Critical Regionalism, the US-Mexican War, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary History

2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 180-199
Author(s):  
Randi Lynn Tanglen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Mexican War ◽  
Critical Regionalism ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
The Us

scholarly journals Spending Time in the Nineteenth Century

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rieke Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Access Point ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Free Time ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Nineteenth Century American Literature ◽  
Cultural Aspects ◽  
American Literary History

This special issue of New American Studies Journal: A Forum looks at nineteenth-century American literature and culture through the analytical lens of free time and leisure. This analytical framework affords a novel access point to American literary history—free time, as this special issue will explore, is a highly contested and politicized concept and resource of the nineteenth century, one that restructures temporalities and spaces. Nineteenth-century American culture and literature can be understood as an archive to explore free time as a significant social and economic innovation into the texture of individual life. The contributions to this special issue explore the rise of free time in the nineteenth century with particular attention toward temporal and spatial reconfigurations that free time afforded. Furthermore they explore the societal and cultural aspects of free time that grew around the logics and logistics of nineteenth-century capitalism—a social formation that made leisure, time off work, not merely possible, but that created entire industries and spaces for leisure and repose.

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.

scholarly journals The New England Renaissance and American Literary Ethnocentrism

Prospects ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 409-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Buell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Romantic Literature ◽  
American Civil Religion ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
American Intellectual History

Just as patriot orators invoked the spirit of Puritanism in their remonstrances against British tyranny, just as the nineteenth-century cult of Pilgrimism taught all America to look back upon the Pilgrim fathers as everyone's fathers, so modern American intellectual history has proclaimed the Puritan origins of the American way. The result has been a scholarly upsurge, during the past half-century, of “Puritan legacy” studies, of which Perry Miller was the prime mover and Sacvan Bercovitch is the leading contemporary theorist. So far as the interpretation of literary history is concerned, these studies have given a new authority and depth to the old New England-centered map of American literary tradition first drawn up by the Yankee-oriented genteel intellectual establishment of the late nineteenth century that presided over the literary institutions whose prestige had been built upon the reputation of the perpetrators of the antebellum New England Renaissance. The old-fashioned interpretation of American literary history and the new-fashioned interpretation of American civil religion as a nationalized version of Puritan ideology have combined to create a strong presumption, at least for specialists in New England Romantic literature, that theirs was the key formative moment in American literary history as a whole.

Country Matters: Rural Fiction, Urban Modernity, and the Problem of American Regionalism

2010 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Storey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Rural Life ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Urban Modernity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Hamlin Garland ◽  
American Literary History

Mark Storey, "Country Matters: Rural Fiction, Urban Modernity, and the Problem of American Regionalism" (pp. 192––213) This essay intervenes in the critical debates surrounding nineteenth-century American regionalism, arguing that such debates have tended to ignore the possibility of a shared and trans-regional category of "rural fiction." Developing this notion, I suggest that literary representations of rural life in the late nineteenth century are a crucial and neglected way of understanding the geographically indiscrete transformations of urban-capitalist modernity. Further, by examining these transformations through the prism of rural fiction, we can challenge the urban-centric tendency of postbellum American literary history. Drawing on several writers who have been the focus of much of critics' attentions on regionalism (Edward Eggleston, Hamlin Garland, and Sarah orne Jewett in particular), this essay considers both the generic and thematic instabilities of rural fiction, arguing that these instabilities serve to encode and refract the social and cultural context from which this fiction emerges. Reading rural fiction against the background of the increasing similarities between geographically distinct areas of rural life, and reconsidering many of the works that we currently gather under the regionalist rubric as, instead, rural, a distinct perspective can be gained on the standardizing and flattening processes of modernity itself.

The Time of the Latinx Nineteenth Century

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-154
Author(s):  
Sharada Balachandran Orihuela
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Printed Materials

Abstract The Latino Nineteenth Century: Archival Encounters in American Literary History (2016), edited by Rodrigo Lazo and Jesse Alemán, is a formative volume that, in its capaciousness, reorients nineteenth-century literary history toward a substantial engagement with Latinx and Latin American literary and cultural production. Consisting of 15 sections written by leading scholars in the field of nineteenth-century Latinx literary studies, the volume tackles an impressive range of nineteenth-century Latinx thinkers and texts. The essays collected here oscillate seamlessly from macro to micro scales of space, move across the long nineteenth century, and engage with an array of printed materials of the Latinx nineteenth century. This volume is about multiplicity: from Jessie Alemán’s Philadelphia to Juan Poblete’s essay on the close ties between California and Chile in the nineteenth century; from the instances of failed immigration outlined by Robert McKee Irwin to Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s migratory “errancy”; from José Aranda’s essay on Mexican American modernity to Marissa Lopez’s argument about Latino dismodernity. Ultimately, the editors and contributors reveal the numerous nineteenth centuries across the hemisphere, and help us imagine the intersections of US literary history and Latinx studies in the nineteenth century.

Sentimental Catechism: Archbishop James Gibbons, Mass-Print Culture, and American Literary History

1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-119
Author(s):  
James Emmett Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
The Face ◽  
American Society ◽  
Gender Paradoxes

Building on an ample foundation of (often feminist) revisionary literary scholarship, which over the last decade has fostered a substantial reexamination of “sentimental” texts created by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American novelists, recent studies of sentimentality in nineteenth-century American culture have continued to expose its political import, social complications, gender paradoxes, and racial construction. Once dismissed as shallow tearjerkers, American sentimental novels, which often drew on the example of British fictional models from Samuel Richardson'sPamela(1740) andClarissa(1747-1748) to Charles Dickens'sA Christmas Carol(1843) andLittle Dorrit(1857-1858), have recently been recognized as “the most radical popular form available to middle-class culture.” By now, Leslie Fiedler's despair in the face of the alleged artistic impoverishments of these books has been abandoned by many critics, who, bypassing or modifying Fiedler's aesthetic imperatives, now prefer to ask pointed questions about the “cultural work” that these books have performed within American society.

Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth-Century US Literary History

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria A. Windell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Native American ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Sentimental Novel ◽  
American Women Writers ◽  
Cultural Violence ◽  
The Us ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Marginal Characters

Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth-Century US Literary History argues that African American, Native American, Latinx, and Anglo-American women writers use genre to negotiate hemispheric encounters amidst the gendered, racialized, and cultural violence of the nineteenth-century Americas. Although US literary sentimentalism is often framed in national and transatlantic terms, this book argues that the mode was deeply transamerican. Given the popularity of the nineteenth-century sentimental novel, the appearance of its central motifs—tearful embraces, fainting heroines, angelic children—in transamerican US texts is unsurprising. What is remarkable is how texts not generally considered sentimental deploy seemingly insignificant affective episodes to navigate gendered and racialized experiences of conflict throughout the Caribbean and the US–Mexico borderlands. Throughout Transamerican Sentimentalism, marginal characters, momentary gestures, offhand remarks, and narrative commentaries serve to disrupt plots, potentially connecting characters across cultural, racial, national, and linguistic borders. Transamerican sentimentalism cannot unseat the violence of the nineteenth-century Americas, but it does dislocate familiar figures such as the coquette and the mulatta to produce other potential outcomes—including new paradigms for understanding the coquette, a locally successful informal diplomacy, and motivations for violent slave revolt. Transamerican sentimentalism is a fleeting, mercurial, and marginal mode. Frequently overwhelmed by the violence pervading the hemisphere, it could be categorized as a failed venture. Yet it is also persistent; as it recurs throughout the nineteenth century, it opens into alternative African American, Native American, and Latinx avenues for navigating and comprehending US–Americas relations.

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