scholarly journals William Dean Howells y Elizabeth Stuart Phelps: masculinidad, feminidad y representaciones literarias del matrimonio. Estados Unidos, 1870-1880

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 225-257
Author(s):  
Cassandra Nájera
Keyword(s):  
William Dean Howells ◽  
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps ◽  
Story Of Avis

Objetivo: el objetivo de este artículo es analizar la dimensión simbólica de las tensiones de género que se desarrollaron en Estados Unidos en el periodo de 1870 a 1880, cuando las esferas de lo público y lo privado habían comenzado a desdibujarse. Metodología: se comparan las representaciones literarias del matrimonio en las novelas Their Wedding Journey (1872) de William Dean Howells y The Story of Avis (1877) de Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, relacionando los personajes femeninos y masculinos y sus preocupaciones en torno al matrimonio con el contexto histórico de las obras. Originalidad: estas novelas no han sido estudiadas en años recientes, aun cuando su contenido resulta valioso para examinar tanto la estructura de sentimiento de la época respecto al género, como las luchas simbólicas de los autores en un contexto de crisis de la feminidad y la masculinidad. Conclusiones: esta investigación revela que la pertenencia sexual de los autores determinó su relación con el género como estructura de distribución del poder y fungió como principio de separación cultural, por lo que cada uno trató de incidir en el ordenamiento de la estructura social desde su forma propia de ser en el mundo: Dean Howells abordó la identidad femenina como complemento de una noción específica de masculinidad, mientras que Stuart Phelps participó en el proceso de creación de la conciencia feminista.

American Realism and Gender

2019 ◽  
pp. 39-63
Author(s):  
Donna M. Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Henry James ◽  
William Dean Howells ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps ◽  
Elizabeth Stoddard ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Race And Sexuality ◽  
Marriage Laws ◽  
And Gender

Critical to the development of realism was the issue of gender, not only in terms of realism’s rejection of the mode of sentimentalism and the genre of women’s fiction but also regarding the women who wrote realism throughout the decades when realism was a dominant literary form. Early realists such as Rebecca Harding Davis, Rose Terry Cooke, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps protested the abuses of industrialism and the unequal gender dynamics encoded in marriage laws while promoting alternative visions of women as independent agents. Second-generation realists Constance Fenimore Woolson, Frances E. W. Harper, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman questioned the dogma of realism as preached by William Dean Howells and Henry James, ranging beyond the limits of decorum regarding race and sexuality to do so. Early twentieth-century writers stretched the limits of realism further by incorporating elements of other forms, including New Woman, utopian, and travel narratives; immigrant and tourist fiction; Native American legends and popular westerns; and novels of region. The resulting reconsideration of women writers yields a realism that remains faithful to Howells’s ideal of the “truthful treatment of material” while ranging beyond realism’s limits by including a wide range of experiences conditioned by gender and race.

Realism and the Middle-Class Balancing Act

2019 ◽  
pp. 463-483
Author(s):  
Patrick Chura
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
William Dean Howells ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Class Mobility ◽  
Social Scale ◽  
The Social ◽  
Realist Novels ◽  
The Subject

This chapter looks at the effects of capitalism and social stratification on notions of class identity in two groups of American realist novels. First, it analyzes a pair of literary responses by William Dean Howells to the 1886 Chicago Haymarket bombing as the lead-in to a discussion of realist works about voluntary downward class mobility or “vital contact.” With Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes as a reference point and paradigm, the chapter also explores the ideologies implicit in several novels about upward social mobility, noting how both groups of texts are ultimately guided by a genteel perspective positioned between dominant and subordinate classes. In similar ways, the novels treated in the chapter balance middle-class loyalties against identities from higher and lower on the social scale while sending messages of both complicity and subversion on the subject of capitalist class relations.

William Dean Howells: The Friendly Eye

1970 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 322
Author(s):  
Clayton L. Eichelberger ◽  
Edward Wagenknecht
Keyword(s):  
William Dean Howells

William Dean Howells: Representative Selections.

1951 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 525
Author(s):  
Edwin H. Cady ◽  
Clara Kirk ◽  
Rudolph Kirk ◽  
Henry Steele Commager
Keyword(s):  
William Dean Howells

Pain and the Aesthetics of US Literary Realism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia J. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
William Dean Howells ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Physical Pain ◽  
Civilizing Process ◽  
Physical Suffering ◽  
Convergence And Divergence ◽  
Similarities And Differences

This book examines the cultural pursuit of a painless ideal as a neglected context for US literary realism. Advances in anesthesia in the final decades of the nineteenth century together with influential religious ideologies helped strengthen the equation of a comfortable existence insulated from physical suffering with the height of civilization. Theories of the civilizing process as intensifying sensitivity to suffering were often adduced to justify a revulsion from physical pain among the postbellum elite. Yet a sizeable portion of this elite rejected this comfort-seeking, pain-avoiding aesthetic as a regrettable consequence of over-civilization. Proponents of the strenuous cult instead identified pain and strife as essential ingredients of an invigorated life. The Ache of the Actual examines variants on a lesser known counter-sensibility integral to the writings of a number of influential literary realists. William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, and Charles Chesnutt each delineated alternative definitions of a superior sensibility indebted to suffering rather than to either revulsion from or immersion in it. They resolved the binary contrast between pain-aversion on one side and pain-immersion on the other by endorsing an uncommon responsiveness to pain whose precise form depended on the ethical and aesthetic priorities of the writer in question. Focusing on these variations elucidates the similarities and differences within US literary realism while revealing areas of convergence and divergence between realism and other long-nineteenth-century literary modes, chief among them both sentimentalism and naturalism, that were similarly preoccupied with pain.

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