Author：Hongxin Jiang

Abstract: Significant portions of Zhongshu Qian’s classic twentieth century novel, Fortress Besieged, are closely correlated with Hunan. This article explores the connections between the novel and Qian’s experiences in National Hunan Normal College (NHNC), later to become Hunan Normal University (HNNU). More than one third of Fortress Besieged describes the experiences of its main character, Hongjian F...

Vol. 1 No. 1 Dec. 2017      Time：2019-07-09 View Citation

Author：Weisheng Tang

Abstract: There has been an obvious “turn” to things or nonhumans in contemporary narrative studies, that is, a turn to “things” that have been largely neglected in the past, including animals, plants, minerals, ecosystem, landscapes, places, etc. Basically, things can play three roles in fictional narratives: things that, as cultural signifiers, reflect (or influence) human culture, things that, as ...

Vol. 3 No. 1 Jun 2019      Time：2019-07-09 View Citation

Author：Anfeng Sheng, Seon-Kee Kim

Abstract: Asian-American literature is often identified as foreign by Asians and considered inauthentic American literature by the American mainstream. However, this minority group literature is unique in its characteristics so that it cannot be easily judged by either Asian or American norms. In order to better understand Asian-American literature, it is necessary to study how the members of Asian immig...

Vol. 3 No. 1 Jun 2019      Time：2019-07-09 View Citation

Author：Norman Finkelstein

Abstract: Ronald Johnson’s relationship to outsider art has long been recognized as crucial to our understanding of his poetry. In interviews and other statements, the poet often affirms his connections with the self-taught makers of fantastic, visionary sculptural environments. The works of such figures as Simon Rodia, le Facteur Cheval, Raymond Isidore, and James Hampton serve as formal and thematic m...

Vol. 3 No. 1 Jun 2019      Time：2019-07-09 View Citation

Author：Steven Tracy

Abstract: Langston Hughes’s work must be seen in context and continuity not only with African American writers like Paul Laurence Dunbar, W. E. B. Du Bois, and James Weldon Johnson, but with acknowledged white forebears such as Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg. A look at poems by Whitman and Sandburg reveal a writer who modeled some of his work on the writings of the earlier poets, revealing his own aesth...

Vol. 3 No. 1 Jun 2019      Time：2019-07-09 View Citation

Author：Mark Scroggins

Abstract: “Yeux Glauques,” the sixth poem of Ezra Pound’s 1920 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, has been read as an indictment of Victorian viewers’ and readers’ rejection of Pre-Raphaelite art and poetry, a rejection proleptic of Georgian readers’ rejection of Pound’s own innovations. This is largely accurate. But the poem’s citation (in its first stanza) of John Ruskin’s “Of Kings’ Treasuries” can be...

Vol. 3 No. 1 Jun 2019      Time：2019-07-09 View Citation

Author：Jon Woodson

Abstract: ​Augusta Savage’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is discussed as a composite work showing influences from ancient Egyptian musical instruments, surrealism, August Rodin, and ancient Egyptian funerary and devotional sculpture. The sculpture is a significant departure from the social realist sculpture of the New Deal era. “Objective” artworks like Savage’s sculpture have been overwritten by i...

Vol. 3 No. 1 Jun 2019      Time：2019-07-09 View Citation

Author：James Sherry

Abstract: This essay describes the connections between the important groups of innovative, avant-garde, and experimental poetry and poetics emerging in the United States since the Vietnam War: language writing, Flarf, conceptualism, identity poetries, and environmental poetry. The method shows an example of how to look at writing through both close reading and from a distance. Understanding the variety o...

Vol. 3 No. 1 Jun 2019      Time：2019-07-09 View Citation

Author：Karen McCarthy Woolf

Abstract: Ecocriticism is a comparatively new and vital discipline that responds to the literatures of an increasingly urgent environmental crisis. Yet, while its remit within materialist and secular thought is diversifying to include postcolonial, cultural, and queer theories, alongside geography and other earth sciences, there is less conversation with complementary and syncretic disciplines such as ec...

Vol. 3 No. 1 Jun 2019      Time：2019-07-09 View Citation

Author：Anthony Joseph

Abstract: ​ Liminality theory remains underused in discussions of post World War II Caribbean writing in the UK. This essay re-considers Samuel Selvon’s seminal 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners through the lens of liminality. In this essay, liminality is used as a lens through which the novel’s characters, structure, locations, and language are viewed. The Lonely Londoners emerges as the prototypical l...

Vol. 3 No. 1 Jun 2019      Time：2019-07-09 View Citation