The history of the Cistercian Order in the Middle Ages encompasses the histories of its central structures, the General Chapter, the international networks and the experiences of individual monastic houses. We cannot isolate one from the other; if we want to explore the history of the White Monks as a whole, we have to consider both the centre and the periphery of the Order and their influence on each other.

In the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Cistercian movement spread from Burgundy to the very frontiers of Latin Christendom in Scandinavia, the Baltic region, Central-Eastern Europe, Iberia, the crusader states and Greece. Cistercian expansion in the 1120s and 1130s involved primarily the core of Western Europe – France, Germany, the British Isles and Christian territories in Iberia – whilst in the 1140s a wave of foundations emerged in Central-Eastern Europe (Poland, Bohemia and Hungary) and Scandinavia (Denmark, Sweden and Norway). The White Monks spread through the foundation of new monasteries from mother houses, but also through incorporation of other reformed communities and appropriation of existing monasteries. Proprietary patrons were often instrumental in this process. In Ireland Cistercian monasteries play an important part in bringing the Hibernian Church in line with the continental model of diocesan and monastic structures. Although the first Cistercian abbey in Ireland, Mellifont, was a direct foundation from Clairvaux, its many daughter houses were originally native monastic communities, which took up Cistercian customs to become incorporated into the Order. Their success was in no small part a result of Irish kings’ support for the ideas of reform. In Denmark the Hvides, a leading noble family in the region, transformed the Benedictine house at Sorø on Zealand (founded in the late 1140s) into a Cistercian monastery in 1161. The founders of the oldest Polish Cistercian abbeys were predominantly bishops, whilst the arrival of White Monks in Scotland was closely connected with the implementation of Church reform there. Many lay founders were ambitious noblemen, such as Fergus, lord of Galloway or Warcisław Świe˛tobrzyc, castellan of Szczecin in Western Pomerania. For the social elites of the European frontiers the Cistercians represented aspirational cultural and spiritual capital. Their acts of patronage were one way of asserting their status as members of the Latin Christian nobility.

In the latter half of the twentieth century developing countries hitched their demands for economic justice to the potential of international law. Their efforts from the 1960s onwards sought to inaugurate a New International Economic Order (NIEO), to delineate a body of ‘international development law’, and to institute a human right to development with a far-reaching set of corresponding duties. However the economic reality of today indicates that international law has failed the poor of the world and begs the question as to what interests it has served in their stead.

In 1976 the developed market economy countries, with 20 per cent of the world population, enjoyed 66 per cent of total world income. By contrast, the developing countries – excluding China – with about 50 per cent of the world population, received 12.5 per cent of the total world income; with China included, 70 per cent of the world’s people accounted for only 30 per cent of world income. By the twenty-first century, 20 per cent of the world population is receiving approximately 85 per cent of income, with 6 per cent going to 60 per cent of the population. In absolute terms, 40 per cent of the world population is today living on incomes so low as to preclude fully participating in wealth creation. One in four people (1.4 billion) in the developing world live in extreme poverty, attempting to survive below the international poverty line of USD 1.25 a day. If world poverty has decreased since the early 1990s, it is largely due to poverty-reduction figures in a very small number of populous countries. As for global inequality, it is widening rapidly between states; inequality between countries weighted by population has shrunk since 1980 only when we factor in the fast growth in China and India, and inequality among households is probably increasing. Moreover, while the global gap between the richest and the poorest people has been expanding, there is little evidence of actual improvement in the absolute position of the poorest since the 1980s (when the latest wave of globalisation began). These dire figures unfold alongside the growth of international law dedicated to economic regulation and to the ascent of international human rights law in the area of socio-economic and development rights.

Preface

This study was planned and brought to fruition over the past couple of years. It has been the source of many thoroughly enjoyable excuses for conversation between the two of us, and also provided the platform for a quite extraordinarily energetic and creative conference at Birkbeck College in London in November 2011. Our idea for the conference was to bring together not only the contributors to this volume but also to a sister volume that we are editing. The result was a four-day event marked by papers that combined strong interdisciplinary engagements with fascinating multidisciplinary styles. Like blindfolded wine tasters we played the game of telling discipline from style without checking first who the speaker was and we were not often wrong – our lawyers, a good proportion of this volume’s contributors, did not let us down, demonstrating that good lawyers can always engage with the world outside without sacrificing the analytical strengths that have made them excellent in their own field in the first place.

Human rights law has migrated from a little-known corner of international law to the whole of law and to the entirety of social relations. To collate a compendium on human rights law is an impossible task. A compendium is a ‘shortcut across a mountain’ and by extension a shortening, an abridgment, an abbreviation. Can such heavy concepts as those entailed in human rights law be shortened or abridged? A compendium must be a shortcut to the most weighty matter, to gains saved over centuries. Can there be a shortcut for human rights law? In this sense, we freely acknowledge that the present collection is caught in a paradox that can be resolved only partially. We have done our best in the selection of contributors to capture the international nature of our subject and the vibrancy of current debates within it. Of course we would have liked an even wider range of writers, from more places and different backgrounds, but the demands of space precluded this.

Three months after NATO concluded its seventy-eight-day campaign over Kosovo, Secretary-General Kofi Annan presented his annual report for 1999 to the UN General Assembly. In it, he presented in stark terms the dilemma confronting those who privileged international law over the need to respond to gross and systematic violations of human rights:

The hypothetical presented here neatly captured the ethical dilemma as many of the acting states sought to present it. Could international law truly prevent such ‘humanitarian’ intervention?

The problem, however, is that this was not the dilemma faced in the context of Rwanda. Rather than international law restraining a state from acting in defence of the Tutsi population, the problem in 1994 was that no state wanted to intervene at all. When France, hardly a disinterested actor, decided to intervene, its decision was swiftly approved in a Council resolution (though reference to ‘impartiality’, a two-month time-limit and five abstentions suggested wariness about France’s motivation).

How are we to comprehend the Cistercian Order? How do we examine and represent a phenomenon which has existed for over 900 years and spread across the world, which has built monumental architecture and produced a wide array of texts, tilled land and cultivated minds, seen schisms and sought concord? How do we grasp the basic tenor, the fluctuations, the varied responses to widely different conditions within one overall scholarly framework?

An influential trend in Cistercian scholarship has viewed the history of the White Monks as a tug-of-war between ‘ideals’ and ‘reality’. The assumption is that the Order was founded on a set of ideals, crystallised in twelfth-century legislation and foundation narratives: lofty aspirations – whether for isolation from the world and its ways, for repudiation of tithes, ownership of serfs and other allegedly corrupting practices or for harmony and uniformity within the Order and its communities. The reality is, then, all those factors which cause appropriation, modulation and abolition of these ideals, synchronically as well as diachronically: local conditions, extramural powers, pragmatism or the impact of individual figures. Louis Lekai, seminally, set the dichotomy as a motto for his momentous The Cistercians: Ideals and Reality (1977) and, in a definitive article, employed the collision between ideals and reality as a key to the dating of the Cistercian decline: the Order’s fourteenth-century fall from its initial ideals, pushed by the overpowering force of reality. Seen in this light, ideals become synonymous with ‘true Cistercianness’ in the shape of unanimity, strictness and absence of ambiguity, whereas reality stands for distortion, deviation and equivocation.

1. “Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there.”

2. “Where we going, man?”

3. “I don’t know, but we gotta go.”

4. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)

One day before the publication of his first novel, TheTown and the City (1950), Jack Kerouac (1922–69) wrote in his journal about his newest work in progress: “How is a miserable hitch-hiking boy going to mean anything … to Howard Mumford Jones who wants everybody to be like him (middleclass, intellectual, ‘responsible’) before he will accept them?” (WW, 276). Kerouac was worried that the “road novel” he had begun to conceptualize in 1948 would be dismissed not only because it failed to foreground the normative cultural values reviewers praised in The Town and the City, but also because he knew that in order to represent an emergent, postwar type of American character the novel would deploy an unconventional, idiosyncratic narratological form (WW, 185). The year Harcourt Brace published The Town and the City, the United States took significant steps to enact cold war policies that established the normative ideological context to which Kerouac’s narratological experimentation would respond and against which his work would primarily be judged: President Truman ordered the production of the hydrogen bomb, authorized U.S. forces to defend South Korea, and enacted National Security Council Report 68 (NSC-68), the foundational document in U.S. cold war policy. Further, in February of 1950 Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) rose to national prominence by claiming to possess a list of State Department employees who were also members of the Communist Party, a claim he could never substantiate.

When Saul Bellow’s (1915–2005) Artur Sammler, Holocaust survivor, transplanted “refugee in Manhattan,” wonders, “Is our species crazy?” he can only reply, with the absolute conviction born of experience and observation: “Plenty of evidence.” Artur Sammler, the protagonist of Bellow’s novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet, published serially in 1969 in the Atlantic Monthly and in book form in 1970, is a man betrayed by history. He is a Jew who barely escaped the Holocaust with only one good eye, the other “struck … by a gun butt and blinded” (SP 137). He is a man who, condemned to die, “clawed his way out” of the mass grave that he was forced to dig, emerging while his wife and others “had been buried alive” (SP 273). Having dug his way, “inside death,” Sammler inexplicably resurfaces, literally scrambling from the grave that was not yet to be his (SP 273). And then, with the eventuality of inexorable oddity, by way of a displaced persons (DP) camp in Salzburg, the bewildered Sammler, resurrected from the grave, finds himself reassigned to America, “advertised throughout the universe as the most desirable, most exemplary of all nations” (SP 14). It is here in America that, far from the European nightmare of Sammler’s ever-receding past, the unimaginable might finally be imagined. Having thus survived, Sammler finds himself in America in the midst of a century that has seen, in Bellow’s own words, “a crime so vast that it brings all Being into Judgment.” And Sammler, “separated from the rest of his species, if not in some fashion severed,” must come to grips with his reconstructed life, must attempt to reinvent himself by negotiating “the charm, the ebullient glamour, the almost unbearable agitation that came from being able to describe oneself as a twentieth-century American” (SP 43, 73).

Frank MacShane prefaces the first full-length biography of Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) with a warning that he is “treating Raymond Chandler as a novelist and not simply as a detective-story writer.” If only it were that easy. The tension between genre fiction and self-consciously literary writing animated – and irritated – Chandler for his entire writing career. Though he did not publish his first novel until he was past fifty, that career spanned the possibilities for an American writer at midcentury, from literary fiction to mass market paperbacks, with the wild card of the movies thrown in.

At his peak, Chandler transcended the crime genre within which he honed and practiced his craft. He was praised by the literati, imitated widely by his crime writer peers, and avidly read by the general public – all before his most ambitious book, The Long Goodbye (1953), even appeared.

No one would have predicted such success for Raymond Chandler in the early years of his career. Though he was once a hot prospect, the sales of Chandler’s early books discouraged him and his publisher. His reversal of fortune says something about the enduring qualities of his writing, especially his great creation, the private investigator Philip Marlowe. But it also tells us a lot about the workings of the American literary marketplace at a dynamic historical moment, and about the genre with which Raymond Chandler will, for better and worse, always be identified. Chandler’s ups and downs are a story with its own sense of mystery. You could call it “the alchemy of a best seller.”

Shortly after the Civil War, when Henry James (1843–1916) began publishing fiction, the endings of American novels changed. Whereas William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789), Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791), Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797), Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s A New-England Tale (1822), James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) all end with tombstones, James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1880–1), William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), and Abraham Cahan’s Yekl (1896) and The Imported Bridegroom (1898) end with troubled marriages. This shift from public memorial to the dynamics of a largely private relation between persons is not absolute, of course, and it is hard to make the immensely varied body of late nineteenth-century fiction fit any pattern at all. Nevertheless, it seems that a formula that once shaped fiction with extraordinary consistency has broken down and the sense of an ending has changed. In turn, a new sense of the novel emerges, one that Henry James, more than any other writer, brought into being.

At the close of Charlotte Temple, Charlotte’s father gestures toward her tomb as he addresses her seducer: “Look on that little heap of earth…. Look at it often, and may thy heart feel such true sorrow as shall merit the mercy of heaven.” The tomb – here only a mound of earth, since Charlotte has just been buried – creates a public monument out of a personal story; as tombstones so often do in early American novels, this grave has the effect of pulling outward and making legible a private story that nevertheless requires interpretation. Novels that graphically reproduce epitaphic inscriptions on the page – The Coquette, The Scarlet Letter – make out of their characters’ lives a text literally open to all; these figures pass on to the reader the task of interpreting, reflecting on, and remembering.

One of the most famous, though possibly apocryphal, conversations in American literary history took place between Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. According to legend, Fitzgerald remarked, “The rich are very different from you and me,” to which Hemingway replied, “Yes – they have more money.” Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) fuses those contradictory attitudes. Few have written more probingly about wealth than Dreiser, and his perspective ranges from awestruck to outraged. The power of his writing results from his completely understanding – and having lived – the most familiar iteration of the American Dream: a young man from a poor, socially marginal family transcends his origins by hard work and singular talent, leading ultimately to success and even, in Dreiser’s case, international celebrity. Dreiser is the consummate chronicler of that mythic American ascent narrative because he understands to his core the allure of money – while also providing unsurpassed critical analysis of it. Loving chronicler and fierce critic of the national obsession with wealth, Dreiser uses the quest for money to examine the meaning of America.

In a famous scene in Dreiser’s debut novel Sister Carrie (1900), the title character strolls down Broadway with her friend Mrs. Vance. A “showy parade” of people “going purposely to see and be seen” all wear “the latest they could afford.” Even the not-particularly-well-dressed “Carrie found herself stared at and ogled,” suggesting the close relationship between displaying what one owns and attracting the opposite sex (another important Dreiserian theme, to which we will return), a point magnified by her sensing around her a “heavy percentage of vice,” implying that prostitutes are strutting on Broadway along with the wealthy and the wanna-bes. Dreiser ends the chapter by swooping down from this wide-angled panorama to a close-up: Carrie “felt that she was not of it.” A sense of personal inadequacy reawakens her slumbering ambition: “She longed to feel the delight of parading here as an equal. Ah, then she would be happy!” Equality is determined by having enough money to exhibit oneself effectively.

The argument for Richard Wright (1908–60) as one of the most influential American novelists of the twentieth century rests on his essayistic and naturalistic novel Native Son (1940) and his fictionalized autobiography, Black Boy (1945). Wright’s trademarks as an urban naturalist and modernist tracing chronic hunger, racial conflict, social disempowerment, family dysfunction, and educational disadvantage pervade these two works. His quest throughout is to understand “the framework of contemporary living … for theories to light up the shadows of conduct.” Charting a new and disturbing trajectory of race relations in America, Wright created both an autobiographical self and a male African-American subjectivity in Black Boy and Native Son. These works provide for the first time in American fiction, as Sterling Brown argues in his 1940 review of Native Son, a racially based “psychological probing of the consciousness of the outcast, the disinherited, the generation lost in the slum jungles of American civilization.” Black Boy and Native Son would establish the form for Wright’s most effective kind of writing – autobiographical prose – that would not only underlie his most successful literary productions but dominate his later travel writings and literary journalism: the observer-participant Black Power (1954), The Color Curtain (1956), White Man Listen! (1957), and Pagan Spain (1957). All are written in this particular prose, which would confirm Wright’s status as an enduring talent and “global man of letters.”

Cormac McCarthy’s (1933–) significance, particularly in his pre–Border Trilogy writings, lies in the refusal of his fiction to be significant, to be meaningful, in the way that American literature generally has intended. His work shies away from depictions of thought or interior mental space, leaving his readers to sort out the motivations of the characters on their own. His language is at times baroque (most notably in Blood Meridian [1985]), at other times stripped back and minimal (Child of God [1973] or The Road [2006]). At the same time, McCarthy is remarkably expert at appropriating the traditions of American fiction in a way that acknowledges them even as he employs them to new effect. He does this sometimes by simply pushing a mode or genre to its extreme. His novel Outer Dark (1968), for instance, toys with the traditions of southern gothic but does so as if the South were actually hell. Blood Meridian imitates the western even as McCarthy cross-pollinates this genre with the spirit of intense viciousness and gnostic philosophy. McCarthy seems both to be bringing one era of American literature – an era tied to more stable notions of character, self, genre, ethics, and order – to a close and to be opening another, this one more interested in the possibilities of pushing the forms and styles to which we are accustomed in new directions.

There is little to suggest this will be the case in McCarthy’s first novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965), which, when it appeared was described as “sorely handicapped” by its “humble and excessive admiration for William Faulkner,” a writer to whom McCarthy is often compared for better or for worse. The first of four novels set in Tennessee before McCarthy turned his gaze to the American West, The Orchard Keeper concerns three characters and a corpse. The corpse is that of young John Wesley Rattner’s father, killed by Marion Sylder and dumped on Rattner’s uncle’s property.

In a new biography of J. D. Salinger, we learn that F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of the most important influences on the writer of the novel that was to become one of the most popular of the twentieth century – and beyond, The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Salinger had met Hemingway in 1945, shortly after the American troops of World War II entered Paris. He knew from Hemingway’s writings that he could be found at the Ritz Hotel, so Salinger wrote to “Poppa” and asked whether he could meet him at the Ritz Bar. He knew of the conflict between Fitzgerald and Hemingway and was careful not to reveal his admiration for the writer who, for him, far exceeded the merits not only of Hemingway, but of William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson as well. Indeed, for Salinger, Fitzgerald belonged with Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, and the other masters of fiction from the previous century.

The importance of The Great Gatsby rests partly on its entrance into our vocabulary – as a word with specific connotations: “gatsbyesque” today is short for the desire to raise oneself out of a lower-class background, to achieve in life the dreams that the early settlers of the country pursued until they were able to rise on the social ladder, realizing the possibilities they had always believed awaited them. Although this classic sells more than 300,000 copies every year, it did not achieve the instant success that might have been expected. Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), was the work that catapulted him into instant fame. Although it was rejected in its original form, titled The Romantic Egotist, the editor Maxwell Perkins, with whom Fitzgerald had been corresponding, urged him to revise it and to resubmit it to Scribner’s.

Near the conclusion of Don DeLillo’s (1936–) first novel, Americana (1971), the twenty-eight-year-old New York television executive David Bell thumbs a ride “somewhere in Missouri” from a “paleolithic lavender Cadillac” that will drive him over the hardscrabble hills and deserts of the Southwest to a makeshift commune of free-love hippies living with a breakaway tribe of Apaches in a shallow valley of sagebrush. “We want to cleave to the old things. The land. The customs. The words. The ideas,” they tell Bell, who in the weeks since he left the city is unshaven and bedraggled (A, 358). Bell’s westward journey is a well-traveled road in American literature, a flight from the trappings of civilization made famous by Huckleberry Finn’s promise at the end of Twain’s iconic novel to “light out for the Territory” for “howling adventures amongst the Injuns.” Dissatisfied with the petty affairs and cubicle conformity of corporate life, Bell is the latest in a long line of restless American seekers, though he does not know exactly what he is looking for except a way to formulate “links” that will lead him to the “nation’s soul.” But he knows he ultimately will not find them in the earnest but conspiratorially minded community of societal castoffs for whom the Apaches are a romantic metaphor for life lived off the “big government” grid (A, 358). With its huts “arranged in no discernible pattern” and no “village square or center” to speak of, the commune is an unwitting example of – rather than a solution for – the post-1960s’ social disorder in a wounded country that has lost its bearings and its sense of national purpose (A, 354).

Jerome David Salinger (1919–2010) is almost as famous for not publishing as he is for writing The Catcher in the Rye (1951), the best-known coming of age novel in American literature. His twenty-five-year career as a published author came to an end in June 1965 with the appearance of “Hapworth 16, 1924” in the New Yorker. From that date until his death, Salinger published nothing and went to significant lengths to ensure not only that his existing work was printed only to his exact specifications, but also that none of the stories he deemed unfit to reprint – many of those published in magazines between 1940 and 1948 – appeared in anthologies. He took legal action against the independent publishers of a collection of his early stories in 1974 and later against John David California to block the U.S. publication of Sixty Years Later: Coming through the Rye (2009), an unauthorized sequel to Catcher. These occasional acts of litigation constitute the bulk of Salinger’s public appearances after 1965, even though he continued to write, telling the New York Times in a rare interview, “Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. … I write just for myself.” This comment has led to intense speculation about the fiction that might become available posthumously and has, along with the popularity of Salinger’s existing work, served to keep this very private writer in the public eye.

Salinger’s determined withdrawal did not spare him the attentions of the media and admirers principally because of the enduring reputation of The Catcher in the Rye, his only full-length novel, which has sold more than 60 million copies and been translated into many languages. Consistently attracting critical acclaim, Catcher features in lists of the one hundred best novels of the twentieth century compiled by the Modern Library, Time magazine, and National Public Radio. Its first-person narrative is utterly distinctive and rich in its evocation of the troubled teenager Holden Caulfield. Holden’s informal, intimate testimony creates a strong sense of connection between him and the reader, who is addressed as “you” throughout.

In April 1857, Maryland authorities arrested Samuel Green, a free African-American minister, charging him with two crimes: first, possessing a map of Canada, a railroad schedule to Canada, and letters Green’s son had written from Canada; second, “knowingly having in his possession a certain abolition pamphlet called ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ or ‘life among the lowly.’” These items, according to the indictment, were “of an inflammatory character calculated to create discontent amongst the colored population of this State.” Although the court concluded that the letter, map, and railroad schedule were not conclusive proof of Green’s intention to help slaves escape, it ruled that Green’s possession of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was clearly a crime. In May, Green was sentenced to ten years in the Maryland State Penitentiary for having a copy of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s (1811–96) novel. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was never merely phenomenally popular; it was fundamentally dangerous.

The novel remains dangerous. If at one time Uncle Tom’s Cabin was thought to be the single most powerful instrument for destroying slavery – an understanding illustrated by Abraham Lincoln’s notorious yet apocryphal comment upon meeting Stowe: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war” – more recently, readers have regarded the novel as an insidious mechanism for solidifying demeaning stereotypes about African Americans (a position crystallized by the way that the incendiary epithet Uncle Tom has become shorthand for the cowardly obsequiousness of a race traitor). As one critic has rather dramatically declared, “The devil himself could have forged no shrewder weapon” to oppress African Americans than Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Toni Morrison (1931–) ranks among the most highly-regarded and widely-read fiction writers and cultural critics in the history of American literature. Novelist, editor, playwright, essayist, librettist, and children’s book author, she has won innumerable prizes and awards and enjoys extraordinarily high regard both in the United States and internationally. Her work has been translated into many languages, including German, Spanish, French, Italian, Norwegian, Finnish, Japanese, and Chinese, and is the subject of courses taught and books and articles written by scholars all over the world. It speaks to academic and mass audiences alike; four of her novels have been Oprah’s Book Club selections. She invites frequent comparison with the best-known writers of the global canon: Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and others. Because of her broad appeal, throughout her career readers and critics alike have sought to praise Morrison by calling her work “universal.”

The adjective “universal” has typically been applied to work in any medium that speaks to readers, viewers, or audience members whatever their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, or socioeconomic status. Art that achieves the status of “universality” is contrasted implicitly or explicitly with work that is labeled “provincial,” that is, more explicitly grounded in the culture, lore, or vernacular of an identifiable group. But for all its “universality,” Morrison’s writing is famously steeped in the nuances of African-American language, music, everyday life, and cultural history. Even more precisely, most of her novels are concerned with the impact of racial patriarchy upon the lives of black women during specific periods of American history, such as the colonial period or the eras of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and civil rights. By exploring the impact of historical and socioeconomic factors and processes upon the lives of black women, Morrison uses her fiction to mine the unexplored depths of American culture.

“I am as American as April in Arizona.” With this affirmation in 1966, Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) both declared his firm allegiance to the country to which he had emigrated in May 1940 and displayed a salient feature of his verbal art: his creative approach to language and his fondness for rejuvenating dead clichés (“American as apple pie”). Yet he also declared in 1966 that “the writer’s art is his real passport” (SO, 63), and one senses that as he matured as a writer of English-language fiction, Nabokov sought to promote a synthesis of the best of Russian, European, and Anglo-American literary traditions. Indeed, in answering a question about national identity in 1964, Nabokov touched upon the many places he had lived (and the many cultures he had experienced): “I am an American writer, born in Russia and educated in England where I studied French literature, before spending fifteen years in Germany” (SO, 26). In his best work he combines vividly observed details about personalities and settings with allusive references to a range of literary material, from medieval Russian epics to French symbolism to the latest manifestations of popular culture.

Nabokov had been a leading figure in the Russian émigré literary community (having published eight novels, more than forty short stories, and dozens of poems) when he arrived in the United States. Now he was faced both with the daunting prospect of reinventing himself as a writer in English and the more immediate task of trying to support himself, his wife, and his young son in a new country. Initially, he had to rely on charity and on private language instruction. Over time, he began publishing book reviews in the New Republic and short stories and poems in the Atlantic Monthly. He taught summer courses at Stanford in 1941 and obtained a part-time position as a lecturer at Wellesley College that eventually became a full-time position, with courses on literature and on the Russian language. He also worked at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, researching and cataloging butterflies.