Was there such a thing as a modern notion of race in the English Renaissance, and, if so, was skin color its necessary marker? In fact, early modern texts described human beings of various national ...origins-including English-as turning white, brown, tawny, black, green, or red for any number of reasons, from the effects of the sun's rays or imbalance of the bodily humors to sexual desire or the application of makeup. It is in this cultural environment that the seventeenth-centuryLondon Gazetteused the term "black" to describe both dark-skinned African runaways and dark-haired Britons, such as Scots, who are now unquestioningly conceived of as "white." InShades of Difference, Sujata Iyengar explores the cultural mythologies of skin color in a period during which colonial expansion and the slave trade introduced Britons to more dark-skinned persons than at any other time in their history. Looking to texts as divergent as sixteenth-century Elizabethan erotic verse, seventeenth-century lyrics, and Restoration prose romances, Iyengar considers the construction of race during the early modern period without oversimplifying the emergence of race as a color-coded classification or a black/white opposition. Rather, "race," embodiment, and skin color are examined in their multiple contexts-historical, geographical, and literary. Iyengar engages works that have not previously been incorporated into discussions of the formation of race, such as Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" and Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis." By rethinking the emerging early modern connections between the notions of race, skin color, and gender,Shades of Differencefurthers an ongoing discussion with originality and impeccable scholarship.
This book describes a major literary culture caught in the act of becoming minor. In 1939, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, "Civilisation has shrunk." Her words captured not only the onset of World ...War II, but also a longer-term reversal of national fortune. The first comprehensive account of modernism and imperialism in England,A Shrinking Islandtracks the joint eclipse of modernist aesthetics and British power from the literary experiments of the 1930s through the rise of cultural studies in the 1950s.
Jed Esty explores the effects of declining empire on modernist form--and on the very meaning of Englishness. He ranges from canonical figures (T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf) to influential midcentury intellectuals (J. M. Keynes and J.R.R. Tolkien), from cultural studies pioneers (Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson) to postwar migrant writers (George Lamming and Doris Lessing). Focusing on writing that converts the potential energy of the contracting British state into the language of insular integrity, he argues that an anthropological ethos of cultural holism came home to roost in late-imperial England. Esty's interpretation challenges popular myths about the death of English literature. It portrays the survivors of the modernist generation not as aesthetic dinosaurs, but as participants in the transition from empire to welfare state, from metropolitan art to national culture. Mixing literary criticism with postcolonial theory, his account of London modernism's end-stages and after-lives provides a fresh take on major works while redrawing the lines between modernism and postmodernism.
Writers, Readers, and Reputations explores the literary world in which the modern best-seller first emerged. Writers were promoted as celebrities, advertising both products and themselves. Philip ...Waller's detailed and entertaining study is a collective biography of literary figures, some forgotten, some enduring, over half a century.
Separate Spheres No More Elbert, Monika M; Damon-Bach, Lucinda L; Rodier, Katharine ...
2014, 2000, 2014-07-15
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Although they wrote in the same historical milieu as their male counterparts, women writers of the 19th- and early 20th-centuries have generally been "ghettoized" by critics into a separate ...canonical sphere. These original essays argue in favor of reconciling male and female writers, both historically and in the context of classroom teaching.   While some of the essays pair up female and male authors who write in a similar style or with similar concerns, others address social issues shared by both men and women, including class tensions, economic problems, and the Civil War experience. Rather than privileging particular genres or certain well-known writers, the contributors examine writings ranging from novels and poetry to autobiography, utopian fiction, and essays. And they consider familiar figures like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson alongside such lesser-known writers as Melusina Fay Peirce, Susie King Taylor, and Mary Gove Nichols.   Each essay revises the binary notions that have been ascribed to males and females, such as public and private, rational and intuitive, political and domestic, violent and passive. Although they do not deny the existence of separate spheres, the contributors show the boundary between them to be much more blurred than has been assumed until now.  
In this book Thomas H. Bestul constructs the literary history of the Latin Passion narratives, placing them within their social, cultural, and historical contexts. He examines the ways in which the ...Passion is narrated and renarrated in devotional treatises, paying particular attention to the modifications and enlargements of the narrative of the Passion as it is presented in the canonical gospels.
Of particular interest to Bestul are the representations of Jews, women, and the body of the crucified Christ. Bestul argues that the greatly enlarged role of the Jews in the Passion narratives of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is connected to the rising anti-Judaism of the period. He explores how the representations of women, particularly the Virgin Mary, express cultural values about the place of women in late medieval society and reveal an increased interest in female subjectivity.
An original account of the importance of diverse forms of fiction in the early American republic—one that challenges the “rise of the novel” narrative
What is the use of fiction? This question ...preoccupied writers in the early United States, where many cultural authorities insisted that fiction-reading would mislead readers about reality. Founded in Fiction argues that this suspicion made early American writers especially attuned to one of fiction’s defining but often overlooked features—its fictionality. Thomas Koenigs shows how these writers explored the unique types of speculative knowledge that fiction could create as they sought to harness different varieties of fiction for a range of social and political projects.
Spanning the years 1789–1861, Founded in Fiction challenges the “rise of novel” narrative that has long dominated the study of American fiction by highlighting how many of the texts that have often been considered the earliest American novels actually defined themselves in contrast to the novel. Their writers developed self-consciously extranovelistic varieties of fiction, as they attempted to reform political discourse, shape women’s behavior, reconstruct a national past, and advance social criticism. Ambitious in scope, Founded in Fiction features original discussions of a wide range of canonical and lesser-known writers, including Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Royall Tyler, Charles Brockden Brown, Leonora Sansay, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Montgomery Bird, George Lippard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs.
By reframing the history of the novel in the United States as a history of competing varieties of fiction, Founded in Fiction shows how these fictions structured American thinking about issues ranging from national politics to gendered authority to the intimate violence of slavery.
In 1798, English essayist and novelist William Godwin ignited a transatlantic scandal withMemoirs of the Author of "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman."Most controversial were the details of the ...romantic liaisons of Godwin's wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, with both American Gilbert Imlay and Godwin himself. Wollstonecraft's life and writings became central to a continuing discussion about love's place in human society. Literary radicals argued that the cultivation of intense friendship could lead to the renovation of social and political institutions, whereas others maintained that these freethinkers were indulging their own desires with a disregard for stability and higher authority. Through correspondence and novels, Andrew Cayton finds an ideal lens to view authors, characters, and readers all debating love's power to alter men and women in the world around them.Cayton argues for Wollstonecraft's and Godwin's enduring influence on fiction published in Great Britain and the United States and explores Mary Godwin Shelley's endeavors to sustain her mother's faith in romantic love as an engine of social change.
While scholars have long associated the group of nineteenth-century French and English writers and artists known as the decadents with alienation, escapism, and withdrawal from the social and ...political world, Matthew Potolsky offers an alternative reading of the movement. InThe Decadent Republic of Letters, he treats the decadents as fundamentally international, defined by a radically cosmopolitan ideal of literary sociability rather than an inward turn toward private aesthetics and exotic sensation.The Decadent Republic of Letterslooks at the way Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, and Algernon Charles Swinburne used the language of classical republican political theory to define beauty as a form of civic virtue. The libertines, an international underground united by subversive erudition, gave decadents a model of countercultural affiliation and a vocabulary for criticizing national canon formation and the increasing state control of education. Decadent figures such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Aubrey Beardsley, and Oscar Wilde envisioned communities formed through the circulation of art. Decadents lavishly praised their counterparts from other traditions, translated and imitated their works, and imagined the possibility of new associations forged through shared tastes and texts. Defined by artistic values rather than language, geography, or ethnic identity, these groups anticipated forms of attachment that are now familiar in youth countercultures and on social networking sites. Bold and sophisticated,The Decadent Republic of Lettersunearths a pervasive decadent critique of nineteenth-century notions of political community and reveals the collective effort by the major figures of the movement to find alternatives to liberalism and nationalism.
The first book in many years to take in the full sweep of national fiction, The Dream of the Great American Novel explains why this supposedly antiquated idea continues to thrive. It shows that four ...G.A.N. "scripts" are keys to the dynamics of American literature and identity--and to the myth of a nation perpetually under construction.
Magical realism has become almost synonymous with Latin American fiction, but this way of representing the layered and often contradictory reality of the topsy-turvy, late-capitalist, globalizing ...world finds equally vivid expression in U.S. multiethnic and British postcolonial literature and film. Writers and filmmakers such as Oscar Zeta Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie have made brilliant use of magical realism to articulate the trauma of dislocation and the legacies of colonialism that people of color experience in the postcolonial, multiethnic world. This book seeks to redeem and refine the theory of magical realism in U.S. multiethnic and British postcolonial literature and film. Frederick Aldama engages in theoretically sophisticated readings of Ana Castillo’s So Far from God, Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, and The Moor’s Last Sigh, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, and Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi’s Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. Coining the term magicorealism to characterize these works, Aldama not only creates a postethnic critical methodology for enlarging the contact zone between the genres of novel, film, and autobiography, but also shatters the interpretive lens that traditionally confuses the transcription of the real world, where truth and falsity apply, with narrative modes governed by other criteria.
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