Patrick Parrinder
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199264858
- eISBN:
- 9780191698989
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199264858.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The chapter discusses how historical romance emerged. Eighteenth-century fiction was mostly focused on the relationship between the gentry and other social classes. This chapter provides an analysis ...
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The chapter discusses how historical romance emerged. Eighteenth-century fiction was mostly focused on the relationship between the gentry and other social classes. This chapter provides an analysis of the works of Disraeli, Scott, and the other authors to explore the interplay of relationships among different characters that represent the social classes and their differences and similarities of ideas in terms of their belief in Romantic Toryism.Less
The chapter discusses how historical romance emerged. Eighteenth-century fiction was mostly focused on the relationship between the gentry and other social classes. This chapter provides an analysis of the works of Disraeli, Scott, and the other authors to explore the interplay of relationships among different characters that represent the social classes and their differences and similarities of ideas in terms of their belief in Romantic Toryism.
Jonathan P. J. Stock
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197262733
- eISBN:
- 9780191734502
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197262733.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music
China has over three hundred distinct styles of music drama, from exorcism theatre to farce, historical romance, and shadow puppetry. This study considers one of the newer operatic forms. Established ...
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China has over three hundred distinct styles of music drama, from exorcism theatre to farce, historical romance, and shadow puppetry. This study considers one of the newer operatic forms. Established just two centuries ago, huju (Shanghai opera), is renowned for its portrayal of ordinary people, not the emperors, courtesans, and heroes of older forms. Acting and make-up aim for realism rather than symbolism, and stories deal with contemporaneous themes: the struggles of lovers to marry, women's rights after the Communist revolution (1949), and life under the new social order established by Deng Xiaoping's reforms in the 1980s. Music ranges from local folksong to syncretic adoptions of Western popular music. Adding to his extensive research on Chinese music, the author's eighteen months of fieldwork in Shanghai have allowed him to interweave material from historical reports, sound recordings, live performance, and first-hand accounts of three generations of singers into a study of a unique Chinese opera form seen equally as historical tradition, venue for social action, and forum for musical creativity. Assessing first the roots of huju in local folksong and ballad, he looks at the enduring role of emotional expressivity. The text then focuses on the rise of actresses, laying out a ‘musical’ reading of gendered performance.Less
China has over three hundred distinct styles of music drama, from exorcism theatre to farce, historical romance, and shadow puppetry. This study considers one of the newer operatic forms. Established just two centuries ago, huju (Shanghai opera), is renowned for its portrayal of ordinary people, not the emperors, courtesans, and heroes of older forms. Acting and make-up aim for realism rather than symbolism, and stories deal with contemporaneous themes: the struggles of lovers to marry, women's rights after the Communist revolution (1949), and life under the new social order established by Deng Xiaoping's reforms in the 1980s. Music ranges from local folksong to syncretic adoptions of Western popular music. Adding to his extensive research on Chinese music, the author's eighteen months of fieldwork in Shanghai have allowed him to interweave material from historical reports, sound recordings, live performance, and first-hand accounts of three generations of singers into a study of a unique Chinese opera form seen equally as historical tradition, venue for social action, and forum for musical creativity. Assessing first the roots of huju in local folksong and ballad, he looks at the enduring role of emotional expressivity. The text then focuses on the rise of actresses, laying out a ‘musical’ reading of gendered performance.
Andrew Lincoln
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748626069
- eISBN:
- 9780748651870
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748626069.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter reviews some aspects of Scott's fiction, specifically its historical perspective and accuracy, and discusses the concept of the romance of disinterested virtue, as well as Scott's ...
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This chapter reviews some aspects of Scott's fiction, specifically its historical perspective and accuracy, and discusses the concept of the romance of disinterested virtue, as well as Scott's representations of the triumph of virtue. It then identifies certain developments in nineteenth-century culture that affected Scott's romance fiction, and ends by determining that Scott's contradictory historical romance should be more of a complicated response to uncertain times instead of a retreat into nostalgia.Less
This chapter reviews some aspects of Scott's fiction, specifically its historical perspective and accuracy, and discusses the concept of the romance of disinterested virtue, as well as Scott's representations of the triumph of virtue. It then identifies certain developments in nineteenth-century culture that affected Scott's romance fiction, and ends by determining that Scott's contradictory historical romance should be more of a complicated response to uncertain times instead of a retreat into nostalgia.
Michelle Sizemore
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- November 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190627539
- eISBN:
- 9780190627553
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190627539.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature
This chapter advances a new understanding of the historical romance as a medium for constituting the people via the readerly experience of enchantment. The motif of vanishing in the revolutionary ...
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This chapter advances a new understanding of the historical romance as a medium for constituting the people via the readerly experience of enchantment. The motif of vanishing in the revolutionary romance, a generic subcategory, signals the absent historical present and the related challenge of representing the people in process. Contrary to a long tradition of literary criticism, the chapter argues that the genre of historical romance seeks to trace out the historical present amid lived conditions of uncertainty. In William Austin’s “Peter Rugg, the Missing Man” (1824) and Catharine Sedgwick’s The Linwoods (1835), two different forms of enchantment (supernatural and affective; the latter is The Linwood’s version of eros) serve as diagnostics on the present, as does the genre’s simultaneous prediction of the future and recreation of the past.Less
This chapter advances a new understanding of the historical romance as a medium for constituting the people via the readerly experience of enchantment. The motif of vanishing in the revolutionary romance, a generic subcategory, signals the absent historical present and the related challenge of representing the people in process. Contrary to a long tradition of literary criticism, the chapter argues that the genre of historical romance seeks to trace out the historical present amid lived conditions of uncertainty. In William Austin’s “Peter Rugg, the Missing Man” (1824) and Catharine Sedgwick’s The Linwoods (1835), two different forms of enchantment (supernatural and affective; the latter is The Linwood’s version of eros) serve as diagnostics on the present, as does the genre’s simultaneous prediction of the future and recreation of the past.
Gretchen J. Woertendyke
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- June 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780190212278
- eISBN:
- 9780190212292
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190212278.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
In the first decades of the nineteenth century, venues such as the North American Review repeatedly called for a writer who could do justice to the nation through literature. It was not until Walter ...
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In the first decades of the nineteenth century, venues such as the North American Review repeatedly called for a writer who could do justice to the nation through literature. It was not until Walter Scott’s publications travelled across the Atlantic that American writers had the language and landscape to produce a fundamentally national literature in the historical romance. Only through the innovations of the Scottish writer did the hemispheric energies, which remain on the surface of the gothic and popular forms, assimilate into the regionalist energies of the historical romance and its more overtly national impulses. In some ways, Walter Scott’s fiction and its circulation in the United States created the conditions of possibility for the literary nationalism that critics of the time eagerly cried out for. His fictions mapped out a new kind of romance in which the long arc of history culminated in the nation’s contemporary moment.Less
In the first decades of the nineteenth century, venues such as the North American Review repeatedly called for a writer who could do justice to the nation through literature. It was not until Walter Scott’s publications travelled across the Atlantic that American writers had the language and landscape to produce a fundamentally national literature in the historical romance. Only through the innovations of the Scottish writer did the hemispheric energies, which remain on the surface of the gothic and popular forms, assimilate into the regionalist energies of the historical romance and its more overtly national impulses. In some ways, Walter Scott’s fiction and its circulation in the United States created the conditions of possibility for the literary nationalism that critics of the time eagerly cried out for. His fictions mapped out a new kind of romance in which the long arc of history culminated in the nation’s contemporary moment.
Ina Ferris
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- June 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780199574803
- eISBN:
- 9780191869747
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780199574803.003.0016
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
This chapter looks at historical romance. Late eighteenth-century historiography began to expand its purview to unofficial spheres of social, cultural, and private life typically cultivated by ...
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This chapter looks at historical romance. Late eighteenth-century historiography began to expand its purview to unofficial spheres of social, cultural, and private life typically cultivated by informal genres such as memoirs, biographies, and novels. The ‘matter’ of history was being increasingly redefined, and this had two key effects that bear on the question of historical romance. First, the ‘reframing’ of the historical field generated a marked reciprocity among the different historical genres in the literary field, as they borrowed material and tactics from one another; second, it led to a splintering albeit not displacement of ‘general’ history, as new branches of history writing took shape, notably that of literary history as a distinct form of history. Hence romance now denoted not only the realm of ‘fancy’ but a superseded literary form of renewed interest in the rethinking of the national past.Less
This chapter looks at historical romance. Late eighteenth-century historiography began to expand its purview to unofficial spheres of social, cultural, and private life typically cultivated by informal genres such as memoirs, biographies, and novels. The ‘matter’ of history was being increasingly redefined, and this had two key effects that bear on the question of historical romance. First, the ‘reframing’ of the historical field generated a marked reciprocity among the different historical genres in the literary field, as they borrowed material and tactics from one another; second, it led to a splintering albeit not displacement of ‘general’ history, as new branches of history writing took shape, notably that of literary history as a distinct form of history. Hence romance now denoted not only the realm of ‘fancy’ but a superseded literary form of renewed interest in the rethinking of the national past.
Sharada Balachandran Orihuela
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781469640921
- eISBN:
- 9781469640938
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469640921.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter examines the ways early nineteenth century authors framed piracy as an instrument of state growth, anti-colonial resistance, as well as a rationale for imperial expansion and ...
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This chapter examines the ways early nineteenth century authors framed piracy as an instrument of state growth, anti-colonial resistance, as well as a rationale for imperial expansion and intervention in the Americas in William Gilmore Simms’s The Yemassee (1835), John Brougham’s 1857 play Columbus, El Filibustero!, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Red Rover: A Tale (1829) and The Water Witch; or, The Skimmer of the Seas (1830), as well as El Filibustero: Novela Historica (1864), written by Yucatec author Eligio Ancona. In a climate of rapid national expansion, nineteenth century authors used the pirate as a central character to plot national(ist) narratives. Given piracy’s relationship to both state-building and anti-colonial enterprises, as well as piracy’s capacity to both facilitate and threaten property ownership, piracy helps us understand the radical and repressive regimes of American power. The historical novels examined in this chapter are interested in the shadowy origins of the American nation-state, as much as they are with the potentially conflicted present and future of these nation-states.Less
This chapter examines the ways early nineteenth century authors framed piracy as an instrument of state growth, anti-colonial resistance, as well as a rationale for imperial expansion and intervention in the Americas in William Gilmore Simms’s The Yemassee (1835), John Brougham’s 1857 play Columbus, El Filibustero!, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Red Rover: A Tale (1829) and The Water Witch; or, The Skimmer of the Seas (1830), as well as El Filibustero: Novela Historica (1864), written by Yucatec author Eligio Ancona. In a climate of rapid national expansion, nineteenth century authors used the pirate as a central character to plot national(ist) narratives. Given piracy’s relationship to both state-building and anti-colonial enterprises, as well as piracy’s capacity to both facilitate and threaten property ownership, piracy helps us understand the radical and repressive regimes of American power. The historical novels examined in this chapter are interested in the shadowy origins of the American nation-state, as much as they are with the potentially conflicted present and future of these nation-states.
Sharada Balachandran Orihuela
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781469640921
- eISBN:
- 9781469640938
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469640921.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
Though the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) ostensibly extended American citizenship to the Mexican landed class at the conclusion of the Mexican American War and ensured their property rights ...
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Though the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) ostensibly extended American citizenship to the Mexican landed class at the conclusion of the Mexican American War and ensured their property rights despite the transfer of land to the U.S., they were nonetheless stripped of formal claims to their property and forced to enter into lengthy and costly legal battles to regain possession of these ranches. Hidalgos had to compete with Anglo agricultural settlers (or squatters), as well as with the railroad barons looking to expand railways in the newly annexed territories. Women are able to best navigate the unstable political economy of the borderlands through the act of squatting, understood broadly to mean the settlement of “unoccupied” land. Read alongside the significant historical events including various land laws and pre-emption acts of the mid-nineteenth century, hidalgo women perform forms of ownership that upend the racialized and gendered logics of citizenship, and the intimate ties between property and rights. The Squatter and the Don recasts the “problem” of Mexican land occupation as U.S. anxiety over territorial expansion and colonization made more complex by the presence of differently racialized populations along the borderlands.Less
Though the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) ostensibly extended American citizenship to the Mexican landed class at the conclusion of the Mexican American War and ensured their property rights despite the transfer of land to the U.S., they were nonetheless stripped of formal claims to their property and forced to enter into lengthy and costly legal battles to regain possession of these ranches. Hidalgos had to compete with Anglo agricultural settlers (or squatters), as well as with the railroad barons looking to expand railways in the newly annexed territories. Women are able to best navigate the unstable political economy of the borderlands through the act of squatting, understood broadly to mean the settlement of “unoccupied” land. Read alongside the significant historical events including various land laws and pre-emption acts of the mid-nineteenth century, hidalgo women perform forms of ownership that upend the racialized and gendered logics of citizenship, and the intimate ties between property and rights. The Squatter and the Don recasts the “problem” of Mexican land occupation as U.S. anxiety over territorial expansion and colonization made more complex by the presence of differently racialized populations along the borderlands.
Hsuan L. Hsu
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781479880416
- eISBN:
- 9781479843404
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479880416.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter examines Mark Twain's imagined encounter with modernized Chinese missionaries to the United States by reading his writings alongside the antiracist and anti-imperialist discourses ...
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This chapter examines Mark Twain's imagined encounter with modernized Chinese missionaries to the United States by reading his writings alongside the antiracist and anti-imperialist discourses produced by two Chinese diasporic writers, Yung Wing and Wong Chin Foo. It first analyzes Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court as both a satire of specific instances of Western imperialism (including in China) and a critical engagement with the emergent genre of historical romance. It then juxtaposes A Connecticut Yankee with two instances of Chinese modernization: Yung Wing's Chinese Educational Mission and Wong Chin Foo's novel Wu Chih Tien. It argues that Twain's long-standing interest in China's relations with the United States provides significant points of reference for A Connecticut Yankee's critical representations of colonial governance and education.Less
This chapter examines Mark Twain's imagined encounter with modernized Chinese missionaries to the United States by reading his writings alongside the antiracist and anti-imperialist discourses produced by two Chinese diasporic writers, Yung Wing and Wong Chin Foo. It first analyzes Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court as both a satire of specific instances of Western imperialism (including in China) and a critical engagement with the emergent genre of historical romance. It then juxtaposes A Connecticut Yankee with two instances of Chinese modernization: Yung Wing's Chinese Educational Mission and Wong Chin Foo's novel Wu Chih Tien. It argues that Twain's long-standing interest in China's relations with the United States provides significant points of reference for A Connecticut Yankee's critical representations of colonial governance and education.
Lloyd Pratt
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781479857722
- eISBN:
- 9781479818334
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479857722.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter uses Edward P. Jones' The Known World—a twenty-first-century novel about slave ownership among African Americans—as a launching pad in discussing the possibilities of historical ...
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This chapter uses Edward P. Jones' The Known World—a twenty-first-century novel about slave ownership among African Americans—as a launching pad in discussing the possibilities of historical totality. It questions whether the absences inherent to archival practices concerning slaveholding in the Americas constitute an obstacle to the possibility of totality. Due to its perception of a way across the gaps of the historical record, the chapter locates resources in the African American historical romance, whose emphasis on human relationships resists the overcomplication of historical truth known as reification. In this way, the historical romance finds the necessity of speculation about the past not only an obstacle but a positive gain.Less
This chapter uses Edward P. Jones' The Known World—a twenty-first-century novel about slave ownership among African Americans—as a launching pad in discussing the possibilities of historical totality. It questions whether the absences inherent to archival practices concerning slaveholding in the Americas constitute an obstacle to the possibility of totality. Due to its perception of a way across the gaps of the historical record, the chapter locates resources in the African American historical romance, whose emphasis on human relationships resists the overcomplication of historical truth known as reification. In this way, the historical romance finds the necessity of speculation about the past not only an obstacle but a positive gain.
Lee Spinks
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719066320
- eISBN:
- 9781781703113
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719066320.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter studies Ondaatje's long poem, the highly successful The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, stating that this volume served as a turning point in Ondaatje's career, and focusing on Billy ...
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This chapter studies Ondaatje's long poem, the highly successful The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, stating that this volume served as a turning point in Ondaatje's career, and focusing on Billy the Kid's final outlaw year on the New Mexico frontier. It shows that Billy the Kid combines a wide range of different registers, including historical romance and oral anecdote. The chapter then discusses Ondaatje's intertextual vision of Billy's legend, as well as its similarities with the genre of ‘historiographic metafiction’. It determines that Ondaatje's true interest in this novel was the hint of a vision unconstrained by social norms or a moral image of life.Less
This chapter studies Ondaatje's long poem, the highly successful The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, stating that this volume served as a turning point in Ondaatje's career, and focusing on Billy the Kid's final outlaw year on the New Mexico frontier. It shows that Billy the Kid combines a wide range of different registers, including historical romance and oral anecdote. The chapter then discusses Ondaatje's intertextual vision of Billy's legend, as well as its similarities with the genre of ‘historiographic metafiction’. It determines that Ondaatje's true interest in this novel was the hint of a vision unconstrained by social norms or a moral image of life.
Michele Loporcaro
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199656554
- eISBN:
- 9780191779749
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199656554.001.0001
- Subject:
- Linguistics, Historical Linguistics, Phonetics / Phonology
The book provides a global reappraisal of a central topic of Romance historical linguistics: the development of vowel length from Latin to the Romance languages and dialects. In Latin, vowel length ...
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The book provides a global reappraisal of a central topic of Romance historical linguistics: the development of vowel length from Latin to the Romance languages and dialects. In Latin, vowel length was contrastive (e.g. mălus ‘bad’ vs mālus ‘apple tree’) but no daughter language has inherited that contrast, though several have established novel vowel length distinctions at different stages of their history and in different ways. While all of these developments deserve attention, the main question the book focuses on is whether a historical link can be established between at least some of the length contrasts documented throughout Romance, today or in the past, and Latin distinctive vowel quantity. The answer is in the positive: the best reconstruction of the rise of contrastive vowel length in Romance varieties displaying that property (nowadays or in the past), scattered over the central–northern part of the Romance-speaking territory from the Apennines to the North Sea (sometimes dubbed Northern Romance), is one in which this is analysed as a diachronic successor of a Proto-Romance open syllable lengthening process, the rise of which can be in turn held responsible for the loss of Classical Latin contrastive vowel length. This conclusion is reached through the sifting of evidence from several diverse categories: in addition to analysing written sources, which yield insights into the phonology of Latin at different epochs and into past stages of the Romance languages, the book fully exploits modern dialect variation—which we can (trivially) study in more detail than past stages—as a resource for linguistic reconstruction.Less
The book provides a global reappraisal of a central topic of Romance historical linguistics: the development of vowel length from Latin to the Romance languages and dialects. In Latin, vowel length was contrastive (e.g. mălus ‘bad’ vs mālus ‘apple tree’) but no daughter language has inherited that contrast, though several have established novel vowel length distinctions at different stages of their history and in different ways. While all of these developments deserve attention, the main question the book focuses on is whether a historical link can be established between at least some of the length contrasts documented throughout Romance, today or in the past, and Latin distinctive vowel quantity. The answer is in the positive: the best reconstruction of the rise of contrastive vowel length in Romance varieties displaying that property (nowadays or in the past), scattered over the central–northern part of the Romance-speaking territory from the Apennines to the North Sea (sometimes dubbed Northern Romance), is one in which this is analysed as a diachronic successor of a Proto-Romance open syllable lengthening process, the rise of which can be in turn held responsible for the loss of Classical Latin contrastive vowel length. This conclusion is reached through the sifting of evidence from several diverse categories: in addition to analysing written sources, which yield insights into the phonology of Latin at different epochs and into past stages of the Romance languages, the book fully exploits modern dialect variation—which we can (trivially) study in more detail than past stages—as a resource for linguistic reconstruction.
Stephanie Brown
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781604739732
- eISBN:
- 9781604739749
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781604739732.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
Americans in the World War II era bought the novels of African American writers in unprecedented numbers. However, the names on the books lining shelves and filling barracks trunks were not the ...
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Americans in the World War II era bought the novels of African American writers in unprecedented numbers. However, the names on the books lining shelves and filling barracks trunks were not the now-familiar Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, but Frank Yerby, Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith, and J. Saunders Redding. This book recovers the work of these innovative novelists, overturning conventional wisdom about the writers of the period and the trajectory of African American literary history. The book also questions the assumptions about the relations between race and genre that have obscured the importance of these once-influential creators. Wright’s Native Son is typically considered to have inaugurated an era of social realism in African American literature. Ellison’s Invisible Man has been cast as both a high mark of American modernism and the only worthy stopover on the way to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. However, readers in the late 1940s purchased enough copies of Yerby’s historical romances to make him the best-selling African American author of all time. Critics, meanwhile, were taking note of the generic experiments of Redding, Himes, and Smith, while the authors themselves questioned the obligation of black authors to write protest, instead penning campus novels, war novels, and, in Yerby’s case, “costume dramas.” Their status as “lesser lights” is the product of retrospective bias, the book demonstrates.Less
Americans in the World War II era bought the novels of African American writers in unprecedented numbers. However, the names on the books lining shelves and filling barracks trunks were not the now-familiar Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, but Frank Yerby, Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith, and J. Saunders Redding. This book recovers the work of these innovative novelists, overturning conventional wisdom about the writers of the period and the trajectory of African American literary history. The book also questions the assumptions about the relations between race and genre that have obscured the importance of these once-influential creators. Wright’s Native Son is typically considered to have inaugurated an era of social realism in African American literature. Ellison’s Invisible Man has been cast as both a high mark of American modernism and the only worthy stopover on the way to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. However, readers in the late 1940s purchased enough copies of Yerby’s historical romances to make him the best-selling African American author of all time. Critics, meanwhile, were taking note of the generic experiments of Redding, Himes, and Smith, while the authors themselves questioned the obligation of black authors to write protest, instead penning campus novels, war novels, and, in Yerby’s case, “costume dramas.” Their status as “lesser lights” is the product of retrospective bias, the book demonstrates.
Joseph J. Letter
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780195385359
- eISBN:
- 9780190252786
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780195385359.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature
This chapter focuses on the Revolutionary novel written between 1820 and 1850, with emphasis on its “supplemental” relation to the American historical romance and to literary nationalism. As a genre, ...
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This chapter focuses on the Revolutionary novel written between 1820 and 1850, with emphasis on its “supplemental” relation to the American historical romance and to literary nationalism. As a genre, Revolutionary novels countered the national narrative of progress with local stories that served as reminders of the nation’s fragmented and conflicted Revolutionary past. They used the American Revolution to negotiate the complex and various historical legacies of the individual states, while giving literary form to the very wounds of history that literary nationalists attempted to deny or ignore as sectional conflicts gradually led the country toward the Civil War. The Revolutionary novel tackled mourning and loss as opposed to the optimism of national progress. It also personified historical ruin, as exemplified by works such as James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821) and John Neal’s Seventy-Six (1823).Less
This chapter focuses on the Revolutionary novel written between 1820 and 1850, with emphasis on its “supplemental” relation to the American historical romance and to literary nationalism. As a genre, Revolutionary novels countered the national narrative of progress with local stories that served as reminders of the nation’s fragmented and conflicted Revolutionary past. They used the American Revolution to negotiate the complex and various historical legacies of the individual states, while giving literary form to the very wounds of history that literary nationalists attempted to deny or ignore as sectional conflicts gradually led the country toward the Civil War. The Revolutionary novel tackled mourning and loss as opposed to the optimism of national progress. It also personified historical ruin, as exemplified by works such as James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821) and John Neal’s Seventy-Six (1823).
Michelle Sizemore
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- November 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190627539
- eISBN:
- 9780190627553
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190627539.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature
The conclusion proposes an alternative to historicism informed by the growing body of work in nineteenth-century American time studies. New approaches need to explore temporalities and temporal ...
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The conclusion proposes an alternative to historicism informed by the growing body of work in nineteenth-century American time studies. New approaches need to explore temporalities and temporal frameworks different from the standard linear chronology employed in historicist criticism. Drawing on Catharine Sedgwick’s The Linwoods, the conclusion advances one such temporal framework (future-passing) and a complementary mode of reading (anticipatory reading) as directions for historicist revisionism. Both future-passing and anticipatory reading emerge from the genre of historical romance, offering possibilities for genre study, and more ambitiously, for literary history.Less
The conclusion proposes an alternative to historicism informed by the growing body of work in nineteenth-century American time studies. New approaches need to explore temporalities and temporal frameworks different from the standard linear chronology employed in historicist criticism. Drawing on Catharine Sedgwick’s The Linwoods, the conclusion advances one such temporal framework (future-passing) and a complementary mode of reading (anticipatory reading) as directions for historicist revisionism. Both future-passing and anticipatory reading emerge from the genre of historical romance, offering possibilities for genre study, and more ambitiously, for literary history.
Leonard Cassuto
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780195385342
- eISBN:
- 9780190252779
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780195385342.003.0020
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
This chapter focuses on American bestsellers published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with particular emphasis on the distinction between “bestselling novels” and novels that ...
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This chapter focuses on American bestsellers published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with particular emphasis on the distinction between “bestselling novels” and novels that sell a lot of copies. It first provides a historical background on the role of the bestseller in print culture before discussing the factors that turn a novel into a bestseller, along with the blurring of the distinction between sentimentalism and historical romance. It then considers novels that embrace topical controversies, especially those involving social debates, together with two main ideologies that provided structural support for bestselling novels during the period: sentimentalism and evolution. The chapter also examines the Western as a bestselling genre. Finally, it cites some examples of bestselling novels, including James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Mary Johnston's To Have and to Hold (1900), Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (1936).Less
This chapter focuses on American bestsellers published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with particular emphasis on the distinction between “bestselling novels” and novels that sell a lot of copies. It first provides a historical background on the role of the bestseller in print culture before discussing the factors that turn a novel into a bestseller, along with the blurring of the distinction between sentimentalism and historical romance. It then considers novels that embrace topical controversies, especially those involving social debates, together with two main ideologies that provided structural support for bestselling novels during the period: sentimentalism and evolution. The chapter also examines the Western as a bestselling genre. Finally, it cites some examples of bestselling novels, including James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Mary Johnston's To Have and to Hold (1900), Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (1936).
Monika Elbert
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780195385359
- eISBN:
- 9780190252786
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780195385359.003.0020
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature
This chapter offers a reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 historical fiction The Scarlet Letter: A Romance. It first considers Henry James’s opinion of The Scarlet Letter before discussing the ...
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This chapter offers a reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 historical fiction The Scarlet Letter: A Romance. It first considers Henry James’s opinion of The Scarlet Letter before discussing the “American” qualities attached to the novel and the darkness associated with its appeal. It then examines why The Scarlet Letter has become a great piece of American literature despite its themes of sinfulness, law, and unjust punishment. It also analyzes Hawthorne’s decision to take on the challenge of writing the historical romance before concluding with an assessment of criticisms against Hawthorne’s morality and politics.Less
This chapter offers a reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 historical fiction The Scarlet Letter: A Romance. It first considers Henry James’s opinion of The Scarlet Letter before discussing the “American” qualities attached to the novel and the darkness associated with its appeal. It then examines why The Scarlet Letter has become a great piece of American literature despite its themes of sinfulness, law, and unjust punishment. It also analyzes Hawthorne’s decision to take on the challenge of writing the historical romance before concluding with an assessment of criticisms against Hawthorne’s morality and politics.
