The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature PDF Author: Stacey Margolis
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822386674
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Stacey Margolis rethinks a key chapter in American literary history, challenging the idea that nineteenth-century American culture was dominated by an ideology of privacy that defined subjects in terms of their intentions and desires. She reveals how writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Henry James depicted a world in which characters could only be understood—and, more importantly, could only understand themselves—through their public actions. She argues that the social issues that nineteenth-century novelists analyzed—including race, sexuality, the market, and the law—formed integral parts of a broader cultural shift toward understanding individuals not according to their feelings, desires, or intentions, but rather in light of the various inevitable traces they left on the world. Margolis provides readings of fiction by Hawthorne and James as well as Susan Warner, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, and Pauline Hopkins. In these writers’ works, she traces a distinctive novelistic tradition that viewed social developments—such as changes in political partisanship and childhood education and the rise of new politico-legal forms like negligence law—as means for understanding how individuals were shaped by their interactions with society. The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature adds a new level of complexity to understandings of nineteenth-century American culture by illuminating a literary tradition full of accidents, mistakes, and unintended consequences—one in which feelings and desires were often overshadowed by all that was external to the self.

The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature PDF Author: Stacey Margolis
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822386674
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book Here

Book Description
Stacey Margolis rethinks a key chapter in American literary history, challenging the idea that nineteenth-century American culture was dominated by an ideology of privacy that defined subjects in terms of their intentions and desires. She reveals how writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Henry James depicted a world in which characters could only be understood—and, more importantly, could only understand themselves—through their public actions. She argues that the social issues that nineteenth-century novelists analyzed—including race, sexuality, the market, and the law—formed integral parts of a broader cultural shift toward understanding individuals not according to their feelings, desires, or intentions, but rather in light of the various inevitable traces they left on the world. Margolis provides readings of fiction by Hawthorne and James as well as Susan Warner, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, and Pauline Hopkins. In these writers’ works, she traces a distinctive novelistic tradition that viewed social developments—such as changes in political partisanship and childhood education and the rise of new politico-legal forms like negligence law—as means for understanding how individuals were shaped by their interactions with society. The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature adds a new level of complexity to understandings of nineteenth-century American culture by illuminating a literary tradition full of accidents, mistakes, and unintended consequences—one in which feelings and desires were often overshadowed by all that was external to the self.

Life Writing and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Market

Life Writing and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Market PDF Author: Sean Grass
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781399506816
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
[headline]Articulates life writing's complex engagement with the nineteenth-century literary market Life Writing and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Market begins from the premise that nineteenth-century life writing circulated in a market, in material and discursive forms determined substantially by the desires of publishers, readers, editors, printers, booksellers and the many other craftsmen and tradesmen who collaborated in transforming first-person narrative into a commodified thing. Studies of nineteenth-century life writing have typically focused on the major autobiographers, or on the formation of 'genre', or on the ways in which different class, gender, race and other affiliations shaped particular kinds of exemplary subjectivities. The aim of this collection, on the other hand, is to focus on life writing in terms of profits and sales, contracts and copyright, printing and illustration - to treat life writing, through particular case studies and through attentive analysis of print and material cultures, as one commodity among many in the vast, complicated literary market of nineteenth-century England. [bio]Sean Grass is Professor of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he specialises in Victorian literature and culture, the book market, the Victorian novel, life writing and the works of Charles Dickens. He has published three monographs: The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace (2019); Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend: A Publishing History (2014); and The Self in the Cell: Narrating the Victorian Prisoner (2004).

Life Writing and Victorian Culture

Life Writing and Victorian Culture PDF Author: David Amigoni
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351922246
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
In this collection of interdisciplinary essays, experts from Britain and the United States in the fields of nineteenth-century literature, and social and cultural history explore new directions in the field of Victorian life writing. Chapters examine a varied yet interrelated range of genres, from the biography and autobiography, to the relatively neglected diary, collective biography, and obituary. Reflecting the rich research being conducted in this area, the contributors link life writing to the formation of gendered and class-based identities; the politics of the Victorian family; and the broader professional, political, colonial, and literary structures in which social and kinship relations were implicated. A wide variety of Victorian works are considered, from the diary of the Radical Samuel Bamford, to the diary of the homosexual George Ives; from autobiographies of professional men to collective biographies of eminent women. Embracing figures as diverse as Gandhi, Wilde, and Bradlaugh, the collection explores the way in which narratives contested one another in a society that devoted an abundance of cultural energy to writing about, and reading of, lives.

Nineteenth-century American Writers on Writing

Nineteenth-century American Writers on Writing PDF Author: Brenda Wineapple
Publisher: Writer's World
ISBN: 9781595340696
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Nineteenth-Centuery American Writers on Writing features essays, letters, poems, prose, and excerpts of interviews by fifty-seven leading authors of the century. Each had to figure out what it meant to be a writer within the context of the relatively new nation they spoke to, for, and about. Each meditated on craft and style and form, as writers do. And each confronted the question of how to define themselves as writers--and their literature as "American"--during a century rocked by the industrial revolution, the Civil War, and the emergence of a global politic.

Kate Field

Kate Field PDF Author: Gary Scharnhorst
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815608745
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Kate Field was among the first celebrity journalists. A literary and cultural sensation, she reported the news while frequently becoming news herself because of her sharp wit and vibrant presence. She wrote for several prestigious newspapers, such as the Boston Post, Chicago Tribune, and New York Herald, as well her own Kate Field’s Washington. Field’s friends and professional acquaintances included Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot. Legendary novelist Henry James patterned the character of Henrietta Stackpole after her in The Portrait of a Lady. In this eloquent and immensely readable biography, Gary Scharnhorst offers a fascinating, often poignant portrait of a fiercely intelligent and enormously independent woman who contributed significantly to America’s intellectual and social life in the late nineteenth century. Kate Field was an outspoken advocate for the rights of black Americans and founder of the first woman’s club in America. She campaigned to make Yosemite a national park and saved John Brown’s Adirondack farm for the nation. The range of Field’s activities should foster interest in her biography from students and scholars of nineteenth-century American literature, women’s studies, journalism, and biography, and from both public and academic libraries.

The Routledge Concise History of Nineteenth-Century Literature

The Routledge Concise History of Nineteenth-Century Literature PDF Author: Josephine Guy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136884467
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Nineteenth-century Britain saw the rise of secularism, the development of a modern capitalist economy, multi-party democracy, and an explosive growth in technological, scientific and medical knowledge. It also witnessed the emergence of a mass literary culture which changed permanently the relationships between writers, readers and publishers. Focusing on the work of British and Irish authors, The Routledge Concise History of Nineteenth-Century Literature: considers changes in literary forms, styles and genres, as well as in critical discourses examines literary movements such as Romanticism, Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism and Decadence considers the work of a wide range of canonical and non-canonical writers discusses the impact of gender studies, queer theory, postcolonialism and book history contains useful, student-friendly features such as explanatory text boxes, chapter summaries, a detailed glossary and suggestions for further reading. In their lucid and accessible manner, Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small provide readers with an understanding of the complexity and variety of nineteenth-century literary culture, as well as the historical conditions which produced it.

Victorian Biography Reconsidered

Victorian Biography Reconsidered PDF Author: Juliette Atkinson
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191591432
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
In 1939, Virginia Woolf called for a more inclusive form of biography, which would include 'the failures as well as the successes, the humble as well as the illustrious'. She did so in part as a reaction against Victorian biography, deemed to have been overly preoccupied with 'Great Men'. Yet a significant number of Victorians had already broken ranks to write the lives of humble, unsuccessful, or neglected men and women. Victorian Biography Reconsidered seeks to uncover and assess this trend. The book begins with an overview of Victorian biography followed by a reflection on how the bagginess of nineteenth-century hero-worship enabled new subjects to emerge. Biographies of 'hidden' lives are then scrutinized through chapters on the lives of humble naturalists, failed destinies, minor women writers, neglected Romantic poets rescued by Victorian biographers, and, finally, the Dictionary of National Biography. In its conclusion, the book briefly discusses how Virginia Woolf absorbed earlier biographical trends before redirecting the representation of 'hidden' lives. Victorian Biography Reconsidered argues that, often paradoxically, nineteenth-century biographers regarded the public sphere with intense wariness. At a time of instability for men of letters, biographers embraced the role of mediators in a manner that asserted their own cultural authority. Frequently, they showed little interest in vouchsafing immortality for their unknown or forgotten subjects, but strove instead to provoke amongst their readers a feeling of gratitude for the hidden labour that sustained the nation and an appreciation for the writers who had brought it to their attention.

Sentimental Materialism

Sentimental Materialism PDF Author: Lori Merish
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822325161
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
Examines the constructions of feminine consumption in the nineteenth century in relation to capitalism and domesticity.

Robert Louis Stevenson and Nineteenth Century French Literature

Robert Louis Stevenson and Nineteenth Century French Literature PDF Author: Katherine Ashley
Publisher: EUP
ISBN: 9781474493239
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
A comparative literary history that explores Robert Louis Stevenson and French literature This study looks at French literature from Stevenson's perspective and at Stevenson from a French perspective. Shedding light on how Stevenson's use of French contributes to his distinct style, and how and why the earliest French critics translated, disseminated and interpreted his books, it does so in context of the debates surrounding the development of the novel at the fin de siècle. Readers learn how the artistic debates taking place in France contributed to the evolution of Stevenson's art, but also how Stevenson became a model of literary innovation for French authors and critics who were seeking to renew the French novel. Katherine Ashley teaches French, English and Translation at Acadia University (Nova Scotia, Canada).

Women's Life Writing, 1700-1850

Women's Life Writing, 1700-1850 PDF Author: D. Cook
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137030771
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This collection discusses British and Irish life writings by women in the period 1700-1850. It argues for the importance of women's life writing as part of the culture and practice of eighteenth-century and Romantic auto/biography, exploring the complex relationships between constructions of femininity, life writing forms and models of authorship.