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25 - Modern domestic realism in America, 1950–1970
- Edited by Dale M. Bauer, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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- Book:
- The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature
- Published online:
- 28 September 2012
- Print publication:
- 24 May 2012, pp 501-514
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Summary
The history of American women's domestic fiction in the second half of the twentieth century describes a movement from a handful of exemplary careers to a panoply of practitioners. The 1950s are typified by a few stellar careers – Flannery O’Connor, Elizabeth Spencer, and Shirley Jackson – a trend that continues into the 1960s with Joyce Carol Oates among others – but as the decade evolves we find the number of realist writers growing at a pace unprecedented since the beginning of the century. In fact, a closer examination of the history of the period suggests that the conventional analogies concerning gender between nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary production in the USA are not really as neat as we often assume. For the rise of new modern domestic novelists (as opposed to sentimental writers and romancers) is one of the least-appreciated stories comprising twentieth-century American literary history. These writers were rendered invisible in the critical accounts, except for some passing nod to one or another of them, often as niche authors – southern gothicists, like Flannery O’Connor; nasty or charming satirists, like Mary McCarthy; or regionalists, like Eudora Welty. Such attribution may have suited the needs of literary historians intent on promoting war novelists, existentialists, or master comedians and tragedians of manners. Untold, however, is the story of how these women writers more and more often turn their attention to contemporary mores, history, and politics as the scene of their fiction.
12 - Whose Hawthorne?
- Edited by Richard H. Millington
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Published online:
- 28 May 2006
- Print publication:
- 23 September 2004, pp 251-265
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Summary
“Our” Hawthorne
As the afterword to the Hawthorne Centenary volume of essays, Lionel Trilling contributed “Our Hawthorne,” an essay he later republished as “Hawthorne in Our Time.” Although Hawthorne specialists have never been particularly enamored of it, the essay is one of the most important studies of the author during the 1960s, not because it introduces any new scholarship or because it offers some methodological advance. Instead, its interest lies in the way it crystallizes a way of thinking about Hawthorne, his importance to US society as well as to academic values. Trilling's second title may have improved over the first, since it minimizes the issue of ownership and insists, however gently, on the historicity of reception. The first title, however, resonates aptly, evoking as it does how much a generation's reading of Hawthorne, or, indeed, any classic author, lays claim to possession, i.e., the owning of critical rights. “Our” moment, for Trilling, was the post-war era of New Critical predominance, the generation whose Hawthorne has given us the one that the post-1980s generations have needed to overturn or recast.
This sense of critical proprietorship is usually disclosed in scholarly skirmishes through questions of propriety – the protocols of interpretation. Generally claims of possession are made by individuals or by societies, perhaps keepers of the flame who may be outraged by some new revisionist. Trilling’s title reminds us that possession is more nuanced and that a generation, even a whole literary culture, can have a great deal invested in seeing an author in a particular light, perhaps in the way that the post-World War II generation had so much invested in Ernest Hemingway, a veteran of World War I, whose example filled a romantic need to exalt the author as both virile and sensitive.
The Dynamics of Erasure: Anti-Semitism and the Example of Ludwig Lewisohn
- Gordon Hutner
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“A recent experience has shown me how terribly hard it is for a man of Jewish birth to get a good position. I had always suspected that it was a matter worth considering, but I had not known how widespread and strong it was. While we shall be glad to do anything we can for you, therefore, I cannot help feeling that the chances are going to be greatly against you.” These words, in 1903, imputed to the chairman of the English Department at Columbia University effectively put an end to Ludwig Lewisohn's dream of becoming a professor of English. The humiliation was so severe that Lewisohn spent most of the next fifty years examining the role of the alien in a gentile country, the Jew in America. He transformed the hatred and shame he suffered into a writing career, of some forty-three volumes, remarkable for its productivity, variety, frankness, and occasional distinction. A critic, journalist, cultural analyst, scholar, translater, polemicist, drama reviewer, editor, and memorist, he perhaps delighted most in being a novelist. A few of his ten novels were celebrated, most especially The Case of Mr. Crump (1926), for which Thomas Mann provided an introduction and which Sigmund Freud hailed as a masterpiece depicting the “tyranny of sex” (as the novel was retitled after being banned in the United States for twenty years), and Island Within; (1928), for some readers as fine a novel of Jewish immigration as has been written. As a literary critic, however, Lewisohn's most significant achievement was surely Expression in America; (1932), the first fullscale psychoanalytic history of American literature, a monumental study of artistic personality and the effect of milieu, later reprinted as The Story of American Literature (1939).