In one of James's best-known stories, “The Middle Years” (1893), the mortally ill author Dencombe, staying at Bournemouth for the sake of what remains of his health, gets an advance copy of his latest – and almost certainly his last – novel, which is called The Middle Years. Looking over what might have been thought to be his finished and dismissed work on his clifftop bench, Dencombe revises it:

Dencombe was a passionate corrector, a fingerer of style; the last thing he ever arrived at was a form final for himself. His ideal would have been to publish secretly, and then, on the published text, treat himself to the terrified revise, sacrificing always a first edition and beginning for posterity and even for the collectors, poor dears, with a second.

The Pathfinder (1840) is the only Leatherstocking tale in which Natty Bumppo at all resembles the wavering hero of a Scott novel. Here for the first and only time we see him waver between the life he has always led — untrammelled by property, responsible only to his own strict code and conscience, free to follow his own bent away from white European society — and the life of a border family man with all that that implies in terms of a wife who must be kept content with her lot, children.who must be properly educated, property which must be acquired and protected. Yet The Pathfinder is not in the least like a Waverley novel. It is not even very much like one of the earlier Leatherstocking tales. Why, more than a decade after burying Leatherstocking in The Prairie (1827), did Cooper revive him again? And why revive him in this particular way?

During the 1830s Vermonters had largely come to accept the sobering fact that their golden age had ended, that no longer would an investment be almost certain to be rewarded nor would rapid growth take up slack and obscure economic problems. After having been the fastest growing state in the Union at the turn of the century, in the 1830s Vermont's population increased by only 11,000 souls, a meagre four per-cent. Without the old boom psychology for support during this turbulent decade, Vermonters coped with chronic cholera epidemics and severe economic dislocations and at the same time experienced a virtual exodus that caused one-third of their towns to lose population. The social fabric clearly reflected the strain as the society desperately sought outlets, and flocked to a variety of movements. Many readily responded to revivalism and, forgetting the teaching of their orthodox divines, easily adopted the word of prophets and millennialists. They turned to egalitarian reforms, anti-slavery agitation, and abolitionism. In politics they rejected the tradional parties of J. Q. Adams and Henry Clay or Jackson and Van Buren for the social nostrums of Anti-Mason candidates.

This article explores the development of behavioral modification programs inside penitentiaries during the 1960s and 1970s, with a focus upon how such tactics were used to crush dissent and silence incarcerated people who challenged the prison regime. First, it explores how psychology became an influential force in the operation of many penitentiaries from the 1950s. Second, it considers the role that psychologists and psychiatrists played in developing brainwashing techniques to punish those prison activists who sought to expose the dehumanizing and brutal treatment of incarcerated people. Finally, it uses the example of the behavioral modification unit at Marion Federal Penitentiary to show how the federal government was complicit in the use of psychological torture to silence prisoners’ complaints.

Native of St. Petersburg, author of works in Russian and French as well as English, and sometime goalkeeper for Trinity College, Cambridge, soccer team, Vladimir Nabokov would not appear to be the most obvious avatar of American Studies in the subject's nationalist phase of the 1950s. My argument, however, is that Lolita, which first appeared in 1955, can be seen as symbiotically intertwined with various classic texts of American Studies that helped to invent and define the field during the Truman and Eisenhower years. At times, the dream of Eden that permeates Nabokov's narrative impels it towards becoming a parody of the early American Studies movement, which harboured within its collective consciousness similar vestiges of an imaginary paradise. More dexterously, though, Lolita makes the theoretical parameters of this movement visible, so that Nabokov's novel might more accurately be described as a metafiction of area studies: a text which holds up a mirror to the implicit assumptions of American Studies and renders them translucent. Just as the process of metafiction can reilluminate ways in which more traditional artefacts have been constructed, so Nabokov's virtualization of American Studies also reflects back upon the established boundaries of other national formations and nation-states, foregrounding the contingent status of their supposedly naturalized values and social markers. In particular, by focusing upon the cultural reception of Lolita in Britain, we will see how the book brings into play troublesome questions about the relationship between formal aesthetics, public morality, and social power. In this sense, Nabokov's perverse reinscription of American Studies might be seen ironically to highlight the multiple dilemmas involved in circumscribing specific national territories for academic study or political jurisdiction.

This essay examines the fascination with bodily conversion that characterizes recent HBO programming. Dramas and comedies like True Blood, Veep, Silicon Valley, and True Detective describe human forms in various states of transformation: into a menagerie of supernatural creatures, polling data, digital information and, even, the landscape of the American South. These transformations anticipate and seek to rationalize the exchange of the programs in which they appear into and out of diverse forms of Time Warner brand equity – even as they rehearse anxieties that the network's famed “quality” diminishes in the face of such exchanges. Female characters bear the brunt of this reflexivity; their forcibly contorted and monetized bodies figure the temporary material form assumed by otherwise liquid equity as it moves within Time Warner and, ultimately, over Internet lines and into the viewer's home. The network's famed misogyny is, in this respect, self-conscious and idiosyncratic, and reveals something essential about the incoherence of HBO's parent company at the moment that the network discovers new pathways for the direct distribution of its product.

In 1865, when Americans asked, “ What shall be done about the freed Negro? ” few of them realized that the question was a fragment of a larger one, “ What shall be done to define and secure the rights of all Americans? ” For despite its regional variations, slavery had a more coherent legal identity than freedom. There were as many different standards of citizenship as there were state and local laws regulating the ownership of property, personal mobility, the criminal code, family relationships, and court procedures. Travel from one state to another could considerably alter a person's legal standing. Even in the one state there was no unitary concept of citizenship and many Americans knew a kind of freedom which would not serve the freed slave well as a model. Married women were severely restricted in their contractual capacity and hence in their freedom to earn a living or own and dispose of property. In some states they had few custodial rights over their children and in others none. They were limited in their access to judicial remedies by laws and customs which prevented them bringing suit in some instances, restricted their right to testify, prohibited their service on juries, and even “ protected ” them from answering for some crimes for which the law held their husbands responsible. Free Negroes in the ante-bellum North, paupers of all races in all states, and Chinese settlers on the West Coast could all have furnished examples of the way in which discriminatory state legislative classifications deprived them of rights. The states operated a sliding scale of citizenship rights which routinely placed some and potentially could place all Americans at a considerable distance from what Republicans argued in 1866 were the rights of all.

Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) was one of America's most distinguished critics. As an international man of letters, he did not confine himself to literature alone, but also investigated main areas of human thought. He fluently pursued learning in seven languages, making it alive for American intellectual readers. He was indeed a ‘ superlative interpreter ’, as Alfred Kazin pointed out. Due to Wilson's wide horizons and perspectives, his works included such diverse areas as literature, politics, language, history and travel. During the 1930s he was mainly interested in political and industrial reporting, as well as studying Marxism, partly neglecting literary criticism. His activities of that decade were not only the outcome of an intellectual curiosity, but a personal need as well, that strongly influenced his political outlook. The growing concern for social justice and for the suffering of the lower classes was the dominant force in Wilson's thought during the thirties. One of the stages in his gradual radicalization was his association in 1934–5 with The Modern Monthly, an anti-Marxist journal. What led the prominent critic, the literary editor of the prestigious New Republic, to join the editorial board of the Monthly, a little magazine with a small circulation? What was Wilson's contribution to the magazine's political approach? Why did he resign after a fourteen-month editorship? How did his association with the editors V. F. Calverton and Max Eastman — who had been denounced by the Communist Party as ‘ social fascists ’ and Trotskyists — influence Wilson's political standing with the Communists? These questions deserve close examination.

We all well know that American Studies offers a particularly fascinating and complex example of the difficulties and challenges involved in an interdisciplinary and area studies approach. There may, indeed, be an element of chance in the fact that this touches so sharply on the links that can be established between literature and other studies (literature and sociology, literature and history): the chance that literature was somehow in there from the beginning, in the early days of the subject, and has still held its place in the area-studies map. So, when Henry Nash Smith asked us once if American Studies could develop a method, he looked for his answer in the intervening ground between literary criticism and sociology; and though he found it hard to arrive at his desired method, he suggested that it would lie in some form of cultural anthropology. The divisions between the various disciplines–above all, the varying roles they allowed to consciousness in their interpretation of society and culture–seemed to him to pose profound problems. So, he said, a new method would have to come piecemeal, through a kind of principled opportunism; but he did assume that we could want to turn to works of literature, and the complex interactions between a writer and his environment that constitute a whole literary career, as an important centre of the study, a significant expression of the culture. The problems in fact are large, since in liberal-democratic society literature performs some of the most complex contours of art that have ever existed. But that very fact is part of the interest of the problem and, while Professor Smith's approach raises certain difficulties, on some of which the first part of the present argument turns, I am happy to take the issue raised–that literature can be seen as a social manifestation, that as a creative manifestation it does uniquely reveal central aspects of a culture–as a very important one.

Professor Erik Erikson was more than justified in 1950 when he asserted that the work he produced on childhood and society was one concerning historicprocesses. He began by documenting certain childhood experiences which he took to be universal, and he continued by urging upon his readers speculative extrapolations that might be seen to apply to society as a whole. Erikson suggested that human beings progressed normally through a chronology of eight ages, the first of which, experienced by infants, involved a psychological dichotomy reflecting the infant's feelings of what he called “basic trust vs. basic mistrust” of the exterior world. Essentially, this early experience, as described by Erikson, was one of tension between a sense of cogency, continuity, and sustenance in the outside world, and an opposite sense that the outer world was unfaithful in its appearances and liable to aberrations in the expected order of things. This antithetical reality, he supposed, was replayed in the wider social institutions of adult life. Experiences of a positive cast, such as basic trust, were so elemental and psychologically crucial that they “bore a special relation to one of the basic elements of society,” and were, thus, re-lived by individuals through the vehicle of some contemporary institution. The past essential crisis, consequently, was eternally present, and historical developments in institutions, to a certain extent, were replays of elemental childhood experiences.

Belief that the Supreme Court is overburdened is not new. In the years after the Civil War, the expansion of the United States, both territorially and economically, enlarged the work of the Justices enormously, for not only did the number of cases on which they were required to pass judgement increase but the miles they had to travel within their own circuits also multiplied hugely. In 1891 the Circuit Courts of Appeal Act was passed, establishing intermediate courts between the District Courts, product of the original 1789 Judiciary Act, and the Supreme Court itself. Whereas in 1890 before the Act was passed 623 new cases were filed, in the 1892 Term only 275 were, and the Court was soon able to reduce its backlog. Nevertheless the number began once again to drift upwards so that by 1923 nearly 750 appeals and petitions for certiorari, on most of which the Justices were obliged to pronounce, reached the Supreme Court. Following intense lobbying by Howard Taft, at that time Chief Justice, a major reform took place in 1925 which allowed the Court discretionary power over virtually all its docket.

One of the notable aspects of Gravity's Rainbow, if we consider it as an historical novel of a special kind, is the way in which “great” political leaders are barely mentioned. The carnival lacks the mock king, and the historical novel lacks the leader who embodies history. The explanation here is paradoxically historicist. Gravity's Rainbow explicitly addresses a constructed audience (in the Orpheus Theatre) in the Cold War and is about the formation of the Cold War in its techno-bureaucratic context. The realpolitik of authority in the Cold War context has changed. Bureaucratic constructions of System operate as the modus operandi for authority in the novel and they parallel the historical formation of Systems theory and analysis with such US organizations as RAND. This development represents, in the technologies and the discourses of the military and political strategists, a response to Hitler and the supposed tyranny and threat of Communism. The series of characters we encounter within the novel reflects different forms of entrapment and/or lines of flight in response to the authority of the System in what John Johnston has called an assemblage, or postmodern multiplicity. Containment and counterforce become metaphors which Pynchon scurrilously uses to subvert the moral righteousness of the Western Cold Warriors in their defense of a “free world” (paradoxically) under siege from an ever threatening Communism. Pynchon is interested not in the great historical figure, but in the relation of the individual to the System, militarily, scientifically, socially, and sexually.

The Dominican American community in New York is perhaps one of the best examples of how processes of transculturation are affecting traditional definitions of ethnic identification. Given the intense economic, social and cultural transnational exchanges between the island and the USA from the 1960s, Dominicanyorks have been challenging the illusion of homogeneity in the definition of Americanness for decades, creating transnational social networks that transcend traditional national and ethnographic boundaries. The theatrical works of Josefina Báez, a Dominican American performer living in New York, and Sherezada (Chiqui) Vicioso, a Dominican poet and playwright who lived and worked in the US metropolis for decades before moving back to the Dominican Republic, lyrically explore issues of diaspora, identity and migration and the impact these phenomena might have in the lives of migrant Dominican women. Presenting diasporic experiences from two differing but interconnected locales – New York and the Dominican Republic – these plays offer two complementary views on the ways in which ethnicity, race, social class, age and geopolitical location interact in the formation of transcultural identities, thus contributing to develop a hemispheric approach to the study of identity formation in the Americas.

This article unpacks the music of the Townsend Plan, an ambitious Depression-era pension proposal, and the overlooked, yet deeply influential, national movement of its supporters, which aimed to simultaneously eradicate old-age poverty and revive the national economy. As well as providing a musical account of the media strategies, political tactics, and institutional culture of Townsendism, this article charts how different demographics of US society also mobilized popular music in arguments for or against pensions in the 1930s and 1940s. In the process, the article highlights some of the rich discourse about welfare, health, and aging in the mid-twentieth-century USA.

Thinking about the approach and scholarship called the New Southern Studies takes me back to the first years in my position in southern studies and history at the University of Mississippi. When I started that job in 1988, I had a great deal to learn, especially about the recent and contemporary South. So I turned to the best scholarly books I could find, especially those by my fellow historians and also by social scientists, literary scholars, music scholars, and folklorists.

American Muslims increasingly negotiate their relation to a government that is suspicious of Islam, yet which recognizes them as rights-bearing citizens, within a culture they claim as their own. To better understand how the post-9/11 state is reshaping American Islam, I examine the case of Muslim American dissident Tarek Mehanna, sentenced to seventeen years in prison in 2012 for providing material support for terrorism. I read Mehanna's verbal and visual depictions of his persecution in relation to the American dissidents Mehanna claims as intellectual predecessors, above all Henry David Thoreau and John Brown, while situating this dissent within a long history of American activism

This article looks at Eleanor Roosevelt's role within the intense debate on nuclear fallout as it developed in the US in the early 1950s. In particular, the article analyzes Mrs. Roosevelt's position on nuclear weapons, deterrence, and disarmament; her condemnation of nuclear testing; and her role as both a public intellectual and a mass educator who helped people to understand the real consequences of nuclear fallout. Here, Mrs. Roosevelt emerges as an active voice that, by defending freedom of speech, also contributed to popularizing the issue of nuclear fallout and making American citizens aware of the urgency of a ban on nuclear testing.

The focus of this article is The End of a Primitive, the novel that marks Chester Himes's transition from a writer of protest to one of crime fiction. Drawing on archival research carried out in the United States, I advance two arguments. Firstly, the story told in the autobiographical Primitive is, in part, that behind Himes's leaving America for Paris in 1953. The novel, I argue, inaugurates a writing of exile that is continued in Himes's crime fiction, a writing through which, because of his literal and figurative distance from America, Himes came to feel more strongly his sense of national – that is, American – identity. Secondly, in Primitive Himes presents the reader with a formal breakdown of sorts, one that “clears the way” for the crime fiction (which, my archival research shows, Himes had begun writing before Primitive was finished). This breakdown – of the protest novel conceived in generic terms – also predicts the trajectory of Himes's hard-boiled crime novels. By signalling the generic exhaustion of protest fiction through the failure of “good” form, Primitive, as the end point of Himes's more generic protest writing, also anticipates the movement of the crime stories towards formal or generic dissolution, an indication, I suggest, of Himes's late belief that literature was in general an ineffective catalyst of social–political change.

The Tortilla Curtain (1995), a novel by T. Coraghessan Boyle, juxtaposes the existence of southern California's affluent whites and non-white underclass by relating the stories of two couples whose lives become irrevocably entangled following a fateful automobile accident. The period flavour derives from racial tensions that culminated in the Los Angeles riots of 1992 and the passage, two years later, of Proposition 187, a package of prohibitive measures to curb the influx of “undocumented” immigrants from Mexico. Delaney Mossbacher, the book's main character, is a freelance nature writer with orthodox liberal views – a caricatured Sierra Club member. He contributes a monthly, Annie Dillard-esque nature column (“Pilgrim at Topanga Creek”) to an outdoor magazine. He lives in an upscale hilltop community designed in impeccable Spanish mission style – the product of white flight – apparently safe from the Mexican hordes that have broken through the border (the brittle “tortilla curtain” of the novel's title) and are overrunning the flatlands.