2021 Outstanding Academic Titles: Writing and Literature

Five selections from the Choice Reviews 2021 Outstanding Academic Titles list. This week we highlight Choice 2021 Outstanding Academic Titles pertaing to writing and literature

Posted on August 10, 2022 in Outstanding Academic Titles

Five selections from the Choice Reviews 2021 Outstanding Academic Titles list. This week we highlight Choice 2021 Outstanding Academic Titles pertaining to writing and literature.

Re-membering and surviving: African American fiction of the Vietnam War Outstanding Academic Title bookcover
1. Re-membering and surviving: African American fiction of the Vietnam War
Hanshaw, Shirley A. J. Michigan State, 2021

With the exception of Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War, ed. by Wallace Terry (CH, Dec’84), scholarship on African American writing on the Vietnam War is in short supply. In Re-membering and Survival Hanshaw (emer., Mississippi State Univ.)​ unveils a veritable archive of African American writing on the subject and provides a road map of genres from fiction to memoir, from poetry to drama, and from film to music (for the first time). Hanshaw focuses on the thematic patterns and aesthetic strategies of four novels, John Williams’s Captain Blackman (1972), A. R. Flowers’s De Mojo Blues (1986), Wesley Brown’s Tragic Magic (1978), and George Davis’s Coming Home (1972), which deal with, respectively, the reenlisted man, the conscientious objector, the dishonorably discharged veteran, and the deserter. Hanshaw situates these texts in their specific social political contexts and the traditions of (African) American literature. View on Amazon.

2. No kids allowed: children’s literature for adults
Abate, Michelle Ann. Johns Hopkins, 2020
No kids allowed: children’s literature for adults Outstanding Academic Title bookcover

This is the first book-length study of a literary genre Abate (Ohio State Univ.) has coined “children’s literature for adults.” Author of several books on children’s literature—recent among them The Big Smallness (CH, Dec’16, 54-1509)—Abate dates this new genre to the late decades of the 20th century. Written exclusively for adults, titles in this genre are published in physical formats (board books, picture books) or have narrative styles (ABC texts, bedtime stories) traditionally associated with young readers. Abate writes that the line between childhood and adulthood has blurred and the “appearance of picture books, alphabet texts, and bedtime tales for grownups marks the moment when these literary schools, narrative styles, and material formats are no longer confined to a specific period in the human life cycle” (p. 191). Abate analyzes American books that have significantly impacted the genre, Dr. Seuss’s You’re only Old Once! (1986)—which Abate credits with launching this genre—Mable Maney’s The Case of the Not-So-Nice Nurse (1993), Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), David and Kelly Sopp’s Safe Baby Handling Tips (2005), and Barbara Parks’s Ma! There’s Nothing to Do Here! (2008). View on Amazon.

3. Jewish American writing and world literature: maybe to millions, maybe to nobody
Zaritt, Saul Noam. Oxford, 2020
Jewish American writing and world literature: maybe to millions, maybe to nobody Outstanding Academic Title bookcover

Zaritt (Yiddish literature, Harvard) opens exciting new doors for the study of Jewish American literature. To do this, he focuses on six Jewish American writers who made Yiddish a central feature of their work: Sholem Asch, Jacob Glatstein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Ann Margolin, and Grace Paley. Bringing together scholarship on world literature, American studies, and Jewish studies, Zarritt considers the theoretical implications of the use of Yiddish. Locating that use in a distinctively Jewish vernacular tradition, Zarritt pits that tradition against two distinctive institutions, American literature and world literature. The first three writers he considers (Asch, Glatstein, and Singer) wrote primarily in Yiddish; the other three (Bellow, Margolin, and Paley), though familiar with Yiddish, wrote primarily in English. For each of them, however, Zarritt argues that “their commitment to Yiddish, as vernacular grounding, unsettles the possibility of arrival and legibility in a world-system” (p. 128). In each writer’s work the relationship between a distinctive Jewish identity and Yiddish makes their work’s relationship to American and world literature “both translatable and untranslatable” (p. 3). View on Amazon.

4. Colonizing the past: mythmaking and pre-Columbian whites in nineteenth-century American writing
Watts, Edward. Virginia, 2020
Colonizing the past: mythmaking and pre-Columbian whites in nineteenth-century American writing Outstanding Academic Title bookcover

In this important work, Watts (Michigan State Univ.) provides the first book-length study of white America’s 19th-century obsession with an explicitly white foundational mythology—a mythology asserting that whites predated Columbus in North American and thus legitimized the US’s settler colonialist presence and expansion. Complementing the historical research of Benedict Anderson, Philip Deloria, Douglas Hunter, et al., Watts’s book focuses on the literary activity that animated five antique pseudo-histories. These included the ostensible 12th-century Atlantic crossing of Welsh Prince Madoc, the New World migration of the lost tribes of Israel, the prehistorical presence of the white Mound Builders, the 6th-century Atlantic crossing by colonizing Celtic monks, and the 10th-century settlements of Norse Vikings. These fictive phenomena generated what Watts dubs the “primordialist texts,” a body of work written to give white Americans deep history apart from that of the former colonial power at a time when race and nation were isomorphic in the mainstream American imagination. View on Amazon.

5. From slave cabins to the White House: homemade citizenship in African American culture
Mitchell, Koritha. Illinois, 2020
From slave cabins to the White House: homemade citizenship in African American culture Outstanding Academic Title Book Cover

Mitchell (Ohio State Univ.) follows up her award-winning Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 (CH, Mar’12, 49-3729)​ with an equally valuable study of the African American experience, this time looking at the domestic roles of Black women in American history. Presenting in the same spirit of discovery and insight, Mitchell determines that American Black women, as homemakers, housekeepers, and mothers, have been punished for achieving the American dream of a home of one’s own. Mitchell’s analyses of canonical texts by and about African American women—Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison—lays bare the hostility these women face as they invest in traditional domesticity. Instead of gaining respectability for their good work and homemade citizenship, Black women experience “know-your-place aggression,” the sometimes not-so-subtle repudiation of their merit and success. She deftly demonstrates her thesis. Of special interest is Mitchell’s depiction of Michelle Obama as a strong Black woman performing as “Mom-in-Chief” and the flagrant white aggression her success inspired. On Amazon.

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