Author: Donald E. Pease
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521378987
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 142
Book Description
Argues the renewed importance of Howells's novel for an understanding of literature as a social force as well as a literary form.
New Essays on The Rise of Silas Lapham
Author: Donald E. Pease
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521378987
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 142
Book Description
Argues the renewed importance of Howells's novel for an understanding of literature as a social force as well as a literary form.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521378987
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 142
Book Description
Argues the renewed importance of Howells's novel for an understanding of literature as a social force as well as a literary form.
The Rise of Silas Lapham
Author: William Dean Howells
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780140390308
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 404
Book Description
William Dean Howells' richly humorous characterization of a self-made millionaire in Boston society provides a paradigm of American culture in the Gilded Age. After establishing a fortune in the paint business, Silas Lapham moves his family from their Vermont farm to the city of Boston, where they awkwardly attempt to break into Brahmin society. Silas, greedy for wealth as well as prestige, brings his company to the brink of bankruptcy, and the family is forced to return to Vermont, financially ruined but morally renewed. As Kermit Vanderbilt points out in his introduction, the novel focuses on important themes in the American literary tradition: the efficacy of self-help and determination, the ambiguous benefits of social and economic progress, and the continual contradiction between urban and pastoral values. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780140390308
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 404
Book Description
William Dean Howells' richly humorous characterization of a self-made millionaire in Boston society provides a paradigm of American culture in the Gilded Age. After establishing a fortune in the paint business, Silas Lapham moves his family from their Vermont farm to the city of Boston, where they awkwardly attempt to break into Brahmin society. Silas, greedy for wealth as well as prestige, brings his company to the brink of bankruptcy, and the family is forced to return to Vermont, financially ruined but morally renewed. As Kermit Vanderbilt points out in his introduction, the novel focuses on important themes in the American literary tradition: the efficacy of self-help and determination, the ambiguous benefits of social and economic progress, and the continual contradiction between urban and pastoral values. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
New Essays on The Rise of Silas Lapham
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9785213731156
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN: 9785213731156
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
New Essays on The Rise of Silas Lapham
Author: Donald E. Pease
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521373111
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 144
Book Description
The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) established William Dean Howells's reputation in the annals of American literature. This collection of essays argues the renewed importance of Howells's novel for an understanding of literature as social force as well as a literary form. In his introduction Donald Pease recounts the fall and rise of the novel's value in literary history, outlines the various critical responses to Silas Lapham, and then restores Silas Lapham to its social context. The essays that follow expand on this theme, challenging the accepted views of literary critics by explicating narrative methods and the genre of literary realism. Focusing much of its attention on economics of morality, manners, and pain, as well as the marketplace, the volume as a whole argues that a relationship exists between Howells's realism and its socioeconomic context.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521373111
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 144
Book Description
The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) established William Dean Howells's reputation in the annals of American literature. This collection of essays argues the renewed importance of Howells's novel for an understanding of literature as social force as well as a literary form. In his introduction Donald Pease recounts the fall and rise of the novel's value in literary history, outlines the various critical responses to Silas Lapham, and then restores Silas Lapham to its social context. The essays that follow expand on this theme, challenging the accepted views of literary critics by explicating narrative methods and the genre of literary realism. Focusing much of its attention on economics of morality, manners, and pain, as well as the marketplace, the volume as a whole argues that a relationship exists between Howells's realism and its socioeconomic context.
The American
Author: Henry James
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781543072266
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 330
Book Description
The American A social comedy about Christopher Newman, an American businessman on his first tour of Europe. Along the way, he finds a widow from an aristocratic French family.
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781543072266
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 330
Book Description
The American A social comedy about Christopher Newman, an American businessman on his first tour of Europe. Along the way, he finds a widow from an aristocratic French family.
A Hazard Of New Fortunes
Author: William Dean Howells
Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
ISBN: 3849657493
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 546
Book Description
No one can complain that in this story Mr. Howells has taken his type from the commonplace. It is a study of life in New York, and the author has brought together such a gallery of odd and strongly differentiated characters as could perhaps be found in no other city on the continent, while the conditions and phases of social life represented are not less distinctive and peculiar. The Marches, it is true, are from Boston, but they serve the purpose of external points of observation, whence to note and sufficiently to emphasize those features of our city life which of necessity strike strangers and outsiders most forcibly and with the greatest freshness of suggestion. A new magazine is founded with the money of old Dryfoos, a "natural gas millionaire," whose primary object is to give his son Conrad — a youth of saint-like character and dominant altruism — opportunity to become a businessman. The prime mover of the venture is Fulkerson, a true Western Yankee, if the phrase be allowable, whose engaging impudence, fluent slang, indomitable assurance, and substantial loyalty and goodness of heart are sure to make him as great a favorite with the reader as he is with all who know him in the story. The Marches, too, are fantastic, and nowhere has Mr. Howells better presented that peculiar American humor which finds motives for half-sarcastic jest and quip in even the most serious things, less out of lightness of heart than from an almost desperate conscious ness of hopeless incongruities and perplexities inherent in the general scheme. The picture is in itself a condemnation of and protest against that rank growth of naked materialism which is the most depressing feature of our time. The character and the faults of society are shown plainly but temperately — the spirit of levity, the love of spectacle, the repugnance to serious thinking, the absence of jealousy of popular rights, constantly encroached upon, ignored and subordinated to selfish corporate or individual interests. The aspects of the city are also most graphically and admirably described in many a wandering of the Marches, and the book exhibits an amount of local study undertaken by the author which speaks well for his conscientiousness, and adds much to the charm and permanent interest of the story. There is, as we have intimated, an unwonted variety and an unwonted force in " A Hazard of New Fortunes." If it can hardly be said to have a dominant note, it is none the less a faithful and carefully elaborated study of New York life, and it presents some of the most salient characteristics of that life in a very impressive and artistic manner. Most readers will, we think, agree with us that the change in method here shown is a change for the better. Never, certainly, has Mr. Howells written more brilliantly, more clearly, more firmly, or more attractively, than in this instance. The reversion to these strong individualizations seems to have put new vigor into his hands, and he deals with the deeper tragedies, the graver emotions of life, with a power which may perhaps be regarded as a practical demonstration of the ultimate supremacy destined to be attained by Nature over Art ; by the true over the false Realism.
Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
ISBN: 3849657493
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 546
Book Description
No one can complain that in this story Mr. Howells has taken his type from the commonplace. It is a study of life in New York, and the author has brought together such a gallery of odd and strongly differentiated characters as could perhaps be found in no other city on the continent, while the conditions and phases of social life represented are not less distinctive and peculiar. The Marches, it is true, are from Boston, but they serve the purpose of external points of observation, whence to note and sufficiently to emphasize those features of our city life which of necessity strike strangers and outsiders most forcibly and with the greatest freshness of suggestion. A new magazine is founded with the money of old Dryfoos, a "natural gas millionaire," whose primary object is to give his son Conrad — a youth of saint-like character and dominant altruism — opportunity to become a businessman. The prime mover of the venture is Fulkerson, a true Western Yankee, if the phrase be allowable, whose engaging impudence, fluent slang, indomitable assurance, and substantial loyalty and goodness of heart are sure to make him as great a favorite with the reader as he is with all who know him in the story. The Marches, too, are fantastic, and nowhere has Mr. Howells better presented that peculiar American humor which finds motives for half-sarcastic jest and quip in even the most serious things, less out of lightness of heart than from an almost desperate conscious ness of hopeless incongruities and perplexities inherent in the general scheme. The picture is in itself a condemnation of and protest against that rank growth of naked materialism which is the most depressing feature of our time. The character and the faults of society are shown plainly but temperately — the spirit of levity, the love of spectacle, the repugnance to serious thinking, the absence of jealousy of popular rights, constantly encroached upon, ignored and subordinated to selfish corporate or individual interests. The aspects of the city are also most graphically and admirably described in many a wandering of the Marches, and the book exhibits an amount of local study undertaken by the author which speaks well for his conscientiousness, and adds much to the charm and permanent interest of the story. There is, as we have intimated, an unwonted variety and an unwonted force in " A Hazard of New Fortunes." If it can hardly be said to have a dominant note, it is none the less a faithful and carefully elaborated study of New York life, and it presents some of the most salient characteristics of that life in a very impressive and artistic manner. Most readers will, we think, agree with us that the change in method here shown is a change for the better. Never, certainly, has Mr. Howells written more brilliantly, more clearly, more firmly, or more attractively, than in this instance. The reversion to these strong individualizations seems to have put new vigor into his hands, and he deals with the deeper tragedies, the graver emotions of life, with a power which may perhaps be regarded as a practical demonstration of the ultimate supremacy destined to be attained by Nature over Art ; by the true over the false Realism.
New Essays on The Rise of Silas Lapham
Author: ANON.
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic book
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic book
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
A Foregone Conclusion
Author: William Dean Howells
Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
ISBN: 3849657302
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 207
Book Description
For many readers, this story belongs to Mr. Howells' most perfect pieces of work. In saying this, these people are not unmindful of the delicious humor and exquisite descriptions of " A Chance Acquaintance," of Kitty's breezy freshness and Mr. Arbuton's typical Bostonism. But Mr. Howells has lived in Venice till the melancholy beauty of its decay has so taken possession of him that he can describe all phases of its life more perfectly than any other English writer; and against a background of palaces and canals' he creates a picture of the drama of love, ever old, yet ever new, which causes a soul to dwell among the shadows of that great past. The American mother and daughter wandering forlorn in foreign lands, in quest of the health for the elder which never is found, the artist consul, the priest wearily going through the round of offices which are a lie to him, and dreaming over his inventions, till he wakes to find himself in love with the young girl whom he has taught Italian, the group of lesser characters, from gondolier to canonico, briefly drawn, but instinct with life, are delineated with the same subtle skill of portraiture, keen irony, and delicious pen, which makes a new book of Mr. Howells' a literary event. The atmosphere of the " Queen of the Sea " hangs over all. Those who know Venice inhale its unique beauty again from these pages, and those who have never floated on those still waters, away from the common world, can see its very spirit reflected here, as the outlines of its buildings and the hues of its skies are imaged in the canals below them.
Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
ISBN: 3849657302
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 207
Book Description
For many readers, this story belongs to Mr. Howells' most perfect pieces of work. In saying this, these people are not unmindful of the delicious humor and exquisite descriptions of " A Chance Acquaintance," of Kitty's breezy freshness and Mr. Arbuton's typical Bostonism. But Mr. Howells has lived in Venice till the melancholy beauty of its decay has so taken possession of him that he can describe all phases of its life more perfectly than any other English writer; and against a background of palaces and canals' he creates a picture of the drama of love, ever old, yet ever new, which causes a soul to dwell among the shadows of that great past. The American mother and daughter wandering forlorn in foreign lands, in quest of the health for the elder which never is found, the artist consul, the priest wearily going through the round of offices which are a lie to him, and dreaming over his inventions, till he wakes to find himself in love with the young girl whom he has taught Italian, the group of lesser characters, from gondolier to canonico, briefly drawn, but instinct with life, are delineated with the same subtle skill of portraiture, keen irony, and delicious pen, which makes a new book of Mr. Howells' a literary event. The atmosphere of the " Queen of the Sea " hangs over all. Those who know Venice inhale its unique beauty again from these pages, and those who have never floated on those still waters, away from the common world, can see its very spirit reflected here, as the outlines of its buildings and the hues of its skies are imaged in the canals below them.
A Likely Story
Author: William Dean Howells
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 90
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 90
Book Description
Criticism and Fiction
Author: William Dean Howells
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 380
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 380
Book Description