The Cambridge History of the American Novel

Hmong American literature is an emerging field within Asian American literature, seeing a steep rise in production starting in the early 2000s. In collective and individual publication efforts, the literature includes mostly memoirs, short stories, and poetry. Essays, personal narratives, transcribed oral folktales, and plays have also been published in anthologies, including two that are edited by Hmong American writers. Although there has been an upsurge in publication and a wide representation in terms of genres, there is still no widely published Hmong American novel. Coming from an orality-based culture and a long history of marginalization both in Asia and the United States, many Hmong American narratives contend with issues related to silence and secrecy. In the context of 20th-century French imperialism and US neocolonialism, much of the literature also touches on the subjects of displacement, refugee resettlement, trauma, and cultural shifts. Of the latter, there is a definite preoccupation with religion and changes in gender roles and sexuality, particularly as many of the writers have been born or largely raised in the United States and are therefore interested in representing Hmong American identities and experiences. Hmong American literature can also be characterized by a sense of regionalism; many of the narratives and publications take place in heavily Hmong-populated areas like the Central Valley of California and Upper Midwest states like Minnesota and Wisconsin. While the move toward textuality comes with its own problems, it also presents Hmong Americans with a new method of self-representation. Historically studied by outsiders and exoticized for belonging to a culture that has resisted assimilation and maintained a unique language, religion, and cultural practices, Hmong writers are producing their own narratives, and altogether, the literature is rich with complex characters, speakers, and stories that represent and explore Hmong American experiences.

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Valerie Babb, A History of the African American Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, £34.99). Pp. 486. isbn978 1 1070 6172 9.

Journal of American Studies ◽

10.1017/s0021875820000456 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 54 (3) ◽

pp. 631-633

Author(s):

AKASH BELSARE

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

American Novel ◽

Cambridge University ◽

History Of

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The New England Village Novel and Picturesque Reform

Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874 ◽

10.1093/oso/9780192894557.003.0006 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 162-210

Author(s):

John Evelev

Keyword(s):

Social Change ◽

Middle Class ◽

New England ◽

American Literature ◽

Social Values ◽

American Novel ◽

History Of ◽

Residual Space ◽

Village Life ◽

The Village

This chapter focuses on the New England village novel, a prestigious subgenre that figured in many of the midcentury’s critical assessments of what constituted “American literature” but that is now largely forgotten. Once important novels like Sylvester Judd’s Margaret (1845), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Kavanagh (1849), Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Elsie Venner (1861), and Henry Ward Beecher’s Norwood (1869) tell us about middle-class social values and their investment in reform in their depictions of New England village life during this period of time. This chapter explores some of the contradictions inherent in locating idealized theological and social change within the residual space of the New England village. As a consequence of these contradictions, the utopia of the New England village novel becomes literally “no place,” frozen between nostalgia for a unified national community that never existed and hope that through reform the village could fulfill utopian possibilities for the nation. This genre also maps out the transformation of attitudes toward social reform from the picturesque utopianism of Judd’s Margaret to a much narrower vision of the transformative possibilities of the picturesque in Beecher’s post-Civil War novel, Norwood, a quarter of a century later. This transformation reveals the importance of the picturesque to an alternative history of the mid-nineteenth-century American novel and explores the rise and decline of middle-class use of the picturesque as an authoritative discourse to reshape spaces and enact social change in American life.

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