Sarah Orne Jewett

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terry Heller
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Mentoring Relationships ◽  
Sarah Orne Jewett ◽  
Local Color ◽  
Fiction Writing ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Serious Injury

Theodora Sarah Orne Jewett (b. 1849–d. 1909) grew up in South Berwick, Maine, the middle daughter of a respected physician, Theodore F. Jewett, and Caroline Perry Jewett, both of distinguished and prosperous local families. Though her locale was provincial, her family connections often took her to Boston, as well as to New York City, Cincinnati, Chicago, and to other parts of the East and Midwest. Graduating in 1865 from the Berwick Academy, Jewett began writing professionally at a young age, appearing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1869. She continued a successful career, writing short fiction and sketches for major magazines and, at regular intervals, publishing collections. She also began to produce more didactic work for adults, as well as stories and poems for children in popular newspapers and magazines, such as The Independent and St. Nicholas. Jewett’s first book, Deephaven (1877), a series of Atlantic sketches worked into a novel, attracted many readers, among them John Greenleaf Whittier, who became a close friend. Her most important friendship was with Annie Fields, wife of the influential publisher, James T. Fields. When Annie was widowed in 1881, not long after Sarah’s father’s death in 1878, the two became lifelong companions, spending about half of each year together at Fields’s two homes in Massachusetts and traveling together in Europe and North America. Fields shared with Jewett her wide acquaintance among contemporary writers and artists. Jewett’s novels and collections sold well during her life; but today, most are in print only as e-books. A Country Doctor (1884) has tended to remain in print and to draw critical interest. “A White Heron” (1886) has remained her best-known short story, frequently anthologized and the focus of many critical studies. Among her longer works, only The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) has had a truly vigorous and continuous following of readers and scholars. Jewett’s fiction-writing career was cut short after a serious injury in a 1902 carriage accident made it impossible to adequately concentrate on writing fiction. However, she continued an extensive correspondence until her death in 1909. In 1908 she began one of the more important mentoring relationships in American literary history: her meetings and letter exchanges with Willa Cather, which critics believe led Cather to give up her successful editing and journalistic career to write the fiction for which she is best remembered. Jewett’s novels and magazine stories were identified from the beginning with local color and regionalist writing. Criticism continues to explore these facets, showing particular interest in how her work participates in the discourses of gender, race, nationalism, and class during the post–Civil War period.

Forming Provisional Identities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Story Cycle ◽  
Narrative Techniques

The introduction argues that the short story cycle is the preeminent genre for articulating the uncertainty that characterizes literary responses to modernity. The introduction outlines two vital contributions of the cycle to American literary history: 1. the absence of textual harmony in the cycle initiated new, pervasive narrative techniques of proliferating perspectives and disrupting chronology that inflect modern and contemporary fiction and 2. the form of the cycle enables the expression of subjectivity without fixity. Contingency and multiplicity are so central to our social-media infused culture that provisionality is its defining characteristic, but this book shows that the seeds for this go back almost to the nation’s founding.

Crumbling into Dust

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Levi Barnard
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Unfinished Business ◽  
Black Newspapers ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Antebellum Period ◽  
David Walker ◽  
Historical Times

This chapter situates Chesnutt’s writing within a tradition of black classicism as political engagement and historical critique extending from the antebellum period to the twentieth century and beyond. Reading Chesnutt as a figure at the crossroads of multiple historical times and cultural forms, the chapter examines his manipulation of multiple mythic traditions into a cohesive and unsettling vision of history as unfinished business. In the novel The Marrow of Tradition and the late short story “The Marked Tree,” Chesnutt echoes a nineteenth-century tradition that included David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, and writers and editors for antebellum black newspapers, while at the same time anticipating a later anti-imperial discourse generated by writers such as Richard Wright and Toni Morrison. Chesnutt provides a fulcrum for a collective African American literary history that has emerged as a prophetic counterpoint to the prevailing historical consciousness in America.

The Center of the World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
June Howard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Local Color ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
The World ◽  
Literary Regionalism ◽  
Multiple Media ◽  
The One

The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is a study of literary regionalism. It focuses on but is not limited to fiction in the United States, also considering the place of the genre in world literature. It argues that regional writing shapes ways of imagining not only the neighborhood, the province, and nation, but also the world. It argues that thinking about place always entails imagining time. It demonstrates the importance of the figure of the schoolteacher and the one-room schoolhouse in local color writing and subsequent place-focused writing. These representations embody the contested relation between localities and the knowledge they produce, and books that carry metropolitan and cosmopolitan learning, in modernity. The book undertakes analysis of how concepts work across disciplines and in everyday discourse, coordinating that work with proposals for revising American literary history and close readings of particular authors’ work. Works from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries are discussed, and the book’s analysis of the form is extended into multiple media.

Wieland; or The Transformation, and Memoirs of Carwin, The Biloquist

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Brockden Brown
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Spontaneous Combustion ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Small Community ◽  
Actual Case ◽  
Her Family ◽  
American Novels

One of the earliest American novels, Wieland (1798) is a thrilling tale of suspense and intrigue set in rural Pennyslvania in the 1760s. Based on an actual case of a New York farmer who murdered his family, the novel employs Gothic devices and sensational elements such as spontaneous combustion, ventriloquism, and religious fanaticism. The plot turns on the charming but diabolical intruder Carwin, who exercises his power over the narrator, Clara Wieland, and her family, destroying the order and authority of the small community in which they live. Underlying the mystery and horror, however, is a profound examination of the human mind's capacity for rational judgement. The text also explores some of the most important issues vital to the survival of democracy in the new American republic. Brown further considers power and manipulation in his unfinished sequel, Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, which traces Carwin's career as a disciple of the utopist Ludloe.

Local Color, World-System; or, American Realism at the Periphery

2019 ◽  
pp. 99-118
Author(s):  
Mark Storey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
World Literature ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sarah Orne Jewett ◽  
Local Color ◽  
The Core ◽  
Hamlin Garland ◽  
Peripheral Position

This chapter employs recent approaches to the study of world literature to offer a new reading of nineteenth-century American regionalism. The huge body of texts usually included in the regional or “local-color” genre often take rural communities as both subject matter and foregrounded setting, communities that are held in a structurally “peripheral” position within the combined and uneven world economy of the late nineteenth century. This chapter argues that such a position is registered in the genre’s distinctive oscillation between realist and “irrealist” literary modes—between the professionalized and ascendant cultural standard of the core and the persistence of nonrealist generic devices and registers. Calling on two of the genre’s quintessential representatives, Hamlin Garland and Sarah Orne Jewett, the chapter ultimately makes a case for reading local-color writing as a form of (semi)peripheral realism within world literature’s expanded geographical and temporal horizons.

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