Academic literature on the topic 'Anglo-American literature'

"Knowing Children" describes the means by which telepathic devices present the mind of the child in novels by Charles Dickens, Henry James, William Faulkner, and Carson McCullers. An intellectual interest in the child and childhood flourished not only during the same period as the formal study of telepathy, but also within the same circles. "Telepathy" can be understood for my purposes as a mode of narrative representation of consciousness and knowledge. Because social, linguistic, and cognitive limitations generally prevent child characters from articulating the contours of their surprisingly complex knowledge, their minds can best be rendered through the use of telepathic literary techniques that enable the child figures themselves to influence the course of their narratives. The theoretical core of the thesis illustrates how telepathic techniques in fiction influence causality, characterization, and reader reception. More broadly, the thesis demonstrates how the telepathic mode challenges the historical assumptions, narrative effects, and readerly responsibilities of so-called omniscient narration, showing how characters' minds are revealed through those of other characters, especially those of children, who would properly be sheltered from the discourses of authority. Thus, the thesis also calls into question the conventional category of childhood itself.<br>« Enfants savants » décrit les méthodes par lesquelles les dispositifs télépathiques présentent l'esprit des enfants dans les romans de Charles Dickens, Henry James, William Faulkner, et Carson McCullers. Un intérêt intellectuel pour l'enfant et l'enfance ont proliféré en tant qu'étude formelle de la télépathie, non seulement lors de la même période, mais aussi à l'intérieur des mêmes milieux. Pour mes fins, la "télépathie" peut être comprise en tant qu'un mode de représentation narrative de la conscience et de la connaissance. Puisque les limitations sociales, linguistiques et cognitives empêchent généralement les personnages d'enfant d'articuler les contours de leur connaissance étonnamment complexe, leurs esprits peuvent le mieux être traduits par le biais de dispositifs télépathiques-dispositifs qui permettent fondamentalement aux personnages d'enfants à influencer eux-mêmes le courant de leurs récits. Le principe théorique de ma thèse souligne la manière dont les techniques télépathiques influence la causalité, la caractérisation et la perception du lecteur. D'une manière générale, la thèse démontre la manière par laquelle le mode télépathique remet en question les suppositions historiques, effets narratifs et responsabilités du lecteur lors d'une narration autrefois omnisciente, montrant comment l'esprit des personnages est relevé à travers d'autres personnages, particulièrement ceux des enfants, qui seraient probablement gardés à l'écart des discours de l'autorité.

Didactic, scientifically oriented children's literature crisscrossed the Atlantic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, finding wide popularity in Great Britain and the United States; yet the genre has since suffered from a reputation for being dull and pedantic and has been neglected by scholars. Challenging this scholarly devaluation, "Science and Imagination in Anglo-American Children's Books, 1760--1855" argues that didactic, scientifically oriented children's books play upon and encourage the use of the imagination. Three significant Anglo-American children's authors---Thomas Day, Maria Edgeworth, and Nathaniel Hawthorne---infuse their writings with the wonders of science and the clear message that an active imagination is a necessary component of a moral upbringing. Indeed, these authors' books, most particularly Sandford and Merton (1783--1789), Harry and Lucy Concluded (1825), and A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1852), are more than mere lessons: they are didactic fantasies intended to spark creativity within their readers.;These didactic fantasies are best understood in the context of the emerging industrial revolution and the height of the Atlantic slave trade. These phenomena, combined with the entrenchment of classicism in Anglo-American culture and the lesser-known transatlantic botany craze, shaped the ways in which Day, Edgeworth, and Hawthorne crafted their children's stories. Certainly dramatic changes on both sides of the Atlantic during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries influenced the differences in the texts. More important to this study, however, are the vital connections among these stories. Each author draws heavily upon Rousseau's ubiquitous child-rearing treatise Emile and upon her or his literary predecessor to create children's books that encourage exploring nature through scientific experimentation and imaginative enterprise.;Yet these writers do not encourage the imagination run amok. Rather, they see the need for morally grounded scientific endeavor, for which they rely primarily on classicism and on gender ideology. Incorporating tales of the ancient world to inculcate the ideal of a virtuous, disinterested, and learned citizen responsible to the larger body politic, the three children's authors---but most notably and explicitly Hawthorne---tie a romanticized, classical past to the emerging industrial world.

This project sets out to develop a model for a study of difficulty in poetry as systematic and nuanced as possible. In doing so, it endeavours to make a significant theoretical and practical contribution to the fields of stylistics, poetics and literary theory. Throughout the twentieth century, the notion of difficulty in poetry has never ceased to interest linguists, literary theorists, psychologists and researchers in education. The popularity of the notion among non-specialist is equally significant, as it is not uncommon for readers to justify their lack of interest in poetry on the grounds of its supposed difficulty. Notwithstanding this, the dynamics of text-reader interaction – the defining trait of difficulty, as argued in Chapter 1 – remains notably underexplored. This thesis addresses this gap in the literature by (a) providing a psychologically plausible and linguistically sound account of difficulty; and by (b) unifying under a coherent framework the insights offered by a large body of materials – from critical readings of literary works to anecdotal evidence, from psychological models of comprehension to controlled psycholinguistic experiments. In terms of methodology, a linguistic, text-based approach is intertwined with an empirical, reader-based one. This combined effort leads to an in-depth analysis of a set of poems from both perspectives (Chapter 3 to 5). Such a qualitative approach allows for the identification of textual and readerly components typical of difficulty. On the textual side, I identify twenty-four features, called linguistic indicators of difficulty and affecting all the linguistic levels – graphology, syntax, lexis, semantics and text structure. Based on scholarly remarks and experimental evidence, these indicators are likely to hamper readers’ comprehension and thus increase the processing effort they require. These two main readerly dimensions of difficulty I qualify as online (i.e. affecting the processing effort in actual reading) and offline (i.e. affecting the post-reading understanding of a poem). In turn, online and offline difficulty are cued by observable readerly behaviours (e.g. interpretive uncertainty, slowed-down reading, statements of rejection) that are explored in Chapters 4 and 5. Overall, difficulty is viewed as a response phenomenon that has a strong linguistic motivation. For reasons of focus and critical consistency, the model is applied to twentieth and twentieth-first century Anglo-American poems only. This temporal restriction acknowledges the critically established connection between difficulty and modernism (e.g. Adams 1991, Adamson 1999, Diepeveen 2003). The case studies from Chapter 3 to 5 focus on Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Susan Howe and Jeremy H. Prynne as representing different aspects of difficulty. Chapter 6 extends this purview to a larger corpus, featuring Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Hart Crane, Charles Olson, Dylan Thomas, John Ashbery and Charles Bernstein. All these poets have been deemed ‘difficult’ by other critics, so the corpus rests on an intersubjective agreement that was missing in previous accounts. The hope is that the model proposed will be fruitfully extended and applied to non-Anglo-American literary traditions as well as to poetry written in earlier centuries.

<p> This dissertation examines the function of family as a thematic in the contemporary Anglo-American novel. It argues that contemporary aesthetics increasingly presents the family as an enabling platform for conciliation with the social totality: as a space of personal development, readying one for life in the wider social field. This analyses hinges on readings of Jonathan Franzen&rsquo;s <i>Freedom</i> (2010), Zadie Smith&rsquo;s <i> NW</i> (2012), A. M. Homes&rsquo; <i>May We Be Forgiven</i> (2012) and Caryl Phillips&rsquo; <i>In the Falling Snow.</i> In approaching these novels, this project addresses the theoretical lacuna left open by the much-touted retreat of postmodernism as a general cultural-aesthetic strategy. This project identifies these novels as examples of a new and competing ideological constellation: metamodernism. Metamodernism encompasses the widely cited return of sincerity to contemporary aesthetics, though this project explains this development in a novel way: as a cultural expression from within the wider arc of postmodernism itself. One recurrent supposition within this project is that postmodernism, in its seeming nihilism, betrays a thwarted political commitment; on the other hand contemporary metamodern attitudes display the seriousness and earnestness of political causes carried out to an ironic disregard of the political. Metamodernism, in other words, is not a wholesale disavowal of postmodern irony, but a re-arrangement of its function: a move from sincere irony to an ironic sincerity. The central inquiry of this dissertation is into this re-arranged role of family and familial participation amidst this new cultural landscape. My argument is that family and the political have maintained a tense relationship through the twentieth century in the American consciousness. They represent competing models of futurity in a zero-sum game for an individual&rsquo;s life-energy. What metamodernism represents, so this dissertation will articulate, is a new form of anti-politics: a fully gratified impulse to depoliticize. Analyzing what this project terms the &ldquo;politics of the local,&rdquo; this dissertation will argue that the highly popular and successful models of conscientious capitalism have been superseded. Today, increasingly, redemption from consumerism guilt is itself wrapped up in commodities: the utopian impulse celebrated by Fredric Jameson has itself obtained a price tag. The contemporary novel thus reflects new social functions for that which has trumped the political: the family. </p>

This is a thesis about English and American imaginative identification with Italy in the period 1848–1865, facilitated by and expressed through periodicals and newspapers. At the centre of the thesis sits New England magazine The Atlantic Monthly, which during the Civil War emerged as a vehicle for abolitionist literature, but which also published extensively on Italy. The Risorgimento, the movement that sought Italian unification, triumphed in 1861—the same year that the battle of Fort Sumter signalled the start of the American Civil War that would last until 1865. This thesis investigates the transatlantic relationship between the Risorgimento and the Civil War as it emerged in The Atlantic Monthly, The Springfield Daily Republican and other nineteenth–century publications, and it does so through contextualised readings of Arthur Hugh Clough, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Emily Dickinson. These three seemingly very disparate authors are connected by The Atlantic Monthly: Clough’s epistolary poem on the fall of the 1849 Roman Republic, Amours de Voyage, was first published there in 1858; Harriet Beecher Stowe serialised her historical Italian romance Agnes of Sorrento in The Atlantic Monthly between 1861 and 1862; and Dickinson was inspired to write a series of poems on Italy and volcanoes after reading both The Atlantic Monthly and local morning newspaper The Springfield Daily Republican. They are also connected by their fascination with Italy. This thesis argues that nineteenth–century periodicals need to be studied in a transatlantic context: they cannot be read, in the traditional style of Benedict Anderson, as simple affirmations of nationalism and national culture. Another way of putting it is to say that this thesis is about a series of exchanges of influence and thought that get attached to national projects but are in themselves international.

Special Relationships examines depictions of love affairs, courtships and marriages between British and American characters in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century American short stories and novels. I argue that these transatlantic love stories respond to shifting Anglo-American cultural, political, and economic exchanges during the period. In some cases, texts under consideration actually helped shape those interactions. I also suggest that many authors found such transnational encounters a useful way to define ideal versions of American national identity, and to endorse or challenge prevalent attitudes regarding class, race, and gender. Special Relationships begins with Cooper’s The Spy (1821), which I discuss in the Introduction. Part One examines works published by Cooper, Irving, Frances Trollope, Lippard, Warner, and Melville during the 1820s, 30s and 40s, and traces the emergence of the “fairytale” of the American woman who marries into English aristocracy. Part Two places works by Henry James, Burnett, and several other writers in the context of a real-life phenomenon: the plethora of American women who between 1870 and 1914 married into European nobility. I conclude by discussing the Anglo-American political rapprochement of the 1890s and the use by Jack London and Edgar Rice Burroughs of Anglo-American love stories to promote racial ‘Anglo-Saxonism.’