THE HEART OF MASCULINITY Tennenhouse, Leonard
The Importance of Feeling English,
02/2009
Book Chapter
On the way to fulfilling the expectations of his European forebears, something happened to the libertine. While assaulting the marriage practices imported from Europe, the libertine set the stage for ...a new kind of masculinity. He did so by creating the need for a character to step forth as a father substitute. When the seduction narrative in which he figured so largely converged with sentimental literature in the new United States, the libertine himself could either assume such a position by renouncing his wicked ways or else cede that position to someone capable of heading up a reformed and revitalized
Afterword Tennenhouse, Leonard
The Importance of Feeling English,
02/2009
Book Chapter
In opening this book, I raised two questions that I shall now briefly address by way of a conclusion: How did English culture achieve hegemony over other diasporic cultures, including the Spanish, ...French, Dutch, and German, as well as over Africans, Jews, and the many different indigenous peoples who were forced to relocate from their traditional lands? Can we classify the literature of a group as “diasporic” if that group eventually becomes an imperial power and its literature that of the nation? Written in 1854–55, Melville’sBenito Cerenoraises these very questions and fails to answer them, at least
THE GOTHIC IN DIASPORA Tennenhouse, Leonard
The Importance of Feeling English,
02/2009
Book Chapter
Leslie Fiedler made the claim, “It is the gothic form that has been most fruitful in the hands of our best writers.”¹ From the colonial period to the present day, our fiction has always been Gothic, ...he declared, “nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic—a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation” (29). Because American literature “is most deeply influenced by the gothic,” in Fiedler’s view, it “is almost essentially a gothic one” (142). Writing almost thirty years later, Toni Morrison updated Fiedler’s contention without really challenging it. She famously found in American fiction
Tennenhouse focuses on the absence of cultural bilingualism plaguing the pedagogy in literature and blocking the advances of American colonial studies. A detailed explanation of the meaning of ...cultural bilingualism in the context of comparative literature studies is presented.
Libertine America Tennenhouse, Leonard
Differences (Bloomington, Ind.),
10/2000, Letnik:
11, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Tennenhouse's reading of eighteenth-century English and American tales of seduction embarks upon a reconsideration of the meanings of masculine and feminine during this early era. He challenges Ann ...Douglas's assumption that early American culture was something masculine that was later feminized.
The fourteen essays in this collection explore the dominance of patronage in Renaissance politics, religion, theatre, and artistic life.
Originally published in 1982.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses ...the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
A Mind for Passion Armstrong, Nancy; Tennenhouse, Leonard
Politics and the Passions, 1500-1850,
01/2009
Book Chapter
Most scholars of eighteenth-century England and America are quick to credit John Locke with being the first to imagine a modern liberal state, where literacy was the ticket for participation in the ...civic arena and men could assume positions there on the basis of their intrinsic worth. While they grant the modernity of his model of the state, many of the same scholars consign Locke’s model of the human subject to the late seventeenth century—there to be superseded during the eighteenth century by Hume, who understood an individual’s intrinsic merit to consist not only or even primarily of reason
This chapter focuses on the nineteenth-century American novel that imagined the peregrinations of the unsettlement narrative and described a cosmopolitan world that was neither territorially bounded ...nor centrally organized. To understand the formal principles organizing this imaginary world, the chapter considers the period from 1790 to 1802, when at least 100,000 immigrants entered the United States and Congress passed four different naturalization acts: the Naturalization Act of 1790, Naturalization Act of 1795, the Naturalization Act of 1798, and the Naturalization Law of 1802. It then examines how a novel made sense of a nation of immigrants and imagined a national culture formed by the dispersion, collision, assimilation, and adaptation of various practices and beliefs. It also discusses the emergence of the settlement novel, as exemplified by Peter Markoe’s The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania (1787), and the seduction novel which attempts to unsettle the narrative of settlement. Finally, the chapter looks at American readers’ interest in gothic fiction.
