Frantic Panoramas

Author : Nancy Bentley
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812201248
Total Pages : 372 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Frantic Panoramas written by Nancy Bentley and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-05-23 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Late nineteenth-century America saw an explosion in mass culture—from sensationalist tabloid newspapers to amusement parks to Wild West shows. Historians and critics have traditionally observed the advent of mass culture as undermining literature's central role in the public sphere. Literary writers of the time either reacted with a public show of disdain or retreated to conduct their own private experiments in style and form. In Frantic Panoramas, Nancy Bentley questions these narratives of opposition. For literary writers, Bentley explains, the confrontation with mass culture was less a retreat than a transformation, an ordeal through which habits of contemplative appreciation could be refashioned into new forms of critical thought. By grappling with the energies that marked mass culture, authors came to recognize kinds of human experience that were only then becoming visible as public. William Dean Howells shaped the plots of his novels around tabloid events like rail and trolley accidents and the public chaos of apartment house fires. Although Henry James was distressed at the way dime fiction had changed the very definition of literature, his meditations on mass culture led him to reimagine the novel as a collective "workshop" in which authors and readers jointly discovered new meaning. Bentley offers close readings of these and other writers such as Edith Wharton, James Weldon Johnson, Pauline Hopkins, and Gertrude Bonnin to demonstrate how leading artists took inspiration from commercial culture to create new and distinct literary forms. Drawing on original archival research and a historically grounded theory of realism, Frantic Panoramas is an innovative and comprehensive study of how the emergence of mass culture affected literary culture in America.

Author : Sarah Gleeson-White
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0197558054
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Silent Film and the Formations of U.S. Literary Culture written by Sarah Gleeson-White and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silent Film and the Formations of U.S. Literary Culture: Literature in Motion discovers the considerable impact of motion pictures on literary culture across the early decades of the twentieth century by exploring how motion pictures spurred change in twentieth century literature.

Author : Lindsay V. Reckson
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108801862
Total Pages : 703 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Literature in Transition, 1876–1910: Volume 4 written by Lindsay V. Reckson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-18 with total page 703 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addressing US literature from 1876 to 1910, this volume aims to account for the period's immense transformations while troubling the ideology of progress that underwrote much of its self-understanding. This volume queries the various forms and formations of post-Reconstruction American literature. It contends that the literature of this period, most often referred to as 'turn-of-the-century' might be more productively oriented by the end of Reconstruction and the haunting aftermath of its emancipatory potential than by the logic of temporal and social advance that underwrote the end of the century and the beginning of the Progressive Era. Acknowledging that nearly all US literature after 1876 might be described as post-Reconstruction, the volume invites readers to reframe this period by asking: under what terms did post-Reconstruction American literature challenge or re-consolidate the 'nation' as an affective, political, and discursive phenomenon? And what kind of alternative pasts and futures did it write into existence?

Author : David McWhirter
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 0521514614
Total Pages : 528 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Henry James in Context written by David McWhirter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-16 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fullest single volume work of reference on James's life and his interactions with the world around him.

Author : Erica Fretwell
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 1478012455
Total Pages : 230 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sensory Experiments written by Erica Fretwell and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-14 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Sensory Experiments, Erica Fretwell excavates the nineteenth-century science of psychophysics and its theorizations of sensation to examine the cultural and aesthetic landscape of feeling in nineteenth-century America. Fretwell demonstrates how psychophysics—a scientific movement originating in Germany and dedicated to the empirical study of sensory experience—shifted the understandings of feeling from the epistemology of sentiment to the phenomenological terrain of lived experience. Through analyses of medical case studies, spirit photographs, perfumes, music theory, recipes, and the work of canonical figures ranging from Kate Chopin and Pauline Hopkins to James Weldon Johnson and Emily Dickinson, Fretwell outlines how the five senses became important elements in the biopolitical work of constructing human difference along the lines of race, gender, and ability. In its entanglement with social difference, psychophysics contributed to the racialization of aesthetics while sketching out possibilities for alternate modes of being over and against the figure of the bourgeois liberal individual. Although psychophysics has largely been forgotten, Fretwell demonstrates that its importance to shaping social order through scientific notions of sensation is central to contemporary theories of new materialism, posthumanism, aesthetics, and affect theory.

Author : Elizabeth Duquette
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192899880
Total Pages : 414 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Tyrannies in the Long Age of Napoleon written by Elizabeth Duquette and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-07 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if the American experiment is twofold, encompassing both democracy and tyranny? That is the question at the core of this book, which traces some of ways that Americans across the nineteenth century understood the perversions tyranny introduced into both their polity and society. While some informed their thinking with reference to classical texts, which comprehensively consider tyranny's dangers, most drew on a more contemporary source--Napoleon Bonaparte, the century's most famous man and its most notorious tyrant. Because Napoleon defined tyranny around the nineteenth-century Atlantic world--its features and emergence, its relationship to democratic institutions, its effects on persons and peoples--he provides a way for nineteenth-century Americans to explore the parameters of tyranny and their complicity in its cruelties. Napoleon helps us see the decidedly plural forms of tyranny in the US, bringing their fictions into focus. At the same time, however, there are distinctly American modes of tyranny. From the tyrannical style of the American imagination to the usurping potential of American individualism, Elizabeth Duquette shows that tyranny is as American as democracy.

Author : Sarah Churchwell
Publisher : A&C Black
ISBN 13 : 144116216X
Total Pages : 386 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers written by Sarah Churchwell and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-08-02 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique survey and interpretive history, spanning 200 years, of the American bestseller.

Author : Katherine Biers
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 0816687609
Total Pages : 344 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Virtual Modernism written by Katherine Biers and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Virtual Modernism, Katherine Biers offers a fresh view of the emergence of American literary modernism from the eruption of popular culture in the early twentieth century. Employing dynamic readings of the works of Stephen Crane, Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein, she argues that American modernist writers developed a “poetics of the virtual” in response to the rise of mass communications technologies before World War I. These authors’ modernist formal experimentation was provoked by the immediate, individualistic pleasures and thrills of mass culture. But they also retained a faith in the representational power of language—and the worth of common experience—more characteristic of realism and naturalism. In competition with new media experiences such as movies and recorded music, they simultaneously rejected and embraced modernity. Biers establishes the virtual poetics of these five writers as part of a larger “virtual turn” in the United States, when a fascination with the writings of Henri Bergson, William James, and vitalist philosophy—and the idea of virtual experience—swept the nation. Virtual Modernism contends that a turn to the virtual experience of language was a way for each of these authors to carve out a value for the literary, both with and against the growth of mass entertainments. This technologically inspired reengagement with experience was formative for American modernism. Situated at the crossing points of literary criticism, philosophy, media studies, and history, Virtual Modernism provides an examination of Progressive Era preoccupations with the cognitive and corporeal effects of new media technologies that traces an important genealogy of present-day concerns with virtuality.

Author : Matthew N. Johnston
Publisher : University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN 13 : 0806154969
Total Pages : 249 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Narrating the Landscape written by Matthew N. Johnston and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2016-04-14 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American nineteenth century saw a largely rural nation confined to the Eastern Seaboard conquer a continent and spawn increasingly dense commercial metropolises. This time of unprecedented territorial and economic growth has long been thought to find its most sweeping visual equivalent in the period’s landscape paintings. But, as Matthew N. Johnston shows, the age’s defining features were just as clearly captured in, and motivated by, visual material mass-produced through innovations in printing technology. Illustrated railroad and steamboat guidebooks, tourist literature, reports of geological surveys, ethnographic studies: all of these new print vehicles brought new meanings to the interplay of time, space, and place as American continental expansion peaked. Instrumental to that project of national and industrial growth, these commercial and scientific publications introduced readers, travelers, and citizens to a changing North American landscape made more accessible by new travel routes blazed between 1825 and 1875. More fundamentally, as Johnston shows in his nuanced analysis, by simulating new temporal frameworks through their presentation of landscape, these print materials established new models of consumption and new kinds of knowledge critical to expansion. Johnston relates these sources to traditional art historical subjects—the landscapes of the Hudson River school, luminist paintings by John Kensett and William Trost Richards, Native portraits painted by George Catlin, and photographs by Timothy O’Sullivan—to show how key discourses associated with expansion shifted away from picturesque strategies pairing imagery and narrative toward entirely new forms that gave temporal structure to viewers’ experience of an emerging modernity. Revealing the crucial role of print and visual culture in shaping the nineteenth-century United States, Narrating the Landscape offers fresh insight into the landscapes Americans beheld and imagined in this formative era.

Author : Alberto Gabriele
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137561483
Total Pages : 309 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity written by Alberto Gabriele and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book maps out the temporal and geographic coordinates of the trope of sensationalism in the long nineteenth century through a comparative approach. Not only juxtaposing different geographical areas (Europe, Asia and Oceania), this volume also disperses its history over a longue durée, allowing readers to perceive the hidden and often unacknowledged continuities throughout a period that is often reduced to the confines of the national disciplines of literature, art, and cultural studies. Providing a wide range of methodological approaches from the fields of literary studies, art history, sociology of literature, and visual culture, this collection offers indispensable examples of the relation between literature and several other media. Topics include the rhetorical tropes of popular culture, the material culture of clothing, the lived experience of performance as a sub-text of literature and painting, and the redefinition of spatiality and temporality in theory, art, and literature.