Uneasy Alliance: Twentieth-century American Literature, Culture And Biography (costerus Ns 150) (costerus New Series)

Uneasy Alliance illuminates the recent search in literary studies for a new interface between textual and contextual readings. Written in tribute to G.A.M. Janssens, the twenty-one essays in the volume exemplify a renewed awareness of the paradoxical nature of literary texts both as works of literary art and as documents embedded in and functioning within a writer’s life and culture. Together they offer fresh and often interdisciplinary perspectives on twentieth-century American writers of more or less established status (Henry James, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, Vladimir Nabokov, Flannery O’Connor, Saul Bellow, Michael Ondaatje, Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros) as well as on those who, for reasons of fashion, politics, ideology, or gender, have been unduly neglected (Booth Tarkington, Julia Peterkin, Robert Coates, Martha Gellhorn, Isabella Gardner, Karl Shapiro, the young Jewish-American writers, Julia Alvarez, and writers of popular crime and detective fiction). Exploring the fruitful interactions and uneasy alliance between literature and ethics, film, biography, gender studies, popular culture, avant-garde art, urban studies, anthropology and multicultural studies, together these essays testify to the ongoing pertinence of an approach to literature that is undogmatic, sensitive and sophisticated and that seeks to do justice to the complex interweavings of literature, culture and biography in twentieth-century American writing. Contents......Page 8 Preface......Page 10 Metaphor, Metonymy, and Ethics in The Portrait of a Lady......Page 16 A Variety of Ambersons: Re-reading Booth Tarkington's and Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons......Page 32 Stepping Through a Looking-Glass: The Worlds of Julia Peterkin (1880-1961)......Page 60 Edna St. Vincent Millay's Sonnets: Putting "Chaos into Fourteen Lines"......Page 82 Portraits of Gotham: Twentieth-Century American Culture and the Writers of New York City......Page 102 American Literary Modernism, Popular Culture and Metropolitan Mass Life: The Early Fiction of Robert M. Coates......Page 110 E.E. Cummings and Marion Morehouse: The Later Years......Page 144 Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998): Femme Fatale of American Letters......Page 156 Reading Signs: Epistemological Uncertainty and the Southern Grotesque in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood......Page 174 "How Rough Can Editors Be?": Conrad Aiken, Edward Dahlberg, and Karl Shapiro in a Literary Row......Page 186 Postillion for Pegasus: Isabella Gardner and Poetry......Page 200 Nabokov's Unwanted Children: Lolita and the Writers of the Olympia Press......Page 216 The Almighty's Own Purposes: Alfred Kazin's God and the American Writer......Page 230 Saul Bellow and the Actual......Page 244 Between Prominence and Obscurity: Jewish-American Writers at the Center of a Decentralized Literature......Page 256 Toni Morrison's Tricksters......Page 270 Site of Passage: The City as a Place of Exile in Contemporary North-American Multicultural Literature......Page 286 Sandra Cisneros: Crossing Borders......Page 306 Border Crossings in Latina Narrative: Julia Alvarez' How the García Girls Lost Their Accents......Page 324 Stalking Multiculturalism: Historical Sleuths at the End of the Twentieth Century......Page 336 The English Tradition in Contemporary American Crime Fiction......Page 346 Notes on Contributors......Page 364 In this essay I want to use the above definition of ethics, taken from Geoffrey Galt Harpham, one of the leading writers on the subject of literature and ethics, as a springboard for a reading of Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady (1881; New York Edition, 1908).