Nineteenth-century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History

Nineteenth-century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History
Author: Juliana Chow
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2021
Genre: American literature
ISBN: 9781108990660

"American cultural technologies of the early nineteenth century shaped Nature and the synonymous "native" in contradictory ways: celebrating the wilderness but then transforming it by cultivation, mourning lost "natives" (both people and species) while also naturalizing the succession of new Euro-American settlers. Settler colonial geopolitics understood its own territorial claims in association with the retreats, migrations, and expansions of select species populations: cattle replacing American bison or Euro-Americans replacing Indians on the western frontier. In this way, Euro-American descendants of settlers who then considered themselves "natives" could be the natural stewards to "preserve" or "reform" wild remnants of nature while also identifying against the encroachment of the Old World. Technological arts as varied as moving panoramas and picturesque sketches depicted and enacted civilization overtaking the wild frontier through visual tours. This chapter explores how the sketch fits into technologies of seeing accompanying American settler colonialism and points to moments when it suggests ecological processes of ongoing passage rather than terminal extinction or succession"--

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War
Author: Cody Marrs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2015-07-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107109833

Nineteenth-century American literature is often divided into two asymmetrical halves, neatly separated by the Civil War. Focusing on the later writings of Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson, this book shows how the war took shape across the nineteenth century, inflecting literary forms for decades after 1865.

The Frontier in American Literature.

The Frontier in American Literature.
Author: Philip Durham
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 1969-06-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780023306303

Collects historical and fictional writings that illustrate the constant progression of territorial conquests, from the Atlantic to the Pacific

Handbook of the American Novel of the Nineteenth Century

Handbook of the American Novel of the Nineteenth Century
Author: Christine Gerhardt
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 584
Release: 2018-06-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110481324

This handbook offers students and researchers a compact introduction to the nineteenth-century American novel in the light of current debates, theoretical concepts, and critical methodologies. The volume turns to the nineteenth century as a formative era in American literary history, a time that saw both the rise of the novel as a genre, and the emergence of an independent, confident American culture. A broad range of concise essays by European and American scholars demonstrates how some of America‘s most well-known and influential novels responded to and participated in the radical transformations that characterized American culture between the early republic and the age of imperial expansion. Part I consists of 7 systematic essays on key historical and critical frameworks ― including debates aboutrace and citizenship, transnationalism, environmentalism and print culture, as well as sentimentalism, romance and the gothic, realism and naturalism. Part II provides 22 essays on individual novels, each combining an introduction to relevant cultural contexts with a fresh close reading and the discussion of critical perspectives shaped by literary and cultural theory.

Archives of American Time

Archives of American Time
Author: Lloyd Pratt
Publisher:
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2016-08-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780812223729

In a bold revision of traditional historical narratives, Pratt analyzes nineteenth-century American literature to disclose the competing temporalities and racial identities that in fact defined the antebellum period.

The Making of Racial Sentiment

The Making of Racial Sentiment
Author: Ezra Tawil
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 26
Release: 2006-07-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139459031

The frontier romance, an enormously popular genre of American fiction born in the 1820s, helped redefine 'race' for an emerging national culture. The novels of James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child, Catharine Maria Sedgwick and others described the 'races' in terms of emotional rather than physical characteristics. By doing so they produced the idea of 'racial sentiment': the notion that different races feel different things, and feel things differently. Ezra Tawil argues that the novel of white-Indian conflict provided authors and readers with an apt analogy for the problem of slavery. By uncovering the sentimental aspects of the frontier romance, Tawil redraws the lines of influence between the 'Indian novel' of the 1820s and the sentimental novel of slavery, demonstrating how Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin ought to be reconsidered in this light. This study reveals how American literature of the 1820s helped form modern ideas about racial differences.