Revisionary Interventions into the Americanist Canon

Revisionary Interventions into the Americanist Canon

  • Auteur: Pease, Donald E.; Warner, Michael; McWilliams, John; Dimock, Wai Chee
  • Éditeur: Duke University Press
  • Collection: New Americanists
  • ISBN: 9780822314783
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822382645
  • Lieu de publication:  Durham , United States
  • Année de publication électronique: 1994
  • Mois : Juin
  • Pages: 352
  • DDC: 813/.309
  • Langue: Anglais
Throughout the era of the Cold War a consensus reigned as to what constituted the great works of American literature. Yet as scholars have increasingly shown, and as this volume unmistakably demonstrates, that consensus was built upon the repression of the voices and historical contexts of subordinated social groups as well as literary works themselves, works both outside and within the traditional canon. This book is an effort to recover those lost voices. Engaging New Historicist, neo-Marxist, poststructuralist, and other literary practices, this volume marks important shifts in the organizing principles and self-understanding of the field of American Studies.
Originally published as a special issue of boundary 2, the essays gathered here discuss writers as diverse as Kate Chopin, Frederick Douglass, Emerson, Melville, W. D. Howells, Henry James, W. E. B. DuBois, and Mark Twain, plus the historical figure John Brown. Two major sections devoted to the theory of romance and to cultural-historical analyses emphasize the political perspective of "New Americanist" literary and cultural study.

Contributors. William E. Cain, Wai-chee Dimock, Howard Horwitz, Gregory S. Jay, Steven Mailloux, John McWilliams, Susan Mizruchi, Donald E. Pease, Ivy Schweitzer, Priscilla Wald, Michael Warner, Robert Weimann

  • Contents
  • Preface
  • New Americanists: Revisionist Interventions into the Canon
  • The Res Publica of Letters
  • The Desublimation of Romance
  • The Rationale for “The American Romance”
  • Scarcity, Subjectivity, and Emerson
  • Hearing Narrative Voices in Melville’s Pierre
  • The Rhetorical Use and Abuse of Fiction: Eating Books in Late Nineteenth-Century America
  • Maternal Discourse and the Romance of Self-Possession in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening
  • The New Historicist Return of the Repressed Context
  • Realism, Ideology, and the Novel in America (1886–1896): Changing Perspectives in the Work of Mark Twain, W.
  • American Literature and the New Historicism: The Example of Frederick Douglass
  • “Ours by the Law of Nature”: Romance and Independents on Mark Twain’s River
  • Cataloging the Creatures of the Deep: “Billy Budd, Sailor” and the Rise of Sociology
  • Violence, Revolution, and the Cost of Freedom: John Brown and W. E. B. DuBois
  • Contributors
  • Index

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