The Moral Picturesque

The Moral Picturesque PDF Author: Darrel Abel
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 9780911198911
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
The book is a collection of fourteen essays by Abel on Hawthorne's fiction. The essays were published over a span of about thirty-five years in various scholarly journals. The author has revised some of these essays considerably and has added seven chapters to give the book continuity and unity. Abel studies two characteristics, besides the classic elegance of its style, that distinguish Hawthorne's fiction. One characteristic is Hawthorne's habitual use of a psychological approach to its subjects. He assumed an absolute of archetypal human experiences enacting a providentially directed drama of which he had an uncertain knowledge through sympathy with characters assuming primordial roles. The other characteristic was Hawthorne's use of the mode that he called "the moral picturesque." This was a mode of figuration of the archetypal experiences that his psychological preoccupations discovered. His sensibility penetrated more deeply than his often banal thought, and the picturesque mode enabled him to cognize perceptions that were not reducible to explicit statement. In all his work he was preoccupied with two concerns: how the ideal appears in the real world, and the distinction and relation of the sexes. He saw in both these concerns paradoxes of opposition and affinity. He dealt with these paradoxes, not as subjects of philosophical speculation, but as matters for artistic treatment. In fact, he thought that the problems of relation posed by these paradoxes were insoluble, and his sole concerns was to present them vividly and dramatically.

The Moral Picturesque

The Moral Picturesque PDF Author: Darrel Abel
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 9780911198911
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
The book is a collection of fourteen essays by Abel on Hawthorne's fiction. The essays were published over a span of about thirty-five years in various scholarly journals. The author has revised some of these essays considerably and has added seven chapters to give the book continuity and unity. Abel studies two characteristics, besides the classic elegance of its style, that distinguish Hawthorne's fiction. One characteristic is Hawthorne's habitual use of a psychological approach to its subjects. He assumed an absolute of archetypal human experiences enacting a providentially directed drama of which he had an uncertain knowledge through sympathy with characters assuming primordial roles. The other characteristic was Hawthorne's use of the mode that he called "the moral picturesque." This was a mode of figuration of the archetypal experiences that his psychological preoccupations discovered. His sensibility penetrated more deeply than his often banal thought, and the picturesque mode enabled him to cognize perceptions that were not reducible to explicit statement. In all his work he was preoccupied with two concerns: how the ideal appears in the real world, and the distinction and relation of the sexes. He saw in both these concerns paradoxes of opposition and affinity. He dealt with these paradoxes, not as subjects of philosophical speculation, but as matters for artistic treatment. In fact, he thought that the problems of relation posed by these paradoxes were insoluble, and his sole concerns was to present them vividly and dramatically.

On the Beautiful, the Picturesque, the Sublime

On the Beautiful, the Picturesque, the Sublime PDF Author: John Gibson Macvicar
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Aesthetics
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description


American Picturesque

American Picturesque PDF Author: John Conron
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271042732
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
"American Picturesque offers a magisterial account of the concept of the picturesque and its manifestation in many aspects of nineteenth-century American life. Conron's study ranges over the entire phenomenon, tracing the development of the picturesque aesthetic in genre, landscape, and topographical painting, rural cottages and villas."--BOOK JACKET.

The Politics of the Picturesque

The Politics of the Picturesque PDF Author: Stephen Copley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521441137
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Essays on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ways of looking at landscape, in theory and practice.

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe PDF Author: James M. Hutchisson
Publisher: University of Delaware
ISBN: 1611490693
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Most frequently regarded as a writer of the supernatural, Poe was actually among the most versatile of American authors, writing social satire, comic hoaxes, mystery stories, science fiction, prose poems, literary criticism and theory, and even a play. As a journalist and editor, Poe was closely in touch with the social, political, and cultural trends of nineteenth-century America. Recent scholarship has linked Poe's imaginative writings to the historical realities of nineteenth-century America, including to science and technology, wars and politics, the cult of death and bereavement, and, most controversially, to slavery and stereotyped attitudes toward women. Edgar Allan Poe: Beyond Gothicism presents a systematic approach to topical criticism of Poe, revealing a new portrait of Poe as an author who blended topics of intellectual and social importance and returned repeatedly to these ideas in different works and using different aesthetic strategies during his brief but highly productive career. Twelve essays point readers toward new ways of considering Poe's themes, techniques, and aesthetic preoccupations by looking at Poe in the context of landscapes, domestic interiors, slavery, prosody, Eastern cultures, optical sciences, Gothicism, and literary competitions, clubs, and reviewing.

The Picturesque, The Sublime, The Beautiful: Visual Artistry in the Works of Charlotte Smith (1749-1806)

The Picturesque, The Sublime, The Beautiful: Visual Artistry in the Works of Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) PDF Author: Valerie Derbyshire
Publisher: Vernon Press
ISBN: 1622737466
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
This book considers the relationships between British Romantic-era novelist, poet and writer of educational works for children, Charlotte Smith (1749-1806), and a number of visual artists of the eighteenth century with whom she had connections. By exploring these associations with artists such as George Smith of Chichester, George Romney, James Northcote, John Raphael Smith and Emma Smith, the book demonstrates how the artwork of these individual artists influenced Charlotte Smith’s literary corpus. It also shows a mutual influence: how the literary works of Charlotte Smith impacted the corpora of these artists. This study uncovers information which was not heretofore known regarding these artists: it reveals a mistaken attribution of a sketch which accompanied the second volume of Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (1797) and sheds light on a print, held by the British Museum, which was previously shrouded in mystery. The artworks also enhance the existing scholarly knowledge about Smith’s biography. This book analyses the tropes and motifs employed by Smith’s artist-associates in the context of the popular aesthetics of the period and undertakes parallel readings between such visual artistry and Smith’s literary works. The book deliberates on how Smith utilises these aesthetics as narrative devices, making use of the tropes of the picturesque, the sublime and the beautiful, as well as that of a national British heraldic artwork, in order to produce and enhance meaning in her literary oeuvre. Thus, Smith uses aesthetic structures as vehicles for social critique, commentating on political, gender, moral and class concerns in addition to enhancing the perceived authenticity of her own artistry. The scholarship aims to correct the common misperception that Smith was a lonely marginal figure of Romanticism and instead asserts her central position in an enormous network of key artistic figures of British Romanticism.

Pictures of Poverty

Pictures of Poverty PDF Author: Lydia Jakobs
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0861969855
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
From Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist to George Sims's How the Poor Live, illustrated accounts of poverty were en vogue in Victorian Britain. Poverty was also a popular subject on the screen, whether in dramatic retellings of well-known stories or in 'documentary' photographs taken in the slums. London and its street life were the preferred setting for George Robert Sims's rousing ballads and the numerous magic lantern slide series and silent films based on them. Sims was a popular journalist and dramatist, whose articles, short stories, theatre plays and ballads discussed overcrowding, drunkenness, prostitution and child poverty in dramatic and heroic episodes from the lives and deaths of the poor. Richly illustrated and drawing from many previously unknown sources, Pictures of Poverty is a comprehensive account of the representation of poverty throughout the Victorian period, whether disseminated in newspapers, illustrated books and lectures, presented on the theatre stage or projected on the screen in magic lantern and film performances. Detailed case studies reveal the intermedial context of these popular pictures of poverty and their mobility across genres. With versatile author George R. Sims as the starting point, this study explores the influence of visual media in historical discourses about poverty and the highly controversial role of the Victorian state in poor relief.

The Philosophy of Literary Amateurism

The Philosophy of Literary Amateurism PDF Author: Naomi Lebowitz
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 9780826209702
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
In this coherent, intense study, Naomi Lebowitz defines and explores what she calls "the philosophy of literary amateurism." With expert readings of the works of major international writers of the Western tradition, Lebowitz passionately argues that all great writing is guided by a moral complexity and richness. Lebowitz defines literary amateurism as an attitude of anti-professionalism that allows a writer to explore and represent experience with complexity and moral fluidity. Citing Montaigne as the father of this philosophy, Lebowitz explores the work of such followers of Montaigne as Emerson, Balzac, Dickens, Henry James, Conrad, William James, Santayana, Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, and Italo Svevo, comparing their work to that of more self-consciously professional writers like Flaubert, Taine, Rousseau, and Proust. In a hyper-professional age of criticism marked by formulaic and political dictition and syntax, Lebowitz tries to recover the amateur perspective naturally carried by great literature's form and play. The Philosophy of Literary Amateurism makes a lasting contribution to the recovery of more generous relations between life and literature.

Herman Melville

Herman Melville PDF Author: John Bryant
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119072697
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1392

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Book Description
A comprehensive exploration of Melville’s formative years, providing a new biographical foundation for today’s generations of Melville readers Herman Melville: A Half Known Life, Volumes 1 and 2, follows Herman Melville’s life from early childhood to his astonishing emergence as a bestselling novelist with the publication of Typee in 1846. These volumes comprise the first half of a comprehensive biography on Melville, grounded in archival research, new scholarship, and incisive critical readings. Author John Bryant, a distinguished Melville scholar, editor, critic, and educator, traces the events and experiences that shaped the many-stranded consciousness of one of literature’s greatest writers. This in-depth and innovative biography covers Melville’s family history and literary friendships, his father-longing, god-hunger, and search for the hidden nature of Being, the genesis of his liberal politics, his empathy for African Americans, Native Americans, Polynesians, South Americans, and immigrants. Original perspectives on Melville’s earliest identities—orphaned son, sibling, farmer, teacher, debater, lover, actor, sailor—provide the context for Melville’s evolution as a writer. The biography presents new information regarding Melville’s reading, his early orations and acting experience, his life at sea and on the road, and the unsettling death of his older, rival brother from mercury poisoning. It provides insights on experiences such as Melville’s trauma at the loss of his father, his learning to write amidst a coterie siblings, his struggles to find work during economic depression, his journey West, his life in whaling and in the navy, and his vagabondage in the South Pacific during the moment of American and European imperial incursions. A significant addition to Melville scholarship, this important biographical work: Explores the nature and development of Melville’s creative consciousness, through the lens of his revisions in manuscript and print Assesses Melville’s sexual growth and exploration of the spectrum of his masculinities Highlights Melville’s relevance in contemporary democratic society Discusses Melville’s blending of dark humor and tragedy in his unique version of the picturesque Examines the ‘replaying’ of Melville’s life traumas throughout his entire works, from Typee, Omoo, Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, Pierre, Israel Potter, and The Confidence-Man to his shorter works, including “Bartleby,” his epic Clarel, his poetry, and his last novella Billy Budd Covers such cultural and historical events as the American revolution of his grandparents, the whaling industry, New York slavery, street life and theater in Manhattan, the transatlantic slave trade, the Jacksonian economy, Indian removal, Pacific colonialism, and westward expansion Written in an engaging style for scholars and general readers alike, Herman Melville: A Half Known Life, Volumes 1 and 2 is an indispensable new source of information and insights for those interested in Melville, 19th-century and modern literature and culture, and readers of general American history and literary culture.

Keywords for Travel Writing Studies

Keywords for Travel Writing Studies PDF Author: Charles Forsdick
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1783089237
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Keywords for Travel Writing Studies draws on the notion of the ‘keyword’ as initially elaborated by Raymond Williams in his seminal 1976 text Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society to present 100 concepts central to the study of travel writing as a literary form. Each entry in the volume is around 1,000 words, the style more essayistic than encyclopaedic, with contributors reflecting on their chosen keyword from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The emphasis on travelogues and other cultural representations of mobility drawn from a range of national and linguistic traditions ensures that the volume has a comparative dimension; the aim is to give an overview of each term in its historical and theoretical complexity, providing readers with a clear sense of how the selected words are essential to a critical understanding of travel writing. Each entry is complemented by an annotated bibliography of five essential items suggesting further reading.