Toward an American Literary History of New National Narratives

Toward an American Literary History of New National Narratives PDF Author: Keiko Nitta
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 478

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Toward an American Literary History of New National Narratives

Toward an American Literary History of New National Narratives PDF Author: Keiko Nitta
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 478

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Book Description


American Literary History and the Turn toward Modernity

American Literary History and the Turn toward Modernity PDF Author: Melanie V. Dawson
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813052408
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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The years between 1880 and 1930 are usually seen as a time in which American writers departed from values and traditions of the Victorian era in wholly new works of modernist literature, with the turn of the century typically used as a dividing line between the old and the new. Challenging this periodization, contributors argue that this entire time span should instead be studied as a coherent and complex literary field. The essays in this volume show that these were years of experimentation, negotiation of boundaries, and hybridity—resulting in a true literature of transition. Contributors offer new readings of authors including Jack London, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser in light of their ties to both the nineteenth-century past and the emerging modernity of the twentieth century. Emphasizing the diversity of the literature of this time, contributors also examine poetry written by and for Native American students in a Westernized boarding school, the changing attitudes of authors toward marriage, turn-of-the-century feminism, dime novels, anthologies edited by late-nineteenth-century female literary historians, and fiction of the Harlem Renaissance. Calling for readers to look both forward and backward at the cultural contexts of these works and to be mindful of the elastic categories of this era, these essays demonstrate the plurality and the tensions characteristic of American literature during the century’s long turn. Contributors: Dale M. Bauer | Donna M. Campbell | Melanie Dawson | Myrto Drizou | Meredith Goldsmith | Karin Hooks | John G. Nichols | Kristen Renzi | Cristina Stanciu

A New Literary History of America

A New Literary History of America PDF Author: Greil Marcus
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781782683575
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages :

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A New Literary History of America contains essays on topics from the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoriccultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape.

Writers in Retrospect

Writers in Retrospect PDF Author: Claudia Stokes
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807877506
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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In the aftermath of America's centennial celebrations of 1876, readers developed an appetite for chronicles of the nation's past. Born amid this national vogue, the field of American literary history was touted as the balm for numerous "ills--from burgeoning immigration to American anti-intellectualism to demanding university administrators--and enjoyed immense popularity between 1880 and 1910. In the first major analysis of the field's early decades, Claudia Stokes offers important insights into the practices, beliefs, and values that shaped the emerging discipline and have continued to shape it for the last century. She considers particular personalities--including Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Dean Howells, Brander Matthews, and Mark Twain--and episodes that had a formative effect on American literary history as a discipline. Reexamining the field's deep attachment to the literature of antebellum New England, the periodization of the nineteenth century, and the omission of Native narratives, Stokes reveals the many forces, both inside and outside the academy, that propelled the rise of American literary history and persist as influences on the work of current practitioners of the field.

American Narratives

American Narratives PDF Author: Margaret Crumpton Winter
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807149543
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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American Narratives takes readers back to the turn of the twentieth century to reintroduce four writers of varying ethnic backgrounds whose works were mostly ignored by critics of their day. With the skill of a literary detective, Molly Crumpton Winter recovers an early multicultural discourse on assimilation and national belonging that has been largely overlooked by literary scholars. At the heart of the book are close readings of works by four nearly forgotten artists from 1890 to 1915, the era often termed the age of realism: Mary Antin, a Jewish American immigrant from Russia; Zitkala- a, a Sioux woman originally from South Dakota; Sutton E. Griggs, an African American from the South; and Sui Sin Far, a biracial, Chinese American female writer who lived on the West Coast. Winter's treatment of Antin's The Promised Land serves as an occasion for a reexamination of the concept of assimilation in American literature, and the chapter on Zitkala- a is the most comprehensive analysis of her narratives to date. Winter argues persuasively that Griggs should have long been a more visible presence in American literary history, and the exploration of Sui Sin Far reveals her to be the embodiment of the varied and unpredictable ways that diversity of cultures came together in America. In American Narratives, Winter maintains that the writings of these four rediscovered authors, with their emphasis on issues of ethnicity, identity, and nationality, fit squarely in the American realist tradition. She also establishes a multiethnic dialogue among these writers, demonstrating ways in which cultural identity and national belonging are peristently contested in this literature.

Constituting Americans

Constituting Americans PDF Author: Priscilla Wald
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822315476
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
"Constituting Americans" rethinks the way that certain writers of the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century contributed to fixing the words precisely of what it means to be an American

Representing the Race

Representing the Race PDF Author: Gene Andrew Jarrett
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814743382
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
The political value of African American literature has long been a topic of great debate among American writers, both black and white, from Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama. In his compelling new book, Representing the Race, Gene Andrew Jarrett traces the genealogy of this topic in order to develop an innovative political history of African American literature. Jarrett examines texts of every sort—pamphlets, autobiographies, cultural criticism, poems, short stories, and novels—to parse the myths of authenticity, popular culture, nationalism, and militancy that have come to define African American political activism in recent decades. He argues that unless we show the diverse and complex ways that African American literature has transformed society, political myths will continue to limit our understanding of this intellectual tradition. Cultural forums ranging from the printing press, schools, and conventions, to parlors, railroad cars, and courtrooms provide the backdrop to this African American literary history, while the foreground is replete with compelling stories, from the debate over racial genius in early American history and the intellectual culture of racial politics after slavery, to the tension between copyright law and free speech in contemporary African American culture, to the political audacity of Barack Obama’s creative writing. Erudite yet accessible, Representing the Race is a bold explanation of what’s at stake in continuing to politicize African American literature in the new millennium.

Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth Century US Literary History

Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth Century US Literary History PDF Author: Maria Windell
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198862334
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Sentimentalism is usually studied through US-British relations after the American Revolution or in connection to national reforms like the abolitionist movement. Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth-Century US Literary History instead argues that African American, Native American, Latinx, and Anglo American women writers also used sentimentalism to construct narratives that reframed or countered the violence dominating the nineteenth-century Americas, including the Haitian Revolution, Indian Removal, the US-Mexican War, and Cuba's independence wars. By tracking the transformation of sentimentalism as the US reacted to, enacted, and intervened in conflict Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth-Century US Literary History demonstrates how marginalized writers negotiated hemispheric encounters amidst the gendered, racialized, and cultural violence of the nineteenth-century Americas. It remaps sentiment's familiar transatlantic and national scholarly frameworks through authors such as Leonora Sansay and Mary Peabody Mann, and considers how authors including John Rollin Ridge, John S. and Harriet Jacobs, Mar�a Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Victor S�jour, and Martin R. Delany adapted the mode. Transamerican sentimentalism cannot unseat the violence of the nineteenth-century Americas, but it does produce other potential outcomes-including new paradigms for understanding the coquette, a locally successful informal diplomacy, and motivations for violent slave revolt. Such transformations mark not sentiment's failures or distortions, but its adaptive attempts to survive and thrive.

The American Ideal

The American Ideal PDF Author: Peter C. Carafiol
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195067657
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
This work argues that American literary scholarship enshrines a reactionary vision of history, of narrative, and of America itself. Carafiol examines the way idealist assumptions have been essential to doing American literary history and unwraps the implications of that symbiosis for current debates about the aims and methods of literary history in general. Carafiol directs his critique not only at traditional approaches to American literature but also at the most influential recent efforts by New Historicists and cultural critics to revise that tradition. Reconsidering the debate between ahistorical and historical models of literary study, he argues that works by such writers like Emerson and Thoreau subvert the claims of critics on both sides. Such writing is important, he proposes, not as timeless art or as social document, but as a voice that can speak powerfully in contemporary conversations, challenging literary critics in all fields to reconsider their critical assumptions and professional practices.

Literary Retrospectives

Literary Retrospectives PDF Author: Karin L. Hooks
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Abstract: This dissertation proposes that the 1890s were critical to the formation of American literature because of their focus on identifying, collecting, and preserving an American literary tradition. Since 1930, when Fred Lewis Pattee claimed that the twentieth century began in the 1890s, a continuing strain in literary criticism has investigated the decade as the birthplace of modernism. In recent years, however, scholars have begun troubling these historical assessments of the era in order to recover a more nuanced understanding of the decade. Building on their work, I study how competing narratives of American literature existed in the 1890s alongside the fin de siècle movement toward literary nationalism. I recover a group of long-lost literary historians who envisioned a more inclusive American literary canon than was eventually adopted in the early years of the twentieth century. I use the term "scenes of negotiation" to refer to discussions of American literature in late nineteenth-century social discourse about the development of a national American literary tradition. More specifically, I argue that these scenes of negotiation can be read as literary history because no fixed narrative of American literature yet existed. These scenes of negotiation make discernible how accounts of literary history emerged at multiple sites, in multiple genres, through multiple agents. The Introduction identifies some of these scenes of negotiation and explains why they should be read as American literary history, which records the history of literature in America through an examination of texts and/or authors. Organized around specific case studies, the chapters explore how literary historians working singly or in conjunction with others documented the 1890s as a period of literary retrospection and consolidation. Chapter 1 investigates how Edmund Stedman and Ellen Hutchinson's co-editorship of A Library of American Literature resulted in one of the late nineteenth century's most important and formative constructions of American literature. Chapter 2 explores how The Critic's elections for "The Forty Immortals" and "The Twenty Immortelles" proposed a gendered model of authorship that closely resembles the current state of the field of American literature. Chapter 3 examines how Pauline Hopkins worked as a cultural stenographer, writing an inclusive account of American literary history in her novel Contending Forces that included African Americans, a group largely ignored in A Library of American Literature and The Critic's elections. Chapter 4 recovers the late nineteenth-century genre of obituary literature as a forum for validating male and female American authorship in order to illustrate how it aided in the development of an American literary tradition. This dissertation reaches three conclusions that provide a new framework for understanding the types of cultural work being done in the 1890s. First, scenes of negotiation document how the literary historians identified herein understood American literature's role in recording the nation's social and political development and in instilling cultural pride and patriotism in its citizenship. Second, scenes of negotiation unsettle traditional notions about who was writing literary history and the venues in which it was being written. Third, scenes of negotiation offer an alternative to traditional literary histories, revealing that some late nineteenth-century literary historians were determined to include female and minority authors in the American literary tradition. Recovering these scenes of negotiation changes our current understanding of the 1890s as an era lost to literary history by showing it a period alive with literary history and demonstrating that late nineteenth-century literary historians made possible the canon wars of the twentieth century by their recording of the rich and diverse American literary past.