Henry B. Wonham
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195161946
- eISBN:
- 9780199788101
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195161946.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
This book asks why so many of the writers who aligned themselves with the social and aesthetic aims of American literary realism apparently violated their most basic principles in relying on stock ...
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This book asks why so many of the writers who aligned themselves with the social and aesthetic aims of American literary realism apparently violated their most basic principles in relying on stock conventions of ethnic caricature in their treatment of immigrant and African American figures. As a self-described “tool of the democratic spirit”, designed to “prick the bubbles of abstract types” (William Dean Howells), literary realism would seem to have little in common with the aggressively dehumanizing comic imagery that began to proliferate in American magazines and newspapers after the Civil War. Indeed, Howells touted the democratic impulse of realist imagery, and Alain Locke hailed realism's potential to accomplish “the artistic emancipation of the Negro”. Yet in practice, Howells and his fellow realists regularly employed comic typification of ethnic subjects as a feature of their representational practice. Critics have generally dismissed such lapses in realist technique as vestiges of a genteel social consciousness that failed to keep pace with the movement's avowed democratic aspirations. Such explanations are useful to a point, but they overlook the fact that the age of realism in American art and letters was simultaneously the great age of ethnic caricature. This book argues that these two aesthetic programs, one committed to representation of the fully humanized individual, the other invested in broad ethnic abstractions, operate less as antithetical choices than as complementary impulses, both of which receive full play within the era's most demanding literary and graphic works.Less
This book asks why so many of the writers who aligned themselves with the social and aesthetic aims of American literary realism apparently violated their most basic principles in relying on stock conventions of ethnic caricature in their treatment of immigrant and African American figures. As a self-described “tool of the democratic spirit”, designed to “prick the bubbles of abstract types” (William Dean Howells), literary realism would seem to have little in common with the aggressively dehumanizing comic imagery that began to proliferate in American magazines and newspapers after the Civil War. Indeed, Howells touted the democratic impulse of realist imagery, and Alain Locke hailed realism's potential to accomplish “the artistic emancipation of the Negro”. Yet in practice, Howells and his fellow realists regularly employed comic typification of ethnic subjects as a feature of their representational practice. Critics have generally dismissed such lapses in realist technique as vestiges of a genteel social consciousness that failed to keep pace with the movement's avowed democratic aspirations. Such explanations are useful to a point, but they overlook the fact that the age of realism in American art and letters was simultaneously the great age of ethnic caricature. This book argues that these two aesthetic programs, one committed to representation of the fully humanized individual, the other invested in broad ethnic abstractions, operate less as antithetical choices than as complementary impulses, both of which receive full play within the era's most demanding literary and graphic works.
Henry B. Wonham
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195161946
- eISBN:
- 9780199788101
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195161946.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
This chapter examines Charles Chesnutt's early sketches in Puck, theorizing that the magazine's insensitive treatment of every imaginable ethnic group or identity provided an important laboratory for ...
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This chapter examines Charles Chesnutt's early sketches in Puck, theorizing that the magazine's insensitive treatment of every imaginable ethnic group or identity provided an important laboratory for Chesnutt's apprenticeship in the art of ethnic caricature. Focusing on the radical juxtapositions of ethnic imagery throughout Puck's printed pages, this chapter suggests that Chesnutt's art is uniquely suited to the era's fascination with ethnic typology. Nevertheless, the chapter argues that the use of ethnic caricature by a writer of color produced its own forms of ambivalence.Less
This chapter examines Charles Chesnutt's early sketches in Puck, theorizing that the magazine's insensitive treatment of every imaginable ethnic group or identity provided an important laboratory for Chesnutt's apprenticeship in the art of ethnic caricature. Focusing on the radical juxtapositions of ethnic imagery throughout Puck's printed pages, this chapter suggests that Chesnutt's art is uniquely suited to the era's fascination with ethnic typology. Nevertheless, the chapter argues that the use of ethnic caricature by a writer of color produced its own forms of ambivalence.
Joanne Lipson Freed
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781501713767
- eISBN:
- 9781501713828
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501713767.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Beginning with the basic conviction that acts of cross-cultural reading have ethical consequences, Haunting Encounters traces the narrative strategies through which certain works fiction forge ...
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Beginning with the basic conviction that acts of cross-cultural reading have ethical consequences, Haunting Encounters traces the narrative strategies through which certain works fiction forge connections with their readers—in particular, their white, Western readers—across boundaries of difference. Through the formal and aesthetic negotiations they carry out, which both draw readers in and set limits on their imaginative engagements, these works respond in concrete ways to the asymmetries of their circulation and consumption in our contemporary global age. By bringing the tools and methods of rhetorical narrative theory to bear on well-known works of ethnic and postcolonial literature, Haunting Encounters revises existing models of narrative ethics—both those based on empathy, and those grounded in alterity—to account for the particular complications and stakes of staging cross-cultural encounters in and through fiction. Illustrating that both sameness and difference are essential elements of our ethical encounters with fictional texts, Haunting Encounters ultimately advocates for a practice of global, comparative literary analysis that is energized, rather than confounded, by this fundamental tension.Less
Beginning with the basic conviction that acts of cross-cultural reading have ethical consequences, Haunting Encounters traces the narrative strategies through which certain works fiction forge connections with their readers—in particular, their white, Western readers—across boundaries of difference. Through the formal and aesthetic negotiations they carry out, which both draw readers in and set limits on their imaginative engagements, these works respond in concrete ways to the asymmetries of their circulation and consumption in our contemporary global age. By bringing the tools and methods of rhetorical narrative theory to bear on well-known works of ethnic and postcolonial literature, Haunting Encounters revises existing models of narrative ethics—both those based on empathy, and those grounded in alterity—to account for the particular complications and stakes of staging cross-cultural encounters in and through fiction. Illustrating that both sameness and difference are essential elements of our ethical encounters with fictional texts, Haunting Encounters ultimately advocates for a practice of global, comparative literary analysis that is energized, rather than confounded, by this fundamental tension.
Jacob Rama Berman
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814789506
- eISBN:
- 9780814789513
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814789506.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This book examines representations of Arabs, Islam, and the Near East in nineteenth-century American culture, arguing that these representations play a significant role in the development of American ...
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This book examines representations of Arabs, Islam, and the Near East in nineteenth-century American culture, arguing that these representations play a significant role in the development of American national identity over the century, revealing largely unexplored exchanges between these two cultural traditions that will alter how we understand them today. Moving from the period of America's engagement in the Barbary Wars through the Holy Land travel mania in the years of Jacksonian expansion and into the writings of romantics such as Edgar Allan Poe, the book argues that not only were Arabs and Muslims prominently featured in nineteenth-century literature, but that the differences that writers established between figures such as Moors, Bedouins, Turks and Orientals provide proof of the transnational scope of domestic racial politics. Drawing on both English and Arabic language sources, the book contends that the fluidity and instability of the term Arab as it appears in captivity narratives, travel narratives, imaginative literature, and ethnic literature simultaneously instantiate and undermine definitions of the American nation and American citizenship.Less
This book examines representations of Arabs, Islam, and the Near East in nineteenth-century American culture, arguing that these representations play a significant role in the development of American national identity over the century, revealing largely unexplored exchanges between these two cultural traditions that will alter how we understand them today. Moving from the period of America's engagement in the Barbary Wars through the Holy Land travel mania in the years of Jacksonian expansion and into the writings of romantics such as Edgar Allan Poe, the book argues that not only were Arabs and Muslims prominently featured in nineteenth-century literature, but that the differences that writers established between figures such as Moors, Bedouins, Turks and Orientals provide proof of the transnational scope of domestic racial politics. Drawing on both English and Arabic language sources, the book contends that the fluidity and instability of the term Arab as it appears in captivity narratives, travel narratives, imaginative literature, and ethnic literature simultaneously instantiate and undermine definitions of the American nation and American citizenship.
Sara Upstone
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719078323
- eISBN:
- 9781781703229
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719078323.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
In his three novels, Season of the Rainbirds (1993), Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) and The Wasted Vigil (2008), Nadeem Aslam fuses conventional postcolonial themes and literary techniques with a ...
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In his three novels, Season of the Rainbirds (1993), Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) and The Wasted Vigil (2008), Nadeem Aslam fuses conventional postcolonial themes and literary techniques with a distinctly British sensibility. Born in Pakistan in 1966, he came with his parents to Britain at the age of fourteen, where the family settled in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, and has described himself as ‘a Pakistani man living in Britain’. Yet, elsewhere, Aslam is described as ‘Pakistani-British’. This personal history embodies his dual positioning as both British Asian and postcolonial migrant author. In many senses, Aslam, rather than embodying the qualities of British Asian literature, is part of the publishing storm surrounding postcolonial writers that developed in the 1990s. He is evidence of how, to consider British Asian authors simply in relation to an ethnic literature (whether defined as British Asian, Black British or postcolonial) is to neglect wider paradigms in contemporary literary fiction: not just British, but also international.Less
In his three novels, Season of the Rainbirds (1993), Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) and The Wasted Vigil (2008), Nadeem Aslam fuses conventional postcolonial themes and literary techniques with a distinctly British sensibility. Born in Pakistan in 1966, he came with his parents to Britain at the age of fourteen, where the family settled in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, and has described himself as ‘a Pakistani man living in Britain’. Yet, elsewhere, Aslam is described as ‘Pakistani-British’. This personal history embodies his dual positioning as both British Asian and postcolonial migrant author. In many senses, Aslam, rather than embodying the qualities of British Asian literature, is part of the publishing storm surrounding postcolonial writers that developed in the 1990s. He is evidence of how, to consider British Asian authors simply in relation to an ethnic literature (whether defined as British Asian, Black British or postcolonial) is to neglect wider paradigms in contemporary literary fiction: not just British, but also international.
Orm Øverland
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780195385342
- eISBN:
- 9780190252779
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780195385342.003.0014
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
This chapter examines American novels written in languages other than English and their place in American literature. It first considers the reasons why American writers have used languages other ...
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This chapter examines American novels written in languages other than English and their place in American literature. It first considers the reasons why American writers have used languages other than English, along with the differences between ethnic literature in English and in non-English languages. It then looks at examples of central themes in U.S. literary studies that may benefit from the inclusion of writing in languages other than the English language. It also discusses American novels in Norwegian that were published when sentiment against immigrants was flourishing. Finally, the chapter cites authors who have written novels in non-English languages, including Abraham Cahan, Ole Edvart Rølvaag, Emil Lauritz Mengshoel, and Ole A. Buslett.Less
This chapter examines American novels written in languages other than English and their place in American literature. It first considers the reasons why American writers have used languages other than English, along with the differences between ethnic literature in English and in non-English languages. It then looks at examples of central themes in U.S. literary studies that may benefit from the inclusion of writing in languages other than the English language. It also discusses American novels in Norwegian that were published when sentiment against immigrants was flourishing. Finally, the chapter cites authors who have written novels in non-English languages, including Abraham Cahan, Ole Edvart Rølvaag, Emil Lauritz Mengshoel, and Ole A. Buslett.
