Vol. 5 no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2011-2012)

Vampire Meets Girl:

Gender Roles and the Vampire’s Side of the Story in Twilight, Midnight Sun and The Vampire Diaries

By M. Carmen Gomez-Galisteo | comments |

This article explores how contemporary vampire stories present the vampire’s perspective, placing it in the context of long-seated American fears about monsters going back to seventeenth-century Puritans, who feared that they lived in a world where the devil was constantly lurching. It also engages with modern rewritings of famous, classical literary works trying to present the other side of the story, a convention that vampire stories, in giving a fresh look on the vampire’s perspective, also develop. This article further analyzes the portrayal of the vampire in the light of the dark hero and feminist criticisms of the gender dynamics in Twilight.

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Credits Vol. 5 no. 2

in
Issue: 

EXECUTIVE EDITORIAL BOARD

Co-Editor-In-Chief
Chris Vanderwees

Co-Editor-In-Chief
Brian Foster

Chief Faculty Editor and Liaison
Andrew Johnston

Chief Copy Editor
Gregg French

Chief Correspondent Editor
Maureen Mahoney

Chief Reviews Editor
Heather Hillsburg

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

David Andrew Beitelman
University of Western Ontario

Sasha Cocarla
University of Ottawa

Andrew Connolly
Carleton University

A review of Educating Scholars: Doctoral Education in the Humanities by Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Harriet Zuckerman, Jeffrey A. Groen, and Sharon M. Brucker

By Christian B. Long | comments |

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Why Do Vampires Prefer Louisiana?

By Irene Sanz Alonso | comments |

Although the vampire has been a common figure in literature since the publication of Polidori’s The Vampyre in 1819, it has been in the last decades when the vampire has become a prominent character, especially thanks to the writings by Anne Rice, Stephanie Meyer or Charlaine Harris, among others. Although their portrayal of the vampire differs, their novels have become bestsellers and, in some cases, have been made into successful movies or television series promoting a huge merchandising and fandom. Of the three authors mentioned before, Rice and Harris are the most similar in their portrayal of the vampire and in the use of Louisiana as the setting for most of their writing. It may be believed that the choice of Louisiana is just a coincidence or that it has to do with both authors being raised in the South of the United States. However, in this article I want to analyze more deeply the reasons why these two authors have chosen this Southern state. For this purpose, the analysis of these two writers will focus on the portrayal of Louisiana as a place that supernatural beings seem to choose for establishing their home and on the reasons why they do so. From Anne Rice’s accurate portrayal of New Orleans and colonial manor houses on swamp areas to Charlaine Harris’s invented Bon Temps, we can see how Louisiana is not only the setting of these stories but also a character in itself.

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Burned in Effigy:

How the Lost Cause Allowed for Reconciliation through Cultural Performances of Surrogation

By Jesse Goldberg | comments |

In the fifty years following the American Civil War, the very national and cultural identity of the United States was on the brink of deconstruction. The white supremacist narratives on which the country’s cultural identity was built were being forcibly challenged by the emancipation of millions of black people from slavery. While some Americans wanted to remember the war as a war fought over slavery – a memory eventually called the emancipationist account of the war, others violently fought to enshrine a different memory into the American cognitive landscape. The continuum of narratives responding to emancipationist accounts of the war came to be collectively known as Lost Cause ideology. The Lost Cause was used to keep white supremacy central to American identity, thereby doing the cultural work of setting the stage for Jim Crow legislation, and allowed the South to engage in multiple complex performances of surrogation in order to cope with the Confederacy’s defeat at the hands of the Union. A common identity narrative for white people was forged and bolstered by the literal hanging and burning in effigy of black people. Thus, the lynching of black people following the American Civil War was a cultural performance of surrogation which was used to bolster the centrality of white supremacy within the American identity. 

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The Ghosts of Past Ages

Uncanny Doubles and Traumatic Transformation in George Lippard’s “Bel of Prarie Eden”

By Natalie Kubasek | comments |

The sensational literature of nineteenth century American author George Lippard has been traditionally neglected and overshadowed by his contemporaries like Poe, Melville, Hawthorne and Whitman, despite the social relevance of his work during the antebellum period. Lippard’s work deserves critical examination because the sensational aspects of his stories are prime sites for understanding the intersections between popular political beliefs and popular forms of literature that produce national narratives reflecting the social and political temperament of antebellum America. In the past two decades, Lippard’s U.S.-Mexico war novelette, ’Bel of Prairie Eden, has undergone critical examination by scholars who are interested in how ’Bel and other U.S.-Mexico War novelettes construct a national narrative of the war that, according to Shelley Streeby, stages the United States’ “unity against the imagined disunity of Mexico.” My project also takes a critical look at ’Bel with regard to the national anxieties about the potential consequences of the war with Mexico that forms the bedrock of the narrative.  I argue that Lippard attempts to establish borders of race and nation between Mexico and the United States in ’Bel, but in the process, these demarcations prove to be unstable and are constantly transgressed thereby exposing national anxieties about racial integration and U.S. expansionism due to the U.S.-Mexico war. As a result, Mexico emerges as an uncanny double of the United States, and the instability of borders in the novelette call into question the so-called unity and superiority of the United States.

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In Search of Excitement:

Understanding Boston’s Civil War “Draft Riot”

By Ian Jesse | comments |

On July 14, 1863, a riot broke out in the North End, Boston’s Irish neighborhood. The rioters attacked the armory on Cooper Street and several gun stores within the area. The protesters also assaulted several police officers in the street. The riot was short lived and lasted only several hours. A few days prior to the mêlée in Boston a much larger event began in New York City. The riot in New York was clearly in opposition to the new conscription law which drafted men for the Union army. This riot quickly turned into a full out race and class war. While the riot in Boston looks very different from the one in New York, and both have little in common outside of timing, historians are quick to tie the two events together. The easy answer is to say that the Boston riot occurred in response to the draft thus connecting it to New York. A close review of sources reveals otherwise. Key sources for my research include the Irish Catholic newspaper, The Pilot, which portrayed the Irish as loyal patriots who did not oppose the draft and an abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, which attempted to tie Boston’s protest to New York City without much evidence. In addition to these sources I analyze personal accounts of the Boston riot which makes the event seem like a mob with no direction or opposition to the conscription, separating it from the riot in New York.

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Woody Allen and the Golden Age of Kitsch

By Shaun Clarkson | comments |

Remembered primarily as an era of artistic achievement and innovation, the Golden Age of Cinema was, in fact, a period plagued by censorship and formulaic restraints. Though some films transcended this repressive environment, most resorted to easily marketable genres, character types, and plot arcs that resulted in little more than artless kitsch. Most important filmmakers immediately following the Golden Age’s demise wholly disregarded its old-fashioned codes, but Woody Allen has made a career out of simultaneously working within and upending the conventions of this earlier period. Allen takes three broad approaches to critique the old Hollywood style: reducing a complicated story to the mores and traditions of ‘30s and ‘40s cinema (Hannah and Her Sisters), disrupting recognized plots and genres (The Purple Rose of Cairo), and self-reflexively commenting upon the process of artistic creation (Stardust Memories). This article analyzes these three Allen’s films to explore the contradictions inherent to his critique of and tribute to the cinema he grew up watching and illustrates the commercial and artistic perils of such methods.

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The Political Sermon as Cultural Text:

John Winthrop, Increase Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and American Identity in the Colonial Era

By Laura McGee | comments |

Scholars of American exceptionalism often suggest that this concept was born from the American Revolution.  This paper argues that this ideology enjoys a longer history, one that can be traced to the sermons of three prominent colonial ministers: John Winthrop, Increase Mather, and Jonathan Edwards.  Through their ‘political sermons’ these men emphasized the exceptionality and divine ordination of the Puritan mission in America.  These men provided the literary foundations from which the national culture derived much of its foundational doctrine.  The ‘city upon a hill’ that Winthrop envisioned, entailed the social, spiritual, and political commitment of the colonists and their descendents, which he and subsequent ministers invoked through a variety of literary devices.  By emphasizing individual and community fulfillment of the spiritual covenant, these sermons explicated and expounded the colony’s exceptionality.  As a source of textual authority, these tracts provided the foundation for a distinct national ideology. 

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