Articles

In the early winter of 1821, a ship called the Nautilus sailed from Richmond, Virginia, to West Africa. Aboard were thirty-three “free people of colour,” one of whom was a teenager, Hilary Teage. He was ninetee... Read More...

At the outbreak of the Civil War, New Orleans expanded the city’s streetcar service and, for the use of black patrons, incorporated Star cars into the new routes. Though Star cars could be used by both black an... Read More...

In his seminal American Renaissance, Frances Otto Matthiessen points to the development by Nathaniel Hawthorne of tragic elements of character, noting his exploration of the “subterranean history of the America... Read More...

“King of the Assholes, drama queen, Red Bull’d 12-year old, Next Chappelle, strangely relatable Megaman,” Black supremacist, hypocrite, poet, social commentator, superstar: the list of titles and labels ascribe... Read More...

Following Jean-Paul Sartre’s claim that “efore you come alive, life is nothing; it’s up to you to give it a meaning” (Existentialism and Human Emotions 49), this essay will examine the methods for constructing ... Read More...

Winner of the 2016 WTM Riches Essay Prize   According to Thomas Mathiesen, “In a two-way and significant double sense of the word, we live in a viewer society” (219). This essay seeks to examine the w... Read More...

Special Mention in the 2016 WTM Riches Essay Prize   According to Dale Bailey, “since Poe first described the House of Usher in 1839, the motif of the haunted house has assumed an enduring role in the ... Read More...

The trail across the sky retraces periodically, for as a universal force, outside of history, Brown is an archetype or prototype, a meteor that recurs comet-like. John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd (123) In The Pres... Read More...

And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions; Joel 2:28... Read More...

The structural and literary symbolism of the horizon/horizontality is one of the most powerful and versatile devices in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead (2004). From an organizational perspective, Robinson car... Read More...

The opening lines to Marilynne Robinson’s 1980 novel Housekeeping famously locate the novel in two literary genealogies. Evoking the opener of Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and invoking the Biblical figure of com... Read More...

We remain unknown to ourselves. Nieztsche, On the Genealogy of Morals 3. Nietzsche places this declaration right at the beginning of his Genealogy of Morals (1887) as an unequivocal statement of fact. It ... Read More...

In 2014, the publication of Marilynne Robinson’s fourth novel, Lila, completed a trilogy of books set in the small fictional town of Gilead, Iowa.  The Pulitzer-prize-winning Gilead (2004) first tells the story... Read More...

Since the publication of her first novel, Housekeeping (1980), Marilynne Robinson has built up a large body of non-fiction that sits beside, and in dialogue with, her fiction. Even before her environmentalist p... Read More...

Special Mention in the 2016 W.T.M Riches Essay Prize This essay explores the (sub)merged worlds depicted in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping (1980). Applying psychoanalytic conceptualisations of trauma,... Read More...

Posterity In his Preface to Due Considerations (2007), John Updike tells us that when he was a very young man, he yearned to become a professional writer so that his ideas might join the “printed material that... Read More...

Winner of the 2015 WTM Riches Essay Prize   In “Diagnosing Billy Pilgrim: A Psychiatric Approach to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five,” Susanne Vees-Gulani proffers a systematic analysis of the explo... Read More...

Now, it would be an overstatement to insist that the art of living is exclusively under the control of women, yet it is approximately true that the social arts—conversation, cookery, dress, manners, the more gr... Read More...

Introduction In Mavis Gallant’s six Linnet Muir stories, identity is continually re-constructed through memory. Paul White states that “shifts in identity are highly complex, sometimes unstable, and often have... Read More...

Anzia Yezierska was a Jewish-American writer, most popular in the 1920s, and best known for her texts on the struggles of immigrants in America. She achieved fame in the 1910s for her efforts to accurately repr... Read More...

In September 2008, Gary Lutz, author of several collections of short fiction, delivered a lecture entitled “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” to the students of Columbia University’s writing program in which he o... Read More...

In a 1967 interview with his former student and future annotator, Alfred Appel, Vladimir Nabokov announced, “Philosophically, I am an indivisible monist” (Strong Opinions 73). The author was responding to a lin... Read More...

Winner of the 2013 WTM Riches Essay Prize   “It seems to me that really truthful American novels would have the heroes and heroines alike looking for mothers instead . This needn’t be embarrassing. It’... Read More...

This article, and the research out of which it springs, has a number of points of origin; it may also have more than one point of conclusion even as it argues that the current manifestation of Las Vegas could w... Read More...

Alan Graham Memorial Lecture, 2014 IAAS Annual Conference   There is a famous story about Lyndon Johnson’s White House.  In some versions, it was the night after Congress had passed the Voting Rights... Read More...

Introduction So we are here, knowing they are “gone to burning hell”, she with a lie on her lips, protecting him, he with her blood on him. Perhaps Blake has what he calls songs to win them back, to make room ... Read More...

One of the truisms of American studies seems to be the intrepid historylessness of the United States. De Tocqueville observed that democracy tended to “make each man forget his ancestors” (de Tocqueville 6), an... Read More...

In 1975, Richard Yates published what was widely considered to be his worst novel. Disturbing the Peace was dismissed by critics as a career-ending disaster from the writer who had published the acclaimed Revol... Read More...

American author Carson McCullers visited Ireland three times. The first two visits were to the ancestral home of Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer Elizabeth Bowen in County Cork in May and July of 195... Read More...

Tributes to Emory Elliott (1942-2009): Compiled and introduced by Louise Walsh

What if the Government Schooling Campaigns to Americanize the Indians and to Anglicize the Irish had never taken place?

Crooning, Catering, and Changing Careers: Anne Tyler’s and Don Cherry’s Bands (and Bonds) of Gold

[R]epeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise: Robert Lowell’s Elegiac Poetry

David Foster Wallace: the Death of the Author and the Birth of a Discipline

“Tierra entre medio”: Borderlands of Knowledge in the Art of Frida Kahlo

DeLillo’s Underworld is one of the most celebrated of all modern American novels, and perhaps the most complex. This complexity is a product of its extraordinarily precise yet oblique chronological structure, which, in its attempt to account for the entire second-half of the twentieth-century, has challenged all its readers, confused many of them, and alienated some.

“I Wish I had Some Indian Blood”: Hemingway’s Primitivism and the Ojibwa Pimadaziwin Paradigm

“Tap Dancing on the Racial Boundary”: Racial Representation and Artistic Experimentation in Bill “Bojangles” Robinson’s Stormy Weather Performance

Delmore Schwartz’s Genesis and ‘international consciousness’

Nathanael O'Reilly Critics often describe Walt Whitman as America’s national poet, and many have concerned themselves with how Whitman came to hold such a position in American and global culture; however, fe... Read More...

“If there is such a literature”: Thoughts on Teaching American Literature in Ireland / Irish Literature in America

Invented Irishness: The Americanization of Irish Identity in the Works of Joseph O’Connor

“Irish by descent”? Marianne Moore’s American-Irish Inheritance

Frank O'Connor's Representations of Relations between Ireland and America

Irish republicans in interwar New York

Jazz, Identity and Sexuality in Ireland during the Interwar Years