The Influence of Travel Books on Early American Hispanism

1954 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-159
Author(s):  
Frederick S. Stimson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Central America ◽  
North American ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Early American ◽  
Travel Books ◽  
Travel Accounts

Students of the famous first contingent of Yankee Hispanists and of North American literature in general, during the national and revolutionary periods, are prone to overlook the pronounced influence of British, American, and French travel books about Spain and Spanish America. The popularity which travel accounts enjoyed in the nineteenth century is attested by a well-known publisher’s observation to the distinguished pioneer explorer of Central America, John L. Stephens, author of the recently reprinted Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas & Yucatan (1841, 1949). On the latter’s query as to what forms of literature Harper Brothers favored, Harper is said to have replied: “Travels sell about the best of anything we get hold of. They don’t always go with a rush, like a novel by a celebrated author, but they sell longer, and in the end, pay better.”

The Early American Qur'an: Islamic Scripture and US Canon

2009 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Einboden
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
American Renaissance ◽  
Early American Literature ◽  
Washington Irving ◽  
Early American ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Although considerable scholarly attention has been paid to US Orientalism in the nineteenth century, there remains no targeted study of the formative influence exercised by the Qur'an upon the canon of early American literature. The present paper surveys receptions, adaptations and translations of the Qur'an during the ‘American Renaissance’, identifying the Qur'anic echoes which permeate the seminal works of literary patriarchs such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe. Examining the literary and religious tensions raised by antebellum importations of Islamic scripture, the essay interrogates how the aesthetic contours of the Qur'an in particular serve both to attract and obstruct early US readings, mapping the diverse responses to the Muslim sacred generated by American Romantics and Transcendentalists.

Toward a Declaration of Interdependence; or, Interrogating the Boundaries in Twentieth-Century Histories of North American Literature

PMLA ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 118 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marietta Messmer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
American Literature ◽  
North American ◽  
Russian Formalism ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

The instrumentalization of nineteenth-century literary historiography in the project of literary and cultural nation building has become a critical commonplace, as Claudio Guillén (6) and David Perkins (4), among many others, have outlined. Beginning with John Neal's American Writers (1824–25), nineteenth-century histories of North American literature emphatically embraced this nationalist paradigm, striving to identify and defend the “American” qualities in America's newly emergent national literature. But when called on, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to justify the establishment of American literature departments in universities across the country, literary histories were, especially during the 1920s and 1930s, under even greater pressure to prove the extent to which American literature is indeed American (Vanderbilt 186–91). Although the rise of New Criticism and the influence of Russian formalism after World War II saw a temporary setback to American historiographical nationalism (Spengemann, Mirror 154), the subsequent institutionalization of American studies took place in the context of the cold war, and the 1960s, in particular, brought a renewed emphasis on the (for the most part nationally oriented) sociopolitical and historical contextualization of American literature. And even the shift to intra-American cultural pluralism in the wake of trans- and subnational challenges to traditional notions of the nation-state throughout the past few decades has all too frequently been accompanied by renewed attempts to establish a revised version of historiographical nationalism.

Publication as Preservation at a Remote Maya Site in the Early Twentieth Century*

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donna Yates
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Central America ◽  
North American ◽  
Archaeological Sites ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Maya Site

This chapter concerns the concept of ‘remoteness’ in early Mesoamerican archaeology as a factor in site preservation. Throughout the nineteenth century, Maya sites were academically and popularly conceived of as beyond ‘preservation’ in any realistic sense. However, the late nineteenth-century emergence of archaeology as a science and the growth of North American academic interest in Central America forced a situation where ‘preservation’ was incorporated into professional archaeological identity. Using the Guatemalan site of Holmul as a case study, the chapter presents publication as a form of preservation for logistically challenging archaeological sites in the early twentieth century. Publication is conceived of as an obligatory process that not only produced a textual ‘preserved site’, but served as an homage to advances in the development of North American-style archaeology as a scientific enquiry.

‘The worst loups-garous that one can meet’: Reading the Werewolf in the Canadian ‘Wilderness’

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-80
Author(s):  
Kaja Franck
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
Native Canadian

Ginger Snaps (2000) has been recognised as a significant example of feminist horror. This article analyses the final film in the trilogy, Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004). On first appearance, Ginger Snaps Back reacts to the ending of the first film, in which Brigitte kills her lupine sister Ginger. Set in the nineteenth century, the film draws on Canadian Gothic tropes with the two sisters trapped in an isolated fort, surrounded by frozen forest. In doing so, it echoes another Canadian werewolf narrative, Henry Beaugrand's ‘The Werwolves' (1898). Beaugrand's story opens with a group of settler-colonisers spending the Christmas period in Fort Richelieu, Quebec. This location evokes North American fears, and the representation of the wooded wilderness as full of wild beasts and wild men. Beaugrand collapses the ‘wild beasts’ and ‘wild men’ into one hybrid monster. By comparing the depiction of werewolves in Ginger Snaps Back and Beaugrand's story, this article uncovers the implications of ignoring and appropriating Native Canadian folklore.

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