AA and the Redeployment of Temperance Literature

This essay is an examination that, primarily comparativist in its approach, links publication materials from the temperance and Prohibition periods with the Big Book to show how AA's narrative antidotes to the traumas of modernity (sited in alcohol abuse) were as much the product of premodernist and turn-of-the-century hysteria as they were an attempt to write a new chapter in America's relationship with alcohol based on contemporary medical and social research.

The Ocho Poetas Mexicanos and the marginalisation of Catholic authors in post-revolutionary Mexico

The group known as the Ocho Poetas Mexicanos were marginalised in post-revolutionary literary circles and remain largely forgotten by literary history because they were dismissed as Catholic authors by a literary establishment which favoured nation-building literature at a time when Catholicism was excluded from official constructions of nationhood. This article draws attention to the significant contribution made by group members to contemporary cultural life and re-evaluates the work they published in the 1955 anthology which announced their arrival onto the literary scene. An analysis of this collection demonstrates that there was scant justification for labelling the group as Catholic poets and suggests that they are best understood with reference to the “universal” strand of Mexican literature and as heirs to groups such as the Contemporáneos. The treatment of the Ocho Poetas provides important evidence of the way in which Catholic authors were marginalised in mid-twentieth century Mexico, even if they did not express religious beliefs in their work, and draws attention to the non-literary criteria which can come into play when evaluating texts.

Revolution and the ritual year: religious conflict and innovation in Cristero Mexico

This article analyses Catholic responses to persecution of the Church by the Mexican state during Mexico's cristero rebellion (1926–9) and seeks to make a new contribution to the revolt's religious history. Faced with the Calles regime's anticlericalism, the article argues, Mexico's episcopate developed an alternative cultic model premised on a revitalised lay religion. The article then focuses on changes and continuities in lay – clerical relations, and on the new religious powers of the faithful, now empowered to celebrate ‘white’ masses and certain sacraments by themselves. The article concludes that persecution created new spaces for lay religious participation, showing the 1910–40 Revolution to be a period of religious, as well as social, upheaval.

Authorizing a tradition: Theory, criticism and (self-) canonization in French Caribbean writing

As critics have noted, Antillean literature has developed in tandem with a strong (self-) critical and theoretical body of work. The various attempts to theorize Antillean identity (négritude, antillanité, créolité) have been controversial and divisive, and the literary scene has been characterized as explosive, incestuous and self-referential. Yet writers aligned with, or opposed to, a given theory often have superior visibility. Meanwhile writers who claim to operate outside the boundaries of theory, such as Maryse Condé, are often canny theoretical operators who, from prestigious academic or cultural positions, manipulate readers’ responses and their own self-image through criticism. While recent polemics have helped to raise the critical stock of the islands generally, they have particularly enhanced the cultural capital of Chamoiseau and Condé, whose literary antagonism is in fact mutually sustaining. Both writers, through a strong awareness of (and contribution to) the critical field in which their work is read, position themselves as canonical authors.

On the way to 'duende' (through Lorca's 'Elogio de Antonia Merce, 'la Argentina', 1930)

This article analyzes how Lorca develops the concept of ‘duende’, finding a crucial missing link in the Elogio de Antonia Mercé, ‘la Argentina’ (1930). ‘Duende’ crystallizes around 1929/1930 when the poet explicitly takes into account the art of the dancer in performance. Three aspects of performance are singled out and systematically traced through Lorca's evolving reflections on popular art and the struggle of the modern artist to create the new – from his first lecture on the cante jondo in 1922 to the Arquitectura del cante jondo (1930) and finally Juego y teoría del duende (1933). The conclusion is drawn that it is in the performance and reception of a text – whether it is heard or read – that the artist's agonistic stand between tradition and modernity, repetition and singularity, is played out, in an invitation to the listener or reader to celebrate his or her mortality.

The Literature of Early Modern Childhoods

The texts adapted for, printed for and marketed to children and youths in the 16th and 17th centuries, the books read by boys and girls in this period, and writings by Renaissance children constitute the literature of early modern childhoods. Yet traditional histories of children’s literature, posing narrow definitions of this genre, have largely overlooked this period. In the past decade, fresh work by early modern scholars attending to the diverse elements of the literature of early modern childhoods has flourished. This essay evaluates the absence of early modern children’s literature from early studies and considers the ways in which this recent work in Renaissance studies has vitally transformed the field through its exploration of alternative definitions of childhood and children’s literature. This work is at an early stage but it has placed the interconnections between early modern childhoods and children’s literature at the centre of both Renaissance studies and childhood studies and has established key topics for future research.

“Hegemony Protected by the Armour of Coercion”: Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest and the State

This article argues that Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest is best understood in the context of the consolidation and expansion of the US state following the First World War and the Russian Revolution. It also argues that Hammett's novel constitutes a highly significant articulation of theoretical debates about the nature of political authority and state power in the modern era and speaks about the transition of one state formation to another. Insofar as Red Harvest explores the way in which the state's coercive and ethical character are bound up together, this article argues that Hammett's novel draws upon an understanding of political authority and state power primarily derived from Gramsci, via Marx. Gramsci insists that control cannot be maintained through force alone (and his conception of hegemony, in turn, suggests a power bloc that can become fragmented and disunited in a war of position). In the same way, Red Harvest traces the transformation of the “economic-corporate” state into the expanded or “ethical” State but crucially any ethical dimension, as Gramsci notes, is always beholden to the needs of the capitalist economy. As such, the apparently arbitrary bloodshed in the novel is conceived as a relatively minor realignment in the ranks of the capitalist classes – certainly less serious than the miners' strike that prefigures the novel. What makes this realignment significant is that it calls attention to the state both as repressive and as a site of conflict and compromise. Here, the work performed by the Continental Op and by the crime novel in general – simultaneously buttressing and, to some extent, contesting the power of the state – needs to be understood as part of the process by which the state is consistently enacting hegemony (albeit protected by the armour of coercion). The article concludes by pointing out that while Gramsci is perhaps too willing to dwell upon the state's expanded reach, Red Harvest is more interested in examining possible “cracks and fissures” in the state formation, even if the critique it ultimately offers goes nowhere and yields nothing.