Genealogies of Black Modernities

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 611-622 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derrick R Spires
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Phillis Wheatley ◽  
Intellectual Inquiry ◽  
Black Intellectual ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Black Writing ◽  
Pauline Hopkins

Abstract This essay introduces the major themes and concerns of “Genealogies of Black Modernity in the Long Nineteenth Century,” a special issue of American Literary History. How does modernity look when read through Black diasporic literary production in the long nineteenth century, broadly conceived? What new narratives can we create by reading this literature as participating in and producing transatlantic genealogies of literary modernity? How does reading Black literary modernity in the nineteenth century disrupt our understandings of modernity as a conceptual framework both for contemporary scholarship and as an object of nineteenth-century Black intellectual inquiry? This introductory essay defines Black modernities of the long nineteenth century as a set of related, sometimes connected, practices and questions focused on the nature of Black life and culture in an ever-shifting antiblack world. Writers from Phillis Wheatley to Pauline Hopkins—to offer one framing—were invested in chronicling and intervening in the newness of their moment, even as they worked to imagine new possibilities for the future. Our task, then, was to deliberate over what something called modernity meant and means for and in African American literary history through the archive of Black writing and through the terms and forms these writers set forth.

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.

The nineteenth-century opium complex: From Thomas Love Peacock to Sherlock Holmes

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-18
Author(s):  
Josephine McDonagh ◽  
Briony Wickes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Commercial Activities ◽  
Opium War ◽  
Thomas Love Peacock ◽  
Detective Stories

This introduction to the special issue proposes that two discrete nineteenth-century histories of opium – a literary history, initiated by the drug confessions of De Quincey, and a colonial history, exemplified by the commercial activities of the East India Company (in which Thomas Love Peacock participated) in cultivating opium in Bengal for export to China, leading to the first Opium War – are common elements in a nineteenth-century ‘opium complex’, a set of interlocking practices of individuals and (quasi)state actors, extending across the globe. Sherlock Holmes detective stories are read as compressed registers of tensions that inhere in this complex.

Mania for Freedom

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Mac Kilgore
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Politics And Literature ◽  
William Apess ◽  
Phillis Wheatley ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
Poetic Inspiration ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
Domestic Reform ◽  
American Authors

“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1841. While this statement may read like an innocuous truism today, the claim would have been controversial in the antebellum United States when enthusiasm was a hotly contested term associated with religious fanaticism and poetic inspiration, revolutionary politics and imaginative excess. In analyzing the language of enthusiasm in philosophy, religion, politics, and literature, John Mac Kilgore uncovers a tradition of enthusiasm linked to a politics of emancipation. The dissenting voices chronicled here fought against what they viewed as tyranny while using their writings to forge international or antinationalistic political affiliations. Pushing his analysis across national boundaries, Kilgore contends that American enthusiastic literature, unlike the era’s concurrent sentimental counterpart, stressed democratic resistance over domestic reform as it navigated the global political sphere. By analyzing a range of canonical American authors—including William Apess, Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Walt Whitman—Kilgore places their works in context with the causes, wars, and revolutions that directly or indirectly engendered them. In doing so, he makes a unique and compelling case for enthusiasm’s centrality in the shaping of American literary history.

Introduction: Global Morrison

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 253-269
Author(s):  
Justine Baillie
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Black Intellectual ◽  
Colonial And Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Black Writing ◽  
New Generation

Abstract As novelist, academic, and public intellectual Toni Morrison has made a profound contribution to the transformation of the black intellectual and political aesthetic. In many ways Morrison’s literary and theoretical formulations represent the feminization of black writing traditions through her representations of identity as being fluid and socially constructed. Her novels transform memory into alternative narratives of recovery that illuminate obscured histories of slavery, migration and urbanisation. This project constitutes a rich legacy for a new generation of writers who, working within a global nexus, interrogate the racial economics of trauma, dislocation and exile in ways that dissolve the distinctions between African American, colonial, and postcolonial studies. The introduction to this special issue highlights the transnational scope of Morrison’s work, with a particular focus on her non-fiction.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 203-212
Author(s):  
Wendy Raphael Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Literary History ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Religious Radicalism ◽  
Literary Histories

Through examples of both print and manuscript poems, the conclusion argues that evangelicalism was a shift in the emphasis on aesthetics and its correct uses more than a theological tenet, and that revival poetry became a central part of not only eighteenth-, but nineteenth-century verse practices and beyond. These legacies, which include the revivalist poet-minister, the print itinerant, espousal piety, the Calvinist couplet, and women poet-minister personae, have important implications for later abolitionist poetry, the sentimental poetess, histories of racialized and gendered aesthetic capacities, the development of lyric address, and the integration of religious experience and practice in American literary history. Though elite defenders of enthusiasm tried to empty enthusiasm of religious radicalism and attach it to literary poetry, the eighteenth century (and beyond) saw the explosion of an enthusiastic poetry explicitly tied to religious revivalism. Ultimately, Roberts argues, literary scholars must grapple with how to write modern literary histories that account for people living with the gods fully present.

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.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document