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"American literature-19th century-History and criticism"
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Ghost-Watching American Modernity:Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination
In Ghost-Watching American Modernity, Maria del Pilar Blanco revisits nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts from Spanish America and the United States to ask how different landscapes are represented as haunted sites. Moving from foundational fictions to Westerns, Blanco explores the diverse ways in which ghosts and haunting emerge across the American hemisphere for authors who are preoccupied with evoking the experience of geographical transformations during a period of unprecedented development. The book offers an innovative approach that seeks to understand ghosts in their local specificity, rather than as products of generic conventions or as allegories of hidden desires. Its chapters pursue formally attentive readings of texts by Domingo Sarmiento, Henry James, Jose Marti, W. E. B. Du Bois, Juan Rulfo, Felisberto Hernandez, and Clint Eastwood. In an intervention that will reconfigure the critical uses of spectrality for scholars in U.S./Latin American Studies, narrative theory, and comparative literature, Blanco advances ghost-watching as a method for rediscovering haunting on its own terms.
eBook
American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853
The antebellum period has long been identified with the belated emergence of a truly national literature. And yet, as Meredith L. McGill argues, a mass market for books in this period was built and sustained through what we would call rampant literary piracy: a national literature developed not despite but because of the systematic copying of foreign works. Restoring a political dimension to accounts of the economic grounds of antebellum literature, McGill unfolds the legal arguments and political struggles that produced an American \"culture of reprinting\" and held it in place for two crucial decades.In this culture of reprinting, the circulation of print outstripped authorial and editorial control. McGill examines the workings of literary culture within this market, shifting her gaze from first and authorized editions to reprints and piracies, from the form of the book to the intersection of book and periodical publishing, and from a national literature to an internally divided and transatlantic literary marketplace. Through readings of the work of Dickens, Poe, and Hawthorne, McGill seeks both to analyze how changes in the conditions of publication influenced literary form and to measure what was lost as literary markets became centralized and literary culture became stratified in the early 1850s.American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853delineates a distinctive literary culture that was regional in articulation and transnational in scope, while questioning the grounds of the startlingly recent but nonetheless powerful equation of the national interest with the extension of authors' rights.
eBook
Words for Conviviality
The industrialization of print technologies in early nineteenth-century America transformed print culture in ways that parallel the transformation wrought by the digital revolution. Understanding how a previous era was shaped by the assumptions print technology engendered may enable us to recognize more clearly how our verbal habits and practices are formed and deformed by our enmeshment in digital technologies. When powerful new verbal media come along, our options are not limited to naive optimism or resigned pessimism. And some of the most helpful guides in charting a path toward genuinely convivial modes of reading are the literary authors who lived through the antebellum industrialization of print. Those authors sought to understand the effects of technologies such as the telegraph and the steam-powered rotary printing press through the most fundamental tool that language provides: metaphor. Evocative metaphors are a potent way to raise cultural awareness regarding the hidden affordances and subtle nudges that are latent within dominant communications technologies. The argument of Words for Conviviality follows a pilgrimage with three stages and considers a set of metaphors that such authors deployed to answer three underlying questions: What does industrial print tempt optimistic readers to imagine themselves as? What does it lead its victims to fear they will become? And what alternative metaphors might ground more convivial reading? The metaphors of hope that Jeffrey Bilbro discusses suggest that to wield textual technologies well, we need to develop cultural practices and institutions that strengthen our relationships with one another and our commitment to a common good. Instead of developing new technologies to solve the problems that technologies have caused, the authors considered here propose developing better readers--readers more attuned to the power of the textual technologies they use and better able to imagine and practice healthy, convivial forms of discourse. These authors obviously did not eschew industrialized print, and they did not simply give up on the technologies of their day. Rather, they developed metaphors that might inspire us to beat textual swords into plowshares.
eBook
Jack London and the Sea
The first book-length study of London as a maritime
writer Jack London’s fiction has been studied
previously for its thematic connections to the ocean, but
Jack London and the Sea marks the first time that his
life as a writer has been considered extensively in relationship
to his own sailing history and interests. In this new study,
Anita Duneer claims a central place for London in the maritime
literary tradition, arguing that for him romance and nostalgia
for the Age of Sail work with and against the portrayal of a
gritty social realism associated with American naturalism in
urban or rural settings. The sea provides a dynamic setting for
London’s navigation of romance, naturalism, and realism to
interrogate key social and philosophical dilemmas of modernity:
race, class, and gender. Furthermore, the maritime tradition
spills over into texts that are not set at sea.
Jack London and the Sea does not address all of
London’s sea stories, but rather identifies key maritime
motifs that influenced his creative process. Duneer’s
critical methodology employs techniques of literary and cultural
analysis, drawing on extensive archival research from a wealth of
previously unpublished biographical materials and other sources.
Duneer explores London’s immersion in the lore and
literature of the sea, revealing the extent to which his writing
is informed by travel narratives, sensational sea yarns, and the
history of exploration, as well as firsthand experiences as a
sailor in the San Francisco Bay and Pacific Ocean. Organized
thematically, chapters address topics that interested London:
labor abuses on “Hell-ships” and copra plantations,
predatory and survival cannibalism, strong seafaring women, and
environmental issues and property rights from San Francisco
oyster beds to pearl diving in the Paumotos. Through its
examination of the intersections of race, class, and gender in
London’s writing,
Jack London and the Sea plumbs the often-troubled waters
of his representations of the racial Other and positions of
capitalist and colonial privilege. We can see the manifestation
of these socioeconomic hierarchies in London’s depiction of
imperialist exploitation of labor and the environment, inequities
that continue to reverberate in our current age of global
capitalism.
eBook
The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848–1948
In The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American
Literature, 1848-1948 , José F. Aranda Jr. describes the first
one hundred years of Mexican American literature. He argues for the
importance of interrogating the concept of modernity in light of
what has emerged as a canon of earlier pre-1968 Mexican American
literature. In order to understand modernity for diverse
communities of Mexican Americans, he contends, one must see it as
an apprehension, both symbolic and material, of one settler
colonial world order giving way to another more powerful
colonialist but imperial vision of North America. Letters,
folklore, print culture, and literary production demonstrate how a
new Anglo-American political imaginary revised and realigned
centuries-old discourses on race, gender, class, religion,
citizenship, power, and sovereignty. The \"modern,\" Aranda argues,
makes itself visible in cultural productions being foisted on a
\"conquered people,\" who were themselves beneficiaries of a notion
of the modern that began in 1492. For Mexican Americans, modernity
is less about any particular angst over global imperial designs or
cultures of capitalism and more about becoming the subordinates of
a nation-building project that ushers the United States into the
twentieth century.
eBook