The Frontier Roots of American Realism

The Frontier Roots of American Realism PDF Author: Gretchen Martin
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820488110
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
In the antebellum South, the «plain folk» maintained social norms, ideals of honor, justice, gender, and liberty that were significantly distinct from town and planter gentility, and the humorists of the Old South captured this important distinction. Southwest humor flourished from the 1830s through the Civil War and this book provides a thorough investigation of the unique and innovative contributions of these humorists to the field of American literary realism, such as use of vernacular authenticity, complex character portraits, and the narrative technique of disclosure. Thus, when the Southwest humorists «tell about the South, » they provide an endlessly entertaining and realistic representation of the vast complexities of the antebellum South and illustrate that the roots of literary realism were sown and nurtured on the southwestern frontier.

The Frontier Roots of American Realism

The Frontier Roots of American Realism PDF Author: Gretchen Martin
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820488110
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 152

Get Book

Book Description
In the antebellum South, the «plain folk» maintained social norms, ideals of honor, justice, gender, and liberty that were significantly distinct from town and planter gentility, and the humorists of the Old South captured this important distinction. Southwest humor flourished from the 1830s through the Civil War and this book provides a thorough investigation of the unique and innovative contributions of these humorists to the field of American literary realism, such as use of vernacular authenticity, complex character portraits, and the narrative technique of disclosure. Thus, when the Southwest humorists «tell about the South, » they provide an endlessly entertaining and realistic representation of the vast complexities of the antebellum South and illustrate that the roots of literary realism were sown and nurtured on the southwestern frontier.

Southern Frontier Humor

Southern Frontier Humor PDF Author: Ed Piacentino
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1617037699
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Since its inception in the early 1830s, southern frontier humor (also known as the humor of the Old Southwest) has had enduring appeal. The onset of the new millennium precipitated an impressive rejuvenation of scholarly interest. Southern Frontier Humor: New Approaches represents the next step in this revival, providing a series of essays with fresh perspectives and contexts. First, the book shows the importance of Henry Junius Nott, a virtually unknown and forgotten writer who mined many of the principal subjects, themes, tropes, and character types associated with southern frontier humor, followed by an essay addressing how this humor genre and its ideological impact helped to stimulate a national cultural revolution. Several essays focus on the genre's legacy to the post-Civil War era, exploring intersections between southern frontier humor and southern local color writers--Joel Chandler Harris, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Sherwood Bonner. Mark Twain's African American dialect piece "A True Story," though employing some of the conventions of southern frontier humor, is reexamined as a transitional text, showing his shift to broader concerns, particularly in race portraiture. Essays also examine the evolution of the trickster from the Jack Tales to Hooper's Simon Suggs to similar mountebanks in novels of John Kennedy Toole, Mark Childress, and Clyde Edgerton and transnational contexts, the latter exploring parallels between southern frontier humor and the Jamaican Anansi tales. Finally, the genre is situated contextually, using contemporary critical discourses, which are applied to G. W. Harris's Sut Lovingood and to various frontier hunting stories.

Downwardly Mobile

Downwardly Mobile PDF Author: Andrew Lawson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199828067
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
In the unstable economy of the nineteenth-century, few Americans could feel secure. Paper money made values less tangible, while a series of financial manias, panics, and depressions clouded everyday life with uncertainty and risk. In this groundbreaking study, Andrew Lawson traces the origins of American realism to a new structure of feeling: the desire of embattled and aspiring middle class for a more solid and durable reality. The story begins with New England authors Susan Warner and Rose Terry Cooke, whose gentry-class families became insolvent in the wake of the 1837 Panic, and moves to the western frontier, where the early careers of Rebecca Harding Davis and William Dean Howells were shaped by a constant struggle for social position and financial security. We see how the pull of downward social mobility affected even the outwardly successful, bourgeois family of Henry James in New York, while the drought-stricken wheat fields of Iowa and South Dakota produced the most militant American realist, Hamlin Garland. For these writers, realism offered to stabilize an uncertain world by capturing it with a new sharpness and accuracy. It also revealed a new cast of social actors-factory workers, slaves, farm laborers, the disabled, and the homeless, all victims of an unregulated market. Combining economic history and literary analysis to powerful effect, Downwardly Mobile shows how the fluctuating fortunes of the American middle class forced the emergence of a new kind of literature, while posing difficult political choices about how the middle class might remedy its precarious condition.

A Literary History of Mississippi

A Literary History of Mississippi PDF Author: Lorie Watkins
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496811925
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
With contributions by: Ted Atkinson, Robert Bray, Patsy J. Daniels, David A. Davis, Taylor Hagood, Lisa Hinrichsen, Suzanne Marrs, Greg O�Brien, Ted Ownby, Ed Piacentino, Claude Pruitt, Thomas J. Richardson, Donald M. Shaffer, Theresa M. Towner, Terrence T. Tucker, Daniel Cross Turner, Lorie Watkins, and Ellen Weinauer Mississippi is a study in contradictions. One of the richest states when the Civil War began, it emerged as possibly the poorest and remains so today. Geographically diverse, the state encompasses ten distinct landform regions. As people traverse these, they discover varying accents and divergent outlooks. They find pockets of inexhaustible wealth within widespread, grinding poverty. Yet the most illiterate, disadvantaged state has produced arguably the nation�s richest literary legacy. Why Mississippi? What does it mean to write in a state of such extremes? To write of racial and economic relations so contradictory and fraught as to defy any logic? Willie Morris often quoted William Faulkner as saying, �To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.� What Faulkner (or more likely Morris) posits is that Mississippi is not separate from the world. The country�s fascination with Mississippi persists because the place embodies the very conflicts that plague the nation. This volume examines indigenous literature, Southwest humor, slave narratives, and the literature of the Civil War. Essays on modern and contemporary writers and the state�s changing role in southern studies look at more recent literary trends, while essays on key individual authors offer more information on luminaries including Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams, and Margaret Walker. Finally, essays on autobiography, poetry, drama, and history span the creative breadth of Mississippi�s literature. Written by literary scholars closely connected to the state, the volume offers a history suitable for all readers interested in learning more about Mississippi�s great literary tradition.

The Word on the Streets

The Word on the Streets PDF Author: Brooks E. Hefner
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813940427
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
From the hard-boiled detective stories of Dashiell Hammett to the novels of Claude McKay, The Word on the Streets examines a group of writers whose experimentation with the vernacular argues for a rethinking of American modernism—one that cuts across traditional boundaries of class, race, and ethnicity. The dawn of the modernist era witnessed a transformation of popular writing that demonstrated an experimental practice rooted in the language of the streets. Emerging alongside more recognized strands of literary modernism, the vernacular modernism these writers exhibited lays bare the aesthetic experiments inherent in American working-class and ethnic language, forging an alternative pathway for American modernist practice. Brooks Hefner shows how writers across a variety of popular genres—from Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner to humorist Anita Loos and ethnic memoirist Anzia Yezierska—employed street slang to mount their own critique of genteel realism and its classist emphasis on dialect hierarchies, the result of which was a form of American experimental writing that resonated powerfully across the American cultural landscape of the 1910s and 1920s.

Twain’s Omissions

Twain’s Omissions PDF Author: Gretchen Martin
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443864366
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 125

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Book Description
Mark Twain utilized a unique literary device throughout his fiction by routinely omitting or suspending crucial information in terms of plot, character portraits, descriptive events, chronology, and other aspects from his texts. Twain often introduces characters with very few details regarding their personal histories; while, other information is withheld in terms of the narrative’s chronology or not addressed at all, thus producing gaps in the narrative. For example, Twain does not provide any significant information about the mothers of two of his most well-known characters, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, nor does he provide detailed information regarding Jim’s personal history, such as how and when he became Miss Watson’s property or specific information regarding the personal history of his relationship with his wife. There are also often substantial chronological gaps in the pace Twain utilizes. There are omissions of several years at a time in Pudd’nhead Wilson and No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, which also create gaps in the plot, particularly regarding information Twain refers to that occurred during the chronological gap, such as an account of the wedding between Morgan and Sandy in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Identifying and exploring gaps in the context of Twain’s fiction yields, as these essays demonstrate, overlooked or under-explored information, ironically generated out of these narrative omissions. The six essays included in this collection explore these issues in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, Pudd’nhead Wilson, “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg,” and Twain’s masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The authors draw from a wide range of theoretical and interpretive perspectives, ranging from reader-response theory to historical and culture studies.

Humor and Satire on Contemporary Television

Humor and Satire on Contemporary Television PDF Author: Silas Kaine Ezell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131711941X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
This book examines contemporary American animated humor, focusing on popular animated television shows in order to explore the ways in which they engage with American culture and history, employing a peculiarly American way of using humor to discuss important cultural issues. With attention to the work of American humorists, such as the Southwest humorists, Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, and Kurt Vonnegut, and the question of the extent to which modern animated satire shares the qualities of earlier humor, particularly the use of setting, the carnivalesque, collective memory, racial humor, and irony, Humor and Satire on Contemporary Television concentrates on a particular strand of American humor: the use of satire to expose the gap between the American ideal and the American experience. Taking up the notion of ’The Great American Joke’, the author examines the discursive humor of programmes such as The Simpsons, South Park , Family Guy , King of the Hill, Daria, American Dad!, The Boondocks, The PJs and Futurama . A study of how animated television programmes offer a new discourse on a very traditional strain of American humor, this book will appeal to scholars and students of popular culture, television and media studies, American literature and visual studies, and contemporary humor and satire.

American Realism

American Realism PDF Author: Gerry Souter
Publisher: Parkstone International
ISBN: 1783107677
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
Urban realism, snow-covered streets of New York, boxing matches, children on the banks of a river, the painters of the Ash Can School preferred realistic images. Their paintings are a true hymn to noise and sensations. This unconventional movement enabled the birth of a true national artistic identity which broke free from the establishment. The Ash Can School resolutely promoted the affirmation of the modernist current of American art. Edward Hopper, who was a student of Robert Henri, embraced the principles of this movement and brought them to another level.

White Liberal Identity, Literary Pedagogy, and Classic American Realism

White Liberal Identity, Literary Pedagogy, and Classic American Realism PDF Author: Phillip Barrish
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 0814210104
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
White Liberal Identity, Literary Pedagogy, and Classic American Realism brings literary works from the turn of the last century face to face with some of the dilemmas and paradoxes that currently define white liberal identity in the United States. Phillip Barrish develops fresh analytic and pedagogical tools for probing contemporary white liberalism, while also offering new critical insights and classroom approaches to American literary realism. New ground is broken by using bold close analysis of works by canonical American realist writers such as Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, and Kate Chopin. These contexts include an affirmative-action court case, the liberal arts classroom, and the "war on drugs," as well as current debates about the United States' role on the international scene. Invoking a methodology that he calls "critical presentism," Barrish's book offers a fresh response to that perennial classroom question, often posed most forcefully by students committed to progressive political agendas: why devote so much time and effort to detailed analyses of canonical American literature? This book makes specific contributions not only to American literary and cultural studies, but also to critical race theory, masculinity studies, and critical pedagogy. -- from back cover.

The Frontier Experience and the American Dream

The Frontier Experience and the American Dream PDF Author: David Mogen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Beyond the mountains that separated the English colonies from the Great Plains lay the frontier, which produced a set of images, attitudes, and assumptions that have shaped a peculiarly American literary heritage. The eighteen scholars represented here focus on the importance of frontier mythology to many American writers.