Download or read book The Sketch the Tale and the Beginnings of American Literature written by Lydia G. Fash and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Sketch the Tale and the Beginnings of American Literature written by Lydia G. Fash and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Combining history, print history, and literary criticism, this book shows how short fiction of the early nineteenth century, including sketches and tales, was vital to the birth of a national literary tradition, the great American novel, and even what it meant to be American"--
Download or read book Between the Novel and the News written by Sari Edelstein and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2014-04-30 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While American literary history has long acknowledged the profound influence of journalism on canonical male writers, Sari Edelstein argues that American women writers were also influenced by a dynamic relationship with the mainstream press. From the early republic through the turn of the twentieth century, she offers a comprehensive reassessment of writers such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Jacobs, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Drawing on slave narratives, sentimental novels, and realist fiction, Edelstein examines how advances in journalism—including the emergence of the penny press, the rise of the story-paper, and the birth of eyewitness reportage—shaped not only a female literary tradition but also gender conventions themselves. Excluded from formal politics and lacking the vote, women writers were deft analysts of the prevalent tropes and aesthetic gestures of journalism, which they alternately relied upon and resisted in their efforts to influence public opinion and to intervene in political debates. Ultimately, Between the Novel and the News is a project of recovery that transforms our understanding of the genesis and the development of American women’s writing.
Download or read book Form and Fable in American Fiction written by Daniel Hoffman and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining the disciplines of folklore and literary criticism in his perceptive readings of works by Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, and Mark Twain, Daniel Hoffman demonstrates how these authors transformed materials from both high and popular culture, from their European past and their American present, in works that helped to form our national consciousness. In his new preface, Hoffman describes the evolution of his critical method and suggests the book's value for contemporary readers.
Download or read book Ethnic American Literature written by Dean J. Franco and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a comparative approach to ethnic literature that begins by accounting for the intrinsic historical, geographical, and political contingencies of different American cultures. This work looks at a range of writing, from novels to literature.
Download or read book Fashion and Fiction written by Lauren S. Cardon and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the twentieth century, the rise of the concept of Americanization—shedding ethnic origins and signs of "otherness" to embrace a constructed American identity—was accompanied by a rhetoric of personal transformation that would ultimately characterize the American Dream. The theme of self-transformation has remained a central cultural narrative in American literary, political, and sociological texts ranging from Jamestown narratives to immigrant memoirs, from slave narratives to Gone with the Wind, and from the rags-to-riches stories of Horatio Alger to the writings of Barack Obama. Such rhetoric feeds American myths of progress, upward mobility, and personal reinvention. In Fashion and Fiction, Lauren S. Cardon draws a correlation between the American fashion industry and early twentieth-century literature. As American fashion diverged from a class-conscious industry governed by Parisian designers to become more commercial and democratic, she argues, fashion designers and journalists began appropriating the same themes of self-transformation to market new fashion trends. Cardon illustrates how canonical twentieth-century American writers, including Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Nella Larsen, symbolically used clothing to develop their characters and their narrative of upward mobility. As the industry evolved, Cardon shows, the characters in these texts increasingly enjoyed opportunities for individual expression and identity construction, allowing for temporary performances that offered not escapism but a testing of alternate identities in a quest for self-discovery.
Download or read book Love and Depth in the American Novel written by Ashley C. Barnes and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "By examining classic nineteenth-century American novels, this book proposes a new approach to reading that reconciles historicist and ethical approaches to literature"--
Download or read book Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke written by Bryan Crable and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke focuses on the little-known but important friendship between two canonical American writers. The story of this fifty-year friendship, however, is more than literary biography; Bryan Crable argues that the Burke-Ellison relationship can be interpreted as a microcosm of the American "racial divide." Through examination of published writings and unpublished correspondence, he reconstructs the dialogue between Burke and Ellison about race that shaped some of their most important works, including Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives and Ellison's Invisible Man. In addition, the book connects this dialogue to changes in American discourse about race. Crable shows that these two men were deeply connected, intellectually and personally, but the social division between white and black Americans produced hesitation, embarrassment, mystery, and estrangement where Ellison and Burke might otherwise have found unity. By using Ellison's nonfiction and Burke's rhetorical theory to articulate a new vocabulary of race, the author concludes not with a simplistic "healing" of the divide but with a challenge to embrace the responsibility inherent to our social order. American Literatures Initiative
Download or read book The Illiberal Imagination written by Joe Shapiro and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2017-11-13 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Illiberal Imagination offers a synthetic, historical formalist account of how—and to what end—U.S. novels from the late eighteenth century to the mid-1850s represented economic inequality and radical forms of economic egalitarianism in the new nation. In conversation with intellectual, social, and labor history, this study tracks the representation of class inequality and conflict across five subgenres of the early U.S. novel: the Bildungsroman, the episodic travel narrative, the sentimental novel, the frontier romance, and the anti-slavery novel. Through close readings of the works of foundational U.S. novelists, including Charles Brockden Brown, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, James Fenimore Cooper, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Joe Shapiro demonstrates that while voices of economic egalitarianism and working-class protest find their ways into a variety of early U.S. novels, these novels are anything but radically dialogic; instead, he argues, they push back against emergent forms of class consciousness by working to naturalize class inequality among whites. The Illiberal Imagination thus enhances our understanding of both the early U.S. novel and the history of the way that class has been imagined in the United States.
Download or read book Reclaiming Nostalgia written by Jennifer K. Ladino and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often thought of as the quintessential home or the Eden from which humanity has fallen, the natural world has long been a popular object of nostalgic narratives. In Reclaiming Nostalgia, Jennifer Ladino assesses the ideological effects of this phenomenon by tracing its dominant forms in American literature and culture since the closing of the frontier in 1890. While referencing nostalgia for pastoral communities and for untamed and often violent frontiers, she also highlights the ways in which nostalgia for nature has served as a mechanism for social change, a model for ethical relationships, and a motivating force for social and environmental justice.
Download or read book Children of the Raven and the Whale written by Caroline Chamberlin Hellman and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2019-11-20 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking its cue from Perry Miller’s 1956 classic of American literary criticism, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville, Caroline Chamberlin Hellman’s new book examines ways in which contemporary multi-ethnic writers of the United States have responded to nineteenth- and early twentieth century texts historically central to the American literary canon. Each chapter of Children of the Raven and the Whale looks down the roads American literature ultimately traveled, examining pairs and constellations of texts in conversation. In their rewritings and layerings of new stories over older ones, contemporary writers forge ahead in their interrogations of a spectrum of American experience, whether they or their characters are native to the United States, first- or second-generation immigrants, or transnational. Revealing the traces of texts by writers such as Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin lying beneath contemporary American literature by Chang-rae Lee, Jonathan Lethem, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Díaz, Joseph O’Neill, Colum McCann, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hellman posits the existence of a twenty-first-century American renaissance.
Download or read book Westernness written by Alan Bacher Williamson and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A first-person meditation on the literary and visual arts of the American West, Westernness: A Meditation explores how this region has developed its own distinct culture, in literature and painting, from the point of view of someone who has been, at different times in his life, both a westerner and an easterner. An engaging and astute reader and observer, Alan Williamson uses his poetic lens to examine the new connections, notably with the Far East, that have been forged in the West, but also the fear, anxiety, and sense of cultural vacancy that western artists have had to overcome in confronting their new landscape, much as the writers of the American Renaissance did a century earlier. Writing as a displaced easterner with significant western roots, Williamson looks at writers and poets such as Cather, Lawrence, Steinbeck, Jefferes, Silko, and Snyder, as well as artists such as the Yosemite painters, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Wayne Thiebaud, to show how, despite the inflated optimism of many western patriots, the work of these individuals relates to the anxieties suffered by their eastern predecessors. By revealing what he sees as the repetition of the evolution of American literature in the rise of western literature, Williamson provides us with a fresh vantage point from which we can appreciate western literature, art, and culture and simultaneously dismantle the literary war between East and West. A tribute to the author's lifelong engagement with a particular landscape and its writers, Westernness speaks to the general reader who is curious about his or her native place and relationship to it, as well as to scholars in literary and ecocritical studies.
Download or read book The Romance of Authenticity written by Jeff Karem and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To what extent has the demand for a vicarious experience of other cultures fuelled the expectation that the most important task for writers is to capture and convey authentic cultural material? This text argues that authenticity is in fact a restrictive category of literary judgment.
Download or read book Stranger America written by Josh Toth and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2018-04-30 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contradictory ideals of egalitarianism and self-reliance haunt America’s democratic state. We need look no further than Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and victory for proof that early twentieth-century anxieties about individualism, race, and the foreign or intrusive "other" persist today. In Stranger America, Josh Toth tracks and delineates these anxieties in America’s aesthetic production, finally locating a potential narrative strategy for circumnavigating them. Toth’s central focus is, simply, strangeness—or those characters who adamantly resist being fixed in any given category of identity. As with the theorists employed (Nancy, i ek, Derrida, Freud, Hegel), the subjects and literature considered are as encompassing as possible: from the work of Herman Melville, William Faulkner, James Weldon Johnson, and Nella Larsen to that of Philip K. Dick, Woody Allen, Larry David, and Bob Dylan; from the rise of nativism in the early twentieth century to object-oriented ontology and the twenty-first-century zombie craze; from ragtime and the introduction of sound in American cinema to the exhaustion of postmodern metafiction. Toth argues that American literature, music, film, and television can show us the path toward a new ethic, one in which we organize identity around the stranger rather than resorting to tactics of pure exclusion or inclusion. Ultimately, he provides a new narrative approach to otherness that seeks to realize a truly democratic form of community.
Download or read book America s Sketchbook written by Kristie Hamilton and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her comprehensive study of American sketch writing, Kristic Hamilton gives new insight into the powers of mass-market intimacy more personal and home-like than home - and into leisure, which as a component of middle-class identity is quite as imperative in its achievement as disciplined morality. Here, also, is a more complex story of the aesthetic, as a class-inflected realm, in which factory women and rural and urban middle-class authors debate the shape of literature and life.
Download or read book Reading Reality written by E. Thomas Finan and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Pirating Fictions written by Monica F. Cohen and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2018-01-02 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two distinctly different meanings of piracy are ingeniously intertwined in Monica Cohen's lively new book, which shows how popular depictions of the pirate held sway on the page and the stage even as their creators were preoccupied with the ravages of literary appropriation. The golden age of piracy captured the nineteenth-century imagination, animating such best-selling novels as Treasure Island and inspiring theatrical hits from The Pirates of Penzance to Peter Pan. But the prevalence of unauthorized reprinting and dramatic adaptation meant that authors lost immense profits from the most lucrative markets. Infuriated, novelists and playwrights denounced such literary piracy in essays, speeches, and testimonies. Their fiction, however, tells a different story. Using landmarks in copyright history as a backdrop, Pirating Fictions argues that popular nineteenth-century pirate fiction mischievously resists the creation of intellectual property in copyright legislation and law. Drawing on classic pirate stories by such writers as Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Louis Stevenson, and J. M. Barrie, this wide-ranging account demonstrates, in raucous tales and telling asides, how literary appropriation was celebrated at the very moment when the forces of possessive individualism began to enshrine the language of personal ownership in Anglo-American views of creative work.
