The New England Village Novel and Picturesque Reform

2021 ◽  
pp. 162-210
Author(s):  
John Evelev
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
New England ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Social Values ◽  
American Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
Residual Space ◽  
Village Life ◽  
The Village

This chapter focuses on the New England village novel, a prestigious subgenre that figured in many of the midcentury’s critical assessments of what constituted “American literature” but that is now largely forgotten. Once important novels like Sylvester Judd’s Margaret (1845), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Kavanagh (1849), Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Elsie Venner (1861), and Henry Ward Beecher’s Norwood (1869) tell us about middle-class social values and their investment in reform in their depictions of New England village life during this period of time. This chapter explores some of the contradictions inherent in locating idealized theological and social change within the residual space of the New England village. As a consequence of these contradictions, the utopia of the New England village novel becomes literally “no place,” frozen between nostalgia for a unified national community that never existed and hope that through reform the village could fulfill utopian possibilities for the nation. This genre also maps out the transformation of attitudes toward social reform from the picturesque utopianism of Judd’s Margaret to a much narrower vision of the transformative possibilities of the picturesque in Beecher’s post-Civil War novel, Norwood, a quarter of a century later. This transformation reveals the importance of the picturesque to an alternative history of the mid-nineteenth-century American novel and explores the rise and decline of middle-class use of the picturesque as an authoritative discourse to reshape spaces and enact social change in American life.

Samuel Clemens and the Progress of a Stylistic Rebel

1961 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 31-42
Author(s):  
Tony Tanner
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
American Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Huckleberry Finn

When Huckleberry Finn was published in 1882 at least one New England library promptly banned it. This rather pathetic gesture is an apt indication of the larger crisis of culture of the decade, the significance of which extends in many directions - social, philosophical, and theological. In art, it took the form of a stylistic rebellion, a rebellion that ultimately rendered obsolete the cherished styles of Longfellow, Emerson and Holmes, and set a tone which has remained a constant in American literature to this day. This rebellion was brought to a head by one man; and his book, Huckleberry Finn, is pivotal in the history of American literature.

Songs of Our Fathers

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Paul
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
State Prison ◽  
History Of ◽  
Van Wyck Brooks ◽  
Usable Past

This chapter focuses on Henry Cowell's advocacy of Charles E. Ives and his music between the years 1927 and 1947. Cowell's ideas about Ives can be grouped into two periods: those produced prior to the sentence he served at San Quentin State Prison for a 1936 conviction on a morals charge, and those produced after his release in 1940. This chapter first considers Cowell's portrait of Ives as a New England musical ethnographer before discussing the views of anthropologists, folklorists, and musical modernists about folk music. It then examines how Cowell became interested in folk music, along with his influence on Ives. It also looks at the notion of a usable past, advanced by Van Wyck Brooks in his essay “On Creating a Usable Past,” in which he called for a rewriting of the history of American literature. The chapter concludes with an assessment of Ives's “Concord” Sonata and Ives's commitment to freedom (in the sense of refusing to impose a fixed final form on his works).

Hmong American Literature and Culture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aline Lo ◽  
Kong Pheng Pha
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Central Valley ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hmong American

Hmong American literature is an emerging field within Asian American literature, seeing a steep rise in production starting in the early 2000s. In collective and individual publication efforts, the literature includes mostly memoirs, short stories, and poetry. Essays, personal narratives, transcribed oral folktales, and plays have also been published in anthologies, including two that are edited by Hmong American writers. Although there has been an upsurge in publication and a wide representation in terms of genres, there is still no widely published Hmong American novel. Coming from an orality-based culture and a long history of marginalization both in Asia and the United States, many Hmong American narratives contend with issues related to silence and secrecy. In the context of 20th-century French imperialism and US neocolonialism, much of the literature also touches on the subjects of displacement, refugee resettlement, trauma, and cultural shifts. Of the latter, there is a definite preoccupation with religion and changes in gender roles and sexuality, particularly as many of the writers have been born or largely raised in the United States and are therefore interested in representing Hmong American identities and experiences. Hmong American literature can also be characterized by a sense of regionalism; many of the narratives and publications take place in heavily Hmong-populated areas like the Central Valley of California and Upper Midwest states like Minnesota and Wisconsin. While the move toward textuality comes with its own problems, it also presents Hmong Americans with a new method of self-representation. Historically studied by outsiders and exoticized for belonging to a culture that has resisted assimilation and maintained a unique language, religion, and cultural practices, Hmong writers are producing their own narratives, and altogether, the literature is rich with complex characters, speakers, and stories that represent and explore Hmong American experiences.

History of Dlonguébougou and the wider region

2020 ◽  
pp. 29-49
Author(s):  
Camilla Toulmin
Keyword(s):  
Political Systems ◽  
Military Recruitment ◽  
The North ◽  
Political Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
Forced Labour ◽  
Village Life ◽  
And Control ◽  
The Village

Chapter 2 sets the village of Dlonguébougou within its wider region. Long-term shifts in rainfall have shaped the landscape and societies, from prehistory through to the emergence of the Ghana, Mali, and Songhai Empires, relying on trans-Saharan trade in gold, salt, and slaves. The Bambara kingdom of Ségou used warfare to exact tribute and control trade, but by the time of the French conquest, much of the region had been taken under the jihadist rule of El Hajj Oumar Tall. The colonial administration had profound, long-lasting impacts on village life, taxation, forced labour, military recruitment, and legal and political systems. Economic and political events since Independence in 1960 are described, including the growing conflict in the north and centre of the country, sparked by demands for Tuareg autonomy, but now spread into widespread instability.

Early English Woodland and Waste

1942 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Neilson
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Large Field ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early English ◽  
Village Life ◽  
The Village ◽  
English Village

Much labor has been spent upon the history of the cultivated and occupied lands of the medieval English village and the social life of its inhabitants, and as a result a fairly clear framework has been constructed into which alterations and additions may be fitted where necessary. This statement is not true of the great background of all early village life, of the activities concerned with the waste or unoccupied land lying outside fields and even village bounds, and either lying idle, or else used for pasture, estovers, and hunting. Modern students have been negligent of this side of the medieval countryside, being more engaged with the human interests of the village; and little allowance has been made for changes and developments occurring within decades or even centuries. The great history of common rights, an extremely important subject, has yet to be written. This paper has a few suggestions to make which might sometime be useful in a study of a very large field.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Sykes
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
American Literature ◽  
York City ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Contemporary American Fiction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Mind

This book has argued that ‘quiet’ is a literary aesthetic, used frequently in contemporary American fiction to privilege reflection and contemplation as a way of engaging with the present. Tracing a long history of quiet in Anglo-American literature and focusing more specifically on American works published since 2000, I have argued that the contemporary American novel is quiet when its narrative is focalised through the mind of a quiet character and set in a quiet location where the protagonist has the time and space to reflect on their present moment. In many ways, New York City is a fitting location in which to end this study. In ...

William Bradford

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
David T. Read
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cape Cod ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century

Students of William Bradford (b. 1590–d. 1657) approach his career from two main standpoints that are closely related but that lead in rather different directions in terms of the existing scholarship. First, there is Bradford the historical personage, the governor of Plymouth Colony for two separate periods of a dozen years (1621–1633 and 1645–1657) and for several shorter terms in between, thus an important figure in the early British colonization of North America as well as in the myth of national founding that developed after the American War of Independence. Second, there is Bradford the writer, the author of the most important and best-known document to emerge from New England during the first phase of settlement, Of Plymouth Plantation. This manuscript was largely out of view for approximately 200 years—in private hands after Bradford’s death and through the 18th century, presumed lost during the American War of Independence, finally located in the bishop of London’s library in 1855, first printed in 1856, and returned to the United States only in 1897—so in many respects Bradford’s history of Plymouth belongs to the modern age. The text is divided between a fairly short First Book that is organized into chapters and offers an eloquent and coherent narrative of the early history of the Pilgrims up to the arrival on Cape Cod and a lengthy Second Book, divided into annals that chronicle Plymouth Colony’s activities from 1621 through 1646. Obviously, Bradford’s manuscript is the essential primary source for the history of the Pilgrims’ colonial enterprise, but its merits and nuances as a book have been recognized at least since its rediscovery in the 19th century, and excerpts from it have a place in the first part of every comprehensive anthology of American literature. The researcher’s line of inquiry will depend on whether the main interest is in Bradford’s contribution to literary and intellectual history or to history more broadly understood, though there remain many possible points of intersection. The aim here is to provide both the core group of materials related to Bradford and a range of resources for exploring the context of important passages, themes, and events in Of Plymouth Plantation.

Mapping Social Change through Youth Perspectives on Homosexuality in India

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keshia D'silva
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Representations ◽  
Knowledge Structures ◽  
Cultural Imperialism ◽  
Colonial Legacy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Middle Class Families ◽  
East West

Social representations theory (SRT) is considered a theory of social change, accounting for democratic transformations in knowledge. However, its applicability in the Global South, where there is a long history of subjugation, has not been sufficiently explored. This essay integrates the contributions of postcolonial theorists with the tools of SRT to track changes in knowledge structures among Southern youth. In doing so, it shows the limits imposed by an enduring colonial legacy and modern cultural imperialism on Southern youths’ ability to challenge hegemonic representations on their own terms. This is further illustrated by a case study on youth perspectives on homosexuality in India which utilizes data from interviews conducted in Bengaluru with three generations of middle-class families representing India’s three major religions. While the youth accepted homosexuality, elders displayed their resistance. Yet tolerance was perceived as a Western import, revealing an East-West divide in understandings of homosexuality.

The Salem Witch Trials

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abram C. Van Engen
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Salem Witch Trials ◽  
Witch Trials ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Witch Hunts

The Salem witch trials have gripped American imaginations ever since they occurred in 1692. At the end of the 17th century, after years of mostly resisting witch hunts and witch trial prosecutions, Puritans in New England suddenly found themselves facing a conspiracy of witches in a war against Satan and his minions. What caused this conflict to erupt? Or rather, what caused Puritans to think of themselves as engaged, at that moment, in such a cosmic battle? These are some of the mysteries that the Salem witch trials have left behind, taken up and explored not just by each new history of the event but also by the literary imaginations of many American writers. The primary explanations of Salem set the crisis within the context of larger developments in Puritan society. Though such developments could be traced to the beginning of Puritan settlement in New England, most commentators focus on shifts occurring near the end of the century. This was a period of intense economic change, with new markets emerging and new ways of making money. It was also a time when British imperial interests were on the rise, tightening and expanding an empire that had, at times, been somewhat loosely held together. In the midst of those expansions, British colonists and settlers faced numerous wars on their frontiers, especially in northern New England against French Catholics and their Wabanaki allies. Finally, New England underwent, resented, and sometimes resisted intense shifts in government policy as a result of the changing monarchy in London. Under James II, Massachusetts Bay lost its original charter, which had upheld the Puritan way for over fifty years. A new government imposed royal rule and religious tolerance. With the overthrow of James II in the Glorious Revolution, the Massachusetts Bay government carried on with no official charter or authority from 1689 until 1691. When a new charter arrived during the midst of the Salem witch hunt, it did not restore all the privileges, positions, or policies of the original “New England Way,” and many lamented what they had lost. In other words, in 1692, New England faced economic, political, and religious uncertainty while suffering from several devastating battles on its northern frontier. All of these factors have been used to explain Salem. When Governor William Phips finally halted the trials, nineteen had been executed, five had died in prison, and one man had been pressed to death for refusing to speak. Protests began almost immediately with the first examinations of the accused, and by the time the trials ended, almost all agreed that something had gone terribly wrong. Even so, the population could not necessarily agree on an explanation for what had occurred. Publishing any talk of the trials was prohibited, but that ban was quickly broken. Since 1695, interpretations have rolled from the presses, and American literature—in poems, plays, and novels—has attempted to make its own sense and use of what one scholar calls the mysterious and terrifying “specter of Salem.”

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