American Literature in Transition, 1876–1910: Volume 4

Addressing US literature from 1876 to 1910, this volume aims to account for the period's immense transformations.

Lindsay V. Reckson (Edited by)

9781108477505, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 18 August 2022

381 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.8 cm, 0.74 kg

Addressing US literature from 1876 to 1910, this volume aims to account for the period's immense transformations while troubling the ideology of progress that underwrote much of its self-understanding. This volume queries the various forms and formations of post-Reconstruction American literature. It contends that the literature of this period, most often referred to as 'turn-of-the-century' might be more productively oriented by the end of Reconstruction and the haunting aftermath of its emancipatory potential than by the logic of temporal and social advance that underwrote the end of the century and the beginning of the Progressive Era. Acknowledging that nearly all US literature after 1876 might be described as post-Reconstruction, the volume invites readers to reframe this period by asking: under what terms did post-Reconstruction American literature challenge or re-consolidate the 'nation' as an affective, political, and discursive phenomenon? And what kind of alternative pasts and futures did it write into existence?

Introduction: We have never been post-reconstruction Lindsay V. Reckson
I. Transitive States: 1. Radical pasts, radical futures Michelle Coghlan
2. Unsettled colonialisms Mary Zaborskis
3. Secularism, race, and sex Peter Coviello
4. Sex and the suicide plot Dana Seitler
5. Virtual subjects Katherine Biers
II. Post-Reconstruction Aesthetics: 6. Lyrics of the color line Sonya Posmentier
7. Experimental realisms Natalia Cecire
8. Species of sentiment Lisa Mendelman
9. The micro-climates of regionalism William Gleason
10. Racial topographies and the poetics of mass culture Alexandra Socarides
III. Old Materialisms: 11. Oil Jamie L. Jones
12. Waste Stephanie Foote
13. Blood Nancy Bentley
14. Color against realism Nicholas Gaskill
IV. Immanent Techniques: 15. Francis Harper's reconstruction Brigitte Fielder
16. Emma Lazarus's cosmopolitanism Sharon Oster
17. Henry James's temporalities Pamela Thurschwell
18. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's pragmatism Cécile Roudeau
19. Nicholas Black Elk's cosmology (or, post-reconstructing Black Elk) Matthew A. Taylor.

Subject Areas: Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]