SOURCE: Newman, Judie. “Paleface into Redskin: Cultural Transformations in Alison Lurie's Foreign Affairs.” In Forked Tongues? Comparing Twentieth-Century British and American Literature, edited by Ann Massa and Alistair Stead, pp. 188-205. London and New York: Longman, 1994.

In the following essay, Newman examines the use of intertextual literary themes and cultural slippages in Foreign Affairs, contending that, rather than reinforcing the fictional stereotypes of Henry James, Frances Hodges Burnett, or John Gay, Lurie subverts traditional clashes between Americans and Europeans and nature and culture to reveal the generative possibilities inherent in such interacting oppositions.

A critic once divided American writers into two camps, the Palefaces and the Redskins. The Redskins looked west, toward the frontier, responded to the more physical and natural aspects of life, and often wrote in a style which expressed raw experience rather than literary form. The Palefaces looked east, wrote of those peculiarly elusive areas...