A Textbook of the Genteel Tradition: Henry Ward Beecher'sNorwood

Prospects ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 135-153
Author(s):  
Henry Nash Smith
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Industrial Process ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Domestic Fiction ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Dime Novels ◽  
Related Series ◽  
Sensation Novel

By the outbreak of the Civil War, the kind of highbrow psychological romance that Hawthorne and Melville had brought to a brilliant consummation in the 1850s had clearly lost favor both with critics and with the reading public. At the same time, middlebrow domestic fiction with a religious emphasis in the manner of Susan B. Warner'sThe Wide, Wide World(1850), and the “sensation novel” of physical adventure aimed at an even less literate audience, were gaining more and more readers. During the 1860s the field of American fiction was dominated by weekly story papers serializing this popular fiction, and the closely related series of dime novels published by the firm of Beadle & Adams and its competitors. Such material was ground out according to formulas in an essentially industrial process; it had little bearing on the development of serious literature.

Unstated: Narrating War in Lebanon

PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 1621-1629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Salah D. Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
North American ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
The State ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
American Writer ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
State Form

This essay consists of three beginnings, then a deferred reading of a novel. One beginning, a theoretical beginning, reflects on the question implicit in my title: What is unstated in the state of Lebanon? Another beginning, a literary critical beginning, returns to the work of Kahlil Gibran, the most famous early-twentieth-century Arab North American writer. Gibran links modernist and postmodernist Arab North American writing and, in a historical parallel, connects the foundations of the Lebanese state under French colonial rule to its disintegration in the context of the civil war. A third beginning, a contextual beginning, evokes more recent events in Lebanon through a discussion of the July War of 2006, during which Israel bombed the country for over a month. These three points of departure, I suggest, are crucial to readings of contemporary Arab North American fiction, which is always conditioned by theories of the state, a post-Gibran literary sensibility, and the politics of the present. More specifically, I argue that Rawi Hage's representation of the civil war in Lebanon in DeNiro's Game negotiates the destruction of the Lebanese state through figures of the unstated, whose very existence questions more generally the state form as the preeminent site of political authority and contributes to unstating the state.

Irish Heritage in the Literary Remains of Frank Yerby and Henry James

MELUS ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 122-146
Author(s):  
Korey Garibaldi
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Henry James ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
British Colonization ◽  
Racial Solidarity ◽  
The One ◽  
Historical Epoch

Abstract This essay investigates how Irish heritage—during the long historical epoch of British colonization—figured into the literary works of Frank Yerby and Henry James. Autobiographical connections and literary affinities between these authors are illuminated and contextualized by, among other published sources, the posthumous collection of essays by the latter novelist’s father, The Literary Remains of the late Henry James (1884). While scholars are newly investigating intersections between Henry James’s oeuvre and African American literature, Yerby’s enormously popular fiction has remained by and large estranged from this new direction in Jamesian studies. When read alongside Henry James, Sr.’s unfinished autobiography featured in the Literary Remains and related nonfictional texts, Yerby’s first novel and commercial best-seller, Foxes of Harrow (1946), seems to share an eerie amount in common with both the James family’s history and their humble Irish origins. Moreover, Yerby’s narrative curiously parallels the cross-racial solidarity the Jameses were regularly credited for in the one hundred years following the American Civil War.

‘The End is No Longer Hidden’: News, Fate and the Sensation Novel

2020 ◽  
pp. 93-123
Author(s):  
Jessica R. Valdez
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Structure ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Experience Of Time ◽  
Crime News ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
Sensation Novels ◽  
Novelistic Form

Victorian commentators saw the sensation novel--a sub-genre known for fast-paced plots drawn from real life--as symptomatic of the newspaper’s growing influence on the reading public. In a famous 1860 review, H. L. Mansel conflated this new novelistic form—which he called ‘The Newspaper Novel’--with crime news. This chapter argues, however, that the sensation novel makes the newspaper into a source of superstition and exclusion, one that problematises similar exclusions practiced by Dickens and Trollope. By experimenting with newspaper time and form, as well as the temporal structure of narrative, these sensation novels highlight characters whose experience of time and community is not presentist, as Anderson suggests, but rather more akin to dynastic time and a sense of history beyond the nation. Throughout Wilkie Collins’s and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensation novels, the newspaper becomes a part of the mysterious, the uncanny, and ‘atmospheric menace’ for which the sensation novel is so famous. Rather than drawing upon newspapers for a sense of realism, as critics have argued, these novels make their newspapers integral to their providential plots.

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