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Original essays by twelve distinguished international scholars offer critical overviews of the major genres, literary culture, and social contexts that define the current state of scholarship. This Companion also features a chronology of key events and publication dates covering the first half of the twentieth century in the United States. The introductory reference guide concludes with a current bibliography of further reading organized by chapter topics.
The first major literary and cultural history of color in America, 1880-1930 Chromographia tells the story of how color became modern and how literature, by engaging with modern color, became modernist. From the vivid pictures in children's books to the bold hues of abstract painting, from psychological theories of perception to the synthetic dyes that brightened commercial goods, color concerned both the material stuff of modernity and its theoretical and artistic formulations. Chromographia spans these diverse practices to reveal the widespread effects on U.S. literature and culture of the chromatic revolution that unfolded at the turn of the twentieth century. In analyzing color experience through the lens of U.S. writers (including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, L. Frank Baum, Stephen Crane, Charles Chesnutt, Gertrude Stein, Nella Larsen, and William Carlos Williams), Chromographia argues that modern aesthetic techniques are inseparable from the theories and technologies that drove modern color. Nicholas Gaskill shows how literature registered the social worlds within which chromatic technologies emerged, and also experimented with the ideas about perception, language, and the sensory environment that accompanied their proliferation. Chromographia is the only study of modern color in U.S. literature. It presents a new reading of perception in literature and a theory of experience that uses color to move beyond the usual divisions of modern thought.
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Enthusiast! is a polemical history of American literature told from the point of view of six of its major enthusiasts. Complaining that his age was ‘retrospective’, Emerson injected enthusiasm into American literature as a way of making it new. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘is a man good for without enthusiasm? and what is enthusiasm but the daring of ruin for its object?’ This book takes enthusiasm to be a defining feature of American literature, showing how successive major writers – Melville, Thoreau, Pound, Moore, Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler – have modernized and re-modeled Emerson’s founding sense of enthusiasm. The book presents the writer as enthusiast, showing how enthusiasm is fundamental to the composition and the circulation of literature. Enthusiasm, it is argued, is the way literary value is passed on. Starting with a brief history of enthusiasm from Plato to Kant and Emerson, the book features chapters on each of Melville, Thoreau, Pound, Moore, O’Hara, and Schuyler. Each chapter presents an aspect of the writer as enthusiast, the book as a whole charting the changing sense of literary enthusiasm from Romanticism to the present day. Lucidly written and combatively argued, the book will appeal to readers of American Literature or Modern Poetry, and to all those interested in the circulation of literary work.
Bryan M. Santin examines over a half-century of intersection between American fiction and postwar conservatism. He traces the shifting racial politics of movement conservatism to argue that contemporary perceptions of literary form and aesthetic value are intrinsically connected to the rise of the American Right. Instead of casting postwar conservatives as cynical hustlers or ideological fanatics, Santin shows how the long-term rhetorical shift in conservative notions of literary value and prestige reveal an aesthetic antinomy between high culture and low culture. This shift, he argues, registered and mediated the deeper foundational antinomy structuring postwar conservatism itself: the stable social order of traditionalism and the creative destruction of free-market capitalism. Postwar conservatives produced, in effect, an ambivalent double register in the discourse of conservative literary taste that sought to celebrate neo-aristocratic manifestations of cultural capital while condemning newer, more progressive manifestations revolving around racial and ethnic diversity.