In their introduction to A bibliography of Henry James Leon Edel and Dan H. Laurence rightly single out the year 1878 as an example of James's astonishing literary productivity. In that year were published French Poets and Novelists, the revised Watch and Ward, Theodolinde (later to be called Rose-Agathe), Daisy Miller, The Europeans, “Longstaff's Marriage” and an International Episode, together with thirty-one articles, reviews and notes, the majority of which were published in the Nation, although James did not become their regular London correspondent until September, 1878. Throughout the seventies James, consciously or unconsciously, had been increasingly preoccupied in his fiction with the “international subject”, and his letter to America also testified to his growing enchantment with Europe. The decision that he made for Europe in 1881 had in one sense been made several years earlier; in his novels, short stories and articles James may be seen constantly weighing two civilizations in the scales of his own artistic purposes, setting off the achievement of Europe against the promise of America. In writing his biography of Hawthorne in 1879 James must have realised that his own problems were in many ways similar to those which had confronted Hawthorne in America.

This essay examines the representation of sexuality and identity in the fictions of American novelist Edmund White. Gay sexuality and identity politics are discussed in relation to “coming out,” the discourse of American identity, and whiteness. White's output is shaped and informed by the cultural, historical and political circumstances which have conditioned how gay male sexuality has been discursively shaped over the last forty years. Yet his work has been inflected by theorizations of sexuality which have called into question the very specificity of a homosexual and/or gay identity. Who is White's audience today, and who wants to read a “white” boy's story anyway?

Scholarship on the theme of Alexis de Tocqueville's changing roles in American culture constitutes a remarkably coherent discourse with distinctive conventions, structures, metaphors, and plots. Especially pronounced in the literature is a constantly repeated narrative – really a myth – that portrays Tocqueville as a vanished hero who suffered a prolonged period of oblivion and then made a celebrated return to play the role of guide to Americans as they faced the perils of the postwar world. Because of the lack of empirical support for this narrative, scholars inadvertently find themselves violating or disregarding elementary rules of evidence and logical argument when they address it. The extraordinary stability and coherence of this discourse are its most notable features: they have persisted, with no oppositional counternarrative, decade after decade for the past forty years. But all discourses have cracks and fissures. This essay reveals the ubiquity as well as the banality of the standard tragic-heroic narrative, and it provides a taxonomy of Tocqueville metaphors – Tocqueville as Orpheus, as Proteus, and as Christ. The supposed facts of Tocqueville's reception (with which these metaphoric clusters are identical) are false. There was no departure, oblivion, or triumphant return of Tocqueville. The mythic discourse advanced an account that had no support in the historical record.

Writers and critics in the Gilded Age United States frequently debated the relations between literature and science. A common contemporary interpretation of this relationship held that these two ways of knowing and writing were fundamentally opposed and that the advancement of science in American culture came at the expense of literary sensibilities. Nevertheless, and often as an effort to challenge this supposed opposition, many scientists also cultivated reputations as literary figures, and produced or planned diverse works ranging from travel writing and novels to verse drama. Such authors as Clarence King, J. Peter Lesley, Simon Newcomb and Nathaniel Southgate Shaler sustained a hybrid literary–scientific culture in the late nineteenth century. This interdisciplinary cultural zone was fragile and increasingly fractured by around 1900, as the emergence and consolidation of new categories of intellectual labour became increasingly wedded to the images of the “professional author” and the “scientist” as mutually exclusive identities. This article seeks to contribute to recurrent debates about the “two cultures” of literature and science by foregrounding the differentiation of these new forms of professional and intellectual identity as a decisive factor which constrained the possibility of a shared literary–scientific culture by the turn of the twentieth century.

This essay argues that the anti-slavery periodical The Liberator cast itself as heir to a revolutionary tradition of Puritan print to sanction its critiques of the American church and state. This reimagination of Puritanism spoke to readers by tapping into desires for spiritual revival within a secularizing public sphere and a print culture shifting from Protestant scarcity to Victorian abundance. By tracking how The Liberator both utilized these new print technologies and imagined their reclamation of Puritanism, this essay ultimately reveals a more ambiguous negotiation between the sacred and the secular in the emergent public sphere than is often supposed.

This article explores how a city remembered a national event that took place before its own existence. To this end, two public works of art in the city of Chicago that have American Revolutionary War participants as their subjects are examined. Particular attention is paid to the historical context surrounding Revolutionary War-themed public art in Chicago as well as to the two men who were responsible for erecting the sculptures – Robert R. McCormick and Barnet Hodes. McCormick, the publisher of the Chicago Daily Tribune, chose to immortalize the doomed Revolutionary spy, Nathan Hale, while Hodes, an attorney for the city of Chicago, centered his attention on a monument that included representations of General George Washington and immigrant financiers Robert Morris and Haym Salomon. By doing so, this article considers what motivated Chicagoans during the 1930s and 1940s to remember the American Revolutionary War. The general consensus that surrounded these acts of remembrance suggests the limitations of otherwise useful and important approaches that focus on conflict and healing in public memory formation.

Scholars have questioned what Nat Turner meant to others in the past; in this article, I question what he means today. Reversing William Andrews's injunction to read “Prophet Nat's” 1831 insurrection through the US's encounter with religio-political terrorism on 9/11, I instead examine the effect September 11th has had on the rebel slave's contemporary afterlife. Ultimately this article asks what cultural work Nat Turner now performs, what his recent depictions tell us about the racial formations of the present. Drawing on comics theory, I parse the visual rhetoric of Kyle Baker's popular and increasingly studied comic Nat Turner, in which Baker tropes Nat Turner as Christ just as Nat Turner himself did in his Confessions. Baker produces an iconic black hero, one who is visually antithetical to racist images of “the terrorist” circulating in post-9/11 discourses. By doing so, Baker safeguards not only Nat Turner but US “blackness” from Islamophobia during the age of the global War on Terror. Finally, by reading Baker's comic alongside other recent, unexamined depictions of the rebel slave, this article updates the archive on Nat Turner and complicates the political possibilities that inhere in other sites of cultural memory.

This article traces the long and antagonistic fashioning of the National Recovery Adminstration's code of practice for the film industry during 1933. The NRA code process publicly exposed resentful fissions within Hollywood, and the oligarchic, if not monopolistic, way in which the major film studios had set up their vertically integrated consolidation of the motion-picture industry in terms of production, distribution and exhibition on a national scale. A media spotlight flooded onto their soundstages and executive suites, and many, including President Franklin Roosevelt, were not pleased with what they saw. The NRA, signed into law in 1933 by Roosevelt, implemented an unprecedented reorganization of the American economy to restore employment to combat the Great Depression. Perhaps most controversially, especially for the union-averse film industry, the NRA established collective bargaining. Though they supported it initially, the major studios would not long abide by the NRA. Throughout 1933, they violated the spirit and letter of the code, ensuring as much as possible that the economic pain and sacrifice of the Great Depression in Hollywood was visited upon artists and technicians, not studio heads and executives. They used the making of the code to attempt to cement and further the advantages they enjoyed while offering little to other interests in the film industry.

The Transcendentalist legacy in Auster's Leviathan faces many questions posed by postmodern cultural politics. Previous studies of the novel have highlighted the irresolvable tension between writerly solitude and political engagement, which largely accounts for Benjamin Sachs's undoing. Departing from this interpretation, the present essay provides an alternative reading that links Auster's Thoreauvian representation with Cavell's idea of Emersonian Perfectionism. It seeks to cast further light on the idea of America, examine its relation to self-transformation, and reevaluate Sachs's life and work within a philosophical framework.

Region, home and transnational migration are explored in terms of the transcultural complexities that reverberate through Iranian American Gina Nahai's Sunday's Silence. Nahai grapples with stereotypes that attach to the Holiness churches in the east Tennessee region of Appalachia. This essay argues that the novel's politics rest on the intersubjectivity of strangers as bound into a metaphysics of desire. It is through this paradigm that Nahai writes against the reductive association of “minority” literature with discrete “national” models and through which she explores the local and the regional in a culturally complex narrative about the crisis of alterity.

October 12. – The Discovery. – It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

Excavation at Night (1908), George Bellows' second painting of the construction work undertaken for Pennsylvania Street Station, offers a dramatic depiction of the site that took up two full New York city-blocks. Bellows' decision to paint a nocturnal scene is vital to both the dramatic effect of the painting and its capacity to make an assertion about the ways in which the excavation could be perceived. In Electrifying America, David Nye suggests that the coming of electricity created the possibility of a new form of visual rhetoric. By making it possible to illuminate specific areas of the nocturnal city, electric light facilitated the privileging and deprivileging of certain spaces. By illuminating, and thus privileging, particular areas of the canvas, Bellows implements a similar rhetoric in Excavation at Night. Thus, illuminated by powerful electric lights, the snow covered far wall of the excavation and the row of buildings above it are placed in contrast, and possibly in opposition, with the man silhouetted by the light of the bonfire near the bottom edge of the canvas. The dramatic force of Bellows' “bravura” style raises the stakes in this contrast or opposition between the small-scale human activity around the fire and the large urban story of the excavation. In this article I intend to theorise Bellows' handling of smallness as an “anecdotal mode,” to suggest that “anecdote” may function both negatively and positively, and to show that this mode becomes particularly problematic when it is applied to city scenes.

Commonly regarded as one of the pioneers of motion-picture technology, Eadweard Muybridge carried out several photographic studies of animal and human movement in the late nineteenth century. One of Muybridge's lesser-known commissions was an album of interior photographs that he created in 1880 for his friends Kate and Robert Johnson. This article offers a close reading of this album and argues that it has more in common with Muybridge's motion studies than historians have previously recognized. Far from being a commercial outlier, the album offered Muybridge an opportunity to experiment with the technological and cultural possibilities of photography in a new way. Through ghosts, mirrors, and other forms of representational excess, these images make visible Muybridge's handiwork as a photographer and the intellectual complexity of his collaboration with Kate and Robert Johnson.

At the start of Pagan Spain (1957), Richard Wright recalled a 1946 conversation with Gertrude Stein; she encouraged him to visit Spain: “ ‘You'll see what the Western world is made of. Spain is primitive, but lovely. ’ ” Wright meditated on his fascination with that country, an obsession rooted in the Civil War's political upheaval: “The fate of Spain hurt me, haunted me; I was never able to stifle a hunger to understand what had happened there and why” (PS, 10). Wright wrote as a leftist, as a political writer who had published anti-Franco articles. In his interest in Spain, and especially in his “hunger to understand” its fate after the fall of the Republic, Wright kept company with many mid-century American artists. Hemingway is the most famous instance of a writer engaged with Spanish affairs, but forms of Hispanophilia have marked the lives of many writers and painters. In his account of a trip to Madrid in 1947, Saul Bellow recalled: “ ‘And then of course I had followed the Spanish Civil War and knew as much about what had gone on in Spain between 1936–8 as a young American of that time could learn.’ ” At around that time, the Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell was creating his series of Elegies to the Spanish Republic, a parade of largely black canvases dominated by oblique representations of archetypal Spanish subjects such as bullfighting. As Arthur Danto has written of these images: “ ‘Spain’ denotes a land of suffering and poetic violence and political agony, and ‘Elegy’ carries the literary weight of tragedy and disciplined lamentation. ”

In a profile of Frank Sinatra published in 1955, in the midst of the star's second defining career ascent, Time magazine declared, “His new success spreads like a Hoboken cargo net across almost every area of showbusiness.”1 Time's use of Sinatra's urban industrial background to describe his extraordinary success is typical of the commentary surrounding the star in the 1950s which cast him as a working-class interloper and betrayed the problematic class dynamics frequently denied by post-war America's dominant culture. Sinatra's non-conformist behaviour, aggressive ambition, extreme experiences of success and failure, and the screen characters through which he portrayed alienation and disenfranchisement combined with this type of unsubtle critique in the development of Sinatra's conspicuous working-class star identity.

This paper examines the attitudes of feminist activists, intellectuals and filmmakers to US intervention in Central America during the 1980s. It traces the development of mutual intellectual and political sustenance between feminism and anti-interventionism, arguing that as feminist thinking bred new ways of approaching US involvement in Central America, so anti-interventionist struggles bred new ways of thinking about women's activism. In making this point, the paper complicates narratives of the “age of Reagan” that overlook the persistence of left-wing politics during the 1980s. Instead, it argues that a specific form of international feminism enabled a community of activists to contribute to a vibrant culture of dissent that criticized conservative approaches to women's rights and, at the same time, vigorously contested the interventionist foreign policy of the Reagan administration.

This essay examines Lawd Today!, Richard Wright's posthumously published novel, written in the 1930s but only made available to readers in 1963. Concentrating on the epigraphs that punctuate the novel, the essay demonstrates the significance of the social criticism of the 1910s and 1920s to Wright's formation as literary artist. In particular, Wright was drawn to the writings of the Young American critics, including Van Wyck Brooks and Waldo Frank, whose criticisms of national ideologies furthered a commitment to “Americanism” as a horizon of social and cultural renewal. Wright's intellectual immersion in early twentieth-century US social criticism gave Lawd Today! a Young American critical imprint. Drawing upon the work of Ernesto Laclau on “populism,” the essay reads Wright's novel as invested in an “Americanism” that seeks to describe common features of early twentieth-century black migrant experience in the urban North in terms of larger national and modern dynamics.

This paper hermeneutically examines the relationship between technology, masculinity, and modernity in John Boorman's film Deliverance (1972). It finds that the suburbanites who are victimized in Appalachia do not regress to a primal, premodern state but rely on their modern values to justify killing their assailants. The men's violence allegorizes the institutionalized violence of the power company that is damming the Cahulawassee River to power their suburban technological comforts. Hermeneutic analysis and critical theories of technology are combined to examine how each man reassesses his life, as one of modernity's beneficiaries, after encountering the displaced mountain people – modernity's others.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s a number of British “scholarship boys” traveled to America sponsored by British and American foundations. Their experiences in the United States qualify and complicate existing narratives about upwardly mobile meritocrats. First, Americans regarded these figures in a manner that helped alter their view of themselves. Distinctions that mattered in Britain became less significant in America, though scholarship boys remained shrewd enough to penetrate the veneer of a superficial egalitarianism. National identity became a marker that sidelined residual anxieties about social hierarchy. Second, American prosperity affected the bias against consumerism shared by many British intellectuals during the mid-twentieth century. As professionals supported by government or educational institutions, these visitors differentiated themselves from those in the private sector, which pursued other goals. America exposed scholarship boys to a system that assimilated consumerism without sacrificing professionalism and a commitment to social progress.

H. W. Brands, The Strange Death of American Liberalism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, paperback edition, 2003, £9.95). Pp. 200. ISBN 0 300 098 24 3.

Michael J. Gerhardt, The Federal Appointments Process: A Constitutional and Historical Analysis (Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, revised and expanded paperback edition, 2003, £18.50). Pp. 406. ISBN 0 8223 3199 3.

William G. Howell, Power without Persuasion: The Politics of Direct Presidential Action (Princeton NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003, cloth £29.95, paper £12.95). Pp. 239. ISBN 0 691 10269, 0 691 10270 8.

Drew Noble Lanier, Of Time and Judicial Behavior: United States Supreme Court Agenda – Setting and Decision-Making, 1888–1997 (Selinsgrove PA: Susquehanna University Press and London: Associated University Presses, 2003, $42.50). Pp. 276. ISBN 1 57591 067 5.

Byron E. Shafer, The Two Majorities and the Puzzle of Modern American Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003, cloth $35, paper $19.95). Pp. 356. ISBN 0 7006 1235 1, 0 7006 1236 X.

One does not have to be an especially sophisticated philosopher of explanatory method to appreciate that, in explaining change in human affairs, much depends on the situation of and level of analysis adopted by the would-be explainer. Do the dots connect or are they mostly what they appear to be – just dots? Reality, according to Bertrand Russell's famous aphorism, is either a bowl of connected jelly or a bucket of disconnected shot. It all depends on the observer, who, of course, is also part of the reality being considered.