Muting White Noise: Native American and European American Novel Traditions by James H. Cox

2007 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 350-351
Author(s):  
Edward J. Rielly
2008 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria A. Windell

Abstract This essay explores the often-overlooked affective discourse that emerges from a close reading of the Mexican and European American women in the first Native American novel, John Rollin Ridge's sensational dime novel The Life and Adventures of Joaquíín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854). Through their investment in sentimental tropes such as the tearful scene, the angelic figure, and the untimely fainting fit, these women enact what I term a transamerican sentimental diplomacy that counters the attempt of the novel's men to define the United States via a nationalistic violence (the legacy of the U.S.-Mexican War). Through their tears, pleas, and actions, the women test the cultural and political milieu of the newly minted state of California. While the women's promotion of a peaceful paradigm for borderland interaction ultimately falls short, its undeniable presence is an important counterweight to the sensational violence in Joaquíín Murieta that has thus far captivated critics.


Author(s):  
Maria A. Windell

Chapter 3 explores instances of “sentimental diplomacy” in the literary aftermath of the US–Mexican War and Indian Removal. It opens by arguing that the heroines of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885)—who seek to counter the violence and dispossession of late-nineteenth-century Californios—stand as unrecognized heirs to the women in John Rollin Ridge’s 1854 novel of Mexican banditry, Joaquín Murieta. Amidst the sensational violence of Joaquín Murieta, the first Native American novel, Mexican and Anglo-American women engage in a sentimental diplomacy that resists rampant racialized violence. In both The Squatter and the Don and Joaquín Murieta, sentimental diplomacy offers local possibilities for peace, but in neither novel can it overcome the war’s brutal legacy or the racism and systemic corruption that followed.


Author(s):  
Christine Holbo

U.S. historians have long considered the Civil War and its Reconstruction as a second American revolution. Literary scholars, however, have yet to show how fully these years revolutionized the American imagination. One marker of this was the postwar search for a “Great American Novel”—a novel fully adequate to the breadth and diversity of the United States in the era of the Fourteenth Amendment. The debate over what full representation would mean led to a thoroughgoing reconstruction of the meaning of “literature” for readers, writers, politics, and law. Legal Realisms examines the transformation of the idea of “realism” in literature and beyond in the face of uneven developments in the racial, ethnic, gender, and class structure of American society. The ideal of equality before the law conflicted with persistent inequality, and it was called into question by changing ideas about accurate representation and the value of cultural difference within the visual arts, philosophy, law, and political and moral theory. Offering provocative new readings of Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Helen Hunt Jackson, Albion Tourgée, and others, Legal Realisms follows the novel through the worlds of California Native American removal and the Reconstruction-era South, of the Mississippi valley and the urban Northeast. It shows how incomplete emancipation haunted the celebratory pursuit of a literature of national equality and explores the way novelists’ representation of the difficulty of achieving equality before the law helped Americans articulate the need for a more robust concept of society.


1997 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 863
Author(s):  
Laura J. Murray ◽  
Giorgio Mariani

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