Michael T. Gilmore
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226294131
- eISBN:
- 9780226294155
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226294155.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
How did slavery and race impact American literature in the nineteenth century? This book argues that they were the carriers of linguistic restriction, and writers from Frederick Douglass to Stephen ...
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How did slavery and race impact American literature in the nineteenth century? This book argues that they were the carriers of linguistic restriction, and writers from Frederick Douglass to Stephen Crane wrestled with the demands for silence and circumspection that accompanied the antebellum fear of disunion and the postwar reconciliation between the North and South. Proposing a new interpretation of nineteenth-century American literature, this book examines struggles over permissible and impermissible utterance in works ranging from Thoreau's “Civil Disobedience” to Henry James's The Bostonians. Combining historical knowledge with readings of some of the classic texts of the American past, this book places Lincoln's Cooper Union address in the same constellation as Margaret Fuller's feminism and Thomas Dixon's defense of lynching. Arguing that slavery and race exerted coercive pressure on freedom of expression, the book offers here a transformative study that alters our understanding of nineteenth-century literary culture and its fraught engagement with the right to speak.Less
How did slavery and race impact American literature in the nineteenth century? This book argues that they were the carriers of linguistic restriction, and writers from Frederick Douglass to Stephen Crane wrestled with the demands for silence and circumspection that accompanied the antebellum fear of disunion and the postwar reconciliation between the North and South. Proposing a new interpretation of nineteenth-century American literature, this book examines struggles over permissible and impermissible utterance in works ranging from Thoreau's “Civil Disobedience” to Henry James's The Bostonians. Combining historical knowledge with readings of some of the classic texts of the American past, this book places Lincoln's Cooper Union address in the same constellation as Margaret Fuller's feminism and Thomas Dixon's defense of lynching. Arguing that slavery and race exerted coercive pressure on freedom of expression, the book offers here a transformative study that alters our understanding of nineteenth-century literary culture and its fraught engagement with the right to speak.
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/9780226294155.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
This Introduction presents a short history of nineteenth-century American literature. It discusses the profound effect of the Civil War and the formation of radically distinct cultures, the age of ...
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This Introduction presents a short history of nineteenth-century American literature. It discusses the profound effect of the Civil War and the formation of radically distinct cultures, the age of slavery, romanticism and the postwar period and reconstruction. It discusses the works of various writers including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville among others. It explores free speech and with how the atrophying of that right plays out in society and culture. The antebellum and postbellum eras are described, including the fiction, nonfiction, and poetry of major writers who confronted or, especially after the war, evaded the problem of free speech with respect to slavery and race. It focuses on the confrontations over hereditary bondage and the place of the ex-slaves in the polity because free speech was at the center of many conflicts.Less
This Introduction presents a short history of nineteenth-century American literature. It discusses the profound effect of the Civil War and the formation of radically distinct cultures, the age of slavery, romanticism and the postwar period and reconstruction. It discusses the works of various writers including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville among others. It explores free speech and with how the atrophying of that right plays out in society and culture. The antebellum and postbellum eras are described, including the fiction, nonfiction, and poetry of major writers who confronted or, especially after the war, evaded the problem of free speech with respect to slavery and race. It focuses on the confrontations over hereditary bondage and the place of the ex-slaves in the polity because free speech was at the center of many conflicts.
Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807835623
- eISBN:
- 9781469601830
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807882665_guthrie-shimizu
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
Baseball has joined America and Japan, even in times of strife, for over 150 years. After the “opening” of Japan by Commodore Perry, this book explains, baseball was introduced there by American ...
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Baseball has joined America and Japan, even in times of strife, for over 150 years. After the “opening” of Japan by Commodore Perry, this book explains, baseball was introduced there by American employees of the Japanese government tasked with bringing Western knowledge and technology to the country, and Japanese students in the United States soon became avid players. In the early twentieth century, visiting Japanese warships fielded teams that played against American teams, and a Negro League team arranged tours to Japan. By the 1930s, professional baseball was organized in Japan, where it continued to be played during and after World War II; it was even played in Japanese American internment camps in the United States during the war. From early on, the author argues, baseball carried American values to Japan, and by the mid-twentieth century, the sport had become emblematic of Japan's modernization and of America's growing influence in the Pacific world. The author contends that baseball provides unique insight into U.S.-Japanese relations during times of war and peace and, in fact, is central to understanding postwar reconciliation. In telling this often-surprising history, the book shines a light on globalization's unlikely, and at times accidental, participants.Less
Baseball has joined America and Japan, even in times of strife, for over 150 years. After the “opening” of Japan by Commodore Perry, this book explains, baseball was introduced there by American employees of the Japanese government tasked with bringing Western knowledge and technology to the country, and Japanese students in the United States soon became avid players. In the early twentieth century, visiting Japanese warships fielded teams that played against American teams, and a Negro League team arranged tours to Japan. By the 1930s, professional baseball was organized in Japan, where it continued to be played during and after World War II; it was even played in Japanese American internment camps in the United States during the war. From early on, the author argues, baseball carried American values to Japan, and by the mid-twentieth century, the sport had become emblematic of Japan's modernization and of America's growing influence in the Pacific world. The author contends that baseball provides unique insight into U.S.-Japanese relations during times of war and peace and, in fact, is central to understanding postwar reconciliation. In telling this often-surprising history, the book shines a light on globalization's unlikely, and at times accidental, participants.
