This chapter looks at the effects of capitalism and social stratification on notions of class identity in two groups of American realist novels. First, it analyzes a pair of literary responses by ...William Dean Howells to the 1886 Chicago Haymarket bombing as the lead-in to a discussion of realist works about voluntary downward class mobility or “vital contact.” With Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes as a reference point and paradigm, the chapter also explores the ideologies implicit in several novels about upward social mobility, noting how both groups of texts are ultimately guided by a genteel perspective positioned between dominant and subordinate classes. In similar ways, the novels treated in the chapter balance middle-class loyalties against identities from higher and lower on the social scale while sending messages of both complicity and subversion on the subject of capitalist class relations.
There is another category of readers who should be newly interested in both of Lee's books: professors of American literature and culture studies, who have tended to ignore Lee. Despite the enormous ...popularity of To Kill a Mockingbird, comparatively few scholarly articles have been written about it, comparatively few college courses include it on their reading lists, and there has not been a sustained or serious critical conversation about the novel among scholars. The publication of Go Set a Watchman offers good reasons for having this conversation now.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Material to Mythology Chura, Patrick
Thoreau the Land Surveyor,
10/2010
Book Chapter
This chapter discusses Henry David Thoreau's surveying career. To analyze
nineteenth-century land surveying is to study Henry Thoreau's primary nonliterary
pursuit, an activity that took up a large ...portion of his adult life. Thoreau actually
made the Walden survey, a three-dimensional pond map that is now one of the most
important images in American literary history. The pond survey was a rare type of work,
an experiential episode in Thoreau's life the processes of which are now somewhat hard
to imagine.
The first superintendent of the Coast Survey was Swiss-born mathematician Ferdinand
Hassler, who directed the project from its inception in 1816 until his death in 1843.
Hassler was one of the most ...skillful measurers in history and the ingenious method he
conceived for implementing the vast survey was his greatest achievement. He devised a
plan to measure the Atlantic seaboard by laying out a network of enormous consecutive
triangles, the sides of which ranged from ten to sixty miles in length. Admiring
descriptions of the Coast Survey appeared frequently in scientific journals and popular
literature during the period immediately prior to Henry Thoreau's 1846 survey of Walden
Pond.
Describing his work in a manner that repeatedly focuses on his unconventional methods
and nonacquisitive purposes, Thoreau relates significant discoveries about seed
dispersal and tree succession ...made while surveying. In doing so, he inculcates an
argument that emphasizes the benefits of surveying and mitigates its potentially
destructive effects. Within Thoreau's assertions that “oaks almost invariably
die if the pines are not cut,” and that by the harvesting of pines
“we find ourselves at last doing as Nature does,” some critics
have detected a somewhat defensive plea for recognition of the ways the speaker's own
role in deforestation conforms to an underlying design.
In agreeing to survey for the Native Americans, surveyor John Brown no doubt realized
that ridding Kansas of illegal settlers was good for both Ottawas and abolitionists.
Earlier that spring, Major ...Jefferson Buford of Eufaula, Alabama, had arrived in the
Territory with four hundred resolute proslavery conscripts recruited from several
Southern states. Buford and other bands of militants, assuming that the
“official” proslavery territorial government would take no action
against them, established their camps on Indian lands and federally owned tracts
surrounding the Free State settlements of Topeka, Lawrence, and Osawatomie. Along with
them, a large number of claim-jumping Missourians had crossed into the Territory not
only in order to vote proslavery, but to suppress their neighbors' votes and seal off
the Kansas border, denying entry especially to newcomers from Northern states. They were
in effect occupiers, seizing operational bases on already-owned land to carry on a war
of intimidation.
Land surveying has long been a tool of empire, linked not coincidentally with the
development and hegemony of white European society over Native peoples in the New World.
Once land was formally ...located and officially acquired, the multiple purposes of
establishing individual ownership, taxable value, and legal jurisdiction were embodied
in the person of the land surveyor. The surveyor not only carried considerable
state-invested power but swore an oath that affirmed his honesty, the accuracy of his
measures, and his loyalty to the state's protocols of property definition and
distribution.
The Skillful Engineer Chura, Patrick
Thoreau the Land Surveyor,
10/2010
Book Chapter
Thoreau made several surveys purely for the pleasure of experimentation. In addition to
the surveys of Walden in 1846 and White Pond in 1851, Thoreau apparently made a
recreational plan of the Old ...Marlborough Road sometime in the 1840s. During his paid
surveying jobs in and around Concord, Thoreau often carried out
“unnecessary” science, recording data that were of value only to
himself as writer-naturalist. He often carried portable surveying instruments on his
almost daily woodland excursions.
