The Worthy Gentleman of Democracy: John William De Forest and the American Dream

The Worthy Gentleman of Democracy: John William De Forest and the American Dream PDF Author: Frank Bergmann
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Aristocracy (Political science) in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 120

Get Book Here

Book Description

The Worthy Gentleman of Democracy: John William De Forest and the American Dream

The Worthy Gentleman of Democracy: John William De Forest and the American Dream PDF Author: Frank Bergmann
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Aristocracy (Political science) in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 120

Get Book Here

Book Description


Handbook of the American Novel of the Nineteenth Century

Handbook of the American Novel of the Nineteenth Century PDF Author: Christine Gerhardt
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110481324
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 586

Get Book Here

Book Description
This handbook offers students and researchers a compact introduction to the nineteenth-century American novel in the light of current debates, theoretical concepts, and critical methodologies. The volume turns to the nineteenth century as a formative era in American literary history, a time that saw both the rise of the novel as a genre, and the emergence of an independent, confident American culture. A broad range of concise essays by European and American scholars demonstrates how some of America‘s most well-known and influential novels responded to and participated in the radical transformations that characterized American culture between the early republic and the age of imperial expansion. Part I consists of 7 systematic essays on key historical and critical frameworks ― including debates aboutrace and citizenship, transnationalism, environmentalism and print culture, as well as sentimentalism, romance and the gothic, realism and naturalism. Part II provides 22 essays on individual novels, each combining an introduction to relevant cultural contexts with a fresh close reading and the discussion of critical perspectives shaped by literary and cultural theory.

"...the real war will never get in the books"

Author: Louis P. Masur
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199726868
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Get Book Here

Book Description
"These thousands, and tens and twenties of thousands of American young men, badly wounded, all sorts of wounds, operated on, pallid with diarrhea, languishing, dying with fever, pneumonia, &c. open a new world somehow to me, giving closer insights, new things, exploring deeper mines than any yet, showing our humanity, (I sometimes put myself in fancy in the cot, with typhoid, or under the knife,) tried by terrible, fearfulest tests, probed deepest, the living soul's, the body's tragedies, bursting the petty bounds of art." So wrote Walt Whitman in March of 1863, in a letter telling friends in New York what he had witnessed in Washington's war hospitals. In this, we see both a description of war's ravages and a major artist's imaginative response to the horrors of war as it "bursts the petty bounds of art." In "...the real war will never get in the books", Louis Masur has brought together fourteen of the most eloquent and articulate writers of the Civil War period, including such major literary figures as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Henry Adams, and Louisa May Alcott. Drawing on a wide range of material, including diaries, letters, and essays, Masur captures the reactions of these writers as the war was waged, providing a broad spectrum of views. Emerson, for instance, sees the war "come as a frosty October, which shall restore intellectual & moral power to these languid & dissipated populations." African-American writer Charlotte Forten writes sadly of the slaughter at Fort Wagner: "It seems very, very hard that the best and noblest must be the earliest called away. Especially has it been so throughout this dreadful war." There are writings by soldiers in combat. John Esten Cooke, a writer of popular pre-Revolutionary romances serving as a Confederate soldier under J.E.B. Stuart, describes Stonewall Jackson's uniform: "It was positively scorched by sun--had that dingy hue, the product of sun and rain, and contact with the ground...but the men of the old Stonewall Brigade loved that coat." And John De Forest, a Union officer, describes facing a Confederate volley: "It was a long rattle like that which a boy makes in running with a stick along a picket-fence, only vastly louder; and at the same time the sharp, quiet whit-whit of bullets chippered close to our ears." And along the way, we sample many vivid portraits of the era, perhaps the most surprising of which is Louisa May Alcott's explanation of why she preferred her noon-to-midnight schedule in a Washington hospital: "I like it as it leaves me time for a morning run which is what I need to keep well....I trot up & down the streets in all directions, some times to the Heights, then half way to Washington, again to the hill over which the long trains of army wagons are constantly vanishing & ambulances appearing. That way the fighting lies, & I long to follow." With unmatched intimacy and immediacy, "...the real war will never get in the books" illuminates the often painful intellectual and emotional efforts of fourteen accomplished writers as they come to grips with "The American Apocalypse."

Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secessions to Loyalty

Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secessions to Loyalty PDF Author: John W. De Forest
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780140437577
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 548

Get Book Here

Book Description
More panoramic in scope and more realistic in its details than Crane's Red Badge of Courage, this is one of the first and best novels ever written about the American Civil War Drawing on his own combat experience with the Union forces, John W. De Forest crafted a war novel like nothing before it in the annals of American literature. His first-hand knowledge of "the wilderness of death" made its way on to the pages of his riveting novel with devastating effect. Whether depicting the tedium before combat, the unspoken horror of battle, or the grisly butchery of the field hospital, De Forest broke new ground, anticipating the realistic war writings of Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, and Tim O'Brien. A commercial failure in its own day, De Forest's story was praised by Henry James and William Dean Howells, who, comparing it favorably to War and Peace, acclaimed the book "one of the best American novels ever written." For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

American Literary Realism, 1870-1910

American Literary Realism, 1870-1910 PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description


American National Biography

American National Biography PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 1052

Get Book Here

Book Description


Dissertations in English and American Literature

Dissertations in English and American Literature PDF Author: Lawrence Francis McNamee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Dissertations, Academic
Languages : en
Pages : 696

Get Book Here

Book Description


Reference Guide to American Literature

Reference Guide to American Literature PDF Author: Jim Kamp
Publisher: Saint James Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1264

Get Book Here

Book Description
Concise discussions of the lives and principal works of American writers, thinkers, and cultural figures, written by subject experts.

Critical Survey of Long Fiction

Critical Survey of Long Fiction PDF Author: Frank Northen Magill
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 520

Get Book Here

Book Description


International Books in Print

International Books in Print PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English imprints
Languages : en
Pages : 1140

Get Book Here

Book Description