Wieland; or, The Transformation of American Literary History

2019 ◽  
pp. 47-60
Author(s):  
Duncan Faherty
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
First Century ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Early American ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Early American Novel

By considering the centrality of Wieland in the development of American literary history, this chapter moves to reaffirm its importance for students of US literature. The chapter begins by surveying the major editions of Wieland, from the first modern edition in 1926 through the scholarly editions in the early twenty-first century. In so doing, the chapter charts how scholars have often recursively positioned Wieland as a bellwether text in the formation of narratives about the development of American literary history, a practice that is often predicated on positioning the text as either the first or the first noteworthy early American novel. In tracing the evolution of the critical reception of the text, the chapter moves to underscore how Wieland’s enduring contribution to our understanding of the development of American literature and culture remains Brown’s insistence on the fallibility of isolationist narratives to register accurate genealogies or histories.

Continuing Visions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Freedman
Keyword(s):  
Social Activism ◽  
William Blake ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ridley Scott ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Protest Group ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Dead Man

The questions that drove Blake’s American reception, from its earliest moments in the nineteenth century through to the explosion of Blakeanism in the mid-twentieth century, did not disappear. Visions of America continued to be part of Blake’s late twentieth- and early twenty-first century American legacy. This chapter begins with the 1982 film Blade Runner, which was directed by the British Ridley Scott but had an American-authored screenplay and was based on a 1968 American novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It moves to Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 film, Dead Man and Paul Chan’s twenty-first century social activism as part of a protest group called The Friends of William Blake, exploring common themes of democracy, freedom, limit, nationhood, and poetic shape.

The Cambridge Companion to Early American Literature

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Early America ◽  
Early American Literature ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Early American ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
European Colonization

This Companion covers American literary history from European colonization to the early republic. It provides a succinct introduction to the major themes and concepts in the field of early American literature, including new world migration, indigenous encounters, religious and secular histories, and the emergence of American literary genres. This book guides readers through important conceptual and theoretical issues, while also grounding these issues in close readings of key literary texts from early America.

On Freedom and the Will to Adorn

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl A. Wall
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
First Century ◽  
James Weldon Johnson ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
The Status ◽  
June Jordan

Although they have written in various genres, African American writers as notable and diverse as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker have done their most influential work in the essay form. The Souls of Black Folk, The Fire Next Time, and In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens are landmarks in African American literary history. Many other writers, such as Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, and Richard Wright, are acclaimed essayists but achieved greater fame for their work in other genres; their essay work is often overlooked or studied only in the contexts of their better-known works. Here Cheryl A. Wall offers the first sustained study of the African American essay as a distinct literary genre. Beginning with the sermons, orations, and writing of nineteenth-century men and women like Frederick Douglass who laid the foundation for the African American essay, Wall examines the genre's evolution through the Harlem Renaissance. She then turns her attention to four writers she regards as among the most influential essayists of the twentieth century: Baldwin, Ellison, June Jordan, and Alice Walker. She closes the book with a discussion of the status of the essay in the twenty-first century as it shifts its medium from print to digital in the hands of writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brittney Cooper. Wall's beautifully written and insightful book is nothing less than a redefinition of how we understand the genres of African American literature.

Edwards’s Place and Importance in Anglo-American Literature

2021 ◽  
pp. 494-513
Author(s):  
Sandra M. Gustafson
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Early American Literature ◽  
Marilynne Robinson ◽  
Oliver Wendell Holmes ◽  
Early American ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Liberal Vision

Long recognized as foundational contributions to British American belles lettres, the works of Jonathan Edwards influenced later writers and shaped narratives of American literary history. Edwards appears in the first descriptions of early American literature, and he continues to figure prominently in anthologies and histories of American writing today. This essay emphasizes major authors—from Harriet Beecher Stowe and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., to Robert Lowell, to Marilynne Robinson—who have acknowledged his influence. The nature of that influence varies, for every generation creates a distinctive version of Edwards. Advancing a liberal vision of Christianity, Stowe and Holmes reacted against Edwards’s alleged theological rigidity and spiritual cruelty. Lowell wrote poems reflecting the Edwardsean revival of the mid-twentieth century and bearing the imprint of the New Criticism. And in recent years, Robinson has staked a claim as a latter-day Edwardsean, embracing his intellectual legacy as an inspiration and resource for her celebrated novels.

Literature, Society, and Politics

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Werner Mackenbach
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Literature History ◽  
The 1960S

The historiography of Central American literature from the early nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century, focusing on the relationships between literature, (literary) history, and the political field, especially within the context of projects centered on national construction, is essential. The approach here analyzes the different periods—or moments of change or transition—regarding the relations between politics, society, and culture from the perspective of historical change, concentrating on “microperiods” characterized by a paradigm shift with respect to the relationships between literature, history, politics and society: the nineteenth century (the post-independence moment); the late nineteenth/early twentieth century; the 1930s–1960s; the 1960s–1990s; and the end of the twentieth century/beginning of the twenty-first. A set of proposals aims at filling the gaps, developing the desiderata, and coping with the challenges in literary historiography in and about Central America at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The Global Remapping of American Literature

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Giles
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Pacific Northwest ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
First Century ◽  
William Gilmore Simms ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
American Literary History

This book charts how the cartographies of American literature as an institutional category have varied radically across different times and places. Arguing that American literature was consolidated as a distinctively nationalist entity only in the wake of the American Civil War, the book identifies this formation as extending until the beginning of the Reagan presidency in 1981. It contrasts this with the more amorphous boundaries of American culture in the eighteenth century, and with ways in which conditions of globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century have reconfigured the parameters of the subject. In light of these fluctuating conceptions of space, the book suggests new ways of understanding the shifting territory of American literary history. It considers why European medievalism and the prehistory of Native Americans were crucial to classic nineteenth-century authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. It discusses how twentieth-century technological innovations, such as air travel, affected representations of the national domain in the texts of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. It also analyzes how regional projections of the South and the Pacific Northwest helped to shape the work of writers such as William Gilmore Simms, José Martí, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Gibson.

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