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.

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.

The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jared Gardner
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Cultural Models ◽  
Charles Brockden Brown ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Washington Irving ◽  
Early American ◽  
Writing Practices ◽  
American Literary History

A transatlantic literary form that refused to break with British cultural models and genealogy, the early American magazine had at its center the anonymous authority of the editor and a porous distinction between reader and author. Esteemed subscribers were treated as magnets to attract other subscribers, and subscribers were prompted to become contributors, giving these early American publications the appearance of public forums. This book reexamines these publications and their reach to show how magazine culture was a multivocal, as opposed to novel, culture. The book describes how those who invested considerable energies in this form—including some of the period's most important political and literary figures such as Charles Brockden Brown and Washington Irving—sought to establish a very different model of literary culture than what came to define American literary history and its scholarship. The book cautions against privileging novels or authors as the essential touchstones of American literary history and instead encourages an understanding of how the “editorial function” favored by magazine culture shaped reading and writing practices. Countering assumptions about early American print culture and challenging our scholarly fixation on the novel, the book reimagines the early American magazine as a rich literary culture that operated as a model for nation-building by celebrating editorship over authorship and serving as a virtual salon in which citizens were invited to share their different perspectives.

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Language ◽  
Pacific Islands ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
History Of

This book explores the history of English-language prose fiction in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific since 1950, focusing not only on the ‘literary’ novel, but also on the processes of production, distribution and reception, and on popular fiction and the fictional sub-genres, as well as the work of major novelists, movements, and tendencies. After World War II, the rise of cultural nationalism in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand and movements towards independence in the Pacific islands, together with the turn toward multiculturalism and transnationalism in the postcolonial world, called into question the standard national frames for literary history. This resulted in an increasing recognition of formerly marginalised peoples and a repositioning of these national literatures in a world literary context. The book explores the implications of such radical change through its focus on the English-language novel and the short story, which model the crises in evolving narratives of nationhood and the reinvention of postcolonial identities. Shifting socio-political and cultural contexts and their effects on novels and novelists, together with shifts in fictional modes (realism, modernism, the Gothic, postmodernism) are traced across these different regions. Attention is given not only to major authors but also to Indigenous and multicultural fiction, children's and young adult novels, and popular fiction. Chapters on book publishing, critical reception, and literary histories for all four areas are included in this innovative presentation of a Trans-Pacific postcolonial history of the novel.

Asian American Realism

2019 ◽  
pp. 218-231
Author(s):  
Julia H. Lee
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Literary History ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Asian American Identity

This chapter examines the use of realism in Asian American literature and the debate surrounding its political and aesthetic meanings in Asian American literary criticism. Even though realist narratives have dominated Asian American literary history, the use and significance of realism nevertheless continue to stir controversy within the field. The chapter explores both sides of the “realism controversy” within Asian American studies and makes the case that realism exposes the contradictions of Asian American identity and that Asian American identity exposes the contradictions of realism. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Hisaye Yamamoto’s short story “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara” (1950), focusing on how the author deploys a realist mode of narration to reveal the historically contingent process by which Japanese American identity and community in the internment era are constituted.

Minorities in the Contemporary Egyptian Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Youssef
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Robust Analysis ◽  
Specific Approach ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Context Specific ◽  
Historical Moment

This book examines questions of identity, nationalism, and marginalization in the contemporary Egyptian novel from a postcolonial lens. Under colonial rule, the Egyptian novel invoked a sovereign nation-state by basking in its perceived unity. After independence, the novel professed disenchantment with state practices and unequal class and gender relations, without disrupting the nation’s imagined racial and ethno-religious homogeneity. This book identifies a trend in the twenty-first-century Egyptian novel that shatters this singular view, with the rise of a new consciousness that presents Egypt as fundamentally heterogeneous. Through a robust analysis of “new-consciousness” novels by authors like Idris ᶜAli, Bahaᵓ Tahir, Miral al-Tahawi, and Yusuf Zaydan, the author argues that this new consciousness does not only respond to predominant discourses of difference and practices of differentiation along the axes of race, ethno-religion, class, and gender by bringing the experiences of Nubian, Amazigh, Bedouin, Coptic, Jewish, and women minorities to the fore of Egypt’s literary imaginary, but also heralds the cacophony of voices that collectively cried for social justice from Tahrir Square in Egypt’s 2011-uprising. This study responds to the changing iconographic, semiotic, and formal features of the Egyptian novel. It fulfills the critical task of identifying an emergent novelistic genre and develops historically reflexive methodologies that interpret new-consciousness novels and their mediatory role in formalizing and articulating their historical moment. By adopting this context-specific approach to studying novelistic evolution, this book locates some of the strands that have been missing from the complex whole of Egypt’s culture and literary history.

White Writers, Race Matters

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory S. Jay
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Cultural Narratives ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
The Social ◽  
White Writers ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Taking Action

White liberal race fiction has been an enduringly popular genre in American literary history. It includes widely read and taught works such as Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird along with period bestsellers now sometimes forgotten. Hollywood regularly adapted them into blockbusters, reinforcing their cultural influence. These novels and films protest slavery, confront stereotypes, dramatize social and legal injustices, engage the political controversies of their time, and try to move readers emotionally toward taking action. The literary forms and arguments of these books derive from the cultural work they intend to do in educating the minds and hearts, and propelling the actions, of those who think they are white—indeed, in making the social construction of that whiteness readable and thus more susceptible of reform. The white writers of these fictions struggle with their own place in systems of oppression and privilege while asking their readers to do the same. The predominance of women among this tradition’s authors leads to exploring how their critiques of gender and race norms often reinforced each other. Each chapter provides a case study combining biography, historical analysis, close reading, and literary theory to map the significance of this genre and its ongoing relevance. This tradition remains vital because every generation must relearn the lessons of antiracism and formulate effective cultural narratives for passing on the intellectual and emotional tools useful in fighting injustice.

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.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Brazil
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Reference Points ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Zadie Smith

In conclusion, this short chapter surveys the ways in which the novelists discussed in this book have become reference points for contemporary debates about the legacy of modernism and experimentation among novelists such as Teju Cole, Zadie Smith, and Ben Lerner. It also surveys how contemporary novelists’ engagements with art are being driven by different concerns than those of earlier writers—attempts to blur the lines between autobiography and fiction, or to recover the political and aesthetic potential of wonder and enchantment. In doing so, it shows how the interactions between art and the novel traced in this book have become part of literary history.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document