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Jeffrey’s Lawrence’s “Mobilizing Literature” inspired an immediate and excited response, especially from scholars who ensconce themselves thoroughly in the often-forgotten literary histories of social movements. What has emerged in this…

I welcome Jeffrey Lawrence’s “Mobilizing Literature: Social Movements and Post-1945 US Literary Studies” as an important, timely provocation that urges us to continue placing the approaches, methodologies, and interpretative frameworks…

In 1989, black feminist literary critic Barbara Christian published an essay called “But What Do We Think We’re Doing Anyway: The State of Black Feminist Criticism(s) or My Version of…

In Lawrence’s expertly subtle and fearlessly ambitious essay, he draws from two traditions of social movement analysis. The first is sociological and it identifies the “new ways of thinking about…

Jeffrey Lawrence’s proposal for movements-based study of post-1945 US literature is most welcome. Numerous writers and artists were involved with or influenced by social movements across the twentieth century. Indeed,…

Jeffrey Lawrence’s bravura essay “Mobilizing Literature” earned my immediate sympathy in its opening diagnosis of a certain — one may say dominant — methodological binary.1 Lawrence lucidly identifies the dominance…

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that it took a scholar of Latin American literature to see what was missing in the study of its US equivalent. Although Jeffrey Lawrence rightly…

Rarely does the publication of a peer-reviewed essay generate the excitement that accompanied Jeffrey Lawrence’s “Mobilizing Literature” in the Fall 2024 issue of ELH. Lawrence aims for an ambitious intervention…