Language Race And Social Class In Howellss America

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Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells's America

Author : Elsa Nettels
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
ISBN 13 : 0813185521
Total Pages : 279 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (131 download)

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Book Synopsis Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells's America by : Elsa Nettels

Download or read book Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells's America written by Elsa Nettels and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No other American novelist has written so fully about language—grammar, diction, the place of colloquialism and dialect in literary English, the relation between speech and writing—as William Dean Howells. The power of language to create social, political, and racial identity was of central concern to Americans in the nineteenth century, and the implications of language in this regard are strikingly revealed in the writings of Howells, the most influential critic and editor of his age. In this first full-scale treatment of Howells as a writer about language, Elsa Nettels offers a historical overview of the social and political implications of language in post-Civil War America. Chapters on controversies about linguistic authority, American versus British English, literary dialect, and language and race relate Howells's ideas at every point to those of his contemporaries—from writers such as Henry James, Mark Twain, and James Russell Lowell to political figures such as Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and John Hay. The first book to analyze in depth and detail the language of Howells's characters in more than a dozen novels, this path-breaking sociolinguistic approach to Howells's fiction exposes the fundamental contradiction in his realism and in the America he portrayed. By representing the speech that separates standard from nonstandard speakers, Howells's novels—which champion the democratic ideals of equity and unity—also demonstrate the power of language to reinforce barriers of race and class in American society. Drawing on unpublished letters of Howells, James, Lowell, and others and on scores of articles in nineteenth-century periodicals, this work of literary criticism and cultural history reaches beyond the work of one writer to address questions of enduring importance to all students of American literature and society.

Playing the Races

Author : Henry B. Wonham
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0195161947
Total Pages : 207 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (951 download)

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Book Synopsis Playing the Races by : Henry B. Wonham

Download or read book Playing the Races written by Henry B. Wonham and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did so many of the writers who aligned themselves with the social and aesthetic aims of American literary realism rely on stock conventions of ethnic caricature in their treatment of immigrant and African-American figures? As a self-described "tool of the democratic spirit," designed to "prick the bubble of abstract types," literary realism would seem to have little in common with the aggressively dehumanizing comic imagery that began to proliferate in magazines and newspapers after the Civil War. Indeed, critics such as Alain Locke hailed realism's potential to accomplish "the artistic emancipation of the Negro," a project that logically extended to other groups systematically misrepresented in the comic imagery of the period. From the influential "Editor's Study" at Harper's Monthly, William Dean Howells touted the democratic impulse of realist imagery as an alternative to romanticism's "pride of caste," which is "averse to the mass of men" and "consents to know them only in some conventionalized and artificial guise." Yet if literary realism pursued the interests of democracy by affirming "the equality of things and the unity of men," why did its major practitioners, including Howells himself, regularly employ comic typification as a feature of their representational practice? Critics have often dismissed such apparent lapses in realist practice as blind spots, vestiges of a genteel social consciousness that failed to keep pace with realism's avowed democratic aspirations. Such explanations are useful to a point, but they overlook the fact that the age of realism in American art and letters was simultaneously the great age of ethnic caricature. Henry B. Wonham argues that these two aesthetic programs, one committed to representation of the fully humanized individual, the other invested in broad ethnic abstractions, operate less as antithetical choices than as complementary impulses, both of which receive full play within the period's most demanding literary and graphic works. The seemingly anomalous presence of gross ethnic abstractions within works by Howells, Twain, James, Wharton, and Chesnutt hints at realism's vexed and complicated relationship with the caricatured ethnic images that played a central role in late nineteenth-century American thinking about race, identity, and national culture. In illuminating that relationship, Playing the Races offers a fresh understanding of the rich literary discourse conceived at the intersection of the realist and the caricatured image.

American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880–1995

Author : Phillip Barrish
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139431951
Total Pages : 227 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (394 download)

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Book Synopsis American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880–1995 by : Phillip Barrish

Download or read book American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880–1995 written by Phillip Barrish and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-02-19 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on key works of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literary realism, Phillip Barrish traces the emergence of new ways of gaining intellectual prestige - that is, new ways of gaining cultural recognition as unusually intelligent, sensitive or even wise. Through extended readings of works by Henry James, William Dean Howells, Abraham Cahan and Edith Wharton, Barrish emphasises the differences between literary realist modes of intellectual and cultural authority and those associated with the rise of the social sciences. In doing so, he greatly refines our understanding of the complex relationship between realist writing and masculinity. Barrish further argues that understanding the dynamics of intellectual status in realist literature provides new analytic purchase on intellectual prestige in recent critical theory. Here he focuses on such figures as Lionel Trilling, Paul de Man, John Guillory and Judith Butler.

Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature, 1860-1930

Author : Michele Birnbaum
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 0521824257
Total Pages : 207 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (218 download)

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Book Synopsis Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature, 1860-1930 by : Michele Birnbaum

Download or read book Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature, 1860-1930 written by Michele Birnbaum and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-11-20 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents

Legal Realisms

Author : Christine Holbo
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019093591X
Total Pages : 465 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (99 download)

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Book Synopsis Legal Realisms by : Christine Holbo

Download or read book Legal Realisms written by Christine Holbo and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: United States historians have long regarded the U.S. Civil War and its Reconstruction as a second American revolution. Literary scholars, however, have yet to show how fully these years revolutionized the American imagination. Emblematic of this moment was the post-war search for a "Great American Novel"--a novel fully adequate to the breadth and diversity of the United States in the era of the Fourteenth Amendment. While the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments declared the ideal of equality before the law a reality, persistent and increasing inequality challenged idealists and realists alike. The controversy over what full representation should mean sparked debates about the value of cultural difference and aesthetic dissonance, and it led to a thoroughgoing reconstruction of the meaning of "realism" for readers, writers, politics, and law. The dilemmas of incomplete emancipation, which would damage and define American life from the late nineteenth century onwards, would also force novelists to reconsider the definition and possibilities of the novel as a genre of social representation. Legal Realisms examines these transformations in the face of uneven developments in the racial, ethnic, gender and class structure of American society. Offering provocative new readings of Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Helen Hunt Jackson, Albion Tourgée and others, Christine Holbo explores the transformation of the novel's distinctive modes of social knowledge in relation to developments in art, philosophy, law, politics, and moral theory. As Legal Realisms follows the novel through the worlds of California Native American removal and the Reconstruction-era South, of the Mississippi valley and the urban Northeast, this study shows how violence, prejudice, and exclusion haunted the celebratory literatures of national equality, but it demonstrates as well the way novelists' representation of the difficulty of achieving equality before the law helped Americans articulate the need for a more robust concept of social justice.

Emotional Reinventions

Author : Melanie Dawson
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 0472052705
Total Pages : 319 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (72 download)

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Book Synopsis Emotional Reinventions by : Melanie Dawson

Download or read book Emotional Reinventions written by Melanie Dawson and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2015-07-14 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historically informed approach to realist-era American fiction, engaging with contemporary affect theory, evolutionary theory, studies of realism, and studies of affect in American literature

Italy in Early American Cinema

Author : Giorgio Bertellini
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253221285
Total Pages : 465 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (532 download)

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Book Synopsis Italy in Early American Cinema by : Giorgio Bertellini

Download or read book Italy in Early American Cinema written by Giorgio Bertellini and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giorgio Bertellini traces the origins of American cinema's century-long fascination with Italy and Italian immigrants to the popularity of the pre-photographic aesthetic—the picturesque. Once associated with landscape painting in northern Europe, the picturesque came to symbolize Mediterranean Europe through comforting views of distant landscapes and exotic characters. Taking its cue from a picturesque stage backdrop from The Godfather Part II, Italy in Early American Cinema shows how this aesthetic was transferred from 19th-century American painters to early 20th-century American filmmakers. Italy in Early American Cinema offers readings of early films that pay close attention to how landscape representations that were related to narrative settings and filmmaking locations conveyed distinct ideas about racial difference and national destiny.

To be Suddenly White

Author : Steven J. Belluscio
Publisher : University of Missouri Press
ISBN 13 : 0826264859
Total Pages : 301 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (262 download)

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Book Synopsis To be Suddenly White by : Steven J. Belluscio

Download or read book To be Suddenly White written by Steven J. Belluscio and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To Be Suddenly White explores the troubled relationship between literary passing and literary realism, the dominant aesthetic motivation behind the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century ethnic texts considered in this study. Steven J. Belluscio uses the passing narrative to provide insight into how the representation of ethnic and racial subjectivity served, in part, to counter dominant narratives of difference. To Be Suddenly White offers new readings of traditional passing narratives from the African American literary tradition, such as James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Nella Larsen's Passing, and George Schuyler's Black No More. It is also the first full-length work to consider a number of Jewish American and Italian American prose texts, such as Mary Antin's The Promised Land, Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers, and Guido d'Agostino's Olives on the Apple Tree, as racial passing narratives in their own right. Belluscio also demonstrates the contradictions that result from the passing narrative's exploration of racial subjectivity, racial difference, and race itself. When they are seen in comparison, ideological differences begin to emerge between African American passing narratives and "white ethnic" (Jewish American and Italian American) passing narratives. According to Belluscio, the former are more likely to engage in a direct critique of ideas of race, while the latter have a tendency to become more simplistic acculturation narratives in which a character moves from a position of ethnic difference to one of full American identity. The desire "to be suddenly white" serves as a continual point of reference for Belluscio, enabling him to analyze how writers, even when overtly aware of the problematic nature of race (especially African American writers), are also aware of the conditions it creates, the transformations it provokes, and the consequences of both. Byexamining the content and context of these works, Belluscio elucidates their engagement with discourses of racial and ethnic differences, assimilation, passing, and identity, an approach that has profound implications for the understanding of American literary history.

Language, Gender, and Citizenship in American Literature, 1789–1919

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135851573
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (358 download)

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Book Synopsis Language, Gender, and Citizenship in American Literature, 1789–1919 by :

Download or read book Language, Gender, and Citizenship in American Literature, 1789–1919 written by and published by Routledge. This book was released on with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Language, Gender, and Citizenship in American Literature, 1789-1919

Author : Amy Dunham Strand
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135851565
Total Pages : 510 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (358 download)

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Book Synopsis Language, Gender, and Citizenship in American Literature, 1789-1919 by : Amy Dunham Strand

Download or read book Language, Gender, and Citizenship in American Literature, 1789-1919 written by Amy Dunham Strand and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-08-27 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining language debates and literary texts from Noah Webster to H.L. Mencken and from Washington Irving to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this book demonstrates how gender arose in passionate discussions about language to address concerns about national identity and national citizenship elicited by 19th-century sociopolitical transformations. Together with popular commentary about language in Congressional records, periodicals, grammar books, etiquette manuals, and educational materials, literary products tell stories about how gendered discussions of language worked to deflect nationally divisive debates over Indian Removal and slavery, to stabilize mid-19th-century sociopolitical mobility, to illuminate the logic of Jim Crow, and to temper the rise of "New Women" and "New Immigrants" at the end and turn of the 19th century. Strand enhances our understandings of how ideologies of language, gender, and nation have been interarticulated in American history and culture and how American literature has been entwined in their construction, reflection, and dissemination.

Ethnicity and Cultural Authority

Author : Daniel G. Williams
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
ISBN 13 : 0748626271
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (486 download)

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Book Synopsis Ethnicity and Cultural Authority by : Daniel G. Williams

Download or read book Ethnicity and Cultural Authority written by Daniel G. Williams and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2005-12-08 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longlisted for the Wales Book of the Year 2007 Writing in 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois suggested that the goal for the African-American was 'to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture'.He was evoking 'culture' as a solution to the divisions within society, thereby adopting, in a very different context, an idea that had been influentially expressed by Matthew Arnold in the 1860s. Du Bois questioned the assumed universality of this concept by asking who, ultimately, is allowed into the 'kingdom of culture'? How does one come to speak from a position of cultural authority?This book adopts a transatlantic approach to explore these questions. It centres on four Victorian 'men of letters' "e; Matthew Arnold, William Dean Howells, W. B. Yeats and W. E. B. Du Bois "e; who drew on notions of ethnicity as a basis from which to assert their cultural authority. In comparative close readings of these figures Daniel Williams addresses several key areas of contemporary literary and cultural debate. The book questions the notion of 'the West' as it appears and re-appears in the formulations of postcolonial theory, challenges the widespread tendency to divide nationalism into 'civic' and 'ethnic' forms, and forces its readers to reconsider what they mean when they talk about 'culture', 'identity' and 'national literature'. Key Features*Offers a substantial, innovative intervention in transatlantic debates over race and ethnicity*Uses 4 intriguing authors to explore issues of national identity, racial purity and the use of literature as a marker of 'cultural capital'*A unique focus on Celtic identity in a transatlantic context*Sets up a dialogue between writers who believe in national identity and those who believe in cultural distinctiveness

Accented America

Author : Joshua L. Miller
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199792674
Total Pages : 644 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (997 download)

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Book Synopsis Accented America by : Joshua L. Miller

Download or read book Accented America written by Joshua L. Miller and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-21 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American literary works written in the heyday of modernism between the 1890s and 1940s were playfully, painfully, and ambivalently engaged with language politics. The immigrant waves of the period fed into writers' aesthetic experimentation; their works, in turn, rewired ideas about national identity along with literary form. Accented America looks at the long history of English-Only Americanism-the political claim that U.S. citizens must speak a singular, shared American tongue-and traces its action in the language workshop that is literature. The broadly multi-ethnic set of writers brought into conversation here-including Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, Henry Roth, Nella Larsen, John Dos Passos, Lionel Trilling, Américo Paredes, and Carlos Bulosan-reflect the massive demographic shifts taking place during the interwar years. These authors share an acute awareness of linguistic standardization while also following the defamiliarizing sway produced by experimentation with invented and improper literary vernaculars. Rather than confirming the powerfully seductive subtext of monolingualism-that those who speak alike are ethically and politically likeminded-multilingual modernists compose literature that speaks to a country of synthetic syntaxes, singular hybrids, and enduring strangeness.

The Real Negro

Author : Shelly Eversley
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135883351
Total Pages : 118 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (358 download)

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Book Synopsis The Real Negro by : Shelly Eversley

Download or read book The Real Negro written by Shelly Eversley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-03-29 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Shelly Eversley historicizes the demand for racial authenticity - what Zora Neale Hurston called 'the real Negro' - in twentieth-century American literature. Eversley argues that the modern emergence of the interest in 'the real Negro' transforms the question of what race an author belongs into a question of what it takes to belong to that race. Consequently, Paul Laurence Dunbar's Negro dialect poems were prized in the first part of the century because - written by a black man - they were not 'imitation' black, while the dialect performances by Zora Neale Hurston were celebrated because, written by a 'real' black, they were not 'imitation' white. The second half of the century, in its dismissal of material segregation, sanctions a notion of black racial meaning as internal and psychological and thus promotes a version of black racial 'truth' as invisible and interior, yet fixed within a stable conception of difference. The Real Negro foregrounds how investments in black racial specificity illuminate the dynamic terms that define what makes a text and a person 'black', while it also reveals how 'blackness', spoken and authentic, guards a more fragile, because unspoken, commitment to the purity and primacy of 'whiteness' as a stable, uncontested ideal.

Reader's Guide to Literature in English

Author : Mark Hawkins-Dady
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135314179
Total Pages : 1024 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (353 download)

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Book Synopsis Reader's Guide to Literature in English by : Mark Hawkins-Dady

Download or read book Reader's Guide to Literature in English written by Mark Hawkins-Dady and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 1024 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reader's Guide Literature in English provides expert guidance to, and critical analysis of, the vast number of books available within the subject of English literature, from Anglo-Saxon times to the current American, British and Commonwealth scene. It is designed to help students, teachers and librarians choose the most appropriate books for research and study.

Critical Zone 3

Author : Douglas Kerr
Publisher : Hong Kong University Press
ISBN 13 : 9622098576
Total Pages : 243 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (22 download)

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Book Synopsis Critical Zone 3 by : Douglas Kerr

Download or read book Critical Zone 3 written by Douglas Kerr and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-01 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite globalizing forces, whether economic, political, or cultural, there remain conspicuous differences that divide scholarly communities. How should we understand and respond to those discursive gaps among different traditions and systems of knowledge production? Critical Zone is a book series in cultural and literary studies that is concerned with current critical debates and intellectual preoccupations in the humanities. The series aims to improve understanding across cultures, traditions, discourses, and disciplines, and to produce international critical knowledge. Critical Zone is an expression of timely collaboration among scholars from Hong Kong, mainland China, the United States, and Europe, and conceived as an intellectual bridge between China and the rest of the world. The second volume of Critical Zone, as does its predecessor, consists of two parts. The first part includes original essays that deal with the concept and practice of "empire," as a collective response to the question of how imperial formations and operations, in the past and at present, should be examined in a larger context of international politics and how historical imperialism may be considered in relation to the conditions of our time. Part II includes two sets of translations of essays, first published in Chinese, about two recent debates in China: one on the canonicity of Lu Xun and the other on the problem of how to reform Peking University in the context of globalization. These two groups of translations are led by review essays that contextualize the debates.

Evolution and Eugenics in American Literature and Culture, 1880-1940

Author : Lois A. Cuddy
Publisher : Bucknell University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780838755556
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (555 download)

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Book Synopsis Evolution and Eugenics in American Literature and Culture, 1880-1940 by : Lois A. Cuddy

Download or read book Evolution and Eugenics in American Literature and Culture, 1880-1940 written by Lois A. Cuddy and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Darwin's theory of descent suggested that man is trapped by biological determinism and environment, which requires the fittest specimens to struggle and adapt without benefit of God in order to survive. Tthis volume focusses on how American literature appropriated and aesthetically transformed this, and related, theories.

Social Stories

Author : Patricia Okker
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 9780813922409
Total Pages : 230 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (224 download)

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Book Synopsis Social Stories by : Patricia Okker

Download or read book Social Stories written by Patricia Okker and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Largely ignored in American literary history, the magazine novel was extremely popular throughout the nineteenth century, with editors describing the form as a virtual "necessity" for magazines. Unlike many previous studies of periodicals that focus often exclusively on elite literary magazines, Social Stories treats a variety of magazines and authors, ranging from Ann Stephens's novels in fashionable magazines for women to William Dean Howells's anxious investigation of modern mass culture in A Modern Instance. William Gilmore Simms's pro-Southern antebellum novels, the publication of Martin Delany's Blake in an African American magazine, Jeremy Belknap's investigation of the racial and national politics of the early national period, and Rebecca Harding Davis's efforts to make sense of race during Reconstruction all receive Patricia Okker's careful attention. By exploring how magazine novelists addressed audiences that differed from one another in terms of race, region, class, and gender, Social Stories offers a narrative of the American magazine novel that emphasizes its direct engagement with social, political, and cultural issues of its day. Rejecting the association of novel reading with notions of the private, Okker convincingly argues that nineteenth-century magazine novels were indeed fiercely social. Created collaboratively with readers, editors, and authors, and read among a community of readers and other texts, the serial novel of the 1800s proved to be an ideal form for exploring the strategies Americans used and the obstacles they faced in forming and sustaining a collective sense of themselves. They are, in short, novels that tell stories about how--and whether--individuals can come together to form a society. Patricia Okker is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and the author of Our Sister Editors: Sarah J. Hale and the Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Women Editors.