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A World Full of Fists

David E. Shi

in Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850–1920

Literary naturalists unearthed sobering new facts about contemporary American life. By exposing the comfortable to the reality of violent households and repulsive persons, they reminded readers that ... More

Literary naturalists unearthed sobering new facts about contemporary American life. By exposing the comfortable to the reality of violent households and repulsive persons, they reminded readers that the supposed moral benefits of poverty may come at the expense of humanity itself. Perhaps most important, the naturalists questioned the very notion of the autonomous self capable of moral judgment and independent action. What most sharply differentiated Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Stephen Crane from William Dean Howells, Henry James Jr., Sarah Orne Jewett, and Edith Wharton was their recognition of the overwhelming power of economic forces and nonrational impulses. To one degree or another, the naturalists imposed upon the world of observed fact an austere assumption about the deterministic nature of existence. This led them to go beyond a realism of simple facts, literal objects, and evident moral choices.Less

Aimless Battles

Stephen Crane

in Accident Society: Fiction, Collectivity, and the Production of Chance

Focusing on Stephen Crane, this chapter examines the most politically charged and profoundly symbolic of American actions: the act of aiming and firing a gun. This act is linked to Crane's short ... More

Focusing on Stephen Crane, this chapter examines the most politically charged and profoundly symbolic of American actions: the act of aiming and firing a gun. This act is linked to Crane's short story “The Five White Mice” that extends his analysis of chance, ostensibly through gambling. Expressing his opposition to traditional liberal theories of free will and self-control, Crane links the accurate execution of one's intentions with imperial violence and connects random, aimless shooting with a preferable mode of ruthless egalitarianism. Crane's interest in aimless shooting has its roots in actual developments in the history of firearms and resulting changes in their use in modern battles. His fiction may be interpreted in relation to a set of neglected rifle training manuals and military strategy papers from the turn of the century. His war stories address, and attempt to reconcile, two competing and precisely opposed theories of shooting that were influential at the time: shooting is either chancy or virtually chanceless.Less

Archival Enthusiasm

Lindsay V. Reckson

in Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature

This chapter examines the ecstatic performances haunting Stephen Crane’s 1895 narrative of the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage. While much has been made of the way the novel strategically ... More

This chapter examines the ecstatic performances haunting Stephen Crane’s 1895 narrative of the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage. While much has been made of the way the novel strategically “forgets” the political history of the war, this chapter analyzes the novel’s complex overlay of religious enthusiasm and minstrel performance, exploring how Red Badge deploys these forms in order to grapple with the embodied semiotics of the Jim Crow era. Recovering traces of the midcentury minstrel figure “Dandy Jim of Caroline” in Jim Conklin’s exuberant death scene, the chapter argues that the narrative afterlife of such traces reveals the novel’s tendency to simultaneously erase and embed the excesses of war and postwar racial violence. Marking the historical resonance between minstrelsy and religious enthusiasm in their objectification of the moving body, Red Badge’s performances treat bodies as kinetic archives, whose stylized gestures offer stunning testimony to history’s traumatic returns. In this sense, the novel treats the ambivalence of performance as precisely the arena in which literature might grapple with history’s unaccountable remainders.Less

Stephen Crane’s Abilities

Katherine Biers

in Virtual Modernism: Writing and Technology in the Progressive Era

This chapter explores the conflict over experience by examining the metaphorics of writing and of color that run throughout Steven Crane’s work. Crane’s violently disfigured forms, faces, and ... More

This chapter explores the conflict over experience by examining the metaphorics of writing and of color that run throughout Steven Crane’s work. Crane’s violently disfigured forms, faces, and landscapes should be understood not as allegories of writing per se, but instead as allegories of socially informed realist writing at the dawn of mass culture. Crane zeroed in on the ironies of the overlap in his fiction, but he was troubled by it as well. The chapter also argues that the textual representation of color allowed Crane to recreate the feeling of incipience characteristic of divine dispossession by the word and to restore to literary writing and the author some margin of their formerly sacred mission and abilities.Less

The Glorious Burden of the Aging Civil War Veteran

John A Casey

in New Men: Reconstructing the Image of the Veteran in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture

Toward the end of the nineteenth century a mythology of the Civil War veteran had been created. This myth was partially constructed by former soldiers who asserted they were the last real men in ... More

Toward the end of the nineteenth century a mythology of the Civil War veteran had been created. This myth was partially constructed by former soldiers who asserted they were the last real men in America. Middle-class white young men resented this claim that veterans held a monopoly over American manhood and sought ways to access social power and prestige. Since war had presumably made veterans into powerful social figures, the rising generation increasingly sought to understand the transformative power of war on these men and, failing that, to find a war of their own. This trend is reflected in the writing of Stephen Crane, who initially attempts in The Red Badge of Courage to intellectually understand how war makes men but then abandons this to find a battle of his own in the Spanish–American War.Less

Crane and the Tyranny of Twelve

Michael T. Gilmore

in The War on Words: Slavery, Race, and Free Speech in American Literature

Stephen Crane published his classic novel about the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage, in 1895, a full three decades after hostilities ended. Crane's tale, a major document of American realism, ... More

Stephen Crane published his classic novel about the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage, in 1895, a full three decades after hostilities ended. Crane's tale, a major document of American realism, incarnates the ex post facto spirit. Crane's novella of a black stable hand who loses his face while saving a white child alerts us to another element in the postbellum détente that hampered dissent: the modernized reach of the doxa. The Red Badge of Courage and The Monster were both products of the post-Reconstruction depths, a temporal congruity too often overlooked in their usual isolation as narratives about, respectively, the Civil War and small-town parochialism. The Monster (1899) was also the context for his reimagining of the clash between North and South. The tale about the ostracizing of a physician for his allegiance to a damaged black stable hand is a strongest evidence for Crane's alienation from his culture's ideological rigidities.Less

Stephen Crane’s Refrain

Max Cavitch

in American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions

This chapter calls to account the sentiment of liberated and liberating free-verse artistry through a reading of Stephen Crane's poetry that combines formal analysis (a counting or measurement) and ... More

This chapter calls to account the sentiment of liberated and liberating free-verse artistry through a reading of Stephen Crane's poetry that combines formal analysis (a counting or measurement) and ethical reckoning (a characterization of the lyric subject). More simply put, it is an effort to interpret, in the work of a very untraditional poet, his use of a very traditional poetic device—the refrain—to measure or mark out a timely sense of a depersonalized aesthetics. Timely, that is, not in terms of present critical anxieties about the aesthetic, but rather in terms of a late-nineteenth-century preoccupation, in literature, science, philosophy, and beyond, with the phenomenon of repetition, which is, of course, the precondition for any type of measurement and for any concept of the personal.Less

Making Reparation; or, How to Count the Wrongs of Slavery

Gregory Laski

in Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress After Slavery

This chapter focuses on the conflicting temporal frames deployed by postbellum authors and activists seeking redress. While there was brief national attention given to reparations in the years ... More

This chapter focuses on the conflicting temporal frames deployed by postbellum authors and activists seeking redress. While there was brief national attention given to reparations in the years following the Civil War, the project lost much of its official sanction after the collapse of Reconstruction. By 1896, the majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson would argue that servitude did not count in defining race-based discrimination. The Plessy decision thus made it more crucial to clarify what was wrong with slavery and how to account for its effects. Narratives appearing in this moment took up this task: from Samuel Hall’s 47 Years a Slave, to Callie House’s articulations of the aims of the ex-slave pension movement, to Stephen Crane’s The Monster. The chapter argues that Crane’s novella conceives the wrong of slavery in a way that can help resolve the problem of causality confronting philosophical debates about making amends even today.Less

Sunny Tropic Scenes: US Travel Writers in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba

Pete Hulme

in American Travel and Empire

This chapter examines the evolution of US travel writing about Cuba, beginning with a broad overview, identifying four major periods, eight kinds of writers, five themes, and four itineraries. It ... More

This chapter examines the evolution of US travel writing about Cuba, beginning with a broad overview, identifying four major periods, eight kinds of writers, five themes, and four itineraries. It then describes the works of writers such as Stephen Crane, who produced forty-six reports from Cuba and Puerto Rico, and a series of short stories, Wounds in the Rain (1900); Erik Saar, an army sergeant who supported the intelligence and interrogation operations at Camp Delta as a linguist and interpreter; and James Yee, a Muslim chaplain at Gitmo.Less

THE ETERNAL BOY

Marion Elizabeth Rodgers

in Mencken: The American Iconoclast

This chapter introduces the themes that formed Mencken's views later in his life. Mencken's experience as an adolescent during the Depression of 1893 foreshadowed his view of the Great Depression of ... More

This chapter introduces the themes that formed Mencken's views later in his life. Mencken's experience as an adolescent during the Depression of 1893 foreshadowed his view of the Great Depression of the 1930s; his preference for realism in his reading and writing blossomed when he became a national critic; and his love of books and writing inspired him to become a newspaperman. Other themes include his love of music and romance with the opposite sex.Less

The Rhetorical Equivalent of War: William James, Kenneth Burke, Stephen Crane

Giorgio Mariani

in Waging War on War: Peacefighting in American Literature

This chapter examines how the rhetoric of war may be turned against war by focusing on the views of William James, Kenneth Burke, and Stephen Crane. Recent literary criticism has suggested that, far ... More

This chapter examines how the rhetoric of war may be turned against war by focusing on the views of William James, Kenneth Burke, and Stephen Crane. Recent literary criticism has suggested that, far from being powerless or simply neutral vis-à-vis the armed conflicts it seeks to represent, language is complicit with violence. This understanding of the relationship between language and violence has been filed by James Dawes under the rubric of “the disciplinary model”—a model that conceives language and violence “as mutually constitutive.” This chapter first considers the ways in which the hard facts of war and violence may be both acknowledged and worked through before discussing Burke's template for understanding the tension as well as the cooperation between war and peace. It also analyzes James's “The Moral Equivalent of War” and concludes by testing the usefulness of some of Burke's recommendations for literary studies through a reading of Crane's “A Mystery of Heroism.”Less

Journalism and the Urban Novel

Betsy Klimasmith

in The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 6: The American Novel 1879-1940

This chapter explores the relationship between journalism and literary realism in the United States, with particular reference to the urban novel. Citing the careers of Theodore Dreiser, Stephen ... More

This chapter explores the relationship between journalism and literary realism in the United States, with particular reference to the urban novel. Citing the careers of Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, and Edith Wharton, it shows that identities as reporters and novelists were intertwined and in fact overlapped. After providing a brief overview of urban journalism in nineteenth-nentury America, the chapter considers some of the basic assumptions that shape the way literary historians distinguish novels from newspapers. It then analyzes three urban novels, Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900), Crane's Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1893), and Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905). It also discusses the state of journalism and the urban novel after World War I.Less

Poetry

Kevin J. Hayes

in A Journey Through American Literature

This chapter examines the history of American poetry. It reviews the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman; major nineteenth-century American poets (e.g. Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and ... More

This chapter examines the history of American poetry. It reviews the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman; major nineteenth-century American poets (e.g. Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Stephen Crane); and modernist poets (e.g. Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost). It also discusses the breakdown of the private/public paradigm in American poetry in the modernist era and the private nature of more recent American verse.Less

Lines of Time, Sight, and Capital: Train Journeys

Mark Storey

in Rural Fictions, Urban Realities: A Geography of Gilded Age American Literature

This chapter examines some of the frequent representations of train journeys found across a variety of rural fictions. Indicative of the deeper incursions of urban capitalism into the American ... More

This chapter examines some of the frequent representations of train journeys found across a variety of rural fictions. Indicative of the deeper incursions of urban capitalism into the American countryside, the train is considered as a herald of modernity as well as a vehicle from which postbellum Americans encountered and traversed rural landscapes in a distinctly modern way. Examples of train journeys in texts by numerous writers–including Maurice Thompson, Hamlin Garland, William Dean Howells, Sarah Orne Jewett, Stephen Crane, and Booth Tarkington–are read against a detailed account of how such journeys altered the travelling subject's relationship to both time and vision.Less

Science, Medicine, Technology, and the Novel, 1860–1915

Jane F. Thrailkill

in The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 6: The American Novel 1879-1940

This chapter examines how the American novel tackled the paradoxes of science, medicine, and technology in the period between 1860 and 1915. It considers how many late nineteenth-century novels ... More

This chapter examines how the American novel tackled the paradoxes of science, medicine, and technology in the period between 1860 and 1915. It considers how many late nineteenth-century novels explored the human effects of technology using a particular form of narrative speech known as free indirect discourse. Citing the works of writers such as Charles Chesnutt, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edward Bellamy, and Stephen Crane, the chapter also demonstrates how fiction tackles scientific concerns including the evolutionary theory and the human consciousness.Less

The American Home on the Move in the Age of Expansion

Amy G. Richter

in At Home in Nineteenth-Century America: A Documentary History

Chapter 4 focuses on the use of domestic goods and values to create feelings of stability and progress in the face of geographic mobility and the United States’ global expansion. Taking up the two ... More

Chapter 4 focuses on the use of domestic goods and values to create feelings of stability and progress in the face of geographic mobility and the United States’ global expansion. Taking up the two meanings of “domestic,” it considers the give-and-take between home and nation and the use of domesticity in the creation and assertion of American identity at the end of the nineteenth century. Documents by W.A. Marin, William Dean Howells, and Stephen Crane offer different views on domestic ideals and experiences in the American west. Mary Antin and an article from Ladies’ Home Journal suggest the ways in which domestic spaces and goods helped women negotiate immigration and growing globalization. And finally, accounts of Theodore Roosevelt’s attitude toward international marriages, the Columbian Exposition, and Caroline Shunk’s experiences as a military wife in the Philippines draw more explicit connections between domesticity, international competition, and U.S. imperialism.Less

The Courage of Authenticity

in Vietnam and Beyond: Tim O'Brien and the Power of Storytelling

This chapter, which argues that authenticity provides the conceptual context of O'Brien's analysis of courage and masculinity, illustrates his awareness of the limitations of the Bildungsroman model, ... More

This chapter, which argues that authenticity provides the conceptual context of O'Brien's analysis of courage and masculinity, illustrates his awareness of the limitations of the Bildungsroman model, so common both in war and in anti-war writing, but rejected by most of his narratives. In this sense, O'Brien takes the lead from Stephen Crane's ironic treatment of the quest for military glory in The Red Badge of Courage (1895), but pushes the anti-heroic lesson one step further, disputing the need for experiential contact with the war in order to ascertain one's courage and moral integrity.Less

The “Twilight of the Poets” in the Age of Realism

Elizabeth Renker

in Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866-1900

American literary histories of the post-Civil War period typically treat “poetry” and “realism” as oppositional phenomena. The core narrative holds that “realism,” the major literary “movement” of ... More

American literary histories of the post-Civil War period typically treat “poetry” and “realism” as oppositional phenomena. The core narrative holds that “realism,” the major literary “movement” of the era, developed apace in prose fiction, while poetry, stuck in a hopelessly idealist late-romantic mode, languished and stagnated in a genteel “twilight of the poets.” This chapter excavates the historical origins of the twilight narrative in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It shows how this narrative emerged as a function of a particular idealist ideology of poetry that circulated widely in authoritative print-culture sites. The chapter demonstrates that the twilight narrative was only one strain in a complex cultural debate about poetry, a debate that entailed multiple voices and positions that would later fall out of literary history when the twilight narrative achieved institutional status as fact.Less