John Carlos Rowe

The New American Studies

In times of liberal despair it helps to have someone like John Carlos Rowe put things into perspective, in this case, with a collection of essays that asks the question, "Must we throw out liberalism's successes with the neoliberal bathwater?" Rowe first lays out a genealogy of early twentieth-century modernists, such as Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison, with an eye toward stressing their transnationally engaged liberalism and their efforts to introduce into the literary avant-garde the concerns of politically marginalized groups, whether defined by race, class, or gender. The second part of the volume includes essays on the works of Harper Lee, Thomas Berger, Louise Erdrich, and Philip Roth, emphasizing the continuity of efforts to represent domestic political and social concerns. While critical of the increasingly conservative tone of the neoliberalism of the past quarter-century, Rowe rescues the value of liberalism's sympathetic and socially engaged intent, even as he criticizes modern liberalism's inability to work transnationally.

Liberalism, Transnationalism, and Political Critique

Afterlives of Modernism

Eric Haralson

An excellent primer to the work and milieu of Henry James, this collection of essays highlights the historical and cultural issues that influenced the great novelist.

A Historical Guide to Henry James

Donald E. Pease

Winfried Fluck

What is the state of American studies in the twenty-first century?

Re-framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies

Henry James Today is a collection of seven essays focused on the relevance of Henry James’s work for an understanding of current problems. This volume includes studies of how James and such contemporaries as Mark Twain and the Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis have influenced each other and modernist and postmodernist writers, such as Cynthia Ozick, Jonathan Franzen, and Philip Roth. These traditional studies of literary influence are complemented by essays on Henry James and visual media (collage, painting, sculpture, architecture) and new media (digital social media and the digital humanities). Recognizing the significant cultural and technological changes since James lived and wrote, the contributors nonetheless focus on the historical and cultural continuities between James’s era and our own. Other contributors focus on innovative practices in James’s cultural era to understand how the modernist avant-garde anticipated social and aesthetic issues that are today central to our lives. The contributors represent a global spectrum of James Studies, and their diverse essays indicate James’s powerful influence on aesthetic and social issues. Brad Evans (Rutgers University), Ashley Barnes (Williams College), Harilaos Stecopoulos (University of Iowa), Harold Hellwig (Idaho State University), Geraldo Cáffaro (Universidade Federale de Minais Gerais, Brazil), John Carlos Rowe (University of Southern California), and Shawna Ross (Arizona State University) represent an exemplary cross-section of those scholars working on Henry James today.

Henry James Today

John Carlos Rowe, considered one of the most eminent and progressive critics of American literature, has in recent years become instrumental in shaping the path of American studies. His latest book examines literary responses to U.S. imperialism from the late eighteenth century to the 1940s. Interpreting texts by Charles Brockden Brown, Poe, Melville, John Rollin Ridge, Twain, Henry Adams, Stephen Crane, W. E. B Du Bois, John Neihardt, Nick Black Elk, and Zora Neale Hurston, Rowe argues that U.S. literature has a long tradition of responding critically or contributing to our imperialist ventures. Following in the critical footsteps of Richard Slotkin and Edward Said, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism is particularly innovative in taking account of the public and cultural response to imperialism. In this sense it could not be more relevant to what is happening in the scholarship, and should be vital reading for scholars and students of American literature and culture.

From the Revolution to World War II

Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism

Post-Nationalist American Studies seeks to revise the cultural nationalism and celebratory American exceptionalism that tended to dominate American studies in the Cold War era, adopting a less insular, more transnational approach to the subject.

Post-Nationalist American Studies

Rowe uses recent work on the oppressive treatment of gays, women and children in his analysis of Henry James, arguing that James mounts a critique of bourgeois values and lack of historical consciousness.

John Carlos Rowe

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