The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism PDF Author: Keith Newlin
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190642890
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 733

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism offers fresh interpretations of the artistic and political challenges of representing life accurately. It is the first book to treat the subject topically and thematically, in wide scope, with essays that draw upon recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies to offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of major and minor figures and the contexts that shaped their work.

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism PDF Author: Keith Newlin
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190642890
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 733

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism offers fresh interpretations of the artistic and political challenges of representing life accurately. It is the first book to treat the subject topically and thematically, in wide scope, with essays that draw upon recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies to offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of major and minor figures and the contexts that shaped their work.

American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract

American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract PDF Author: Brook Thomas
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520326113
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 374

Get Book Here

Book Description
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in `1997.

American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880–1995

American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880–1995 PDF Author: Phillip Barrish
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139431951
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Get Book Here

Book Description
Focusing on key works of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literary realism, Phillip Barrish traces the emergence of new ways of gaining intellectual prestige - that is, new ways of gaining cultural recognition as unusually intelligent, sensitive or even wise. Through extended readings of works by Henry James, William Dean Howells, Abraham Cahan and Edith Wharton, Barrish emphasises the differences between literary realist modes of intellectual and cultural authority and those associated with the rise of the social sciences. In doing so, he greatly refines our understanding of the complex relationship between realist writing and masculinity. Barrish further argues that understanding the dynamics of intellectual status in realist literature provides new analytic purchase on intellectual prestige in recent critical theory. Here he focuses on such figures as Lionel Trilling, Paul de Man, John Guillory and Judith Butler.

Black and White Strangers

Black and White Strangers PDF Author: Kenneth W. Warren
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226873855
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 182

Get Book Here

Book Description
From Abraham Lincoln's wry observation that Harriet Beecher Stowe was "the little lady who made this big war" to Mark Twain's "wild proposition" that Walter Scott had somehow touched off sectional hostilities, there have been many competing theories about the impact of literature on nineteenth-century American society. In this provocative book, Kenneth W. Warren argues that the rise of literary realism late in the century was shaped by and in turn helped to shape the politics of racial difference following Reconstruction. Taking up a variety of novelists from this period, including most prominently Henry James and William Dean Howells, Warren demonstrates that even works not directly concerned with race were instrumental in forging a Jim Crow nation. As a literary history, Black and White Strangers places the writing of realistic novels within the context of their serialization in the monthly magazines of the 1880s. By viewing these novels in light of editorial policies regarding social propriety, national unity, and literary aesthetics, Warren reveals the often surprising ways in which realistic fiction at once challenged and abetted the growing conservatism of racial politics. Warren also seeks to bridge the gap between American and African-American literary studies, which have hitherto been "strangers" to each other. James and Howells, he argues, can be understood fully only when read alongside W.E.B. Du Bois and Frances E.W. Harper; James's The American Scene, for instance must be seen as a companion text to Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk. In making these connections, Warren challenges American and African-American studies to see themselves as mutually constitutive enterprises and to question the value of canon-based criticism in any complete investigation of the meaning of "race" in American cultural history.

Affecting Fictions

Affecting Fictions PDF Author: Jane F. Thrailkill
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674025127
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Get Book Here

Book Description
Thrailkill offers a new understanding of late-nineteenth-century American literary realism that draws on neuroscience and cognitive psychology, positioning her argument against the emotionless interpretations of the New Critics.

Pain and the Aesthetics of US Literary Realism

Pain and the Aesthetics of US Literary Realism PDF Author: Cynthia J. Davis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198858736
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Get Book Here

Book Description
The postbellum period saw many privileged Americans pursuing a civilized ideal premised on insulation from pain. Medico-scientific advances in anesthetics and analgesics and emergent religious sects like Christian Science made pain avoidance seem newly possible. The upper classes could increasingly afford to distance themselves from the suffering they claimed to feel more exquisitely than did their supposedly less refined contemporaries and antecedents. The five US literary realists examined in this study resisted this contemporary revulsion from pain without going so far as to join those who celebrated suffering for its invigorating effects. William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, and Charles Chesnutt embraced the concept of a heightened sensitivity to pain as a consequence of the civilizing process but departed from their peers by delineating alternative definitions of a superior sensibility indebted to suffering. Although the treatment of pain in other influential nineteenth century literary modes including sentimentalism and naturalism has attracted ample scholarly attention, this book offers the first sustained analysis of pain's importance to US literary realism as practiced by five of its most influential proponents.

The Problem of American Realism

The Problem of American Realism PDF Author: Michael Davitt Bell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226042022
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ever since William Dean Howells declared his "realism war" in the 1880s, literary historians have regarded the rise of "realism" and "naturalism" as the great development in American post-Civil War fiction. Yet there are many problems with this generalization. It is virtually impossible, for example, to extract from the novels and manifestoes of American writers of this period any consistent definitions of realism or naturalism as modes of literary representation. Rather than seek common traits in widely divergent "realist" and "naturalist" literary works, Michael Davitt Bell focuses here on the role that these terms played in the social and literary discourse of the 1880s and 1890s. Bell argues that in America, "realism" and "naturalism" never achieved the sort of theoretical rigor that they did in European literary debate. Instead, the function of these ideas in America was less aesthetic than ideological, promoting as "reality" a version of social normalcy based on radically anti-"literary" and heavily gendered assumptions. What effects, Bell asks, did ideas about realism and naturalism have on writers who embraced and resisted them? To answer this question, he devotes separate chapters to the work of Howells and Frank Norris (the principal American advocates of realism and naturalism in the 1880s and 1890s), Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Sarah Orne Jewett. Bell reveals that a chief function of claiming to be a realist or a naturalist was to provide assurance that one was a "real" man rather than an "effeminate" artist. Since the 1880s, Bell asserts, all serious American fiction writers have had to contend with this problematic conception of literary realism. The true story of the transformation of American fiction after the Civil War is the history of this contention - a history of individual accommodations, evasions, holding actions, and occasional triumphs.

Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture

Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture PDF Author: Julie Olin-Ammentorp
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496216881
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 517

Get Book Here

Book Description
Edith Wharton and Willa Cather wrote many of the most enduring American novels from the first half of the twentieth century, including Wharton's The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and The Age of Innocence, and Cather's O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. Yet despite their perennial popularity and their status as major American novelists, Wharton (1862-1937) and Cather (1873-1947) have rarely been studied together. Indeed, critics and scholars seem to have conspired to keep them at a distance: Wharton is seen as "our literary aristocrat," an author who chronicles the lives of the East Coast, Europe-bound elite, while Cather is considered a prairie populist who describes the lives of rugged western pioneers. These depictions, though partially valid, nonetheless rely on oversimplifications and neglect the striking and important ways the works of these two authors intersect. The first comparative study of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather in thirty years, this book combines biographical, historical, and literary analyses with a focus on place and aesthetics to reveal Wharton's and Cather's parallel experiences of dislocation, their relationship to each other as writers, and the profound similarities in their theories of fiction. Julie Olin-Ammentorp provides a new assessment of the affinities between Wharton and Cather by exploring the importance of literary and geographic place in their lives and works, including the role of New York City, the American West, France, and travel. In doing so she reveals the two authors' shared concern about the culture of place and the place of culture in the United States.

The American Counterfeit

The American Counterfeit PDF Author: Mary McAleer Balkun
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817314970
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Get Book Here

Book Description
Fakery, authenticity, and identity in American literature and culture at the turn of the 20th century Focusing on texts written between 1880 and 1930, Mary McAleer Balkun explores the concept of the “counterfeit,” both in terms of material goods and invented identities, and the ways that the acquisition of objects came to define individuals in American culture and literature. Counterfeiting is, in one sense, about the creation of something that appears authentic—an invented self, a museum display, a forged work of art. But the counterfeit can also be a means by which the authentic is measured, thereby creating our conception of the true or real. When counterfeiting is applied to individual identities, it fosters fluidity in social boundaries and the games of social climbing and passing that have come to be representative of American culture: the Horatio Alger story, the con man or huckster, the social climber, the ethnically ambiguous. Balkun provides new readings of traditional texts such as The Great Gatsby, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The House of Mirth, as well as readings of less-studied texts, such as Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days and Nella Larsen’s Passing. In each of these texts, Balkun locates the presence of manufactured identities and counterfeit figures, demonstrating that where authenticity and consumerism intersect, the self becomes but another commodity to be promoted, sold, and eventually consumed.

The Damnation of Theron Ware or Illumination

The Damnation of Theron Ware or Illumination PDF Author: Harold Frederic
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 516

Get Book Here

Book Description