Download or read book Frantic Panoramas written by Nancy Bentley and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-05-23 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Late nineteenth-century America saw an explosion in mass culture—from sensationalist tabloid newspapers to amusement parks to Wild West shows. Historians and critics have traditionally observed the advent of mass culture as undermining literature's central role in the public sphere. Literary writers of the time either reacted with a public show of disdain or retreated to conduct their own private experiments in style and form. In Frantic Panoramas, Nancy Bentley questions these narratives of opposition. For literary writers, Bentley explains, the confrontation with mass culture was less a retreat than a transformation, an ordeal through which habits of contemplative appreciation could be refashioned into new forms of critical thought. By grappling with the energies that marked mass culture, authors came to recognize kinds of human experience that were only then becoming visible as public. William Dean Howells shaped the plots of his novels around tabloid events like rail and trolley accidents and the public chaos of apartment house fires. Although Henry James was distressed at the way dime fiction had changed the very definition of literature, his meditations on mass culture led him to reimagine the novel as a collective "workshop" in which authors and readers jointly discovered new meaning. Bentley offers close readings of these and other writers such as Edith Wharton, James Weldon Johnson, Pauline Hopkins, and Gertrude Bonnin to demonstrate how leading artists took inspiration from commercial culture to create new and distinct literary forms. Drawing on original archival research and a historically grounded theory of realism, Frantic Panoramas is an innovative and comprehensive study of how the emergence of mass culture affected literary culture in America.
Download or read book Silent Film and the Formations of U S Literary Culture written by Sarah Gleeson-White and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silent Film and the Formations of U.S. Literary Culture: Literature in Motion discovers the considerable impact of motion pictures on literary culture across the early decades of the twentieth century by exploring how motion pictures spurred change in twentieth century literature.
Download or read book Henry James in Context written by David McWhirter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-16 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fullest single volume work of reference on James's life and his interactions with the world around him.
Download or read book American Literature in Transition 1876 1910 Volume 4 written by Lindsay V. Reckson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-18 with total page 703 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addressing US literature from 1876 to 1910, this volume aims to account for the period's immense transformations while troubling the ideology of progress that underwrote much of its self-understanding. This volume queries the various forms and formations of post-Reconstruction American literature. It contends that the literature of this period, most often referred to as 'turn-of-the-century' might be more productively oriented by the end of Reconstruction and the haunting aftermath of its emancipatory potential than by the logic of temporal and social advance that underwrote the end of the century and the beginning of the Progressive Era. Acknowledging that nearly all US literature after 1876 might be described as post-Reconstruction, the volume invites readers to reframe this period by asking: under what terms did post-Reconstruction American literature challenge or re-consolidate the 'nation' as an affective, political, and discursive phenomenon? And what kind of alternative pasts and futures did it write into existence?
Download or read book Sensory Experiments written by Erica Fretwell and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-14 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Sensory Experiments, Erica Fretwell excavates the nineteenth-century science of psychophysics and its theorizations of sensation to examine the cultural and aesthetic landscape of feeling in nineteenth-century America. Fretwell demonstrates how psychophysics—a scientific movement originating in Germany and dedicated to the empirical study of sensory experience—shifted the understandings of feeling from the epistemology of sentiment to the phenomenological terrain of lived experience. Through analyses of medical case studies, spirit photographs, perfumes, music theory, recipes, and the work of canonical figures ranging from Kate Chopin and Pauline Hopkins to James Weldon Johnson and Emily Dickinson, Fretwell outlines how the five senses became important elements in the biopolitical work of constructing human difference along the lines of race, gender, and ability. In its entanglement with social difference, psychophysics contributed to the racialization of aesthetics while sketching out possibilities for alternate modes of being over and against the figure of the bourgeois liberal individual. Although psychophysics has largely been forgotten, Fretwell demonstrates that its importance to shaping social order through scientific notions of sensation is central to contemporary theories of new materialism, posthumanism, aesthetics, and affect theory.
Download or read book A Companion to American Literary Studies written by Caroline F. Levander and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-08-17 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to American Literary Studies addresses the most provocative questions, subjects, and issues animating the field. Essays provide readers with the knowledge and conceptual tools for understanding American literary studies as it is practiced today, and chart new directions for the future of the subject. Offers up-to-date accounts of major new critical approaches to American literary studies Presents state-of-the-art essays on a full range of topics central to the field Essays explore critical and institutional genealogies of the field, increasingly diverse conceptions of American literary study, and unprecedented material changes such as the digital revolution A unique anthology in the field, and an essential resource for libraries, faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates
Download or read book Guilty Pleasures written by Hugh McIntosh and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2018-09-24 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Guilty pleasures in one’s reading habits are nothing new. Late-nineteenth-century American literary culture even championed the idea that popular novels need not be great. Best-selling novels arrived in the public sphere as at once beloved and contested objects, an ambivalence that reflected and informed America’s cultural insecurity. This became a matter of nationhood as well as aesthetics: the amateurism of popular narratives resonated with the discourse of new nationhood. In Guilty Pleasures, Hugh McIntosh examines reactions to best-selling fiction in the United States from 1850 to 1920, including reader response to such best-sellers as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Ben Hur, and Trilby as well as fictional representations—from Trollope to Baldwin—of American culture’s lack of artistic greatness. Drawing on a transatlantic archive of contemporary criticism, urban display, parody, and advertising, Guilty Pleasures thoroughly documents how the conflicted attitude toward popular novels shaped these ephemeral modes of response. Paying close attention to this material history of novel reading, McIntosh reveals how popular fiction’s unique status as socially saturating and aesthetically questionable inspired public reflection on what it meant to belong to a flawed national community.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism written by Keith Newlin and published by Oxford Handbooks. This book was released on 2019 with total page 733 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism offers 35 original essays of fresh interpretations of the artistic and political challenges of representing life accurately. Organized by topic and theme, essays draw upon recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies to offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of major and minor figures and the contexts that shaped their work. One set of essays explores realism's genesis and its connection to previous and subsequent movements. Others examine the inclusiveness of representation, the circulation of texts, and the aesthetic representation of science, time, space, and the subjects of medicine, the New Woman, and the middle class. Still others trace the connection to other arts--poetry, drama, illustration, photography, painting, and film--and to pedagogic issues in the teaching of realism"--
Download or read book The Value of Emily Dickinson written by Mary Loeffelholz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-23 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first compact introduction to Emily Dickinson to focus principally on her poems and their significance to readers. It addresses the question of literary value, considering current controversies over whether Dickinson's writings are best appreciated as visual works or as rhymed and metered poems intended for the ear.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature written by Yogita Goyal and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-13 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For two decades, the 'transnational turn' in literary studies has generated enormous comment and controversy. This Companion provides a comprehensive account of the scope, impact, and critical possibilities of the transnational turn in American literary studies. It situates the study of American literature in relation to ethnic, postcolonial, and hemispheric studies. Leading scholars open up wide-ranging examinations of transnationalism in American literature - through form and aesthetics, theories of nation, gender, sexuality, religion, and race, as well as through conventional forms of historical periodization. Offering a new map of American literature in the global era, this volume provides a history of the field, key debates, and instances of literary readings that convey the way in which transnationalism may be seen as a method, not just a description of literary work that engages more than one nation. Contributors identify the key modes by which writers have responded to major historical, political, and ethical issues prompted by the globalization of literary studies.
Download or read book When Did Indians Become Straight written by Mark Rifkin and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2011-01-27 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a groundbreaking study of the uses of the native in the making of critical theory and national belonging."---Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Professor of Anthropology & Gender Studies, Columbia University --
Download or read book Carceral Fantasies written by Alison Griffiths and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking contribution to the study of nontheatrical film exhibition, Carceral Fantasies tells the little-known story of how cinema found a home in the U.S. penitentiary system and how the prison emerged as a setting and narrative trope in modern cinema. Focusing on films shown in prisons before 1935, Alison Griffiths explores the unique experience of viewing cinema while incarcerated and the complex cultural roots of cinematic renderings of prison life. Griffiths considers a diverse mix of cinematic genres, from early actualities and reenactments of notorious executions to reformist exposés of the 1920s. She connects an early fascination with cinematic images of punishment and execution, especially electrocutions, to the attractions of the nineteenth-century carnival electrical wonder show and Phantasmagoria (a ghost show using magic lantern projections and special effects). Griffiths draws upon convict writing, prison annual reports, and the popular press obsession with prison-house cinema to document the integration of film into existing reformist and educational activities and film's psychic extension of flights of fancy undertaken by inmates in their cells. Combining penal history with visual and film studies and theories surrounding media's sensual effects, Carceral Fantasies illuminates how filmic representations of the penal system enacted ideas about modernity, gender, the body, and the public, shaping both the social experience of cinema and the public's understanding of the modern prison.
Download or read book Useful Objects written by Reed Gochberg and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-18 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Useful Objects examines the history of American museums during the nineteenth century through the eyes of visitors, writers, and collectors. Museums of this period included a wide range of objects, from botanical and zoological specimens to antiquarian artifacts and technological models. Intended to promote "useful knowledge," these collections generated broader discussions about how objects were selected, preserved, and classified. In guidebooks and periodicals, visitors described their experiences within museum galleries and marveled at the objects they encountered. In fiction, essays, and poems, writers embraced the imaginative possibilities represented by collections and proposed alternative systems of arrangement. These conversations interrogated many aspects of American culture, raising deep questions about how objects are interpreted--and who gets to decide their value. Combining literary criticism, the history of science, and museum studies, Useful Objects examines the dynamic and often fraught debates that emerged during a crucial period in the history of museums by drawing on a wide range of archival materials and accounts in fiction, guidebooks, and periodicals. As museums gradually transformed from encyclopedic cabinets to more specialized public institutions, many writers, including J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, William Wells Brown, Walt Whitman, and Henry David Thoreau, questioned who would have access to collections and the authority to interpret them. Throughout this period, they considered loss and preservation, raised concerns about the place of new ideas, and resisted increasingly fixed categories. Their reflections shaped broader debates about the scope and purpose of museums in American culture that continue to resonate today.
Download or read book Reading for Reform written by Laura R. Fisher and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unprecedented examination of class-bridging reform and U.S. literary history at the turn of the twentieth century Reading for Reform rewrites the literary history of late nineteenth and early twentieth century America by putting social reform institutions at the center of literary and cultural analysis. Examining the vibrant, often fractious literary cultures that developed as part of the Progressive mandate to uplift the socially disadvantaged, it shows that in these years reformers saw literature as a way to combat the myriad social problems that plagued modern U.S. society. As they developed distinctly literary methods for Americanizing immigrants, uplifting and refining wage-earning women, and educating black students, their institutions gave rise to a new social purpose for literature. Class-bridging reform institutions—the urban settlement house, working girls’ club, and African American college—are rarely addressed in literary history. Yet, Laura R. Fisher argues, they engendered important experiments in the form and social utility of American literature, from minor texts of Yiddish drama and little-known periodical and reform writers to the fiction of Edith Wharton and Nella Larsen. Fisher delves into reform’s vast and largely unexplored institutional archives to show how dynamic sites of modern literary culture developed at the margins of social power. Fisher reveals how reformist approaches to race, class, religion, and gender formation shaped American literature between the 1880s and the 1920s. In doing so, she tells a new story about the fate of literary practice, and the idea of literature’s practical value, during the very years that modernist authors were proclaiming art’s autonomy from concepts of social utility.
Download or read book Damn Great Empires written by Alexander Livingston and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Damn Great Empires! offers a new perspective on the works of William James by placing his encounter with American imperialism at the center of his philosophical vision. Treating James's speeches, essays, notes, and correspondence on the United States' annexation of the Philippines as keys for unlocking the political significance of his celebrated writings on psychology, religion, and philosophy, this book reconstructs his overlooked political thought. It shows how James located a craving for authority at the heart of empire, a craving he diagnosed and unsettled through his insistence of a modern world without ultimate foundations.
Download or read book Must Read Rediscovering American Bestsellers written by Sarah Churchwell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-08-02 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is it about certain books that makes them bestsellers? Why do some of these books remain popular for centuries, and others fade gently into obscurity? And why is it that when scholars do turn their attention to bestsellers, they seem only to be interested in the same handful of blockbusters, when so many books that were once immensely popular remain under-examined? Addressing those and other equally pressing questions about popular literature, Must Read is the first scholarly collection to offer both a survey of the evolution of American bestsellers as well as critical readings of some of the key texts that have shaped the American imagination since the nation's founding. Focusing on a mix of enduring and forgotten bestsellers, the essays in this collection consider 18th and 19th century works, like Charlotte Temple or Ben-Hur, that were once considered epochal but are now virtually ignored; 20th century favorites such as The Sheik and Peyton Place; and 21st century blockbusters including the novels of Nicholas Sparks, The Kite Runner, and The Da Vinci Code.
Download or read book Time Tense and American Literature written by Cindy Weinstein and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-09 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Time, Tense, and American Literature, Cindy Weinstein examines canonical American authors who employ a range of tenses to tell a story that has already taken place. This book argues that key texts in the archive of American literature are inconsistent in their retrospective status, ricocheting between past, present and future. Taking 'The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym' as her point of departure, Weinstein shows how Poe's way of representing time involves careening tenses, missing chronometers and inoperable watches, thus establishing a vocabulary of time that is at once anticipated in the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown and further articulated in works by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Theodore Dreiser and Edward P. Jones. Each chapter examines the often strange narrative fabric of these novels and presents an opportunity to understand how especially complicated historical moments, from the founding of the new nation to the psychic consequences of the Civil War, find contextual expression through a literary uncertainty about time.
