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36 results

Page 1 of 2

  • Introduction - Politics and Literary History

  • Edited by John D. Kerkering, Loyola University, Chicago
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics
    Published online:
    06 March 2025
    Print publication:
    13 March 2025, pp 1-16

  • Summary

    This Introduction distinguishes three approaches to studying politics: political science, political philosophy, and the history of political thought. It identifies the last of these as the focus of the chapters in the collection. It then uses an example from Abraham Lincoln’s 1858 Illinois US Senate debates with Stephen A. Douglas to characterize literature’s relationship to politics. Finally, it distinguishes three approaches to literary history, which it labels poststructuralist discourse analysis, standpoint epistemology, and pragmatism. It treats pragmatism as the most suitable description of the mode of literary history practiced in the chapters in the collection.

  • Chapter 4 - Nationalism: Character, Identity, and Hyphenated Selfhood

  • from Part I - Concepts
  • Edited by John D. Kerkering, Loyola University, Chicago
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics
    Published online:
    06 March 2025
    Print publication:
    13 March 2025, pp 67-92

  • Summary

    Nationalism represents, advances, and protects the interests of a national “people,” but the metaphor of bodily nativity at the core of claims to national unity proved increasingly implausible for a United States that, in the buildup to and the aftermath of the Civil War, proved to be more of a politically divided house than a corporeally singular nation. Efforts of mid-century writers like John W. Deforest and Walt Whitman to imagine a US nation-state as a heterosexual conjugal union between a single, feminized, national body and its governing state-as-husband would face challenges from later writers like William Dean Howells, who imagined increasingly intensive ways for racial difference within this single national body to undermine national unity figured as corporeal nativity. Responding at century’s end to such racial fractures in corporeal unity, W. E. B. Du Bois would displace the now-untenable conjugal union of the US nation-state with a double-consciousness located within the US citizen’s individual self. This hyphenated identity, grounded in a color line, installs the failed legacy of nineteenth-century US nationalism at the core of how twentieth- and twenty-first-century US citizens understand and describe their own and others’ imperial Americanness.

The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics
  • Edited by John D. Kerkering
  • Published online:
    06 March 2025
    Print publication:
    13 March 2025
  • The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics addresses the political contexts in which nineteenth-century American literature was conceived, consumed, and criticized. Individual chapters examine how US literature from this period engaged with broad political concepts and urgent political issues, such as liberalism, conservatism, radicalism, nationalism, communitarianism, sovereignty, religious liberty, partisanship and factionalism, slavery, segregation, immigration, territorial disputes, voting rights, gendered spheres, and urban/rural tensions.  Chapters on literary genres and forms show how poetry, drama, fiction, oratory, and nonfiction participated in political debate. The volume's introduction situates these chapters in relation to two larger disciplines, the history of political thought and literary history. This Companion provides a valuable resource for students and instructors interested in Nineteenth-Century American literature and politics.

  • Chapter 17 - The South in Reconstruction

  • from Part II - A New Nation: Poetry from 1800 to 1900
  • Edited by Alfred Bendixen, Princeton University, New Jersey, Stephen Burt, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of American Poetry
    Published online:
    05 December 2014
    Print publication:
    27 October 2014, pp 383-402

  • Summary

    The New England tradition was contested throughout the United States, its meanings were never monolithic, and authors like John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell are more interesting than literary history has remembered them to be. Whittier's relation to the antislavery movement was entirely print-mediated, and in the vexed political climate of the 1830s his publications made him notorious. Whitman Bennett has described Whittier's antislavery newspaper poems as a very special brand. The dialectical distinction between national and natural literature characterizes Lowell's stance on literary value: literature becomes national as it becomes natural, by growing from a global tradition. The decline of Lowell's productivity after the Civil War has been noted, but the Commemoration Ode really commemorates the passing of the kind of public verse he had championed, which once shaped the social order, but which will have a less important place in the new, postbellum world.

  • 28 - Theories of poetry

  • from VI - Genre criticism
  • Edited by M. A. R. Habib, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    07 February 2013, pp 524-538

  • Summary

    Matthew Arnold was probably the most influential British critic of the Victorian period. His central ideas and reputation were somewhat controversial in his own time, especially with regard to his biblical or religious criticism. The fact that Arnold had published Culture and Anarchy earlier in 1869 helps to establish the outline of his career as an active writer. While writing his Taunton Commission report he was also creating the character of Arminius, the fictional German visitor he used to satirize British society in Friendship's Garland. One early and important instance of the influence of Arnold's cultural criticism was in the Renaissance essays of Walter Pater. Arnold's critique of the English Dissenters begins with, My Countrymen in 1866, and he refers to St Paul repeatedly in the essays of Culture and Anarchy. Arnold's introduction to Macmillan's 1879 edition of Wordsworth's poetry became one of his most important contributions to literary criticism.

The Poetics of National and Racial Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
  • John D. Kerkering
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    11 December 2003
  • John D. Kerkering's study examines the literary history of racial and national identity in nineteenth-century America. Kerkering argues that writers such as DuBois, Lanier, Simms, and Scott used poetic effects to assert the distinctiveness of certain groups in a diffuse social landscape. Kerkering explores poetry's formal properties, its sound effects, as they intersect with the issues of race and nation. He shows how formal effects, ranging from meter and rhythm to alliteration and melody, provide these writers with evidence of a collective identity, whether national or racial. Through this shared reliance on formal literary effects, national and racial identities, Kerkering shows, are related elements of a single literary history. This is the story of how poetic effects helped to define national identities in Anglo-America as a step toward helping to define racial identities within the United States. This highly original study will command a wide audience of Americanists.

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