Gothic to Multicultural: Idioms of Imagining in American Literary Fiction, twenty-three essays each carefully revised from the past four decades, explores both range and individual register. The collection opens with considerations of gothic as light and dark in Charles Brockden Brown, war and peace in Cooper’s The Spy, Antarctica as world-genesis in Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the link of “The Custom House” and main text in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, reflexive codings in Melville’s Moby-Dick and The Confidence-Man, Henry James’ Hawthorne as self-mirroring biography, and Stephen Crane’s working of his Civil War episode in The Red Badge of Courage. Two composite lineages address apocalypse in African American fiction and landscape in women’s authorship from Sarah Orne Jewett to Leslie Marmon Silko. There follow culture and anarchy in Henry James’ The Princess Casamassima, text-into-film in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, modernist stylings in Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway, and roman noir in Cornell Woolrich. The collection then turns to the limitations of protest categorization for Richard Wright and Chester Himes, autofiction in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and the novel of ideas in Robert Penn Warren’s late fiction. Three closing essays take up multicultural genealogy, Harlem, then the Black South, in African American fiction, and the reclamation of voice in Native American fiction.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction: Pathways, Bearings 1. A Darkness Visible: Gothic and the Case of Charles Brockden Brown 2. Making History, Making Fiction: Cooper’s The Spy 3. Impudent and Ingenious Fiction: Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket 4. Like a Dream Behind Me: Hawthorne’s “The Custom-House” and The Scarlet Letter 5. The Mirrors of Biography, The Mirrors of Fiction: Henry James’ Hawthorne 6. Moby-Dick as Anatomy 7. Voices Off, On, and Beyond: Ventriloquy in The Confidence-Man 8. Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage: The Novella as Moving Box 9. Hell’s Loose: Apocalypse in the Early and Modern African American Novel 10. Woman’s Place? The Landscapes of Jewett, Chopin, Cather, Hurston, Welty, Chávez, Yamashita, Silko 11. Odd Man Out? Henry James, The Canon and The Princess Casamassima 12. Watching Manners: Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence 13. A Quality of Distortion: Imagining The Great Gatsby 14. Everything Completely Knit Up: Seeing For Whom the Bell Tolls Whole 15. Modernist Faulkner? A Yoknapatawpha Trilogy 16. The View from the Rear Window: The Fiction of Cornell Woolrich 17. Richard Wright’s Inside Narratives 18. Violence Become a Form: The Novels of Chester Himes 19. Flunking Everything Else Except English Anyway: Holden Caulfield, Author 20. The Place We Have Come To: The Late Fiction of Robert Penn Warren 21. Harlem on My Mind: Fictions of a Black Metropolis 22. Down Home: Mapping The South in Contemporary African American Fiction 23. I Am Your Worst Nightmare: I Am an Indian with a Pen – Fictions of the Indian, Native Fictions Index