The Antimodernist Unconscious: Genre and Ideology in The House of Mirth
01 Jan 1989-Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory (Johns Hopkins University Press)-Vol. 44, Iss: 4, pp 55-79
TL;DR: The House of Mirth as discussed by the authors was one of the first novels to break all sales records at Scribner's during its heyday as a national best seller and became a classic of American literature.
Abstract: NY reconsideration of Edith Wharton's place in the canon of American literature must come to terms with the following anomaly. With a handful of other novelists, it is her distinction to have successfully negotiated the realms of high and mass culture at a time when their separation had become institutionalized. Published in 1905, The House of Mirth propelled Wharton to the front rank of American authors and broke all sales records at Scribner's during its heyday as a national best seller (Lewis 151). The body of critical opinion that has characterized Wharton as a \"literary aristocrat\" or antimodernist,1 out of touch with the main currents of twentieth-century American culture, cannot explain her popular following of 1905. Furthermore, it has tended to diminish the historical significance of her oeuvre. This paper is a contribution toward a fuller appreciation of Wharton's enduring claims on the present. There are several important precedents for such an undertaking. In the company of Henry Adams, Samuel Clemens, and William James, Wharton figures among the \"dtamatis personae\" of Jackson Lears' revisionist study in American cultural history, No Place of Grace (32223). Far from being \"the death rattle of old-stock Northeastern elites unable to adjust to a raw new industrial civilization,\" the antimodetnism of these fin-de-siecle artists and intellectuals \"helped to revitalize familiar bourgeois values and eased the transition to new ones\" appro-
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TL;DR: This article explored the origins of turn-of-the-century American antimodernism and found that the culture of the Arts and Crafts was not simple escapism, but reveals some enduring and recurring tensions in American culture.
Abstract: T. J. Jackson Lears draws on a wealth of primary sources -- sermons, diaries, letters -- as well as novels, poems, and essays to explore the origins of turn-of-the-century American antimodernism. He examines the retreat to the exotic, the pursuit of intense physical or spiritual experiences, and the search for cultural self-sufficiency through the Arts and Crafts movement. Lears argues that their antimodern impulse, more pervasive than historians have supposed, was not \"simple escapism,\" but reveals some enduring and recurring tensions in American culture.
50 citations
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TL;DR: Booth as mentioned in this paper analyzed how we manage to share quite specific ironies and why we often fail when we try to do so, and showed that at least some of our commonplaces about meaninglessness require revision.
Abstract: Perhaps no other critical label has been made to cover more ground than \"irony,\" and in our time irony has come to have so many meanings that by itself it means almost nothing. In this work, Wayne C. Booth cuts through the resulting confusions by analyzing how we manage to share quite specific ironies-and why we often fail when we try to do so. How does a reader or listener recognize the kind of statement which requires him to reject its \"clear\" and \"obvious\" meaning? And how does any reader know where to stop, once he has embarked on the hazardous and exhilarating path of rejecting \"what the words say\" and reconstructing \"what the author means\"? In the first and longer part of his work, Booth deals with the workings of what he calls \"stable irony,\" irony with a clear rhetorical intent. He then turns to intended instabilities-ironies that resist interpretation and finally lead to the \"infinite absolute negativities\" that have obsessed criticism since the Romantic period. Professor Booth is always ironically aware that no one can fathom the unfathomable. But by looking closely at unstable ironists like Samuel Becket, he shows that at least some of our commonplaces about meaninglessness require revision. Finally, he explores-with the help of Plato-the wry paradoxes that threaten any uncompromising assertion that all assertion can be undermined by the spirit of irony.
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01 Jan 1982
2,508 citations
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01 Jan 1982
TL;DR: Modleski as mentioned in this paper revisited her widely read book, bringing to this new edition a review of the issues that have, in the intervening years, shaped and reshaped questions of women's reading.
Abstract: Upon its first publication, Loving with a Vengeance was a groundbreaking study of women readers and their relationship to mass-market romance fiction Feminist scholar and cultural critic Tania Modleski has revisited her widely read book, bringing to this new edition a review of the issues that have, in the intervening years, shaped and reshaped questions of women's reading With her trademark acuity and understanding of the power both of the mass-produced object, film, television, or popular literature, and the complex workings of reading and reception, she offers here a framework for thinking about one of popular culture's central issuesThis edition includes a new introduction, a new chapter, and changes throughout the existing text
653 citations
Book•
26 Jul 2021
TL;DR: The authors explored the origins of turn-of-the-century American antimodernism and argued that their anti-heroic impulse was not simple escapism, but reveals some enduring and recurring tensions in American culture.
Abstract: T. J. Jackson Lears draws on a wealth of primary sources -- sermons, diaries, letters -- as well as novels, poems, and essays to explore the origins of turn-of-the-century American antimodernism. He examines the retreat to the exotic, the pursuit of intense physical or spiritual experiences, and the search for cultural self-sufficiency through the Arts and Crafts movement. Lears argues that their antimodern impulse, more pervasive than historians have supposed, was not "simple escapism," but reveals some enduring and recurring tensions in American culture.
639 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1978
TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigate the entire spectrum of techniques for portraying the mental lives of fictional characters in both the stream-of-consciousness novel and other fiction, and each chapter deals with one main technique, illustrated from a wide range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction by writers including Stendhal, Dostoevsky, James, Mann, Kafka, Joyce, Proust, Woolf, and Sarraute.
Abstract: This book investigates the entire spectrum of techniques for portraying the mental lives of fictional characters in both the stream-of-consciousness novel and other fiction. Each chapter deals with one main technique, illustrated from a wide range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction by writers including Stendhal, Dostoevsky, James, Mann, Kafka, Joyce, Proust, Woolf, and Sarraute.
639 citations
Book•
[...]
01 Jan 1974
TL;DR: Booth as discussed by the authors analyzed how we manage to share quite specific ironies and why we often fail when we try to do so, and showed that at least some of our commonplaces about meaninglessness require revision.
Abstract: Perhaps no other critical label has been made to cover more ground than "irony," and in our time irony has come to have so many meanings that by itself it means almost nothing. In this work, Wayne C. Booth cuts through the resulting confusions by analyzing how we manage to share quite specific ironies-and why we often fail when we try to do so. How does a reader or listener recognize the kind of statement which requires him to reject its "clear" and "obvious" meaning? And how does any reader know where to stop, once he has embarked on the hazardous and exhilarating path of rejecting "what the words say" and reconstructing "what the author means"? In the first and longer part of his work, Booth deals with the workings of what he calls "stable irony," irony with a clear rhetorical intent. He then turns to intended instabilities-ironies that resist interpretation and finally lead to the "infinite absolute negativities" that have obsessed criticism since the Romantic period. Professor Booth is always ironically aware that no one can fathom the unfathomable. But by looking closely at unstable ironists like Samuel Becket, he shows that at least some of our commonplaces about meaninglessness require revision. Finally, he explores-with the help of Plato-the wry paradoxes that threaten any uncompromising assertion that all assertion can be undermined by the spirit of irony.
511 citations