Download or read book The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism written by Christophe Den Tandt and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dynamic reappraisal of American literary naturalism, Christophe Den Tandt connects late nineteenth-century fiction to its romantic, urban gothic roots and to recent discussions of the sublime in postmodern theory. Den Tandt focuses on aspects of naturalist novels -- their use of hyperbole and hysteria, of the grotesque and the abject, of uncanniness and mesmerism -- that have often been left in the periphery of naturalist discourse. He argues that realistic strategies of literary representation can never succeed in depicting the urban environment since the logic of the city rests on a network of hidden relations. Naturalist texts try to resolve this dilemma by opposing sublime components and realistic documentary elements.

Download or read book The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism written by Christophe Den Tandt and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dynamic reappraisal of American literary naturalism, Christophe Den Tandt connects late nineteenth-century fiction to its romantic, urban gothic roots and to recent discussions of the sublime in postmodern theory. Den Tandt focuses on aspects of naturalist novels -- their use of hyperbole and hysteria, of the grotesque and the abject, of uncanniness and mesmerism -- that have often been left in the periphery of naturalist discourse. He argues that realistic strategies of literary representation can never succeed in depicting the urban environment since the logic of the city rests on a network of hidden relations. Naturalist texts try to resolve this dilemma by opposing sublime components and realistic documentary elements.

Download or read book American Literary Naturalism a Divided Stream written by Charles Child Walcutt and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1956 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Literary Naturalism, a Divided Stream was first published in 1956. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The literary concept of naturalism perpetually contradicts itself, oscillating between the transcendental affirmation of human freedom and the demonstration of its nonexistence. In this tension it gropes for forms that will satisfy both demands. These contradictions, and this divided stream, Mr. Walcutt shows, represent the central intellectual and social problem of the modern world, where the confusions between materialism and religion are ubiquitous. In tracing the development of naturalism in the novel, the author provides a background with chapters on naturalistic theory and the theory and practice of Emile Zola. He then traces the shifts in form through the worlds of Harold Frederic, Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Frank Norris, Winston Churchill, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, James T. Farrell, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passes. College English commented: "This is a book that will clarify some of the confusion that teachers and students face when they discover that naturalistic novels do not always follow naturalistic theory." Writing in Prairie Schooner, Ihab Hassan pointed out: "In speculating on the origins of naturalism, in perceiving the inner contradictions of its spirit and the tensions of its form, and in following its full and vital sweep as it allies itself now with impressionism, now with expressionism, Professor Walcutt manages to throw new light on a major movement in American letters."

Download or read book The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism written by Karin M. Danielsson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-09-05 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism responds to a need to expand and refine the connections among nonhuman studies and American literary naturalism and to productively expand the scholarly discourse surrounding this vital movement in American literary history. This collection focuses on that which becomes visible when the human subject is skirted, or moved off-center: in other words, the representation of nonhuman animals and other vital or inert species, things, entities, cityscapes and seascapes, that play an important part in American literary naturalism. Informed by animal studies, ecocriticism, posthumanism, new materialism, and other recent theoretical perspectives, the essays in this collection discuss early naturalist texts as well as more recent naturalistic-oriented authors.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism written by Keith Newlin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-26 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After its heyday in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, naturalism, a genre that typically depicts human beings as the product of biological and environmental forces over which they have little control, was supplanted by modernism, a genre in which writers experimented with innovations in form and content. In the last decade, the movement is again attracting spirited scholarly debate. The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism takes stock of the best new research in the field through collecting twenty-eight original essays drawing upon recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies. The contributors offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of writers from Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London to Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, John Steinbeck, Joyce Carol Oates, and Cormac McCarthy. One set of essays focus on the genre itself, exploring the historical contexts that gave birth to it, the problem of definition, its interconnections with other genres, the scientific and philosophical ideas that motivate naturalist authors, and the continuing presence of naturalism in twenty-first century fiction. Others examine the tensions within the genre-the role of women and African-American writers, depictions of sexuality, the problem of race, and the critique of commodity culture and class. A final set of essays looks beyond the works to consider the role of the marketplace in the development of naturalism, the popular and critical response to the works, and the influence of naturalism in the other arts.

Download or read book Form and History in American Literary Naturalism written by June Howard and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-03-01 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the novels of Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, and other writers, June Howard presents a study of American literary naturalism as a genre. Naturalism, she states, is a way of imagining the world and the relation of the self to the world, a way of making sense -- and making narrative -- out of the comforts and discomforts of its historical moment. Howard believes that naturalism accomodates the sense of perilousness, uncertainty, and disorder that many Americans felt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She argues for a redefinition of the form which allows it to be seen as an immanent ideology responding to a specific historical situation. Working both from accepted definitions of naturalism and from close analysis of the literary texts themselves, Howard consructs a new description of the genre in terms of its thematic antinomies, patterns of characterization, and narrative strategies. She defines a range of historical and cultural reference for the ideas and images of American naturalism and suggests that the form has affinities with such contemporary ideologies as political progressivism and criminal anthropology. In the process, she demonstrates that genre criticism and historical analysis can be combined to create a powerful method for writing literary history. Throughout Howard's study, the concept of genre is used not as a prescriptive straitjacket but as a category allowing the perception of significant similarities and differences among literary works and the coordination of textual analysis with the history of literary and social forces. For Howard, naturalism is a dynamic solution to the problem of generating narrative from the particular historical and cultural materials available to the authors. Originally published in 1985. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Download or read book American Literary Naturalism written by Donald Pizer and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2020-10-09 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book collects Pizer’s late career essays on various writers and subjects related to American naturalism. Of these, two seek to describe the movement as a whole, six are on specific writers or works (with an emphasis on Theodore Dreiser), and two reprint informative interviews by Pizer on the subject. The essays reflect Pizer’s mature engagement of the subject he has spent a lifetime exploring.

Download or read book A Companion to American Literature written by Susan Belasco and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-04-02 with total page 4591 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive, chronological overview of American literature in three scholarly and authoritative volumes A Companion to American Literature traces the history and development of American literature from its early origins in Native American oral tradition to 21st century digital literature. This comprehensive three-volume set brings together contributions from a diverse international team of accomplished young scholars and established figures in the field. Contributors explore a broad range of topics in historical, cultural, political, geographic, and technological contexts, engaging the work of both well-known and non-canonical writers of every period. Volume One is an inclusive and geographically expansive examination of early American literature, applying a range of cultural and historical approaches and theoretical models to a dramatically expanded canon of texts. Volume Two covers American literature between 1820 and 1914, focusing on the development of print culture and the literary marketplace, the emergence of various literary movements, and the impact of social and historical events on writers and writings of the period. Spanning the 20th and early 21st centuries, Volume Three studies traditional areas of American literature as well as the literature from previously marginalized groups and contemporary writers often overlooked by scholars. This inclusive and comprehensive study of American literature: Examines the influences of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and disability on American literature Discusses the role of technology in book production and circulation, the rise of literacy, and changing reading practices and literary forms Explores a wide range of writings in multiple genres, including novels, short stories, dramas, and a variety of poetic forms, as well as autobiographies, essays, lectures, diaries, journals, letters, sermons, histories, and graphic narratives. Provides a thematic index that groups chapters by contexts and illustrates their links across different traditional chronological boundaries A Companion to American Literature is a valuable resource for students coming to the subject for the first time or preparing for field examinations, instructors in American literature courses, and scholars with more specialized interests in specific authors, genres, movements, or periods.

Download or read book Between the Self and the Public written by Stephan Wender and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the study of American literature there persists an assumption that literary naturalism was overtaken around 1910 or so by modernism, a mode of writing that represents a clear advancement in technique and subject matter. This idea has been reinforced by the segregation of academic literary study into distinct periods of specialization, a disciplinary cordon that helps to explain an otherwise puzzling absence of critical work that seeks to identify elements of continuity between the two literary modes. My dissertation argues that naturalism and modernism ought not to be regarded as ancestor and successor upon an evolutionary timeline of development, but rather as complementary strategies of representation that are 'co-implicated' in American urban fiction. In the dissertation I maintain that during the fin-de-siecle period of accelerated industrialization and urbanization a new system of cultural selection called 'the promotional matrix' begins to fuse and focalize public and private spheres so that individual identities are defined vis-a-vis the wider social system, which is itself increasingly devoted to the promotion of individual identities. Pace the poststructuralist critics of the last twenty years who have sought to debunk the oppositional status of naturalism, it is my contention that the most vital and lasting legacy of the original generation of American naturalists can be found in their shared commitment to describing and interrogating the system of structured competition that was coming to mediate between the self and the public in the United States. Indeed, I argue that naturalism constitutes a usable literary counter-tradition for the writers of modernism, one that they freely adapted and transformed in accordance with changing literary techniques and political circumstances. Throughout the dissertation I approach questions of literary form by considering how fiction might be related to such disparate discourses as urban sociology, economic data, cultural geography, popular culture, critical theory and literary biography. While my analysis might be accurately characterized as 'materialist' or 'historicist' I have also been crucially informed by deconstruction, gender studies and psychoanalysis, methods that have helped me to more fully comprehend the co-extensive realms of social space and representation.

Download or read book American Literary Naturalism and Its Twentieth century Transformations written by Paul Civello and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This study examines American literary naturalism as a narrative form and the ways in which it has been reworked in modern and postmodern texts. Departing from the work of such widely diverse theorists as Charles Child Walcutt, Donald Pizer, and Walter Benn Michaels, Paul Civello views naturalism not as a distinctly turn-of-the-century literary phenomenon but as a form of narrative that continued to manifest itself in later literary movements." "In tracing the evolution of this movement, Civello concentrates on three authors from distinctly different periods of American literature: Frank Norris, representative of nineteenth-century literary naturalism; Ernest Hemingway, a central figure in modernism; and Don DeLillo, a writer in the postmodern tradition. Beginning with a discussion of the Darwinian roots of naturalism, Civello reads two representative texts by each of the three authors in light of scientific and philosophical discourse of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Download or read book The City in American Literature and Culture written by Kevin R. McNamara and published by . This book was released on 2021-08-05 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines what literature and film reveal about the urban USA. Subjects include culture, class, race, crime, and disaster.

Download or read book The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism written by Donald Pizer and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his first book devoted exclusively to naturalism, Donald Pizer brings together thirteen essays and four reviews written over a thirty-year period that in their entirety constitute a full-scale interpretation of the basic character and historical shape of naturalism in America. The essays fall into three groups. Some deal with the full range of American naturalism, from the 1590s to the late twentieth century, and some are confined either to the 1890s or to the twentieth century. In addition to the essays, an introduction in which Pizer recounts the development of his interest in American naturalism, reviews of recent studies of naturalism, and a selected bibliography contribute to an understanding of Pizer's interpretation of the movement. One of the recurrent themes in the essays is that the interpretation of American naturalism has been hindered by the common view that the movement is characterized by a commitment to Emile Zola's deterministic beliefs and that naturalistic novels are thus inevitably crude and simplistic both in theme and method. Rather than accept this notion, Pizer insists that naturalistic novels be read closely not for their success or failure in rendering obvious deterministic beliefs but rather for what actually does occur within the dynamic play of theme and form within the work. Adopting this method, Pizer finds that naturalistic fiction often reveals a complex and suggestive mix of older humanistic faiths and more recent doubts about human volition, and that it renders this vital thematic ambivalence in increasingly sophisticated forms as the movement matures. In addition, Pizer demonstrates that American naturalism cannot be viewed monolithically as a school with a common body of belief and value. Rather, each generation of American naturalists, as well as major figures within each generation, has responded to threads within the naturalistic impulse in strikingly distinctive ways. And it is indeed this absence of a rigid doctrinal core and the openness of the movement to individual variation that are responsible for the remarkable vitality and longevity of the movement. Because the essays have their origin in efforts to describe the general characteristics of American naturalism rather than in a desire to cover the field fully, some authors and works are discussed several times (though from different angles) and some referred to only briefly or notat all. But the essays as a collection are "complete" in the sense that they comprise an interpretation of American naturalism both in its various phases and as a whole. Those authors whose works receive substantial discussion include Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, James T. Farrell, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, and William Kennedy. Of special interest is Pizer's essay on Ironweed, which appears here for the first time.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature written by Kevin R. McNamara and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-06 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion offers readers an accessible survey of the historical and symbolic relationships between literature and the city.

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies written by Lieven Ameel and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-08-10 with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past decades, the growing interest in the study of literature of the city has led to the development of literary urban studies as a discipline in its own right. The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies provides a methodical overview of the fundamentals of this developing discipline and a detailed outline of new directions in the field. It consists of 33 newly commissioned chapters that provide an outline of contemporary literary urban studies. The Companion covers all of the main theoretical approaches as well as key literary genres, with case studies covering a range of different geographical, cultural, and historical settings. The final chapters provide a window into new debates in the field. The three focal issues are key concepts and genres of literary urban studies; a reassessment and critique of classical urban studies theories and the canon of literary capitals; and methods for the analysis of cities in literature. The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies provides the reader with practical insights into the methods and approaches that can be applied to the city in literature and serves as an important reference work for upper-level students and researchers working on city literature. Chapter 15 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com

Download or read book Silent Film and U S Naturalist Literature written by Katherine Fusco and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-17 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Typically, studies of early cinema’s relation to literature have focused on the interactions between film and modernism. When film first emerged, however, it was naturalism, not modernism, competing for the American public’s attention. In this media ecosystem, the cinema appeared alongside the works of authors including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jack London, and Frank Norris. Drawing on contemporaneous theories of time and modernity as well as recent scholarship on film, narrative, and naturalism, this book moves beyond traditional adaptation studies approaches to argue that both naturalism and the early cinema intervened in the era’s varying experiments with temporality and time management. Specifically, it shows that American naturalist novels are constructed around a sustained formal and thematic interrogation of the relationship between human freedom and temporal inexorability and that the early cinema developed its norms in the context of naturalist experiments with time. The book identifies the silent cinema and naturalist novel’s shared privileging of narrative progress over character development as a symbolic solution to social and aesthetic concerns ranging from systems of representation, to historiography, labor reform, miscegenation, and birth control. This volume thus establishes the dynamic exchange between silent film and naturalism, arguing that in the products of this exchange, personality figures as excess bogging down otherwise efficient narratives of progress. Considering naturalist authors and a diverse range of early film genres, this is the first book-length study of the reciprocal media exchanges that took place when the cinema was new. It will be a valuable resource to those with interests in Adaptation Studies, American Literature, Film History, Literary Naturalism, Modernism, and Narrative Theory.

Download or read book Literature and the Peripheral City written by Jason Finch and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-05-27 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cities have always been defined by their centrality. But literature demonstrates that their diverse peripheries define them, too: from suburbs to slums, rubbish dumps to nightclubs and entire failed cities. The contributors to this collection explore literary urban peripheries through readings of literature from four continents and numerous cities.

Download or read book Place Making in the Declarative City written by Beatrix Busse and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-06-08 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language in Text and Discourse is an innovative state-of-the-art interdisciplinary series of monographs and edited collections that focus on cutting-edge linguistic studies at the interface between discourse and society including corpus approaches. This series is a forum for studies of language in interaction with other semiotic modes which address the question of how meanings are activated, remade or re-shaped within a variety of contexts and interactions, such as social or textual structures, places, styles, or discursive moments. These are considered to be resources for placemaking or positioning, which correlate and are indexically linked with repetitive semiotic patterns. Verbal and non-verbal positioning as well as conventionalised forms of patterning determine, construe and reflect historically variable concepts of social reality. These are part of a complex network of discursive realities, power relations and voices. The series incorporates studies of social styling and language usage as well as processes of position-ing in a number of different linguistic as well as social, cultural, aesthetic and historical contexts. By transcending disciplinary boundaries the series is integrative in a number of ways. We will publish linguistic studies written in English or German about grammatical, knowledge-oriented, stylistic and sociolinguistic approaches within the fields of discourse analy-sis or corpus linguistics. These studies com-bine quantitative and qualitative investigations or represent mono- or multi-modal analyses. All submissions will be peer-reviewed. Editors: Beatrix Busse, professor of English linguistics, is Vice-rector for teaching and learning at the University of Köln (Germany). Ingo H. Warnke holds the chair of German linguistics and interdisciplinary linguistics at the University of Bremen (Germany).