scholarly journals The New England Renaissance and American Literary Ethnocentrism

Prospects ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 409-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Buell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Romantic Literature ◽  
American Civil Religion ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
American Intellectual History

Just as patriot orators invoked the spirit of Puritanism in their remonstrances against British tyranny, just as the nineteenth-century cult of Pilgrimism taught all America to look back upon the Pilgrim fathers as everyone's fathers, so modern American intellectual history has proclaimed the Puritan origins of the American way. The result has been a scholarly upsurge, during the past half-century, of “Puritan legacy” studies, of which Perry Miller was the prime mover and Sacvan Bercovitch is the leading contemporary theorist. So far as the interpretation of literary history is concerned, these studies have given a new authority and depth to the old New England-centered map of American literary tradition first drawn up by the Yankee-oriented genteel intellectual establishment of the late nineteenth century that presided over the literary institutions whose prestige had been built upon the reputation of the perpetrators of the antebellum New England Renaissance. The old-fashioned interpretation of American literary history and the new-fashioned interpretation of American civil religion as a nationalized version of Puritan ideology have combined to create a strong presumption, at least for specialists in New England Romantic literature, that theirs was the key formative moment in American literary history as a whole.

Country Matters: Rural Fiction, Urban Modernity, and the Problem of American Regionalism

2010 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Storey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Rural Life ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Urban Modernity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Hamlin Garland ◽  
American Literary History

Mark Storey, "Country Matters: Rural Fiction, Urban Modernity, and the Problem of American Regionalism" (pp. 192––213) This essay intervenes in the critical debates surrounding nineteenth-century American regionalism, arguing that such debates have tended to ignore the possibility of a shared and trans-regional category of "rural fiction." Developing this notion, I suggest that literary representations of rural life in the late nineteenth century are a crucial and neglected way of understanding the geographically indiscrete transformations of urban-capitalist modernity. Further, by examining these transformations through the prism of rural fiction, we can challenge the urban-centric tendency of postbellum American literary history. Drawing on several writers who have been the focus of much of critics' attentions on regionalism (Edward Eggleston, Hamlin Garland, and Sarah orne Jewett in particular), this essay considers both the generic and thematic instabilities of rural fiction, arguing that these instabilities serve to encode and refract the social and cultural context from which this fiction emerges. Reading rural fiction against the background of the increasing similarities between geographically distinct areas of rural life, and reconsidering many of the works that we currently gather under the regionalist rubric as, instead, rural, a distinct perspective can be gained on the standardizing and flattening processes of modernity itself.

Howells's Obscure Hurt

1975 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-211
Author(s):  
John W. Crowley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great War ◽  
Henry Adams ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Late Nineteenth

‘ 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.

scholarly journals Spending Time in the Nineteenth Century

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rieke Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Access Point ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Free Time ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Nineteenth Century American Literature ◽  
Cultural Aspects ◽  
American Literary History

This special issue of New American Studies Journal: A Forum looks at nineteenth-century American literature and culture through the analytical lens of free time and leisure. This analytical framework affords a novel access point to American literary history—free time, as this special issue will explore, is a highly contested and politicized concept and resource of the nineteenth century, one that restructures temporalities and spaces. Nineteenth-century American culture and literature can be understood as an archive to explore free time as a significant social and economic innovation into the texture of individual life. The contributions to this special issue explore the rise of free time in the nineteenth century with particular attention toward temporal and spatial reconfigurations that free time afforded. Furthermore they explore the societal and cultural aspects of free time that grew around the logics and logistics of nineteenth-century capitalism—a social formation that made leisure, time off work, not merely possible, but that created entire industries and spaces for leisure and repose.

Reconstituting the Study of American Political Thought in a Regime-Change Perspective

1990 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 169-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eldon J. Eisenach
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Erich Fromm ◽  
American Political Thought ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Roger Williams ◽  
Institutional Relationships

The story of American political thought has been told in many different ways. Three genres stand out. The first is written within the larger framework of intellectual history and takes the form of anthology and narrative summary. Among its most prominent features are an eclecticism of sources (from Roger Williams to Walt Whitman to Erich Fromm) and a heavy emphasis on the period from the first New England settlements through the victory of Jeffersonian democracy. A second form is constitutionalist. Charting the major struggles over legal and institutional relationships through time, this perspective gives prominence to landmark court decisions and articulations of major constitutional issues by party and political leaders. As articulated in the late nineteenth century, it examines the major forms of constitutionalist thinking that lie behind these constitutional and institutional struggles. The third genre, I label populist-progressive. Here, the story of American political thought is Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Southwestern Political Science Association annual meeting, March 23–26, 1988, Houston, Texas, and at the American Politics Group meeting in Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University, January 4–6, 1988.

Mill Town Mortality: Consequences of Industrial Growth in Two Nineteenth-Century New England Towns

1999 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan I. Hautaniemi ◽  
Alan C. Swedlund ◽  
Douglas L. Anderton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mortality Trends ◽  
Industrial Growth ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Connecticut Valley ◽  
Broad Objective ◽  
The Impact

Recent research has considerably increased our understanding of the factors associated with the American epidemiological transition in the late nineteenth century. However, uncertainty remains regarding the impact on mortality of specific changes ancillary to urbanization and industrialization in American cities and towns. The broad objective of the Connecticut Valley Historical Demography Project is to examine changing relationships between socioeconomic status, the rise of new urban-industrial communities, and cause-specific mortality trends during the rapid development of New England manufacturing. To address these issues, the present analysis examines two emergent urban centers in Massachusetts, adopting a micro-demographic approach to explore late-nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-century determinants of mortality.

Bank Mergers in Late Nineteenth-Century New England: The Contingent Nature of Structural Change

1991 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 537-557 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi R. Lamoreaux
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Structural Change ◽  
New England ◽  
Banking System ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Economic Environment ◽  
Competitive Environment ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Bank Mergers ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Although New England's unit banking system was declining in profitability during the late nineteenth century, the existing competitive environment prevented large institutions from outperforming their smaller rivals. As a result, there was little change in the structure of the banking system during this period. At the turn of the century, however, a wave of mergers radically transformed the banking sectors of Boston and Providence. Although the greater profitability of the mergers indicates they were a better fit to the economic environment than their smaller predecessors, their creation was only made possible by a special combination of historical circumstances.

scholarly journals DISJUNCTIVE CIRCLES: MODERN INTELLECTUAL CULTURE IN CUZCO AND THE JOURNEYS OF INCAN ANTIQUITIES, C.1877–1921

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 399-414 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEFANIE GÄNGER
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
European North ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Intellectual Networks ◽  
The Many

This essay explores the journeys of Andean pre-Columbian antiquities across the Americas and the Atlantic during the late nineteenth century along the veins of intellectual networks, between Andean communities and European, North American and Creole collectors and museums. Centred on the studies and collection of José Lucas Caparó Muñíz, the essay focuses on the Creole and European practice of lifting pre-Columbian objects preserved or “still” in use in Andean communities out of their context and taking them to European and Creole private and public collections. Intellectual history has long paid scant attention to the many voices that its authors silenced, disfigured and suppressed. By looking at the journeys of Andean artefacts—at their owners, their brokers and their losers—this erssay traces the systemic hierarchies and the chasms of an expanding modern intellectual culture.

The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Blacklock
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fourth Dimension ◽  
Higher Dimensional ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
History Of

The idea of the fourth dimension of space has been of sustained interest to nineteenth-century and Modernist studies since the publication of Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (1983). An idea from mathematics that was appropriated by occultist thought, it emerged in the fin de siècle as a staple of genre fiction and grew to become an informing idea for a number of important Modernist writers and artists. Describing the post-Euclidean intellectual landscape of the late nineteenth century, The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension works with the concepts derived from the mathematical possibilities of n-dimensional geometry—co-presence, bi-location, and interpenetration; the experiences of two consciousnesses sharing the same space, one consciousness being in two spaces, and objects and consciousness pervading each other—to examine how a crucially transformative idea in the cultural history of space was thought and to consider the forms in which such thought was anchored. It identifies a corpus of higher-dimensional fictions by Conrad and Ford, H.G. Wells, Henry James, H.P. Lovecraft, and others and reads these closely to understand how fin de siècle and early twentieth-century literature shaped and were in turn shaped by the reconfiguration of imaginative space occasioned by the n-dimensional turn. In so doing it traces the intellectual history of higher-dimensional thought into diverse terrains, describing spiritualist experiments and how an extended abstract space functioned as an analogue for global space in occult groupings such as the Theosophical Society.

‘Independence, Dependence, and Interdependence Day’

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter D. McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Philosophical Thinking ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Finnegans Wake ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter begins by reflecting on various reactions Joyce’s Finnegans Wake provoked during its long gestation, looking in detail at H. G. Wells, T. S. Eliot, Eugene Jolas, and C. K. Ogden. After explaining why it is important to consider the Wake’s place in intellectual history, it focuses on three traditions from which Joyce derived inspiration: the political thinking of the late nineteenth century, reflected in the writings of the Russian anarchist Léon Metchnikoff (1838–88); the linguistic thinking of the early twentieth century, as manifest in the work of the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen (1860–1943); and the philosophical thinking also of the early twentieth century, associated with the Austro-Hungarian journalist, novelist, and philosopher Fritz Mauthner (1849–1923). The chapter concludes by considering the Wake’s various lessons in reading, the centrality it accords to writing, and the bearing this has on how we think about language, culture, community, and the state.

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