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.

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.

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.

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.

Metaregionalism: The Global Pacific Northwest

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Giles
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Pacific Northwest ◽  
Critical Distance ◽  
William Gibson ◽  
Gary Snyder ◽  
Domestic Security ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Richard Brautigan ◽  
Douglas Coupland

This chapter examines the metaregional dimensions of the Pacific Northwest and the ways in which its very inscription as a region elucidates the fraught and contested relation between text and place in American literature. Elettra Bedon coined the term “metaregionalism” to describe a self-conscious manipulation of certain forms of dialect. On analogy with metafiction, metaregionalism might be said to foreground the assumptions involved in traditional ascriptions of place. The chapter first considers the epistemology of space before discussing how the Pacific Northwest was tackled in the writings of Gary Snyder, Ursula Le Guin, and Richard Brautigan. It also analyzes the fiction of William Gibson and Douglas Coupland; Gibson deploys Vancouver to achieve critical distance from the behemoths of U.S. capitalism, and Coupland brings his native Pacific Northwest into the wider oceanic orbit of Asia and Australasia in order to chart a generational passage away from domestic security and entitlement.

Literary History on the Road: Transatlantic Crossings and Transpacific Crossovers

PMLA ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 119 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takayuki Tatsumi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jazz Age ◽  
The Road ◽  
History Of ◽  
On The Road

Literary history has always mirrored discursive revolutions in world history. In the United States, the Jazz Age would not have seen the Herman Melville revival and the completion of Carl Van Doren's The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917–21) without the rise of post–World War I nativism. If it had not been for Pearl Harbor, F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) could not have fully aroused the democratic spirit embedded in the heritage of New Criticism. Likewise, the postcolonial and New Americanist climate around 1990, that critical transition at the end of the cold war, brought about the publication of Emory Elliott's The Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988) and Sacvan Bercovitch's The Cambridge History of American Literature (1994–). I would like to question, however, the discourse that narrates American literary history in the globalist age of the twenty-first century.

Writing American Literary History Sacvan Bercovitch (ed.), The Cambridge History of American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994–2005, £495.00). Volume One: 1590–1820 (1994, £70.00). Pp. xiii+829. ISBN 0 521 30105 [squf ]. Volume Two: Prose Writing, 1820–1865 (1995, £75.00). Pp. xviii+887. ISBN 0 521 30106 8. Volume Three: Prose Writing, 1860–1920 (2005, £80.00). Pp. xi+813. ISBN 0 521 30107 6. Volume Four: Nineteenth-Century Poetry, 1800–1910 (2004, £75.00). Pp. x+562. ISBN 0 521 30108 4. Volume Five: Poetry and Criticism, 1900–1950 (2003, £75.00). Pp. xi+624. ISBN 0 521 30109 2. Volume Six: Prose Writing, 1910–1950 (2002, £70.00). Pp. xx+620. ISBN 0 521 49731 0. Volume Seven: Prose Writing, 1940–1990 (1999, £75.00). Pp. xxiii+795. ISBN 0 521 49732 9. Volume Eight: Poetry and Criticism, 1940–1995 (1996, £75.00). Pp. viii+545. ISBN 0 521 49733 7.

2006 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 399-411
Author(s):  
RICHARD GRAY
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
And Gender ◽  
A Site

Each generation needs to rewrite literary history. And it may be that this generation needs to do it more than most, if only because the proliferation of schools and theories has turned what was once common critical ground into a battlefield. American books, among others, have become a site of struggle, and American writers have been among those caught in the criss-crossing searchlights of ethnic and gender studies, interdisciplinary investigations and studies of popular culture, language and communication. Just how far things have gone can be measured by the fact that every term in the phrase “history of American literature,” is now open to debate. The textuality of history and the historicity of the text have become the most contentious issues in contemporary criticism, while the question of nationhood, in particular, is under scrutiny. In a famous phrase, Walt Whitman described his work as a language experiment, an attempt to summon a nation into being through words. The slippery, plural nature of American identity and the bewildering contingencies of American history that drove Whitman to say this feed into the more challenging of the recent accounts of American writing.

scholarly journals The Tastes from Portugal: Food as Remembrance in Portuguese American Literature

2008 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 126-152
Author(s):  
Reinaldo Silva
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
New England ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Ethnic Food ◽  
Piazza Tales

Contemporary Portuguese American literature written by Thomas Braga (1943-), Frank Gaspar (1946-), and Katherine Vaz (1955-) share a profusion of topics - with ethnic food being, perhaps, the most representative one. What these writers have in common is that their roots can be traced to Portugal's Atlantic islands - the Azores - and not to continental Portugal. They are native Americans and write in English, though their characters and themes are Portuguese American. Some of them lived close to the former New England whaling and fishing centers of New Bedford and Nantucket, which Herman Melville has immortalized in Moby-Dick and in his short story, “The 'Gees,” in The Piazza Tales. These seaports were renowned worldwide and eventually attracted Azorean harpooners. The Azorean background of Thomas Braga and Frank Gaspar helps us to understand why fish and seafood feature so extensively in their writings instead of dishes containing meat as is the case in the fiction of Katherine Vaz.

Tracing the Fur Trade

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J. Cromwell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Historical Archaeology ◽  
Pacific Northwest ◽  
Fur Trade ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The World ◽  
Interethnic Relationships

The origins of historical archaeology in the Pacific Northwest of North America in the mid-twentieth century concentrated on the excavations of British terrestrial fur trade forts, but little synthesis and inter-site comparisons of available data has been completed. This chapter presents a comparative typological analysis of these early-nineteenth-century British and Chinese ceramic wares recovered from the Northwest Company’s Fort Okanogan (ca. 1811–1821), Fort Spokane (ca. 1810–1821), Fort George (ca. 1811–1821) and the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fort Vancouver (ca. 1825–1860). This study helps to reveal the extent that early Victorian ideals gave precedence to the supply of British manufactured goods to these colonial outposts on the opposite side of the world and what the presence of these ceramic wares may reveal about the complex interethnic relationships and socioeconomic statuses of the occupants of these forts and the Native Americans who engaged in trade with these forts.

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.

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