Readers in History PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Readers in History PDF full book. Access full book title Readers in History by James L. Machor. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: James L. Machor
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801844379
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322
Get Book Here
Book Description
Nineteenth-century America witnesses an unprecedented rise in reading activity as a result of increasing literacy, advances in printing and book production, and improvements in transporting printed material. As the act of reading took on new cultural and intellectual significance, American writers had to adjust to changes in their relationship with a growing audience. Calling for a new emphasis on historical analysis, Readers in History reconsiders reader-response and reception approaches to the shifting contexts of reading in nineteenth-century America. James L. Machor and his contirbutors dispute the "essentializing tendency" of much reader-response criticism to date, arguing that reading and the textual construction of audience can best be understood in light of historically specific interpretive practices, ideological frames, and social conditions. Employing a variety of perspectives and methods—including feminism, deconstruction, and cultural criticsim—the essays in this volume demonstrate the importance of historical inquiry for exploring the dynamics of audience engagement.
Author: James L. Machor
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801844379
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322
Get Book Here
Book Description
Nineteenth-century America witnesses an unprecedented rise in reading activity as a result of increasing literacy, advances in printing and book production, and improvements in transporting printed material. As the act of reading took on new cultural and intellectual significance, American writers had to adjust to changes in their relationship with a growing audience. Calling for a new emphasis on historical analysis, Readers in History reconsiders reader-response and reception approaches to the shifting contexts of reading in nineteenth-century America. James L. Machor and his contirbutors dispute the "essentializing tendency" of much reader-response criticism to date, arguing that reading and the textual construction of audience can best be understood in light of historically specific interpretive practices, ideological frames, and social conditions. Employing a variety of perspectives and methods—including feminism, deconstruction, and cultural criticsim—the essays in this volume demonstrate the importance of historical inquiry for exploring the dynamics of audience engagement.
Author: Jonathan Senchyne
Publisher: Studies in Print Culture and t
ISBN: 9781625344731
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
The true scale of paper production in America from 1690 through the end of the nineteenth century was staggering, with a range of parties participating in different ways, from farmers growing flax to textile workers weaving cloth and from housewives saving rags to peddlers collecting them. Making a bold case for the importance of printing and paper technology in the study of early American literature, Jonathan Senchyne presents archival evidence of the effects of this very visible process on American writers, such as Anne Bradstreet, Herman Melville, Lydia Sigourney, William Wells Brown, and other lesser-known figures. The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature reveals that book history and literary studies are mutually constitutive and proposes a new literary periodization based on materiality and paper production. In unpacking this history and connecting it to cultural and literary representations, Senchyne also explores how the textuality of paper has been used to make social and political claims about gender, labor, and race.
Author: Steven Petersheim
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498508383
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Get Book Here
Book Description
The nineteenth-century roots of environmental writing in American literature are often mentioned in passing and sometimes studied piece by piece. Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Ecological Awareness of Early Scribes of Nature brings together numerous explorations of environmentally-aware writing across the genres of nineteenth-century literature. Like Lawrence Buell, the authors of this collection find Thoreau’s writing a touchstone of nineteenth-century environmental writing, particularly focusing on Thoreau’s claim that humans may function as “scribes of nature.” However, these studies of Thoreau’s antecedents, contemporaries, and successors also reveal a range of other writers in the nineteenth century whose literary treatments of nature are often more environmentally attuned than most readers have noticed. The writers whose works are studied in this collection include canonical and forgotten writers, men and women, early nineteenth-century and late nineteenth-century authors, pioneers and conservationists. They drew attention to the conflicted relationships between humans and the American continent, as experienced by Native Americans and European Americans. Taken together, these essays offer a fresh perspective on the roots of environmental literature in nineteenth-century American nonfiction, fiction, and poetry as well as in multi-genre compositions such as the travel writings of Margaret Fuller. Bringing largely forgotten voices such as John Godman alongside canonical voices such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, the authors whose writings are studied in this collection produced a diverse tapestry of nascent American environmental writing in the nineteenth-century. From early nineteenth-century writers such as poet Philip Freneau and novelist Charles Brockden Brown to later nineteenth-century conservationists such as John James Audubon and John Muir, Scribes of Nature shows the development of an environmental consciousness and a growing conservationist ethos in American literature. Given their often surprisingly healthy respect for the natural environment, these nineteenth-century writers offer us much to consider in an age of environmental crisis. The complexities of the supposed nature/culture divide still work into our lives today as economic and environmental issues are often seen at loggerheads when they ought to be seen as part of the same conversation of what it means to live healthy lives, and to pass on a healthy world to those who follow us in a world where human activity is becoming increasingly threatening to the health of our planet.
Author: Cody Marrs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107109833
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 207
Get Book Here
Book Description
Nineteenth-century American literature is often divided into two asymmetrical halves, neatly separated by the Civil War. Focusing on the later writings of Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson, this book shows how the war took shape across the nineteenth century, inflecting literary forms for decades after 1865.
Author: Lydia G. Fash
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 081394399X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 399
Get Book Here
Book Description
Accounts of the rise of American literature often start in the 1850s with a cluster of "great American novels"—Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But these great works did not spring fully formed from the heads of their creators. All three relied on conventions of short fiction built up during the "culture of beginnings," the three decades following the War of 1812 when public figures glorified the American past and called for a patriotic national literature. Decentering the novel as the favored form of early nineteenth-century national literature, Lydia Fash repositions the sketch and the tale at the center of accounts of American literary history, revealing how cultural forces shaped short fiction that was subsequently mined for these celebrated midcentury novels and for the first novel published by an African American. In the shorter works of writers such as Washington Irving, Catharine Sedgwick, Edgar Allan Poe, and Lydia Maria Child, among others, the aesthetic of brevity enabled the beginning idea of a story to take the outsized importance fitted to the culture of beginnings. Fash argues that these short forms, with their ethnic exclusions and narrative innovations, coached readers on how to think about the United States’ past and the nature of narrative time itself. Combining history, print history, and literary criticism, this book treats short fiction as a vital site for debate over what it meant to be American, thereby offering a new account of the birth of a self-consciously national literary tradition.
Author: Edward Watts
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1611484200
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 355
Get Book Here
Book Description
John Neal and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture is a critical reassessment of American novelist, editor, critic, and activist John Neal, arguing for his importance to the ongoing reassessment of the American Renaissance and the broader cultural history of the Nineteenth Century. Contributors (including scholars from the United States, Germany, England, Italy, and Israel) present Neal as an innovative literary stylist, penetrating cultural critic, pioneering regionalist, and vital participant in the business of letters in America over his sixty-year career.
Author: Stacey Margolis
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822386674
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247
Get Book Here
Book Description
Stacey Margolis rethinks a key chapter in American literary history, challenging the idea that nineteenth-century American culture was dominated by an ideology of privacy that defined subjects in terms of their intentions and desires. She reveals how writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Henry James depicted a world in which characters could only be understood—and, more importantly, could only understand themselves—through their public actions. She argues that the social issues that nineteenth-century novelists analyzed—including race, sexuality, the market, and the law—formed integral parts of a broader cultural shift toward understanding individuals not according to their feelings, desires, or intentions, but rather in light of the various inevitable traces they left on the world. Margolis provides readings of fiction by Hawthorne and James as well as Susan Warner, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, and Pauline Hopkins. In these writers’ works, she traces a distinctive novelistic tradition that viewed social developments—such as changes in political partisanship and childhood education and the rise of new politico-legal forms like negligence law—as means for understanding how individuals were shaped by their interactions with society. The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature adds a new level of complexity to understandings of nineteenth-century American culture by illuminating a literary tradition full of accidents, mistakes, and unintended consequences—one in which feelings and desires were often overshadowed by all that was external to the self.
Author: J. Husband
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230105211
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 168
Get Book Here
Book Description
Antislavery Discourse and Nineteenth-Century American Literature examines the relationship between antislavery texts and emerging representations of "free labor" in mid-nineteenth-century America. Husband shows how the images of families split apart by slavery, circulated primarily by women leaders, proved to be the most powerful weapon in the antislavery cultural campaign and ultimately turned the nation against slavery. She also reveals the ways in which the sentimental narratives and icons that constituted the "family protection campaign" powerfully influenced Americans sense of the role of government, gender, and race in industrializing America. Chapters examine the writings of ardent abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, non-activist sympathizers, and those actively hostile to but deeply immersed in antislavery activism including Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Author: Russ Castronovo
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199730431
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 456
Get Book Here
Book Description
How do we approach the rich field of nineteenth-century American literature? How might we recalibrate the coordinates of critical vision and open up new areas of investigation? To answer such questions, this volume brings together 23 original essays written by leading scholars in American literary studies. By examining specific novels, poems, essays, diaries and other literary examples, the authors confront head-on the implications, scope, and scale of their analysis. The chapters foreground methodological concerns to assess the challenges of transnational perspectives, disability studies, environmental criticism, affect studies, gender analysis, and other cutting-edge approaches. The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature is thus both critically incisive and sharply practical, inviting attention to how readers read, how critics critique, and how interpreters interpret. It offers forceful strategies for rethinking protest novels, women's writing, urban literature, slave narratives, and popular fiction, just to name a few of the wide array of topics and genres covered. This volume, rather than surveying established ideas in studies of nineteenth-century American literature, registers what is happening now and anticipates what will shape the field's future.
Author: Marianne Noble
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108481337
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 306
Get Book Here
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.
