Author: Arthur Riss Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1139458442 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 134
Book Description
Moving boldly between literary analysis and political theory, contemporary and antebellum US culture, Arthur Riss invites readers to rethink prevailing accounts of the relationship between slavery, liberalism, and literary representation. Situating Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass at the center of antebellum debates over the person-hood of the slave, this 2006 book examines how a nation dedicated to the proposition that 'all men are created equal' formulates arguments both for and against race-based slavery. This revisionary argument promises to be unsettling for literary critics, political philosophers, historians of US slavery, as well as those interested in the link between literature and human rights.
Author: Publisher: ISBN: 9780511246067 Category : African Americans in literature Languages : en Pages : 238
Book Description
Moving boldly between literary analysis and political theory, contemporary and antebellum U.S. culture, Arthur Riss invites readers to rethink prevailing accounts of the relationship between slavery, liberalism, and literary representation. This revisionary argument promises to be unsettling for literary critics, political philosophers, and historians of U.S. slavery.
Author: Michael T. Gilmore Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226294153 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 342
Book Description
How did slavery and race impact American literature in the nineteenth century? In this ambitious book, Michael T. Gilmore argues that they were the carriers of linguistic restriction, and writers from Frederick Douglass to Stephen Crane wrestled with the demands for silence and circumspection that accompanied the antebellum fear of disunion and the postwar reconciliation between the North and South. Proposing a radical new interpretation of nineteenth-century American literature, The War on Words examines struggles over permissible and impermissible utterance in works ranging from Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” to Henry James’s The Bostonians. Combining historical knowledge with groundbreaking readings of some of the classic texts of the American past, The War on Words places Lincoln’s Cooper Union address in the same constellation as Margaret Fuller’s feminism and Thomas Dixon’s defense of lynching. Arguing that slavery and race exerted coercive pressure on freedom of expression, Gilmore offers here a transformative study that alters our understanding of nineteenth-century literary culture and its fraught engagement with the right to speak.
Author: Stacey Margolis Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 0822386674 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 247
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: Jolene Hubbs Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1009250655 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 205
Book Description
Shows how representations of poor white southerners helped shape middle-class identity and major American literary movements and genres.
Author: Sarah E. Chinn Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1009442694 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 267
Book Description
The book is a study of the ways that white radicals deployed the physical and literary image of amputation during the Civil War and Reconstruction to argue for full Black citizenship and against a national reconciliation that reimposed white supremacy. It gives readers a new way to think about the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Author: Arthur Riss
Author: 
Author: Dana Brand
Author: Michael T. Gilmore
Author: Cassie Mayer
Author: Lori Merish
Author: Stacey Margolis
Author: Owen Clayton
Author: Jolene Hubbs
Author: Sarah E. Chinn