Blackwell History Of American Literature 1865 1914


Blackwell History Of American Literature 1865 1914
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Blackwell History Of American Literature 1865 1914


Blackwell History Of American Literature 1865 1914
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Author : Alfred Bendixen
language : en
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Release Date : 2015-04-03

Blackwell History Of American Literature 1865 1914 written by Alfred Bendixen and has been published by Wiley-Blackwell this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2015-04-03 with categories.


My major goal is to produce a history that is informed by recent scholarly understandings of American literature and culture, but remains accessible and engaging to an educated reading audience. Thus, the book will have to avoid the mere recitation of names, dates, and facts while still being rooted in the dense texture of history, particularly the history of dramatic change and social turmoil that marks this period. It will have to recognize the achievements of the major literary figures, especially Mark Twain and Henry James, without stooping to the level of literary hagiography or pretending that literary history can be merely the story of great men. The discussion of these figures will not occur in separate chapters but be integrated into the entire book. My goal is to place the work of these and other writers fully into the contexts of the time so that a reader can understand how the various phases of Henry James reflect and respond to the flux of cultural history. Thus, the syntax of James?s major phase needs to be tied to aesthetic movements (especially, the rise of impressionism), political developments (in particular, issues of class and gender), and an emerging science that will challenge moral and epistemological boundaries (reflected perhaps most notably in Freudian psychology). Mark Twain?s career also provides a kind of paradigm for American cultural experience during this period: he began his literary career with an editor named Bliss and ended with one named Paine. The movement from bliss to pain is part of what my narrative will be about. My over-riding aim, however, is to avoid over-simplification while still providing a meaningful guide to the period. This requires that I root the individual texts into multiple cultural contexts. Thus, Twain?s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur?s court is best understood when immersed in multiple generic frames, including the international novel (which usually contrasted American democracy and European values), the satire of romanticism in its contemporary form (Tennysonian medievalism), the historical novel (probably the most popular form of the time), and an emerging science fiction (which began to challenge faith in progress and technology). I hope to be able to provide both a lively narrative and a detailed analysis of culture and texts. The overall shape of this history will be marked by three stages: the rise of realism; its complex development into literary forms that struggle to grasp elusive social and psychological realities; and the emergence of naturalism as a literary movement that both extends and rejects the basic premises of realism and that will ultimately culminate in an emerging modernism. Such an overview may seem conventional, but the actual history will challenge some old-fashioned notions of the period. The section dealing with the rise of realism will emphasize the contributions of the New England women who first made regionalism an effective and sometimes powerful literary tool (Stowe, Davis, Phelps, Cooke) and whose best evocations of local life are imbued with the incipient feminism that will finally emerge in Jewett, Freeman, and Chopin. Feminist issues will be important in the discussion of both male and female writers - it is, of course, Henry James who insists throughout his long career that the secret nature of American life is intimately connected with the peculiarities of female identity in our culture. The treatment of local color will confront the sentimentality, nostalgia, and escapism that sometimes mask injustice and bigotry, but it will also explore how regionalism liberated some of the most significant writers of the period, empowering some women to raise troubling questions about the emptiness of domestic life and leading some men as well as some women to confront the contradictions between democratic ideals and American realities. Without lapsing into reductionism, the chapter on regionalism must outline the various traits that distinguish our various regional literatures, thus enabling the reader, for instance, to understand how literary comedy is radically different in the Northeast, South, Midwest, and West and how Mark Twain?s success stems partly from his ability to fuse various regional forms into what will be hailed as American humor. Thus, the text ends up confronting the competing pressures of regional and national impulses that continue to shape American culture. Throughout the history, I attempt to raise the basic contradictions and paradoxes that provide realism with its primary energy - this is the period that discovered the child as literary subject, but our most powerful exemplars, including both Huck Finn and Turn of the Screw are really about abused children and the nature of child abuse. The treatment of realism will need to deal with the form?s long-recognized concern with social issues and political reform, and I hope to give a fuller treatment of the period?s treatment of social class than can be found in most conventional histories. Nevertheless, I also plan to emphasize Howells? recognition that the American literary mind was fundamentally turned inward in ways that made psychological realities of equal importance to social facades. Thus, the period of realism coincides with the great age of the supernatural tale, which exemplifies realism?s underlying epistemological concern with the question of what is real while also providing a powerful literary vehicle for the confrontation with sexual repression and social injustice. The history I propose will be distinguished by its insistence on recognizing the importance of genres that have been unjustly neglected in other treatments of this period, including the ghost story, the historical novel, the adventure tale, detective fiction, and the western. Recent scholarship has begun to unearth more significant poetry than previous scholars recognized, and the history will have to find a way of incorporating these insights and discoveries as well as paying attention to experiments in drama. The history will recognize the importance of race as a subject matter and the rising stature of certain writers, perhaps most notably Charles Chesnutt. While exploring the achievements of Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Dunbar, Dunbar-Nelson, and other African Americans, the chapter focusing on race and immigration will also deal with other ethnic voices (i.e., Sui Sin Far, Abraham Cahan, Maria Mena, Zitkala-Sa) as well as white writers who attacked racism (Cable, Tourgee) or attempted to justify it (Page, Dixon). The concluding section will focus on Naturalism and the relationship to an emerging modernism with emphasis on Wharton, Crane, and London. These three are central to my purpose because they represent most fully naturalism?s uneasy war with the realistic tradition and the varieties of responses that scientific determinism could elicit from writers of talent or genius. Dreiser will be mentioned in passing, but he really represents the start of 20th-century traditions and I expect that he will be important to the author of the next volume of this history. Since I do not have outlines for the other projected volumes, I have to emphasize that I am presuming that some overlap between volumes will be necessary in order to ensure that each volume can stand alone. Of course, attention must be paid to precursors as well as to the ways in which the traditions outlined in my text flowed into twentieth-century literary movements. My proposed volume will begin with the end of the Civil War and include some discussion of Dickinson and Whitman, both of whom will, I presume, receive fuller treatment in the volume immediately preceding mine in the series. It is essential that I briefly discuss the romantic precursors in order to detail the competing ways in which romanticism and realism attempted to define the literary needs of an emerging democratic culture and to dispel the old myth that romantic modes dominate our fictional traditions. The volume will end with a brief discussion of how realistic modes and values became vital to certain modern writers (most notably Fitzgerald, Frost, and Cather) and how the ideas raised by naturalism formed the philosophical underpinnings of much later writing and raised the issues that Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Ellison would later confront in other ways. The Period: At one time, critics referred to the years between the American civil war and the start of World War I as the ?genteel age? in American literature, but recent scholars agree that it was actually a period of enormous violence as well as astonishing change and radical transformation. The reality of political violence can be represented most acutely by one statistic: three of the seven Presidents elected between 1860 and 1900 were assassinated in office; in other words, of our 43 Presidents, three out of the four who died in office were murdered during this period. At the start of this period, the United States was a relatively young nation attempting to heal the wounds of the most costly and most violent war in our history - (the casualty figures of the American Civil War exceed that of all prior and subsequent American wars combined). In 1865, the nation was primarily agricultural and the bulk of it was unsettled - at least by white Euro-centric standards. Things changed quickly. In 1876, the nation experienced and celebrated its first centennial. By 1890, the frontier, which had once seemed endless, was declared closed and the United States was clearly on its way to becoming a heavily industrialized nation with imperialist ambitions. Jefferson?s idealized agrarian vision was demolished by the early 20th century. Farm life gave way to factory labor. Large cities grew at ferocious rates, packing masses of desperate immigrants into filthy slums. As large-scale poverty became a fact of life for the first time in U.S. history, robber barons and financiers amassed huge fortunes, threatened to dominate crucial markets and industries, and posed new challenges to the ideas and ideals behind American democracy. Labor unions were formed and often violently crushed. It was a period marked by economic turmoil and by corresponding debates on whether the nation should fully commit itself to unbridled capitalism or invest in some form of socialism. Scientific progress provided railroads, automobiles, airplanes, telegraphs, telephones, radio, electricity, and indoor plumbing. Progress was, however, at best problematic. As Americans discovered that the technologies of communication and transportation accelerated at almost frightening rates, they learned those rapid modes of communication and transportation would not give them something meaningful to say or someplace worthwhile to go. Technology would also change writing and publishing. Advances in printing brought about the mass market magazines, which with the rising importance of advertising, would transform publishing into a business that sold marketing access to readers instead of one that sold worthwhile reading material to readers. By the start of the 20th century, the United States was no longer young. Its citizens could no longer pretend to cosmic innocence. The nation had experienced a rate of population growth unparalleled in human history, but it had also experienced economic turmoil, the realities of political corruption, and a world that seemed perpetually on the brink of crisis or even collapse. The political establishment responded to increasing multiculturalism as a threat and created some of the most racist laws in our history. The abolition of slavery gave way to Jim Crow laws and lynching and to a cultural regionalism more engaged in nostalgia than concerned with justice. The major wars against the Native American Indians were fought and largely won during this period. Laws were also passed to stem the tide of immigration especially from Asia, Eastern Europe, and other areas where skin color or religion might differ from white Protestant norms. American democracy was fervent in its desire to cope with change, sometimes violently fervent and sometimes in ways that later generations would find embarrassing, but political reform also became a new fact of American life. Reformers challenged corruption and raised a crusade that would ultimately extend democracy, grant women the vote, create national parks, limit corporations, extend rights to labor, and outlaw alcoholic beverages. BLACKWELL HISTORIES OF AMERICAN LITERATURE Like the volumes proposed for the series on British literature, the Blackwell Histories of American Literature, will be culturally grounded. They will aim to be comprehensive, and succinct, and to recognise that to write literary history involves more than placing texts in chronological sequence. Thus the emphasis within each volume will fall both on plotting the significant literary developments of a given period, and on the wider cultural contexts within which they occurred. Authors will be asked to construe ?cultural history? in broad terms, and address such issues as politics, society, the arts, ideologies, varieties of literary production and consumption, and dominant genres and modes. The emphasis will be on contexts, including a retrospective element on the inheritance of past literature; on texts and authors; and the lasting effects of the literary period under discussion, and incorporate such topics as critical reception and modern reputations. Thisarrangement will help to elicit a full treatment of each period, to establish some conformity between the volumes, to dovetail one with another, and to leave each author with considerable room for manoeuvre. While a thematic, as opposed to a chronological, approach might be tempting in some cases, it would tend to put the subjects treated in this way into a kind of ghetto. We expect anyone writing a volume for a series of this kind to deal with issues of regionalism as well as with African American writing, Native American writing etc. As befits a culturally grounded series, these volumes are first and finally concerned with the plural nature of American culture and how that feeds into American writing. Obviously, in any chronological arrangement, one period shades into and overlaps with the ones before and after. But, in so far as any division into period makes sense, the divisions here may be said to (e.g. many of the great American Modernists were already shifting into gear before the First World War). The effect of each volume will be to give the reader a sense of possessing a crucial sector of literary terrain, of understanding the forces that give a period its distinctive cast, and of seeing how writing of a given period impacts on, and is shaped by, its cultural circumstances. Each volume will recommend itself as providing an authoritative and up-to-date entrée to texts and issues, and their historical implications, and will therefore interest students, teachers and the general reader alike. The series as whole will be attractive to libraries as a work that renews and redefines a familiar form. Proposed volumes: Pre-Columbian, colonial, and revolutionary literatures A large stretch of time but a relatively limited quantity of material. Native American narratives and poetry prior to Columbus and the encounter with Europeans, narratives of exploration, conquest and settlement, sermons and diaries, early poetry, drama, and fiction. Literature until the end of the Civil War The emergence and the threatened split-up of the American nation. The writers of the 'American renaissance', sentimental literature, slave narratives and other literature of the slavery debate, writing of and from the West, the search for an American epic. Literature 1865-1914 The transformation of the American economy. The emergence of realism and naturalism, 'local colour' and new western and southern writing. The literature of the women's movement, the poetry of isolation. Literature 1900-1945 The arrival of the US as a 'superpower'. Modernism, its accompaniments and consequences, the literature of the New Deal, new ethnic literatures, the growth of the literature of immigration. Literature 1945-2000 The Cold War and its aftermath. America postmodernism and the new realism, the poetic wars, genre writing, the emergence of American drama, the impact of the visual arts and popular culture.



Reading The American Novel 1865 1914


Reading The American Novel 1865 1914
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Author : G. R. Thompson
language : en
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Release Date : 2011-10-17

Reading The American Novel 1865 1914 written by G. R. Thompson and has been published by John Wiley & Sons this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2011-10-17 with Literary Criticism categories.


An indispensable tool for teachers and students of American literature, Reading the American Novel 1865-1914 provides a comprehensive introduction to the American novel in the post-civil war period. Locates American novels and stories within a specific historical and literary context Offers fresh analyses of key selected literary works Addresses a wide audience of academics and non-academics in clear, accessible prose Demonstrates the changing mentality of 19th-century America entering the 20th century Explores the relationship between the intellectual and artistic output of the time and the turbulent socio-political context



A Companion To American Fiction 1865 1914


A Companion To American Fiction 1865 1914
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Author : Robert Paul Lamb
language : en
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Release Date : 2008-04-15

A Companion To American Fiction 1865 1914 written by Robert Paul Lamb and has been published by John Wiley & Sons this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2008-04-15 with Literary Criticism categories.


A Companion to American Fiction, 1865-1914 is a groundbreaking collection of essays written by leading critics for a wide audience of scholars, students, and interested general readers. An exceptionally broad-ranging and accessible Companion to the study of American fiction of the post-civil war period and the early twentieth century Brings together 29 essays by top scholars, each of which presents a synthesis of the best research and offers an original perspective Divided into sections on historical traditions and genres, contexts and themes, and major authors Covers a mixture of canonical and the non-canonical themes, authors, literatures, and critical approaches Explores innovative topics, such as ecological literature and ecocriticism, children’s literature, and the influence of Darwin on fiction



A Short History Of American Literature


A Short History Of American Literature
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Author : Walter Cochrane Bronson
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 1900

A Short History Of American Literature written by Walter Cochrane Bronson and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1900 with American literature categories.




A Short History Of American Literature


A Short History Of American Literature
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Author : Walter Cochrane Bronson
language : en
Publisher: Hardpress Publishing
Release Date : 2012-08-01

A Short History Of American Literature written by Walter Cochrane Bronson and has been published by Hardpress Publishing this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2012-08-01 with categories.


Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.



A Short History Of American Literature


A Short History Of American Literature
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Author : Bronson Walter C.
language : en
Publisher: Literary Licensing, LLC
Release Date : 2014-03

A Short History Of American Literature written by Bronson Walter C. and has been published by Literary Licensing, LLC this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2014-03 with categories.


This Is A New Release Of The Original 1900 Edition.



A Short History Of American Literature


A Short History Of American Literature
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Author : Walter Cochrane Bronson
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2000

A Short History Of American Literature written by Walter Cochrane Bronson and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2000 with categories.




The Wiley Blackwell Anthology Of African American Literature Volume 1


The Wiley Blackwell Anthology Of African American Literature Volume 1
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Author : Gene Andrew Jarrett
language : en
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Release Date : 2014-01-02

The Wiley Blackwell Anthology Of African American Literature Volume 1 written by Gene Andrew Jarrett and has been published by John Wiley & Sons this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2014-01-02 with Literary Criticism categories.


The Wiley Blackwell Anthology of African American Literature is a comprehensive collection of poems, short stories, novellas, novels, plays, autobiographies, and essays authored by African Americans from the eighteenth century until the present. Evenly divided into two volumes, it is also the first such anthology to be conceived and published for both classroom and online education in the new millennium. Reflects the current scholarly and pedagogic structure of African American literary studies Selects literary texts according to extensive research on classroom adoptions, scholarship, and the expert opinions of leading professors Organizes literary texts according to more appropriate periods of literary history, dividing them into seven sections that accurately depict intellectual, cultural, and political movements Includes more reprints of entire works and longer selections of major works than any other anthology of its kind This first volume contains a comprehensive collection of texts authored by African Americans from the eighteenth century until the 1920s The two volumes of this landmark anthology can also be bought as a set, at over 20% savings.



The Norton Anthology Of American Literature


The Norton Anthology Of American Literature
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Author : Nina Baym
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2003-11

The Norton Anthology Of American Literature written by Nina Baym and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2003-11 with American literature categories.




The Oxford Handbook Of American Literary Naturalism


The Oxford Handbook Of American Literary Naturalism
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Author : Keith Newlin
language : en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date : 2011-03-01

The Oxford Handbook Of American Literary Naturalism written by Keith Newlin and has been published by Oxford University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2011-03-01 with Literary Criticism categories.


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.