Examination of the critical discourse on the literary movement of 'realism.' Concepts of Realismsurveys the central episodes in the development of the discourse surrounding 'realism' from its inception, with substantial reference to developments in the United States. It concentrates on modernismand the avant-garde as hostile to the realist movement, but more positive critics of the concept, such as Erich Auerbach and Joseph Stern, also receive ample treatment.
The first major literary and cultural history of color in America, 1880–1930 Chromographia tells the story of how color became modern and how literature, by engaging with modern color, became modernist. From the vivid pictures in children’s books to the bold hues of abstract painting, from psychological theories of perception to the synthetic dyes that brightened commercial goods, color concerned both the material stuff of modernity and its theoretical and artistic formulations. Chromographia spans these diverse practices to reveal the widespread effects on U.S. literature and culture of the chromatic revolution that unfolded at the turn of the twentieth century. In analyzing color experience through the lens of U.S. writers (including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, L. Frank Baum, Stephen Crane, Charles Chesnutt, Gertrude Stein, Nella Larsen, and William Carlos Williams), Chromographia argues that modern aesthetic techniques are inseparable from the theories and technologies that drove modern color. Nicholas Gaskill shows how literature registered the social worlds within which chromatic technologies emerged, and also experimented with the ideas about perception, language, and the sensory environment that accompanied their proliferation. Chromographia is the only study of modern color in U.S. literature. It presents a new reading of perception in literature and a theory of experience that uses color to move beyond the usual divisions of modern thought.
This volume explores the linguistic complexities and critical issues of the Midland dialect area of the USA, and contains a unique data-based set of investigations of the Midlands dialect. The authors demonstrate that the large central part of the United States known colloquially as the Heartland, geo-culturally as the Midwest, and linguistically as the Midland is a very real dialect area, one with regional cohesiveness, social complexity, and psycho-emotional impact. The individual essays problematize historical origins, track linguistic markers of social identity over time and across social spaces, frame dialect issues within the linguistic marketplace, account for extra-linguistic influences on changing patterns of linguistic behaviors, and describe maintenance strategies of non-English languages. This book is an important move forward in the understanding of American English. Sociolinguists, dialectologists, applied linguists, and all those involved in the statistical and qualitative study of language variation will find this volume relevant, timely, and insightful.
Hamlin Garland, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of more than forty books, was a central figure in American literary life for half a century. He was intimately involved with many of the major literary, social, and artistic movements in American culture, and his extensive correspondence with the intellectual leaders of American culture was almost unparalleled in scope. This volume brings together a rich, representative sample of Garland?s letters. They are addressed to an impressive roster of individuals: Samuel Clemens, William Dean Howells, Walt Whitman, Zona Gale, Theodore Roosevelt, Van Wyck Brooks, Howard Mumford Jones, Brander Matthews, Stephen Crane, George Washington Cable, and many others. The letters touch on an equally broad range of subjects, from the U.S. government?s reprehensible treatment of Native Americans to environmental issues to the major literary figures and controversies of Garland?s day. Frank, opinionated, and wide-ranging, Garland?s letters provide a valuable and entertaining portrait of American cultural and intellectual life in the years between 1890 and 1940.
As the United States struggled to absorb a massive influx of ethnically diverse immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century, the question of who and what an American is took on urgent intensity. It seemed more critical than ever to establish a definition by which Americanness could be established, transmitted, maintained, and judged. Americans of all stripes sought to articulate and enforce their visions of the nation’s past, present, and future; central to these attempts was President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt fully recognized the narrative component of American identity, and he called upon authors of diverse European backgrounds including Israel Zangwill, Jacob Riis, Elizabeth Stern, and Finley Peter Dunne to promote the nation in popular written form. With the swell and shift in immigration, he realized that a more encompassing national literature was needed to “express and guide the soul of the nation.” Rough Writing examines the surprising place and implications of the immigrant and of ethnic writing in Roosevelt’s America and American literature.
