XVIAmerican Literature to 1900
2016; Oxford University Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/ywes/maw016
ISSN1471-6801
AutoresHelena Goodwyn, Katie McGettigan, Rebecca White,
Tópico(s)American Sports and Literature
ResumoThis chapter has two sections: 1 General; 2 American Literature to 1900. Section 1 is by Katie McGettigan; section 2 is by Helena Goodwyn, Katie McGettigan, and Rebecca White. The Journal of American Studies continues to place nineteenth-century literature in interdisciplinary contexts. Tamara L. Follini’s ‘Speaking Monuments: Henry James, Walt Whitman and the Civil War Statues of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ ( JAS 48:i[2014] 25–49) locates James’s revaluation of Whitman in the 1890s within James’s attempts to confront Civil War trauma. James rejects martial monuments in favour of Whitman’s intimate accounts of wounded soldiers’ bodies, and Follini reads James’s description of New York harbour, in The American Scene [1905], as a monument to Whitman. In ‘A Chicago Architect in King Arthur’s Court: Mark Twain, Daniel Burnham and the Imperialism of Gilded Age Modernity’ ( JAS 48:i[2014] 99–126), Timothy A. Hickman argues that Twain’s Connecticut Yankee [1889] critiques the modernizing project of US imperialism that Burnham’s 1893 World’s Fair championed. Although both men understood modernity in spatial terms, Burnham’s architecture proposed that the present could recover the past, while Twain argued that such modernization would inevitably lead to destruction. In ‘Transcendental Democracy: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Political Thought, the Legacy of Federalism, and the Ironies of America’s Democratic Tradition’ ( JAS 48:ii[2014] 481–500), Benjamin E. Park suggests that Emerson’s emphasis on education and personal awakening echoes a lingering New England Federalist politics. Park’s argument that tensions in Emerson’s democratic politics speak to those in the wider antebellum US leaves room for a deeper consideration of Emerson as a representative figure of his political moment. Cynthia Lee Patterson discusses Godey’s Lady’s Magazine ’s commentary on contemporary issues in ‘Performative Morality: Godey’s Match Plates, Nineteenth-Century Stage Practice, and Social/Political/Economic Commentary in America’s Popular Ladies’ Magazine’ ( JAS 48:ii [2014] 613–37). Patterson proposes that the magazine’s ‘match plate’ engravings, which paired virtue and vice, capitalize on popular stage genres to respond to the economic downturn of the 1850s and to comment on social problems experienced by the magazine’s readers. In ‘ “Was There Not Reason to Doubt?”: Wieland and Its Secular Age’ ( JAS 48:iii[2014] 735–56), Christine Hedlin contextualizes Charles Brockden Brown’s novel within the competing modes of belief that medicine and religion offered in the early republic. Hedlin argues that Clara is caught between these discourses, and suggests that Brown ironizes his narrator’s final self-incrimination: in an age of intellectual instability, how can anything be established beyond doubt? Graham Culbertson uncovers Douglass’s interest in urban environments in ‘Frederick Douglass’s “Our National Capital”: Updating L’Enfant for an Era of Integration’ ( JAS 48:iv[2014] 911–35). Comparing Douglass to the architect of Washington DC, Pierre-Charles L’Enfant, Culbertson analyses how Douglass rebuilds DC in his neglected speech ‘Our National Capital’ (1877), in which he argues that for DC to become a national capital, black labour must drive out Southern indolence.
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