Language Race And Social Class In Howells S America

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

Author : Elsa Nettels
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2014-07-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780813161310

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Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells's America by Elsa Nettels Pdf

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 Drawing on unpublished letters of Howells, James, Lowell, and others and on scores of articles in nineteenth-century periodicals, this work of literary criticism and cultural history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.

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

Author : Elsa Nettels
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
Page : 279 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2021-10-21
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780813185521

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Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells's America by Elsa Nettels Pdf

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
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2004-06-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0198036647

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Playing the Races by Henry B. Wonham Pdf

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.

Edith Wharton in Context

Author : Laura Rattray
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2012-10-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781107310810

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Edith Wharton in Context by Laura Rattray Pdf

Edith Wharton was one of America's most popular and prolific writers, becoming the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921. In a publishing career spanning seven decades, Wharton lived and wrote through a period of tremendous social, cultural and historical change. Bringing together a team of international scholars, this volume provides the first substantial text dedicated to the various contexts that frame Wharton's remarkable career. Each essay offers a clearly argued and lucid assessment of Wharton's work as it relates to seven key areas: life and works, critical receptions, book and publishing history, arts and aesthetics, social designs, time and place, and literary milieux. These sections provide a broad and accessible resource for students coming to Wharton for the first time while offering scholars new critical insights.

The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South

Author : Fred Hobson,Barbara Ladd
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 584 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2016-01-04
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780190493943

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The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South by Fred Hobson,Barbara Ladd Pdf

The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South brings together contemporary views of the literature of the region in a series of chapters employing critical tools not traditionally used in approaching Southern literature. It assumes ideas of the South--global, multicultural, plural: more Souths than South--that would not have been embraced two or three decades ago, and it similarly expands the idea of literature itself. Representative of the current range of activity in the field of Southern literary studies, it challenges earlier views of antebellum Southern literature, as well as, in its discussions of twentieth-century writing, questions the assumption that the Southern Renaissance of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s was the supreme epoch of Southern expression, that writing to which all that had come before had led and by which all that came afterward was judged. As well as canonical Southern writers, it examines Native American literature, Latina/o literature, Asian American as well as African American literatures, Caribbean studies, sexuality studies, the relationship of literature to film, and a number of other topics which are relatively new to the field.

Reader's Guide to Literature in English

Author : Mark Hawkins-Dady
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 1024 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2012-12-06
Category : Reference
ISBN : 9781135314170

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Reader's Guide to Literature in English by Mark Hawkins-Dady Pdf

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.

Emotional Reinventions

Author : Melanie Dawson
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 319 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2015-07-14
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9780472052707

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Emotional Reinventions by Melanie Dawson Pdf

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

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

Author : Lois A. Cuddy,Claire M. Roche
Publisher : Bucknell University Press
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0838755550

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Evolution and Eugenics in American Literature and Culture, 1880-1940 by Lois A. Cuddy,Claire M. Roche Pdf

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
Page : 230 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0813922402

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Social Stories by Patricia Okker Pdf

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.

New Essays on The Rise of Silas Lapham

Author : Donald E. Pease
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 142 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 1991-05-31
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0521378982

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New Essays on The Rise of Silas Lapham by Donald E. Pease Pdf

Argues the renewed importance of Howells's novel for an understanding of literature as a social force as well as a literary form.

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

Author : Phillip Barrish
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 227 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2001-02-19
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781139431958

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American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880–1995 by Phillip Barrish Pdf

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.

The Master and the Dean

Author : Rob Davidson
Publisher : University of Missouri Press
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2005
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780826264688

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The Master and the Dean by Rob Davidson Pdf

"Comparative study of Henry James's and William Dean Howells's literary criticism. Examines the interrelationship between the men, emphasizing their aesthetic concerns and attitudes toward the market and audience, and their beliefs concerning the moral value of fiction and the United States as a literary subject, and writings about each other"--Provided by publisher.

Italy in Early American Cinema

Author : Giorgio Bertellini
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 465 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2010
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780253221285

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Italy in Early American Cinema by Giorgio Bertellini Pdf

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.

Willa Cather's Canadian and Old World Connections

Author : Robert Thacker,Michael A. Peterman
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
Page : 364 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 1999-01-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0803263988

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Willa Cather's Canadian and Old World Connections by Robert Thacker,Michael A. Peterman Pdf

Cather Studies 4 contains eighteen essays and elaborates a theme, ?Willa Cather?s Canadian and Old World Connections.? Such connections are central to Cather?s art and artistry. She transported much from the Old World to the New, shaping her antecedents to tell, in new ways, the stories of Nebraska, of the American Southwest, and especially of Quebec, in Shadows on the Rock. ø David Stouck details Cather?s numerous Canadian connections, Richard Millington treats her ?anthropological? re-creation of the cultural moment of seventeenth-century Quebec, and Franöois Palleau-Papin finds ?The Hidden French in Cather?s English.? A volume of lively and informed criticism, Cather Studies 4 vividly demonstrates Cather?s artistry and her work?s deep connections to the present cultural and critical moment.

The Real Negro

Author : Shelly Eversley
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 132 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2004-03-29
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781135883348

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The Real Negro by Shelly Eversley Pdf

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