July / 224 pages / 6 photos
0-231-10816-8 / $45.00s,
cloth
0-231-10817-6 / $16.50g,
paper
Literary Studies
The gothic novel--the literary stronghold of ghosts, family curses, imperiled heroines and cumbersome plots--might be thought to fall under the category of "escapist fiction." But in this groundbreaking reappraisal, Teresa Goddu demonstrates that the American Gothic novel was, in often surprising ways, actively engaged with social, political, and cultural concerns of its time.
Although social dislocations such as slavery or the massacre of Native Americans were repressed by our national consciousness, Goddu points out that these subjects were effectively incorporated by the gothic novel, articulated into an enduring national identity.
Focusing on literature between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, Gothic America traces the development of the genre as a whole and of several subgenres--the female gothic, the Southern gothic, and the African-American gothic. Among the works Goddu reexamines are Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance, Alcott's ghost stories, and Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. It is, finally, the African-American gothic, Goddu argues, that illuminates most clearly the link between frightening literature and a horror-filled social reality.
Questioning basic assumptions about America's identity, Gothic America is a fresh examination of both a much-neglected genre of American literature and the complex historical circumstances that produced it.
TERESA A. GODDU is assistant professor of English at Vanderbilt University, where she was a fellow of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities.
Social Foundations of Aesthetic Forms Series: Jonathan Arac, Editor
April / 320 pages / 55 halftones / ISBN 0-231-10460-X
/ $45.00s, cloth
ISBN 0-231-10461-8 / $17.50g, paper
Cities of the Dead is going to be one of the most important books of the decade. It will have a profound and significant impact on the areas of cultural studies, performance studies, and literary criticism and theory. It will be on the list of the dozen significant studies of race and culture in the West of the last fifty years."
--Emory Elliott, University of California, Riverside
The colorful handmade costumes of beads and feathers swirl frenetically, as the Mardi Gras Indians dance through the streets of New Orleans in remembrance of a widely disputed cultural heritage. Iroquois Indians visit London in the early part of the eighteenth century and give birth to the "feathered people" in the British popular imagination.
What do these seemingly disparate strands of culture share over three hundred years and several thousand miles of ocean? Artfully interweaving theatrical, musical, and ritual performance from the eighteenth century to the present in London and New Orleans, Cities of the Dead takes a look at a rich continuum of intercultural exchange that reinvents, re-creates, and restores history.
Complemented with fifty-five illustrations, including spectacular photos of the famed Mardi Gras Indians, Joseph Roach's fascinating new work employs an entirely unique approach to the study of culture. Rather than focusing on one region, Cities of the Dead explores broad cultural connections over place and time, showing through myriad examples how performance can revise the unwritten past.
In illuminating discussions of social events ranging from burials to sacrifices, from auctions to parades, encompassing regional traditions as diverse as Haitian Voudon and British funerary rites, Roach looks at performance traditions along the Atlantic rim. Cities of the Dead details patterns of remembrance and forgetting, of communities defining their identities and imagining their futures. Combining the intellectual tools of history, anthropology, American studies, and literary criticism with his own impressive body of ethnographic and archival research, Roach closely examines an extraordinary and enduring web of myth, history, and performance.
Cities of the Dead proposes a new way to think about the relationship between history and memory as well as between document and performance. Any reader fascinated by the interracial, intercultural heritage of performance that makes New Orleans' Mardi Gras a central event each year will find a treasure in this beautifully crafted work.
Joseph Roach is Professor of English at Tulane University. He is the author of The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (1985), which won the Barnard Hewitt Award, and coeditor, with Janelle Reinelt, of Critical Theory and Performance (1992).
1995 / 648 pages / ISBN 0-231-08122-7 / $29.95 cloth
An authoritative survey of the poetry of the American people, The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry covers all of the canonical American poets, from the colonial to the contemporary--Anne Bradstreet, Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Adrienne Rich are all included. But Parini has also selected a broad sampling of poetry from voices that have not been heard as widely over the years. Here, for the first time, is a thorough collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry by women, Native Americans, and African Americans.
Jay Parini's introduction deftly guides us into the rich history of poetry in our country. Whether in search of a well-known classic or a poem which has not yet been canonized in the American poetic tradition, readers will find much to enjoy in The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry.
December 24, 1999