Author: Jonathan Arac
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674018693
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284
Book Description
In the mid-nineteenth century writers such as Hawthorne and Melville produced works of fiction that even today help define American literature. In this work of innovative literary history, Jonathan Arac explains what made this remarkable creativity possible and what it accomplished.
The Emergence of American Literary Narrative, 1820-1860
Author: Jonathan Arac
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674018693
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284
Book Description
In the mid-nineteenth century writers such as Hawthorne and Melville produced works of fiction that even today help define American literature. In this work of innovative literary history, Jonathan Arac explains what made this remarkable creativity possible and what it accomplished.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674018693
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284
Book Description
In the mid-nineteenth century writers such as Hawthorne and Melville produced works of fiction that even today help define American literature. In this work of innovative literary history, Jonathan Arac explains what made this remarkable creativity possible and what it accomplished.
Poe and the Subversion of American Literature
Author: Robert T. Tally Jr.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1623569206
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 167
Book Description
Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2014 In Poe and the Subversion of American Literature, Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that Edgar Allan Poe is best understood, not merely as a talented artist or canny magazinist, but primarily as a practical joker who employs satire and fantasy to poke fun at an emergent nationalist discourse circulating in the United States. Poe's satirical and fantastic mode, on display even in his apparently serious short stories and literary criticism, undermines the earnest attempts to establish a distinctively national literature in the nineteenth century. In retrospect, Poe's work also subtly subverts the tenets of an institutionalized American Studies in the twentieth century. Tally interprets Poe's life and works in light of his own social milieu and in relation to the disciplinary field of American literary studies, finding Poe to be neither the poète maudit of popular mythology nor the representative American writer revealed by recent scholarship. Rather, Poe is an untimely figure whose work ultimately makes a mockery of those who would seek to contain it. Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze's distinction between nomad thought and state philosophy, Tally argues that Poe's varied literary and critical writings represent an alternative to American literature. Through his satirical critique of U.S. national culture and his otherworldly projection of a postnational space of the imagination, Poe establishes a subterranean, nomadic, and altogether worldly literary practice.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1623569206
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 167
Book Description
Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2014 In Poe and the Subversion of American Literature, Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that Edgar Allan Poe is best understood, not merely as a talented artist or canny magazinist, but primarily as a practical joker who employs satire and fantasy to poke fun at an emergent nationalist discourse circulating in the United States. Poe's satirical and fantastic mode, on display even in his apparently serious short stories and literary criticism, undermines the earnest attempts to establish a distinctively national literature in the nineteenth century. In retrospect, Poe's work also subtly subverts the tenets of an institutionalized American Studies in the twentieth century. Tally interprets Poe's life and works in light of his own social milieu and in relation to the disciplinary field of American literary studies, finding Poe to be neither the poète maudit of popular mythology nor the representative American writer revealed by recent scholarship. Rather, Poe is an untimely figure whose work ultimately makes a mockery of those who would seek to contain it. Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze's distinction between nomad thought and state philosophy, Tally argues that Poe's varied literary and critical writings represent an alternative to American literature. Through his satirical critique of U.S. national culture and his otherworldly projection of a postnational space of the imagination, Poe establishes a subterranean, nomadic, and altogether worldly literary practice.
American Literature
Author: Hans Bertens
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135104654
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 493
Book Description
This comprehensive history of American Literature traces its development from the earliest colonial writings of the late 1500s through to the present day. This lively, engaging and highly accessible guide: offers lucid discussions of all major influences and movements such as Puritanism, Transcendentalism, Realism, Naturalism, Modernism and Postmodernism draws on the historical, cultural, and political contexts of key literary texts and authors covers the whole range of American literature: prose, poetry, theatre and experimental literature includes substantial sections on native and ethnic American literatures explains and contextualises major events, terms and figures in American history. This book is essential reading for anyone seeking to situate their reading of American Literature in the appropriate religious, cultural, and political contexts.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135104654
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 493
Book Description
This comprehensive history of American Literature traces its development from the earliest colonial writings of the late 1500s through to the present day. This lively, engaging and highly accessible guide: offers lucid discussions of all major influences and movements such as Puritanism, Transcendentalism, Realism, Naturalism, Modernism and Postmodernism draws on the historical, cultural, and political contexts of key literary texts and authors covers the whole range of American literature: prose, poetry, theatre and experimental literature includes substantial sections on native and ethnic American literatures explains and contextualises major events, terms and figures in American history. This book is essential reading for anyone seeking to situate their reading of American Literature in the appropriate religious, cultural, and political contexts.
The Cambridge History of the American Novel
Author: Leonard Cassuto
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316184439
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1271
Book Description
This ambitious literary history traces the American novel from its emergence in the late eighteenth century to its diverse incarnations in the multi-ethnic, multi-media culture of the present day. In a set of original essays by renowned scholars from all over the world, the volume extends important critical debates and frames new ones. Offering new views of American classics, it also breaks new ground to show the role of popular genres - such as science fiction and mystery novels - in the creation of the literary tradition. One of the original features of this book is the dialogue between the essays, highlighting cross-currents between authors and their works as well as across historical periods. While offering a narrative of the development of the genre, the History reflects the multiple methodologies that have informed readings of the American novel and will change the way scholars and readers think about American literary history.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316184439
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1271
Book Description
This ambitious literary history traces the American novel from its emergence in the late eighteenth century to its diverse incarnations in the multi-ethnic, multi-media culture of the present day. In a set of original essays by renowned scholars from all over the world, the volume extends important critical debates and frames new ones. Offering new views of American classics, it also breaks new ground to show the role of popular genres - such as science fiction and mystery novels - in the creation of the literary tradition. One of the original features of this book is the dialogue between the essays, highlighting cross-currents between authors and their works as well as across historical periods. While offering a narrative of the development of the genre, the History reflects the multiple methodologies that have informed readings of the American novel and will change the way scholars and readers think about American literary history.
American Literary Misfits
Author: D. Berton Emerson
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469678411
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 171
Book Description
The study of nineteenth-century American literature has long been tied up with the study of American democracy. Just as some regions in the United States are elevated to stand in for the whole nation—New England is a good example—D. Berton Emerson argues the same is true for American literature of the nineteenth century; a few canonical texts overrepresent the more motley history of American letters. Emerson examines an eclectic group of literary texts that have rarely, if ever, been considered representative of "the nation" because of their unseemly characters or plots, divergence from dominant literary trends of the era, or local particularity. These are his "literary misfits," authors and texts that show different forms of egalitarianism in action that existed outside and even against the dominant liberal narratives of American democracy. Emerson's unique contribution is revealing these texts and the people they represent as rich with political knowledge. This knowledge, he argues, finds its most potent expression in the local. Such texts show us a different kind of democratic politics: one that is egalitarian, disorderly, and radical rather than homogeneous.
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469678411
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 171
Book Description
The study of nineteenth-century American literature has long been tied up with the study of American democracy. Just as some regions in the United States are elevated to stand in for the whole nation—New England is a good example—D. Berton Emerson argues the same is true for American literature of the nineteenth century; a few canonical texts overrepresent the more motley history of American letters. Emerson examines an eclectic group of literary texts that have rarely, if ever, been considered representative of "the nation" because of their unseemly characters or plots, divergence from dominant literary trends of the era, or local particularity. These are his "literary misfits," authors and texts that show different forms of egalitarianism in action that existed outside and even against the dominant liberal narratives of American democracy. Emerson's unique contribution is revealing these texts and the people they represent as rich with political knowledge. This knowledge, he argues, finds its most potent expression in the local. Such texts show us a different kind of democratic politics: one that is egalitarian, disorderly, and radical rather than homogeneous.
Cultural History of Reading [2 volumes]
Author: Sara E. Quay
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313071675
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1083
Book Description
What is it about some books that makes them timeless? Cultural History of Reading looks at books from their earliest beginnings through the present day, in both the U.S. and regions all over the world. Not only fiction and literature, but religious works, dictionaries, scientific works, and home guides such as Mrs. Beeton's all have had an impact on not only their own time and place, but continue to capture the attention of readers today. Volume 1 examines the history of books in regions throughout the world, identifying both literature and nonfiction that was influenced by cultural events of its time. Volume 2 identifies books from the pre-colonial era to the present day that have had lasting significance in the United States. History students and book lovers alike will enjoy discovering the books that have impacted our world.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313071675
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1083
Book Description
What is it about some books that makes them timeless? Cultural History of Reading looks at books from their earliest beginnings through the present day, in both the U.S. and regions all over the world. Not only fiction and literature, but religious works, dictionaries, scientific works, and home guides such as Mrs. Beeton's all have had an impact on not only their own time and place, but continue to capture the attention of readers today. Volume 1 examines the history of books in regions throughout the world, identifying both literature and nonfiction that was influenced by cultural events of its time. Volume 2 identifies books from the pre-colonial era to the present day that have had lasting significance in the United States. History students and book lovers alike will enjoy discovering the books that have impacted our world.
John Neal and Nineteenth-century American Literature and Culture
Author: Edward Watts
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1611484200
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 355
Book Description
John Neal and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture is a critical reassessment of American novelist, editor, critic, and activist John Neal, arguing for his importance to the ongoing reassessment of the American Renaissance and the broader cultural history of the Nineteenth Century. Contributors (including scholars from the United States, Germany, England, Italy, and Israel) present Neal as an innovative literary stylist, penetrating cultural critic, pioneering regionalist, and vital participant in the business of letters in America over his sixty-year career.
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1611484200
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 355
Book Description
John Neal and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture is a critical reassessment of American novelist, editor, critic, and activist John Neal, arguing for his importance to the ongoing reassessment of the American Renaissance and the broader cultural history of the Nineteenth Century. Contributors (including scholars from the United States, Germany, England, Italy, and Israel) present Neal as an innovative literary stylist, penetrating cultural critic, pioneering regionalist, and vital participant in the business of letters in America over his sixty-year career.
A History of California Literature
Author: Blake Allmendinger
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316299074
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 445
Book Description
Blake Allmendinger's A History of California Literature surveys the paradoxical image of the Golden State as a site of dreams and disenchantment, formidable beginnings and ruinous ends. This history encompasses the prismatic nature of California by exploring a variety of historical periods, literary genres, and cultural movements affecting the state's development, from the colonial era to the twenty-first century. Written by a host of leading historians and literary critics, this book offers readers insight into the tensions and contradictions that have shaped the literary landscape of California and also American literature generally.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316299074
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 445
Book Description
Blake Allmendinger's A History of California Literature surveys the paradoxical image of the Golden State as a site of dreams and disenchantment, formidable beginnings and ruinous ends. This history encompasses the prismatic nature of California by exploring a variety of historical periods, literary genres, and cultural movements affecting the state's development, from the colonial era to the twenty-first century. Written by a host of leading historians and literary critics, this book offers readers insight into the tensions and contradictions that have shaped the literary landscape of California and also American literature generally.
Literature in the Making
Author: Nancy Glazener
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199390134
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 341
Book Description
In the eighteenth century, literature meant learned writings; by the twentieth century, literature had come to be identified with imaginative, aesthetically significant works, and academic literary studies had developed special protocols for interpreting and valuing literary texts. Literature in the Making examines what happened in between: how literature came to be more precisely specified and valued; how it was organized into genres, canons, and national traditions; and how it became the basis for departments of modern languages and literatures in research universities. Modern literature, the version of literature familiar today, was an international invention, but it was forged when literary cultures, traditions, and publishing industries were mainly organized nationally. Literature in the Making examines modern literature's coalescence and institutionalization in the United States, considered as an instructive instance of a phenomenon that was going global. Since modern literature initially offered a way to formulate the value of legacy texts by authors such as Homer, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, however, the development of literature and literary culture in the U.S. was fundamentally transnational. Literature in the Making argues that Shakespeare studies, one of the richest tracts of nineteenth-century U.S. literary culture, was a key domain in which literature came to be valued both for fuelling modern projects and for safeguarding values and practices that modernity put at risk-a foundational paradox that continues to shape literary studies and literary culture. Bringing together the histories of literature's competing conceptualizations, its print infrastructure, its changing status in higher education, and its life in public culture during the long nineteenth century, Literature in the Making offers a robust account of how and why literature mattered then and matters now. By highlighting the lively collaboration between academics and non-academics that prevailed before the ascendancy of the research university starkly divided experts from amateurs, Literature in the Making also opens new possibilities for envisioning how academics might partner with the reading public.
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199390134
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 341
Book Description
In the eighteenth century, literature meant learned writings; by the twentieth century, literature had come to be identified with imaginative, aesthetically significant works, and academic literary studies had developed special protocols for interpreting and valuing literary texts. Literature in the Making examines what happened in between: how literature came to be more precisely specified and valued; how it was organized into genres, canons, and national traditions; and how it became the basis for departments of modern languages and literatures in research universities. Modern literature, the version of literature familiar today, was an international invention, but it was forged when literary cultures, traditions, and publishing industries were mainly organized nationally. Literature in the Making examines modern literature's coalescence and institutionalization in the United States, considered as an instructive instance of a phenomenon that was going global. Since modern literature initially offered a way to formulate the value of legacy texts by authors such as Homer, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, however, the development of literature and literary culture in the U.S. was fundamentally transnational. Literature in the Making argues that Shakespeare studies, one of the richest tracts of nineteenth-century U.S. literary culture, was a key domain in which literature came to be valued both for fuelling modern projects and for safeguarding values and practices that modernity put at risk-a foundational paradox that continues to shape literary studies and literary culture. Bringing together the histories of literature's competing conceptualizations, its print infrastructure, its changing status in higher education, and its life in public culture during the long nineteenth century, Literature in the Making offers a robust account of how and why literature mattered then and matters now. By highlighting the lively collaboration between academics and non-academics that prevailed before the ascendancy of the research university starkly divided experts from amateurs, Literature in the Making also opens new possibilities for envisioning how academics might partner with the reading public.
Glancing Visions
Author: Zachary Tavlin
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817360891
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257
Book Description
"The sweeping vantages that typify American landscape painting from the nineteenth century by Thomas Cole and other members of the Hudson School are often interpreted for their geopolitical connotations, as visual attempts to tame the wild, alleviating fears of a savage frontier through views that subdue the landscape to the eye. Zachary Tavlin's "Glancing Visions" challenges the long-standing assumption that visuality in nineteenth-century art and literature was inherently imperialistic or possessive. While there is much to be said for both material, economic, and theological impulses to clear the wilderness, superimpose a national identity, and usher in a Puritanical idyll, many literary figures of the era display a purposeful disdain for the "possessive gaze," signaling instead a preference for subtle glances, often informed by early photography, Impressionism, new techniques in portraiture, and, soon after, the dawn of cinema. The visual subjectivities and contingencies introduced by these media made room for a visual counter-narrative, one informed by a mode of seeing that moves fast and lightly across the surface of things. Tavlin probes Nathaniel Hawthorne's idea of the imagination, one that derives from both the camera obscura (in "The Custom House") and the daguerreotype (in The House of the Seven Gables), each in its way an instance of the "glance" and entirely dependent on temporal moments. The poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper toggles between gazes and glances, unsettling two competing forms of racialized seeing as they pertain to nineteenth-century Black life and racial hierarchies--the sentimental gaze and the slave trader's glance--highlighting the life-and-death stakes of both looking anyone squarely in the eye and looking away. Emily Dickinson's "certain slant of light," syntactical oddities, and her stitching of scraps and fragments into the fascicles that constitute her corpus all derive from a commitment to contingency, "the ungrounded life's only defense against the abyss of non-being." Tavlin investigates, as well, Henry James's vexed but entirely dependent relationship to literary and painterly impressionism, and William Carlos Williams's imagist poetics as a response to early cinema's use of the cut as the basis for a new visual grammar. Each of these literary artists, Tavlin argues--via their own distinctive sensibilities and the artistic or technological counterparts that informed them-refuse the authoritative, all-possessive gaze in favor of the glance, a mode of seeing, thinking, and being that made way for what we now think of as commonplace, namely modernity"--
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817360891
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257
Book Description
"The sweeping vantages that typify American landscape painting from the nineteenth century by Thomas Cole and other members of the Hudson School are often interpreted for their geopolitical connotations, as visual attempts to tame the wild, alleviating fears of a savage frontier through views that subdue the landscape to the eye. Zachary Tavlin's "Glancing Visions" challenges the long-standing assumption that visuality in nineteenth-century art and literature was inherently imperialistic or possessive. While there is much to be said for both material, economic, and theological impulses to clear the wilderness, superimpose a national identity, and usher in a Puritanical idyll, many literary figures of the era display a purposeful disdain for the "possessive gaze," signaling instead a preference for subtle glances, often informed by early photography, Impressionism, new techniques in portraiture, and, soon after, the dawn of cinema. The visual subjectivities and contingencies introduced by these media made room for a visual counter-narrative, one informed by a mode of seeing that moves fast and lightly across the surface of things. Tavlin probes Nathaniel Hawthorne's idea of the imagination, one that derives from both the camera obscura (in "The Custom House") and the daguerreotype (in The House of the Seven Gables), each in its way an instance of the "glance" and entirely dependent on temporal moments. The poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper toggles between gazes and glances, unsettling two competing forms of racialized seeing as they pertain to nineteenth-century Black life and racial hierarchies--the sentimental gaze and the slave trader's glance--highlighting the life-and-death stakes of both looking anyone squarely in the eye and looking away. Emily Dickinson's "certain slant of light," syntactical oddities, and her stitching of scraps and fragments into the fascicles that constitute her corpus all derive from a commitment to contingency, "the ungrounded life's only defense against the abyss of non-being." Tavlin investigates, as well, Henry James's vexed but entirely dependent relationship to literary and painterly impressionism, and William Carlos Williams's imagist poetics as a response to early cinema's use of the cut as the basis for a new visual grammar. Each of these literary artists, Tavlin argues--via their own distinctive sensibilities and the artistic or technological counterparts that informed them-refuse the authoritative, all-possessive gaze in favor of the glance, a mode of seeing, thinking, and being that made way for what we now think of as commonplace, namely modernity"--