Marilynne Robinson

By Manchester University Press

Best known for a trilogy of historical novels set in the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa, Marilynne Robinson is a prolific writer, teacher, and public speaker, who has won the Pulitzer Prize and was awarded the National Humanities Medal by Barack Obama. This collection intervenes in Robinson’s growing critical reputation, pointing to new and exciting links between the author, the historical settings of her novels, and the contemporary themes of her fictional, educational, and theoretical work. Introduced by a critical discussion from Professors Bridget Bennett, Sarah Churchwell, and Richard King, Marilynne Robinson features analysis from a range of international academics, and explores debates in race, gender, environment, critical theory, and more, to suggest new and innovative readings of her work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526134677

Book preview

Marilynne Robinson

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CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN AND CANADIAN WRITERS

series editors

Nahem Yousaf and Sharon Monteith

Also available

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Crossing borders and queering citizenship: Civic reading practice in contemporary American and Canadian writing ZALFA FEGHALI

The quiet contemporary American novel RACHEL SYKES

Sara Paretsky: Detective fiction as trauma literature CYNTHIA S. HAMILTON

Making home: Orphanhood, kinship, and cultural memory in contemporary American novels MARIA HOLMGREN TROY, ELIZABETH KELLA, HELENA WAHLSTROM

Thomas Pynchon SIMON MALPAS AND ANDREW TAYLOR

Jonathan Lethem JAMES PEACOCK

Mark Z Danielewski EDITED BY JOE BRAY AND ALISON GIBBONS

Louise Erdrich DAVID STIRRUP

Passing into the present: Contemporary American fiction of racial and gender passing SINÉAD MOYNIHAN

Paul Auster MARK BROWN

Douglas Coupland ANDREW TATE

Philip Roth DAVID BRAUNER

Marilynne Robinson

Edited by

Rachel Sykes, Anna Maguire Elliott, Jennifer Daly

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2022

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

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First published 2022

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Series editors’ foreword

This innovative series reflects the breadth and diversity of writing over the last thirty years, and provides critical evaluations of established, emerging and critically neglected writers – mixing the canonical with the unexpected. It explores notions of the contemporary and analyses current and developing modes of representation with a focus on individual writers and their work. The series seeks to reflect both the growing body of academic research in the field, and the increasing prevalence of contemporary American and Canadian fiction on programmes of study in institutions of higher education around the world. Central to the series is a concern that each book should argue a stimulating thesis, rather than provide an introductory survey, and that each contemporary writer will be examined across the trajectory of their literary production. A variety of critical tools and literary and interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged to illuminate the ways in which a particular writer contributes to, and helps readers rethink, the North American literary and cultural landscape in a global context.

Central to debates about the field of contemporary fiction is its role in interrogating ideas of national exceptionalism and transnationalism. This series matches the multivocality of contemporary writing with wide-ranging and detailed analysis. Contributors examine the drama of the nation from the perspectives of writers who are members of established and new immigrant groups, writers who consider themselves on the nation's margins as well as those who chronicle middle America. National labels are the subject of vociferous debate and including American and Canadian writers in the same series is not to flatten the differences between them but to acknowledge that literary traditions and tensions are cross-cultural and that North American writers often explore and expose precisely these tensions. The series recognises that situating a writer in a cultural context involves a multiplicity of influences, social and geo-political, artistic and theoretical, and that contemporary fiction defies easy categorisation. For example, it examines writers who invigorate the genres in which they have made their mark alongside writers whose aesthetic goal is to subvert the idea of genre altogether. The challenge of defining the roles of writers and assessing their reception by reading communities is central to the aims of the series.

Overall, Contemporary American and Canadian Writers aims to begin to represent something of the diversity of contemporary writing and seeks to engage students and scholars in stimulating debates about the contemporary and about fiction.

Nahem Yousaf

Sharon Monteith

To our families, and our pets

Contents

List of contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction – Rachel Sykes, Jennifer Daly, and Anna Maguire Elliott

Robinson in context: a critical conversation – Sarah Churchwell, Richard H. King, Bridget Bennett

Part I:Writing, form, and style

1 ‘It might be better to burn them’: archive fever and the Gilead novels of Marilynne Robinson – Daniel Robert King

2 ‘One day she would tell him what she knew’: disturbance of the epistemological conventions of the marriage plot in Lila – Maria Elena Carpintero Torres-Quevedo

3 Robinson's triumphs of style – Jack Baker

Part II:Gender and environment

4 The female orphan and an ecofeminist ethic-of-care in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and Lila – Anna Maguire Elliott

5 ‘Souls all unaccompanied’: enacting feminine alterity in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping – Makayla C. Steiner

6 The domestic geographies of grief: bereavement, time, and home spaces in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and Home – Lucy Clarke

Part III:Imagined histories: race, religion, and rights

7 Domesticating political feeling, affect, and memory in Marilynne Robinson's Home – Christopher Lloyd

8 ‘Onward Christian liberals’: Marilynne Robinson's essays and the crisis of mainline Protestantism – Alex Engebretson

9 Presence in absence: the spectre of race in Gilead and Home – Emily Hammerton-Barry

Part IV:Robinson and her contemporaries

10 ‘Everything can change’: civil rights, civil war, and radical transformation in Home and Gilead – Tessa Roynon

11 ‘A great admirer of American education’: Robinson as professor and defender of ‘America's best idea’ – Steve Gronert Ellerhoff and Kathryn E. Engebretson

12 Acknowledging a numinous ordinary: Marilynne Robinson and Stanley Cavell – Paul Jenner

Epilogue – ‘A little different every time’: accumulation and repetition in Jack – Rachel Sykes

Index

List of contributors

Jack Baker is an Associate Lecturer at the Open University and an Honorary Fellow in the Department of English at Durham University, where he completed a PhD on the impersonal modes of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens. He has published essays on Pound, Stevens, Wassily Kandinsky, and Geoffrey Hill, and is working on a book about beauty and consolation in modernist poetry.

Bridget Bennett is Professor of American Literature and Culture in the School of English, University of Leeds. Her research interests include a focus on representations of home in American culture, the focus of her monograph in progress Dangerous Domesticities. Related publications include "‘The Silence Surrounding the Hut’: Invisible Slaves and Vanished Indians in Wieland’ which was awarded the 2019 Arthur Miller Prize. She is currently working on a research project titled The Dissenting Atlantic: Archives and Unquiet Libraries, 1776–1865", which is supported by a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust.

Maria Elena Carpintero Torres-Quevedo is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She previously studied at the University of Seville and completed funded research in American literature at Cornell University. Her current research explores contemporary American women's life-writing.

Sarah Churchwell is Professor of American Literature and Chair of Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She is the author of Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream, Careless People:

Murder, Mayhem and The Invention of The Great Gatsby, and The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe.

Lucy Clarke completed a PhD on the literature of Marilynne Robinson and grief, focusing on the ways Robinson elevates the felt experience of grief to a place of high sentiment. She is particularly interested in the ways in which Robinson's work challenges received wisdom about bereavement and might fruitfully expand ways to think about loss. Prior to commencing her PhD, she was an English teacher in the FE sector and a mentor for refugee children. She is now a mum and a yoga teacher.

Jennifer Daly holds a PhD in American Literature from Trinity College Dublin. She edited a collection of essays on Richard Yates, Richard Yates and the Flawed American Dream (McFarland 2017) and was guest editor of a special issue of the Irish Journal of American Studies on the writing of Marilynne Robinson.

Alex Engebretson is a Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Baylor University. His book, Understanding Marilynne Robinson, was published by The University of South Carolina Press.

Kathryn E. Engebretson is an Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research focuses on social studies, gender equity, and the amplification of women's voices and experiences in educational settings. Her work has been published in Gender and Education, The Journal of Social Studies Research, and Curriculum and Teaching Dialogue.

Steve Gronert Ellerhoff holds a PhD from the School of English at Trinity College Dublin. His books include Mole and Post-Jungian Psychology and the Short Stories of Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut. He has co-edited critical collections on George Saunders and Ray Bradbury's Elliott Family stories. His next scholarly work is Jung and the Mythology of Star Wars.

Emily Hammerton-Barry is currently completing her PhD on The Spectre of Race in American Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Sheffield. A freelance filmmaker and photographer as well as an academic, her teaching and research interests focus on applying an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach to political representation within contemporary literature and visual media.

Paul Jenner is a Lecturer in English at Loughborough University. His research focuses on philosophy and literature, and his most recent publication appears in the collection Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination. His current research focuses on Marilynne Robinson, Stanley Cavell, and David Foster Wallace.

Daniel Robert King is currently a Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Derby. His research interests lie in archival studies and the role of literary editing in the production of twentieth century literature. His first book, Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Evolution was published in 2018 and his work has previously appeared in Open Library of Humanities, The International Journal of Comic Art, Literature and Medicine, and Comparative American Studies.

Richard H. King is Professor Emeritus in American intellectual history at Nottingham University. His most recent book Arendt and America was published in 2015. He has also written on the history of race and racism in the US in Race, Culture and the Intellectuals, 1940–1970 (2004) and Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom (1992). He has also been chair of the British Association of American Studies and has edited books on Obama and African American political culture, on modern Southern culture, and on Hannah Arendt and history. He is interested in the relationship between politics and ethics and also between literature and morality.

Christopher Lloyd is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Hertfordshire. He is the author of two monographs, including Corporeal Legacies in the US South: Memory and Embodiment in Contemporary Culture (2018), co-editor of three journal special issues, and author of numerous articles on twenty-first-century US literature and culture. He is co-editing a forthcoming book on affect and pedagogy in literary studies, and writing a third monograph on queer nonhumans.

Anna Maguire Elliott holds a PhD in American Literature from the University of Sussex. Her research interests are in domesticity and the environment in American women's writing. She has taught English at the University of Sussex and at Binghamton University, USA. Most recently, she has completed a collaborative article on domestic space and dementia carers, published in Home Cultures.

Tessa Roynon is the founding Librarian at the Swan School, Oxford. Prior to that she taught Literature in English at the University of Oxford, primarily as a research fellow at the Rothermere American Institute. Her most recent book is The Classical Tradition in Modern American Fiction (2021), which examines allusions to ancient Greek and Roman traditions in works by Cather, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Ellison, Morrison, Roth, and Robinson. Other publications include Toni Morrison and the Classical Tradition (2013 – winner of the Toni Morrison Society book prize in 2015) and The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison (2012).

Makayla C. Steiner is a PhD candidate at the University of Iowa. She was awarded the Huston Diehl Dissertation fellowship in 2019–20. Her intellectual interests are concentrated in contemporary American religious writing, Jewish-American literature, Native and African American literatures, and Postsecular studies. She has published essays in Literature and Belief, Resources for American Literary Study, and the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies. Further work on Marilynne Robinson and an essay on Cormac McCarthy's postsecular faith are forthcoming in Religion and Literature and a special issue of Intégrité, respectively.

Rachel Sykes is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham. They are the author of The Quiet Contemporary American Novel (2018) and have published work on Marilynne Robinson in Critique, Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literature, and Dictionary of Literary Biography. Their current work focuses on the politics of confession in contemporary American culture. They have recently published articles on the function of ‘oversharing’ in contemporary American culture (Signs), representations of Hillary Clinton in US satire and melodrama (Journal of American Studies), and the confessional dynamics of Taylor Swift, Lana del Rey, and Beyoncé (Routledge Companion of Music and Literature).

Acknowledgements

The inspiration for this collection arose from a one-day symposium on Robinson's writing, organised by the editors in 2016. The range of scholarship shared on that day showed us how much interest there was in taking that work further, and we thank everyone who participated for their part in the book you now hold in your hands. The editors would like to thank those who supported the initial symposium: Frances Banks, Nahem Yousaf, and Sharon Monteith at Nottingham Trent University and the British Association for American Studies and the Irish Association for American Studies who provided funding and vital encouragement. We would also like to thank Nahem and Sharon for their enthusiastic support of this volume and for their essential help in getting it to print.

Most importantly, we would like to thank each of the contributors for the passion, enthusiasm, and patience they have shown as we shepherded this project to a conclusion. And, finally, we would like to thank each other for being a good team – this wouldn't have happened without each other.

Introduction

Rachel Sykes, Jennifer Daly, and Anna Maguire Elliot

A prolific essayist, teacher, and public speaker, Marilynne Summers Robinson is best known for a quartet of historical novels set in the small fictional town of Gilead, Iowa: Gilead (2004), Home (2008), Lila (2014), and Jack (2020).¹ Since the publication of her debut novel Housekeeping in 1980, critics celebrate Robinson as a singular author of American historical fiction. Yet, as this collection hopes to demonstrate, she is an author who challenges rather than sanctions convention, highlighting the exclusionary ways in which history is written and remembered and retelling similar stories from different perspectives to address issues as diverse as abolitionism and segregation, the relationship between science and faith, and predestination and grace, sex work and gender politics, and the state of political thought in the contemporary United States.

Robinson is similarly unconventional in her approach to a writing career. In a 2016 lecture published as Our Public Conversation: How America Talks About Itself (2018), Robinson makes the following observation about her public image:

Recently I read a brief overview of myself and my work, an article on the Internet. It said that if someone were bioengineered to personify unhipness, the result would be Marilynne Robinson. The writer listed the qualities that have earned me this distinction – I am in my seventies, I was born in Idaho, I live in Iowa, I teach in a public university, and I am a self-professed Calvinist. Ah, well. I will only grow older, I am happy in Iowa, and my religion is my religion. That I was born in Idaho will be true forever. (135)

As she acknowledges, Robinson has always been slightly out of step with literary trends, if also at ease with the role she has carved out for herself. She was 37 years old when Housekeeping was published and took 24 years to publish her next novel, Gilead. What is often interpreted as a literary silence was an intense period of writing, reading, and teaching. In the years between Housekeeping and Gilead, Robinson became an influential figure at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and secured a reputation for nonfiction through publication of two diverse and controversial volumes that she often refers to as her most important works: Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989) and The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998). Since Gilead, the rate at which Robinson has published fiction has been astonishing, with a fourth Gilead novel released in 2020, as Rachel Sykes discusses in the Epilogue to this collection.

Marilynne Robinson analyses the growing significance and contrasting ‘unhipness’ of Robinson's work, suggesting new and exciting ways forward for Robinson scholarship. As editors, one rationale for putting together this collection was our suspicion that despite winning major international literary prizes for each of her novels, the central themes and settings of the author's work are often read as old fashioned and that Robinson is rarely considered a contemporary novelist.² The grounding of her fiction in the primarily rural Pacific North- and Midwest of the United States and the infusion of her Christian faith into her fiction and nonfiction can be – and has been – read as regressive or nostalgic. However, her fiction and nonfiction engage with the rural as a marginalised site of modernity. Robinson's novels often focus on constructions of race and gender in the context of the pastoral and the challenges and failures of white allyship aligned with civil rights causes. Her essays also fiercely and more directly critique the conservative politics of the neoliberal university, nuclear power and the governmental dumping of nuclear waste, issues of American democracy and the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, and the state of political thought in the contemporary United States. Read for the breadth and contemporaneity of her preoccupations, Robinson's writing reveals a profound and sustained engagement with present-day issues across a broad spectrum of social concerns and academic disciplines. She issues a challenge to readers to think more about what religious or rural writing might be with characteristic and measured care. Marilynne Robinson therefore situates the critical acclaim for Robinson's fiction – and her status as one of very few women writers whose work is always highly anticipated – against a rigorous and critical analysis of how her historical fiction responds to the politics of the present.

Robinson now

In a very contemporary way, this collection began online, during a Twitter conversation about Robinson's fourth novel, Lila, which touched on religion, sex, domesticity, and the implications of reading the novel's depiction of the Californian dust bowl as a postapocalyptic wasteland.³ Introducing three Early Career Researchers who were all reading and studying Robinson, the conversation highlighted a critical like-mindedness that led to a symposium on Robinson, organised by the editors and held at Nottingham Trent University in June 2016. We saw our intervention as clear: for a best-selling novelist who has received a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Award, and a National Medal for the Humanities, and who – at the time of our symposium – was being interviewed by President Barack Obama, Robinson had been the subject of comparatively little sustained scholarship. Extant scholarship tended to have a theological focus and while Robinson's religiosity makes this work very necessary, critical analysis continues to neglect the wider secular and, indeed, popular impact she enjoys as a writer and public figure.

Marilynne Robinson seeks to redress that imbalance, not least because Robinson is an increasingly vocal cultural and political commentator. The period in which we compiled this collection saw an obvious and symbolic deepening of divisions in the American political and cultural landscape. Having issued our call for papers in August 2016, the essays that follow were all written and edited between the election of Donald Trump as 45th President of the United States and the inauguration of his successor, Joe Biden, in January 2021. Robinson initially interpreted Trump's victory – which saw him lose the popular vote but win the Electoral College – as a glitch in an otherwise sound process of American democracy. In an interview with the Guardian, she described the election as a ‘bizarre thing’ but emphasised that ‘our system is not broken’ and might be fixed (McCrum). She suggested that the result might reinvigorate the political system: ‘Trump has brought us to a state where we will have to do a lot of very basic thinking about how our society goes on from this point. […] People will try all kinds of things, and will recover a sense of possibility.’ As Steve Gronert Ellerhoff and Kathryn E. Engebretson suggest in their essay in this collection, optimism and faith in American democracy runs through Robinson's fiction and her nonfiction, often linked to a valorisation of the American university as a site of public good.

⁴

By the time our contributors submitted their essays, however, Robinson's positivity had already dulled:

I don't feel that I know what we will leave to history. In this country, as the world knows, we have an administration and majority party that seems actively hostile to books and ideas. On the other hand, we have a lucid, fervent articulation of humane values in opposition to them. Either could be an important part of our legacy. (Books Blog)

Like many moderate Democrats, Robinson's faith in ‘fair’ intellectual debate and a mutual respect between opposing political sides – represented by Reverends Ames and Boughton in Gilead and Home – seems increasingly diminished. Her growing concern for American democracy has meant that despite – or perhaps because of – retiring from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in May 2016, she devotes more time to political writing and public conversation. In February 2018, Robinson published What Are We Doing Here?, a collection of public lectures written to expose what she described as the ‘essential ways we share false assumptions’ (1). With more sustained attention to the present than ever before, Robinson describes a widespread intellectual cynicism, highlighting a lack of intellectual rigour in arguments on the right and left of the political spectrum and calling for a re-examination of what she had previously assumed were shared American values of ‘wisdom, courage, generosity, personal dignity’ (4).

Therefore, this collection is published at a transitional moment in Robinson's career. As we prepared the final manuscript, Jack was published to divisive reviews. Some critics praised its completely uncynical ‘Calvinist romance’ (Perry), arguing that Jack gracefully concluded the Gilead quartet through common themes of redemption, predestination, morality, and earthly desire. Others turned on the author for writing ‘brilliant’ but ‘extremely boring novels’ (Walton) that tell the same eventless story over and over again. For Robinson's avid readership, Jack provides a backstory for the eponymous Jack Boughton – the antagonist of both Gilead and Home – by exploring how he contemplates his redemption through ‘[a]nother theological question, how one human being can mean so much to another’ (Robinson Jack 300). Beginning eight years prior to the events of Gilead and Home, Robinson finally centres themes of racial segregation, the civil rights movement, and white apathy that remained at the margins of her previous novels, and which Christopher Lloyd, Tessa Roynon, and Emily Hammerton-Barry examine in this collection. More explicitly rooted in an examination of American racism, while giving more – though not total – attention to the Black communities excluded from Gilead, Jack provides a vital and confirmatory link between Robinson's determinedly historical fiction and a present political moment in which, she contends, ‘very irresponsible people’ court fascism to gain political power while ‘vast crowds’ convening at Black Lives Matter protests give her ‘grounds for hope’ (Coman).

New perspectives on Marilynne Robinson

In a speech honouring her retirement from the University of Iowa, former president Barack Obama suggested that Robinson's work embodies ‘the notion that, ultimately, we are all connected, that we can speak to each other across the void’ (The University of Iowa Center for Advancement). Our hope is that this collection gathers essays that ‘speak to each other’ in similar ways, even when they adopt radically different lenses or critical approaches. Because all four novels in the Gilead quartet pivot around two families and their relationships in the same rural town, essays inevitably touch on similar themes and topics, something that Robinson makes unavoidable.⁵ The dialogue presented here between critics and across essays demonstrates new ways of reading the complexities in Robinson's work for how it reflects the contemporary through the historical, the political in the domestic, and the collective through the particular.

The collection begins with three short contributions by Sarah Churchwell, Richard H. King, and Bridget Bennett. Robinson in Context reflects each scholar's different position on the contemporary resonances in Robinson's writing. Beginning with an examination of the wider historical context for the Gilead novels, Sarah Churchwell considers their key concepts of justice and charity in relation to the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Richard H. King addresses Robinson's theological and philosophical ideas, especially of goodness and grace, drawing on historical parallels and ‘real differences’ between the Gilead novels and the work of fellow Christian writer, Flannery O’Connor. Finally, in a discussion of home and its ‘varied iterations’, Bridget Bennett dissects Robinson's ‘conservative’ reputation through her conception of the home, discussing how the often-political nature of her books tends to be overlooked by scholars.

Part I: ‘Writing, Form, and Style’ unpacks the stylistic and formal innovations of Robinson's prose. Building on Bridget Bennett's discussion, Daniel King in Chapter 1 draws on contemporary critical debates around literary and historical archives to examine the creation and destruction of written histories in the Gilead novels. Focusing particularly on Gilead, King draws on critical thinker Jacques Derrida, and literary critics Helen Freshwater and Janine Utell, to examine what Derrida calls mal d’archive, represented by Ames's competing desires to write and burn his papers. Challenging critical association of the domestic with the conservative, in Chapter 2 Maria Elena Carpintero Torres-Quevedo expands on the ‘marriage plot’ in Lila to counter those critics who interpret Lila's role as epistemically and theologically inferior to that of her husband Ames. Jack Baker in Chapter 3 then focuses on rhythm and vision in Housekeeping and Gilead to argue that Robinson's ‘highly stylised and visionary passages’ register aesthetic and conceptual coherences through ‘patterns of sense and suggestion’. All three essays in this section engage critical perceptions or misconceptions to reanimate analysis of Robinson's literary technique, with a particular focus on narrative, plot, and style.

Part II: ‘Gender and Environment’ intervenes in a particularly vibrant and growing area of Robinson scholarship. Anna Maguire Elliott in Chapter 4 tackles the breach between Robinson's first and fourth novels, Housekeeping and Lila, arguing that Robinson uses the figure of the orphan to explore the tension between American self-reliance and a feminist ethic-of-care. Makayla Steiner in Chapter 5 argues for a reappraisal of Emmanuel Levinas, who feminist thinkers often interpret as a ‘patriarchal philosopher’. Drawing particularly on Housekeeping's all-female environment, Steiner unpacks how Robinson's characters support and complicate the lived efficacy of a Levinasian feminine ‘alterity’ as they attempt to create a welcoming home for two young orphans. Lucy Clarke explores the relationship between domesticity and grief in Chapter 6, with reference to psychologist Leeat Granek, to read domestic spaces and states of homelessness in Housekeeping and Home as enactments of loss and prolonged suffering. Read together, the essays in this section interrogate Robinson's portrayal of gender roles, particularly motherhood, and how through characters, particularly Ruth Stone and Lila Dahl, Robinson quietly dismantles and remodels restrictive gender categories but without suggesting a radical break from them.

Part III: ‘Imagined Histories’ explores the intersection of the personal and the national, with a particular focus on fictionalising American racism. Christopher Lloyd in Chapter 7 discusses the relationship between memory, race, and nation in Home, arguing that Robinson uses affect to disrupt the space of home and nation from within. Alex Engebretson steps away from Robinson's fiction in Chapter 8 to consider how her essays illuminate her perspective on the Protestant mainline church, linking explorations of her Christian faith to a desire to defend, renew, and diversify the racial and gender politics of the church. To conclude this section, in Chapter 9 Emily Hammerton-Barry explores a politics of racial absence by focusing on the spectral in Gilead and Home and suggests that Robinson's novels feature a narrative ‘haunting’ that critiques whiteness and white anxiety about ‘race’. Different in several compelling ways, these essays draw attention to the significance of identity and memory in the writing of shared histories by focusing on the role of intimate emotions, anxieties, and religious beliefs and their role in shaping notions of a collective American identity in Robinson's writing.

Part IV puts Robinson in conversation with other contemporary writers and cultural institutions. Tessa Roynon in Chapter 10 reads Home and Gilead within an African American literary context, considering parallels to the work of other visionary authors, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison. Steve Gronert Ellerhoff and Kathryn E. Engebretson provide an incisive and timely analysis of Robinson's role at the Iowa Writer's Workshop in Chapter 11, considering the university as a force in her work and the important legacy of her role as an educator of future writers. In Chapter 12, Paul Jenner juxtaposes the inheritance of transcendentalism in Robinson's work with the philosophical retrieval of Emerson and Thoreau in the writing of Stanley Cavell, suggesting that by mounting a ‘conversation of the ordinary’ both authors give decisive voice to transcendentalist thought. This final part highlights Robinson's significant contribution to broader American conversations about ethics, environment, and nation, emphasising her position as a contemporary author whose work should be read in wider contemporary critical and writerly contexts. The issues that define this collection situate Robinson's relevance to the current environment and the importance of reading her amongst and against her contemporaries.

Notes

1 Throughout the collection, all authors refer to the Gilead trilogy – Gilead, Home, and Lila – because the existence of Jack was only confirmed in early 2020. The epilogue for this collection offers a brief reading of Jack and bridges this gap.

2 Housekeeping won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel in 1982; Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2004; Home won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2009; and Lila was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2014. Robinson herself was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2012, the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2016, and was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in 2016, among numerous other accolades.

3 The conversation was the first of a now ongoing series of online book discussions hosted by US Studies Online: www.baas.ac.uk/usso/bookhour-tuesday-25th-november-marilynne-robinsons-lila/. (Accessed21/8/2021.)

4 Robinson's faith in democracy shines through her conversations with Obama in November 2015, when she described being on the ‘losing’ side of an election as a worthwhile and ‘meaningful vote’ for American institutions (President Obama and Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation in Iowa). Robinson expressed her interest in engaging in another presidential conversation with Donald Trump: ‘when all is said and done, he is a human being and it would be sort of interesting just simply to talk with him’ (Allardice).

5 For more on the importance of narrative sequence and ‘simultaneity’ in the first three Gilead novels, see: Rachel Sykes, ‘Those Same Trees: Narrative Sequence and Simultaneity in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead Novels’, Irish Journal of American Studies, Summer 2017, http://ijas.iaas.ie/issue-6-rachel-sykes/.

Works cited

Allardice, L. Marilynne Robinson: ‘Obama was very gentlemanly … I'd like to get a look at Trump.’ The Guardian, 6 July 2018. www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/06/marilynne-robinson-interview-barack-obama-donald-trump-writer-theologian. (Accessed 21/06/2021.)

Books Blog: Marilynne Robinson. The Guardian, 26 January 2018, www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/live/2018/jan/23/marilynne-robinson-webchat-post-your-questions-now. (Accessed 21/06/2021.)

Coman, Julian. Marilynne Robinson: America still has a democratic soul. The Guardian, 26 September 2020. www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/26/marilynne-robinson-author-gilead-interview-barack-obama-jack-america. (Accessed 21/06/2021.)

McCrum, Robert. From Marilynne Robinson to Richard Ford, six writers in search of Trump's America. The Guardian, 15 January 2017. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/15/writers-in-search-of-trumps-america-marilynne-robinson-richard-ford-walter-mosley-lionel-shriver. (Accessed 21/06/2021.)

Perry, Sarah. Jack by Marilynne Robinson review – a Calvinist romance. The Guardian, 25 September 2020. www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/25/jack-by-marilynne-robinson-review-a-calvinist-romance. (Accessed 21/06/2021).

President Obama and Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation - II. The New York Review of Books, 19 November 2015. www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/11/19/president-obama-marilynne-robinson-conversation-2/. (Accessed 21/06/2021.)

Robinson, Marilynne. Jack. Virago, 2020.

—— What Are We Doing Here? Virago, 2018.

The University of Iowa Center for Advancement. President Obama Retirement Message for Marilynne Robinson. YouTube, Interview with Barack Obama, 13 December 2016.

Walton, James. Jack by Marilynne Robinson review. The Times, 2 October 2020. www.thetimes.co.uk/article/jack-by-marilynne-robinson-review-f5hszwb0j. (Accessed 21/06/2021.)

Robinson in context: a critical conversation

The contributions in this section were originally presented as part of a roundtable discussion at the Marilynne Robinson Symposium at Nottingham Trent University in 2016. As a result of the wide-ranging conversation sparked among delegates, the editors invited the speakers to summarise their contributions for inclusion in this collection.