The Atlantic Monthly, 1857-1909

The Atlantic Monthly, 1857-1909 PDF Author: Ellery Sedgwick
Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
From its founding in 1857 until its sale by Houghton Mifflin in 1908, the Atlantic Monthly was the most respected literary periodical in the United States. This study focuses on the magazine's first seven editors: James Russell Lowell, James T. Fields, William Dean Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Horace Scudder, Walter Hines Page, and Bliss Perry. Ellery Sedgwick examines their personalities, editorial policies, and literary tastes, and shows how each balanced his role as advocate of "high" culture with the demands of the literary marketplace and American democracy. Although the Atlantic was rooted in the Yankee humanism of Boston, Cambridge, and Concord, its scope was national. Sedgwick points out that while the magazine spoke for high culture, its tradition was one of intellectual tolerance and of moderate liberalism on social and political issues. It supported abolition, women's rights, and religious tolerance, and published incisive criticism of unregulated industrial capitalism. The Atlantic also played an important role in the rise of American literary realism, and published early work not only by such authors as James, Jewett, and Howells, but also by Chesnutt, Du Bois, Cahan, and Zitkala-Sa.

The Atlantic Monthly, 1857-1909

The Atlantic Monthly, 1857-1909 PDF Author: Ellery Sedgwick
Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
From its founding in 1857 until its sale by Houghton Mifflin in 1908, the Atlantic Monthly was the most respected literary periodical in the United States. This study focuses on the magazine's first seven editors: James Russell Lowell, James T. Fields, William Dean Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Horace Scudder, Walter Hines Page, and Bliss Perry. Ellery Sedgwick examines their personalities, editorial policies, and literary tastes, and shows how each balanced his role as advocate of "high" culture with the demands of the literary marketplace and American democracy. Although the Atlantic was rooted in the Yankee humanism of Boston, Cambridge, and Concord, its scope was national. Sedgwick points out that while the magazine spoke for high culture, its tradition was one of intellectual tolerance and of moderate liberalism on social and political issues. It supported abolition, women's rights, and religious tolerance, and published incisive criticism of unregulated industrial capitalism. The Atlantic also played an important role in the rise of American literary realism, and published early work not only by such authors as James, Jewett, and Howells, but also by Chesnutt, Du Bois, Cahan, and Zitkala-Sa.

Truth Stranger Than Fiction

Truth Stranger Than Fiction PDF Author: Augusta Rohrbach
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230107265
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
Using the lens of business history to contextualize the development of an American literary tradition, Truth Stranger than Fiction shows how African American literature and culture greatly influenced the development of realism, which remains one of the most significant genres of writing in the United States. More specifically, Truth Stranger than Fiction traces the influences of generic conventions popularized in slave narratives - such as the use of authenticating details, as well as dialect, and a frank treatment of the human body - in later realist writings. As it unfolds, Truth Stranger than Fiction poses and explores a set of questions about the shifting relationship between literature and culture in the United States from 1830-1930 by focusing on the evolving trend of literary realism. Beginning with the question, 'How might slave narratives - heralded as the first indigenous literature by Theodore Parker - have influenced the development of American Literature?' the book develops connections between an emerging literary marketplace, the rise of the professional writer, and literary realism.

Encyclopedia of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Encyclopedia of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era PDF Author: John D. Buenker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317471687
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1412

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Book Description
Spanning the era from the end of Reconstruction (1877) to 1920, the entries of this reference were chosen with attention to the people, events, inventions, political developments, organizations, and other forces that led to significant changes in the U.S. in that era. Seventeen initial stand-alone essays describe as many themes.

The Trouble in Room 519

The Trouble in Room 519 PDF Author: Thomas Aiello
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807176036
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
At approximately seven o’clock in the evening on May 7, 1950, Gordon Malherbe Hillman filled an empty bottle with water, capped it, and walked into his mother’s room in the pair’s fifth-floor suite at Boston’s luxurious Copley Plaza Hotel. He then edged up behind the semi-invalid woman and bludgeoned her to death. Hotel staff had planned to evict the two the following day after several weeks of unpaid rent. Mounting debts had finally broken the fifty-year-old Hillman, a now-struggling author of mixed success, but it had not always been that way, as Thomas Aiello shows in his study of the life and work of this forgotten midcentury figure. As a youth, Hillman attended the prestigious Noble and Greenough School near Boston. Pursuing a career as a writer, he published several dozen pieces of short fiction and a critically acclaimed novel, Fortune’s Cup (1941). Hollywood studios purchased the rights to two of his stories and made them into films, The Great Man Votes (1939) and Here I Am a Stranger (1940). But Hillman remained, for the most part, a middling magazine writer like the majority of fiction authors working during the Depression. Although most did not resort to acts of manic violence, Hillman’s tenuous position in literary circles, along with his gradual descent into financial ruin, proved a far more common tale than the stories of literary success often pored over by critics and historians of this period. In The Trouble in Room 519: Money, Matricide, and Marginal Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century, Aiello weaves a compelling true crime narrative into his exploration of the economics of magazine fiction and the strains placed on authors by the publishing industry prior to World War II. Examining Hillman’s writing as exemplary of Depression-era popular fiction, Aiello includes eight stories written by Hillman and originally published in prominent midcentury American magazines, including Collier’s, Liberty, and McCall’s, to provide additional context and insight into this trying time and tragic life.

The Forgotten Man

The Forgotten Man PDF Author: Andrew R. Parnell
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820367605
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
The Forgotten Man is a biography of Walter Hines Page (1855–1918), a turn of the nineteenth-century North Carolinian writer, newspaper and magazine editor, political and educational reformer, and U.S. ambassador to Britain during the first World War. Page stood up to self-serving Southern politicians, helped defeat the antebellum myth entrenched in the legacy of slavery, was one of America's preeminent magazine editors, and campaigned for public school systems in the South. Andrew R. Parnell’s biography sheds new light on Page’s quest to improve the lives of fellow Americans, particularly those living in the South. For many, improvement and opportunity were impeded by the question of race in the South. Parnell contends that Page’s position on race was not as “complex” as is often implied; it was very simple: He believed in people as people regardless of race. Page was relentless in advocating for practical, proven solutions, often in the face of great resistance and criticism. In 1897he delivered his seminal Forgotten Man speech which emphasized that nothing (class, economic means, race, nor religion) should be a barrier to education; this speech was a catalyst for the transformation of education in the South. Page championed equality, universal education, and industrialization across the South, and his legacy includes laying the foundation for North Carolina State University. Page also profoundly influenced American culture in the early-twentieth century during his tenure at several national periodicals, most notably the Forum and the Atlantic, and then his own magazine, the World’s Work. Having established a national reputation as a defender of democracy, Page was asked by President Woodrow Wilson to serve as ambassador to Britain. Page’s actions during the War have wrongly attracted significant criticism, but Parnell shows how Page was looking out for America’s interests. Throughout his life, Page showed that democracy was not based on the idea that some people were born for labor and others were born to live luxuriously—but that all were free to strive for self-improvement.

The Life of Henry James

The Life of Henry James PDF Author: Peter Collister
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119483077
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 487

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Book Description
Discover anew the life and influence of Henry James, part of the acclaimed Wiley Blackwell Critical Biographies series. In The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, Peter Collister, an established critic and authority on Henry James, offers an original and fully documented account of one of America’s finest writers, who was both a creative practitioner and theorist of the novel. In this volume, James’s life in all its personal and cultural richness is examined alongside a detailed scrutiny of his fiction, essays, biographies, autobiographies, travel writing, plays and reviews. James was a dedicated and brilliant letter-writer and his biographer make judicious use of this material, some of it previously unpublished, evoking in the novelist’s own words the society within which he moved and worked. His gift for friendship, often resulting in close relationships with both men and women, are sensitively explored. Near the beginning of his long and highly productive life, James left America to immerse himself in European culture and history – a necessity, he felt, for the developing artist. In an ironic symmetry he witnessed in his youth the effects of the American Civil War and in his last days, finally becoming a British citizen, despaired at the unfolding tragedy of the Great War in Europe. Sustained, nevertheless, by his own creative energy, he never ceased to believe in the capacity of the arts to enhance and give significance to life. Provides well-informed accounts of Henry James’s youth in New York City, his unconventional education, his extensive travel in Europe, his eventual assimilation into British society, his development as a writer and his personal relationships as a single man. Features discussions of James’s major works in a variety of genres from an assured theoretical and historical perspective. Assesses James’s developing quest for dramatic form in his fiction – the ‘scenic art’ – as well as his critical writing which was to have a lasting influence on the literature and aesthetic values of the twentieth century. Discusses his achieved aspiration to be ‘just literary’, to become what he called that ‘queer monster’, an artist. Charts James’s lifelong interest in art and theatre. An incisive discussion of the life of an author of major stature, The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography offers a refreshingly lucid and human account of a novelist and his often challenging, but rewarding, writing. Peter Collister, a former college Assistant Principal, has published many essays in Europe and America on a range of nineteenth-century British and French authors. He is the author of Writing the Self: Henry James and America and later edited for the university presses of Cambridge and Virginia the award-winning volumes: The Complete Writings of Henry James on Art and Drama, James's autobiographical writings, A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother, and The Middle Years, as well as The American Scene.

A Power to Translate the World

A Power to Translate the World PDF Author: David LaRocca
Publisher: Dartmouth College Press
ISBN: 1611688302
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description


More Than Meets the Eye

More Than Meets the Eye PDF Author: Herbert Rowland
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838640920
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Americans and other English speakers have long associated the name of Hans Christian Andersen exclusively with fairy tales for children. Danes and other Scandinavians, however, have preserved an awareness that the fairy tales are but part of an extensive and respectable lifework that embraces several other literary forms. Moreover, they have never lost sight of the fact that the fairy tales themselves address adults no less than children. Significantly, many of Andersen's coevals in the U.S. knew of his broader literary activity and the sophistication of his fairy tales. Major authors and critics commented on his various works in leading magazines and books, establishing a noteworthy corpus of criticism. One of them, Horace E. Scudder, wrote a seminal essay that surpassed virtually all contemporary writing on him in any language. The basic purpose of this study, the first of its kind, is to trace the course of American Andersen criticism over the second half of the nineteenth century and to view it in several American contexts.

The Grand Chorus of Complaint

The Grand Chorus of Complaint PDF Author: Michael J. Everton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199924252
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
An engaging study of authorship, ethics, and book publishing in 18th- and 19th-century America, The Grand Chorus of Complaint considers the uneasy relationship between art and commerce with readings of correspondence, newspaper articles, and works by Thomas Paine, Herman Melville, and Fanny Fern.

Kiddie Lit

Kiddie Lit PDF Author: Beverly Lyon Clark
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801881701
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Honor Book for the 2005 Book Award given by the Children's Literature Association The popularity of the Harry Potter books among adults and the critical acclaim these young adult fantasies have received may seem like a novel literary phenomenon. In the nineteenth century, however, readers considered both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as works of literature equally for children and adults; only later was the former relegated to the category of "boys' books" while the latter, even as it was canonized, came frequently to be regarded as unsuitable for young readers. Adults—women and men—wept over Little Women. And America's most prestigious literary journals regularly reviewed books written for both children and their parents. This egalitarian approach to children's literature changed with the emergence of literary studies as a scholarly discipline at the turn of the twentieth century. Academics considered children's books an inferior literature and beneath serious consideration. In Kiddie Lit, Beverly Lyon Clark explores the marginalization of children's literature in America—and its recent possible reintegration—both within the academy and by the mainstream critical establishment. Tracing the reception of works by Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, L. Frank Baum, Walt Disney, and J. K. Rowling, Clark reveals fundamental shifts in the assessment of the literary worth of books beloved by both children and adults, whether written for boys or girls. While uncovering the institutional underpinnings of this transition, Clark also attributes it to changing American attitudes toward childhood itself, a cultural resistance to the intrinsic value of childhood expressed through sentimentality, condescension, and moralizing. Clark's engaging and enlightening study of the critical disregard for children's books since the end of the nineteenth century—which draws on recent scholarship in gender, cultural, and literary studies— offers provocative new insights into the history of both children's literature and American literature in general, and forcefully argues that the books our children read and love demand greater respect.