Author: Phillip Barrish Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1139431951 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 227
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.
Author: Phillip Barrish Publisher: ISBN: 9781107120631 Category : American fiction Languages : en Pages : 213
Book Description
Focusing on key works of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American literary realism, Barrish traces the emergence of new ways of gaining intellectual prestige and some degree of cultural recognition. This book is the first extended treatment of a genre, realism, central to our understanding of American literature.
Author: Gary Totten Publisher: University of Alabama Press ISBN: 0817354190 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 328
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.
Author: Thomas B. Connery Publisher: Northwestern University Press ISBN: 0810127334 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 314
Book Description
A paradigm of actuality -- Searching for the real and actual -- Stirrings and roots: urban sketches and America's flaneur -- The storytellers -- Picturing the present -- Carving out the real -- Experiments in reality -- Documenting time and place.
Author: Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 0807173401 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 236
Book Description
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.
Author: Christine Gerhardt Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG ISBN: 3110480913 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 643
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.
Author: Ian Frederick Finseth Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 0415977444 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 648
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.
Author: David McWhirter Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1316154203 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 528
Book Description
Long misread as a novelist conspicuously lacking in historical consciousness, Henry James has often been viewed as detached from, and uninterested in, the social, political, and material realities of his time. As this volume demonstrates, however, James was acutely responsive not only to his era's changing attitudes toward gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity, but also to changing conditions of literary production and reception, the rise of consumerism and mass culture, and the emergence of new technologies and media, of new apprehensions of time and space. These essays portray the author and his works in the context of the modernity that determined, formed, interested, appalled, and/or provoked his always curious mind. With contributions from an international cast of distinguished scholars, Henry James in Context provides a map of leading edge work in contemporary James studies, an invaluable reference work for students and scholars, and a blueprint for possible future directions.
Author: Phillip Barrish
Author: Phillip Barrish
Author: Gary Totten
Author: William M. Morgan
Author: Thomas B. Connery
Author: Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus
Author: Christine Gerhardt
Author: Ian Frederick Finseth
Author: David McWhirter
Author: Paul Giles