{"id":97,"date":"2011-08-19T14:18:49","date_gmt":"2011-08-19T18:18:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/wordpress-camp\/pschmid1\/?page_id=97"},"modified":"2025-03-03T09:54:20","modified_gmt":"2025-03-03T14:54:20","slug":"books","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/?page_id=97","title":{"rendered":"Publications"},"content":{"rendered":"

A selection of my print and digital scholarly work is listed below. \u00a0For my online essays from the 1990s to the present, including those on my blog, see the Publications menu subheading (above) and the blog’s “recent posts” and “archives” (to the right). \u00a0 For a fuller list of downloadable essays, from referred academic journals and otherwise, see my page on Academia.edu:\u00a0https:\/\/swarthmore.academia.edu\/PeterSchmidt<\/a><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

Thanks for your interest! \u00a0<\/strong>\u2014PS<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2022 Review-essay<\/a> of William Carlos Williams’ By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 1916-1959<\/em>, edited by Jonathan Cohen (NY: New Directions, 2011). \u00a0 This is a slightly longer version of my essay, with more analysis on 1) the role of little magazines in the modernist movement, and 2) how this volume should deepen our understanding of the importance of Latin American poetry in Spanish to the development of U.S. English-language poetry in the 20th century. \u00a0 The slightly shorter print version of the essay may be found in The William Carlos Williams Review, Spring 2013. \u00a0 Thanks to Ian Copestake for his editing work and for permission to publish the longer version here.<\/p>\n

\u2022 “Truth so mazed”: Faulkner and U.S. Plantation Fiction<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2022 On Eros Crossing the Color-Line in William Faulkner and Margaret Mitchell<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2022 Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2022 The \u201cRaftsmen\u2019s Passage,\u201d Huck\u2019s Crisis of Whiteness, and Huckleberry Finn in U.S. Literary History<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2022 Tolentino, Cable, and Tourg\u00e9e Confront the New South and the New Imperialism<\/p>\n

\u2022 On Optimists\u2019 Sons and Daughters: Eudora Welty\u2019s The Optimist\u2019s Daughter<\/em> and Peter Taylor\u2019s A Summons to Memphis<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\u2022 \u00a0Peter Schmidt’s Books and Selected Articles (Print Scholarship)<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2022 \u00a0Making and Unmaking Whiteness in Early New South Literature<\/a><\/em> (an e-book essay)<\/p>\n

This essay\u2014a work of literary criticism and critical race studies written to be accessible to non-specialists\u2014examines how popular fiction contributed to and contested new forms of white racial dominance, collectively known as Jim Crow or the \u201ccolor-line,\u201d in the U.S. in the 1880s and after. \u00a0I focus in particular on the cultural work undertaken by the \u201ccommand performance\u201d scene in these texts, in which a black person was asked to tell a story or otherwise give a performance that was supposed to affirm the affection and respect \u201cgood\u201d blacks held for whites. Yet what begins to emerge again and again in such \u201ccommand performance\u201d scenes, even sometimes against the author\u2019s efforts to downplay them, are suggestions of coercion, duplicity, and instability in power hierarchies and racial identities. White supremacy is demonstrably not a given here; it is imperfectly produced, or at least reaffirmed under stress, in a way that locally conditions any power that whiteness may claim. And if a white person\u2019s sense of entitlement was so dependent upon the performance of another, to what degree could such a sense of self be threatened or even unmade in such encounters?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Making and Unmaking Whiteness surveys a broad range of black and white authors but gives special attention to the fictions of four\u2014Joel Chandler Harris, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Kate Chopin, and Pauline Hopkins\u2014who in the early Jim Crow era both dissected the contradictions in white supremacy and imagined alternatives.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A selection of my print and digital scholarly work is listed below. \u00a0For my online essays from the 1990s to the present, including those on my blog, see the Publications menu subheading (above) and the blog’s “recent posts” and “archives” … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/97"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=97"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/97\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1050,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/97\/revisions\/1050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=97"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}