Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
Articles 1 - 7 of 7
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
The Short, Happy Life Of The California Partnership Tale, Tara Penry
The Short, Happy Life Of The California Partnership Tale, Tara Penry
Tara Penry
No abstract provided.
Bret Harte, Mark Twain And The Art Of Western Storytelling, Tara Penry
Bret Harte, Mark Twain And The Art Of Western Storytelling, Tara Penry
Tara Penry
Many clichés of the U.S. western mythos have been traced to nineteenth-century California writer Bret Harte, including the gambler, the prostitute with a heart of gold, and more. Harte's reputation languishes today largely because of his association with clichés. This lecture offers fresh reasons for appreciating this short-story writer and compares his vision of America and humanity with the vision of the friend-turned-detractor whose reputation outshines Harte's today: Mark Twain. The lecture provides some insight into how the Harte-Twain relationship might have contributed to Harte's eclipse. Enrollees may expect to leave the lecture ready to read both Harte and Twain …
"Tennessee's Partner" As Sentimental Western Metanarrative, Tara Penry
"Tennessee's Partner" As Sentimental Western Metanarrative, Tara Penry
Tara Penry
Published interpretations of Bret Harte's "Tennessee's Partner" (1869) differ widely, but most share a common expectation. Like the New Critics who once declared the story "oversimplified," even sympathetic readers agree that the key to understanding the tale must be explaining the title character's inscrutable motive.1 The story and its problem are well-known: Tennessee absconds with his partner's wife, and when the wife runs off with yet another man, the Partner welcomes Tennessee home in defiance of everyone's expectations. Puzzled by the Partner's loyalty, critics have tended to assume that the Partner must be a "realistic" narrative creation with a recognizable …
Book History Comes West, Tara Penry
Book History Comes West, Tara Penry
Tara Penry
As specialists defined it in the 1970s and '80s, "book history" was a field of inquiry with little connection to the American West. Following the lead of French academics, scholars of early modern English used the phrase "book history" to study the shift from manuscript to print in Europe. But others saw applications beyond Europe. By 1983, the Library of Congress and the American Antiquarian Society had established programs promoting the study of books as material objects in the United States. Despite the intent of these institutions to inspire national research, by the early 1990s, a group of scholars at …
Sketching California: The Ethnographic Work Of Gold Rush Literature, 1850--1870, Tara Penry
Sketching California: The Ethnographic Work Of Gold Rush Literature, 1850--1870, Tara Penry
Tara Penry
This study proposes reading small-press "regional" periodicals to discover a more diverse set of traditions in U.S. literary history. In particular, it compares the complex representations of western culture in the literary modes of Gold Rush California magazines with the simplified "local color" view of the west that northeastern magazines disseminated. Chapter one surveys Gold Rush demographics and the history of publishing and related institutions in California of the 1850s and '60s. In chapter two, the picturesque mode is shown to encourage immigration by portraying California as a worthy destination for people of taste. The sentimental mode (chapter 3) offers …
Manly Domesticity On The Gold Rush Frontier: Recovering California’S Honest Miner, Tara Penry
Manly Domesticity On The Gold Rush Frontier: Recovering California’S Honest Miner, Tara Penry
Tara Penry
When artist Charles Christian Nahl painted his now famous Sunday Morning in the Mines (1872) more than twenty years after the Gold Rush, the painting's comico-sentimental, or "Dickensian," quality and the figures of its "idle" and "industrious" miners were already commonplaces of California art and literature.1 Before even the young Bret Harte arrived in the San Fransisco Bay area in 1854, California periodicals had begun to represent miners as extreme types of either virtue or vice. According to one writer of 1853, mining camps had been dominated by "vileness and lawless conduct" and "the drunken revel," as pictured on …
Sentimental Eco-Memoir: Refuge, Hole In The Sky, And The Necessary Reader, Tara Penry
Sentimental Eco-Memoir: Refuge, Hole In The Sky, And The Necessary Reader, Tara Penry
Tara Penry
In the recent issue of Western American Literature devoted to the subject of "Western Autobiography and Memoir", a recurring theme asserts itself: according to the issue editors as well as several contributing essayists and reviewers, "the project of identity is relational," as demonstrated even in the autobiography of a Victorian cowboy.1 In making this claim, editors Kathleen Boardman and Gioia Woods join recent autobiographical critics in defining the genre's subject as "encumbered," not solitary or autonomous.2 In this regard, theorists of autobiography echo literary historians who are recovering a nineteenth-century sentimental tradition. The sentimental subject, according to critic Joanne Dobson, …