American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880–1995

American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880–1995 PDF Author: Phillip Barrish
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139431951
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Focusing on key works of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literary realism, Phillip Barrish traces the emergence of new ways of gaining intellectual prestige - that is, new ways of gaining cultural recognition as unusually intelligent, sensitive or even wise. Through extended readings of works by Henry James, William Dean Howells, Abraham Cahan and Edith Wharton, Barrish emphasises the differences between literary realist modes of intellectual and cultural authority and those associated with the rise of the social sciences. In doing so, he greatly refines our understanding of the complex relationship between realist writing and masculinity. Barrish further argues that understanding the dynamics of intellectual status in realist literature provides new analytic purchase on intellectual prestige in recent critical theory. Here he focuses on such figures as Lionel Trilling, Paul de Man, John Guillory and Judith Butler.

American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880–1995

American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880–1995 PDF Author: Phillip Barrish
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139431951
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Get Book Here

Book Description
Focusing on key works of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literary realism, Phillip Barrish traces the emergence of new ways of gaining intellectual prestige - that is, new ways of gaining cultural recognition as unusually intelligent, sensitive or even wise. Through extended readings of works by Henry James, William Dean Howells, Abraham Cahan and Edith Wharton, Barrish emphasises the differences between literary realist modes of intellectual and cultural authority and those associated with the rise of the social sciences. In doing so, he greatly refines our understanding of the complex relationship between realist writing and masculinity. Barrish further argues that understanding the dynamics of intellectual status in realist literature provides new analytic purchase on intellectual prestige in recent critical theory. Here he focuses on such figures as Lionel Trilling, Paul de Man, John Guillory and Judith Butler.

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism PDF Author: Keith Newlin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190056940
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 733

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Book Description
The scholarship devoted to American literary realism has long wrestled with problems of definition: is realism a genre, with a particular form, content, and technique? Is it a style, with a distinctive artistic arrangement of words, characters, and description? Or is it a period, usually placed as occurring after the Civil War and concluding somewhere around the onset of World War I? This volume aims to widen the scope of study beyond mere definition, however, by expanding the boundaries of the subject through essays that reconsider and enlarge upon such questions. The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism aims to take stock of the scholarly work in the area and map out paths for future directions of study. The Handbook offers 35 vibrant and original essays of new interpretations of the artistic and political challenges of representing life. It is the first book to treat the subject topically and thematically, in wide scope, with essays that draw upon recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies to offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of major and minor figures and the contexts that shaped their work. Contributors here tease out the workings of a particular concept through a variety of authors and their cultural contexts. A set of essays explores realism's genesis and its connection to previous and subsequent movements. Others examine the inclusiveness of representation, the circulation of texts, and the aesthetic representation of science, time, space, and the subjects of medicine, the New Woman, and the middle class. Still others trace the connection to other arts--poetry, drama, illustration, photography, painting, and film--and to pedagogic issues in the teaching of realism. As a whole, this volume forges exciting new paths in the study of realism and writers' unending labor to represent life accurately.

The American Civil War

The American Civil War PDF Author: Ian Frederick Finseth
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0415977444
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 648

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Book Description
This anthology brings together a wide variety of both well-known and more obscure writing from and about the Civil War, along with supplementary appendices to facilitate its use in courses. The selections include short fiction, poetry, public addresses, diary entries, song lyrics, and essays from such figures as Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane, and Louisa May Alcott, as well as Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Jefferson Davis, and Ulysses S. Grant. The writing not only includes those directly involved in the war, but also those writing about the war afterward, to include the perspective of historical memory. This collection makes a perfect addition to any course on Civil War history or literature as well as courses on popular memory.

Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race

Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race PDF Author: Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 080717341X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Winner of the SAMLA Studies Award Honorable Mention for the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize From the 1880s to the early 1900s, a particularly turbulent period of U.S. race relations, the African American novel provided a powerful counternarrative to dominant and pejorative ideas about blackness. In Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race, Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus uncovers how black and white writers experimented with innovative narrative strategies to revise static and stereotypical views of black identity and experience. In this provocative and challenging book, Daniels-Rauterkus contests the long-standing idea that African Americans did not write literary realism, along with the inverse misconception that white writers did not make important contributions to African American literature. Taking up key works by Charles W. Chesnutt, Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain, Daniels-Rauterkus argues that authors blended realism with romance, often merging mimetic and melodramatic conventions to advocate on behalf of African Americans, challenge popular theories of racial identity, disrupt the expectations of the literary marketplace, and widen the possibilities for black representation in fiction. Combining literary history with close textual analysis, Daniels-Rauterkus reads black and white writers alongside each other to demonstrate the reciprocal nature of literary production. Moving beyond discourses of racial authenticity and cultural property, Daniels-Rauterkus stresses the need to organize African American literature around black writers and their meditations on blackness, but she also proposes leaving space for nonblack writers whose use of comparable narrative strategies can facilitate reconsiderations of the complex social order that constitutes race in America. With Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race, Daniels-Rauterkus expands critical understandings of American literary realism and African American literature by destabilizing the rigid binaries that too often define discussions of race, genre, and periodization.

Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors

Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors PDF Author: Gary Totten
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817354190
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
American writer Edith Wharton (1862-1937) once wrote in Harper's that she wanted to "penetrate ... the carefully guarded interior[s]" of her past memories and fashion them "into a little memorial like the boxes formed of exotic shells which sailors used to fabricate between voyages." For Totten (English, North Dakota State U.) this statement is a striking reminder of the connections between material objects and cultural meanings in Wharton's life and work. He presents 11 essays that explore these connections in a variety of ways. Topics include critical linkages of Wharton to materiality as a means to keep her outside the canonical, resistance to commodification in The House of Mirth, the creation of the disposable object and Wharton's characters' fears of their disposability, Wharton's ideas about the use of museum space in The Age of Innocence, and the effect of technology on domestic space in The Fruit of the Tree.

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: 3110480913
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 643

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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.

Reading the American Novel 1865 - 1914

Reading the American Novel 1865 - 1914 PDF Author: G. R. Thompson
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0631234063
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 455

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Book Description
An indispensable tool for teachers and students of American literature, Reading the American Novel 1865-1914 provides a comprehensive introduction to the American novel in the post-civil war period. Locates American novels and stories within a specific historical and literary context Offers fresh analyses of key selected literary works Addresses a wide audience of academics and non-academics in clear, accessible prose Demonstrates the changing mentality of 19th-century America entering the 20th century Explores the relationship between the intellectual and artistic output of the time and the turbulent socio-political context

Literary Modernism and Beyond

Literary Modernism and Beyond PDF Author: Richard Lehan
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807143898
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Book Description
Early modernists turned to theories of consciousness and aestheticism to combat what they saw as the hostility of naturalism and to find new ways of thinking about reality. This consciousness took various forms, including a Jamesian sense of moral ambiguity, Proustian time spots, and B ergsonian intuition, but the Nietzschean theory that reality depends on perception connected them all. This modernist movement reached a distinguished level of achievement with novelists Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce, but a succession of counterinfluences transformed it after World War II, when elitism and a desire for a homogeneous culture gave way to diversity and elements of mass culture. In Literary Modernism and Beyond, Richard Lehan tracks the evolution of the movement from its emergence in the late nineteenth century to its recent incarnations. In this wide-ranging study, Lehan demonstrates how and why the "originary vision" of modernism changed radically after it gained prominence. With critical discussions on a wide variety of major modernist writers, intellectuals, and artists and their works -- including Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Andre Gide, Franz Kafka, Zora Neale Hurston, Ian Fleming, and J. K. Rowling -- Lehan examines the large-scale changes that came as critical authority moved from one generation to another. Both popular culture and literary criticism -- especially "critical theory" -- acted as key agents of change, and structuralism, poststructuralism, and concerns with gender and race also greatly influenced the movement. Along with a process of decline and a nihilism that emerged from the modernist movement, these changes created a new literary reality and with it a new textuality. Literary Modernism and Beyond treats modernism's major innovations of myth, symbol, and structure not as individual pieces but as interrelated contributions to a historical process, the product of three generations of transformations. Lehan's analysis provides a more complete understanding than ever before of the movement itself.

Mark Twain and Male Friendship

Mark Twain and Male Friendship PDF Author: Peter Messent
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199889309
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
This book explores male friendship in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through Mark Twain and the relationships he had with William Dean Howells, Joseph Twichell, and Henry H. Rogers.

The Poetics of Sovereignty in American Literature, 1885-1910

The Poetics of Sovereignty in American Literature, 1885-1910 PDF Author: Andrew Hebard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110702806X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
The book examines trends in American literature and sheds new light on the legal history of race relations during the Progressive Era.