Gothic to Multicultural

Gothic to Multicultural: Idioms of Imagining in American Literary Fiction, twenty-three essays each carefully revised from the past four decades, explores both range and individual register. The collection opens with considerations of gothic as light and dark in Charles Brockden Brown, war and peace in Cooper’s The Spy, Antarctica as world-genesis in Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the link of “The Custom House” and main text in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, reflexive codings in Melville’s Moby-Dick and The Confidence-Man, Henry James’ Hawthorne as self-mirroring biography, and Stephen Crane’s working of his Civil War episode in The Red Badge of Courage. Two composite lineages address apocalypse in African American fiction and landscape in women’s authorship from Sarah Orne Jewett to Leslie Marmon Silko. There follow culture and anarchy in Henry James’ The Princess Casamassima, text-into-film in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, modernist stylings in Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway, and roman noir in Cornell Woolrich. The collection then turns to the limitations of protest categorization for Richard Wright and Chester Himes, autofiction in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and the novel of ideas in Robert Penn Warren’s late fiction. Three closing essays take up multicultural genealogy, Harlem, then the Black South, in African American fiction, and the reclamation of voice in Native American fiction.

A. Robert Lee is Professor of American Literature at Nihon University, Tokyo, having previously taught at the University of Kent, UK. His publications include Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America (1998), Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions (2003), which won the American Book Award for 2004, Japan Textures: Sight and Word, with Mark Gresham (2007), and United States: Re-viewing Multicultural American Literature (2008).

”In this group of loosely connected essays traces the evolution of distinctly American writing from the Revolutionary period to the present. While he makes use of the work of the standard exemplars, Hawthorne, Poe, Cooper, Melville, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, etc. Lee looks at them in terms of America’s view of itself and its history. For this reason, he often selects lesser-known stories to examine. Part of the change Lee notes is the growing respect for women as serious novelists and the various reflections of African American and Native American experiences. The article on Native Americans moves from their representation in books and films by non-Natives to writers who come from the culture. An interesting chapter on Wharton’s /Age of Innocence/ and Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of it stresses the way in which our national self-perception has changed. Lee’s style is clear and flowing, refreshingly free of literary jargon.” in: Book News Inc. (Portland), 2009