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Echoes of Emerson - Rethinking Realism in Twain, James, Wharton, and Cather (Paperback)
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Echoes of Emerson - Rethinking Realism in Twain, James, Wharton, and Cather (Paperback)
Series: American Literary Realism & Naturalism
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Winner of the 2018 Robert Penn Warren--Cleanth Brooks Award for
Outstanding Literary Scholarship and Criticism" from the Center for
Robert Penn Warren Studies at Western Kentucky University Probes
the ways in which two major periods in nineteenth-century American
literature--Romanticism and Realism--have come to be understood and
defined. Echoes of Emerson: Rethinking Realism in Twain, James,
Wharton, and Cather traces the complex and unexplored relationship
between American realism and the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Critics often read American realism as a clear disavowal of earlier
American romantic philosophy and as a commitment to recognizing the
stark realities of a new postbellum order. Diana Hope Polley's
study complicates these traditional assumptions by reading American
realism as an ongoing dialogue with the ideas--often idealisms--of
America's greatest romantic philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In
this illuminating work, Polley offers detailed readings of Mark
Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Henry James's The Portrait
of a Lady, Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, and Willa Cather's
My Antonia--all through the lens of Emersonian philosophy and
discourse. This unique contribution to nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century literary studies shows how these texts revisit
Emerson's antebellum "republic of the spirit" philosophy,
specifically the trope of the Emersonian hero/heroine navigating
the harsh contingencies of the modern world. Romanticism and
realism are often seen as opposing binaries, with romanticism
celebrating the individual, self-reliance, and nature and realism
emphasizing the weight of socio-historical forces. Realism is often
characterized as rejecting the transcendent principles of
Emersonian thought. Rather than accept those distinct boundaries
between romance and realism, Polley argues that American realists
struggled between celebrating Emerson's core philosophies of
individual possibility and acknowledging the stark "realities" of
American social and historical life. In short, this study
recognizes within realism a divided loyalty between two historical
trends and explores how these seemingly contradictory
notions--Emerson's romantic philosophy and later nineteenth-century
visions of historical reality--exist, simultaneously, within the
literature of the period.
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