1. Becoming Henry James

2021 ◽  
pp. 11-29
Author(s):  
Susan L. Mizruchi
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Publishing Industry ◽  
Copyright Law ◽  
Literary Marketplace ◽  
Women's Experience ◽  
International Publishing ◽  
Periodical Publishing

‘Becoming Henry James’ presents a biography of Henry James and his family. It also details the start of his writing career that would establish him as among the great fictionalizers of women’s experience and foremost novelists in English. Among the first literary authors to navigate the international publishing scene effectively, James managed to profit from the security of American copyright law and the ambiguity of British law. However, his relationship to the literary marketplace was characteristically ambivalent. What did assist James’s career immensely was the growth of the publishing industry in the post–Civil War period, especially periodical publishing, catalyzed by the expansion and professionalization of advertising.

Emily Dickinson and the Battle of Ball's Bluff

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (5) ◽  
pp. 1582-1599 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Friedlander
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Literary Marketplace ◽  
Local Newspapers

Emily Dickinson's response to the Civil War—once discounted as nonexistent or negligible, now embraced as part of the canon of Civil War writing—gives evidence of a conscious testing of alternatives. Among these alternatives, the most surprising, perhaps, is her potentially public positioning of herself as a war poet in works that celebrate military heroism. One such celebration, “When I was small, a Woman died—,” written in the aftermath of Ball's Bluff—a disastrous Union loss—revises the scenarios presented in two other Ball's Bluff poems and transforms the horrific death of a local soldier into a glorious ascent into the heavens, an uncharacteristically joyous response to an event that others (including Herman Melville) experienced as entirely mournful. Since the two other poems appeared in her local newspapers and since the soldier was Amherst's first casualty, Dickinson's poem is likely a carefully crafted bid for publication. Read in this way, moreover, “When I was small” reminds us that war presents a poet with unique rhetorical problems but also with opportunities, and that these opportunities can be tempting even for a writer as resistant to the literary marketplace as Dickinson.

The Literary Marketplace of British India: 1780–1844

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Máire ní Fhlathúin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Publishing Industry ◽  
Economic Factors ◽  
British India ◽  
Literary Marketplace ◽  
Factors Affecting ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
At Home

This chapter discusses the material conditions for the emergence of a publishing and print culture in early British India and throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. It explores the demographic and economic factors affecting the development of the publishing industry. It argues that newspapers and literary titles were not simply a conduit for the distribution of the news and culture of ‘home’ across India, but also provided a forum in which the British community in India could write for (and often about) itself, thus enabling the development of a sense of local and colonial identity, related to but also set apart from the identity of the British at ‘home’.

Toward the Bouddha chrétien

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Haydock
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Henry James ◽  
New Thought ◽  
Comedie Humaine ◽  
Confidence Man ◽  
Billy Budd

Nearly three decades passed between the stoppage of writing on The Confidence-Man and Melville’s work on Billy Budd, Sailor began in 1885. During that time, particularly after the Civil War, much more of Balzac’s work became available in translation, and numerous important critical works appeared about him, particularly as Henry James began to build his understanding of Balzac’s method into Realism. Moreover, America had taken up New Thought, not the confident cosmopolitan’s “geniality,” and was growing in ideas of spiritualism, paranormal psychology, and most prominently, Theosophy. Melville or members of Melville’s household, bought across this time more than a dozen renditions of Balzac in English along with transatlantic commentaries. Melville himself, in his poetry, began to find particular favor in Eastern thought, and the first successful set of La Comédie humaine in English was made and interpreted through Theosophical Buddhism. Melville read and marked a number of these volumes, particularly Balzac’s personal correspondence, which seemed to affect him profoundly. This combination of reading and rereading opened him to a much deeper resonance with Balzac’s ontological belief than he had comprehended previously: the Christian Buddha of the “Avant-propos.”

Henry Adams in England

1977 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-186
Author(s):  
William Dusinberre
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Henry Adams ◽  
George Santayana ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
American Minister

Like other unusual “ New Englanders ” of the post-Civil-War era — Henry James, George Santayana, W. E. B. DuBois — Henry Adams needed to cross his native with an alien culture before he could flourish. The fusion was made possible by the stroke of fortune which in 1861 sent his father as American Minister, accompanied by Henry as his private secretary, to England.

The Timothy 0. Webster Papers and the Pearce Civil War Collection: Using Civil War Military Collections for Women's History

Collections ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-381
Author(s):  
Julie L. Holcomb
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Working Class ◽  
African American Women ◽  
White Women ◽  
Final Part ◽  
American Women ◽  
Women's Experience ◽  
History Of ◽  
Civil War Era

Working-class and rural white women and free and enslaved African American women left few material traces, making it difficult for scholars to document their experience of the Civil War. This three-part article uses the story of the Timothy O. Webster Papers, which is part of the Pearce Civil War Collection at Navarro College in Corsi-cana, Texas, to examine the possibilities and limitations of recovering women's experience of the war from military collections. The first part examines the practice of collecting Civil War documents, the history of the Pearce Civil War Collection, and the collection and preservation of the Webster letters. In the second part, I begin to reconstruct Harriet's story using letters from the Webster Papers. The final part returns to the archive to consider how archivists might aid scholars in recovering the story of Civil War-era women from military collections.

Feminist Publishing in France 1975–2000

Making Waves ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 85-100
Author(s):  
Fanny Mazzone
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Publishing Industry ◽  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
Feminist Movement ◽  
French Society ◽  
International Publishing ◽  
Feminist Publishing ◽  
Cultural Shifts ◽  
Internal Division

This chapter examines the place of feminist publishing in both the French and international publishing industries from 1975 until 2000. It uses the theories of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in order to analyse the ways in which feminist publishers attempted to gain a foothold in an industry that was marked by broader economic, political and cultural shifts in French society in the decades following the 1970s. It considers both the publishing industry and feminism as ‘fields’, following Bourdieu, the intersection of which allowed French feminists and women writers a means of expressing and disseminating their ideas and experiences. Structural and political changes in the 1980s and 1990s, however, meant that the context was generally less favourable for feminist publishing, although some publishers were able to adapt to the shifting context and markets. Internal division and disagreements within the feminist movement also contributed to a decline in specialist collections devoted to feminism.

The Business of War

2020 ◽  
pp. 22-38
Author(s):  
David A. Rennie
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Publishing Industry ◽  
John Dos Passos ◽  
Literary Marketplace ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
Cultural Forces ◽  
The Way

War writing was implicated in and shaped by wider cultural forces. During the war, patriotic bestsellers flooded the literary marketplace, censorship suppressed certain anti-war writing, while authors participated in the CPI’s propaganda machine. After the war, changes in the publishing industry, allied to a growing awareness of the importance of advertising, shaped the way war writing was presented to the public. Hollywood, meanwhile, provided opportunities for writers to supplement their income, either by writing for the studios or by sanctioning adaptations of their work. Discussing the work of Guy Empey, John Dos Passos, and E. E. Cummings, this chapter considers the ways the content of American World War I texts—and the formats in which they were presented to the public—were influenced by these factors.

Speaking Monuments: Henry James, Walt Whitman, and the Civil War Statues of Augustus Saint-Gaudens

2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-49
Author(s):  
TAMARA L. FOLLINI
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Walt Whitman ◽  
War Memories ◽  
Emotional Issues ◽  
The Way

Although James's first published response to Whitman's poetry, an 1865 review of Drum-Taps, was dismissive, he expressed a profound affinity with the poet later in his career. This essay considers how his reading of two volumes of Whitman's correspondence in 1898, in particular The Wound Dresser letters, are crucial to James's reevaluation of Whitman and may be seen to be exerting pressure in The American Scene (1907). Through also examining a key event of the year previous, when James's Civil War memories were reignited by the dedication of the Robert Gould Shaw memorial in Boston, I suggest reasons for his changed relation to Whitman's aesthetic project. My argument focusses on how Whitman's epistolary and poetic treatment of the wounded body reformulated vital representational and emotional issues for James, and made Whitman an active presence for him during his 1904–5 American sojourn. James makes no explicit comment about Whitman when he details his journey in The American Scene, yet the poet's influence can be felt in the way James writes about recently erected Civil War monuments by Saint-Gaudens, in New York and Boston, and Whitman is also acknowledged by the stylistic memorial, in this work, that James builds for him.

What Happened to Balthasar Bekker in England? A Mystery in the History of Publishing

2010 ◽  
Vol 90 (4) ◽  
pp. 609-631 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Fix
Keyword(s):  
Publishing Industry ◽  
Ghost Stories ◽  
Scriptural Interpretation ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Evil Spirits ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
Periodical Publishing ◽  
Henry More ◽  
The Devil

AbstractThis article looks at the fate of Balthasar Bekker's De Betoverde Weereld in England. The famous work opposing the earthly activity of evil spirits, rejecting the reality of witchcraft, and debunking spirit stories by suggesting natural causes for the supposed supernatural events, was published in Amsterdam (following a rowe with the original Leeuwarden publisher) by Anthony van Dale in 1692–1693 and caused an intense controversy. Bekker was a strict monotheist unwilling to hand over any of God's power to evil spirits or the Devil, an advocate of the accomodationist school of Scriptural interpretation that had landed Galileo in jail in 1633, a serious student of spirit “superstition” with works such as those of Reginald Scot, Abraham Paling, and Anthony van Dale in his library. And he was a Cartesian: he owned Clauberg, Heereboord, Sylvain-Regis, etc. His opponents said that if one did not believe in evil spirits one could not believe in God. Bekker's book went through several Dutch printings, was right away translated into French and German, stirring reaction in those countries (the new book by Nooijen, Unserm Großen Bekker ein Denkmahl? looks at the German reaction). In England plans were afoot to translate the Betoverde Weereld by 1694, and Book I was translated and published. But that was all that got done. The highly controversial Book II and the final two books remained untranslated and unpublished. Why? Not for a lack of interest in evil spirits in England: witness the works of Glanvill, Henry More, George Sinclair, John Webster, and many others. Ghost stories were not lacking—just see the “Devil of Tedworth” and “Beckington Witch” stories. I argue the failure was a result of the vicissitudes of the London publishing industry, especially the relatively new periodical publishing, and of the eccentric, intellectual, but unfocussed general publisher John Dunton, who ruined himself and the Bekker project with his poor business sense (his wife ran the shop for him and when she died he was lost) which led him to travel to Dublin and Boston in search of publishable manuscripts (even on spirits!) instead of allowing him to concentrate his resources on Bekker. As a result, Bekker's work remained little known in the English-speaking world and its significance was almost totally overshadowed by the work of Locke. Would Daniel van Dalen, Jan ten Hoorn, or Willem Blaeu have made the same mistake? Also, Dunton put a goodly amount of his resources into the risky new periodical market and lost money that could have financed publication of the last three books of De Betoverde Weereld. Just because of the controversial nature of what he said, Bekker deserved better in England.

scholarly journals TAKING BACK THE THREAD: MYTH REVISION IN RODOREDA’S “SECRET” ODYSSEY POEMS

2006 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-50
Author(s):  
Nicole Altamirano
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Merce Rodoreda ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Women's Experience ◽  
Classical Myths ◽  
Return Home ◽  
The Mediterranean

While Mercè Rodoreda is frequently recognized as the most famous novelist in Catalan, her poetry remains virtually unexplored. Written after the Civil War led Rodoreda to flee her Catalonian homeland for France in 1939, the poems of Món d’Ulisses do not focus on the eponymous hero’s longing to return home; rather, the poet shifts viewpoint to that of the women Ulysses leaves behind. By enabling them to tell their own version of the Mediterranean epic, concentrating on their private experience of exile, their expressions of absence, anger, and isolation, Rodoreda reevaluates and revises classical myths of the feminine in a testament to women’s experience of loss.

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