The Social Construction Of American Realism

Author : Amy Kaplan
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 9780226424293
Total Pages : 198 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Social Construction of American Realism written by Amy Kaplan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kaplan redefines American realism as a genre more engaged with a society in flux than with one merely reflective of the status quo. She reads realistic narrative as a symbolic act of imagining and controlling the social upheavals of early modern capitalism, particularly class conflict and the development of mass culture. Brilliant analyses of works by Howells, Wharton, and Dreiser illuminate the narrative process by which realism constructs a social world of conflict and change. "[Kaplan] offers some enthralling readings of major novels by Howells, Wharton, and Dreiser. It is a book which should be read by anyone interested in the American novel."—Tony Tanner, Modern Language Review "Kaplan has made an important contribution to our understanding of American realism. This is a book that deserves wide attention."—June Howard, American Literature

Author : Amy Kaplan
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226424308
Total Pages : 199 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Social Construction of American Realism written by Amy Kaplan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1992-12-15 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kaplan redefines American realism as a genre more engaged with a society in flux than with one merely reflective of the status quo. She reads realistic narrative as a symbolic act of imagining and controlling the social upheavals of early modern capitalism, particularly class conflict and the development of mass culture. Brilliant analyses of works by Howells, Wharton, and Dreiser illuminate the narrative process by which realism constructs a social world of conflict and change. "[Kaplan] offers some enthralling readings of major novels by Howells, Wharton, and Dreiser. It is a book which should be read by anyone interested in the American novel."—Tony Tanner, Modern Language Review "Kaplan has made an important contribution to our understanding of American realism. This is a book that deserves wide attention."—June Howard, American Literature

Author : Michael Davitt Bell
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 9780226042015
Total Pages : 270 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Problem of American Realism written by Michael Davitt Bell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1993-04-15 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since William Dean Howells declared his "realism war" in the 1880s, literary historians have regarded the rise of "realism" and "naturalism" as the great development in American post-Civil War fiction. Yet there are many problems with this generalization. It is virtually impossible, for example, to extract from the novels and manifestoes of American writers of this period any consistent definitions of realism or naturalism as modes of literary representation. Rather than seek common traits in widely divergent "realist" and "naturalist" literary works, Michael Davitt Bell focuses here on the role that these terms played in the social and literary discourse of the 1880s and 1890s. Bell argues that in America, "realism" and "naturalism" never achieved the sort of theoretical rigor that they did in European literary debate. Instead, the function of these ideas in America was less aesthetic than ideological, promoting as "reality" a version of social normalcy based on radically anti-"literary" and heavily gendered assumptions. What effects, Bell asks, did ideas about realism and naturalism have on writers who embraced and resisted them? To answer this question, he devotes separate chapters to the work of Howells and Frank Norris (the principal American advocates of realism and naturalism in the 1880s and 1890s), Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Sarah Orne Jewett. Bell reveals that a chief function of claiming to be a realist or a naturalist was to provide assurance that one was a "real" man rather than an "effeminate" artist. Since the 1880s, Bell asserts, all serious American fiction writers have had to contend with this problematic conception of literaryrealism. The true story of the transformation of American fiction after the Civil War is the history of this contention - a history of individual accommodations, evasions, holding actions, and occasional triumphs.

Author : William Dean Howells
Publisher : Standard Ebooks
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 554 pages
Book Rating : 4.7F/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Hazard of New Fortunes written by William Dean Howells and published by Standard Ebooks. This book was released on 2023-03-28T06:39:24Z with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Basil March jumps at the chance to leave his boring job to become the founding editor of a new magazine. But this also means that he must leave comfortable Boston for the confusion and chaos of 1890s New York. As March and his wife try to find a decent place to live, he also struggles to find contributors and readers. The Marches are quickly drawn into the tangled lives of their fellow New Yorkers: a bitter German socialist who lost his hand fighting for the Union in the Civil War, a colonel nostalgic for slavery, Bohemian artists, increasingly desperate workers on strike, a slick publicist, a starchy society family, and a wealthy farmer-turned-speculator who hurts those he loves most. Born in Ohio, William Dean Howells was a highly successful magazine editor before he became a full-time writer. He believed that this midlife novel, which draws on his own family’s experiences moving from Boston to New York, was his “most vital work.” Mark Twain, whom Howells helped early in his career, called A Hazard of New Fortunes “the exactest & truest portrayal of New York and New York life ever written … a great book.” This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

Author : Sally Haslanger
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199892644
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Resisting Reality written by Sally Haslanger and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary theorists use the term "social construction" with the aim of exposing how what's purportedly "natural" is often at least partly social and, more specifically, how this masking of the social is politically significant. In these previously published essays, Sally Haslanger draws on insights from feminist and critical race theory to explore and develop the idea that gender and race are positions within a structure of social relations. On this interpretation, the point of saying that gender and race are socially constructed is not to make a causal claim about the origins of our concepts of gender and race, or to take a stand in the nature/nurture debate, but to locate these categories within a realist social ontology. This is politically important, for by theorizing how gender and race fit within different structures of social relations we are better able to identify and combat forms of systematic injustice. Although the central essays of the book focus on a critical social realism about gender and race, these accounts function as case studies for a broader critical social realism. To develop this broader approach, several essays offer reworked notions of ideology, practice, and social structure, drawing on recent research in sociology and social psychology. Ideology, on the proposed view, is a relatively stable set of shared dispositions to respond to the world, often in ways that also shape the world to evoke those very dispositions. This looping of our dispositions through the material world enables the social to appear natural. Additional essays in the book situate this approach to social phenomena in relation to philosophical methodology, and to specific debates in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language. The book as a whole explores the interface between analytic philosophy and critical theory.

Author : Kimberly Freeman
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135885389
Total Pages : 174 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Love American Style written by Kimberly Freeman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-03 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A popular subject in sociology and cultural studies, divorce has been overlooked by literary critics. Spanning nearly a century during which the divorce rate skyrocketed, this study traces the treatment of divorce in the American novel.

Author : Joe B. Fulton
Publisher : University of Missouri Press
ISBN 13 : 9780826211446
Total Pages : 196 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mark Twain's Ethical Realism written by Joe B. Fulton and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Twain's Ethical Realism is the only work that looks specifically at how Twain blends ethical and aesthetic concerns in the act of composing his novels. Fulton conducts a spirited discussion regarding these concepts, and his explanation of how they relate to Twain's writing helps to clarify the complexities of his creative genius.

Author : Donald Pizer
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521438766
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism written by Donald Pizer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-06-30 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion examines a number of issues related to the terms realism and naturalism. The introduction seeks both to discuss the problems in the use of these two terms in relation to late nineteenth-century fiction and to describe the history of previous efforts to make the terms expressive of American writing of this period. The Companion includes ten essays which fall into four categories: essays on the historical context of realism and naturalism by Louis Budd and Richard Lehan; essays on critical approaches to the movements since the early 1970s by Michael Anesko, essays on the efforts to expand the canon of realism and naturalism by Elizabeth Ammons; and a full-scale discussion of ten major texts, from W. D. Howell's The Rise of Silas Lapham to Jack London's The Call of the Wild, by John W. Crowley, Tom Quirk, J. C. Levenson, Blanche Gelfant, Barbara Hochman, and Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin.

Author : Keith Newlin
Publisher : Oxford Handbooks
ISBN 13 : 0190642890
Total Pages : 733 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism written by Keith Newlin and published by Oxford Handbooks. This book was released on 2019 with total page 733 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism offers 35 original essays of fresh interpretations of the artistic and political challenges of representing life accurately. Organized by topic and theme, essays draw upon recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies to offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of major and minor figures and the contexts that shaped their work. One set of essays explores realism's genesis and its connection to previous and subsequent movements. Others examine the inclusiveness of representation, the circulation of texts, and the aesthetic representation of science, time, space, and the subjects of medicine, the New Woman, and the middle class. Still others trace the connection to other arts--poetry, drama, illustration, photography, painting, and film--and to pedagogic issues in the teaching of realism"--

Author : Peter Messent
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199736804
Total Pages : 270 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mark Twain and Male Friendship written by Peter Messent and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-10-30 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores male friendship in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through Mark Twain and the relationships he had with William Dean Howells, Joseph Twichell, and Henry H. Rogers.