David E. Shi
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195106534
- eISBN:
- 9780199854097
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195106534.003.0012
- Subject:
- History, History of Ideas
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 ...
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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
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.
Stephen Crane
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804775359
- eISBN:
- 9780804778459
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804775359.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
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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
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.
Katherine Biers
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816667543
- eISBN:
- 9781452946542
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816667543.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
John A Casey
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823265398
- eISBN:
- 9780823266708
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823265398.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
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 ...
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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
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.
Max Cavitch
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231156172
- eISBN:
- 9780231520775
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231156172.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
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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
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.
Michael T. Gilmore
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226294131
- eISBN:
- 9780226294155
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226294155.003.0015
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century 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, ...
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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 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.
Gregory Laski
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190642792
- eISBN:
- 9780190642815
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190642792.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature, African-American Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Pete Hulme
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846311802
- eISBN:
- 9781846315084
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781846311802.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
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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
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.
Marion Elizabeth Rodgers
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195072389
- eISBN:
- 9780199787982
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195072389.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Giorgio Mariani
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252039751
- eISBN:
- 9780252097850
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252039751.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century 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 ...
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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
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.”
Katherine Biers
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816667543
- eISBN:
- 9781452946542
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816667543.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This book offers a fresh view of the emergence of American literary modernism from the eruption of popular culture in the early twentieth century. Employing dynamic readings of the works of Stephen ...
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This book offers a fresh view of the emergence of American literary modernism from the eruption of popular culture in the early twentieth century. Employing dynamic readings of the works of Stephen Crane, Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein, it argues that American modernist writers developed a “poetics of the virtual” in response to the rise of mass communications technologies before World War I. These authors’ modernist formal experimentation was provoked by the immediate, individualistic pleasures and thrills of mass culture. But they also retained a faith in the representational power of language—and the worth of common experience—more characteristic of realism and naturalism. In competition with new media experiences such as movies and recorded music, they simultaneously rejected and embraced modernity. This book establishes the virtual poetics of these five writers as part of a larger “virtual turn” in the United States, when a fascination with the writings of Henri Bergson, William James, and vitalist philosophy—and the idea of virtual experience—swept the nation. The book contends that a turn to the virtual experience of language was a way for each of these authors to carve out a value for the literary, both with and against the growth of mass entertainments. This technologically inspired reengagement with experience was formative for American modernism.Less
This book offers a fresh view of the emergence of American literary modernism from the eruption of popular culture in the early twentieth century. Employing dynamic readings of the works of Stephen Crane, Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein, it argues that American modernist writers developed a “poetics of the virtual” in response to the rise of mass communications technologies before World War I. These authors’ modernist formal experimentation was provoked by the immediate, individualistic pleasures and thrills of mass culture. But they also retained a faith in the representational power of language—and the worth of common experience—more characteristic of realism and naturalism. In competition with new media experiences such as movies and recorded music, they simultaneously rejected and embraced modernity. This book establishes the virtual poetics of these five writers as part of a larger “virtual turn” in the United States, when a fascination with the writings of Henri Bergson, William James, and vitalist philosophy—and the idea of virtual experience—swept the nation. The book contends that a turn to the virtual experience of language was a way for each of these authors to carve out a value for the literary, both with and against the growth of mass entertainments. This technologically inspired reengagement with experience was formative for American modernism.
Cindy Weinstein and Christopher Looby (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231156172
- eISBN:
- 9780231520775
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231156172.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Rethinking the category of aesthetics in light of recent developments in literary theory and social criticism, this book showcases the interpretive possibilities available to those who bring ...
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Rethinking the category of aesthetics in light of recent developments in literary theory and social criticism, this book showcases the interpretive possibilities available to those who bring politics, culture, ideology, and conceptions of identity into their critiques. Chapters combine close readings of individual works and authors with more theoretical discussions of aesthetic theory and its relation to American literature. The introduction argues that aesthetics never left American literary critique. Instead, it casts the current “return to aesthetics” as the natural consequence of shortcomings in deconstruction and new historicism, which led to a reconfiguration of aesthetics. Subsequent chapters demonstrate the value and versatility of aesthetic considerations in literature, from eighteenth-century poetry to twentieth-century popular music. Organized into four groups—politics, form, gender, and theory—the chapters revisit the canonical works of Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Stephen Crane, introduce the overlooked texts of Constance Fenimore Woolson and Earl Lind, and unpack the complexities of the music of The Carpenters. Deeply rooted in an American context, the book explores literature's aesthetic dimensions in connection to American liberty and the formation of political selfhood.Less
Rethinking the category of aesthetics in light of recent developments in literary theory and social criticism, this book showcases the interpretive possibilities available to those who bring politics, culture, ideology, and conceptions of identity into their critiques. Chapters combine close readings of individual works and authors with more theoretical discussions of aesthetic theory and its relation to American literature. The introduction argues that aesthetics never left American literary critique. Instead, it casts the current “return to aesthetics” as the natural consequence of shortcomings in deconstruction and new historicism, which led to a reconfiguration of aesthetics. Subsequent chapters demonstrate the value and versatility of aesthetic considerations in literature, from eighteenth-century poetry to twentieth-century popular music. Organized into four groups—politics, form, gender, and theory—the chapters revisit the canonical works of Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Stephen Crane, introduce the overlooked texts of Constance Fenimore Woolson and Earl Lind, and unpack the complexities of the music of The Carpenters. Deeply rooted in an American context, the book explores literature's aesthetic dimensions in connection to American liberty and the formation of political selfhood.
Betsy Klimasmith
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780195385342
- eISBN:
- 9780190252779
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780195385342.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Mark Storey
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199893188
- eISBN:
- 9780199332793
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199893188.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century 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 ...
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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
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.
Kevin J. Hayes
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199862078
- eISBN:
- 9780190252892
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199862078.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature, American, 20th Century 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 ...
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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
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.
Amy G. Richter
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814769133
- eISBN:
- 9780814769157
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814769133.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
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 ...
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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
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.
Jane F. Thrailkill
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780195385342
- eISBN:
- 9780190252779
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780195385342.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846318207
- eISBN:
- 9781846317767
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846317767.003
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
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, ...
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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
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.
Elizabeth Renker
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- June 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198808787
- eISBN:
- 9780191863660
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198808787.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
