The Feminine Origins of American Literary Realism

2019 ◽  
pp. 63-82
Author(s):  
Sophia Forster
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Louisa May Alcott ◽  
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Rebecca Harding Davis ◽  
Elizabeth Stoddard ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
American Literary Realism

This chapter describes American literary realism as emerging from the efforts of a group of early postbellum women writers—Elizabeth Stoddard, Rebecca Harding Davis, Louisa May Alcott, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps—to access the newly minted American high literary culture exemplified by the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The origins of realism, these writers’ texts show, lie in intertextuality. They not only revise their own and one another’s work to excise the vestiges of the popular feminine tradition of domestic sentimentalism, but they also rework Hawthorne’s canonical gothic plots and imagery in the context of a shift in literary tastes away from the romance and toward an aesthetic that values the contemporary and the everyday. Their adaptation of the Hawthornean gothic to address the patriarchal and capitalist foundations of social life yields the earliest version of American literary realism as a mode of structural social critique.

scholarly journals The idea of community and its practice: Tensions, disruptions and hope in Glasgow’s urban growing projects

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 484-499
Author(s):  
Helen Traill
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Community Gardening ◽  
Conceptual Approach ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Community Theory ◽  
Communal Space ◽  
Work Done ◽  
Do So

The question of what community comes to mean has taken on increasing significance in sociological debates and beyond, as an increasingly politicised term and the focus of new theorisations. In this context, it is increasingly necessary to ask what is meant when community is invoked. Building on recent work that positions community as a practice and an ever-present facet of human sociality, this article argues that it is necessary to consider the powerful work that community as an idea does in shaping everyday communal practices, through designating collective space and creating behavioural expectations. To do so, the article draws on participant observation and interviews from a community gardening site in Glasgow that was part of a broader research project investigating the everyday life of communality within growing spaces. This demonstrates the successes but also the difficulties of carving out communal space, and the work done by community organisations to enact it. The article draws on contemporary community theory, but also on ideas from Davina Cooper about the role of ideation in social life. It argues for a conceptual approach to communality that does not situate it as a social form or seek it in everyday practice, but instead considers the vacillation between the ideation and practices of community: illustrated here in a designated community place. In so doing, this approach calls into focus the frictions and boundaries produced in that process, and questions the limits of organisational inclusivity.

American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract

1998 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 98
Author(s):  
Maxwell Bloomfield ◽  
Brook Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Literary Realism ◽  
American Literary Realism

scholarly journals Divorce, kinship, and errant wives: Islamic feminism in India, and the everyday life of divorce and maintenance

Ethnicities ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 146879682199990
Author(s):  
Sagnik Dutta
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Law Reform ◽  
Islamic Feminism ◽  
Escape Route ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Movement Building ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
Feminist Movements

This article is an ethnographic exploration of a women’s sharia court in Mumbai, a part of a network of such courts run by women qazi (Islamic judges) established across India by members of an Islamic feminist movement called the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (Indian Muslim Women’s Movement). Building upon observations of adjudication, counselling, and mediation offered in cases of divorce and maintenance by the woman qazi (judge), and the claims made by women litigants on the court, this article explores the imaginaries of the heterosexual family and gendered kinship roles that constitute the everyday social life of Islamic feminism. I show how the heterosexual family is conceptualised as a fragile and violent institution, and divorce is considered an escape route from the same. I also trace how gendered kinship roles in the heterosexual conjugal family are overturned as men fail in their conventional roles as providers and women become breadwinners in the family. In tracing the range of negotiations around the gendered family, I argue that the social life of Islamic feminism eludes the discourses and categories of statist legal reform. I contribute to existing scholarship on Islamic feminism by exploring the tension between the institutionalist and everyday aspects of Islamic feminist movements, and by exploring the range of kinship negotiations around the gendered family that take place in the shadow of the rhetoric of ‘law reform’ for Muslim communities in India.

Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism.

1994 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 843
Author(s):  
Sandra Gunning ◽  
Kenneth W. Warren
Keyword(s):  
Literary Realism ◽  
Black And White ◽  
American Literary Realism

scholarly journals Correspondence of S.F. Platonov and M.M. Bogoslovsky

2021 ◽  
pp. 174-184
Author(s):  
Andrey V. Melnikov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Historical Science ◽  
The Public ◽  
Significant Events ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Science In Russia ◽  
Public Consciousness ◽  
History Of ◽  
Academy Of Sciences

The article is devoted to the source features of a unique documentary complex – the correspondence of two major Russian historians S.F. Platonov (1860–1933) and M.M. Bogoslovsky (1867–1929). The epistolary dialogue of scientists is of considerable interest not only in terms of studying their life and work. The confidential correspondence reflects significant events in the scientific and social life of Russia, Moscow, Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad. Correspondence is a valuable historical and historiographic source not only for understanding the development of historical science in Russia, the formation of Moscow and St. Petersburg historical schools, but also for studying the public consciousness of the Russian humanitarian intelligentsia at the end of the 19th — first third of the 20th centuries, in-depth knowledge of the culture of a turning point in the history of Russia. The letters contain valuable information about the everyday life and life of the professors, the organization of scientific life at the Academy of Sciences, the Archaeographic commission, at Moscow university and the Moscow theological academy, at the Moscow higher courses for women, at the Institute of history of the RANION, the Historical Museum, other higher educational institutions and scientific societies two capitals, they reflect the international ties of domestic historical science with scientists from Great Britain, Germany, France, USA, Czech Republic.

Refracted visions: Street photography, humanism and the loss of innocence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Carville
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Visual Expression ◽  
Politics Of Religion ◽  
Street Photography

Justin Carville draws on recent debates in relation to photography and the everyday in order to examine the role of street-photography in the cultural politics of religion as it was played out in the quotidian moments of social relations within Dublin’s urban and suburban spaces during the 1980s and 90s. The essay argues that photography was important in giving visual expression to the social contradictions within the relations between religion and the transformation of Irish social life, not through the dramatic and traumatic experiences that defined the nation’s increased secularism, but in the quiet, humdrum and sometimes monotonous routines of religious ceremonies and everyday social relations.

Living with Mess

2019 ◽  
pp. 178-197
Author(s):  
Anna Strhan
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Local Area ◽  
Hierarchical Order ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Riverside Church

Through ethnographic focus on ‘Messy Church’ at Riverside Church (open evangelical), Chapter 7 turns to examine shifting ethical currents within conservative, charismatic, and open evangelical cultures. Considering the contemporary significance of ideas of ‘mess’ and ‘messiness’ at Riverside and St George’s churches, the chapter argues that this turn to ‘mess’ at both churches is shaped by both a strategy of differentiation from conservative evangelicalism—which emphasizes a desire for hierarchical order within church, self, and society—and by an ethics of responsiveness to the everyday needs of those in their local area, marked by heightened socio-economic polarization. How groups engage with ideas of ‘order’ and ‘mess’, the chapter argues, is significant for understanding how different groups respond to fragmented experiences of social life, and how they enact modes of difference and belonging in the contemporary moment.

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