The Poetics of National and Racial Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

The Poetics of National and Racial Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature PDF Author: John D. Kerkering
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139440985
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
John D. Kerkering's study examines the literary history of racial and national identity in nineteenth-century America. Kerkering argues that writers such as DuBois, Lanier, Simms, and Scott used poetic effects to assert the distinctiveness of certain groups in a diffuse social landscape. Kerkering explores poetry's formal properties, its sound effects, as they intersect with the issues of race and nation. He shows how formal effects, ranging from meter and rhythm to alliteration and melody, provide these writers with evidence of a collective identity, whether national or racial. Through this shared reliance on formal literary effects, national and racial identities, Kerkering shows, are related elements of a single literary history. This is the story of how poetic effects helped to define national identities in Anglo-America as a step toward helping to define racial identities within the United States. This highly original study will command a wide audience of Americanists.

The Poetics of National and Racial Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

The Poetics of National and Racial Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature PDF Author: John D. Kerkering
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139440985
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 367

Get Book Here

Book Description
John D. Kerkering's study examines the literary history of racial and national identity in nineteenth-century America. Kerkering argues that writers such as DuBois, Lanier, Simms, and Scott used poetic effects to assert the distinctiveness of certain groups in a diffuse social landscape. Kerkering explores poetry's formal properties, its sound effects, as they intersect with the issues of race and nation. He shows how formal effects, ranging from meter and rhythm to alliteration and melody, provide these writers with evidence of a collective identity, whether national or racial. Through this shared reliance on formal literary effects, national and racial identities, Kerkering shows, are related elements of a single literary history. This is the story of how poetic effects helped to define national identities in Anglo-America as a step toward helping to define racial identities within the United States. This highly original study will command a wide audience of Americanists.

The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics

The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics PDF Author: John D. Kerkering
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108841899
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
This volume addresses the political contexts in which nineteenth-century American literature was conceived, consumed, and criticized. It shows how a variety of literary genres and forms, such as poetry, drama, fiction, oratory, and nonfiction, engaged with political questions and participated in political debate.

Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature PDF Author: Marianne Noble
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108481337
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
The book analyzes the evolution of antebellum literary explorations of sympathy and human contact in the 1850s and 1860s. It will appeal to undergraduates and scholars seeking new approaches to canonical American authors, psychological theorists of sympathy and empathy, and philosophers of moral philosophy.

The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry

The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry PDF Author: Kerry C. Larson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052176369X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
The first critical collection of its kind devoted solely to this subject, this Companion covers both well-known and lesser-known poets.

The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature PDF Author: Justine S. Murison
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139497634
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
For much of the nineteenth century, the nervous system was a medical mystery, inspiring scientific studies and exciting great public interest. Because of this widespread fascination, the nerves came to explain the means by which mind and body related to each other. By the 1830s, the nervous system helped Americans express the consequences on the body, and for society, of major historical changes. Literary writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe, used the nerves as a metaphor to re-imagine the role of the self amidst political, social and religious tumults, including debates about slavery and the revivals of the Second Great Awakening. Representing the 'romance' of the nervous system and its cultural impact thoughtfully and, at times, critically, the fictional experiments of this century helped construct and explore a neurological vision of the body and mind. Murison explains the impact of neurological medicine on nineteenth-century literature and culture.

American Literature and Immediacy

American Literature and Immediacy PDF Author: Heike Schaefer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108487386
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Demonstrates that the quest for immediacy, or experiences of direct connection and presence, has propelled the development of American literature and media culture.

Postwar American Fiction and the Rise of Modern Conservatism

Postwar American Fiction and the Rise of Modern Conservatism PDF Author: Bryan M. Santin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108974236
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Bryan M. Santin examines over a half-century of intersection between American fiction and postwar conservatism. He traces the shifting racial politics of movement conservatism to argue that contemporary perceptions of literary form and aesthetic value are intrinsically connected to the rise of the American Right. Instead of casting postwar conservatives as cynical hustlers or ideological fanatics, Santin shows how the long-term rhetorical shift in conservative notions of literary value and prestige reveal an aesthetic antinomy between high culture and low culture. This shift, he argues, registered and mediated the deeper foundational antinomy structuring postwar conservatism itself: the stable social order of traditionalism and the creative destruction of free-market capitalism. Postwar conservatives produced, in effect, an ambivalent double register in the discourse of conservative literary taste that sought to celebrate neo-aristocratic manifestations of cultural capital while condemning newer, more progressive manifestations revolving around racial and ethnic diversity.

Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels

Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels PDF Author: Dale M. Bauer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108486541
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
Recovers the careers of four US women serial writers, and establishes a new archive for American literary studies.

Wild Abandon

Wild Abandon PDF Author: Alexander Menrisky
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108905269
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
The American wilderness narrative, which divides nature from culture, has remained remarkably persistent despite the rise of ecological science, which emphasizes interconnection between these spheres. Wild Abandon considers how ecology's interaction with radical politics of authenticity in the twentieth century has kept that narrative alive in altered form. As ecology gained political momentum in the 1960s and 1970s, many environmentalists combined it with ideas borrowed from psychoanalysis and a variety of identity-based social movements. The result was an identity politics of ecology that framed ecology itself as an authentic identity position repressed by cultural forms, including social differences and even selfhood. Through readings of texts by Edward Abbey, Simon Ortiz, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Jon Krakauer, among others, Alexander Menrisky argues that writers have both dramatized and critiqued this tendency, in the process undermining the concept of authenticity altogether and granting insight into alternative histories of identity and environment.

American Literature and American Identity

American Literature and American Identity PDF Author: Patrick Colm Hogan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000062023
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
American Literature and American Identity addresses the crucial issue of identity formation, especially national identity, in influential works of American literature. Patrick Colm Hogan uses techniques of cognitive and affective science to examine the complex and often highly ambivalent treatment of American identity in works by Melville, Cooper, Sedgwick, Apess, Stowe, Jacobs, Douglass, Hawthorne, Poe, and Judith Sargeant Murray. Hogan focuses on the issue of how authors imagined American identity—specifically, as universal, democratic egalitarianism—in the face of the nation’s clear and often brutal inequalities of race and sex. In the course of this study, Hogan advances our understanding of nationalism in general, American identity in particular, and the widely read literary works he examines.