In his study Modern Poetry after Modernism, James Longenbach criticizes the lingering critical perception of the postmodernist development in poetry as a “breakthrough” narrative that rebelled against the traditionalism and impersonality of Eliotic modernism. As he points out, postmodern poets in fact confronted Eliot via a series of intricate and ambivalent interactive processes that are not confinable within this “breakthrough” narrative. In this paper, I use Longenbach's argument as a starting point for a re-examination of Eliot's influence on the major poetry of one of his more apparently vocal opponents: John Berryman. Berryman's attitude towards Eliot was radically ambivalent, based on an idea that poetic predecessors must become “anti-models,” figures whom the contemporary poet can only incorporate through productive gestures of reaction against them. In the light of this idea, I show that in Berryman's major works, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and The Dream Songs, Eliot exerts a far stronger and more significant influence than has hitherto been recognized. My discussion of Berryman's participation in a postwar “Eliotic inheritance” allows for readings of these two poets that are not dependent upon crude oppositions between the “impersonal” and the “personal”. And as a consequence it opens the way for richer and more nuanced readings of Berryman's work as well as for invigorating reassessments of Eliot's own verse and his influence on twentieth-century poetry.

Following Elizabeth Young's 1991 analysis of the controversy surrounding the publication of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, this article discusses the efforts of the makers of the 2000 film adaptation to “rehabilitate” the novel. It explores the recognition of Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner that Patrick Bateman was constructed from the literary debris of a variety of “debased” genres, how they responded by constructing a specifically cinematic Bateman and how, in doing so, they renegotiated the “pigeonholes” of genre fiction originally used in hostile reviews to dismiss Ellis's authorial intent.

This article examines the way in which three contemporary novelists have interpreted the proliferation of cults and other independent communities in the USA. Thomas Pynchon's Vineland is read as a critique of individualism that regrets the loss of collective identity and purpose. A subsequent reading of Katherine Dunn's Geek Love demonstrates the destructive consequences of individual submission that draws parallels between the dynamics of “cult” communities and mainstream society. This is developed further in a discussion of Don DeLillo's Mao II, which is represented as an attempt to reconcile libertarian and communitarian discourses, while remaining mindful of the dangers of both.

This article looks at a number of James Baldwin's early essays. These include “Stranger in the Village” (1953), “A Question of Identity” (1954), “Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown” (1950) and “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American” (1959). In these essays Baldwin resolves the contradiction between his sense of himself as an individual and his racial identity by affirming both his American citizenship and his racial identity as a source of cultural strength and authority. He conceives of race in dialectical terms, with the African American as the dynamic agent in a process envisaged as leading to an overcoming of both whiteness and blackness in favour of a reformulated American nationalism.

Evan S. Connell's Bridge novels, Mrs. Bridge (1959) and Mr. Bridge (1969), are products of a post-World War II culture set in a prewar Kansas City of the 1920s and 1930s. In this paper, I argue that these novels pointedly articulate their historically disjunct construction – remaining firmly planted in a carefully articulated history and geography of pre-World War II Kansas City and representing the alienation and dissipation of postwar suburban life – in both the presentation of the racial and social geography of Kansas City between the wars and in the gap between the novels' two generations of the Bridge family.

This paper uses some key scholarship on ethnicity, including work by Glazer, Moynihan, Sollors, and Hollinger, as a backdrop for re-examining specific plays by Arthur Miller, especially The Crucible and After the Fall. While looking closely at distinctive expressions of ethnicity related to Miller's Jewish-American status, the paper argues that the playwright should not be thought of as a “pluralist” or “cosmopolitanist” but rather as a “universalist.” Miller deserves distinctive credit for his ability to invoke situations where rhetoric transcends the particularities of ethnicity and sheds light not just on American, or Jewish, or Jewish-American history, but also, for example, on the current situation in the Middle East. The playwright also demonstrates how rigid identification with one side of a conflict can blind us to the omnipresence of evil.

This essay explores the interplay of literary and social memory in Lorenzo Carcaterra's prison and revenge memoir, Sleepers (1995), in particular its appropriation of Alexander Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo (1844–45) as both a literary template and a political marker. Monte Cristo is the central text in Carcaterra's rewriting of a long tradition of “bad-boy” narratives depicting juvenile dispossession, crime, and redemptive vigilantism. The essay also traces the transatlantic routes of Dumas in modern US popular culture, especially in Albert Kanter's Illustrated Classics, in light of Antonio Gramsci's theories of popular narrative and law.