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American Literary History and the Turn Toward Modernity

Author : Melanie Dawson

Publisher :

Page : pages

File Size : 20,91 MB

Release : 2019

Category : American literature

ISBN : 9780813053813

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Book Description

Approaching the period of 1880 to 1930 in American literature as one in which the processes of rethinking the past were as prevalent as wholly 'new' works of art, this collection treats the century's long turn as a site that overtly staged the tension among conflicting sets of values-those of past, present, and the imagined future. Navigating established literary modes as well as anticipatory inscriptions of the 'modern,' turn-of-the-century authors continually negotiated ideological boundaries, treating the century's long turn as a period ripe for experimentation. Essays in the collection, which range across topics such as canonicity, advice literature, Native American education, companionate marriage, turn-of-the-century feminism, dime novels, and the Harlem Renaissance, stress the hybridity born of multiple historical investments.



American Literary History and the Turn toward Modernity

Author : Melanie V. Dawson

Publisher : University Press of Florida

Page : 299 pages

File Size : 27,28 MB

Release : 2018-08-10

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 0813052408

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Book Description

The years between 1880 and 1930 are usually seen as a time in which American writers departed from values and traditions of the Victorian era in wholly new works of modernist literature, with the turn of the century typically used as a dividing line between the old and the new. Challenging this periodization, contributors argue that this entire time span should instead be studied as a coherent and complex literary field. The essays in this volume show that these were years of experimentation, negotiation of boundaries, and hybridity—resulting in a true literature of transition. Contributors offer new readings of authors including Jack London, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser in light of their ties to both the nineteenth-century past and the emerging modernity of the twentieth century. Emphasizing the diversity of the literature of this time, contributors also examine poetry written by and for Native American students in a Westernized boarding school, the changing attitudes of authors toward marriage, turn-of-the-century feminism, dime novels, anthologies edited by late-nineteenth-century female literary historians, and fiction of the Harlem Renaissance. Calling for readers to look both forward and backward at the cultural contexts of these works and to be mindful of the elastic categories of this era, these essays demonstrate the plurality and the tensions characteristic of American literature during the century’s long turn. Contributors: Dale M. Bauer | Donna M. Campbell | Melanie Dawson | Myrto Drizou | Meredith Goldsmith | Karin Hooks | John G. Nichols | Kristen Renzi | Cristina Stanciu



Archives of American Time

Author : Lloyd Pratt

Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press

Page : 262 pages

File Size : 48,49 MB

Release : 2011-07-07

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 0812203534

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Book Description

American historians have typically argued that a shared experience of time worked to bind the antebellum nation together. Trains, technology, and expanding market forces catapulted the United States into the future on a straight line of progressive time. The nation's exceedingly diverse population could cluster around this common temporality as one forward-looking people. In a bold revision of this narrative, Archives of American Time examines American literature's figures and forms to disclose the competing temporalities that in fact defined the antebellum period. Through discussions that link literature's essential qualities to social theories of modernity, Lloyd Pratt asserts that the competition between these varied temporalities forestalled the consolidation of national and racial identity. Paying close attention to the relationship between literary genre and theories of nationalism, race, and regionalism, Archives of American Time shows how the fine details of literary genres tell against the notion that they helped to create national, racial, or regional communities. Its chapters focus on images of invasive forms of print culture, the American historical romance, African American life writing, and Southwestern humor. Each in turn revises our sense of how these images and genres work in such a way as to reconnect them to a broad literary and social history of modernity. At precisely the moment when American authors began self-consciously to quest after a future in which national and racial identity would reign triumphant over all, their writing turned out to restructure time in a way that began foreclosing on that particular future.



Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age

Author : Melanie V. Dawson

Publisher : University Press of Florida

Page : 379 pages

File Size : 31,37 MB

Release : 2020-02-17

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 0813057418

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Book Description

Providing a counterpoint to readings of modern American culture that focus on the cult of youth, Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age interrogates early twentieth-century literature’s obsessions with aging past early youth. Exploring the ways in which the aging process was understood as generating unequal privileges and as inciting intergenerational contests, this study situates constructions of age at the center of modern narrative conflicts. Dawson examines how representations of aging connect the work of Edith Wharton to writings by a number of modern authors, including Willa Cather, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Zora Neale Hurston, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Floyd Dell, Eugene O’Neill, and Gertrude Atherton. For these writers, age-based ideologies filter through narratives of mourning for youth lost in the Great War, the trauma connected to personal change, the contested self-determination of the aged, the perceived problem of middle-aged sexuality, fantasies of rejuvenation, and persistent patterns of patriarchal authority. The work of these writers shows that as the generational ascendancy of some groups was imagined to operate in tandem with disempowerment of others, the charged dynamics of age gave rise to contests about property and authority. Constructions of age-based values also reinforced gender norms, producing questions about personal value that were directed toward women of all ages. By interpreting Edith Wharton’s and her contemporaries’ works in relation to age-based anxieties, Dawson sets Wharton’s work at the center of a vital debate about the contested privileges associated with age in contemporary culture.



The African American Roots of Modernism

Author : James Edward Smethurst

Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press

Page : 266 pages

File Size : 45,65 MB

Release : 2011

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 0807834637

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Book Description

The period between 1880 and 1918, at the end of which Jim Crow was firmly established and the Great Migration of African Americans was well under way, was not the nadir for black culture, James Smethurst reveals, but instead a time of profound response fr



Translating the World

Author : Birgit Tautz

Publisher : Penn State Press

Page : 279 pages

File Size : 10,87 MB

Release : 2017-12-07

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 0271080515

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Book Description

In Translating the World, Birgit Tautz provides a new narrative of German literary history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Departing from dominant modes of thought regarding the nexus of literary and national imagination, she examines this intersection through the lens of Germany’s emerging global networks and how they were rendered in two very different German cities: Hamburg and Weimar. German literary history has tended to employ a conceptual framework that emphasizes the nation or idealized citizenry, yet the experiences of readers in eighteenth-century German cities existed within the context of their local environments, in which daily life occurred and writers such as Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe worked. Hamburg, a flourishing literary city in the late eighteenth century, was eventually relegated to the margins of German historiography, while Weimar, then a small town with an insular worldview, would become mythologized for not only its literary history but its centrality in national German culture. By interrogating the histories of and texts associated with these cities, Tautz shows how literary styles and genres are born of local, rather than national, interaction with the world. Her examination of how texts intersect and interact reveals how they shape and transform the urban cultural landscape as they are translated and move throughout the world. A fresh, elegant exploration of literary translation, discursive shifts, and global cultural changes, Translating the World is an exciting new story of eighteenth-century German culture and its relationship to expanding global networks that will especially interest scholars of comparative literature, German studies, and literary history.



Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism

Author : Emily Josephine Orlando

Publisher :

Page : 0 pages

File Size : 12,6 MB

Release : 2016

Category : Authors, American

ISBN : 9780813062815

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Book Description

"These energizing, excellent essays address the international scope of Wharton's writing and contribute to the growing fields of transatlantic, hemispheric, and global studies."--Carol J. Singley, author of A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton "Readers will emerge with a new respect for Wharton's engagement with the world around her and for her ability to convey her particular vision in her literary works."--Julie Olin-Ammentorp, author of Edith Wharton's Writings from the Great War Hailed for her remarkable social and psychological insights into the Gilded Age lives of privileged Americans, Edith Wharton, the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, was a transnational author who attempted to understand and appreciate the culture, history, and artifacts of the regions she encountered in her extensive travels abroad. Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism explores the international scope of Wharton's life and writing, focusing on how her work connects with the idea of cosmopolitanism. This volume illustrates the many ways Wharton engaged with global issues of her time. Contributors examine both her canonical and lesser-known works, including her art historical discoveries, political work, travel writing, World War I texts, and first novel. They consider themes of anarchism, race, imperialism, regionalism, and orientalism; Wharton's treatment of contemporary marriage debates; her indebtedness to her literary predecessors; and her genre experimentation. Together, they demonstrate how Wharton's struggle to balance her powerful local and national identifications with cosmopolitan values, resulted in a diverse, complex, and sometimes problematic relationship to a cosmopolitan vision. Contributors Ferd Asya - William Blazek - Rita Bode - Donna Campbell - Mary Carney - Clare Virginia Eby - June Howard - Meredith L. Goldsmith - Sharon Kim - D. Medina Lasansky - Maureen Montgomery - Emily J. Orlando - Margaret A. Toth - Gary Totten



Viral Modernism

Author : Elizabeth Outka

Publisher : Columbia University Press

Page : 355 pages

File Size : 13,30 MB

Release : 2019-10-22

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 0231546319

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Book Description

The influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 took the lives of between 50 and 100 million people worldwide, and the United States suffered more casualties than in all the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries combined. Yet despite these catastrophic death tolls, the pandemic faded from historical and cultural memory in the United States and throughout Europe, overshadowed by World War One and the turmoil of the interwar period. In Viral Modernism, Elizabeth Outka reveals the literary and cultural impact of one of the deadliest plagues in history, bringing to light how it shaped canonical works of fiction and poetry. Outka shows how and why the contours of modernism shift when we account for the pandemic’s hidden but widespread presence. She investigates the miasmic manifestations of the pandemic and its spectral dead in interwar Anglo-American literature, uncovering the traces of an outbreak that brought a nonhuman, invisible horror into every community. Viral Modernism examines how literature and culture represented the virus’s deathly fecundity, as writers wrestled with the scope of mass death in the domestic sphere amid fears of wider social collapse. Outka analyzes overt treatments of the pandemic by authors like Katherine Anne Porter and Thomas Wolfe and its subtle presence in works by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and W. B. Yeats. She uncovers links to the disease in popular culture, from early zombie resurrection to the resurgence of spiritualism. Viral Modernism brings the pandemic to the center of the era, revealing a vast tragedy that has hidden in plain sight.



The New Edith Wharton Studies

Author : Jennifer Haytock

Publisher : Cambridge University Press

Page : 277 pages

File Size : 42,53 MB

Release : 2020

Category : Literary Collections

ISBN : 1108422691

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Book Description

Uncovers new evidence and presents new ideas that invite us to reconsider our understanding Edith Wharton's life and career.



An Ethic of Innocence

Author : Kristen L. Renzi

Publisher : SUNY Press

Page : 298 pages

File Size : 43,61 MB

Release : 2019-09-01

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 1438475977

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Book Description

Offers a feminist theory of ignorance that sheds light on the misunderstood or overlooked epistemic practices of women in literature. An Ethic of Innocence examines representations of women in American and British fin-de-siècle and modern literature who seem “not to know” things. These naïve fools, Pollyannaish dupes, obedient traditionalists, or regressive anti-feminists have been dismissed by critics as conservative, backward, and out of sync with, even threatening to, modern feminist goals. Grounded in the late nineteenth century’s changing political and generic representations of women, this book provides a novel interpretative framework for reconsidering the epistemic claims of these women. Kristen L. Renzi analyzes characters from works by Henry James, Frank Norris, Ann Petry, Rebecca West, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and others, to argue that these feminine figures who choose not to know actually represent and model crucial pragmatic strategies by which modern and contemporary subjects navigate, survive, and even oppose gender oppression. “An Ethic of Innocence recalibrates the critical landscape, revealing blind spots in contemporary models for thinking about knowledge and agency within a feminine context. The author builds a persuasive case from powerful close readings of texts, which invite readers to question their assumptions. I cannot now imagine the field of feminist modernist studies without the interventions of this project.” — Barbara Green, author of Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life: Women and Modernity in British Culture “This is a fascinating and very interesting intervention about the construction of knowledge/innocence within the field of literary studies. Anyone teaching or studying this period will find it of great use.” — Stephanie A. Smith, author of Conceived by Liberty: Maternal Figures and Nineteenth-Century American Literature