Series

The Limits and Freedoms of Literary Regionalism: How Sandra Cisneros’s Chicano Literature Reimagines Chicago’s Borders

The Limits and Freedoms of Literary Regionalism: How Sandra Cisneros’s Chicano Literature Reimagines Chicago’s Borders

Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories asks us to imagine literary regionalism as more than just literature set in a single place, but as fiction’s ability to funnel different places and the experiences they birth into one environment.

Imagining the Anthropocene: Cathy Park Hong’s Engine Empire

Imagining the Anthropocene: Cathy Park Hong’s Engine Empire

In the nineteenth century, Manifest Destiny cast pillage as a moral imperative. Its rallying cry re-ignited the American founding’s genocide and environmental destruction to fuel westward expansion. Cathy Park Hong’s sonorous triptych Engine Empire reshapes the Western’s tropes into a chilling interrogation of digitally facilitated detachment.

The Limits and Freedoms of Literary Regionalism: Edith Wharton’s Design of New York City from the Inside Out

The Limits and Freedoms of Literary Regionalism: Edith Wharton’s Design of New York City from the Inside Out

Divided into chapters focusing on various elements of the home, The Decoration of Houses illustrates that Wharton’s design of New York in her literature worked from the inside out, proving that a woman could appreciate both the interior beauty of a space, while living life freely beyond the walls of domesticity and with disregard to (glass) ceilings.

Big Picture, Small Picture: Context for James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”

Big Picture, Small Picture: Context for James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”

James Baldwin’s short story, “Sonny’s Blues,” is published in the summer 1957 edition of the New York City literature magazine, Partisan Review. The story’s narrator is a high school teacher from Harlem struggling to reconcile his relationship with his younger brother, Sonny, a jazz pianist hooked on heroin.