Nineteenth-century American Writers on Writing

Nineteenth-century American Writers on Writing PDF Author: Brenda Wineapple
Publisher: Writer's World
ISBN: 9781595340696
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Nineteenth-Centuery American Writers on Writing features essays, letters, poems, prose, and excerpts of interviews by fifty-seven leading authors of the century. Each had to figure out what it meant to be a writer within the context of the relatively new nation they spoke to, for, and about. Each meditated on craft and style and form, as writers do. And each confronted the question of how to define themselves as writers--and their literature as "American"--during a century rocked by the industrial revolution, the Civil War, and the emergence of a global politic.

Nineteenth-century American Writers on Writing

Nineteenth-century American Writers on Writing PDF Author: Brenda Wineapple
Publisher: Writer's World
ISBN: 9781595340696
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
Nineteenth-Centuery American Writers on Writing features essays, letters, poems, prose, and excerpts of interviews by fifty-seven leading authors of the century. Each had to figure out what it meant to be a writer within the context of the relatively new nation they spoke to, for, and about. Each meditated on craft and style and form, as writers do. And each confronted the question of how to define themselves as writers--and their literature as "American"--during a century rocked by the industrial revolution, the Civil War, and the emergence of a global politic.

Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature PDF Author: Steven Petersheim
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498508383
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
The nineteenth-century roots of environmental writing in American literature are often mentioned in passing and sometimes studied piece by piece. Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Ecological Awareness of Early Scribes of Nature brings together numerous explorations of environmentally-aware writing across the genres of nineteenth-century literature. Like Lawrence Buell, the authors of this collection find Thoreau’s writing a touchstone of nineteenth-century environmental writing, particularly focusing on Thoreau’s claim that humans may function as “scribes of nature.” However, these studies of Thoreau’s antecedents, contemporaries, and successors also reveal a range of other writers in the nineteenth century whose literary treatments of nature are often more environmentally attuned than most readers have noticed. The writers whose works are studied in this collection include canonical and forgotten writers, men and women, early nineteenth-century and late nineteenth-century authors, pioneers and conservationists. They drew attention to the conflicted relationships between humans and the American continent, as experienced by Native Americans and European Americans. Taken together, these essays offer a fresh perspective on the roots of environmental literature in nineteenth-century American nonfiction, fiction, and poetry as well as in multi-genre compositions such as the travel writings of Margaret Fuller. Bringing largely forgotten voices such as John Godman alongside canonical voices such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, the authors whose writings are studied in this collection produced a diverse tapestry of nascent American environmental writing in the nineteenth-century. From early nineteenth-century writers such as poet Philip Freneau and novelist Charles Brockden Brown to later nineteenth-century conservationists such as John James Audubon and John Muir, Scribes of Nature shows the development of an environmental consciousness and a growing conservationist ethos in American literature. Given their often surprisingly healthy respect for the natural environment, these nineteenth-century writers offer us much to consider in an age of environmental crisis. The complexities of the supposed nature/culture divide still work into our lives today as economic and environmental issues are often seen at loggerheads when they ought to be seen as part of the same conversation of what it means to live healthy lives, and to pass on a healthy world to those who follow us in a world where human activity is becoming increasingly threatening to the health of our planet.

Writing the Mind

Writing the Mind PDF Author: Hannah Walser
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503632040
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Novels are often said to help us understand how others think—especially when those others are profoundly different from us. When interpreting a character's behavior, readers are believed to make use of "Theory of Mind," the general human capacity to attribute mental states to other people. In many well-known nineteenth-century American novels, however, characters behave in ways that are opaque to readers, other characters, and even themselves, undermining efforts to explain their actions in terms of mental states like beliefs and intentions. Writing the Mind dives into these unintelligible moments to map the weaknesses of Theory of Mind and explore alternative frameworks for interpreting behavior. Through readings of authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, Herman Melville, Martin Delany, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Chesnutt, and Mark Twain, Hannah Walser explains how experimental models of cognition lead to some of the strangest formal features of canonical American texts. These authors' attempts to found social life on something other than mental states not only invite us to revise our assumptions about the centrality of mind reading and empathy to the novel as a form; they can also help us understand more contemporary concepts in social cognition, including gaslighting and learned helplessness, with more conceptual rigor and historical depth.

In the Company of Books

In the Company of Books PDF Author: Sarah Wadsworth
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 9781558495418
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Tracing the segmentation of the literary marketplace in 19th century America, this book analyses the implications of the subdivided literary field for readers, writers, and literature itself.

The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing

The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing PDF Author: Dale M. Bauer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521669757
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
A 2001 Companion providing an overview of the history of writing by women in nineteenth-century America.

The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers

The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers PDF Author: Hollis Robbins
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143130676
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 673

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Book Description
A landmark collection documenting the social, political, and artistic lives of African American women throughout the tumultuous nineteenth century. Named one of NPR's Best Books of 2017. The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers is the most comprehensive anthology of its kind: an extraordinary range of voices offering the expressions of African American women in print before, during, and after the Civil War. Edited by Hollis Robbins and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., this collection comprises work from forty-nine writers arranged into sections of memoir, poetry, and essays on feminism, education, and the legacy of African American women writers. Many of these pieces engage with social movements like abolition, women’s suffrage, temperance, and civil rights, but the thematic center is the intellect and personal ambition of African American women. The diverse selection includes well-known writers like Sojourner Truth, Hannah Crafts, and Harriet Jacobs, as well as lesser-known writers like Ella Sheppard, who offers a firsthand account of life in the world-famous Fisk Jubilee Singers. Taken together, these incredible works insist that the writing of African American women writers be read, remembered, and addressed. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-century American Literature

The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-century American Literature PDF Author: Jonathan Senchyne
Publisher: Studies in Print Culture and t
ISBN: 9781625344731
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The true scale of paper production in America from 1690 through the end of the nineteenth century was staggering, with a range of parties participating in different ways, from farmers growing flax to textile workers weaving cloth and from housewives saving rags to peddlers collecting them. Making a bold case for the importance of printing and paper technology in the study of early American literature, Jonathan Senchyne presents archival evidence of the effects of this very visible process on American writers, such as Anne Bradstreet, Herman Melville, Lydia Sigourney, William Wells Brown, and other lesser-known figures. The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature reveals that book history and literary studies are mutually constitutive and proposes a new literary periodization based on materiality and paper production. In unpacking this history and connecting it to cultural and literary representations, Senchyne also explores how the textuality of paper has been used to make social and political claims about gender, labor, and race.

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War PDF Author: Cody Marrs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107109833
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Nineteenth-century American literature is often divided into two asymmetrical halves, neatly separated by the Civil War. Focusing on the later writings of Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson, this book shows how the war took shape across the nineteenth century, inflecting literary forms for decades after 1865.

Cultures of Letters

Cultures of Letters PDF Author: Richard H. Brodhead
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226075266
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Richard H. Brodhead uses a great variety of historical sources, many of them considered here for the first time, to reconstruct the institutionalized literary worlds that coexisted in nineteenth-century America: the middle-class domestic culture of letters, the culture of mass-produced cheap reading, the militantly hierarchical high culture of the post-Civil War decades, and the literary culture of post-emancipation black education. Moving across a range of writers familiar and unfamiliar, and relating groups of writers often considered in artificial isolation, Brodhead describes how these socially structured worlds of writing shaped the terms of literary practice for the authors who inhabited them.

No Place in Time

No Place in Time PDF Author: Sharon B. Oster
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814345832
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature examines how the Hebraic myth, in which Jewishness became a metaphor for an ancient, pre-Christian past, was reimagined in nineteenth-century American realism. The Hebraic myth, while integral to a Protestant understanding of time, was incapable of addressing modern Jewishness, especially in the context of the growing social and national concern around the "Jewish problem." Sharon B. Oster shows how realist authors consequently cast Jews as caught between a distant past and a promising American future. In either case, whether creating or disrupting temporal continuity, Jewishness existed outside of time. No Place in Time complicates the debates over Eastern European immigration in the 1880s and questions of assimilation to a Protestant American culture. The first chapter begins in the world of periodicals, an interconnected literary culture, out of which Abraham Cahan emerged as a literary voice of Jewish immigrants caught between nostalgia and a messianic future outside of linear progression. Moving from the margins to the center of literary realism, the second chapter revolves around Henry James’s modernization of the "noble Hebrew" as a figure of mediation and reconciliation. The third chapter extends this analysis into the naturalism of Edith Wharton, who takes up questions of intimacy and intermarriage, and places "the Jew" at the nexus of competing futures shaped by uncertainty and risk. A number of Jewish female perspectives are included in the fourth chapter that recasts plots of cultural assimilation through intermarriage in terms of time: if a Jewish past exists in tension with an American future, these writers recuperate the "Hebraic myth" for themselves to imagine a viable Jewish future. No Place in Time ends with a brief look at poet Emma Lazarus, whose understanding of Jewishness was distinctly modern, not nostalgic, mythical, or dead. No Place in Time highlights a significant shift in how Jewishness was represented in American literature, and, as such, raises questions of identity, immigration, and religion. This volume will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth- and turn-of-the-century American literature, American Jewish literature, and literature as it intersects with immigration, religion, or temporality, as well as anyone interested in Jewish studies.