front cover of Echoes of Emerson
Echoes of Emerson
Rethinking Realism in Twain, James, Wharton, and Cather
Diana Hope Polley
University of Alabama Press, 2017
Winner of the 2018 Robert Penn Warren—Cleanth  Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Scholarship and Criticism” from the Center for Robert Penn Warren Studies at Western Kentucky University

Probes the ways in which two major periods in nineteenth-century American literature—Romanticism and Realism—have come to be understood and defined.

Echoes of Emerson: Rethinking Realism in Twain, James, Wharton, and Cather traces the complex and unexplored relationship between American realism and the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Critics often read American realism as a clear disavowal of earlier American romantic philosophy and as a commitment to recognizing the stark realities of a new postbellum order. Diana Hope Polley’s study complicates these traditional assumptions by reading American realism as an ongoing dialogue with the ideas—often idealisms—of America’s greatest romantic philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In this illuminating work, Polley offers detailed readings of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, and Willa Cather’s My Ántonia—all through the lens of Emersonian philosophy and discourse. This unique contribution to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary studies shows how these texts revisit Emerson’s antebellum “republic of the spirit” philosophy, specifically the trope of the Emersonian hero/heroine navigating the harsh contingencies of the modern world.

Romanticism and realism are often seen as opposing binaries, with romanticism celebrating the individual, self-reliance, and nature and realism emphasizing the weight of socio-historical forces. Realism is often characterized as rejecting the transcendent principles of Emersonian thought. Rather than accept those distinct boundaries between romance and realism, Polley argues that American realists struggled between celebrating Emerson’s core philosophies of individual possibility and acknowledging the stark “realities” of American social and historical life. In short, this study recognizes within realism a divided loyalty between two historical trends and explores how these seemingly contradictory notions—Emerson’s romantic philosophy and later nineteenth-century visions of historical reality—exist, simultaneously, within the literature of the period.
[more]

front cover of Through the Window, Out the Door
Through the Window, Out the Door
Women's Narratives of Departure, from Austin and Cather to Tyler, Morrison, and Didion
Janis P. Stout
University of Alabama Press, 1998

This informative and provocative study focuses on the centrality of departure in the texts of five major American women novelists.

An important moment in many novels and poems by American women writers occurs when a central character looks out a window or walks out the door of a house. These acts of departure serve to convey such values as the rejection of constraining social patterns, the search for individual fulfillment, and the entry into the political.

Janis Stout examines such moments and related patterns of venture and travel in the fiction of five major American novelists of the 20th century: Mary Austin, Willa Cather, Anne Tyler, Toni Morrison, and Joan Didion. Stout views these five writers within a spectrum of narrative engagements with issues of home and departure—a spectrum anchored at one end by Sarah Orne Jewett and at the other by Marilynne Robinson, whose Housekeeping posits a vision of female transience.

Through the Window, Out the Door ranges over an expansive territory. Moving between texts as well as between texts and contexts, Stout shows how women writers have envisioned the walls of physical and social structures (including genres) as permeable boundaries, drawing on both a rhetoric of liberation and a rhetoric of domesticity to construct narrative arguments for women's right to move freely between the two. Stout concludes with a personal essay on the dilemmas of domesticity and the ambivalence of departure.




 
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter