The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism offers thirty-five original chapters with fresh interpretations of the artistic and political challenges of representing life accurately. Organized by topic and theme, the chapters draw on recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies to offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of major and minor figures and the contexts that shaped their work. One set of chapters explores realism’s genesis and its connection to previous and subsequent movements. Others examine the inclusiveness of representation, the circulation of texts, and the aesthetic representation of science, time, space, and the subjects of medicine, the New Woman, and the middle class. Still others trace the connection to other arts—poetry, drama, illustration, photography, painting, and film—and to pedagogical issues in the teaching of realism.

Author(s):  
Keith Newlin

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism offers thirty-five original chapters with fresh interpretations of the artistic and political challenges of representing life accurately. Organized by topic and theme, the chapters draw on recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies to offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of major and minor figures and the contexts that shaped their work. One set of chapters explores realism’s genesis and its connection to previous and subsequent movements. Others examine the inclusiveness of representation, the circulation of texts, and the aesthetic representation of science, time, space, and the subjects of medicine, the New Woman, and the middle class. Still others trace the connection to other arts—poetry, drama, illustration, photography, painting, and film—and to pedagogical issues in the teaching of realism.


2021 ◽  
pp. 55-74
Author(s):  
Noelle Hedgcock

Contributor Noelle Hedgcock examines the tension the studios create when they market the stars of their prestige pictures—Betty Davis, Joan Crawford, Evelyn Venable, and Joan Fontaine, as "authentically-Victorian" even as the women themselves are demonstrating characteristics of an emerging class of modern women. The studio's mixed strategies result in an ideological strain that underscores the mediated nature of the “New Woman” in mid-twentieth century Hollywood and the United States. Images of the “New Woman” could circulate, but only when set in very specific conditions. Hedgcock's insightful analysis shows the studios allowed the “New Woman” to appear as a rich, young woman in an urban setting, but not in small-town, middle-class, conservative America. In this way, Hedgcock suggests, the studios appeal to the aspirations and anxieties of womanhood found in their audiences, but only if they also left space for their stars to fit the less sophisticated notions of womanhood.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (10) ◽  
pp. 732-734
Author(s):  
Abha Pandey ◽  

Shashi Deshpande in her novel has presented a realistic picture of the modern educated, intelligent middle class woman in the novel. The New Woman is neither fully traditional nor fully modern. A new paradigms related to a womans life came into existence i.e. tradition and modernity, economic dependence, self-assertion, aspiration and independent in life in her novel.The New Woman in Deshpandes novel gets all types of rights in their life hence they struggle a lot to get free from the traditional world andin quest for her own identity. The present paper is an attempt to analyze Shashi Deshpandes novel The Dark Holds No Terrors.The Methodology followed in the analysis is of comparative and contrast.Sarita is the main protagonist of the novel, who is modern emancipated middle-class educated woman in the novel. She plays different roles to achieve her goals and aspirations in her life through facing various traumas in the novel.An attempt has been made to highlight Deshpandes story The Dark Holds No Terror that allocates the educated women in all possible ways.


2001 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea L. Broomfield

IT IS DIFFICULT TO DISCUSS the Victorian women’s rights movement and the antifeminist backlash which ensued without mentioning Eliza Lynn Linton’s contribution. Known primarily as the author of the notorious Saturday Review essay, “The Girl of the Period” (1868), Linton was and has been viewed primarily as an essayist who verbally lashed middle-class, progressive women. As late as the 1880s and 1890s, she maintained an active role in the woman-question debate, publishing her “Wild Women” essays, writing a New Woman novel, The New Woman in Haste and At Leisure, and reissuing her Girl of the Period (G.O.P) essays in volume form. Linton scholars have been particularly intrigued by the discrepancies between Linton’s emancipated lifestyle and the restricted one she advocated for other women. How could the first salaried woman journalist in England maintain such a hostile attitude towards her professionally inclined cohorts? More significantly, how could a woman who wrote one of the most radical, protofeminist novels of her time, Realities (1851), suddenly shift to promoting women’s subjection? Various, compelling answers have been offered to such questions. Vineta Colby, in The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century, and Elizabeth Helsinger, Robin Sheets, and William Veeder in The Woman Question. Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837–1883 contend that the contradictions between Linton’s lifestyle and her antifeminist essays mirror Victorian England’s own contradictory attitudes regarding gender relations.1


2019 ◽  
pp. 26-55
Author(s):  
Lisa Mendelman

Chapter 1 discusses a paradigmatic New Woman narrative, Willa Cather’s 1915 The Song of the Lark, in which Cather ostensibly reclaims sentiment for the New Woman, only to place her female opera singer in sentimental relation to art, not domesticity. The chapter analyzes the Künstlerroman’s unorthodox marriage plot as it stages the conflicts of New Woman sexuality. The chapter further explores Cather’s use of a New Woman artist to reconfigure the role of emotion in the aesthetic encounter, and links this representational paradigm to both the nascent neurophysiological concept of empathy and the modernist ideal articulated by T. S. Eliot’s dissociation of sensibility. Reiterating stereotypes of traditional sentimental reading as uncritical, overemotional, and unsophisticated, Lark develops and endorses a self-conscious and discerning alternative.


Author(s):  
Veronica Pravadelli

This chapter examines the early sound period. From a formal perspective, the dominant film style has an affinity with silent cinema; it is filled with superimpositions, extended dissolves, elaborate optical effects, and a wide range of “attractions.” Consequently, the films of this period rely heavily on visual rather than verbal devices. The chapter then argues that between the end of the 1920s and the early 1930s, American cinema privileges plots of female emancipation and images of the New Woman. The figure of the New Woman, combined with the aesthetic of attractions, can be interpreted in light of the “modernity thesis.”


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