A Chinese translation of “Rip Van Winkle.” A speech by Ralph Waldo Emerson honoring the Burlingame-Seward treaty. A translation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life” inscribed on a Mandarin fan. The autobiography and poetry of Yale’s first Chinese graduate, who founded a school for Chinese exchange students in Hartford. Judging by the stature of the figures and institutions involved, we might expect that the archive of nineteenth-century literary encounters between China and the United States would have generated lasting networks of influence.

Spoiler alert. Just before Stan Emery, the tragic embodiment of youthful excess in John Dos Passos’ glittering Manhattan Transfer, dies in an apartment fire, he looks out onto the cityscape of Manhattan and says, “Kerist I wish I was a skyscraper!” (255). For each reader of the novel, the line will stand out. It hits the eye, a solitary line after a set of song lyrics and before a paragraph break.

Scholars have long understood the centrality that the plantation house possesses as both institution and symbol in William Faulkner’s fictional world. The earliest critical investigations often approached his Yoknapatawpha County through a gothic literary lens, equating the plantation with the decline of the elite white families of the Old South—a line of inquiry often preserved by contemporary critics. Faulkner’s plantation is commonly interpreted as a type of Ozymandian warning, with the characters caught in the monumental failure of the slave economy. In Jay Parini’s words, the “haunted landscape of Faulkner’s fiction teems with houses,” the “gutted ruin” of the manor house evoking “an elegiac symbol of the plantation system itself.” Similarly, for Scott Romine, the plantation “abides as a kind of ghostly barracks—structurally haunting, if materially absent.” This conflation of the plantation with gothic ruin downplays an important aspect of Faulkner’s vision—the institutional success of the plantation system in the twentieth century and the historical violence at the foundation of this edifice. In his complex representation of the economic power exercised by elite planters, Faulkner anticipated some of the later findings of contemporary plantation studies, especially the fact that while the elite planters had “forfeited their slaves,” many of them continued to “retai[n] considerable landholdings as well as the social and political power they had enjoyed before the Civil War.” This article elucidates Faulkner’s earliest effort to write the plantation house and argues that his first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust, presents the plantation not as a gothic relic of a dead past, but as a major hub of activity, part of a decisive consolidation of social and economic power that links the institution of slavery to the sharecropping economy that emerged afterward. This is not to suggest that haunting phantasms play no role in Flags in the Dust, but to acknowledge that the Sartoris plantation manor, for all its sinister atmosphere, is part of a viable commercial institution. Faulkner here presents not the decline of the elite white planter class, but rather the survival and persistence of their economic power under new material conditions. He imagines the plantation house, moreover, in terms of what I call a cognitive cartography, as a temporal compression of movement, behavior and thinking in social space, offering a model for how individual consciousness not only interacts with its external environment, but is composed of it as well. This article shows how Flags in the Dust imagines the twentieth-century plantation as both a physical and a cognitive architecture that simultaneously preserves, recreates and disseminates a violent paradigm of power. I argue that once Faulkner establishes the cognitive architectonics of the plantation house and personifies this paradigm in the figure of Colonel John Sartoris, the dead plantation patriarch, he charts this structure upon other hubs of social space. Thus, Faulkner creates the nodes and arteries of recurrent movement and behavior in his Yoknapatawpha County that indicate how an elite class of planters adapted to the large tenant plantations that emerged after the Civil War.

© 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press The endpapers of Liesl Olson’s new book are disorienting. We see a map of a city bisected by lines and organized into grids. Heavier lines punctuated by circles indicate public transportation routes and their stops. A jagged shoreline appears at the bottom, cutting off the geometric exactness of the lines. But the lines grow less dense toward the top of the papers, indicating where the suburbs begin (or end) on the map. In the lower nook of the binding...

Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz has gone in and out of print since it was first published by Charles Scribner’s & Sons in 1932. It was brought back in 1967 by Southern Illinois Press, and it appeared later in the Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew Bruccoli and with an introduction by Mary Gordon, from University of Alabama Press in 1991. Handheld Press’s reprint comes at just the right time, following a great flourishing of works—from biographies to a streaming...

From 1920 to 1932, the Literary Digest—a weekly American magazine—accurately predicted the winner of each presidential election in the United States by conducting massive straw polls. In 1936, however, the magazine fell into irreparable ignominy when, after distributing over ten million questionnaires, the editors predicted a landslide victory for Republican candidate Alf Landon, only to have Franklin Roosevelt win handily, securing sixty-one percent of the popular vote. George Gallup’s American Institute of Public Opinion, founded just the year before, gained widespread notoriety for not only correctly predicting the election’s outcome using only 50,000 respondents, but also estimating the Digest poll’s error in advance of their publication, with a sample of just 3,000. Gallup took the technique of the questionnaire, made politically potent by mass print culture, yet still employed as a blunt instrument, and infused it with a newfound statistical rigor. Gallup’s confrontation with the Digest at once exemplified and accelerated the growing influence that questionnaires had in American culture in the 1930s, and particularly highlighted how modern periodicals might thrive—or wither—by using this technique to actively engage national political debates. The Literary Digest, founded in 1890, endured its shame only briefly, being sold in 1938 and shortly thereafter dissolved into Henry Luce’s Time. Gallup’s Institute, meanwhile, became a leading authority in evaluating public opinion, his name soon treated as metonymic for the use of modern, quantitative polling. Not all questionnaires from this transformative era in America culture, however, sought out quantitative consensus. Partisan Review, generally considered the most influential modernist “little magazine” in the United States from the 1930s through the 1950s, consistently employed questionnaires as a means to prompt its impressive network of authors and intellectuals into debating philosophical ideals, artistic movements, and political struggles. These questionnaires, or “symposia” as they were interchangeably called by Partisan Review’s editors, evince the magazine’s evolving commitments across its decades of cultural influence, from its early years as an organ of the Communist Party, signaled by “What is Americanism? A Symposium on Marxism and the American Tradition” in 1936, to its gradual turn towards a postwar liberal anticommunism, signaled by “Our Country and Our Culture” in 1952. For many critics, Partisan Review’s shift from the radicalism of the 1930s to the liberalism of the 1950s has served as an index for the growing aesthetic orthodoxy, and thus dwindling cultural vitality, of literary modernism, for which Partisan Review served as a leading institutional champion in the United States during these years. Even the preeminent, multivolume Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (2012) neatly recapitulates this tragic narrative, proposing that “something had been lost or forgotten” as the “bohemian left intellectual environment of the 1910s and Masses had morphed through a period of Marxist position-taking into the emerging hegemony of the New York intellectuals, accompanied by a stable, conservative literary modernism.”

In 1923 Alfred Stieglitz published “How I Came to Photograph Clouds,” a short essay in which he writes:

November 2018 not only sees the US midterm elections which will allow the American people to respond at the ballot box to the tumultuous and often exhaustingly toxic political environment during the Trump presidency. It also brings the less heralded and seemingly more distant centenary commemorations of the end of the First World War on November 11th, 1918. Yet another world historical milestone to be overshadowed by a relentless domestic news cycle dominated by a politics of distraction and fear that seems to harness racism, misogyny, economic inequality and outright violence to an unprecedented degree.

This book investigates a flood that sprawled across forty percent of the United States (and some of Canada), killing hundreds (and perhaps thousands, since African American deaths were not included in any “official” count), displacing nearly one million people—including 300,000 African Americans who were placed in makeshift camps, which the Red Cross called “concentration camps” and which reproduced a particularly American racial logic—and stimulating an enormous range of intellectual and aesthetic production from the Mississippi Delta blues of Bessie Smith to the Berlin radio broadcasts of Walter Benjamin. The 1927 Mississippi flood, Parrish argues at length, and quite compellingly, should be understood as one of the central events in the history of modernism.

The contours of Latino/a modernism only begin to clarify in the light of the prodigious literary production of US Spanish-language serials. [1] The original and republished literature that circulated in these serials—newspapers, weekly digests, literary magazines—defies current paradigms of modernism, including the experimentalism of canonical Anglo modernism, the aestheticism of Latin American modernismo, and the political bent of borderlands modernism. The size of this archive is staggering: Nicolás Kanellos and Helvetia Martell have documented the existence of 1,141 Spanish-language serials in the United States between 1880 and 1945, the vast majority of which included literary texts as part of their regular publication agenda. [2] Almost a century after the apex of this literary formation, however, US Spanish-language print culture is virtually invisible in contemporary literary scholarship. That invisibility results from translation practices that have paradoxically served to disconnect Latino/a studies from modernist studies, fields that would mutually benefit from sustained engagement. In this essay, I give a brief account of how translation—understood literally and metaphorically—has worked as a point of blockage in the (non-)relationship of modernist and Latino/a studies. I then highlight the Kansas City Spanish-language weekly El Cosmopolita (1914–1919) as one example of how Latino/a modernism negotiates transnational literary currents and local social concerns. If we are to see these negotiations in their full complexity, we must adjust our research and teaching agendas, adopting underused translations and sponsoring new ones, allowing Latino/a modernism to challenge the boundaries of US and hemispheric modernisms alike.