Howells's Obscure Hurt

1975 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-211
Author(s):  
John W. Crowley

‘ Every loyal American who went abroad during the first years of our great war felt bound to make himself some excuse for turning his back on his country in the hour of her trouble ’, wrote W. D. Howells in 1881. It is a striking coincidence in American literary history that four major writers of the late nineteenth century – Howells, Henry James, S. L. Clemens, and Henry Adams – all failed to serve in the Civil War. Whether or not they believed that they had turned their backs on their country, each made some excuse in his published work. The most notorious is Henry James's statement in Notes of a Son and Brother that ‘ a horrid even if an obscure hurt ’ had prevented him from volunteering to fight.

1984 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Elliott

At the Reformation, three possibilities faced English Catholics. They could continue to be Catholics and so suffer the penalties of the penal laws; they could conform to the Church of England; or they could adopt a middle course and become Church Papists. The Nevills of Nevill Holt, near Market Harborough in Leicestershire, went through all three phases. In the reign of Edward VI, Thomas Nevill I became a Protestant. His grandson, Thomas Nevill II, became a Church Papist under James I; and Thomas II’s son, Henry Nevill I, continued to be one at the time of the Civil War. But Henry l’s son William was definitely a Catholic and went into exile with King James II, while William’s son, Henry Nevill II, was an open Catholic under Charles II. Henry Nevill II’s descendants continued to be Catholics throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until they left Nevill Holt in the late nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
Deanna Ferree Womack

This book picks up where most books on the American Syria Mission have left off-in 1860, when civil war threw the Syrian Protestant community and the wider Ottoman Syrian society into chaos. This opening chapter introduces the diverse characters who sought to rebuild Syrian society and became enmeshed or entangled in one another’s history during the Arab renaissance (Nahda) that picked up steam in the late nineteenth century: American missionaries, Ottoman administrators, Syrian Protestants, and others from Syria’s Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Druze sects. It proposes setting the dominant Western male missionary narrative alongside the overlooked stories of Ottoman residents-especially women-and it locates this exploration of Syrian Protestant history within the field of World Christianity.


Author(s):  
John Mac Kilgore

The epilogue to the book gestures toward the destiny of enthusiasm in the post-Civil War era. In the wake of the trauma of war, the end of slavery, and the birth of a technologically-oriented culture of disenchanted realism, political enthusiasm no longer seemed necessary or viable. At the same time, the final lesson of Walt Whitman circa the centennial of the American Revolution is not so much that political enthusiasm has come to an end but that it must take on new, unheard-of forms specific to its historical era—in Whitman’s view, that meant a struggle for the rights of labor against the corruptions of capitalism (what he called the “tramp and strike question”). As one indication of how literatures of enthusiasm continued to operate in the late nineteenth century, the chapter discusses Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward and Whitman’s contemporaneous interest in anti-capitalism. Enthusiasm is finally what Whitman calls the “latent right of insurrection,” a “quenchless, indispensable fire” in the convulsive context of political tyranny.


Author(s):  
Sarah Blackwood

This chapter traces a new visual genealogy of inner life as it appears in canonical late-nineteenth-century painter and portraitist Thomas Eakins’s work. It situates Eakins’s lauded portraits alongside the complex political and racialized questions about mind and body that emerged in the U.S. after the Civil War. It centers a reading of a marginal Eakins painting—Whistling for Plover—that Eakins gave as a gift to neurologist S. Weir Mitchell. This painting is a part of a web of inventive thinking about mind and body in the postbellum U.S., evincing the deep anxiety felt nationally over the bodily scars left by the Civil War’s racial violence, an anxiety that is essential to the development of the New Psychology as a discipline.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. v-vii
Author(s):  
Diederik F. Janssen

I am pleased to introduce Boyhood Studies, Volume 11, Issue 1. This issue’s authors unanimously invite an appreciation of the many regional, temporal and contextual inflections of manliness-in-the-making. After all: “Among boys, as among men, there are ‘all sorts and conditions;’ environment moulds them” (Anon. 1890: 147). This merits a bit of intercontinental timetravel. Ecce puer: from Lord Baden-Powell’s and American contemporaries’ middle ages to late nineteenth-century Mexico’s French Third Republic, back to Baden-Powell and into the Great War, and back again to presentday Mexico. In Mexico, on both visits, we are travelling back and forth as well, between the rural and urban experience.


1987 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 551-581 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shin'ichi Yonekawa

In this wide-ranging article, Professor Yonekawa identifies and examines in detail the burst of cotton spinning company formation that occurred in the late nineteenth century among the major cotton-producing nations of the world. His comparative approach allows him to focus on key local factors responsible for the company flotation booms in the areas discussed. He is also able to compare the effects of more general circumstances in the industry, such as trends in the price of raw cotton and the disruption during the American Civil War, on the various locations. Finally, his multinational approach brings to light many intriguing questions and illuminates areas for productive future research.


Author(s):  
Diane Miller Sommerville

Suicide, by late nineteenth century, had transformed from a shameful, sinful act to one of sacrifice and courage. The most famous suicide of the Civil War, that of Edmund Ruffin, shows this evolution in attitudes about suicide. Ruffin’s suicide is venerated in Lost Cause literature as an act of patriotic martyrdom. The glorification of (white) suicide converged with the racial politics of the era as seen in the classic film, Birth of a Nation, and on the novel on which it was based, Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman. Suicide had become a marker of racial superiority that anchored the act to a neo-Confederate identity. By contrast, black suicides were either denied or explained as the acts of uncontrollable, manic, crazy former slaves no longer under the constraints of enslavement. Heroic suicide instilled meaning into the vast suffering in the failed effort at independence.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Matthew E. Stanley

The introduction outlines the book’s major arguments and argues for the importance of collective memory. The late nineteenth-century US labor movement was “abolitionized,” as land reformers, socialists, anarchists, labor agitators, social democrats, and populists all elicited the Civil War veteran. The labor movement’s wielding of Civil War memory achieved at least five often overlapping principal functions: ideology, recruitment, nostalgia, assimilation, and nationalism. Palpable tensions between modes of commemoration rooted in nationalism and reform and revolutionary memories centered more on internationalism and socialism revealed and influenced broader political currents between the Civil War and the first decades of the twentieth century.


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