scholarly journals Race, Class, and Herman Melville

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan De Santis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Class Structure ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Bartleby The Scrivener ◽  
American Society ◽  
Benito Cereno

<p>Analyzes two of the short stories in Herman Melville's The Piazza Tales, "Bartleby the Scrivener: a Story of Wall Street" and "Benito Cereno" and argues that these stories are highly critical of the bourgeois class structure of American society that inform Wall Street, as well as the slave trade, in mid-Nineteenth-Century America. Posits that in these works Melville addresses the questions of hierarchical power in the workplace and the effects of racism and slavery in the colonization of America.</p>

scholarly journals An Ecocritical Reading of Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener"

2016 ◽  
Vol 73 ◽  
pp. 7-16
Author(s):  
Laleh Atashi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Culture ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Open Spaces ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Critical Attitude ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Bartleby The Scrivener

This research is an ecocritical reading of Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener." Melville's treatment of the environment is described and analyzed with regard to Augé 's theory of non-Places. The examples of non-place in Melville's Wall Street story include the compartmentalized office, the urban labyrinth, artificial and natural greeneries and oriental landscapes. The motif of compartmentalization forms the binary of insider and outsider. A close attention to the binaries in this story reveal Melville's critical attitude towards urban culture that threatens the American identity and mocks the American predilection for mobility in open spaces. This story reveals the way social institutions of an urban culture can determine the tragic fate of an out of place individual. Melville, in this story, reveals the consequences of marginalizing nature and indicates his ecological concerns in mid-nineteenth century America. He mourns the fading out of biocentric view of nature and warns against the domination of the anthropocentric worldview which is brought about by modernity, enlightenment and capitalism.

Infidel Deathbeds: Irreligious Dying and Sincere Disbelief in Nineteenth-Century America

2017 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 427-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bradley Kime
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Society

This article inquires into the piecemeal, provisional de-marginalization of American irreligion and analyzes the social stakes and strategies of dis/belief's invocation during the long nineteenth century. It does so by considering the era's corpus of American deathbed narratives. It argues that late-century irreligionists mimed and subverted the deathbed strategies of their Christian detractors to convince a skeptical American audience to concede the contested sincerity of their disbelief. For much of the nineteenth century, Christian-produced infidel deathbed narratives mapped the mixture and multiplicity of inner irreligion and interrogated the sincerity of disbelief. In response, irreligionists—initially ambivalent about the interpretability of the deathbed—eventually came to invest it with as much power to prove sincerity as had American Christians. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, irreligionists developed a nationwide network of irreligious dying and selectively, strategically deployed the deathbed's accrued power to prove the uniform sincerity of their disbelief. By the turn of the century, they had largely neutralized the derisive force of the infidel deathbed genre, leaving disbelief a partially, provisionally less marginal and less multiplex marker in American society, and re-tethering themselves to their Christian detractors in the process.

Case Study #5: Bartleby, the Scrivener, a Story of Wall Street by Herman Melville

Public Voices ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 162
Author(s):  
Ken Nichols
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Carbon Paper ◽  
Law Firm ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Principal Character ◽  
Bartleby The Scrivener ◽  
The Relationship

“Bartleby” is the name of the principal character in Herman Melville’s short story about the relationship between a manager and an employee. Bartleby is the employee. His job is to be a scrivener, or a copyist.The setting is a small law firm on Wall Street a century and a half ago — long before computers and photocopy machines, or even typewriters and carbon paper. A scrivener’s job was to copy a document clearly and accurately using the information technology of the day: paper, a bottle of ink, and a sharpened quill.You’ll find that the office technology may be different now than it was in Bartleby’s time, but people are much the same as ever. As you read this story, ask yourself what kind of employee Bartleby is. What kind of boss does the attorney make? Does the story have to end the way it does?

Constructing Gender: Sexual Slander in Nineteenth-Century America

1995 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew J. King
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Social Concern ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Legal Response ◽  
The Family ◽  
Secular Society ◽  
Sexual Slander ◽  
American Society ◽  
Legal Concepts

The decades following the American Revolution witnessed major changes in American society. As traditional means of social control eroded, an increasingly secular society turned to lawmakers—both judicial and legislative—to craft new norms. Nineteenth-century legislators and judges actively promoted new visions of the economy, politics, and society. No area of social concern escaped their attention. Recent scholarship focusing on women and the family has explored how lawmakers transformed pre-Revolutionary legal concepts in reaction to changes in the nature of the family itself. This article examines the legal response in one narrow intersection of law and society: the law of sexual slander.

AMERICANIZATION BY CATHOLIC MEANS: FRENCH CANADIAN NATIONALISM AND TRANSNATIONALISM, 1889–1901

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 284-301
Author(s):  
Patrick Lacroix
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
The United States ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Canadian ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The North ◽  
Canadian Immigration ◽  
American Society

The age of nationalities and nationalism associated with nineteenth-century Europe also found expression in North America in the same period: French Canadians developed a national consciousness charged with a religious and providential mission. As these Canadians crossed into the United States in ever-rising numbers and established permanent “colonies” during the Gilded Age, they carried with them a cultural ideology that kept them apart from mainstream American society—and apart from their Irish American coreligionists and coworkers. Claiming the freedoms promised to them by the Constitution, these immigrants from the North battled for accommodation not only in political conventions or state legislatures, but also in the Roman Catholic Church, whose leaders seemed intent on doing away with foreign languages and customs. The religious battle came to a head as lay and clerical Catholics gathered in Baltimore, in 1889, to reassert the Church's unity as well as its patriotic credentials. By drawing attention to French Canadian immigration, often overlooked in immigration studies, this article refocuses the question of Americanization on the Catholic Church, which proved one of the most powerful agents of acculturation in late nineteenth-century America.

scholarly journals Gender Issues in Freeman’s The Revolt of Mother

2021 ◽  
pp. 104-111
Author(s):  
Gobinda Puri
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Gender Role ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
Gender Issues ◽  
Gender Disparity ◽  
The Family ◽  
Males And Females ◽  
American Society

This paper analyses the gender role in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's (1890) one of the most popular short stories, The Revolt of Mother through a Marxist feminist perspective. The story depicts the gender disparity created by the patriarchal American society of the nineteenth century and the revolt of a female character, Sarah as the indication of the women's movement of 1848. The analysis of the story reveals how females are dominated and oppressed by the males in the family and also in society concerning decision-making affairs. Furthermore, it shows that if male domination and suppression continue without understanding females’ desires and fulfilling the promises made for them, they can be turned into rebellions and the traditional gender dichotomy can be broken down in a while as the protagonist appears in the story. This article also relates gender discrimination and proposes possible ways to maintain the equality and harmony between males and females concerning Nepali society.

Henry Boynton Smith and Church History in Nineteenth-Century America

2016 ◽  
Vol 85 (2) ◽  
pp. 302-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annette G. Aubert
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church History ◽  
Church Of Christ ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
German Education ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Doctrine ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Church

Henry Boynton Smith (1815–1877) was one of the few nineteenth-century American scholars committed to disseminating German methods of ecclesiastical historiography to a country known for its anti-historical tendencies. However, modern scholars have generally overlooked his significant contributions in this area. Hence exploring his scholarly reception and specifically his History of the Church of Christ, in Chronological Tables will fill a niche in the historiography of church history.Philip Schaff (1819–1893), the renowned church historian and founder of the American Society of Church History, was one of the few contemporaries of Smith who understood that Smith's scholarship was on a par with that being produced in Germany. Schaff specifically praised Smith's chronological tables—evidence of Smith's German education among some of the best German historians of the period, including Leopold von Ranke and August Neander. This essay reviews Smith's History of the Church of Christ, in Chronological Tables in the context of the newly emerging scientific history and describes his contribution to nineteenth-century American scholarship. Smith is worthy of attention for establishing a central position for the history of doctrine and for promoting the field of church history and the use of chronological tables in nineteenth-century America.

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