Abstract: In tracing the causes of eponymous disorder in American Nervousness, George M. Beard claims the "chief and primary cause of this development and very rapid increase of nervousness is modern civilization."1 In The Damnation of Theron Ware, by contrast, Harold Frederic's protagonist seems to owe his nervous collapse to his own provincialism, his utter naïveté in the face of modern civilization. Theron's downfall clearly is precipitated by his encounters with the cosmopolitan ideas of the late-nineteenth century, but the causal chain to determine accountability for his ruin is less clear. His conservative town of Octavius and Theron's orthodox Methodism stand in contrast to industrial, urban American civilization. ... Read More PubDate: 2020-10-26T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In The Antinomies of Realism, Fredric Jameson makes a startling claim about the origins of literary realism. Affect—defined as the body's range of feelings and sensations—enters the novels of Flaubert, Zola, Tolstoy, and others as the narrative opponent of emotions.1 Jameson distinguishes affect not from emotions as such but from their capacity to be named. "If the word love comes up between them I am lost":2 in this example from Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), the naming of love makes the characters, and us, aware of their identities and destinies. There is a whole system of named emotions (fear, anger, etc.) available to authors for constructing knowable characters and plots.3 Affect, on the other ... Read More PubDate: 2020-10-26T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Twenty-three letters newly recovered from newspaper databases and auction sites, primarily by Mark Twain, as well as one addressed to him and another sent to his Australian lecture agent concerning him, are presented here in chronological order.Journalist William L. Alden,1 who left the editorial department of the New York Times briefly in January 1881 to conduct the "Editor's Drawer" of Harper's Monthly, wrote two letters in short succession, on 3 and 9 November 1881, pressing Twain for a submission. His response humorously targets the Drawer's reputation for facetiae and his relationship with his new publisher, James R. Osgood.Hartford, Nov. 11/81.Dear Mr. Alden—Look here, it really looks to me like a piece of ... Read More PubDate: 2020-10-26T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Samuel Clemens and his family lived in Berlin between mid-October 1891 and March 1892, one of their first long stops after closing the Hartford mansion the previous June and traveling to Europe to save money. Soon after his arrival in Berlin, he was the subject of a news story dated 4 November 1891 in the Tägliches Cincinnatier Volksblatt, a German-language daily newspaper in Ohio. This report has been lost to scholarship until now1 and is here published for the first time in English translation:Mark Twain is in Berlin for the first time and arrived with a large company. He travels with his wife, his three adult children, his wife's sister, another lady, a courier, and servants.2 It appears that his stay in Berlin ... Read More PubDate: 2020-10-26T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: On the inside front cover of her diary for 1900, Charlotte Perkins Gilman succinctly inscribed her agenda for the twentieth century: "Because God, manifesting himself in Society, calls for ever fuller and more perfect forms of expression; therefore I, as part of Society and part of God owe my whole service to the Social development."1 An ardent champion of socialism, Gilman published numerous works promoting its cause. In a promotional ad in the January 1903 issue of Wilshire's Magazine, published by the "millionaire socialist" Gaylord Wilshire, Gilman's name appeared alongside such "celebrated authors whose articles have appeared" in the magazine as Jack London, H. G. Wells, Hamlin Garland, Upton Sinclair, and ... Read More PubDate: 2020-10-26T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In the course of researching Mark Twain's life, I have located forty-four interviews new to scholarship, including alternative versions of interviews known in other transcriptions. Among the topic Twain discusses in these interviews are woman's suffrage (#22), international copyright (#36), New England weather (#27), political corruption (#22, 32), the authorship of Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (#7), Christian Science (#23), vegetarianism (#43), and censorship (#35). Among the people he mentions are Paul Bourget (#5), John Bunyan (#17), George Washington Cable (#1), Winston Churchill (#19), Marcus Clarke (#13), Olivia Clemens (#30, 32), Mary Baker Eddy (#41), Emperor Franz Josef (#16), U. S. Grant (#1) ... Read More PubDate: 2020-10-26T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time, Howard offers a fresh look at the complexity of regional writing and its connection to the world beyond local region. Her focus, as she explains in her preface, is "how such writing shapes the ways we inhabit and imagine, not only neighborhoods and provinces, but also the world."Howard takes time in her opening chapters to define regionalism as a concept, not simply a form of realism. At the heart of this concept is the idea that a "relational element is always implicit" even when focusing on a particular place, thus "every region is defined by its location in a larger system." In this sense, Howard moves beyond the question of locality to ... Read More PubDate: 2020-10-26T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: A first-rate reissue of Cather's book of poetry with an excellent introductory essay by Thacker. Well-suited for classroom adoption and a valuable addition to Cather scholars' shelves. ... Read More PubDate: 2020-10-26T00:00:00-05:00
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