literature

Cormac McCarthy's Brutal Allegories of the American Empire

by Greg Grandin

"McCarthy demonstrated how the frontier wasn’t an incubator of democratic equality but a place of unrelenting pain, cruelty, and suffering."

Actually, All of Shakespeare's Plays are About Race

by Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

A new collection of essays argues that Shakespeare's works helped Renaissance Europeans to invent the category of "whiteness," and for later generations to refine and contest its meaning. 

Is Globalization Changing Mexico's Relationship to Death?

by Humberto Beck

Post-revolutionary Mexico embraced cultural commemorations of the dead—Diá de los Muertos—to help conceal the violence of the regime's rise. Now, that "traditional" culture is again being transformed by global cultural appropriation and the escalating violence of global drug trafficking.

America Fought Its Own Battle Over Books Before it Fought the Nazis

by Brianna Labuskes

The Armed Services Editions paperback books were wildly popular among World War II servicemembers. But they became symbols of American freedom to read in the war against fascism only after a bitter domestic battle about the works and topics that would be permitted. 

The Past Isn't Even Past, Especially in Florida

by Diane Roberts

"I plan to carry on teaching the way I always have, resisting the state’s decrees. The point of education is to produce not just pliant cogs but thinking citizens with knowledge of the rich and expansive ways to be human. That is genuine freedom."

Why is Italy's Far Right Embracing Dante?

Italy's original Fascists embraced Dante as a marker of national chauvinism, and a prophet of authoritarianism; today's far right has renewed their enthusiasm for the poet. 

Between Perpetrating a Hoax and Charging One: American Politics in the Waste Land

by Jed Rasula

The centenary of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land reminds readers of the rumors that the poem was published as a hoax. While pulling off a hoax takes cleverness, invoking the word to dismiss inconvenient facts is an abdication of responsibility that plagues political culture today.

What Happens if We Read Jay Gatsby as "Passing"?

by Alonzo Vereen

A high school literature teacher found his students were better able to engage with the classic if they stopped assuming that it's title character was a white man. 

The Indigenous Sami Culture Shaped this Novelist's Fiction

Ann-Helén Laestadius grew up among the Sámi, an Indigenous people living near the Arctic Circle, in Europe. Her fiction has brought the long-running conflict between the Sami and the Swedish government, and the racism and violence endured by the Sami, to the forefront of public debate. 

How the Russian Jews Became Soviet

The novelist Gary Shteyngart, who emigrated from the USSR to the US as a child, reviews Sasha Senderovich's "How the Soviet Jew was Made," a work that gives short shrift to neither the "Soviet" nor "Jewish" sides of the question. 

Reissued 1933 Novel in Translation Captures Fascism's Rise Around You

Lion Feuchtwanger's "The Oppermans" captures the complexity of a dilemma faced by German Jews in 1933: whether a society has become sufficiently hostile to a minority group to force its members to leave. 

Revisiting the "Knickerbocker" Origin Story of Santa Claus

by Tom A. Jerman

The notion that the American Santa Claus evolved naturally from the European Saint Nicholas conceals an origin story for the character that's both simpler and more complex. 

Does Novelist Robert Keable Deserve a Reappraisal?

by Simon Keable-Elliott

Briefly celebrated in the 1920s, then consigned to posthumous obscurity, the missionary and novelist, whose experiences encompassed the collision of colonialism, war and racism in the British empire, is overdue for rediscovery. 

The Moral Corruption of Holocaust Fiction

A popular book for young readers strips the Holocaust of its horror, and its victims of their Jewishness in favor of banal lessons about empathy and kindness. 

Against Queer Presentism—How Literary Studies Neglects the Archive

by Colton Valentine

LGBTQ writers in today's literary world too often operate on the presumption that they are the first to experience queerness openly, making their own experiences of repression seem universal and transhistorical, and effacing older fictional and critical voices. 

Do Documents Clear Chaucer's Name Over Accusations of Rape?

Although the belief that Chaucer was accused of the crime spurred a significant wave of feminist critical studies of sex and power in his writing, scholars have recently argued that the documents used to support the charge have been misinterpreted. 

"I'm Not Racist, I'm Just Mad Amazon is Destroying Tolkien's Middle Earth with Black Hobbits"

by Mary Rambaran-Olm

Viewer complaints that Amazon Prime has defiled the author's fantasy vision with "wokeness" ignore the historical diversity of the medieval society on which Tolkien based his works. 

Cuban-American Playwright Censored by Miami-Dade Schools—Is it over "Don't Say Gay"?

Columnist Fabiola Santiago argues that the censorship of the Cuban-American writer's plays by local schools shows that Cuban Americans can't expect the state's escalating culture wars to leave them alone. 

Sorry Zoomers, Gen X Invented the "Quiet Quit"

"Strivers, grinders and hustlers hate them, but quiet quitters, slackers and work-to-rulers are treasured antiheroes in American folk culture."

Salman Rushdie Changed Everything

by Siva Vaidhyanathan

The novelist's creative brilliance and critical acclaim signaled a moment for south Asian people around the world to see themselves outside the frame of colonialism and to grapple with the subcontinent's ethnic and religious fissures.