- Home
- A-Z Publications
- European Journal of American Culture
- Previous Issues
- Volume 29, Issue 3, 2011
European Journal of American Culture - Volume 29, Issue 3, 2011
Volume 29, Issue 3, 2011
-
-
It's my house, isn't it?: Memory, haunting and liminality in Stephen King's Bag of Bones
More LessRich in its references to history and regionalism, Stephen King's Bag of Bones (1998) provides an in-depth study of how the personal and communal intertwine within the context of small-town Maine life. King uses the device of a haunted house, here in the form of a rural log cabin, to consider how the past lingers to inform and shape the present. This article argues that the house functions specifically as a liminal space; caught between past and present, the living and the dead, it provides a transitional area in which traumatic memories of racially motivated violence are relived and continually thrust back upon the community responsible. These ideas can be linked to gothic themes of past horror and the return of the repressed. My article thus considers how the classic gothic motif of haunting permits an exploration of the nature of memory and identity in the special kind of arena that liminality provides.
-
-
-
The dearest of cemeteries: European intertexts in Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer
More LessThis essay reads Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1934) as the trace of a belated expatriate moment that forms an American literary nexus by drawing together a number of provocative European artistic contexts. Miller's relationship to the rhetoric of the manifesto is discussed, as is the creation of a powerful literary persona and narrating voice from the traces of a tissue of intertextual quotations. Miller draws on contemporary tropes of death, decadence and last things, and in the process, I argue, brings late Romantic and early twentieth-century texts from Nietzsche, Spengler, Strindberg, Goethe, Joyce, lie Faure and Giovanni Papini together to articulate a late apocalyptic modernism.
-
-
-
Huck and Hank go to the circus: Mark Twain under Barnum's big top
By Mark StoreyThis essay argues that Mark Twain's acquaintance with P. T. Barnum, and more especially Twain's fascination with the world of popular entertainment that Barnum epitomized, provided inspiration and material for some of Twain's most enduring works. In particular, the essay argues that two of Twain's most revered novels The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889) are invested both thematically and generically in the complex cultural associations of the postbellum circus. Embodying the commercial capitalism of industrialized America whilst also offering a romantic liberation from everyday life, the circus becomes a condensation of many of the competing impulses of Twain's life and work: between irreverent humour and sober social critique and between the desire for imaginative freedom and a recognition of financial imperatives.
-
-
-
The cultural expansion of America: Imperialism, civic design and the Philippines in the early 1900s
By Ian MorleyThis article grants a narrative of the conception of American city plans for the Philippine settlements of Baguio and Manila, two of the early twentieth century's most important exercises in city designing and nation-building. In so doing the work examines how the conceptualization and construction of the settlements in 190405 spoke of America's yearning to disassociate the Philippines away from its past as an uncivilized place, and to create a fresh national identity by means of instigating new physical and cultural environments that epitomized imperial hopes, principles and pride. Using well-established research methods to align political and cultural transitions occurring during the 1890s and early 1900s with the realization of instantly recognizable new visions of nationhood in built environmental form, the article ventures to explicate the connection between the evolution of American culture, the modern art of civic design and imperial nation-building through a consideration of environmental images, meanings and associations. In this manner it is anticipated that the work shall deepen the comprehension of how cultural, political, artistic and environmental forces operated upon and affected each other during an era when American society underwent profound evolution.
-
-
-
Reviews
Authors: Adam Hallett, Alison Stanley and Karen VeitchAmerican Travel and Empire, Susan Castillo and David Seed (eds.) (2009) Liverpool: Liverpool U.P., 288 pp. ISBN: 978-1-84631-180-2 (hbk) 65.
American Culture in the 1950s, Martin Halliwell (2007) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 336 pp., ISBN: 978-0-7486-1884-9 (pbk) 19.99
American Culture in the 1980s, Graham Thompson (2007) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 260 Theophilus Savvas is the author of Don DeLillo article in index ISBN: 978-0-7486-1910-8 (pbk), 17.99/$29.50
-
Volumes & issues
-
Volume 42 (2023)
-
Volume 41 (2022)
-
Volume 40 (2021)
-
Volume 39 (2020)
-
Volume 38 (2019)
-
Volume 37 (2018)
-
Volume 36 (2017)
-
Volume 35 (2016)
-
Volume 34 (2015)
-
Volume 33 (2014)
-
Volume 32 (2013)
-
Volume 31 (2012)
-
Volume 30 (2011 - 2012)
-
Volume 29 (2010 - 2011)
-
Volume 28 (2009)
-
Volume 27 (2008)
-
Volume 26 (2007 - 2008)
-
Volume 25 (2005 - 2007)
-
Volume 24 (2005)
-
Volume 23 (2004)
-
Volume 22 (2003)
-
Volume 21 (2002)
-
Volume 20 (2001 - 2002)