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As a graduate student, and later as a junior scholar specializing in the literatures of the Americas, I sought out many books, articles, and reviews by members of the Post45…

Jeffrey Lawrence’s “Mobilizing Literature” argues that Jamesonian cultural materialism and McGurlian institutionalism “have set the agenda for critical debate” among scholars of post-1945 US literature, and that these schools have…

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…