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American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions
No full textRethinking the category of aesthetics in light of recent developments in literary theory and social criticism, the contributors to this volume showcase the interpretive possibilities available to those who bring politics, culture, ideology, and conceptions of identity into their critiques. Essays combine close readings of individual works and authors with more theoretical discussions of aesthetic theory and its relation to American literature. In their introduction, Weinstein and Looby argue that aesthetics never left American literary critique. Instead, the essay casts the current "return to aesthetics" as the natural consequence of shortcomings in deconstruction and new historicism, which led to a reconfiguration of aesthetics.
Subsequent essays demonstrate the value and versatility of aesthetic considerations in literature, from eighteenth-century poetry to twentieth-century popular music. Organized into four groups—politics, form, gender, and theory—contributors revisit the canonical works of Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Stephen Crane, introduce the overlooked texts of Constance Fenimore Woolson and Earl Lind, and unpack the complexities of the music of The Carpenters. Deeply rooted in an American context, these essays explore literature's aesthetic dimensions in connection to American liberty and the formation of political selfhood
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Genre and Belonging in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
Full text linkOver the past thirty years, the expansion of the literary canon has enriched Americanist critics’ sense for what sorts of stories make up the nineteenth-century novel. Our basic narrative about what happens to the novel over the span of the century, however, has remained staunchly in place: the novel rises. The terms of the rise vary, but the model abides, carried over from Cathy Davidson’s Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (1986) into Philip F. Gura’s Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel (2013). This dissertation contends that it is time to replace the rise model. Thinking the nineteenth-century novel through its system of subgenres, it presents a broad and conceptually coherent account of the novel’s midcentury flourishing.Around 1840, the novel triumphs—over readers and writers alike. If the novel rises, it squashes too; new novels “drop down by millions all over our land,” quips one critic, overwhelmed in 1847. At this moment, the novel must learn do for a mass audience what a master-reader no longer can: contextualize and conceptualize the ways its instances plummet, jostle, clump, and spread. Major subgenres of the novel develop themselves, I show, by developing different techniques for attaching their instances to one another and detaching them from instances of other subgenres. Sentimental novels prosper by the conventionalisms of plot and character they share. The bildungsroman, a story of individual development, strives instead to appear in a condensed, paradigmatic instance. Gothic novels scatter into sub-subgenres (like city mysteries or detective fiction), improvised clusters that momentarily absorb and redirect the impulse to scatter further. And the novels of American literary realism emphasize the autonomy of each work, its simple difference from other stories in a world full of other stories. A system of love proclivities or erotic shapes subtends these subgenres. The place, I claim, where the generic dynamics that define nineteenth-century novels can be observed most clearly and creatively is the love plot
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Theories of Reading from Nineteenth-Century American Fiction
Full text linkTheories of Reading from Nineteenth-Century American Fiction proceeds from the claim that when we read nineteenth-century American literature, we read about reading. From characters depicted with books in hand, to citations of newspapers within novels, nineteenth-century texts teem with depictions of overt and implied reading. While diverse scenes of reading are everywhere in nineteenth-century American literature, the stories Americanist critics tell about reading in this period are surprisingly limited. Though literature does not depict reading solely (or even usually) as a means to cultivate subjectivity, Americanist criticism seems unable to resist framing all modes of reading as a mechanism for cultivating liberal subjects and spurring participation in the public sphere. The question that drives Theories of Reading from Nineteenth-Century American Fiction is: what else could we say about reading if we suspended our belief that to read is always to participate in an enlightenment project?This dissertation mines scenes of reading from five key texts to articulate multiple and competing theories of reading that are not bound up with discussions of liberal subject formation or debates about the public sphere. I define a “scene of reading” as a tableau in which there is a prior, potential, or present relationship between a witness and a text. This capacious definition collects an array of representations that imply, reference, or contain the possibility for reading under a single heading. Across four chapters and an epilogue, I explicate theories of reading as an activity that affects one’s perception of the world in The Sketch-Book (1820); registers in the feeling body in Wieland (1798); intervenes in social relations in Hope Leslie (1827); is irreducibly material and ideologically changeable in Clotel (1853); and proves the limits of our ability to textualize bodies of knowledge in Moby-Dick (1851). I examine interpolated letters, reprinted poems, moments of newspaper sharing, debates about gift books, and other scenes from fiction in order to multiply our descriptions for the uses of reading
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“Blood and Thunder” in the Public Sphere: Deception, Feminist Sentiment, and Sexological Etiologies in Louisa May Alcott’s Sensation Fiction
Full text linkThis thesis is an exploration of how the literary public sphere generates sexual discourse and an effort to understand the link between sexology and imaginative literatures of the nineteenth century. Using Louisa May Alcott’s work as a case study, I consider the ramifications of authorial deception, arguing that deception was necessary in order to create sexual discourse in the periodical sphere. I also consider an American origin of sexology, rather than the typically invoked European medical origins, and with that intervention argue that imaginative literature and the queer possibilities it creates should be given more importance in the study of sexology and the history of sexuality more broadly
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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Occult Americans: Invisible Culture and the Literary Imagination
Full text linkMy dissertation argues that a symbiotic relationship between fiction and the occult existed in nineteenth century America. American authors reproduced occult ideas culled from the ancient systems of Hermeticism and Neoplatonism in their texts, and these fictions in turn inspired speculative traditions in America. "Occult Americans: Invisible Culture and the Literary Imagination" also provides a connecting link between ancient, magical ideas about the cosmos that were brought to America by its first colonists, and the later nineteenth century occult resurgence. Occult ideas did not go out of existence when Enlightenment dawned in America, but only shifted their terrain, and my dissertation sketches these new loci of occultism in antebellum America. In my first chapter, "The Triumph of Unreason: Charles Brockden Brown's Occult Moment," I examine the discourse of revelation as it was presented by several eighteenth century occult groups. This chapter isolates the religious threat implicit in the "Illuminati Panic" of the 1790s, and argues that Brown explored the occult claims of secret fraternities in his unfinished novella, Carwin, and in his novel, Ormond (1799). My second chapter, "Discursive Failure and Imaginative Genesis: Occult Narration in the Corpus of Edgar Allan Poe," performs a close reading of Poe's 1848 cosmology, Eureka, the writer's earnest attempt to prove the coequality of matter and spirit and man's innate divinity. Poe's novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), is a more successful realization of Hermetic ideas in its narrative form; unlike Eureka, Pym embeds the central Hermetic tropes of revelation, secrecy, and initiation in its ambiguous ending, symbolic language, and fantastic imagery. My third chapter, "Masonry, Anti-Masonry, and the Brotherhood of the Union: George Lippard's Fraternal Dialectic," recounts the history of Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism in early America. Lippard's 1848 novel, Paul Ardenheim, stages the occult anointing of George Washington, and many of the novel's Rosicrucian vignettes appear as sacred books in the order Lippard founded, the Brotherhood of the Union. This occult context also provides fresh insight into Lippard's most popular novel, The Quaker City (1845), which dramatizes the antebellum discourse of Anti-Masonry in the corrupt "Monks of Monk Hall.
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Matters of Life: Writing Lives in the Age of United States Slavery
Full text linkWhat is black life-writing beyond the canon of the slave narrative? Matters of Life: Writing Lives in the Age of United States Slavery shows that on the margins of the slave narrative exists a plenitude of forms, practices, and concepts that invite reconsideration of the premises that continue to structure understandings of the field of life-writing in the age of slavery. These premises include, but are not limited to, the following claims: that emulative lives begin in enslavement and end in freedom, that sophisticated narrative is the domain of autobiography, that authenticity and truth are the goals of life-writing. Matters of Life explores how biographical novellas, collective biographies, and scrapbooks offer alternative accounts about the possible life stories and forms that such stories take during the age of slavery in the United States
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The Periodical Origins of the American Self
Full text linkMy project examines the historical ideas of American identity that developed in early U.S. periodicals, the most popular form of print in the 18th- and 19th-century U.S. In periodicals, I show, American identity was often imagined as a category distinct from nationality or U.S. citizenship, and expressed a host of local and contingent meanings. I look beyond the book form to historicize U.S. writers’ ideas of the relationship between the American, the U.S. government, and the nation it purportedly represented
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Speech as Writing: Literary Dialect Orthography in the United States 1790-1930
Full text linkThe study and characterization of the literary uses of non-standard AmericanEnglish writing systems was once a topic of research central to the study of American
literature. Speech as Writing: Literary Dialect Orthography in the United States
1790-1930 argues that the emergence of new computational tools and theoretical
insights enables a return to the general study of at least one common component of
literary dialect – non-standard orthography. The use of non-standard orthographic
systems in crafting dialect literature differs from the use of non-standard syntax or
vocabulary in that it presents a full system of meaning independent from the encoding
facet of orthography typically explored by linguistics or cognitive science. "Speech as
Writing" employs these insights alongside a computational methodology drawn from
corpus linguistics and information theory to explore how this novel understanding of
orthography can contribute to novel understandings of nineteenth and early
twentieth-century United States literature
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