This essay examines two of the best-known postbellum representations of country doctors, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Doctor Zay (1882) and Sarah Orne Jewett's A Country Doctor (1884). While they have often been considered from a feminist point of view, this essay seeks both to complement and to argue against these existing readings by bringing a specifically geo-medical framework to bear on the texts. I consider both the thematic and the generic implications of representing country doctors in the postbellum era, exploring how they reflect, refract and encode the state of medical knowledge in postbellum America. I argue that literary representations of country doctors can contribute to an understanding of postbellum medical modernization by decentring it – by, in a sense, allowing us to comprehend the course of modern medical knowledge from a place usually assumed to remain outside modernity's transformations. Whilst I do, therefore, approach both these novels from a loosely new historicist perspective, I also want to think about how the social context they were engaging with determined, constrained and embedded itself into the thematic, formal and generic makeup of the novels themselves. Ultimately, this essay not only offers fresh readings of two important late nineteenth-century novels, but makes an intervention within the wider debates about nineteenth-century medical history and geography.

This article argues that voices of doom, predicting the demise of Crescent City, have been drowned out by an optimistic and energetic movement both within and outside New Orleans to bring everyone home, and to revive and renew the city, especially through a showcasing of its diverse cultures. New Orleans's history is one of destruction and rebuilding, climatic disaster and haphazard reconstruction. The dramatic disappearance of the wetlands and urban hinterland, caused by climate change and ecological damage brought about by construction and oil companies, makes New Orleans's physical and demographic future questionable and controversial. But there is strong commitment by its citizens and internationally celebrated musicians to keep the city alive, and the global reputation and power of its music have attracted powerful advocates and cheerleaders. Music, film, television programmes, the visual arts, literature and many forms of published testimony and oral history have reminded the world of this city's unique multicultural postcolonial history, drawing back tourists and visitors to celebrate one of America's most extraordinary melting pots.

Kara Walker describes her book After the Deluge (2007) as “rumination” on Hurricane Katrina structured in the form of a “visual essay.” The book combines Walker's own artwork and the works of other artists into “a narrative of fluid symbols” in which the overarching analogy of “murky, toxic waters” holds the potential to “become the amniotic fluid of a potentially new and difficult birth.” This essay considers Walker's use of history within this collection of images to show how the book opens up ways to interrogate Katrina's particular significance as a wholly new, and yet eerily familiar, historical “event.” Nuancing a reading of Walker's book with reference to James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963), to which After the Deluge implicitly alludes, the essay examines Walker's artistic challenge to the notion that history is a narratable account of a past that precedes the present and demonstrates how that challenge encourages us to think about the potential uses of history within civil rights discourse after Katrina.

In the introduction to Quid 11: Three U.S. Poets (November 2002), Keston Sutherland wrote, “One considerable and vital task now facing U.S. poets … might be a confrontation with abstraction per se.” In the context of political poetry, this speaks to two important questions: first, how the individual is to be portrayed as a political subject by the avant-garde; second, what is the role of form in that portrayal? This essay will explore these questions through a detailed reading of Eléna Rivera's sequence Mistakes, Accidents, and a Want of Liberty (Barque Press, 2006). At first sight, Mistakes reads as a coded series of meditations in an associative order which give the reader the feeling of being abandoned into the text. However, Googling the opening poem's title, “thinking of my life, I almost forgot my liberty”, takes the reader straight to the nineteenth-century autobiography of slavery, escape and freedom The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). This connects Rivera's sequence and the reader with one of the moments when a new type of individual-as-political-subject enters literature. An important part of Frederick Douglass's story involves learning to read and write at a time when slaves were forbidden to do so. In this context, Rivera is opening an argument about how the political subject is constructed and portrayed in language. We will argue, then, that through its intertextual relationship with The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and with other texts such as King Lear, Rivera's sequence offers revitalizing strategies not only for portraying the subject but for writing and reading politically. In this way, Mistakes, Accidents, and a Want of Liberty suggests ways of thinking, writing and reading outside what one poem calls “The limits … of ‘you’ as reflection, of ‘you’ as reaction”.

Within certain conservative narratives imposed upon the events of 2005, New Orleans has been demonized as a site promoting gay licentiousness and therefore meriting divine retribution. In queer narratives, New Orleans has been valorized as promoting that same licentiousness but lamented for having those hedonistic excesses tempered by the widespread destruction of the city. Especially in the latter scenario, there is a significant degree of nostalgia, an element that also marks other queer understandings of the city that focus not so much on the hedonism as on the day-to-day warp and woof of pre-hurricane gay communities. The main focus of this essay is on how, as gay communities have been reconfigured in the aftermath of the hurricane by temporary and permanent evacuations, job relocations, and other alterations, gay responses have continued to evince a range of emotions, including anger, bitterness, resignation, and optimism. This essay focusses on gay literary production responding directly to the hurricane to examine essays and poems published as Love, Bourbon Street: Reflections of New Orleans (2006) and Blanche Survives Katrina in FEMA Trailer Named Desire, Mark Sam Rosenthal's off-Broadway show structured around a parody of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire that, as a result of this structure, faced legal action instigated by the University of the South, owner of the intellectual rights to Williams's literary production. The collection and the play are sustained queer responses to Katrina's flooding of the city that showcase both the energizing and problematic aspects of these responses.

This paper focusses on Norman Mailer's treatment of the 1967 March on the Pentagon in his Pulitzer Prize-winning work of non-fiction The Armies of the Night. The visual and linguistic properties developed by the author throughout the first book of The Armies of the Night are identified and assessed in relation to the anti-war movements and counterculture temperament of the 1960s. Comparisons are made with post-war writers and earlier North American authors as a means of clarifying “American” aspects of Mailer's handling of his material. Mailer's journalistic techniques, his often spontaneous and engaged responses, are also defined within the context of the social conflicts of the late 1960s.

African Americans and Korean Americans have addressed Black–Korean encounters and responded to each other predominantly in their favorite genres: in films and rap music for African Americans and in novels and poems for Korean Americans. A case in point is the intertextuality between Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker. A comparative study of the two demonstrates that they are seminal texts of African American–Korean American dialogue and discourse for mutual understanding and harmonious relationships between the two races in the USA. This paper reads the African American film and the Korean American fiction as dialogic responses to the well-publicized strife between Korean American merchants and their African American customers in the late 1980s and early 1990s and as windows into a larger question of African American–Korean American relations and racialization in US culture. This study ultimately argues that the dialogue between Spike Lee's film and Chang-rae Lee's novel moves towards a possibility of cross-racial identification and interethnic coalition building.

Joseph Rodríguez re-creates and represents African American experiences which yet remain hidden or elided in mainstream memorializations of Hurricane Katrina. Intent upon giving “a voice to the voiceless,” Rodríguez relies upon an aesthetics of rupture and juxtaposition to create multiple narratives resistant to any reformist impetus towards cathartic trajectories of moral uplift. Fragmented and elliptical, his photographs, diary entries and textual captions operate in slippery relation to one another to signify upon unimaginable traumas. Rodríguez's subjects maintain agency by engaging in political, cultural and social acts of resistance. Signifying on the documentary mode, he creates self-reflexive compositions which rely on a symbolic visual language to challenge white mainstream tendencies towards depicting African Americans as types rather than as individuals. Refusing to objectify, appropriate or colonize private black testimonies by documenting the black body as a spectacular site of suffering, he turns instead to individual identities as intertwined with family histories as the only effective way in which to begin to explore the atrocities enacted in the aftermath of Katrina. Anti-explication, anti-exhibition and anti-sensationalism, Rodríguez's Still Here is a work of disjuncture, reimagining and experimentation.

This essay examines detective fiction that takes New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina as setting and theme. It explores the ways in which stories told in novels and prime-time TV shows across the interlocking genres of police procedural and crime thriller have steered a sensationalist course through the recovery of the city over the last five years. It considers the role and representation of the New Orleans Police Department in particular, and of law enforcement officials more broadly, as post-Katrina protagonists who protect and serve the city, a rejoinder to media-made myths according to which they deserted their posts in the days after the storm. It closes with a case study of FOX TV's K-Ville, the first television series to depict New Orleans post-Katrina in a sustained way, and investigates the extent to which it was judged harshly for translating the disaster into a formulaic cop show. Deep-seated assumptions about genre, narrative form, the burden of representation and popular ideas about this particular locale inform the reception of these genre fictions.

Whilst Muriel Rukeyser's poetic affinity with Walt Whitman is generally acknowledged, the close relation of her work and poetic sensibility to the thought and writing of Herman Melville has somehow gone relatively unnoticed, and almost wholly unexamined. In 1918, Van Wyck Brooks called for the creation of a usable past that would energize America by recasting its cultural tradition. His plea addressed the need to rebuild a national heritage via the rediscovery of culturally “great” figures. By the late 1930s, many scholars and writers had answered the call, and the new discipline of American studies was beginning to take shape, aided by a reclamation of one of the country's greatest, most neglected, writers – Herman Melville. This was also the period in which Rukeyser “came of age”; a time when political and international conflicts and economic crises generated both the stark, documentary representation of present social realities and the drive to retrieve or reconstruct a more golden age that might mobilize a dislocated nation. The following article examines the importance of Melville to Rukeyser's work, and situates her within the “Melville revival” as an important figure in the movement throughout the first half of the twentieth century to reconstruct an American cultural character.