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This book is a history of the nineteenth-century poetry of slavery
and freedom framed as an argument about the nature of poetry
itself: why we write it, why we read it, how it interacts with
history. The poetry of the transatlantic abolitionist movement
represented a powerful alliance across racial and religious
boundaries; today it challenges the demarcation in literary studies
between cultural and aesthetic approaches. Now is a particularly
apt moment for its study. This book is a history of the
nineteenth-century poetry of slavery and freedom framed as an
argument about the nature of poetry itself: why we write it, why we
read it, how it interacts with history. Poetry that speaks to a
broad cross-section of society with moral authority, intellectual
ambition, and artistic complexity mattered in the fraught years of
the mid nineteenth century; Brian Yothers argues that it can and
must matter today. Yothers examines antislavery poetry in light of
recent work by historians, scholars in literary, cultural, and
rhetorical studies, African-Americanists, scholars of race and
gender studies, and theorists of poetics. That interdisciplinary
sweep is mirrored by the range of writers he considers: from the
canonical - Whitman, Barrett Browning, Beecher Stowe, DuBois,
Melville - to those whose influence has faded - Longfellow, Lydia
Huntley Sigourney, John Pierpont, John Greenleaf Whittier, James
Russell Lowell - to African American writers whose work has been
recovered in recent decades - James M. Whitfield, William Wells
Brown, George Moses Horton, Frances E. W. Harper.
This book is the first to engage with the full range of American
travel writing about nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine, and the
first to acknowledge the influence of the late-eighteenth-century
Barbary captivity narrative on nineteenth-century travel writing
about the Middle East. Brian Yothers argues that American travel
writing about the Holy Land forms a coherent, if greatly varied,
tradition, which can only be fully understood when works by major
writers such as Twain and Melville are studied alongside missionary
accounts, captivity narratives, chronicles of religious
pilgrimages, and travel writing in the genteel tradition. Yothers
also examines works by lesser-known authors such as Bayard Taylor,
John Lloyd Stephens, and Clorinda Minor, demonstrating that
American travel writing is marked by a profound intertextuality
with the Hebrew and Christian scriptures and with British and
continental travel narratives about the Holy Land. His concluding
chapter on Melville's Clarel shows how Melville's poem provides an
incisive critique of the nascent imperial discourse discernible in
the American texts with which it is in dialogue.
Travel writing has, for centuries, composed an essential historical
record and wide-ranging literary form, reflecting the rich
diversity of travel as a social and cultural practice, metaphorical
process, and driver of globalization. This interdisciplinary volume
brings together anthropologists, literary scholars, social
historians, and other scholars to illuminate travel writing in all
its forms. With studies ranging from colonial adventurism to the
legacies of the Holocaust, The Long Journey offers a unique dual
focus on experience and genre as it applies to three key realms:
memory and trauma, confrontations with the Other, and the
cultivation of cultural perspective.
An accessible and highly readable guide to the story of Melville
criticism as it has developed over the past century and a half.
Herman Melville is among the most thoroughly canonized authors in
American literature, and the body of criticism dealing with his
writing is immense. Until now, however, there has been no standard
volume on the history of Melvillecriticism. That a volume on this
subject is timely and important is shown by the number of
introductions and companions to Melville's work that have been
published during the last few years (none of which focuses on the
criticalreception of Melville's works), as well as the steady
stream of critical monographs and scholarly biographies that have
been published on Melville since the 1920s. Melville's Mirrors
provides Melville scholars and graduateand undergraduate students
with an accessible guide to the story of Melville criticism as it
has developed over the years. It is a valuable reference for
research libraries and for the personal libraries of scholars of
Melville and of nineteenth-century American literature in general,
and it is also a potential textbook for major-author courses on
Melville, which are offered at many universities. BRIAN YOTHERS is
the Frances Spatz Leighton Endowed Distinguished Professor of
English at the University of Texas at El Paso and associate editor
of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. He is the author of
Reading Abolition: The Critical Reception of Harriet Beecher Stowe
and Frederick Douglass (Camden House, 2016).
A pathbreaking consideration of the intertwined critical responses
to Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass, giants of
abolitionist literature. Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick
Douglass represent a crucial strand in nineteenth-century American
literature: the struggle for the abolition of slavery. Yet there
has been no thoroughgoing discussion of the critical receptionof
these two giants of abolitionist literature. Reading Abolition
narrates and explores the parallels between Stowe's critical
reception and Douglass's. The book begins with Stowe's Uncle Tom's
Cabin, considering its initial celebration as a work of genius and
conscience, its subsequent dismissal in the early twentieth century
as anti-Southern and in the mid-twentieth century as racially
stereotypical, and finally its recent recovery as a classic of
women's, religious, and political fiction. It also considers the
reception of Stowe's other, less well-known novels, non-fictional
works, and poetry, and how engaging the full Stowe canon has
changed the shape of Stowe studies. The second half of the study
deals with the reception of Douglass both as a writer of three
autobiographies that helped to define the contours of African
American autobiography for later writers and critics and as an
extraordinarily eloquent and influential orator and journalist.
Reading Abolition shows that Stowe's and Douglass's critical
destinies have long been intertwined, with questions about race,
gender, nationalism, religion, and thenature of literary and
rhetorical genius playing crucial roles in critical considerations
of both figures. Brian Yothers is Frances Spatz Leighton Endowed
Distinguished Professor and Associate Chair of the Department
ofEnglish at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Travel writing has, for centuries, composed an essential historical
record and wide-ranging literary form, reflecting the rich
diversity of travel as a social and cultural practice, metaphorical
process, and driver of globalization. This interdisciplinary volume
brings together anthropologists, literary scholars, social
historians, and other scholars to illuminate travel writing in all
its forms. With studies ranging from colonial adventurism to the
legacies of the Holocaust, The Long Journey offers a unique dual
focus on experience and genre as it applies to three key realms:
memory and trauma, confrontations with the Other, and the
cultivation of cultural perspective.
Herman Melville's The Piazza Tales is the only collection of short
fiction that he published in hislifetime, and it includes his two
most famous short stories, Bartleby, the Scrivener and Benito
Cerenoalong with the less well-known but deeply engaging sketches
of the Galapagos Islands that make up TheEncantadas and three more
short stories: The Piazza, The Bell-Tower, and The Lightning-Rod
Man. This edition places these stories in the context of
nineteenth-century debates over slavery, free willand determinism,
science and technology, and the nature and value of literary
artistry. The stories in ThePiazza Tales demonstrate the global
range of Melville's cultural and aesthetic concerns, as Melville
sethis stories in locales ranging from rural western Massachusetts
and Wall Street in the United States to thePacific coast of South
America and southern Europe. This edition is especially concerned
with Melville's engagement with both political questions related
toslavery and imperialism and aesthetic questions germane to the
short story tradition as developed by hisnear contemporaries
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.
Above the American Renaissance takes David S. Reynolds's classic
study Beneath the American Renaissance as a model and a provocation
to consider how language and concepts broadly defined as spiritual
are essential to understanding nineteenth-century American literary
culture. In the 1980s, Reynolds's scholarship and methodology
enlivened investigations of religious culture, and since then, for
reasons that include a rising respect for interdisciplinarity and
the aftershocks of the 9/11 attacks, religion in literature has
become a major area of inquiry for Americanists. In essays that
reconsider and contextualize Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Harriet
Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, Abraham Lincoln, and others, this
volume captures the vibrancy of spiritual considerations in
American literary studies and points a way forward within literary
and spiritual investigations. In addition to the editors and David
S. Reynolds, contributors include Jeffrey Bilbro, Dawn Coleman,
Jonathan A. Cook, Tracy Fessenden, Zachary Hutchins, Richard
Kopley, Mason I. Lowance Jr., John Matteson, Christopher N.
Phillips, Vivian Pollak, Michael Robertson, Gail K. Smith, Claudia
Stokes, and Timothy Sweet.
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