Failure, Gender-Making, and Region: Alternative Approaches to Literary Archives and the Question of Form

Abstract This review essay considers three essays that tackle questions of form, meaning, and genre across three distinct sets of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. Across both well-known narratives and more obscure published and unpublished works, these scholars contend with the difficulty of these texts and the demands they make for alternative methods of interpretation. Spanning slave narratives, a “lost” novel by W.E.B Du Bois, and a virtually ignored novel by Canadian writer Winnifred Eaton, these essays detail the application of expansive and contrary analytical frameworks, such as failure, region, and gender-making. In doing so, these essays suggest that when texts do not neatly align with the bodies of knowledge used to situate them within fields, the onus should be on rewriting the borders of those disciplines, rather than the texts themselves.