Life in Letters of William Dean Howells
Author: William Dean Howells
Publisher:
Published: 1928
Total Pages: 472
ISBN-13:
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William Dean Howells
Author: Susan Goodman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2005-05-01
Total Pages: 580
ISBN-13: 052093024X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPossibly the most influential figure in the history of American letters, William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was, among other things, a leading novelist in the realist tradition, a formative influence on many of America's finest writers, and an outspoken opponent of social injustice. This biography, the first comprehensive work on Howells in fifty years, enters the consciousness of the man and his times, revealing a complicated and painfully honest figure who came of age in an era of political corruption, industrial greed, and American imperialism. Written with verve and originality in a highly absorbing style, it brings alive for a new generation a literary and cultural pioneer who played a key role in creating the American artistic ethos. William Dean Howells traces the writer's life from his boyhood in Ohio before the Civil War, to his consularship in Italy under President Lincoln, to his rise as editor of Atlantic Monthly. It looks at his writing, which included novels, poems, plays, children's books, and criticism. Howells had many powerful friendships among the literati of his day; and here we find an especially rich examination of the relationship between Howells and Mark Twain. Howells was, as Twain called him, "the boss" of literary critics—his support almost single-handedly made the careers of many writers, including African Americans like Paul Dunbar and women like Sarah Orne Jewett. Showcasing many noteworthy personalities—Henry James, Edmund Gosse, H. G. Wells, Stephen Crane, Emily Dickinson, and many others—William Dean Howells portrays a man who stood at the center of American literature through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Civilizing the Machine
Author: John F. Kasson
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 1999-05-17
Total Pages: 294
ISBN-13: 0809016206
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA major theme in American history has been the desire to achieve a genuinely republican way of life that values liberty, order, and virtue. This work shows us how new technologies affected this drive for a republican civilization - a question as vital now as ever.
My Mark Twain
Author: William Dean Howells
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 1999-03-01
Total Pages: 216
ISBN-13: 9780807101254
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFor more than forty years William Dean Howells counted Mark Twain among his closest friends. Howells knew all the great men of American literature during the last half of the nineteenth century. In his acquaintance were Longfellow, Emerson, Lowell, Holmes, and a long list of other sages, poets, novelists, and critics. “They were like on another and like other literary men,” Howells wrote, “but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.” Mark Twin’s death on April 21, 1910, moved Howells to record his memories of the man he felt “pervaded” the era “almost more than any other man of letters.” His reminiscences were published in Harper’s Monthly and subsequently put into book form along with twelve pieces of Howells’ criticism of Mark Twain’s work. This is the first new edition of the book since the original printing in 1910. Both the sketch and the essays have been annotated to give the reader a full appreciation of Mark Twain’s growth as a writer and Howells’ increasing awareness of his friends’ greatness. The notes identify and explain the literary issues, the people, places, and events to which Howells alludes. The long friendship between Howells and Mark Twain fostered innumerable visits, extensive correspondence, joint literary projects, and often humorous escapades. To a great degree Howells identified with Clemens. Both men were of midwestern origin and came from similar backgrounds. They encountered literary Boston together. Both experienced domestic tragedy. The immediacy of My Mark Twain affords the reader a rare and intimate picture of Mark Twain and indirectly, of Howells.
A New Jane Austen
Author: Juliette Wells
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2023-10-05
Total Pages: 237
ISBN-13: 135036553X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCompleting Juliette Wells' groundbreaking trio of books on Austen's readers, this latest volume revolutionizes our understanding of how Austen came to be viewed as the world's greatest novelist. Wells shows that Austen's global reputation was established not by British scholars, as is commonly believed, but by visionary American writers and collectors, working largely outside academia. Drawing on extensive research, Wells weaves together colorful, compelling case studies of men and women who, from the 1880s to the 1980s, helped readers appreciate Austen's novels, persuasively advocated for her place in the literary canon, and preserved artifacts vital to her legacy. Engagingly written and abundantly illustrated, A New Jane Austen will inform and delight scholars and Austen fans alike.
Romantic Dialogues and Afterlives
Author: Monika Coghen
Publisher: Wydawnictwo UJ
Published: 2020-06-15
Total Pages: 351
ISBN-13: 8323371644
DOWNLOAD EBOOKRomantic writers often asserted their individuality, but this assertion tended to take the form of positioning themselves in relation to other authors and literary texts. Thus they implicitly acknowledged the rich network of broadly understood poetic dialogue as an important and potent source for their own creativity. When in 1816 John Keats wrote “Great spirits now on earth are sojourning,” he celebrated the originality of his contemporaries and the historical significance of his times, pointing to deep interest in “the hum of mighty works” in all the fields of human activity, to which “the nations” ought to listen. Keats’s sonnet suggests not only stimulating exchanges between poets, artists and social thinkers in the same language, but also the idea of transnational appreciation and dialogue. The volume takes up this idea and explores the dialogues of Romantic authors within the wide scope of European and American cultures. Essays by scholars from Germany, Britain, Bulgaria, Poland, Canada and the United States of America examine Romantic writers’ responses to their contemporaries, explore their dialogues with the culture of the past, and their interactions across the arts and sciences. They also scrutinize the Romantics’ far-reaching influence on later writers and artists, and thus extend the network of artistic exchange to modern times. The volume offers a rich tapestry of interconnections that span across time and space, interlace languages and cultures, and link Romantic writers and artists with their predecessors and successors across Europe and America. The essays in the collection invite the reader to join ongoing dialogues between writers and their audiences, of the past and present.
Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature
Author: Modern Humanities Research Association
Publisher:
Published: 1928
Total Pages: 706
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIncludes both books and articles.
Deans and Truants
Author: Gene Andrew Jarrett
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2013-03-01
Total Pages: 233
ISBN-13: 081220235X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFor a work to be considered African American literature, does it need to focus on black characters or political themes? Must it represent these within a specific stylistic range? Or is it enough for the author to be identified as African American? In Deans and Truants, Gene Andrew Jarrett traces the shifting definitions of African American literature and the authors who wrote beyond those boundaries at the cost of critical dismissal and, at times, obscurity. From the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, de facto deans—critics and authors as different as William Howells, Alain Locke, Richard Wright, and Amiri Baraka—prescribed the shifting parameters of realism and racial subject matter appropriate to authentic African American literature, while truant authors such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, George S. Schuyler, Frank Yerby, and Toni Morrison—perhaps the most celebrated African American author of the twentieth century—wrote literature anomalous to those standards. Jarrett explores the issues at stake when Howells, the "Dean of American Letters," argues in 1896 that only Dunbar's "entirely black verse," written in dialect, "would succeed." Three decades later, Locke, the cultural arbiter of the Harlem Renaissance, stands in contrast to Schuyler, a journalist and novelist who questions the existence of a peculiarly black or "New Negro" art. Next, Wright's 1937 blueprint for African American writing sets the terms of the Chicago Renaissance, but Yerby's version of historical romance approaches race and realism in alternative literary ways. Finally, Deans and Truants measures the gravitational pull of the late 1960s Black Aesthetic in Baraka's editorial silence on Toni Morrison's first and only short story, "Recitatif." Drawing from a wealth of biographical, historical, and literary sources, Deans and Truants describes the changing notions of race, politics, and gender that framed and were framed by the authors and critics of African American culture for more than a century.
The Simple Life
Author: David E. Shi
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 346
ISBN-13: 0820329754
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLooking across more than three centuries of want and prosperity, war and peace, Shi introduces a rich cast of practitioners and proponents of the simple life, among them Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, Jane Addams, Scott and Helen Nearing, and Jimmy Carter.
