Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download The Power of Sympathy PDF full book. Access full book title The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: William Hill Brown Publisher: Graphic Arts Books ISBN: 1513273671 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 122
Book Description
The Power of Sympathy (1789) is a novel by American author William Hill Brown. Considered the first American novel, The Power of Sympathy is a work of sentimental fiction which explores the lessons of the Enlightenment on the virtues of rational thought. A story of forbidden romance, seduction, and incest, Brown’s novel is based on the real-life scandal of Perez Morton and Fanny Apthorp, a New England brother- and sister-in-law who struck up an affair that ended in suicide and infamy. Inspired by their tragedy, and hoping to write a novel which captured the need for rational education in the newly formed United States of America, Brown wrote and published The Power of Sympathy anonymously in Boston. The novel, narrated in a series of letters, is the story of Thomas Harrington. He falls for the local beauty Harriot Fawcet, initially hoping to make her his mistress. But when she rejects him, his friend Jack Worthy suggests that he attempt to court and then propose to her, which is the honorable and lawful choice. Thomas’ overly sentimental mind is persuaded by Jack’s unflinching reason, and so he decides to pursue Harriot once more. This time, he is successful, and the two eventually become engaged, but their happiness soon fades when Mrs. Eliza Holmes, a family friend of the Harringtons, reveals the true nature of Harriot’s identity. As the secrets of Mr. Harrington—Thomas’ father—are revealed, the couple are forced to choose between the morals and laws of society and the passionate love they share. The Power of Sympathy is a moving work of tragedy and romance with a pointed message about the need for education in the recently founded United States. Despite borrowing from the British and European traditions of sentimental fiction and the epistolary novel, Brown’s work is a distinctly American masterpiece worthy of our continued respect and attention. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.
Author: William Hill Brown Publisher: Graphic Arts Books ISBN: 1513273671 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 122
Book Description
The Power of Sympathy (1789) is a novel by American author William Hill Brown. Considered the first American novel, The Power of Sympathy is a work of sentimental fiction which explores the lessons of the Enlightenment on the virtues of rational thought. A story of forbidden romance, seduction, and incest, Brown’s novel is based on the real-life scandal of Perez Morton and Fanny Apthorp, a New England brother- and sister-in-law who struck up an affair that ended in suicide and infamy. Inspired by their tragedy, and hoping to write a novel which captured the need for rational education in the newly formed United States of America, Brown wrote and published The Power of Sympathy anonymously in Boston. The novel, narrated in a series of letters, is the story of Thomas Harrington. He falls for the local beauty Harriot Fawcet, initially hoping to make her his mistress. But when she rejects him, his friend Jack Worthy suggests that he attempt to court and then propose to her, which is the honorable and lawful choice. Thomas’ overly sentimental mind is persuaded by Jack’s unflinching reason, and so he decides to pursue Harriot once more. This time, he is successful, and the two eventually become engaged, but their happiness soon fades when Mrs. Eliza Holmes, a family friend of the Harringtons, reveals the true nature of Harriot’s identity. As the secrets of Mr. Harrington—Thomas’ father—are revealed, the couple are forced to choose between the morals and laws of society and the passionate love they share. The Power of Sympathy is a moving work of tragedy and romance with a pointed message about the need for education in the recently founded United States. Despite borrowing from the British and European traditions of sentimental fiction and the epistolary novel, Brown’s work is a distinctly American masterpiece worthy of our continued respect and attention. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.
Author: Stephen Shapiro Publisher: Penn State Press ISBN: 0271046732 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 382
Book Description
Taking his cue from Philadelphia-born novelist Charles Brockden Brown's Annals of Europe and America, which contends that America is shaped most noticeably by the international struggle between Great Britain and France for control of the world trade market, Stephen Shapiro charts the advent, decline, and reinvigoration of the early American novel. That the American novel "sprang so unexpectedly into published existence during the 1790s" may be a symptom of the beginning of the end of Franco-British supremacy and a reflection of the power of a middle class riding the crest of a new world economic system. Shapiro's world-systems approach is a relatively new methodology for literary studies, but it brings two particularly useful features to the table. First, it refines the conceptual frameworks for analyzing cultural and social history, such as the rise in sentimentalism, in relation to a long-wave economic history of global commerce; second, it fosters a new model for a comparative American Studies across time. Rather than relying on contiguous time, a world-systems approach might compare the cultural production of one region to another at the same location within the recurring cycle in an economic reconfiguration. Shapiro offers a new way of thinking about the causes for the emergence of the American novel that suggests a fresh way of rethinking the overall paradigms shaping American Studies.
Author: Bryce Traister Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108889387 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 303
Book Description
This Companion covers American literary history from European colonization to the early republic. It provides a succinct introduction to the major themes and concepts in the field of early American literature, including new world migration, indigenous encounters, religious and secular histories, and the emergence of American literary genres. This book guides readers through important conceptual and theoretical issues, while also grounding these issues in close readings of key literary texts from early America.
Author: Jared Gardner Publisher: University of Illinois Press ISBN: 025209381X Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 227
Book Description
Countering assumptions about early American print culture and challenging our scholarly fixation on the novel, Jared Gardner reimagines the early American magazine as a rich literary culture that operated as a model for nation-building by celebrating editorship over authorship and serving as a virtual salon in which citizens were invited to share their different perspectives. The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture reexamines early magazines and their reach to show how magazine culture was multivocal and presented a porous distinction between author and reader, as opposed to novel culture, which imposed a one-sided authorial voice and restricted the agency of the reader.
Author: Benjamin Railton Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1442276371 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 175
Book Description
Throughout history, creative writers have often tackled topical subjects as a means to engage and influence public discourse. American authors—those born in the States and those who became naturalized citizens—have consistently found ways to be critical of the more painful pieces of the country’s past yet have done so with the patriotic purpose of strengthening the nation’s community and future. In History and Hope in American Literature: Models of Critical Patriotism, Ben Railton argues that it is only through an in-depth engagement with history—especially its darkest and most agonizing elements—that one can come to a genuine form of patriotism that employs constructive criticism as a tool for civic engagement. The author argues that it is through such critical patriotism that one can imagine and move toward a hopeful, shared future for all Americans. Railton highlights twelve works of American literature that focus on troubling periods in American history, including John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath,David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident, Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Dave Eggers’s What Is the What. From African and Native American histories to the Depression and the AIDS epidemic, Caribbean and Rwandan refugees and immigrants to global climate change, these works help readers confront, understand, and transcend the most sorrowful histories and issues. In so doing, the authors of these books offer hard-won hope that can help point people in the direction of a more perfect union. History and Hope in American Literature will be of interest to students and practitioners of American literature and history.
Author: John Sutherland Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0199214891 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 145
Book Description
For the last century, the tastes and preferences of readers of fiction have been reflected in the American and British bestseller lists, and this Very Short Introduction takes an engaging look through the lists to reveal what we have been reading - and why.
Author: Henri Petter Publisher: [Columbus] : Ohio State University Press ISBN: Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 524
Book Description
Descriptive and critical study of American fiction to 1820. Systematically and without apology presents the derivative nature, cliché plots, flat characters, and limited range of America's earliest fiction.
Author: Philip F. Gura Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN: 1429951346 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 354
Book Description
From the acclaimed cultural historian Philip F. Gura comes Truth's Ragged Edge, a comprehensive and original history of the American novel's first century. Grounded in Gura's extensive consideration of the diverse range of important early novels, not just those that remain widely read today, this book recovers many long-neglected but influential writers—such as the escaped slave Harriet Jacobs, the free black Philadelphian Frank J. Webb, and the irrepressible John Neal—to paint a complete and authoritative portrait of the era. Gura also gives us the key to understanding what sets the early novel apart, arguing that it is distinguished by its roots in "the fundamental religiosity of American life." Our nation's pioneering novelists, it turns out, wrote less in the service of art than of morality. This history begins with a series of firsts: the very first American novel, William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy, published in 1789; the first bestsellers, Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, novels that were, like Brown's, cautionary tales of seduction and betrayal; and the first native genre, religious tracts, which were parables intended to instruct the Christian reader. Gura shows that the novel did not leave behind its proselytizing purpose, even as it evolved. We see Catharine Maria Sedgwick in the 1820s conceiving of A New-England Tale as a critique of Puritanism's harsh strictures, as well as novelists pushing secular causes: George Lippard's The Quaker City, from 1844, was a dark warning about growing social inequality. In the next decade certain writers—Hawthorne and Melville most famously—began to depict interiority and doubt, and in doing so nurtured a broader cultural shift, from social concern to individualism, from faith in a distant god to faith in the self. Rich in subplots and detail, Gura's narrative includes enlightening discussions of the technologies that modernized publishing and allowed for the printing of novels on a mass scale, and of the lively cultural journals and literary salons of early nineteenth-century New York and Boston. A book for the reader of history no less than the reader of fiction, Truth's Ragged Edge—the title drawn from a phrase in Melville, about the ambiguity of truth—is an indispensable guide to the fascinating, unexpected origins of the American novel.
Author: Jeff Martin Publisher: Catapult ISBN: 1593764049 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 177
Book Description
Scholars, journalists, and publishers have turned their brains inside out in the effort to predict what lies ahead, but who better to comment on the future of the book than those who are driven to write them? The way we absorb information has changed dramatically. Edison’s phonograph has been reincarnated as the iPod. Celluloid went digital. But books, for the most part, have remained the same--until now. And while music and movies have undergone an almost Darwinian evolution, the literary world now faces a revolution, a sudden change in the way we buy, produce, and read books. In The Late American Novel, Jeff Martin and C. Max Magee gather some of today’s finest writers to consider the sea change that is upon them. Lauren Groff imagines an array of fantastical futures for writers, from poets with groupies to novelists as vending machines. Rivka Galchen writes about the figurative and literal death of paper. Joe Meno expounds upon the idea of a book as a place set permanently aside for the imagination, regardless of format. These and other original essays by Reif Larsen, Benjamin Kunkel, Victoria Patterson, and many more provide a timely and much-needed commentary on this compelling cultural crossroad.