential as narrative engine complementary to the narrative drive. In most verses five main stresses stands out clearly, creating a blank-verse drive, but there is an overall predilection for a falling trochaic cadence, with dactyls and spondees arresting and countering the rising iambic movement of the traditional blank verse. The verse retains a pulse of five beats to a line, around which it builds its local effects by braking or speeding up, effects created by constant rearrangement of rhythmical patterning to suit the semantic import of the given moment. It is, though, quite in keeping with the paratextual reluctance of Lara to stand out from a tacit norm that the text, with one possible exception, refuses to discuss its own versification. The possible exception, which is when Lara’s father confesses to a fondness for traditional verse, makes a very subtle point to do with rhythm: “he preferred a good rhyme really, /to chug a poem along” (80). Although offering no rhyme, the regularity of the three iambic stresses of “to chug a poem along” offsets with finely calculated effect the freedom provided by reading Walt Whitman, when the last part of the line is read with two stresses only, thus underlining the reaching out: “Still, this man took him places.” (Emphases added to suggest stress/beat.) Evaristo’s choice of the verse mode lends substantiality to words in themselves. It is this attention to the verbal as the construction site for meaning rather than as its translucent filter which explains why the lyrical with its verbal play depending primarily on metaphor becomes such a natural part of Evaristo’s enunciations, as in a passage describing the countryside where Lara’s mother Ellen was sent for safety during the war. But there is more to it than just invitation to lyrical passages naturalized by the verse environment. A passage like the one just quoted, which reads like so much poetry of the idyllic Georgian school, may be what we expect from poetry, but it is singularly out of tune with the postcolonial theme sounded in Lara. In the context it indicates the kind of culture and the ways, here rendered by literature, in which this British culture is traditionally disseminated, how Britain is “sold” both at home and abroad. The verse mode with its rhythmical arrangement of sound is closer to the dynamics of the signification process than the prose employed by realist fiction, which implies pre- or extra-verbal signification. Evaristo’s verse novel is written from the vantage point of verbal density, as it were, rendering any fixed meanings insecure as they dissolve into a wealth of interacting signifiers, with the five beats of the lines as the sole point of stable verbal orientation. The full title of the Australian poet Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse (1999) makes plain its generic affiliation from the very start. Apart from the verse mode, made up of eight-line stanzas of highly irregular blank verse, the fictional narrative stands out from the mainstream realist format of the novel by its recourse to the device of magic realism. Suffering psycho-somatic trauma from having witnessed atrocious treatment of women in Turkey during the First World War and being prevented from coming to their rescue, Friedrich (Fredy) Boettcher loses his sense of touch. Fredy acts as a kind of everyman representing the necessary immunity to face the realities of a cruel twentieth century. His numbness only goes away when, at home in Australia for good, he realizes the need to forgive.

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A passage reads like a turn of the screw on Coleridge’s ancient mariner being required to bless the symbol of evil, the water snakes for the winds to move again and the albatross to fall from his neck. Fredy’s final line, “But there’s too much in life: you can’t describe it” (255) is, contrary to the negation, an affirmation of life’s crowdedness, and hence the need for pre-emptive forgiving. Murray’s verse novel does not present any external evidence in explanation of the author’s choice of narrative mode. The title emphasizes its intended generic category as novel, whereas the publishers, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, categorize it as poetry, in both the bar-code data on the back of the book and the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data entry. Fredy Neptune engages with traumatic twentieth-century world history. The body of its hero reacts to atrocities by calling attention to the non-working of the tactile sense. The reader, perhaps grown insensitive by an overkill of smooth-prose stories of suffering, is analogically forced to reconsider the very nature of the linguistic medium by its subjection of the word game of verse. Bibliography Burgess, Anthony. Byrne. London: Hutchinson, 1995. Dickie, Margaret. On the Modernist Long Poem. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986. Dixon, W. M. and H.J.C. Grierson, eds. The English Parnassus: An Anthology Chiefly of Longer Poems. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1909. Evaristo, Bernadine. Lara. Tunbridge Wells, Kent: Angela Royal Publishing, 1997. Fielding, Henry. Joseph Andrews. 1742. London: Dent (Everyman’s Library), 1962. Hejinian, Lyn. Oxota: A Short Russian Novel. Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1991. Hudgins, Andrew. After the Lost War: A Narrative. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988. McHale, Brian. The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems. Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 2004. Mason, David. The Country I Remember. Brownsville, OK: Story Line Press, 1996. Murray, Les. Fredy Neptune . New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. Preminger, Arthur and T.V.F. Brogan, T.V.F., eds. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Raine, Craig. History: The Home Movie. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1994. Sauerberg, Lars Ole. “Repositioning Narrative: The Late-Twentieth-Century Verse Novels of Vikram Seth, Derek Walcott, Craig Raine, Anthony Burgess, and Bernadine Evaristo.” Orbis Litterarum: International Review of Literary Studies 59.6 (2004): 439–464. Seth, Vikram. The Golden Gate. 1986. London: Faber and Faber, 1999. Walcott, Derek. Omeros. London: Faber and Faber, 1990.

Further Reading Dickie, Margaret. On the Modernist Long Poem. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986; Dixon, W. M., and H.J.C. Grierson, eds. The English Parnassus: An Anthology Chiefly of Longer Poems. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1909; McHale, Brian. The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems. Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 2004.

LARS OLE SAUERBERG

W WESTERN LITERATURE Definition. While most people recognize a Western novel when they see one, defining the genre is another matter. Today’s postmodern Western genre generally emphasizes a dominant male or female hero undergoing a series of dangerous ordeals or tasks in a lawless culture of unrestrained violence and sex in a place loosely called the West during the nineteenth century. But such a definition must be qualified by contrasting today’s Westerns with those of the past. As with other action genres of twenty-first century popular fiction, Westerns have changed dramatically from older versions of the genre. The geographic American West has always captured the imagination of Americans and Europeans alike as a place apart, and to a degree that remains true today. The region’s vastness seems to allow one to feel closer to uncompromised nature. But human development of the West has significantly shaped our perception of it. It was once the frontier, representing a way of life that no longer is. Traditional or modernist Western novels, which include most Westerns up through the 1990s, celebrated something that was lost. New or postmodern Westerns, as a rule, no longer concern themselves with nostalgia. Historically the old West was a place just ahead of civilization, just ahead of the law. It was a place once inhabited by exotic native peoples. Great stories from this frontier romanticized the historic West: Lewis and Clark’s expedition, the discovery of gold in California in 1849, the wagon trains traveling from St. Louis to Oregon, Indian battles such as Little Big Horn, Washita Creek, and Wounded Knee. And this historic West was inhabited by larger-than-life personalities: General Custer, Crazy Horse, Wyatt Earp, Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Geronimo, Calamity Jane. Above all else, it was a time and place of violence. Survival skills were a necessity in a dangerous, demanding environment. The old West tested one’s character, producing a disproportionate number of heroic characters and ideals. Modernist Westerns celebrate this imaginative construct of the West. Not all novels that are located geographically in the Western United States qualify as Westerns,

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and neither do all novels that are located historically in the frontier territories. Modernist approaches to the genre would say that in order for a story to be a Western, as opposed to merely a novel of the West, a story must partake of three elements: It must capture the Western Moment, the Western Myth, and the Western Place. The Western Moment refers to a specific time in U.S. history, whether real, mythical, or nostalgic. Usually that moment is placed after the Civil War and before the turn of the twentieth century. However, frontier stories occurring before the Civil War are said to be Westerns because they look forward to the Western Moment, and some stories set in the early twentieth century can qualify as Westerns because they look back nostalgically to the Western Moment. The Western Myth refers to the accumulated stories and traditions that through the decades have modified, often considerably, recollection of historic fact through oral tradition, customs, cinema, and popular fiction. Westerns do not reflect factual history. They reflect the myths that have accumulated through the years. What Billy the Kid was like as a real human being at a real moment in history is relevant to a Western story only as one element out of many in telling his story. For example, the myth gives us a handsome, devilish but likeable left-handed gunfighter, still a youth with a measure of puckish innocence. Above all else, the Western myth is based on individual prowess, and violence is simply a part of life. Westerns assume their readers are acquainted with the myths of the West. The third element, Western Place, can generally be defined as a mythical place in a frontier American setting, usually, though not always, west of the Mississippi River. Early Westerns especially celebrated the Great Plains, but more recent Westerns have tended to celebrate the deserts and borderlands with Mexico. The chief requirement for Western Place is that it be open and endless. Thus, fenced off farms in Kansas and Montana cannot be part of the Western Place. But this modernist understanding of the Western genre is rapidly losing ground in the twenty-first century. For postmodern readers of Westerns, the old stories of the West remain in the background, but they no longer capture the imagination. Postmodernism, by definition, repudiates the myths of the past, including the Western myths. For one thing, those myths tend to reflect a macho white male perspective. They encompass stories of white men conquering Native Americans and women and “winning” the West. Few postmodern readers can accept the values upon which modernist twentieth century Westerns were based. Thus creators of Westerns today, whether authors, editors, or corporate publishing enterprises, must search for new ways to overturn older paradigms of the Western story.

THE TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY WESTERN Twenty-first-century Westerns acknowledge only marginally the historical and geographical myths of the American West. Their West is a mythical place of open landscapes and huge panoramic vistas, but not specific landscapes. Even when named, most geography in twentyfirst century Westerns is deliberately imaginative, or, as when a Ralph Compton novel is set on a real historic trail, such as the Whoop Up Trail, the emphasis is on the exaggerated exoticism of the place, not its true location in Montana.What ties a postmodern Western to the past is primarily the violence, unrestrained sex, lawlessness of society, and individual determination to survive.

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History. The commonly known modernist Westerns trace their origins to Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902) a best-selling novel of the West that has always been recognized as an important literary work. The novel centers on the tension between the hero, the Virginian, and Trampas. The most famous line of any popular Western comes when Trampas makes the mistake of calling the hero “a son of a bitch.” Quick as lightning the gun comes out and the Virginian says, “When you call me that, smile.” At the end the two shoot it out. Nearly all the elements of the traditional modernist formula Western can be found in this prototype novel. Subsequent early Westerns tended to look back toward a West that had only very recently closed and been won (for white people), a West that could be no more. Zane Grey became a best-selling Western writer with titles like Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) and The Light of Western Stars (1914), which, while full of sanitized violence and action, often read like travelogues celebrating the West as a place that retained its enchantment despite encroachments of civilization. Other early writers were B. M. Bower, a female Western writer who wrote a series about the Happy Family of the Flying U Ranch. Clarence Mulford wrote a series of Westerns from the World War I era through the late 1930s comprising tales of the Bar 20 Ranch and its leading hero, Hopalong Cassidy. All of these writers prided themselves on the historical and geographic authenticity of their Westerns, and from the beginning Western writers and readers have insisted that such authenticity was essential to the genre. It didn’t take long, though, for another trend to develop, a trend with more influence on postmodern Westerns than authenticity—the imagined Western. Beginning with the pulp magazines of the 1920s, a new kind of Western began to emerge, a Western that gloried not in the authentic but in the bizarre, in the purely imagined landscape and in purely mythic history. The greatest of all pulp writers, Max Brand, wrote 422 novels before his death on the battlefield during World War II. The typical Max Brand Western makes no effort to center its story in any identifiable location other than somewhere in the West. Town names, mountain ranges, rivers are nearly all imaginative. Historical events and real-life characters have virtually no presence in Brand’s Westerns. Instead, his characters often are near superhuman and mythical in stature and presence, sometimes aided by near supernatural agents: dogs that can run faster than horses, horses larger than anything imaginable and endowed with unbelievable speed. For Brand, Westerns were not authentic anyway, so he need not bother to focus on authenticity or historical accuracy. By the middle of the twentieth century, then, these two major trends—the authentic and the imaged—had been established. Hollywood reinforced the imagined Western with its B-grade Westerns of the 1930s and 1940s. Italian or “Spaghetti” Westerns of the 1960s continued the film trend away from authentic Westerns; this same period marked the shift of popular Western fiction away from authenticity as well. Nevertheless, authentic Westerns dominated the paperback market. Writers of the 1940s and 1950s, such as Ernest Haycox and Luke Short, wrote about a real West. Louis L’Amour, arguably the most successful Western writer of all time, nearly monopolized the market from the 1950s until the 1980s. His reprinted novels continue to account for a large percentage of total Western sales in the twenty-first century despite being dated. For L’Amour, geographic authenticity mattered as much as any other element of a Western. Could a story really be a Western if its location could not be identified on a map? L’Amour fans have always claimed that if the L’Amour hero was crawling on his belly down a gully away from the sniper up on

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the ledge, you could count on it that Louis L’Amour himself once crawled down that same gully on his belly. Readers today, though, look back on L’Amour’s Westerns and simply see a flawed modernist interpretation of the Western myths. His female characters and his marginalized minorities are unlike any that ever truly existed, and his views of human psychology are more superficial than insightful. In the late twentieth century, L’Amour’s Westerns were dominating the fiction bookracks. But other versions of Westerns were developing in influential European markets. Lucky Luke comic books were highly popular in France and Frenchspeaking cultures. Lucky Luke was a wildly imaginative cowboy ever in pursuit of the Daltons. English Black Horse Westerns were also becoming popular. Late in the century Western-themed video games began to appear, based upon the imagined West of Spaghetti Westerns. In short, the public perception of the Western myth was changing rapidly as the twentieth century came to a close. As in other areas of American popular culture, the modernist paradigm was changing. This transformation inevitably found its way into popular Western paperbacks as well. During the 1980s and 1990s, alongside all the Louis L’Amour Westerns, a new kind of Western began to appear, the adult Western. Playboy Press was one of the first publishers in this field. Large numbers of these very thin Westerns cropped up seemingly everywhere. Among the most popular were the Longarm series, the Trailsman series, and The Edge series. The Longarm series has been running since 1978 and still flourishes with over 300 novels in the series, written by numerous writers under the name Tabor Evans. The Edge series, actually written by a single author, George G. Gilman, begun in 1972, has been revived by Gilman since 2002 with a much older Edge character. These novels have two things in common: page after page of extraordinarily gruesome violence, and incredibly graphic, explicit sex. They are strictly imaginative Westerns, bearing almost no reference to historic authenticity. For many non-readers of Westerns, these novels have become the dominant image of what Westerns are all about. The traditional Western myths, for this audience, are dead. Publishers and authors, realizing this trend, had to change with the times as the new century dawned. And thus the not-so-subtle change has occurred at the beginning of the twenty-first century from modernist Westerns to postmodern Westerns. Modernist Westerns saw the West as formative of masculine character. With white males at the center, all other characters—women, Native Americans, all non-white peoples—were marginalized. Modernist Western plots were based upon regenerative violence, violence that actually purified evil and brought about salvation. Authentic representation of history and geography validated the white male experience—after all, one could say, this was the way it really happened. The cultural codes of twentieth century modernism in general pervaded these Westerns as they based action and decisions by protagonists squarely upon the practical, the reasonable, and the thoroughly secular. Postmodern Westerns written since 2000 rarely depict the West as formative of masculine character. In fact, the West might be said generally to corrupt character. Postmodern Westerns tend to be much more violent than modernist Westerns, yet the violence cannot be considered regenerative or redemptive. While many feminist critics might still see strong male domination in twenty-first century Westerns, comparatively speaking, these new Westerns are not strictly centered in a white male paradigm. At least the possibility of multiple paradigms is being considered. Stories centered on formerly marginalized peoples, as well as stories with women characters equally strong and consequential as men are common today. The nineteenth century’s

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feminine ideal (that is, a woman whose primary duties were to support her husband and to tend to domestic affairs) is no longer validated in Western literature, nor considered normative. Instead, women in postmodern Westerns generally have a past or depth of character that allows them to assert themselves equal to men. Prostitutes often take the role of the typical woman of the West in an egalitarian way. Unrestrained and extensively described sex is typical but not necessary. Most sex is casual, commoditized, or the result of violent rape. But like the modernist Westerns, postmodern Westerns still are basically secular. Trends and Themes. Many of the common trends and themes of Westerns written since 2000 were well in place by the late decades of the previous century. Because modernist Westerns seemed to have devolved into many versions of the same basic formulas, and because the market for the older Westerns was simply growing stale, recent writers have been forced to look for something new to write about and new ways of presenting their stories. A far greater variety of subject matter appears in today’s Western stories than in the past. For one thing, the Western Moment has been stretched backward as well as forward. No longer do we assume a Western will take place strictly after the Civil War or before 1900. For example, Mountain Men novels have become a popular subgenre of Westerns. William W. Johnstone made his reputation with his Mountain Man series and his First Mountain Man series. Larry McMurtry’s Berrybender Narratives series take place in the 1830s and 1840s. Numerous Westerns have concentrated almost exclusively on Native Americans. Don Coldsmith’s Westerns relate stories of Native Americans prior to European contact. Generally, the traditional formula stories, such as gunfighter narratives, are de-emphasized unless they can be told from an unusual perspective, through the eyes of a female character as in Jane Candia Coleman’s Doc Holiday’s Woman, for instance. Contexts and Issues. A basic assumption among cultural critics when approaching any work of fiction is that the work truly reflects the era and culture in which it is written, rather than the culture of the fictional setting. A Western, for instance, is never about the old West. It is always about the culture of the time it was written. As we look back at Westerns of the twentieth century we can see how they responded to such historical events as the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and the Women’s Movement. Westerns written during World War II might emphasize savage warfare with Native Americans, for instance, as a way of reflecting upon the savage combat with the Japanese. So to what current developments do Westerns written since 2000 relate? The beginning of the twenty-first century saw the most aggressive direct attack on the United States in recent history with the September 11, 2001 attacks. A war with seemingly no end in sight with Iraq has occupied the U.S. military since 2002. Though these events have certainly impacted American culture, it is too early to determine how they will be reflected in Westerns. Other potential cultural trends that may appear in upcoming Westerns include stories about invasions from our neighbors to the south or the onslaught of alien peoples into a domesticated territory. We might see savage warfare stories again as well as stories with tyrannical powerful leaders. There is no doubt that Westerns will change in the twenty-first century, but exactly what trends will emerge is yet to be seen. Reception. As with all popular media since 2000, the popular Western market depends heavily on Internet visibility. Virtually all writers have their own Web sites for their fans, and publishers devote web space to their Western products. Several

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writers such as William W. Johnstone have long-running discussion boards for their fans to chat about their novels. Writers such as Ed Gorman maintain continuous blogs for their fans to read, and the fans themselves blog regularly about their favorite writers and books. No longer can we consider the path of a Western as simply a chain of author/publisher/bookseller/consumer. The main industry awards for Westerns and Western writers are the Spur Awards and the Western Heritage Awards. The Spur Awards are given each year by the Western Writers of America. The somewhat more prestigious Western Heritage Awards are awarded annually by the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum of Oklahoma City. The commercial market for mass market traditional Westerns (as opposed to Westerns with contemporary settings) is serving readers of Westerns well in 2007. According to the Western Writers of America Web site, “Nielsen BookScan, which covers about 70% of U.S. book sales, says Western sales have increased by 9% in 2005 and 10% thus far in 2006. Books in Print says the number of Western titles produced has increased from 543 in 1995 to 901 in 2005.”

AWARDS FOR WESTERN FICTION The Spur Award, from the Western Writers of America 2007: 2007: 2006:

2005: 2004: 2003: 2002: 2001: 2000:

Best Western Long Novel: The Night Journal by Elizabeth Crook.Viking/Penguin. Best Western Short Novel: The Shape Shifter by Tony Hillerman. HarperCollins. Best Western Novel: Tie for Spur Winner: Camp Ford: A Western Story by Johnny D. Boggs, Five Star Publishing; and The Undertaker’s Wife by Loren D. Estleman, Forge Books. Buy the Chief a Cadillac by Rick Steber. Bonanza Publishing I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company by Brian Hall.Viking. The Chili Queen by Sandra Dallas. St. Martin’s Press. The Way of the Coyote by Elmer Kelton. Forge Books. Summer of Pearls by Mike Blakely. Forge Books. Masterson by Richard S.Wheeler. Forge Books.

Western Heritage Awards 2008: Harpsong by Rilla Askew. 2007: Broken Trail by Alan Geoffrion. Fulcrum Publishing. 2006: Buffalo Calf Road Woman, The Story of a Warrior of the Little Bighorn by Rosemary Agonito and Joseph Agonito.The Globe Pequot Press/Two Dot Books. 2005: And Not to Yield, by Randy Lee Eickhoff. Forge Books. 2004: Spark on the Prairie:The Trial of the Kiowa Chiefs by Johnny Boggs. Signet. 2003: Moon of Bitter Cold by Frederick J. Chiaventone. Forge Books. 2002: The Master Executioner by Loren D. Estleman. Forge Books. 2001: Gates of the Alamo by Stephen Harrigan. Alfred A. Knopf. 2000: The Contract Surgeon by Dan O’Brien.The Lyons Press. From Western Writers of America (http://www.westernwriters.org/spur_award_history.htm) From National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum (http://www.nationalcowboymuseum. org/default.aspx)

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For writers of Westerns, the market news is not so promising, however. Books in Print lists include Print on Demand titles and vanity titles, and there are quite a few Westerns printed by vanity presses each year. But nowadays most publishers put all their non-catalog books into Print on Demand status. Thus, these books don’t carry much reward for the authors. Worse yet, the entire Western paperback offerings are dominated by reprints of titles by Louis L’Amour, William W. Johnstone, and Ralph Compton. There are probably fewer than thirty working authors of mass market traditional Westerns in the U.S. market today. But again, readers can enjoy a variety of Westerns being placed on the shelves. During the twentieth century Westerns were popular with movie makers, and several Westerns by Zane Grey, Max Brand, Louis L’Amour and others were adapted to film. However, since 2000 only a few Westerns each year have come out of Hollywood. Two of the most notable Western films based on Western novels since 2000 are Open Range (2003) based on Lauran Paine’s novel of the same name in the same year, and Broken Trail (2006) based on Alan Geoffrion’s 2006 novel of the same name. Selected Authors. Obviously, plenty of writers who made their mark in the later decades of the last century are still active today and their work hasn’t necessarily changed simply because we are in a new century. One such author still producing plenty of Westerns in the twenty-first century is Elmer Kelton, the Texas writer who published his first Western in 1955 and won the first of his seven Spur Awards in 1956. Besides the Spur Awards, Kelton has been voted all-time best Western author by the Western Writers of America and is a four time winner of Western Heritage Awards. Kelton’s novels haven’t changed noticeably over the several decades. The Way of the Coyote (2001) is set, typically, in Texas. It is the Reconstruction period and thus the story plays off conflicts between Reconstruction agents and defeated Confederate sympathizers. We are intended to read the novel with sympathy for the defeated Texans. Rusty Shannon, the main character, loses his farm due to legal shenanigans by the state authorities. In fact, all the Reconstruction agents and supporters are uniformly evil. No doubt Kelton counts on his readers sharing the views put forth in the novel. However, a more objective reading reveals attitudes incompatible with postmodern culture. Kelton, still the modernist, takes a racial realist view at every opportunity. In other words, he evidently sees his characters’ race as inherent in their biological makeup rather than the more modern view that race is something constructed by culture. An African American character, former slave who is humbled by the Ku Klux Klan, supports his former oppressors and reviles the Reconstruction agents. One of the leaders of the Klan turns out to have a softer side. Perhaps most disturbing is a main character who was captured as a child and brought up in Comanche ways. He is “rescued” and, though he longs for his tribal ways, made to become “civilized.” The title, The Way of the Coyote, comes from a major episode when he casts off his white ways and uses his tribal skills of tracking like a coyote in a long chase and pursuit scene. He saves another white boy captured by evil Comanche. At the end of the novel Andy symbolically cuts his hair and merges fully into his real people. No matter what his upbringing, his real racial identity is white Euro-American. The novel won a Spur Award in 2001. Also making his reputation in the late twentieth century, Loren Estleman is that rare genre writer for whom character and style can transcend plot. Tending toward the Hemingway-esque, Estleman pares his prose close and delights in showing the humanness of the neglected and the stereotyped characters of the mythic West. A

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Michigan native who wrote his first novel in 1976, he has remained consistently popular since 2000. According to his Web site, he has written 59 books along with numerous short works and he prides himself on writing exclusively on a manual typewriter. Estleman, like other Western authors, frequently crosses into other genres; he has received numerous awards for his mystery novels. His Westerns have earned him five Spur Awards and three Western Heritage Awards. Estleman’s The Master Executioner (2001) won a Western Heritage Award. A carpenter takes up the profession of hangman and, through an apprenticeship with a veteran hangman, learns the trade to become a master executioner. But Oscar Stone becomes so devoted to perfectionism in his trade that he loses everything in his dedication to what others see as abhorrent. Here, as in his other novels, Estleman de-emphasizes typical Western formula elements. In The Undertaker’s Wife (2005), also a Spur Award winner, Estleman again chooses an unglamorous profession and develops a compelling story along with a shot of unexpected romance. Told through the point of view of his devoted wife, the undertaker is pressured to cover up a suicide on the corpse of a prominent financier in order to avert suspicion that economic times aren’t what they seem. The novel features lots of inside the embalming room story material. In Black Powder, White Smoke (2002) Estleman attempts to weave two parallel main plots with two subplots in a way not typical of older genre Westerns. Again he focuses on characters often ignored by classic Westerns: the African American owner of a brothel out to avenge the mutilation of one of his girls, and a lawless reveler who kills a Chinese immigrant running from an urban Chinese gang. The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion (2006) is a tale of an acting troupe out to gouge anybody and everybody, Wild West style. Shakespeare may be playing onstage but the bank’s being robbed down the street. Loren Estleman’s most popular series is his Paige Murdock series. Murdock is a U.S. Deputy Marshal working for Federal Judge Harlan A. Blackstone. The main character frequently travels far afield in the pursuit of his duties. In Port Hazard (2004), Murdock travels to the Barbary Coast and in White Desert (2001) he pursues a ruthless band into the Canadian North Country. Author Cotton Smith’s motto, according to his Web site, is “Delivering a wellhoned psychological edge to western history,” and, indeed, his novels do emphasize characters’ interior reactions to the various dilemmas they encounter. Pray for Texas (2000), for example, filters through the psyche of a crazed Confederate cavalryman who cannot accept defeat and thus joins an outlaw band. In his zeal to fight on, he confronts his childhood of abuse from his preacher father and confronts the demons of his past. The novel was nominated for the Western Heritage Award. Peter Brandvold published his first Western in 1999. The back covers of all of his books boast, “Brandvold writes a lot like L’Amour.” And, sure enough, Brandvold writes what at first might appear to be traditional, modernist Western fiction. His novels look like authentic Westerns. The Romantics (2001), for example, is based on a typical chase and pursuit after gold treasure deep into Mexico trailed by vile desperados, former Confederate followers of Bloody Bill Anderson. There is plenty of action and wonderfully portrayed regenerative violence. But Brandvold does recognize women, and it is through the presence of a female protagonist that The Romantics shifts slightly from modernist Westerns. One of the main characters is Maria, the gorgeous Mexican wife of the character with the treasure map. Maria’s beauty proves a problem all along the journey as she faces numerous rape attempts. But she

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can ride and shoot and she proves as tough as anybody. At the end the gold is found and she survives along with the novel’s hero, Jack Cameron. The Romantics is a twenty-first century Western with soft graphic language and merely suggestive sex, but graphic detailed violence and a portrayal of Native Americans as savages. Although Westerns have traditionally been written by male authors from a male character’s point of view, the genre has always included a handful of talented female writers such as B.M. Bower, and there are probably more women writing Westerns today than ever before. The Western Romance market, for example, is flourishing. A.H. Hope, Elizabeth Crook, and many others are actively marketing Westerns, both traditional and romantic. Elizabeth Fackler, who made her reputation in the 1990s with Westerns with strong women protagonists, has devoted most of her efforts to crime fiction since 2000. However, she returned to Westerns in 2006 with Bone Justice, a story with horrific implications of a kindhearted outlaw on the road to reform suddenly