David Greven's Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature: Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 94-97
Author(s):  
Anna De Biasio
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Margaret Fuller ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Antebellum American Literature

American Obscurantism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Lurie
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
William Faulkner ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Hart Crane ◽  
Stanley Kubrick ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Racial History ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Ongoing Development

American Obscurantism argues for a salutary indirection in U.S. culture. From its earliest canonical literary works through films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the most compelling manifestations of America’s troubled history have articulated this content through a unique formal and tonal obscurity. Envisioning the formidable darkness attending racial history at nearly every stage of the republic’s founding and ongoing development, writers such as William Faulkner and Hart Crane, and directors like the Coen brothers and Stanley Kubrick, present a powerful critique of American conquest, southern plantation culture, and western frontier ideology. American Obscurantism engages the basis of these explorations in Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville, each of whom present notable occlusions in their characters’ racial understanding, an obtuseness or naivety that is expressed by a corresponding formal opacity. Such oblique historicity as the book describes allows a method at odds with—and implicitly critical of—the historicizing trend that marked literary studies in the wake of the theoretical turn. The book thus restores an emphasis on aesthetic and medium-specific features to argue for a formalist historicity. Working through challenges to an implicitly white, bourgeois, heteronormative polity, American Obscurantism posits an insistent, vital racial otherness at the heart of American literature and cinema. It examines this pattern across a canon that shows more self-doubt than assuredness, arguing for the value of openness and questioning in place of epistemological or critical certainty.

History, Romance, and the Novel

2019 ◽  
pp. 154-170
Author(s):  
Gretchen J. Woertendyke
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Washington Irving ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Government ◽  
Conjectural History

This chapter traces Charles Brockden Brown’s theories of romance, history, and the novel, from his earliest fictional-historical essays, “The Rhapsodist” (1789), “Walstein’s School of History” (1799), and “The Difference between History and Romance” (1800); to Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798) and Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799); to An Address to the Government of the United States (1803) and “Annals of Europe and America” (1807–1810). For Brown, romance is a form of conjectural history, true because of its imaginative range beyond the limitations of the novel’s verisimilitude. The future-oriented romance is especially suited to the local and regional conditions of the United States and uniquely connected to the geography of the nation. Brown’s influence can be found in later writers of romance, such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville.

Fargo’s Whitened Spaces

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Lurie
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Visual Field ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Planar Surface ◽  
Postmodern Theory ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Historical Past

This chapter reads the Coens’ film Fargo as a typical Gothic narrative, replete with paternal sin, uncanny doubles, and a dark historical past that returns to trouble a violent present. It traces the Gothic’s history in the United States and notes its uniquely American features in describing Fargo’s affinity with writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville, in the latter case by way of the film’s concern with whiteness—both the visual field of the film’s mise-en-scéne and the ethnic whiteness (or historical whitening) of the American interior. It shows a particularly cinematic version of the Gothic due to Fargo’s use of an offscreen, “unlawful” space associated with the film’s criminal element. It posits a postmodern sublime in the film’s tonal and visual ironies and, by way of postmodern theory, in a stubbornly immanent sublimity through affinities between the snowbound scene and the screen’s planar surface.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. xviii-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Gerald Kennedy ◽  
Scott Peeples
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
First Century ◽  
Global Literature ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Critical Approaches

Edgar Allan Poe has long occupied a problematic place in discussions of American literature. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, an intensive reexamination of his relationship to nineteenth-century print culture and the controversies of Jacksonian America reframed our understanding of his work. Whereas scholars once regarded his dark fantasies as extraneous to American experience, we now recognize the complex and nuanced ways in which Poe’s work responded to and questioned core assumptions of American culture. The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe offers a wide-ranging exploration of Poe, rereading his works through a variety of critical approaches and illuminating his ultimate impact on global literature, art, and culture. The introduction to the volume traces the development of scholarship on Poe from the time of his death in 1849 to the beginning of the twenty-first century, exploring the future possibilities for the study of Poe in the digital era.

Lounging on the Sofa with Leigh Hunt: A New Source for the Notes in Melville's Shakespeare Volume

2008 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-115
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Sanborn
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Implied Reader ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Leigh Hunt ◽  
Quarterly Review ◽  
Periodical Essay

Abstract The argument of this essay is that several of the notes that Herman Melville wrote in the back leaves of one of his Shakespeare volumes——notes that have been an object of interest and speculation ever since their discovery in the 1930s——were responses to essays written by Leigh Hunt and collected in a volume called The Indicator. In all likelihood, Melville read these essays——along with a Quarterly Review essay by Francis Palgrave, which has previously been shown to be the source of other notes in the back of the Shakespeare volume——on the sofa of his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, shortly before or after the birth of his son Malcolm in February 1849. The discovery of the new source is important both as an aid in identifying when and where Melville took all of these notes and as an indication of how carefully Melville studied the British periodical essay before beginning Moby-Dick (1851). In the essays of writers like Hunt, he encountered a form that seemed as though it could stretch to accommodate his literary and philosophical ambitions without sacrificing the companionship of the implied reader. For at least two years, Melville would believe enough in the possibilities of that form to compose his miraculously sociable expressions of unresolvable hope and rage, to give voice to the seemingly ““wicked,”” and yet to feel, as he told Nathaniel Hawthorne, ““spotless as the lamb.””

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