Download or read book Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe s Circle written by Eliza Richards and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-09-06 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poe is frequently portrayed as an isolated idiosyncratic genius who was unwilling or unable to adapt himself to the cultural conditions of his time. Eliza Richards revises this portrayal through an exploration of his collaborations and rivalries with his female contemporaries. Richards demonstrates that he staged his performance of tortured isolation in the salons and ephemeral publications of New York City in conjunction with prominent women poets whose work sought to surpass. She introduces and interprets the work of three important and largely forgotten women poets: Frances Sargent Osgood, Sarah Helen Whitman, and Elizabeth Oakes Smith. Richards re-evaluates the work of these writers, and of nineteenth-century lyric practices more generally, by examining poems in the context of their circulation and reception within nineteenth-century print culture. This book will be of interest to scholars of American print culture as well as specialists of nineteenth-century literature and poetry.

Download or read book Who Killed American Poetry written by Karen L. Kilcup and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2019-10-25 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the 19th century, American poetry was a profoundly populist literary form. It circulated in New England magazines and Southern newspapers; it was read aloud in taverns, homes, and schools across the country. Antebellum reviewers envisioned poetry as the touchstone democratic genre, and their Civil War–era counterparts celebrated its motivating power, singing poems on battlefields. Following the war, however, as criticism grew more professionalized and American literature emerged as an academic subject, reviewers increasingly elevated difficult, dispassionate writing and elite readers over their supposedly common counterparts, thereby separating “authentic” poetry for intellectuals from “popular” poetry for everyone else.\ Conceptually and methodologically unique among studies of 19th-century American poetry, Who Killed American Poetry? not only charts changing attitudes toward American poetry, but also applies these ideas to the work of representative individual poets. Closely analyzing hundreds of reviews and critical essays, Karen L. Kilcup tracks the century’s developing aesthetic standards and highlights the different criteria reviewers used to assess poetry based on poets’ class, gender, ethnicity, and location. She shows that, as early as the 1820s, critics began to marginalize some kinds of emotional American poetry, a shift many scholars have attributed primarily to the late-century emergence of affectively restrained modernist ideals. Mapping this literary critical history enables us to more readily apprehend poetry’s status in American culture—both in the past and present—and encourages us to scrutinize the standards of academic criticism that underwrite contemporary aesthetics and continue to constrain poetry’s appeal. Who American Killed Poetry? enlarges our understanding of American culture over the past two hundred years and will interest scholars in literary studies, historical poetics, American studies, gender studies, canon criticism, genre studies, the history of criticism, and affect studies. It will also appeal to poetry readers and those who enjoy reading about American cultural history.

Download or read book Dickinson s Misery written by Virginia Jackson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-03 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we know that Emily Dickinson wrote poems? How do we recognize a poem when we see one? In Dickinson's Misery, Virginia Jackson poses fundamental questions about reading habits we have come to take for granted. Because Dickinson's writing remained largely unpublished when she died in 1886, decisions about what it was that Dickinson wrote have been left to the editors, publishers, and critics who have brought Dickinson's work into public view. The familiar letters, notes on advertising fliers, verses on split-open envelopes, and collections of verses on personal stationery tied together with string have become the Dickinson poems celebrated since her death as exemplary lyrics. Jackson makes the larger argument that the century and a half spanning the circulation of Dickinson's work tells the story of a shift in the publication, consumption, and interpretation of lyric poetry. This shift took the form of what this book calls the "lyricization of poetry," a set of print and pedagogical practices that collapsed the variety of poetic genres into lyric as a synonym for poetry. Featuring many new illustrations from Dickinson's manuscripts, this book makes a major contribution to the study of Dickinson and of nineteenth-century American poetry. It maps out the future for new work in historical poetics and lyric theory.

Download or read book The Black Romantic Revolution written by Matt Sandler and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The prophetic poetry of slavery and its abolition During the pitched battle over slavery in the United States, Black writers—enslaved and free—allied themselves with the cause of abolition and used their art to advocate for emancipation and to envision the end of slavery as a world-historical moment of possibility. These Black writers borrowed from the European tradition of Romanticism—lyric poetry, prophetic visions--to write, speak, and sing their hopes for what freedom might mean. At the same time, they voiced anxieties about the expansion of global capital and US imperial power in the aftermath of slavery. They also focused on the ramifications of slavery's sexual violence. Authors like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, George Moses Horton, Albery Allson Whitman, and Joshua McCarter Simpson conceived the Civil War as a revolutionary upheaval on par with Europe's stormy Age of Revolutions. The Black Romantic Revolution proposes that the Black Romantics' cultural innovations have shaped Black radical culture to this day, from the blues and hip hop to Black nationalism and Black feminism. Their expressions of love and rage, grief and determination, dreams and nightmares, still echo into our present.

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 The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville written by Robert S. Levine and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-25 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville provides timely, critical essays on Melville's classic works. The essays have been specially commissioned for this volume and provide a complete overview of Melville's career. Melville's major novels are discussed, along with a range of his short fiction and poetry, including neglected works ripe for rediscovery. The volume includes essays on such new topics as Melville and oceanic studies, Melville and animal studies, and Melville and the planetary, along with a number of essays that focus on form and aesthetics. Written at a level both challenging and accessible, this New Companion brings together a team of leading international scholars to offer students of American literature the most comprehensive introduction available to Melville's art.

Download or read book The Western Captive and Other Indian Stories written by Elizabeth Oakes Smith and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2015-08-10 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edition recovers Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s successful 1842 novel The Western Captive; or, The Times of Tecumseh and includes many of Oakes Smith’s other writings about Native Americans, including short stories, legends, and autobiographical and biographical sketches. The Western Captive portrays the Shawnee leader as an American hero and the white heroine’s spiritual soulmate; in contrast to the later popular legend of Tecumseh’s rejected marriage proposal to a white woman, Margaret, the “captive” of the title, returns Tecumseh’s love and embraces life apart from white society. These texts are accompanied by selections from Oakes Smith’s Woman and Her Needs and her unpublished autobiography, from contemporary captivity narratives and biographies of William Henry Harrison depicting the Shawnee, and from writings by her colleagues Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft.

Download or read book Anthologizing Poe written by Emron Esplin and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-08-06 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection explores how anthologizers and editors of Edgar Allan Poe play an integral role in shaping our conceptions of Poe as the author we have come to recognize, revere, and critique today. In the spheres of literature and popular culture, Poe wields more global influence than any other U.S. author. This influence, however, cannot be attributed solely to the quality of Poe’s texts or to his compellingly tragic biography. Rather, his continued prominence as a writer owes much to the ways that Poe has been interpreted, portrayed, and packaged by an extensive group of mediators ranging from anthologizers, editors, translators, and fellow writers to literary critics, filmmakers, musicians, and illustrators. In this volume, the work of presenting Poe’s texts for public consumption becomes a fascinating object of study in its own right, one that highlights the powerful and often overlooked influence of those who have edited, anthologized, translated, and adapted the author’s writing over the past 170 years.

Download or read book Heaven s Interpreters written by Ashley Reed and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Heaven's Interpreters, Ashley Reed reveals how nineteenth-century American women writers transformed the public sphere by using the imaginative power of fiction to craft new models of religious identity and agency. Women writers of the antebellum period, Reed contends, embraced theological concepts to gain access to the literary sphere, challenging the notion that theological discourse was exclusively oppressive and served to deny women their own voice. Attending to modes of being and believing in works by Augusta Jane Evans, Harriet Jacobs, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Elizabeth Stoddard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Susan Warner, Reed illuminates how these writers infused the secular space of fiction with religious ideas and debates, imagining new possibilities for women's individual agency and collective action. Thanks to generous funding from Virginia Tech and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

Download or read book What Jane Knew written by Maureen Konkle and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2024-04-30 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The children of an influential Ojibwe-Anglo family, Jane Johnston and her brother George were already accomplished writers when the Indian agent Henry Rowe Schoolcraft arrived in Sault Ste. Marie in 1822. Charged by Michigan's territorial governor with collecting information on Anishinaabe people, he soon married Jane, "discovered" the family's writings, and began soliciting them for traditional Anishinaabe stories. But what began as literary play became the setting for political struggle. Jane and her family wrote with attention to the beauty of Anishinaabe narratives and to their expression of an Anishinaabe world that continued to coexist with the American republic. But Schoolcraft appropriated the stories and published them as his own writing, seeking to control their meaning and to destroy their impact in service to the "civilizing" interests of the United States. In this dramatic story, Maureen Konkle helps recover the literary achievements of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and her kin, revealing as never before how their lives and work shed light on nineteenth-century struggles over the future of Indigenous people in the United States.

Download or read book Electric Meters written by Jason R. Rudy and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics Jason R. Rudy connects formal poetic innovations to developments in the electrical and physiological sciences, arguing that the electrical sciences and bodily poetics cannot be separated, and that they came together with special force in the years between the 1830s, which witnessed the invention of the electric telegraph, and the 1870s, when James Clerk Maxwell's electric field theory transformed the study of electrodynamics. Combining formal poetic analysis with cultural history, Jason Rudy traces the development of Victorian physiological poetics from the Romantic poetess tradition through to the works of Alfred Tennyson, the "Spasmodic" poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Algernon Swinburne, among others.

Download or read book American Literature in Transition 1820 1860 Volume 2 written by Justine S. Murison and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-23 with total page 765 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in American Literature in Transition, 1820-1860 offer a new approach to the antebellum era, one that frames the age not merely as the precursor to the Civil War but as indispensable for understanding present crises around such issues as race, imperialism, climate change, and the role of literature in American society. The essays make visible and usable the period's fecund imagined futures, futures that certainly included disunion but not only disunion. Tracing the historical contexts, literary forms and formats, global coordinates, and present reverberations of antebellum literature and culture, the essays in this volume build on existing scholarship while indicating exciting new avenues for research and teaching. Taken together, the essays in this volume make this era's literature relevant for a new generation of students and scholars.

Download or read book New England Women Writers Secularity and the Federalist Politics of Church and State written by Gretchen Murphy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-10 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on literature, correspondence, sermons, legal writing, and newspaper publishing, this book offers a new account women's political participation and the process of religious disestablishment. Scholars have long known that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American women wrote pious, sentimental stories, but this book uses biographical and archival methods to understand their religious concerns as entry points into the era's debates about democratic conditions of possibility and the role of religion in a republic. Beginning with the early republic's constitutional and electoral contests about the end of religious establishment and extending through the nineteenth century, Murphy argues that Federalist women and Federalist daughters of the next generation adapted that party's ideas and fears by promoting privatized Christianity with public purpose. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catharine Sedgwick, Lydia Sigourney, Judith Sargent Murray, and Sally Sayward Wood authorised themselves as Federalism's literary curators, and in doing so they imagined new configurations of religion and revolution, faith and rationality, public and private. They did so using literary form, writing in gothic, sentimental, and regionalist genres to update the Federalist concatenation of religion, morality, and government in response to changing conditions of secularity and religious privatization in the new republic. Murphy shows that their project both complicates received narratives of separation of church and state and illuminates the problem of democracy and belief in postsecular America.

Download or read book Teaching Tainted Lit written by Janet G. Casey and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2015-11-15 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular American fiction has now secured a routine position in the higher education classroom despite its historic status as culturally suspect. This newfound respect and inclusion have almost certainly changed the pedagogical landscape, and Teaching Tainted Lit explores that altered terrain. If the academy has historically ignored, or even sneered at, the popular, then its new accommodation within the framework of college English is noteworthy: surely the popular introduces both pleasures and problems that did not exist when faculty exclusively taught literature from an established “high” canon. How, then, does the assumption that the popular matters affect teaching strategies, classroom climates, and both personal and institutional notions about what it means to study literature? The essays in this collection presume that the popular is here to stay and that its instructive implications are not merely noteworthy, but richly nuanced and deeply compelling. They address a broad variety of issues concerning canonicity, literature, genre, and the classroom, as its contributors teach everything from Stephen King and Lady Gaga to nineteenth-century dime novels and the 1852 best-seller Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It is no secret that teaching popular texts fuels controversies about the value of cultural studies, the alleged relaxation of aesthetic standards, and the possible “dumbing down” of Americans. By implicitly and explicitly addressing such contentious issues, these essays invite a broader conversation about the place of the popular not only in higher education but in the reading lives of all Americans.

Download or read book Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture written by Jerome McGann and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2012-12-19 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edgar Allan Poe (1809--1849) has long occupied the position of literary outsider. Dismissed as unrepresentative of the main currents of antebellum culture, Poe commented incisively -- in fiction and nonfiction -- on nationalism, science, materialism, popular taste, and cultural ideology. Opposing the pressure to write nationalistic "American" tales or from a restricted New England perspective, he produced a body of work held in greater international esteem than that of any of his U.S. contemporaries. In Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture, scholars explore Poe's anti-nationalistic Americanism as they redefine the outlines of antebellum print culture and challenge ideas that situate Poe at the margins of national thought and cultural activity. The contributors offer fresh perspectives on an often-maligned author, including essays on Poe's preoccupation with celebrity, his fascination with metropolitan crime and mystery, his impact as an observer of racial fear, his role as an eccentric cultural icon, and his fluctuating reputation in our own era. They also argue for new digital approaches that facilitate remapping of print culture. Contributors: Anna Brickhouse, Betsy Erkkila, Jennifer Rae Greeson, Leon Jackson, J. Gerald Kennedy, Maurice S. Lee, Jerome McGann, Scott Peeples, Leland S. Person, and Eliza Richards

Download or read book Slavery Surveillance and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature written by Kelly Ross and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-30 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature argues for the existence of deep, often unexamined, interconnections between genre and race by tracing how surveillance migrates from the literature of slavery to crime, gothic, and detective fiction. Attending to the long history of surveillance and policing of African Americans, the book challenges the traditional conception of surveillance as a top-down enterprise, equally addressing the tactics of sousveillance (watching from below) that enslaved people and their allies used to resist, escape, or merely survive racial subjugation. Examining the dialectic of racialized surveillance and sousveillance from fugitive slave narratives to fictional genres focused on crime and detection, the book shows how these genres share a thematic concern with the surveillance of racialized bodies and formal experimentation with ways of telling a story in which certain information is either rendered visible or kept hidden. Through close readings of understudied fugitive slave narratives published in the 1820s and 1830s, as well as texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Hannah Crafts, and Harriet Jacobs, Ross analyzes the different ways white and black authors take up these issues in their writing--from calming white fears of enslaved rebellion to abolishing slavery--and demonstrates how literary representations ultimately destabilize any clear-cut opposition between watching from above and below. In so doing, the book demonstrates the importance of race to surveillance studies and claims a greater role for the impact of surveillance on literary expression in the US during the era of slavery.

Download or read book The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth Century American Literature written by Justine S. Murison and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-21 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For much of the nineteenth century, the nervous system was a medical mystery, inspiring scientific studies and exciting great public interest. Because of this widespread fascination, the nerves came to explain the means by which mind and body related to each other. By the 1830s, the nervous system helped Americans express the consequences on the body, and for society, of major historical changes. Literary writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe, used the nerves as a metaphor to re-imagine the role of the self amidst political, social and religious tumults, including debates about slavery and the revivals of the Second Great Awakening. Representing the 'romance' of the nervous system and its cultural impact thoughtfully and, at times, critically, the fictional experiments of this century helped construct and explore a neurological vision of the body and mind. Murison explains the impact of neurological medicine on nineteenth-century literature and culture.