The Nonhuman In American Literary Naturalism

Download or read book The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism written by Karin M. Danielsson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-09-05 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism responds to a need to expand and refine the connections among nonhuman studies and American literary naturalism and to productively expand the scholarly discourse surrounding this vital movement in American literary history. This collection focuses on that which becomes visible when the human subject is skirted, or moved off-center: in other words, the representation of nonhuman animals and other vital or inert species, things, entities, cityscapes and seascapes, that play an important part in American literary naturalism. Informed by animal studies, ecocriticism, posthumanism, new materialism, and other recent theoretical perspectives, the essays in this collection discuss early naturalist texts as well as more recent naturalistic-oriented authors.

Download or read book American Literary Naturalism, a Divided Stream written by Charles Child Walcutt and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1956 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Literary Naturalism, a Divided Stream was first published in 1956. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The literary concept of naturalism perpetually contradicts itself, oscillating between the transcendental affirmation of human freedom and the demonstration of its nonexistence. In this tension it gropes for forms that will satisfy both demands. These contradictions, and this divided stream, Mr. Walcutt shows, represent the central intellectual and social problem of the modern world, where the confusions between materialism and religion are ubiquitous. In tracing the development of naturalism in the novel, the author provides a background with chapters on naturalistic theory and the theory and practice of Emile Zola. He then traces the shifts in form through the worlds of Harold Frederic, Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Frank Norris, Winston Churchill, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, James T. Farrell, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passes. College English commented: "This is a book that will clarify some of the confusion that teachers and students face when they discover that naturalistic novels do not always follow naturalistic theory." Writing in Prairie Schooner, Ihab Hassan pointed out: "In speculating on the origins of naturalism, in perceiving the inner contradictions of its spirit and the tensions of its form, and in following its full and vital sweep as it allies itself now with impressionism, now with expressionism, Professor Walcutt manages to throw new light on a major movement in American letters."

Download or read book Ibero-American Ecocriticism written by J. Manuel Gómez and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2024-02-19 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book disrupts the quintessential assumptions of ecology, the politics of identity, and environmental destruction, while proposing new readings, interpretations, and solutions in the face of urgent environmental issues.

Download or read book Animal Texts written by Lauren E. Perry-Rummel and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-09-25 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Animal Texts examines critical works of American Environmental Literature for how they portray, discuss, and represent animals. By interweaving animal studies, literary animal studies, animal science, and close readings, the author establishes critical animal concepts for environmental literature that expand the understanding and knowledge of animal lives to promote conservation and meaningful reflection on current human-animal relationships. Lauren E. Perry-Rummel demonstrates the grave importance and promise these writers saw in the animals alongside them by examining the textual proof of how America's great environmental writers viewed animals. The author’s tracing of animal texts begins with late nineteenth century American texts from Sarah Orne Jewett, Jack London, into the mid-early twentieth century, ecologically focused works of Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson, into the later twentieth century with the musings of Edward Abbey and the devastating memoir of Terry Tempest Williams, and ending with the contemporary species-centric works of Nate Blakeslee and Dan Flores.

Download or read book The Multiverse as Theory in Postmodern Speculative Fictional Narratives written by Angélica Cabrera Torrecilla and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-11-15 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Multiverse as Theory in Postmodern Speculative Fictional Narratives considers the concept of the multiverse beyond the immediacy of being merely an excuse or scenario for the development of stories, instead positioning the multiverse as a theoretical method in which speculative fiction narratives can explore diverse issues to bridge ideas across cultural, social, and philosophical analysis. Taking a cross-cultural approach, the book centres around the critical engagements that literary and media texts have with the representations of the multiverse, beyond considering this subject as a mere rhetorical flourish or a passing fad. A diverse and international team of authors engage with the multiverse from the point of view of “other worlds,” understanding it not as the appearance of another independent world, but as the collision of two or more different worlds into one of them. From this key finding, the multiverse encourages us to pay attention to the influence that fiction exerts on narratives and world-building, providing possible frameworks to rethink critical aspects of temporality, space, self, society, and culture in contemporary times. This pioneering work will interest students and scholars working in the areas of media and cultural studies, comparative literature, popular culture studies, speculative fiction, and transmedia studies.

Download or read book Form and History in American Literary Naturalism written by June Howard and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-03-01 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the novels of Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, and other writers, June Howard presents a study of American literary naturalism as a genre. Naturalism, she states, is a way of imagining the world and the relation of the self to the world, a way of making sense -- and making narrative -- out of the comforts and discomforts of its historical moment. Howard believes that naturalism accomodates the sense of perilousness, uncertainty, and disorder that many Americans felt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She argues for a redefinition of the form which allows it to be seen as an immanent ideology responding to a specific historical situation. Working both from accepted definitions of naturalism and from close analysis of the literary texts themselves, Howard consructs a new description of the genre in terms of its thematic antinomies, patterns of characterization, and narrative strategies. She defines a range of historical and cultural reference for the ideas and images of American naturalism and suggests that the form has affinities with such contemporary ideologies as political progressivism and criminal anthropology. In the process, she demonstrates that genre criticism and historical analysis can be combined to create a powerful method for writing literary history. Throughout Howard's study, the concept of genre is used not as a prescriptive straitjacket but as a category allowing the perception of significant similarities and differences among literary works and the coordination of textual analysis with the history of literary and social forces. For Howard, naturalism is a dynamic solution to the problem of generating narrative from the particular historical and cultural materials available to the authors. Originally published in 1985. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Download or read book Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature written by S.K. Robisch and published by University of Nevada Press. This book was released on 2009-05-28 with total page 685 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The wolf is one of the most widely distributed canid species, historically ranging throughout most of the Northern Hemisphere. For millennia, it has also been one of the most pervasive images in human mythology, art, and psychology. Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature examines the wolf’s importance as a figure in literature from the perspectives of both the animal’s physical reality and the ways in which writers imagine and portray it. Author S. K. Robisch examines more than two hundred texts written in North America about wolves or including them as central figures. From this foundation, he demonstrates the wolf’s role as an archetype in the collective unconscious, its importance in our national culture, and its ecological value. Robisch takes a multidisciplinary approach to his study, employing a broad range of sources: myths and legends from around the world; symbology; classic and popular literature; films; the work of scientists in a number of disciplines; human psychology; and field work conducted by himself and others. By combining the fundamentals of scientific study with close readings of wide-ranging literary texts, Robisch astutely analyzes the correlation between actual, living wolves and their representation on the page and in the human mind. He also considers the relationship between literary art and the natural world, and argues for a new approach to literary study, an ecocriticism that moves beyond anthropocentrism to examine the complicated relationship between humans and nature.