Clay Zuba

FICTION

Love in the House of Seven Gables (unpublished manuscript, 2023)

“Love in the House of the Seven Gables” (L7G), is a prequel to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s iconic novel House of the Seven Gables. L7G re-examines the mysterious death of Colonel Pyncheon, which Hawthorne places 150 years before the main plot of House of the Seven Gables, yet leaves unexplained at his novel’s conclusion.

In L7G, Colonel Pyncheon’s bookwise but sheltered niece, Theodosia, travels to colonial Massachusetts to marry his son, Randolph, after her father’s death. Unfortunately, upon arriving Theodosia finds Colonel Pyncheon dead by unknown causes, Randolph mad with grief, and the Salem Witch trials rising to a fever pitch.

With the aid of the dashing Helios, and the African and Native American servants Phoebe and Penelope, Theodosia must find her uncle’s killer and restore Randolph to sanity, while negotiating the arcane mores of Puritan society. Theodosia soon falls in love with Helios as she unearths dark secrets that link her uncle’s death to that of her own father. In the process, she begins to suspect that there is more to Randolph’s madness than meets the eye. As the story approaches its climax, Theodosia must depend on Phoebe and Penelope, whom she once regarded as her inferiors, to help uncover the rot at the roots of her family tree.

“Love in the House of Seven Gables is a 98,000-word, first-person POV gothic mystery about race, gender, and the networks women must build to survive in a fundamentalist, patriarchal society. The book has the potential to launch a series centered on unexplored aspects of Hawthorne’s fiction. Clay is actively seeking representation for this manuscript.

nONFICTION

Essays

Contributor, Teaching PALS: Pedagogy and American Literature Studies.

• “Weird Things Nick Carraway Says” (March 2022)

• ”Teaching the Literature of Witchcraft” (October 2021)

• “Pandemic Distance High School” (August 2020)

• “Texting Thomas Paine: Connecting 18th-Century Politics and 21st-Century Students” (October 2019)

• ”Teaching the Crucible in the Post-Truth Era” (May 2019)

• ”Teaching The Crucible in the Age of Trump” (April 2019)

• ”Dear College Professor: On the (Un)Ethical Use of Technology” (October 2018)

• ”Dear College Professor: On Your Incoming Students” (May 2018)

Journal Articles

“Apess’ Eulogy and the Politics of Native Visualcy.” Early American Literature. 52.3 (2017) 651-77.

"Hawthorne’s Empire: Sculpture and the Indigenous in The Marble Faun.” Studies in American Fiction. 43.2 (2016) 161-183.

"Monstrosity and the Majority: Defamiliarizing Race in the University Classroom.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture. 16.2 (2016) 353-367.

Book Chapters

“Redness and the Contest of Anglo-American Empires.” In Community without Consent: New Perspectives on the Stamp Act. Edited by Zach Hutchins. Dartmouth College/University of New England Press, 2016.

Doctoral Dissertation: “Printing Indians and the Imperial Contest in America”

I wrote and submitted this dissertation to support my candidacy for a Doctorate in English from the University of Delaware in 2016. The project builds on recent innovations in empires studies to argue that between King Philip’s War (1676) and the conclusion of the U.S. Civil War (1864), the visual and the textual representation of Native Americans in print culture worked in dialogue with one another to shape imperial identities among the diverse peoples of North America. I suggest that rather than forming through the commonly accepted colonizer/colonized model that theorizes the figure of the Indian as pure other, imperial identities in North America emerged through image-text patterns of triangulation that located Native Americans between empires.

Director: Edward Larkin.