Keith Newlin - Böcker

The scholarship devoted to American literary realism has long wrestled with problems of definition: is realism a genre, with a particular form, content, and technique? Is it a style, with a distinctive artistic arrangement of words, characters, and description? Or is it a period, usually placed as occurring after the Civil War and concluding somewhere around the onset of World War I? This volume aims to widen the scope of study beyond mere definition, however, by expanding the boundaries of the subject through essays that reconsider and enlarge upon such questions. The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism aims to take stock of the scholarly work in the area and map out paths for future directions of study. The Handbook offers 35 vibrant and original essays of new interpretations of the artistic and political challenges of representing life. It is the first book to treat the subject topically and thematically, in wide scope, with essays that draw upon recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies to offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of major and minor figures and the contexts that shaped their work. Contributors here tease out the workings of a particular concept through a variety of authors and their cultural contexts. A set of essays explores realism's genesis and its connection to previous and subsequent movements. Others examine the inclusiveness of representation, the circulation of texts, and the aesthetic representation of science, time, space, and the subjects of medicine, the New Woman, and the middle class. Still others trace the connection to other arts--poetry, drama, illustration, photography, painting, and film--and to pedagogic issues in the teaching of realism. As a whole, this volume forges exciting new paths in the study of realism and writers' unending labor to represent life accurately.

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism offers twenty-eight original essays about an important genre that typically depicts human beings as the product of biological and environmental forces over which they have little control. Drawing upon recent scholarship as well as innovations in cultural studies, contributors offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of a genre that included writers from Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London to Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Upton Sinclair, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, Joyce Carol Oates, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo. Organized by topic and theme, essays explore the contexts that prompted the origins of the genre, the problem of definition and the interconnections with other genres, and the scientific and philosophical background. Others examine the tensions with the genre-the role of women and African-American writers, depictions of sexuality, the problem of race, the critique of commodity culture and class, and the continuing presence of naturalism in twentieth- and twenty-first century fiction. Contributors also consider the role of the marketplace in the development of naturalism as well as the popular and critical response and the influence of naturalism in the other arts.

For a century, Theodore Dreiser has represented for many readers a rebellious modernism whose novels both critiqued the American dream and embodied a bleakly deterministic perception of life. His first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), was reluctantly published and then ignored by its publisher, who thought the book immoral. Another publisher withdrew his fifth novel, The Genius (1915), rather than face prosecution on obscenity charges. Dreiser did not enjoy widespread popularity and critical acclaim until his masterpiece, An American Tragedy, appeared in 1925. This reference is an authoritative guide to his life and works.Included are several hundred entries on each of Dreiser's books and short stories, as well as magazine and newspaper pieces he collected during his life. Noteworthy uncollected and posthumously collected works are given separate entries, as are major characters in the novels, family members, friends, and other persons important to understanding his writings. There are also entries on Dreiser's publishers, his major influences, the places and events important to his life, and the literary and social contexts of his works. Expert contributors wrote each of the entries, many of which cite works for further reading. The volume closes with a selected bibliography of works by and about Dreiser.

Hamlin Garland, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of more than forty books, was a central figure in American literary life for half a century. He was intimately involved with many of the major literary, social, and artistic movements in American culture, and his extensive correspondence with the intellectual leaders of American culture was almost unparalleled in scope. This volume brings together a rich, representative sample of Garland's letters. They are addressed to an impressive roster of individuals: Samuel Clemens, William Dean Howells, Walt Whitman, Zona Gale, Theodore Roosevelt, Van Wyck Brooks, Howard Mumford Jones, Brander Matthews, Stephen Crane, George Washington Cable, and many others. The letters touch on an equally broad range of subjects, from the U.S. government's reprehensible treatment of Native Americans to environmental issues to the major literary figures and controversies of Garland's day.Frank, opinionated, and wide-ranging, Garland's letters provide a valuable and entertaining portrait of American cultural and intellectual life in the years between 1890 and 1940.

In A Summer to Be, Isabel Garland Lord writes an honest and revealing memoir of growing up in the shadow of her famous father, the pioneering realist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Hamlin Garland. Lord unveils a hitherto unknown side of her father—the intensely loving, domineering patriarch whose deep love for his eldest daughter led him to change the trajectory of his career even as that love impeded his daughter's own independence. Written in the 1960s, A Summer to Be movingly weaves the story of Lord's own coming of age that is also a snapshot of American literary culture during the first decades of the twentieth century. Part memoir and part autobiography, A Summer to Be records a daughter's gradual emergence from her devoted and possessive father; it is a story full of moments of revelation and intrigue, betrayal and guilt, and ultimately the joy of self-discovery.

In recognition of his achievements in literature, Hamlin Garland (1860–1940) received four honorary doctorates and a Pulitzer Prize. Keith Newlin traces the rise of this prairie farm boy with a half-formed ambition to write who then skyrocketed into international prominence before he was forty. His life is a story of ironic contradictions: the radical whose early achievement thrust him to the forefront of literary innovation but whose evolutionary aesthetic principles could not themselves adapt to changing conditions; the self-styled "veritist" whose credo demanded that he verify every fact but whose credulity led him to spend a lifetime seeking to confirm the existence of spirits. His need for recognition caused him to cultivate rewarding friendships with the leaders of literary culture, yet even when he attained that recognition, it was never enough, and his self-doubt caused him fits of black despair. The first and only other biography of Hamlin Garland was published more than forty years ago; since then, letters, manuscripts, and family memoirs have surfaced to provide, along with changing literary scholarship, a more evaluative and critical interpretation of Garland's life and times. Hamlin Garland: A Life is an exploration of Garland's contributions to American literary culture and places his work within the artistic context of its time.

Widely regarded as the best of Hamlin Garland's novels, Rose of Dutcher's Coolly tells the story of a country girl of precocious ability who is raised by her widower father on a small Wisconsin farm. She wants to be a poet and eventually attends the university, where her talent is encouraged. A carefully crafted defense of the New Woman, the first generation of women to achieve economic and social independence, Rose of Dutcher's Coolly deals with issues that are still with us—the nature of femininity, the problem of reconciling career and family, the meaning of "love," and the need for equal opportunity. Above all, it records a nineteenth-century man's vision of a world that still eludes us, one in which men and women are equal partners. This edition reprints the text of the 1895 printing and includes an introduction that places the novel in the historical context of the early feminist movement.

A Hopi child is torn from his parents and sent off to boarding school; white settlers encroach on the Cheyenne reservation, and the Cheyenne vow to fight to the death rather than give up their land; Howling Wolf witnesses the brutal murder of his brother and, when he protests, is in turn brutalized; after Sitting Bull's triumph over Custer's forces, he vows to fight to the death rather than submit to the white invaders. In these and other stories written from 1890–1905, Hamlin Garland sought to capture his vision of the spirit of the Native American Indian in transition. Based on ten years of visits to reservations in the American West, these stories are of interest for readers today in part because they illustrate a sincere and well-intentioned white reformer coming to understand a culture radically at odds with his own—and discovering in the process that his own culture is less "advanced" than he had supposed.

These six plays present varying accounts of the battle of the sexes in the early years of the 20th century. The subjects include the double standard, the advent of the New Woman and turn-of-the-century feminism, and the clash between a woman's career and conventional marriage. Delightful...these plays...provide wonderful insights into the collective mentality of the period. —Library Journal