Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866-1900

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Renker
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
Literary History ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
The Core ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
The Many

The terms “poetry” and “realism” have a complex and often oppositional relationship in American literary histories of the postbellum period. The core narrative holds that “realism,” the major literary “movement” of the era, developed apace in prose fiction, while poetry, stuck in a hopelessly idealist late-romantic mode, languished and stagnated. Poetry is almost entirely absent from scholarship on American literary realism except as the emblem of realism’s opposite: a desiccated genteel “twilight of the poets.” Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866–1900 refutes the familiar narrative of postbellum poetics as a scene of failure, and it recovers the active and variegated practices of a diverse array of realist poets across print culture. The triumph of the twilight tale in the twentieth century obscured, minimized, and flattened the many poetic discourses of the age, including but not limited to a significant body of realist poems currently missing from U.S. literary histories. Excavating an extensive archive of realist poems, this volume offers a significant revision to the genre-exclusive story of realism and, by extension, to the very foundations of postbellum American literary history dating back to the earliest stages of the discipline.

The “Twilight of the Poets” in the Age of Realism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Renker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
The Core ◽  
Multiple Voices ◽  
Institutional Status ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
Historical Origins

American literary histories of the post-Civil War period typically treat “poetry” and “realism” as oppositional phenomena. The core narrative holds that “realism,” the major literary “movement” of the era, developed apace in prose fiction, while poetry, stuck in a hopelessly idealist late-romantic mode, languished and stagnated in a genteel “twilight of the poets.” This chapter excavates the historical origins of the twilight narrative in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It shows how this narrative emerged as a function of a particular idealist ideology of poetry that circulated widely in authoritative print-culture sites. The chapter demonstrates that the twilight narrative was only one strain in a complex cultural debate about poetry, a debate that entailed multiple voices and positions that would later fall out of literary history when the twilight narrative achieved institutional status as fact.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Renker
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
William Dean Howells ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
The Core ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
American Literary Realism

The terms “poetry” and “realism” have a complex and mostly oppositional relationship in American literary histories of the postbellum period. The core narrative holds that “realism,” the major literary “movement” of the era, developed apace in prose fiction, while poetry, stuck in a hopelessly idealist late-romantic mode, languished and stagnated. Poetry is thus almost entirely absent from scholarship on American literary realism except as the emblem of realism’s opposite: a desiccated genteel “twilight of the poets.” The typical tale held that, while poetry sputtered into decline, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Mark Twain towered over literary culture as “major realists,” with 1885 standing as the ...

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.

The Creative Potential of Dialect Writing in Later-Nineteenth-Century America

2000 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Kersten
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Linguistic Diversity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Paul Laurence Dunbar ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Literary Heritage ◽  
Linguistic Strategy ◽  
Literary Histories

When Walt Whitman in An American Primer called his native language "a tongue that spurns all laws," he furnished a description that can serve as a perfect characterization for the mode of literary expression during the period spanning the final decades of the nineteenth and the beginning decades of the twentieth centuries. It was a phase in American literary history that was particularly rich in texts that, in order to achieve their literary effects, availed themselves of the expressive potential inherent in unconventional language use. Produced by writers such as Finley Peter Dunne, Charles Godfrey Leland, Thomas A. Daly, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alexander Posey and others-names rarely listed in standard literary histories-these texts derived their appeal from the way they used language but also from the perspective their linguistic strategy created. While dialect texts enjoyed a tremendous popularity, the critical reception by literary scholars has mostly been one of indifference or even scorn. Encouraged by the more favorable evaluations of dialect writing that have appeared in recent times, in this essay I argue for a reappraisal of these neglected forms of literary activity in the United States. Their linguistic virtuosity, their potential value as documents of folklore and linguistic diversity, and their significance in the development toward alternative forms of literary expression make them an unusual treasure in America's literary heritage.

In Plain Sight

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Socarides
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Women's Poetry ◽  
Familiar Figure ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Length Analysis

In Plain Sight explores how the poetry of nineteenth-century American women that was once so visible within American culture could have, with the exception of that by Emily Dickinson, so thoroughly disappeared from literary history. By investigating erasure not merely as something that was done to these women but as the result of the conventions that once made the circulation of their poetry possible in the first place, this book offers the first book-length analysis of the conventions of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry. In doing so, In Plain Sight makes visible a whole field of poetry that has been long forgotten. In order to recover this field instead of its individual women poets, each of the chapters focuses on a specific convention and its participation in the construction of literary history. Taken together they tell the complicated story of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry, tracing the spaces within literary culture where it lived and thrived, the spaces from which its authors were always in the process of vanishing. By inhabiting those spaces, we can see both the conventions that were taken up with such gusto that they made the woman poet a familiar figure to nineteenth-century readers and the specter of obscurity and unreadability that are embedded within them. By reclaiming these conventions as a constitutive part of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry, this book asks readers to take seriously the work these women produced and the role their work might play in remapping American literary history.

Predicting the Past

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Boyden
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Niklas Luhmann ◽  
Modern Problem ◽  
Professional Discipline ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mary Douglas ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories

Drawing from the social theories of Niklas Luhmann and Mary Douglas, Predicting the Past advocates a reflexive understanding of the paradoxical institutional dynamic of American literary history as a professional discipline and field of study. Contrary to most disciplinary accounts, Michael Boyden resists the utopian impulse to offer supposedly definitive solutions for the legitimation crises besetting American literature studies by “going beyond” its inherited racist, classist, and sexist underpinnings. Approaching the existence of the American literary tradition as a typically modern problem generating diverse but functionally equivalent solutions, Boyden argues how its peculiarity does not, as is often supposed, reside in its restrictive exclusivity but rather in its massive inclusivity which drives it to constantly revert to a self-negating “beyond” perspective. Predicting the Past covers a broad range of both well-known and lesser known literary histories and reference works, from Rufus Griswold’s 1847 Prose Writers of America to Sacvan Bercovitch’s monumental Cambridge History of American Literature. Throughout, Boyden focuses on particular themes and topics illustrating the selfinduced complexity of American literary history such as the early “Anglocentric” roots theories of American literature; the debate on contemporary authors in the age of naturalism; the plurilingual ethnocentrism of the pioneer Americanists of the mid-twentieth century; and the genealogical misrepresentation of founding figures such as Jonathan Edwards, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Lowell.

Language politics, translation, and American literary history

Target ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Boyden
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Language Politics ◽  
Translation Strategies ◽  
Internal Logic ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
Foreignizing Translation

The article deals with the problem of linguistic alterity in American literary histories. The debate over the ‘foreignness’ or the ‘domesticity’ of a text or translation is usually conducted in a rather polarizing fashion, as in the case of Venuti (1995). Venuti’s conceptual framework fails to provide adequate criteria for differentiating domesticating and foreignizing translation strategies, which easily results in inflated claims about the linguistic hegemony of the Anglo-American world. In reaction to this, the article reconceptualizes the two translation strategies as part of the paradoxical internal logic of culture in order to highlight how every culture is continually in the process of (re-)translating itself. Therefore, the analysis is broadened to include the domesticating aspects of the foreignizing strategy, and vice versa, the foreignizing potential of domesticating translations. The domestication of the foreign is evident in the ambiguous inclusion of non-English or bilingual texts in American literary histories. The foreignization of the domestic, by contrast, appears from a persistent tendency on the part of literary historians to describe their forerunners or competitors as excessively Anglo- or Eurocentric. Through this reflexive application of Venuti’s strategies, the article draws attention to the paradoxical togetherness of the foreign and the domestic inside American literary culture.

scholarly journals De autonomisering van de twintigste-eeuwse Amerikaanse literatuurgeschiedschrijving

1970 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 5-19
Author(s):  
Michael Boyden
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Social Mission ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Representative Selection ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
The One ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
Selection Of

This article offers an impetus to a semantic analysis of the discipline ofAmerican literary history from a systems theoretical perspective. The analysisis based on a representative selection of four literary histories in the field. Themain argument is chat these histories make use of a double legitimizationstrategy to authorize themselves as definitive reference works on Americanliterature. On the one hand, they significantly broaden the object of study asit has been demarcated in previous works. On the other, they plead for areconnection of the study of literature to its original social mission. The functionof this double strategy is to assert the autonomy of American literary history.

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.

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