View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

American Literary Studies: A Methodological Reader gathers together leading scholars of American literature to address the questions of methodology that have invigorated and divided their field: the rise of interdisciplinarity and the wealth of theoretical methods now available to the critic of American literature. Their engagement with these issues takes a unique form in this book: Each scholar has chosen a methodologically innovative essay, which he or she then introduces, explaining why it is both exemplary in its approach and central to the issues that most engage American literary scholarship today. The book includes both an introduction to the controversial interdisciplinary methods that have made American literary studies such a vibrant field, as well as groundbreaking scholarship on topics as diverse as James Fenimore Cooper, minstrel songs, and Lakota Indian stories.

This volume has been designed to serve as a starting point for teachers and students to explore the fundamental questions of American literary scholarship: What does "method" mean in literary studies? Which texts should it study? What makes literary study unique? What should literary scholarship do? American Literary Studies argues that these questions can only be answered through a discussion of the interdisciplinary methods currently in use by scholars today. Finally, an original introduction by Michael A. Elliott and Claudia Stokes explains why questions of method are crucial to American literary studies and how past scholars of American literature have tried to answer them.

Contributors include: Lauren Berlant, Russ Castronovo, Wai Chee Dimock, AnnduCille, Michael A. Elliott, Frances Smith Foster, Elaine A. Jahner, Rob Kroes, Arnold Krupat, Paul Lauter, Marilee Lindemann, W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Christopher J. Looby, David Palumbo-Liu, Roy Harvey Pearce, Lora Romero, RamA3n SaldA-var, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Werner Sollors, Claudia Stokes, Claudia Tate, Paula A. Treichler, Priscilla Wald, Michael Warner, Laura Wexler, Sau-ling C. Wong

An aesthetic of unoriginality shaped literary style and reader taste for decades of the nineteenth century. While critics in the twentieth century and beyond have upheld originality and innovation as essential characteristics of literary achievement, they were not features particularly prized by earlier American audiences, Claudia Stokes contends. On the contrary, readers were taught to value familiarity, traditionalism, and regularity. Literary originality was often seen as a mark of vulgar sensationalism and poor quality. In Old Style Stokes offers the first dedicated study of a forgotten nineteenth-century aesthetic, explicating the forms, practices, conventions, and uses of unoriginality. She focuses in particular on the second quarter of the century, when improvements in printing and distribution caused literary markets to become flooded with new material, and longstanding reading practices came under threat. As readers began to prefer novelty to traditional forms, advocates openly extolled unoriginality in an effort to preserve the old literary ways. Old Style examines this era of significant literary change, during which a once-dominant aesthetic started to give way to modern preferences. If writing in the old style came to be associated with elite conservatism—a linkage that contributed to its decline in the twentieth century—it also, paradoxically provided marginalized writers—people of color, white women, and members of the working class—the literary credentials they needed to enter print. Writing in the old style could affirm an aspiring author's training, command of convention, and respectability. In dismissing unoriginality as the literary purview of the untalented or unambitious, Stokes cautions, we risk overlooking something of vital importance to generations of American writers and readers.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

American Literary Studies: A Methodological Reader gathers together leading scholars of American literature to address the questions of methodology that have invigorated and divided their field: the rise of interdisciplinarity and the wealth of theoretical methods now available to the critic of American literature. Their engagement with these issues takes a unique form in this book: Each scholar has chosen a methodologically innovative essay, which he or she then introduces, explaining why it is both exemplary in its approach and central to the issues that most engage American literary scholarship today. The book includes both an introduction to the controversial interdisciplinary methods that have made American literary studies such a vibrant field, as well as groundbreaking scholarship on topics as diverse as James Fenimore Cooper, minstrel songs, and Lakota Indian stories.

This volume has been designed to serve as a starting point for teachers and students to explore the fundamental questions of American literary scholarship: What does "method" mean in literary studies? Which texts should it study? What makes literary study unique? What should literary scholarship do? American Literary Studies argues that these questions can only be answered through a discussion of the interdisciplinary methods currently in use by scholars today. Finally, an original introduction by Michael A. Elliott and Claudia Stokes explains why questions of method are crucial to American literary studies and how past scholars of American literature have tried to answer them.

Contributors include: Lauren Berlant, Russ Castronovo, Wai Chee Dimock, AnnduCille, Michael A. Elliott, Frances Smith Foster, Elaine A. Jahner, Rob Kroes, Arnold Krupat, Paul Lauter, Marilee Lindemann, W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Christopher J. Looby, David Palumbo-Liu, Roy Harvey Pearce, Lora Romero, RamA3n SaldA-var, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Werner Sollors, Claudia Stokes, Claudia Tate, Paula A. Treichler, Priscilla Wald, Michael Warner, Laura Wexler, Sau-ling C. Wong

Displays of devout religious faith are very much in evidence in nineteenth-century sentimental novels such as Uncle Tom's Cabin and Little Women, but the precise theological nature of this piety has been little examined. In the first dedicated study of the religious contents of sentimental literature, Claudia Stokes counters the long-standing characterization of sentimental piety as blandly nondescript and demonstrates that these works were in fact groundbreaking, assertive, and highly specific in their theological recommendations and endorsements. The Altar at Home explores the many religious contexts and contents of sentimental literature of the American nineteenth century, from the growth of Methodism in the Second Great Awakening and popular millennialism to the developing theologies of Mormonism and Christian Science. Through analysis of numerous contemporary religious debates, Stokes demonstrates how sentimental writers, rather than offering simple depictions of domesticity, instead manipulated these scenes to advocate for divergent new beliefs and bolster their own religious authority. On the one hand, the comforting rhetoric of domesticity provided a subtle cover for sentimental writers to advance controversial new beliefs, practices, and causes such as Methodism, revivalism, feminist theology, and even the legitimacy of female clergy. On the other hand, sentimentality enabled women writers to bolster and affirm their own suitability for positions of public religious leadership, thereby violating the same domestic enclosure lauded by the texts. The Altar at Home offers a fascinating new historical perspective on the dynamic role sentimental literature played in the development of innumerable new religious movements and practices, many of which remain popular today.

A young girl being abused neglected and abandoned by both her parents. She and her siblings were taken and placed into foster care by the state. The young girl and her siblings were separated and place into different homes. The young girl was confused, lost and humiliated to all the changes in her life. The young girl began to go into a state of depression. The one thing the girl knew was to pray daily to God. The abuse continued to worsen throughout her childhood. The young woman knew that her life belonged to God. She changed her life for the good and didn't want to be like her parents. The young woman remembered that praying to God could save her again. Once again God answered her prayers and when she encountered the evil of the world God was by her side. Through prayer God saved the young woman at every crossroad she had encountered.

In the aftermath of America's centennial celebrations of 1876, readers developed an appetite for chronicles of the nation's past. Born amid this national vogue, the field of American literary history was touted as the balm for numerous "ills"--from burgeoning immigration to American anti-intellectualism to demanding university administrators--and enjoyed immense popularity between 1880 and 1910.

In the first major analysis of the field's early decades, Claudia Stokes offers important insights into the practices, beliefs, and values that shaped the emerging discipline and have continued to shape it for the last century. She considers particular personalities--including Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Dean Howells, Brander Matthews, and Mark Twain--and episodes that had a formative effect on American literary history as a discipline. Reexamining the field's deep attachment to the literature of antebellum New England, the periodization of the nineteenth century, and the omission of Native narratives, Stokes reveals the many forces, both inside and outside the academy, that propelled the rise of American literary history and persist as influences on the work of current practitioners of the field.

When Mary Cabot loses her beloved brother in the war, she feels as though she will never feel peace again until the arrival of her widowed Aunt Winifred. Sharing the wisdom that has comforted her through her grief, Winifred offers Mary a groundbreaking view of the afterlife as a place of loving reunion with all those who were lost. Winifred's vision of the afterlife circulates within the community and attracts local adherents who have also suffered great loss in the war.