Asked by an interviewer about the starting-point for his stories, Raymond Carver once commented:

I never start with an idea. I always see something. I start with an image, a cigarette being put out in a jar of mustard, for instance, or the remains, the wreckage of a dinner left on the table. Pop cans in the fireplace, that sort of thing. And a feeling goes with that. And that feeling seems to transport me back to that particular time and place, and the ambiance of the time. But it is the image, and the emotion that goes with that image – that's what's important.

If Carver was interested in moving from the image into narrative, his stories have had a tendency to inspire their readers to translate them back into images. This was initially a critical tendency, as parallels were frequently drawn between Carver's stories and the paintings of Edward Hopper, and the paintings and sculptures of Photo Realists such as Duane Hanson, Richard Estes and Ralph Goings. But it was not only critics who looked to draw connections. In 1989, for example, Jo Ann Callis used a selection of Carver's poems to accompany her photographs in an exhibition catalogue, Objects of Reverie, while Bob Adelman has produced a book of photographs purporting to represent Carver Country.

Few American writers have been so rooted in a single place as Henry David Thoreau. Born in Concord, Massachusetts, sixteen miles west of Boston, Thoreau spent nearly all his short life, some forty-four years, in the vicinity of his native town – “the most estimable place in all the world” he deemed it – with only brief sojourns beyond New England. Like many of his contemporaries, he did try out the big city, living close to Manhattan in 1843, an aspiring writer, age twenty-six, with hopes of a literary career. But he quickly recoiled from the urban scene. “I don't like the city better, the more I see it, but worse,” he wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. “I am ashamed of my eyes that behold it. It is a thousand times meaner than I could have imagined. … The pigs in the street are the most respectable part of the population.” Homesick, he was back in Concord within six months. Only once did he stray outside the United States, for a week-long excursion to Montreal and Quebec. To this “Yankee in Canada,” it was a disappointing jaunt. “What I got by going to Canada was a cold.” Thoreau was simply happiest in his hometown, where he “traveled a good deal,” exploring the ponds, woods, and fields, observing and provoking the neighbors, and transforming his chosen ground, in Walden and in his journals, into a sacred site on the American literary landscape. Concord, he declared, is “my Rome, and its people … my Romans.”

Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe is nothing less than a nationalist narrative that extols the burgeoning capitalism of eighteenth-century England. In this moving tale, a ship-wrecked slave trader, stranded on an island for twenty-four-years, single-handedly consolidates the arduous and multi-tasked feat of making bread – from planting the wheat to producing the finished product – into a one-person job. On a smaller but no less devastating scale, he also succeeds in replicating the process of colonization through his master–slave relationship with Friday. The novel thus popularizes the notion of self-sufficiency through the mechanisms of capitalism, conquest, and the transmission of hegemony.

On January 7, 1892, Forest and Stream – the magazine of “true sportsmen” – featured a photograph of wild mule deer taken by Fred Baker, a hunter from Wyoming. A doe and her two fawns rest peacefully in front of a patch of sagebrush, as the midday sun casts a bright light. “Here, by a piece of good fortune which might not come to a man once in a lifetime,” the editor George Bird Grinnell explained, “Mr. Baker discovered the deer, and creeping up to the edge of the ravine focussed his camera on them without disturbing their siesta.” Grinnell emphasized to readers the accuracy and details portrayed in the image – the large mule-like ears of the deer and the black tips of fur that marked their tails. But he also drew a moral message from this scene of tranquility. “The flesh of the mule deer is excellent eating,” Grinnell wrote, “far better in the estimation of some people than that of the Virginia deer; but we think a man would have to be pretty hungry or quite without soul who would be willing to disturb the charming family group which is shown in our illustration. As we grow older we incline more and more to the opinion that a camera is sometimes a more satisfactory implement to hunt with than a gun.”

Although a good deal of recent critical attention to Melville's writing has followed the lead of Robert K. Martin in addressing the issue of sexuality, the predominant themes in discussions of “Bartleby” remain changes in the nature of the workplace in antebellum America and transformations in capitalism. But, if one of the abiding mysteries of the story is the failure of the lawyer–narrator to sever his relationship with his young scrivener once Bartleby embarks upon his policy of preferring not to, it is a mystery that makes sense within both of these critical discourses. On the one hand, the longevity of the relationship dramatizes a tension implicit in Michael Gilmore's suggestion that the lawyer–narrator straddles the old and the new economic orders of the American market-place. Although he may employ his scriveners “as a species of productive property and little else”, his attachment to his employees is overwhelmingly paternalistic and protective. On the other hand, James Creech suggests that Pierre (published the year before “Bartleby”) is a novel preoccupied with the closeting of homosexual identity within the values of an American middleclass family, while Gregory Woods describes Melville as the nearest thing in the prose world of the American Renaissance to the Good Gay Poet Whitman. In this critical context the longevity of the relationship suggests that the lawyer–narrator's desire to know Bartleby, to protect him, to tolerate him, to be close to him, to have him for his own, and then to retell the story of their relationship, needs to be considered in relation to sexual desire.

A unified Europe – the economic and political powerhouse of the world – looms just over the horizon. All that is lacking is a strong personality to galvanise and unify the various factions on the continent. And that person is coming!

Charles Dyer, World News and Bible Prophecy (1993, 206)

The subject of Europe, its history, politics, and integration, is an important area of study across a range of academic disciplines and professional spheres. Theorists and policy-makers alike have made European developments, particularly the elements of union, a key area of inquiry. This article seeks to explore a somewhat neglected field of analysis – the influence of religion in shaping understandings of Europe. In contrast to much work on Europe, my focus here is on the European perspective of a particular group of outsiders: conservative, premillennial Protestants in the United States.

During the height of the 1840 presidential campaign season, the Democratic editor, Charles Gordon Greene, printed in his Boston Morning Post the following lampoon of the September 10 Bunker Hill Whig Convention: “ ‘Madam, I am astonished that you do not wave your handkerchief; I thought that the women were all whigs,’ said a gentleman to a lady while the procession was passing by them on Thursday. ‘You are mistaken, sir,’ was the answer – ‘the whigs are all women.’ ” Greene efficiently slung this partisan mud at the 80,000 men and women who demonstrated their support for the Whigs at the gathering. The editor fastened upon the opposition's previous pronouncement that “ ‘The Ladies are all Whigs’ ” and inverted it to effeminize men who would vote for William Henry Harrison. “The Whigs are all women,” “Colonel” Greene now declared. On this page of one of Boston's most widely read dailies, the gender of both Whig men and women was questioned and distinctions between them became blurred in unflattering ways. Greene thus defiled both sexes with one swift printed gesture.

Virginia, Britain's most populous and arguably most important North American colony, once seemed the perfect fit for the “consensus” interpretation of the War of Independence. Indeed, the percentage of white colonists who became loyalists was probably lower in Virginia than in any other rebelling colony. The widespread agreement on secession from Britain should not, however, be mistaken for social consensus. The reality was that revolutionary Virginia was frequently in turmoil. One of the most intriguing of the local insurrections broke out in the northern county of Loudoun just five months before the Declaration of Independence. In February 1776, the county erupted into a heated confrontation pitting gentlemen against their less wealthy neighbours. Lund Washington, who was managing Mount Vernon, warned his cousin, General George Washington, who was outside Boston training his fledgeling patriot army, that the “first Battle we have in this part of the Country will be in Loudon” – not against British soldiers, but against fellow patriots. Within a week, the revolutionary government in Williamsburg, the Committee of Safety, felt compelled to send troops to quell the disturbances. Yet, for months afterwards, gentry Virginians worried that their effort to suppress the rebellion had failed. In mid-May, Andrew Leitch told Leven Powell of Loudoun, “I really lament the torn and distracted condition of your County.” The “troublesome times,” as another gentleman called them, were slow to abate.

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.

In 1825, Harriet Beecher Stowe's father, Lyman Beecher, gave a series of six sermons which helped to launch the temperance movement. In these sermons, published in 1826 and much reprinted thereafter, Beecher used the slave trade as a moral yardstick for the evils of intemperance. In doing so, he built on the moral outrage which brought an end to the legal importation of African slaves in 1808, and further criminalized the trade in 1820 when it was declared piracy. Beecher concluded that, morally reprehensible as the slave trade had been, intemperance was the greater evil, for it did greater damage to the individual soul, and cast a wider shadow of suffering. “We have heard of the horrors of the middle passage, the transportation of slaves, the chains, the darkness, the stench, the mortality and living madness of wo, and it is dreadful,” Beecher noted before counting the human cost of bondage to alcohol:

Yes, in this nation there is a middle passage of slavery, and darkness, and chains, and disease, and death. But it is a middle passage, not from Africa to America, but from time to eternity; and not of slaves whom death will release from suffering, but of those whose sufferings at death do but just begin. Could all the sighs of these captives be wafted on one breeze, it would be loud as thunder. Could all their tears be assembled, they would be like the sea.

Given the rhetorical power of the comparison between the evils of chattel slavery and the evils of alcohol dependency, it is hardly surprising that Lyman Beecher's daughter, writing some thirty years later, would build on her father's work, inverting, in Dred, the import of the comparison.

In the spring of 1942, the Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Company was gearing up for the most productive three years in its history. With the United States at war, the demand for transport ships would soon propel the Chester-based shipyard to a position of unmatched prominence in the industry – a remarkable development for a concern that was originally conceived as a support subsidiary for its parent, the Sun Oil Company. Twenty-six years earlier, Joseph N. Pew, the younger of two brothers who oversaw the fortunes of Sun Oil, had suggested the creation of a shipyard to build tankers needed to carry the products of Sun's Marcus Hook (Pa.) refinery. He and his older brother J. Howard acquired the old Merchant's Shipyard, hired cousin John G. Pew as president, and began building tankers.

By the end of 1943, Sun Ship boasted 35,000 employees, approximately half of whom were black. More than one third of the black employees worked in the company's No. 4 facility, a yard intended by the Pews to be staffed completely by black workers. Yard No. 4 presented blacks with another instance of a recurring dilemma: should they postpone the goal of full integration for the sake of economic improvement, or should they forgo the opportunity to improve their vocational expertise and economic condition for the ultimate goal of total equality in a fully integrated society? Such a goal seemed, on the eve of the Second World War, nearly as remote as it had been at the close of the Civil War. Jim Crow ruled throughout the South. The North lacked Jim Crow laws, but discrimination and segregation were the norm rather than the exception. “What have Negroes to fight for?” A. Philip Randolph demanded in 1942. “If you haven't got democracy yourself, how can you carry it to somebody else?”

The St. Louis Hegelians existed as a loosely organized group from approximately 1858 to 1880. Before the Civil War they participated in the St. Louis Literary and Philosophical Society which dissolved when most of its members left the city to fight in the war. After the guns fell silent, a few of these “respectable vagabonds,” most notably Henry Conrad Brokmeyer and William Torrey Harris, organized the St. Louis Philosophical Society in January 1866. Both organizations were part of a larger “St. Louis Movement” which included an art club, an Aristotle club, a Shakespeare society, the St. Louis Academy of Science, the St. Louis Philharmonic Society, and the Academy of Useful Science. All of these organizations were primarily composed of local professionals – public school teachers and administrators, judges, and attorneys.

In April 1859 a group of well-to-do manufacturers and Republican politicians coaxed a reclusive Henry Carey, Philadelphia's pre-eminent economist, from his study to a public dinner in his honour. One hundred and twenty five names were at the foot of an invitation to dine at the opulent La Pierre Hotel in recognition of Carey's “service in behalf of American industrial interests.” The banqueting hall glittered with brilliantly illuminated chandeliers trimmed with floral arrangements; at one end a banner proclaimed “Protection to American Labor,” although, curiously, none of the guests looked as though they actually laboured; strung across the other end of the hall another banner blazoned “Harmony of Interests,” but only one interest sat at table. These two slogans encapsulate Carey's world view. He had a vision of an ideal America in which small manufacturing towns would spread across the land. To him “association ” allowed farmers to exchange products with neighbouring mechanics and to develop America beyond the stage of primary producer. Towns would grow into cities, generate a social and cultural life, and cities would trade with other cities. By such a process all underdeveloped nations would achieve economic maturity. Through the free association of co-operating individuals, town and country and capital and labour achieved harmony. The only way to overcome the baneful effect of British imperialism was through the protective tariff. To Carey's way of thinking, free trade was the antithesis of association because it created “centralization,” a system in which a core industrial capitalism traded manufactures for raw materials with a faraway and less developed periphery. Trading at such a distance allowed a merchant class to intervene and siphon off the hard-won efforts of labour. Free trade led to wild, speculative fluctuations in economic activity, periodic overproduction as consumers were not matched by producers, and long-term underdevelopment of the agricultural regions of the American South and West which lay outside the orbit of north-eastern manufacturers. Carey's ripened theoretical position was consequent upon the enormous changes experienced by American society during the decades of the 1830s, 40s and 50s. Like all utopias, the future was intimately linked to the hopes and fears of the present. To the growing but still subaltern class of manufacturers that rubbed shoulders at La Pierre's dinner tables, he offered a comforting vision of American small-town life as an antidote to the reality of British social polarization and class conflict.

Slavery was not the most important issue for which George Washington is remembered; nor were his views on the institution as revealing as those of some of his fellow Founding Fathers. But Washington was a slaveowner for all of his adult life and he lived in Virginia, which was dominated by tobacco plantations based on slave labour. Slavery was central to the socio-economic life of the Old Dominion: after 1750 40 per cent of the North American slave population lived there and the first United States census of 1790 showed 300,000 slaves in Virginia. The tobacco they produced was the most valuable staple crop grown in North America. At his home Mount Vernon, situated on the upper Potomac river overlooking the Maryland shore, Washington created an estate, based on the latest agricultural practice, that was also a set of plantation farms centred around the work of enslaved Africans. Slavery, then, was clearly a persistent part of Washington's life and career. Because of this and his pre-eminent position in American public life, Washington's use of slave labour and his views on an important paradox of American history in the revolutionary era – the coexistence of slavery and liberty – deserve close attention. One man's dilemma in dealing with the morality of his own slaveholding was mirrored in the broader context of what the United States could or would do about the problem of slavery.

Our nation has been founded in what we may call our American religion, baptized and reared in the faith that a man requires no master to take care of him, and that common people can work out their salvation well enough together if left free to try.

William James, “Robert Gould Shaw Oration,” 1897

[T]he civic religion of which Whitman and Dewey were prophets … centered around taking advantage of traditional pride in American citizenship by substituting social justice for individual freedom as our country's principal goal … You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every morning.

Richard Rorty, “A Cultural Left,” 1997

James and Rorty refer here to what sociologists used to call the American civil religion. In 1967, Robert N. Bellah coined this phrase to suggest how Americans, shaped by the complex interplay of republican and Christian traditions, believe they have an obligation “to carry out God's will on earth.” Since the 1970s, though, it has been historians like J. G. A. Pocock who have shown how republicans throughout the modern West have for the last five centuries blended the millennialist beliefs of Christianity with the ancient conviction that humans realize their political nature through the virtuous acts required to sustain republics in a cosmos ruled by fortune. As James once said of pragmatism, republicanism is a new name for an old way of thinking.

Ralph Ellison's career will undoubtedly provide students of American literature and biographers much to puzzle over in the coming years. He published his first novel, Invisible Man, in 1952 when he was 38, an age when Faulkner was in the midst of his great period and just poised to publish Absalom, Absalom! After the early 1950s, Ellison published two books of essays, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986), and a few excerpts from an ever more mythical work-in-progress. That work-in-progress, or some truncated version of it, has now appeared with the intriguing title, Juneteenth, which refers to the day, 19 June 1865, when the slaves in Texas learned they were free, some two months after the end of the Civil War.

Without a doubt, Ralph Ellison considered himself, above all, an American writer of the modernist persuasion; indeed, he was one of the most patriotic of writer-citizens in the republic of letters. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was attacked by anti-war forces for his qualified support for the Johnson administration's prosecution of the Vietnam War, and black radicals for insufficient militance about his “blackness.” Through it all, Ellison resolutely resisted the obligation to make his art explicitly political. It was precisely that which was at issue in his famous polemical exchanges with Irving Howe.

Yet, Ellison's writing always was political in at least two senses. First, as he asserted in 1964 before the civil rights movement gave way to Black Power and its cultural wing, the Black Arts movement: “protest is an element of all art, though it does not necessarily take the form of speaking for a political or social program.” In other words: art was political but not in the programmatic way demanded by others, whoever they might be.

At the start of Pagan Spain (1957), Richard Wright recalled a 1946 conversation with Gertrude Stein; she encouraged him to visit Spain: “ ‘You'll see what the Western world is made of. Spain is primitive, but lovely. ’ ” Wright meditated on his fascination with that country, an obsession rooted in the Civil War's political upheaval: “The fate of Spain hurt me, haunted me; I was never able to stifle a hunger to understand what had happened there and why” (PS, 10). Wright wrote as a leftist, as a political writer who had published anti-Franco articles. In his interest in Spain, and especially in his “hunger to understand” its fate after the fall of the Republic, Wright kept company with many mid-century American artists. Hemingway is the most famous instance of a writer engaged with Spanish affairs, but forms of Hispanophilia have marked the lives of many writers and painters. In his account of a trip to Madrid in 1947, Saul Bellow recalled: “ ‘And then of course I had followed the Spanish Civil War and knew as much about what had gone on in Spain between 1936–8 as a young American of that time could learn.’ ” At around that time, the Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell was creating his series of Elegies to the Spanish Republic, a parade of largely black canvases dominated by oblique representations of archetypal Spanish subjects such as bullfighting. As Arthur Danto has written of these images: “ ‘Spain’ denotes a land of suffering and poetic violence and political agony, and ‘Elegy’ carries the literary weight of tragedy and disciplined lamentation. ”

Mack: pimp; talk someone into something

“Pimptionary,” Ice-T

Mack man: Short for Mackerel man, a pimp. Possibly from the French maquereau. Connotes the working side of pimping, especially the line, the “rap,” the psychological game.

“Pimp Talk,” Christina and Richard Milner

Mack, as these definitions attest, is synonymous with pimp and is so deployed in gangsta rap as both noun and verb. From this denotative meaning, the term has assumed secondary meanings: to persuade, or as Ice-T says “to talk someone into.” The mack comes to mean the persuader, the trickster, the rapper. This semantic shift strikes at the centre of the equivalencies between rap artist and pimp. As music critic S. H. Fernando asserts, “the one specific quality that pimps and rappers share is their way with words.” If broad parallels can be drawn between pimping and rapping, what is distinctive about the notorious and highly successful subgenre of gangsta rap, which emerged in late-1980s urban California, is that here this equivalence is literalized. Many gangsta rappers actually assume pimp personae, presenting oral narratives which fulfil both denotative and connotative meanings of the word mack.

The subtly entrapping nature of celebrity has been a common theme of Don DeLillo's work since his third novel, Great Jones Street (1973), narrated by a twenty-six-year-old rock star, Bucky Wunderlick, who tires of fame in the middle of a national tour and goes to ground in a seedy New York bedsitter. This theme, however, finds its fullest expression in DeLillo's 1991 novel Mao II, where it is linked to a specific concern which may be closer to home for him – the paradoxical fascination with author–recluses in American celebrity culture. DeLillo, who came to reluctant terms with major league celebrity from the mid-1980s onwards after a long period of respectful reviews and polite notices, has praised reclusive authors for “refusing to become part of the all-incorporating treadmill of consumption and disposal,” in spite of the “automatic mechanism” of the media which tries “to absorb certain such reluctant entities into the weave.” Mao II is about what happens when this absorption takes place, and whether or not this wholly devalues the author's own tactics of silence and renunciation.