Elizabeth Stoddard & the Boundaries of Bourgeois Culture

Elizabeth Stoddard & the Boundaries of Bourgeois Culture
Author: Lynn Mahoney
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2004-01-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1135883416

Elizabeth Stoddard and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Culture traces Stoddard's emergence as a writer in the 1850s, her conflict-ridden relationships with the writers associated with the genteel tradition, and her efforts to negotiate the boundaries of Victorian culture in the United States. While in many ways a critic of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture, Stoddard remained in other ways an adherent; her work was not a rejection of bourgeois culture but a reworking of it, which suggests that bourgeois culture was not as monolithic as later critics believed. Recovering the richness and possibility that characterized early Victorian writing, this book examines the range of literary expression which had existed at mid-century, a period that boasts some of American literature's most iconoclastic voices.

The Selected Letters of Elizabeth Stoddard

The Selected Letters of Elizabeth Stoddard
Author: Elizabeth Stoddard
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2012-11-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 160938122X

Although she wrote voluminously in a range of genres, including fiction, poetry, and journalism, Elizabeth Stoddard has mainly been known as the wife of poet Richard Henry Stoddard. Here, editors Stockton (Southwestern University) and Putzi (College of William and Mary) collect 84 of her letters, organized chronologically from 1851 to 1902. The letters offer insight into her explorations of identity, especially her identification with the New York City literati, and provide a literary and cultural history of the city, which was the nation's printing and publishing capital during the mid to late 19th century. The letters have been selected to reflect a wide range of her experiences, opinions, and interests. A detailed introduction provides a review her life. The book also includes a timeline and a few b&w historical photos. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760-1860

Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760-1860
Author: Sharon M. Harris
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2016-05-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317105583

This volume illustrates the significance of epistolarity as a literary phenomenon intricately interwoven with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural developments. Rejecting the common categorization of letters as primarily private documents, this collection of essays demonstrates the genre's persistent public engagements with changing cultural dynamics of the revolutionary, early republican, and antebellum eras. Sections of the collection treat letters' implication in transatlanticism, authorship, and reform movements as well as the politics and practices of editing letters. The wide range of authors considered include Mercy Otis Warren, Charles Brockden Brown, members of the Emerson and Peabody families, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Stoddard, Catherine Brown, John Brown, and Harriet Jacobs. The volume is particularly relevant for researchers in U.S. literature and history, as well as women's writing and periodical studies. This dynamic collection offers scholars an exemplary template of new approaches for exploring an understudied yet critically important literary genre.

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism
Author: Keith Newlin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 733
Release: 2019-08-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0190056940

The scholarship devoted to American literary realism has long wrestled with problems of definition: is realism a genre, with a particular form, content, and technique? Is it a style, with a distinctive artistic arrangement of words, characters, and description? Or is it a period, usually placed as occurring after the Civil War and concluding somewhere around the onset of World War I? This volume aims to widen the scope of study beyond mere definition, however, by expanding the boundaries of the subject through essays that reconsider and enlarge upon such questions. The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism aims to take stock of the scholarly work in the area and map out paths for future directions of study. The Handbook offers 35 vibrant and original essays of new interpretations of the artistic and political challenges of representing life. It is the first book to treat the subject topically and thematically, in wide scope, with essays that draw upon recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies to offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of major and minor figures and the contexts that shaped their work. Contributors here tease out the workings of a particular concept through a variety of authors and their cultural contexts. A set of essays explores realism's genesis and its connection to previous and subsequent movements. Others examine the inclusiveness of representation, the circulation of texts, and the aesthetic representation of science, time, space, and the subjects of medicine, the New Woman, and the middle class. Still others trace the connection to other arts--poetry, drama, illustration, photography, painting, and film--and to pedagogic issues in the teaching of realism. As a whole, this volume forges exciting new paths in the study of realism and writers' unending labor to represent life accurately.

A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry

A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry
Author: Jennifer Putzi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 718
Release: 2016-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1316033546

A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry is the first book to construct a coherent history of the field and focus entirely on women's poetry of the period. With contributions from some of the most prominent scholars of nineteenth-century American literature, it explores a wide variety of authors, texts, and methodological approaches. Organized into three chronological sections, the essays examine multiple genres of poetry, consider poems circulated in various manuscript and print venues, and propose alternative ways of narrating literary history. From these essays, a rich story emerges about a diverse poetics that was once immensely popular but has since been forgotten. This History confirms that the field has advanced far beyond the recovery of select individual poets. It will be an invaluable resource for students, teachers, and critics of both the literature and the history of this era.

Enterprising Youth

Enterprising Youth
Author: Monika Elbert
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2008-06-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1135898545

"Recommended" by Choice Enterprising Youth examines the agenda behind the shaping of nineteenth-century children’s perceptions and world views and the transmission of civic duties and social values to children by adults. The essays in this book reveal the contradictions involved in the perceptions of children as active or passive, as representatives of a new order, or as receptacles of the transmitted values of their parents. The question, then, is whether the business of telling children's stories becomes an adult enterprise of conservative indoctrination, or whether children are enterprising enough to read what many of the contributors to this volume see as the subversive potential of these texts. This collection of literary and historical criticism of nineteenth-century American children’s literature draws upon recent assessments of canon formations, gender studies, and cultural studies to show how concepts of public/private, male/female, and domestic/foreign are collapsed to reveal a picture of American childhood and life that is expansive and constrictive at the same time.

The Fortress of American Solitude

The Fortress of American Solitude
Author: Shawn Thomson
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2009
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0838642179

For individuals who are interested in how Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and other narratives of shipwrecks and castaways influenced antebellum American Culture, Shawn Thomson's The Fortress of American Solitude is useful. More specifically, for Melville scholars, the second, third, and fourth chapters provide some interesting insight into possible readings for how Defoe's novel-and the castaway genre in general-may have influenced Melville's call to sea and the penning of some of his most interesting characters.

Edith Wharton as Spatial Activist and Analyst

Edith Wharton as Spatial Activist and Analyst
Author: Reneé Somers
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2013-09-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1135922969

Because she devoted much of her life to exploring the relationships that exist between people and their built environment, Edith Wharton developed a set of philosophies that she expressed in many arenas, including interior design, architecture, and landscaping. Her theories of space were practiced and materially executed, in addition to being expressed in her writing. This book explores Wharton's theories of space in Newport, Rhode Island during the Gilded Age when the town was transformed from a rustic seaport to a playground for the fabulously wealthy. The built environment played a pivotal role as social, economic and personal conflicts were enacted among private and public spaces. As a cultural worker and as an author, Wharton stood squarely in the middle of these conflicts and directly participated in them. Accordingly, the book shows Wharton in a new light by exploring texts such as The Decoration of Houses and The House of Mirth as well as by examining the architecture and aesthetics of three of Wharton's primary homes.