Practices of Surprise in American Literature After Emerson

Kate Stanley is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2013. Her contributions to the study of American literature, modernism, pragmatism, and pedagogy have appeared or are forthcoming in Modernism/modernity, American Literary History, Criticism, Henry James Review, and Women's Studies Quarterly.

'Kate Stanley's Practices of Surprise in American Literature After Emerson redefines everything we thought we knew about American modernism. In its convincing account modernism isn't about the experience of shock, speed, newness, noise and the crazed obsession with futurity. Instead, it appears as a series of practices cultivating moments of surprise that come gently and leave quietly; it is about reception and serenity rather than the loud expounding of manifestos; it is about slowness and restoration of the old, and not at all a matter of forgetting the past on the grounds of its datedness. In this beautifully written and rigorously argued book canonical figures, from Emerson to Gertrude Stein are restored as the bearers of such a gentle and quiet modernism. This book will change the way we think about the history of American ideas at the turn of the twentieth century.' Branka Arsić, Charles and Lynn Zhang Professor, Columbia University, New York

• Introduction: through Emerson's eye; 1. Proust's perceptual training; 2. Henry James's syntax of surprise; 3. Nella Larsen's novel weather; 4. Gertrude Stein's grammars of attention; Coda: surprised by silence (listening with Cage).