Arts and Humanities Commons^™

An Objective Aural-Relative In Middlemarch, Peter J. Capuano

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This article attempts to show that the grammar of perspective governing pictorial realism is less applicable to music because music exists in a place beyond language and because it requires fewer symbolic, re-presentational forms; it is closer to the essence of the thing itself. In “Notes on Form in Art” (1868), George Eliot writes that “boundary or outline and visual appearance are modes of Form which in music and poetry can only have a metaphorical presence.” George Eliot’s “battle ground of conflicting metaphors” then ceases to pose so much of a problem in the aural world of Middlemarch since conflicting …

Faulkner In The Fifties: The Making Of The Faulkner Canon, Roland K. Végső

Department of English: Faculty Publications

First three paragraphs:

As many commentators of the period noted, one of the most significant events of early post-war literary culture in the United States was William Faulkner’s sudden rise to international fame. The most extensive investigation of this dramatic revaluation of cultural status was carried out by Lawrence D. Schwartz in his Creating Faulkner’s Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism. Schwartz examines in detail the cultural and political processes that led to Faulkner’s discovery in the 1940s after the primarily negative reception of his works in the 1930s by leftist critics. He argues that Faulkner’s entry into …

Review Of Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience Among Antebellum New Englanders By Ronald J. Zboray And Mary Saracino Zboray, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Using letters written and diaries kept by 931 New Englanders living during the antebellum era, Ronald and Mary Zboray beneficially unsettle a number of grand narratives about readers and reading in the nineteenth-century United States. Since the influential work of theorist Rolf Engelsing, the turn from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century has been understood as the transition point from intensive reading and rereading of a select group of texts (such as the Bible) to extensive reading of many texts without rereading. Literary historians under the sway of Michel Foucault who have sought to chart the “rise of …

Review Of Willa Cather And Material Culture: Real-World Writing, Writing The Real World, Edited By Janis P. Stout, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In her essay "The Novel Démeublé," American novelist Willa Cather famously protested against the "over-furnished" modern novel, in which "material objects and their vivid presentation" have overtaken artistic vision and skill. In response, she advocates "throw[ing] all of the furniture out of the [novel's] window," leaving behind "the room bare as the stage of a Greek theatre.". In the introduction to this collection of essays and in many of the essays themselves, editor Janis Stout and the essays' authors refer to and rebut Cather's famous artistic manifesto through analyses of material objects in her fiction. Stout's introduction frames the collection …

Review Of Back To Nature: The Green And The Real In The Late Renaissance, By Robert N. Watson, Elizabeth Spiller

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Robert Watsons Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance identifies the Renaissance as the moment of an "absolutely fundamental change in its consensual interpretation of reality" (41). Fear that material reality obscures true knowledge ("things getting in the way of the Word") gave way to concern that words and other forms of human perception were key impediments to truth or knowledge ("words getting in the way of Things") (41). This decentering of medieval religious epistemology made itself felt across the arts and sciences of late Renaissance culture and brought with it a compensatory need to …

Literature In The Arid Zone, Thomas Lynch

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This chapter surveys and assesses from an ecocentric perspective some representative literary portrayals of the Australian deserts. Generally, it contrasts works that portray the desert as an alien, hostile, and undifferentiated void with works that recognise and value the biological particularities of specific desert places. It explores the literature of three dominant cultural orientations to the deserts: pastoralism, mining, and traversal. It concludes with a consideration of several multi-voiced and/or multi-genred bioregionally informed works that suggest fruitful directions for more ecocentric literary approaches.

Review Of Reclaiming Authorship: Literary Women In America, 1850-1900, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Like Naomi Z. Sofer's Making the America of Art (2005) and Anne E. Boyd's Writing for Immorality (2004), Susan Williams Reclaiming Authorship seeks to recreate and analyze how American women authors in the second half of the nineteenth century understood their own authorship. All three include Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Constance Fenimore Woolson as subjects, but Williams includes authors who did not conceive of their authorship in a high cultural mode (Maria Cummins, Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Abigail Dodge), and she traverses the careers of Alcott and Phelps so as to emphasize their movements in and out of …

Willa Cather [From The Oxford Encyclopedia Of Women In World History], Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

American novelist, Born in Virginia, Cather moved with her family to Nebraska in 1883 and is best known as a novelist of the American prairie. However, her life history and literary output belie this characterization. As a student at the University of Nebraska she published short stories and poems and worked as a journalist. This experience earned her a position at the Home Monthly magazine in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. When the magazine failed, she stayed in Pittsburgh, first returning to newspaper journalism and then teaching high school. For several years she lived in the family home of Isabelle McClung, a young …

Louisa May Alcott [From Oxford Encyclopedia Of Women In World History], Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

American fiction writer best known as the author of the girls’ novel Little Women (1868-1869). Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, to Abigail May Alcott and the progressive educator Bronson Alcott. The March family of Little Women was an idealized version of her own family, which was far less stable and more mobile. Alcott’s father’s idealistic education, and reform ventures regularly failed, necessitating the family’s frequent moves, and she and her mother increasingly provided the family’s economic support. Her childhood and adolescence were split primarily between Concord and Boston, Massachusetts, where she was deeply influenced by members of her father’s …

Introduction To Signet Classic's The Song Of The Lark By Willa Cather (2007), Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In May of 1912, Willa Cather traveled to Winslow, Arizona, to visit her brother, Douglass, who worked for the railroad. The year before, she had begun a leave of absence from McClure's Magazine, where she had been an editor since 1906, so that she could focus her energies on writing fiction. Although she had been publishing short fiction regularly since 1892, her first novel-the cosmopolitan, somewhat derivative Alexander's Bridge ‒ did not appear until 1912. Feeling tired and unwell, she, like many other Americans, sought renewal in the dry air and open spaces of the desert. After six years in …