This essay discusses the history of American literature anthologies from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century; examines their racial and gender inclusions and exclusions; and argues that literary anthologies have played an important role in the production of the American, and more recently multicultural, national narrative.
Chinese translations of U.S. literature manifest a shift from the third-world internationalism and anti-Western and anti-capitalist politics of the 1950s toward a diminished rhetorical antagonism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Because translation introductions are instrumental in introducing Chinese readers to the social context of U.S. literature, we surveyed a broad sample of prefaces. Based on this survey, we theorize China-U.S. translation relations within a world system; examine the ideological character of post-Revolution translation introductions to American literature; and identify shifting ideological tides following the Cultural Revolution.
The essay addresses the right to education for inmates and the disappearance of postsecondary education from US prisons; prison-university educational partnerships; and the potential of online programmes toward realization of education rights for US prisoners. As practical address to these issues, the article discusses an English department initiative to provide a partnership with prisons. As a creative example of how to reach all prison populations, this essay illustrates an online writing internship between undergraduate writing majors with primarily maximum-security inmates at the Penitentiary of New Mexico. By using online technology common on university campuses in the United States and elsewhere, the project has created a prison-university bridge and educational service that can be replicated and scaled upward. Such digital work spurs new social activism within university communities.
Testimonies of salvation, popular in contemporary faith-based prison programming, have a lengthy history in US prison literature. Yet accounts of private spirituality can as easily frame an epistemic insufficiency of topical avoidance, concealment, and falsification. To illustrate the pitfalls of such narratives the paper historicizes and analyzes the unpublished 1793–94 prison letters of John Shaw, held in a Kentucky jail for seven years on unknown grounds. By claiming a divine mantle in his letters, Shaw avoids confronting himself. While he writes that he has laid his “soul naked” before readers, in fact he does the opposite and obscures himself. This double motion—both to participate in the world and to hide from it—relies on fabulation and a vindication narrative based on Christian faith.
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