This essay seeks to extend Faulkner's imaginative writings beyond the temporal, spatial and aesthetic parameters of regionalism and modernism, according to which his work has been widely read. In an exemplary reading of his 1942 novel Go Down, Moses, I recontextualize Faulkner's fiction in a broader literary and discursive tradition of the US frontier narrative. To draw out the frontier meanings and tropes of Go Down, Moses, I examine closely those texts – Faulkner's and others' – that circulate around the major fiction and necessarily exert, I argue, interpretative pressure on it. These more secondary or contiguous texts include Faulkner's screenwriting for two of the great Hollywood Western directors, John Ford and Howard Hawks; his short stories and speeches; James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking tales; and the political discourse that emerged in response to the democratic crisis of the 1930s. Certain tropes and narratives – to do with colonialism, for example – that have been submerged within the Faulknerian southern narrative of the plantation, begin to surface, to reset the narrative in relation to a national project. Reading Faulkner in this way constructs a critical frame that is both diachronic and transregionalist, and thus contributes to current debates articulated within the revisionary project of new southern studies about the ways in which we think and write anew about the post-South.

Historical and universal issues of love and hate, patriarchy and bigotry prevail in Alice Childress's tragic drama Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White. Originally written in the early 1960s, the play was not printed or performed professionally until 1966, despite some interest in producing the play on Broadway. Hence, due to its alleged controversial subject matter, the play remained largely unknown to mainstream audiences. Childress, it seems, unfashionably portrays a long-standing, committed interracial relationship set in 1918 South Carolina. This representation conflictingly juxtaposes with the well-documented fervent civil rights period of the mid-1960s. Additionally, with predominantly black and white male civil rights activists peacefully enforcing laws upholding desegregation in the South, Childress demonstrates segregation's insidious nature primarily through the insightfulness and experience of black women. This perceptiveness introduces what Childress herself penned as “anti-woman laws,” patriarchal norms that made living incredibly difficult for black and white women alike.

This article proceeds from the observation that all of Lethem's novels subvert traditional genres in some way, and argues that the way genres mutate or evolve reflects one of his central ethical concerns – evolution itself. Many of the characters in Gun, with Occasional Music (1994) are “evolved animals” that have undergone “evolution therapy” and can now talk, walk upright, and carry weapons. As the narrator Metcalf observes, these animals are characteristically reluctant to acknowledge their animal lineage. Here one sees evolution's contradiction: it purports to be progress, but is also a melancholic forgetting of origins. In a world where a drug called Forgettol abstracts people from their own memories, it is the detective's job, though he is despised for it, to continue asking questions and remind people of shared culpability and connected narratives. Metcalf, this paper suggests, is engaged in a struggle to maintain the novel as detective fiction, to resist the encroaching sci-fi elements which symbolize the death of community through increasing dependence on an unethical science of forgetting. Amnesia Moon (1995) depicts a postapocalyptic America in which the typical “evolutionary” reaction to the unspecified catastrophe is a retreat into a blinkered regionalism which, like Forgettol or evolution therapy, encourages the individual to forget any sense of wider responsibility. The article concludes with reflections on literary influence and the evolution of Lethem's own work in subsequent novels.

The growing number of academic autobiographies published in recent years has sparked interesting debates on the nature and function of life writing. We now grapple with the question of the degrees to which autobiographical and professional writing function in conjunction – if we can read autobiographical writing from professional perspectives or, alternatively, to what extent scholarship grows from personal experiences. This approach to the academic autobiography links our notions about processes of self-inscription to the forms of production of historical and cultural knowledge. This essay examines these ideas by reading Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Among the White Moon Faces (1997). Lim's literary and scholarly production superlatively illustrates the development of contemporary perspectives on national identity and language, migration, and homelands. Her work, which includes poetry collections, novels, short stories, academic studies and a memoir – compels readers to engage the interplay between the competing forces of race, ethnicity, gender, and nationality within spaces that embody these conflicts. I argue that a comparative reading of personal and professional narratives invites us to reconsider how, working within specific epistemic contexts, academics like Lim consciously negotiate the intersection between personal history and academic commitment, a vital subtext in their autobiographical performance.

The enduring success of any roman-à-clef owes to the ghost of the real world lurking, like a palimpsest, behind the storyworld. Barring a few counterfactual twists, Richard Condon's Death of a Politician follows the chequered career of a dead-ringer for Richard Milhous Nixon through the war-scam 1940s, the red scare 1950s, and the freewheeling-dealing 1960s. Square the revisionist drive of Condon's political fiction with the premise of historical veracity, and you may wonder where sober fact ends and fiction begins. How much of Nixon lies in Walter Bodmor Slurrie? How much of Nixon's banker and confidant “Bebe” Rebozo lies in Slurrie's banker and confidant “Kiddo” Cardozo? How much of the Miami mobster Mayer Lansky lies in Cardozo's boss, Miami mobster Abner Danzig? How much of their crass venality and control is the figment of Condon's imagination? Better still, how much is true? In my article I set out to answer all these questions, using Condon's roman-à-clef as a springboard for analysis of salient aspects of the Nixon presidency and of American electoral politics in general.

This article offers a revisionist reading of the aesthetic of the American modernist poet George Oppen. It seeks, in the first instance, to supplement those established readings of Oppen that have concluded that his work is most profitably understood in the discursive contexts of American literary modernism and modern European Continental philosophy by arguing that such approaches overlook a key indigenous intellectual influence upon his corpus: that body of philosophical inquiry and cultural self-reflection that has come to be known as American pragmatism. The article attempts to rectify this omission by making two simultaneous and complementary suggestions: first, that pragmatic thought opens up a number of formal and semantic questions – indeed, a number of questions about the relationship between form and meaning – that have been too little considered in recent work on American poetry; and second, that something crucial to Oppen's poetry remains unthinkable without sustained attention to the questions and claims that pragmatism places at the very heart of its endeavour. While the relationship between pragmatist thought and Oppen's poetics helps to illuminate a set of concerns that lies at the very core of his aesthetic, the paper will argue, it also reciprocally exposes the limitations of an influential genealogical vision of American literary modernism. To support this contention it examines the ways in which a certain literary version of American intellectual history has reinterpreted the pragmatism of William James in the image of an Emersonian linguistic scepticism in order to establish the historical centrality of a broadly Romantic genealogy of American modernism. The paper concludes by suggesting that a renewed attention to the specific forms and modalities of Oppen's poetry demonstrates not only the inadequacy of this version of literary history to a particular tradition of American poetics, but also promises to recover the force and distinctiveness of the American pragmatist inheritance for succeeding generations of writers.

Mobility is a significant feature of American history and culture. This is reflected in the literature and cinema of the road genre, in influential novels such as Jack Kerouac's On the Road and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, and in films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969). However, when non-Americans create road stories they tend to employ symbols and narratives that are often considered intrinsically American. These storytellers appear to have absorbed or internalized aspects of American national identity, and this is reflected in their work. This is demonstrated in The Cursed Earth, an apocalyptic road story in twenty-five parts, which was published in the British weekly comic 2000AD from May to October 1978. Written by British writer Pat Mills, with contributions from John Wagner and Chris Lowder, The Cursed Earth features the character Judge Dredd, perhaps the most popular and most recognizable icon of British comics of the last thirty years. Through close textual analysis of the Cursed Earth story, this article reveals how thematic elements of the road genre are linked to significant themes in American history and culture.