Showing papers in "American Literature in 1977"

Heroines in Uncle Tom's Cabin

Abstract: LATE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Harriet Beecher Stowe announced that God wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin (I852). The novel by then seemed too monumental even to its author to have been imagined by one woman.1 Earlier in her life, in contrast, Stowe had no doubt that she wrote the subversive book or that she was inspired to write it, despite marital and household irritations, precisely because she was a woman. In a letter to her husband ten years before the publication of the novel, and almost ninety years before Virginia Woolf's famous declaration of independence on behalf of all women writers in A Room of One's Own (I929), Harriet Beecher Stowe said: "There is one thing I must suggest. If I am to write, I must have a room to myself, which shall be my room."3 With her room came the mission to write what became America's best-known novel, and the mission fell to her, she believed, because she was a mother. She recalled for one of her grown children, "I well remember the winter you were a baby and I was writing 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' My heart was bursting with the anguish excited by the cruelty and injustice our nation was showing to the slave, and praying God to let me do a little and to cause my cry for them to be heard. I remember many a night weeping over you as you lay sleeping beside me, and I thought of the slave mothers whose babies were torn from them."' One of her seven children died while still an infant. She says: "It was at his dying bed and at his grave that I learned what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her."5 Authors'

Fact & Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel.

Abstract: Journalists and novelists responded to the pervasive social changes of the 1960s in America with a variety of experiments in nonfiction. Those who have praised the vitality of the new journalism have seen it as a fusion of the journalist's passion for detail and the novelist's moral vision. Hollowell presents a critically sharp portrait of what the new journalists and novelists are doing and why. The author concludes that future writing will further obscure the difference between fact and fiction. Originally published in 1977. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

The Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens: Phenomenological Parallels with Husserl and Heidegger.@@@Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes.

Abstract: This is a study of the development of the middle and later poetry of Wallace Stevens that uses comparisons with the phenomenological methods of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger to clarify many of the difficulties in the poet's mature work.

Thoreau's Maine Woods Indians: More Representative Men

Abstract: W HEN IN I850 RALPH WALDO EMERSON brought out his fourth book of essays, his title accurately conveyed the substance of what had become a major preoccupation in Transcendentalist circles, the identification of individuals who might serve as Representative Men for the age. His published lectures on "representative genius" suggested that in the modern age, and especially in democratic America, while divine truth was discernible in all individuals, biographers should cease to look for "completeness" in any one man. Contrary to the opinions of Emerson's Scottish correspondent Thomas Carlyle, there could no longer be heroes or hero worship. Once someone accepted the premise that the Oversoul manifested itself in all beings, he had to approach a biographical subject in a new way. With true democratic vigor Emerson declared that there were no "common men." All men were at last of a size, and "the true art [of biography] is only possible on the conviction that every talent has its apotheosis somewhere."' But in assembling his list Emerson failed to abide by his own egalitarian proposition. With such subjects as Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe, he essentially had composed a hagiography of European intellectual giants, unconsciously committing the sin against America and its democratic principles he had warned against in his I836 essay, Nature.2 While Emerson still groped among the dry bones of the European

The American Revolution in American Romance

Abstract: W RITING ON "Late American Books" in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine for September, I825, John Neal, an American novelist and critic living in England, observes that a large amount of historical fiction had begun to be written in the United States, "every month of late, nay, almost every week" yielding "a volume or two, such as they were, of tales founded, with some regard for historical truth" on the American past. "The favourite period," he goes on to say, "would seem to be that of the Revolution," though quite enough, he believes, had already been said on that subject.1 Novels of the American Revolution were, of course, not nearly so numerous as Neal's observation implies,2 but the time was right for the appearance of this kind of fiction, and American writers were quick to seize the occasion. This was, after all, the period of intense nationalistic feeling that followed the War of I8I2, a feeling that could hardly be expected to subside as the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution approached and memories were reawakened by the grand tour of the United States made by the Marquis de Lafayette between July, I824, and September, I825. For writers of historical fiction, the time was golden. What form that fiction should take, however, remained something of a problem, for two quite different models had already appeared. In The Spy (I82I); James Fenimore Cooper had used the historical romance, derived from the work of Sir Walter Scott, as a vehicle for presenting his theme, and Cooper had used the form in two other

The Ordering of the Camera Eye in U.S.A.

Abstract: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ELEMENTS in the Camera Eye sections of John Dos Passos' trilogy U.S.A. are the subject of a well-researched essay by James N. Westerhoven. His discussion is valuable because "once an autobiographical framework has been established, the Cameaa Eye gains in credibility as the impression not of an invented persona, but of the author himself."1 Understanding that the Camera Eye is impressionistic autobiography, we can accept more readily Dos Passos' assertion that it is his attempt at "draining off the subjective'2 so as to make the other three devices in the trilogy-the twelve narratives about fictionalized characters, the twenty-seven clipped biographies, and the sixty-eight Newsreels-appear to be objective. But having demonstrated the autobiographical nature of the Camera Eye, Westerhoven finds no particular reason for Dos Passos having ordered it as he did. Westerhoven points out that in U.S.A. there are fifty-one Camera Eye sections but that they are not evenly divided among the three volumes of the trilogy. The 42nd Parallel has twenty seven; Nineteen Nineteen, fifteen; and The Big Money, nine-a reduction by almost half in each successive volume. He remarks only that:

Melville and Wordsworth

Abstract: THE RECENT DISCOVERY of Herman Melville's annotated copy of Wordsworth's poems admits light into an area that has to date been explored largely by conjecture.1 From Melville's markings and annotations, it is possible not only to judge his response to Wordsworth but to reach some conclusions about his critical thinking in general, his private feelings, and his knowledge of several other authors. The edition Melville had was The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth Together With a Description of the Country of the Lakes in the North of England, Now First Published with His Works, edited by Henry Reed (Philadelphia: James Kay, Jun. and Brother; Boston: James Munroe and Company; Pittsburgh: C. H. KayC I839). The book is in good condition except for the damage done by a binder who trimmed the pages and took off parts of ten annotations and almost all of four others. (The trimming casualties include most of Melville's signature on the title page.) Fortunately the ten can be almost completely restored from the letters and letter fragments that remain.2 It is possible that other annotations have been lost in their entirety. Two pages, 389-390, containing the "Ode. Intimations of Immortality," stanza viii, line 7 to the end, are missing from the book and seem to have been removed after the rebindinga small torn fragment remains in the binding. Before the title page

Tall Tale, Tall Talk: Pursuing the Lie in Jacksonian Literature

Abstract: W 7HAT IS A TALL TALE? And what is tall talk? A tall tale is a folk tale seized by the activity of tall talk and construed as a lie. Anyone who memorizes Vladimir Propp's thirty-one episodes can tell a folk tale, recite the legend of a hunt, but only a thinker who has contemplated the bloody hurt of that hunt, considered the pains of Time, Distance, and Dimension, and examined critically the way myth resolves them, can properly stretch a tale, derange its structural features, and expose its absurdity. Tall talk is thus at once a narrative skill and a philosophical stance. The teller unerringly bombards us with pertinent hyperbole, artfully digresses, takes us in, draws us into the field of deception, and makes us at last complicit. Whether in folklore or literature, the tall tale is never innocent, mythically immediate, but instead always begins as a subversion of the story. "This technique," Jorge Luis Borges asserts of Pierre Menard's precise and lunatic version of Don Quixote, "fills the most placid works with adventure."1 When understood as a humor, a feeling about experience, and not seen as simply humorous, when it is truly "half horse, half alligator," the function of myth comically revealed, the tall tale is as sophisticated in its contrivance as the Borgesian fable.

The Superfluous men : conservative critics of American culture, 1900-1945

Abstract: This volume allows readers to sample the witty and original conservative thought that enlivened the American intellectual landscape during the first half of the twentieth century, the period that laid the groundwork for many of the ideas central to debates in contemporary political and social theory: the necessity for limited government, the need for economic decentralization, and the value of America's tradition of federalism.

Literary Contexts of "Life in the Iron-Mills"

Abstract: REBECCA HARDING DAVIS'S "Life in the Iron-Mills," published in the April, i86i 4tlantic Monthly, is the first notable work of fiction to concern itself with the life of the factory worker in an industrial American town.' In literary histories, the story is usually treated, if treated at all, as a forerunner or early example of American literary realism.2 That it should receive such treatment is natural. Davis takes pains to initiate us into the knowledge of hitherto little acknowledged social realities; she seems a pioneer exploring a territory which, by the end of the nineteenth century, would be recognized as the new American wilderness. Yet the significance of "Life in the Iron-Mills" can better be appreciated, I think, by setting it in several other literary contexts: the achievement of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the writer to whom Davis owed most; the tradition of the social novel; the religious, apocalyptic bias of mid-nineteenth-century American literature. Set in these contexts, Davis's story comes to life not as a work which is admirable because it is almost realistic, but as a work which astonishes and informs its past and present readers because it shares in and extends the accomplishments of the romance. In Bits of Gossip, a book of reminiscences, Davis recalls the world of romance she constructed as a child reading Bunyan and Scott in a tree-house.3 One day she brought up into her private world a collection of "moral tales" for children, among which, she records,

"All Dressed Up But No Place to Go": The Black Writer and his Audience During the Harlem Renaissance

Abstract: FHE BLACK WRITER of the I920'S knew that more white people than black read his works. He often expressed the naive belief that black art was removing racial barriers. Yet he worried about his relationship to his own community, and he was sometimes puzzled and angered by the response of the black audience to his best efforts. The anxiety that he felt on these occasions made him ask: who was his proper audience? Was it black? Could it be white? Or was art sufficient unto itself and the question of an audience unimportant? The issues raised during an historical period, Alfred North Whitehead has observed, tell us more about it than do its answers. The problem of a suitable audience for black writers preoccupied the best minds of that period in American literary history we now call the "Harlem Renaissance." No one saw the issues more clearly than did James Weldon Johnson. In an article called "The Dilemma of the Negro Author," written in I928 for H.L. Mencken's American Mercury, he noted that

Winesburg, Ohio as A Dance of Death

Abstract: HERWOOD ANDERSON's implied purpose in Winesburg, Ohio is "to express something" for his characters, to release them from their frustration and loneliness through his art. This motive is revealed in the prayer of Elizabeth Willard (mother of the nascent artist George Willard), who, sensing the approach of her death, says: "I will take any blow that may befall if but this my boy be allowed to express something for us both" (p. 40).' The view of art, however, in this book does not suggest the fulfillment of that prayer. Artists, like the old man in the introductory sketch and like Enoch Robinson in "Loneliness," are among those least capable of expressing themselves to others, either in their life gestures or in their art. The old man in "The Book of the Grotesque" is a pathetic figure preoccupied with fantasies about his failing health. He has a vision of people in a procession and a theory about the "truths" that make them grotesques; but he does not publish the book he is writing about these people, for he realizes it would represent only his truth about them, that it is not possible to express the truth for someone else. Enoch Robinson, the pathologically shy painter, tries to reach out to others through his work, but his paintings fail to make even his fellow artists experience what he has thought and felt. The central insight in the book concerning human relationships is that each man lives according to his own "truth" and that no one can understand and express fully that truth for someone else. Or, put another way, every human being in this world is ultimately alone. In desperate reaction to this vision Elizabeth Willard, near the end of her life, seeks out death as her companion:

Mark Twain the Tourist: The Form of The Innocents Abroad

Abstract: W HILE MOST READERS AGREE that The Innocents Abroad is organized by some kind of consistent narrative stance, just what that stance is remains a mystery and a cause of argument. The Innocents has lasted a century as the most popular travel book ever written by an American, and in the course of that century this particular American, this "Mark Twain" who guides us through Europe, has been hailed and damned with a baffling variety of names. Flagwaving Yankee-Philistine, hater of Americans and American ways, exacting and sober critic of civilization, boor and yahoo, ferocious democrat, sycophant before royal fools, pilgrim of real or hypocritical or parodistic piety-the long list gives little hope of ever settling the question.1 Even so, understanding the narration and the structure of The Innocents can be made much easier if we recognize a mistake common to most of these opinions: the mistake of listening too closely to one voice among the many which present themselves in the narrative-and of consequently missing the one voice behind them all. Solving the identity problem can be fairly simple, provided one is willing to trust Mark Twain a little and take The Innocents to be, in one sense, exactly what he says it is. Repeatedly his book announces itself as "the record of a pleasure trip,"2 of the "Great Pleasure Excursion,"3 of America's historic first "picnic on a gigantic scale" ;4 that is, an account not merely of travel but of travel for the fun of it, of

Politics and Poetics: The Reception of Melville's Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War

Abstract: IN AUGUST i866 Harper and Brothers published Herman Melville's first volume of poetry, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, in an edition of I,260 copies. On December 7, the publisher reported to Melville that "there have been given to Editors, say in round numbers, 300."' However, only eleven reviews have been identified as resulting from the distribution of close to one quarter of the publishing run.2 Now two additional reviews, in the New York Times and The Round Table, a New York weekly, have come to light.' Each of these-but in different ways-helps explain the book's disappointing sales. On February 13, i868, Harper's reported to Melville that only 486 copies had been sold, and since he had guaranteed publication expenses there was a deficit of $338.93 in his account.4 The poor sales of this topical volume came at a time when, as Robert Penn Warren has reminded us, "Melville had been desperately in need of money as well as appreciation."' The review in the New York Times is one of the most sympathetic that the book would receive, and with good reason. It appeared on August 27, i866, only eleven days after the paper's great editor, Henry Raymond, a Member of Congress and Chairman of the Executive Committee of the National Union Party, had urged in an eloquent speech to the Party's convention in Philadelphia that it

Robinson Jeffers Today: Beyond Good and Beneath Evil

Abstract: O`N MARCH 3, 194I, Robinson Jeffers read from his poetry to a %-J large audience in Emerson Hall, Harvard University. The room seated four hundred, but many more crowded the halls outside. The next day I drove Jeffers to visit Emerson's Concord and Walden Pond, and in conversation inquired the title of his next book. "Beyond Good and Evil," he replied; and when I did not hear well, he added: "Nietzsche." Nine months later his new book bore the title, Be Angry at the Sun; and on December 7 Pearl Harbor exploded. At that time the incident did not seem very important. The title poem of the new volume translated the Nietzschean idea into poetic language, while it recalled the German of Spengler (mentioned in another poem), whose Untergang des Abendlandes announced the setting sun of all Western civilization. But after Pearl Harbor the new volume seemed almost treasonous: one poem coupled Roosevelt with Hitler as equal instigators of the new world war: "Roosevelt by grandiose good intentions, cajolery / And public funds, . . . Hitler by fanatic / Patriotism, frank lies, genius and terror." This seemed too much. When "The Bowl of Blood" sought to imagine Hitler as a kind of tragic hero, in order "to present contemporary things in the shape of eternity," most people stopped reading Jeffers. Now more than a generation later, 1941 looms as a watershed in American history. But it also marks a watershed in the history of Jeffers's reputation. In March, 1941, his popularity had reached its highest point (although some critics had been denouncing him since the publication of The Women at Point Sur in 1927). But after Pearl Harbor his attempts to argue that "The cause is far beyond good and evil, / Men fight and their cause is not the cause," effectively destroyed his reputation. At the very moment when Americans most needed to believe in the absolute goodness of their cause, Jeffers

Marriage in Howells's Novels

Abstract: A6 NY MARRIAGE, happy or unhappy," W. H. Auden once asA serted, "is infinitely more interesting and significant than any romance, however passionate."' Few American writers, assuredly, would have concurred more readily with Auden on this point than William Dean Howells, called by one commentator "pre-eminently the novelist of late nineteenth century American mating and marriage."2 Curiously enough, though, Howells's role as the first American writer to explore in any detail the actual "ever after" in which newlyweds presumably live happily once their vows are spoken has been largely overlooked.3 This is particularly surprising when one considers that from his first novel, Their Wedding Journey (I87I), which depicts newlyweds (no longer terribly young or passionate ones, at that), until his last, The Vacation of the Kelwyns (I920), which delineates three marriages and closes with a fourth in the offing, a major portion of Howells's work examines marriage in America. Indeed, it is safe to say that without an awareness of Howells's view of the impact marriage has on those in it and on society one cannot fully understand his overriding vision of life. Before Howells, the few glimpses of American marriage afforded readers neither show how most married Americans live nor make the prospect of marriage seem a particularly enticing one. Irving's Van Winkles, Cooper's grim lower class marrieds like the Bushes or Spikes, Hawthorne's Aylmers, Browns, and other misunited unfortunates, and Poe's couples enmeshed in the dubious gratifications of spiritual and psychological vampirism all convey an implicit encomium to celibacy. Even ostensibly pleasant unions, like Cooper's

Cotton Mather: The Puritan Historian as Renaissance Humanist

Abstract: ODERN SCHOLARSHIP has come to recognize Renaissance humanism as essentially a phase in the Western rhetorical tradition.' The humanists turned to the classics because they were inspired by "the firm belief that in order to write and to speak well it was necessary to study and to imitate the ancients."2 They approached classical literature "almost exclusively as style," and they valued style "chiefly as a model for imitation."' Such statements do not mean that humanist writing consisted of rhetorical exercises or excursions into sophistry. Rhetoric was but a means of conveying sound doctrine and wisdom. Nevertheless, such doctrine or wisdom did not constitute a characteristic humanist philosophy: though sharing a classically inspired rhetoric, the humanists applied that rhetoric to the propagation of very different creeds and philosophies, among them Platonism (Ficino, Pico della Mirandola), skepticism (Montaigne), "secularism" (Machiavelli), and various forms of Christianity (Erasmus, More, Richard Hooker, Melanchthon, Calvin).' It is not surprising, therefore, that in England "the puritans and the humanists were quite often the same people."5 Cotton Mather is the most impressive exemplar of the humanist tradition in American Puritanism. His magnum opus, the Magnalia Christi Americana (I702), is not only a history of Puritan New England and a glorification of its faith; it is also a work whose style and rhetoric reveal his adherence to humanist literary prin-

Melville's Markings in Shakespeare's Plays

Abstract: 1 OFFER HERE a summary of Melville's 491 markings in the sevenvolume Hilliard & Grey edition of the plays that he acquired in I849 and studied extensively just before and during the composition of Moby-Dick in i850-i851. My purpose is to exhibit the range and variety of Melville's markings more fully than has yet been done, to challenge the prevailing impression that he was inspired chiefly by Shakespeare's intimations of a godless or demonic universe, and to delineate what seems to me the actual configuration made by the whole set of markings taken as an aggregate.1 In trying to assemble

American Authors and British Reviewers 1798-1826: A Bibliography

Abstract: W\IIJILLIAM B. CAIRNS studied the attitudes of British periodicals IVY toward American authors more than fifty years ago,' but when he finished the second of his two pioneer studies in I922, there were not only no lists of reviews and general articles such as the one which follows, but there was no identification of the periodicals themselves and no union lists to indicate where they might be seen. The list which follows expands Cairns's list of reviews and articles by perhaps fifty per cent and hence opens up new opportunities for investigation, both of individual authors and of American literature generally. Much more remains to be done both before and after the dates here covered,2 but that which is offered is submitted in the belief that it provides a small aperture for viewing the past and that this aperture is worthy of great enlargement so that those vast archives of the past-our periodicals and our newspapers, both British and American-can be investigated fully for the first time. Without the necessary bibliographical aids, however, the job will never be done except in incomplete and piecemeal fashion, and as a result a vast store of information will remain all but untouched. As Thomas De Quincey so well said a century and a half ago, "Worlds of fine thinking lie buried in that vast abyss, never to be disentombed or restored to human admiration . . . treasures without end-confounded with the rubbish and purgamenta of ages." Some guide to identify those "treasures" is necessary or they may never be seen. The task is indeed a big one, but perhaps some insight and encouragement is provided by the statement which John Shaw Billings is said to have made to the Librarian of the Royal Society of Medicine: "I'll let you in on a secret: there's nothing