English Language and Literature Commons^™

American Literary Studies: A Methodological Reader, Michael Elliott, Claudia Stokes

Claudia Stokes

American Literary Studies: A Methodological Reader gathers together leading scholars of American literature to address the questions of methodology that have invigorated and divided their field: the rise of interdisciplinarity and the wealth of theoretical methods now available to the critic of American literature. Their engagement with these issues takes a unique form in this book: Each scholar has chosen a methodologically innovative essay, which he or she then introduces, explaining why it is both exemplary in its approach and central to the issues that most engage American literary scholarship today. The book includes both an introduction to the controversial …

Writers In Retrospect: The Rise Of American Literary History, 1875-1910, Claudia Stokes

Claudia Stokes

In the aftermath of America's centennial celebrations of 1876, readers developed an appetite for chronicles of the nation's past. Born amid this national vogue, the field of American literary history was touted as the balm for numerous "ills"—from burgeoning immigration to American anti-intellectualism to demanding university administrators—and enjoyed immense popularity between 1880 and 1910. In the first major analysis of the field's early decades, Claudia Stokes offers important insights into the practices, beliefs, and values that shaped the emerging discipline and have continued to shape it for the last century. She considers particular personalities—including Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Dean Howells, …

The Poetics Of Unoriginality: The Case Of Lucretia Davidson, Claudia Stokes

Claudia Stokes

The Social Uses of Conventionality: Lucretia Davidson’s Poetics of Unoriginality

Literary conventionality and unoriginality have long been presumed to be markers of lesser literary quality. Scholars of women’s literature have argued that this assumption enabled the denigration of nineteenth-century American women writers, many of whose works markedly adhered to literary convention and evaded innovation. Following the work of such critics as Eliza Richards and Virginia Jackson in unearthing the contemporary literary contexts that framed female literary conventionality, this essay argues that the writings of Lucretia Davidson, an enormously popular poet, provides an important data point in our understandings of the …

Literary Retrospection In The Harlem Renaissance, Claudia Stokes

Claudia Stokes

In 1925, book collector and Harlem Renaissance patron Arthur A. Schomburg began the essay "The Negro Digs Up His Past," published in Alain Locke's landmark anthology The New Negro (1925), by proclaiming that the "American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future. ... So among the rising democratic millions we find the Negro thinking more collectively, more retrospectively than the rest, and opt out of the very pressure of the present to become the most enthusiastic antiquarian of them all" (231). These words might be surprising to the beginning student of the Harlem Renaissance, seduced by …

In Defense Of Genius: Howells And The Limits Of Literary History, Claudia Stokes

Claudia Stokes

In early 1886, William Dean Howells fell into an ugly public debate with the poet and critic Edmund Clarence Stedman. Carried out in the pages of Harper’s Monthly and the New Princeton Review, this dispute started as a disagreement about the origins of literary craftsmanship but quickly escalated into a heated epistemological squabble about the limits of historical knowledge. It began in March of that year, when Howells gave a mixed review to Stedman’s Poets of America (1885), a history of American poetry. Though Howells conceded the importance of Stedman’s contribution to the emerging discipline of American literary history, he …

These Days Of Large Things: The Culture Of Size In America, 1865-1930 [Review], Claudia Stokes

Claudia Stokes

In These Days of Large Things: The Culture of Size in America, 1865–1930, Michael Tavel Clarke examines the Progressive Era preoccupation with size. As Clarke argues with considerable evidence, largeness was widely interpreted in this period (and, indeed, in our own) to denote progress and advancement while smallness in turn signified degeneracy and unwholesomeness. This pervasive and enduring schema, Clarke shows, had its roots in American expansionism and imperialism, enterprises underwritten by the interlocking beliefs that bigger is better and that superiority must be physically manifest.

Copyrighting American History: International Copyright And The Periodization Of The Nineteenth Century, Claudia Stokes

Claudia Stokes

With the publication in 1930 of the third and final volume of his Main Currents in American Thought, Vernon Parrington gave singular shape and force to an already established paradigm of the American nineteenth century as two discrete eras, hinged politically and culturally by the Civil War. After 1865, goes the familiar narrative, the Boston Brahmins and their ‘‘love of standards’’ were unseated by itinerant, gritty, self-made writers based in New York. For Parrington, this literary restaging of the American Revolution, in which Old World aristocratic power fell at the hands of an American populism, was best exemplified by …

In Defense Of Genius: Howells And The Limits Of Literary History, Claudia Stokes

Claudia Stokes

In early 1886, William Dean Howells fell into an ugly public debate with the poet and critic Edmund Clarence Stedman. Carried out in the pages of Harper’s Monthly and the New Princeton Review, this dispute started as a disagreement about the origins of literary craftsmanship but quickly escalated into a heated epistemological squabble about the limits of historical knowledge. It began in March of that year, when Howells gave a mixed review to Stedman’s Poets of America (1885), a history of American poetry. Though Howells conceded the importance of Stedman’s contribution to the emerging discipline of American literary history, …

What Is Method And Why Does It Matter?, Michael A. Elliott, Claudia Stokes

Claudia Stokes

The recent emphasis on interdisciplinary scholarship—manifest in the resurgence of institutional programs like American studies and publications in cultural studies—has relocated both the literary critic and the literary text to unfamiliar territory. This new interest in broaching disciplinary limits has proved to be exciting and invigorating. Literary critics have turned their attention to media other than the written text,and nonliterary specialists,such as historians and sociologists,have used literary texts to support their own research. This book is a response to American literary interdisciplinarity and attempts to raise,and address,the inevitable questions that emerge when disciplines collaborate: What can texts tell us about …

These Days Of Large Things: The Culture Of Size In America, 1865-1930 [Review], Claudia Stokes

Claudia Stokes

In These Days of Large Things: The Culture of Size in America, 1865–1930, Michael Tavel Clarke examines the Progressive Era preoccupation with size. As Clarke argues with considerable evidence, largeness was widely interpreted in this period (and, indeed, in our own) to denote progress and advancement while smallness in turn signified degeneracy and unwholesomeness. This pervasive and enduring schema, Clarke shows, had its roots in American expansionism and imperialism, enterprises underwritten by the interlocking beliefs that bigger is better and that superiority must be physically manifest.

The Mother Church: Mary Baker Eddy And The Practice Of Sentimentalism, Claudia Stokes

Claudia Stokes

“The Mother Church” analyzes the influence of literary sentimentalism on the writings and doctrine of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. Having attempted a career as a sentimental poet in her early life, Eddy imported sentimental notions of motherhood and parent-child separation into Christian Science belief and iconography.

Bodies Of Reform: The Rhetoric Of Character In Gilded Age America [Review], Claudia Stokes

Claudia Stokes

What is the nature of human character? Is it innate or the product of socialization? Is it fixed or fungible, whether for good or for ill? The multiple theories regarding the origins of character that percolated throughout the 1800s have become a mainstay of nineteenth-century U.S. studies over the last twenty years, receiving particular attention in analyses of late-century responses to the anxiety sparked by immigration, labor agitation, and unstable financial markets as well as by the Race Question and the Woman Question. Societal reform during this time was actively fueled by debates about the nature and origin of character, …

My Kingdom: Sentimentalism And The Refinement Of Hymnody, Claudia Stokes

Claudia Stokes

Few features of mid-nineteenth-century American women’s literature seem as foreign and outdated today as the omnipresence of hymns. In countless literary works, hymns are quoted, sung, discussed, and contemplated. Hymns in these texts are rivaled in influence only by the Bible and are potent catalysts of religious experience, sparking conversion in the unbeliever and offering reassurance to the faithful during times of trouble. In the literary world of the American mid-century, the singing of a hymn can bring tears to the eyes of even the most hardened unbeliever. Such scenes pervade fiction of the period. During Ellen Montgomery’s sorrowful trip …

The Religious Revival: Narratives Of Religious Origin In Us Culture, Claudia Stokes

Claudia Stokes

The administration of George W. Bush ushered in a new era of public religious discourse. Before the 2000 election, a politician’s religion generally remained in the shadowy recesses of private life, politely referenced only as metonymic evidence attesting to his or her strong moral foundation and character. The presidential campaigns of George W. Bush moved religious rhetoric from the political margins to the center, by speaking openly about the effects of his midlife conversion to Christianity and by using coded religious language to mobilize conservative Christian voters. This explicit inclusion of religious rhetoric has dramatically changed the texture of American …

Realists And Reformers In The Nineteenth Century, Claudia Stokes

Claudia Stokes

Amid the violence and tensions of contemporary globalization, it is perhaps unsurprising that American literary historians of the last decade have been preoccupied by literary transnationalism. As with the work of such critics as Anna Brickhouse, Wai Chee Dimock, and Kirsten Silva Gruesz (among many others), this field of research has carefully exposed the international contexts of American literature and put pressure on the nationalist borders that have always delimited literary history. Amanda Claybaugh’s new book, The Novel of Purpose, is a worthy contribution to this growing field of transnational literary history.