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Ever since feminist scholarship began to reintroduce Harriet Beecher Stowe's writings to the American literary canon in the 1970s, critical interest in her work has steadily increased. Beyond Uncle Tom's Cabin: The Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, edited by Sylvia Mayer and Monika Mueller, shows that during her long writing and publishing career, Stowe was a highly prolific writer who targeted diverse audiences, dealt with drastically changing economic, commercial, and cultural contexts, and wrote in a diversity of genres.
Knowledge in an Uncertain World is an exploration of the relation between knowledge, reasons, and justification. According to the primary argument of the book, you can rely on what you know in action and belief, because what you know can be a reason you have and you can rely on the reasons you have. If knowledge doesn't allow for a chance of error, then this result is unsurprising. But if knowledge does allow for a chance of error - as seems required if we know much of anything at all - this result entails the denial of a received position in epistemology. Because any chance of error, if the stakes are high enough, can make a difference to what can be relied on, two subjects with the same ev...
John Guillory considers close reading within the larger history of reading and writing as cultural techniques. At a time of debate about the future of “English” as a discipline and the fundamental methods of literary study, few terms appear more frequently than “close reading,” now widely regarded as the core practice of literary study. But what exactly is close reading, and where did it come from? Here John Guillory, author of the acclaimed Professing Criticism, takes up two puzzles. First, why did the New Critics—who supposedly made close reading central to literary study—so seldom use the term? And second, why have scholars not been better able to define close reading? For Gui...
Throughout history, American literature has provided an escape from the classroom; yet authors like Twain, Melville, and Ellison remain key figures in high school and college curricula. This book offers an account of this paradox, examining the contentious but ultimately generative relationship between literary and scholastic culture in the US.
Is there a "great divide" between highbrow and mass cultures? Are modernist novels for, by, and about snobs? What might Lord Peter Wimsey, Mrs. Dalloway, and Stephen Dedalus have to say to one another?Sean Latham's appealingly written book "Am I a Snob?" traces the evolution of the figure of the snob through the works of William Makepeace Thackeray, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Dorothy Sayers. Each of these writers played a distinctive role in the transformation of the literary snob from a vulgar social climber into a master of taste. In the process, some novelists and their works became emblems of sophistication, treated as if they were somehow apart from or above the ficti...
Charity bazaars were a key method women used to intervene in political, social, and cultural affairs. Bazaar Literature reorients our understanding of Victorian social reform fiction by reading it in light of the copious amount of literature generated for charity bazaars--which shaped the social, political, and literary movements of its time.
This book investigates the role of exemplarity as a rhetorical device in late Elizabethan and Jacobean literature and culture. Ullyot argues that exemplarity is driven by both reader and author, and that positive moral examples were presented as aspirational models in posthumous biography.
Eleanor Davies was one of the most prolific women writing in early - 17th-century England. This volume includes 38 of her tracts, revealing her experiences as a woman and exhibiting her extraordinary intellect, extensive education and fascination with words.
With Slavery, Capitalism, and Women’s Literature, Kristin Allukian makes an important contribution to slavery and capitalism scholarship by including the voices of some of the best-known nineteenth-century American women writers. Women’s literature offers crucial and previously unconsidered economic insights into the relationship between slavery and capitalism, different from those we typically find in economics and economic histories. Allukian demonstrates that because women’s imaginative and creative texts take the material-historical connection of slavery and capitalism as their starting point, they can be read for the more speculative extensions of that connection, extensions not p...
Offers a feminist theory of ignorance that sheds light on the misunderstood or overlooked epistemic practices of women in literature. An Ethic of Innocence examines representations of women in American and British fin-de-siècle and modern literature who seem “not to know” things. These naïve fools, Pollyannaish dupes, obedient traditionalists, or regressive anti-feminists have been dismissed by critics as conservative, backward, and out of sync with, even threatening to, modern feminist goals. Grounded in the late nineteenth century’s changing political and generic representations of women, this book provides a novel interpretative framework for reconsidering the epistemic claims of ...