Late Nineteenth-century Fiction Research Articles

Sarah Orne Jewett’s China

Abstract This essay reads Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven (1877) to show how chinaware could be used to delineate American identity in late nineteenth-century fiction. As I show, china’s aura of exoticism—reflected in its very name—could be deployed by regionalist writers to prop up local identity. Importantly, Jewett’s characters make china the centerpiece of their bequeathals so that the foreign is the vehicle by which generations exert influence over the present. Chinaware’s utility reifies the association of Asian identity with objectification. The town more generally appropriates Chinese signifiers and objects in their creation of a distinct spirit. I argue that towns perform this subsumption of the international in the service of the regional to position themselves in an intriguing position with regards to the national: distinct but also useful. Authors like Jewett show how the regional can, in part, deviate from the national by offering a tame and safe version of exoticism. The stakes of materiality thus include the determination of American belonging.

Roots in Fiction and Philology: George Eliot, Ernest Renan, and Willed Ethnonationalism

Abstract: Scholarship on George Eliot’s 1860s Condition-of-England novel Felix Holt has been divided on whether it signals the racist nativism of its decade or advocates for inclusive, willed national belonging. This paper proposes that it accomplishes both, promoting what I call “willed ethnonationalism.” A counterintuitive phrase, willed ethnonationalism captures how Eliot’s novel both defines the nation-form against race belonging and encourages modern nationals to perform racial self-identification. I argue that this stance emerged from Eliot’s engagement with Ernest Renan’s philological career. Recalling how theories of racial-linguistic inheritance influenced a zeitgeist of thinking around constructed nations (epitomized by Renan’s 1882 essay on nationalism), I show how mythic ideas about racial roots informed the ostensibly rational form of the nation-state as expressed in late nineteenth-century fiction and essayistic prose.

The Nadir and the Zenith: Temperance and Excess in the Early African American Novel by Anna Pochmara

Reviewed by: The Nadir and the Zenith: Temperance and Excess in the Early African American Novel by Anna Pochmara Michaela Corning-Myers (bio) The Nadir and the Zenith: Temperance and Excess in the Early African American Novel, by Anna Pochmara. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021. 256 pp. Cloth, $114.95; Paper, $29.95; Ebook, $28.45. Anna Pochmara’s The Nadir and the Zenith is an excellent study of melodrama and temperance in late nineteenth-century fiction. Over the course of this concise and well-structured text, Pochmara seeks to achieve five goals. The first is a historical-aesthetic reclamation of the Nadir era, “the historical moment when black people’s status reached its lowest point” (1), as a productive period for African American fiction as prolific and multi-faceted. The second is defining the political consciousness of this era and type of literature. Third, Pochmara defines the political locus of the genre of naturalism as utilized by African American authors during the Nadir era. Fourth, Pochmara argues for the affective force of naturalism in the sense that there is a deep and sometimes indivisible relationship between sentimentalism and naturalism. Finally, Pochamara closely examines how ethical temperance in literature, manifesting as self-discipline among its youthful female characters, fosters social and political community. Pochmara draws from a compact archive of 26 primary texts published from 1876 to 1902. She also refers to an impressive bibliography of works from critics writing within the schools of neo-Marxism, critical race theory, and intersectional feminism. Pochmara’s refreshing text is emblematic of a crucial directional shift in studies in American literary naturalism over the last eighteen years: texts written by African American authors have been understudied at a substantial detriment to our field. Pochmara displays with acute attention to historical context the ways in which African American writers of this era were very much in tune with the literary— and political—conversations that evolved from the Antebellum Era into [End Page 100] the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century. In fact, these authors drove that conversation with rigor: there could be no conversation about the political health of the United States without discussion of the emancipated slave, the African American emigrant workers in the North, and the continued activism of African Americans as they fought for better economic conditions and against the growing tide of anti-Black violence. Within this historical context Pochmara situates her compelling study of novels published in the Nadir era by Charles Chesnutt, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Amelia E. Johnson, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Pochmara maps a trajectory from midcentury sentimentalism into twentieth century naturalism as evinced by these authors. Pochmara makes three distinct interventions in the field of African American literary studies and literary history. First, she argues that the “New Negro” woman is posed in direct contrast to her antebellum-era progenitors, particularly in her assertion of control in her community (e.g., as an effective and inspiring teacher) and in her private life (e.g., in her assertion of her right to accept or reject marital suitors or decide her family members’ living situations). Pochmara’s second intervention asserts that the female “mulatta” character is central too in the texts produced by African American male writers. Pochmara’s third intervention situates her study within the field of literary history studies. She is critical of “atemporal” analyses, in particular ones that develop critical tools that could not have been adopted or understood in the era to which they are applied. Pochmara’s interest is in examining a body of work over a short period of time. She seeks specifically to enumerate and parse through the ways authors over time examined the same ideas in different ways. Across all seven of the texts Pochmara closely examines, authors unrelentingly engaged with the genres, subjects, and social ideas of their time. Pochmara’s study serves specifically to show how these novelists utilized the “mulatta melodrama” to discuss the political, social, and economic issues of the Progressive Era. The structure of the mulatta melodrama is emblematic of a relationship between the present and the past. Embodied by the past are the father—white, paternalistic, and failing—and...

Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850–1915 by Owen Clayton

Reviewed by: Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850–1915 by Owen Clayton Joanna Madloch Owen Clayton, Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850–1915 New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2015, 233 pp. This book discusses a variety of interactions between photography and literature in the transitory period of the medium between 1850 and 1915. Building on terminology established by Daniel Novak and John Tagg, Owen Clayton chooses the term “photographies,” which stresses the fact that during the early days of the photographic medium, instead of one dominant process, there existed an array of coexisting techniques and photographic methods. As the author explains in his Introduction, the main goal of his work is to establish how various literary uses of photography reflect upon the heterogeneity of the medium itself and how they portray the changes that photography was undergoing. Chapter One further explores the notion of the term “photographies” and features [End Page 367] Clayton’s abbreviated history of the medium’s development, which includes notions of both its simultaneity and technological multiplicity. Chapter Two discusses Henry Mayhew’s work titled London Labour and the London Poor (1850–62), in which a popular English journalist portrays urban workers and underprivileged classes of his time. Clayton notices that while Mayhew’s work has already been well researched, the critiques never paid enough attention to the way it utilizes photographic images. According to Clayton, Mayhew’s choice of the daguerreotype-engraving mixed process over the more modern collodion technique is purposeful. The chapter presents how, by staging the images and then selectively engraving them, Mayhew achieves his goal to create an illusion of objectivity, while at the same time establishing his position of control and succeeding in generating specific emotions among his readers. In Chapter Three, Clayton presents how photography is employed in the creation of selfhoods in late nineteenth-century fiction. While discussing Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Clayton argues that Stevenson uses photography as a metaphor for the psychotic effect of modernity. The novel itself reflects the writer’s fascination with several photographic techniques, especially those that allow multiple images to be shown simultaneously (zoopraxiscope) and those that combine multiple exposures of the same image (composite photography). On the other hand, Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop (1888) introduces photography as a gender-model construction tool. According to Clayton, Levy uses photography to display how gender is constructed not through the portrayal of characters, but rather through their performance. This is illustrated by the novel, which presents the story of four sisters engaged in (an unusual for their time) pursuit of the photographic business, in the form of a gender performativity discourse in relation to photography. Chapter Four is dedicated to the analysis of William Dean Howells’s Suburban Sketches (1871). Clayton concentrates his attention on relationships between the notions of work, literature, and photography expressed in Howells’s work. For example, according to the author, Howells builds one of his reoccurring characters, Bartley Hubbard, as a polemic to Hawthorne’s Holgrave, and respective characters illustrate both authors’ notions of the nature of work. In addition, Clayton argues, in his novel titled A Modern Instance (1882), the motif of photographic portraiture is used as a representation of the self-destructive impulses of the protagonist. Chapter Five explores the interconnections between literary works by Jack London and both photography and early cinema. The analysis of London’s The People of the Abyss (1902), presents how London uses a variety of photographic techniques, including composite method, in order to create socially and politically meaningful images. As it is shown in the chapter, the image manipulation allows the writer to achieve the rhetorical effect, but consequently puts his work [End Page 368] under scrutiny for the lack of realism. Later in the chapter, Clayton presents the ways London’s photographs adopt numerous cinematic tropes, but also how the changing cinema reflects itself in his late fiction, including the Abysmal Brute (1911) and The Valley of the Moon (1913). In the Afterward the author talks about nostalgia for “photographies,” which at the end of the twentieth century takes a form of a revival of interest in old...

Representing the Poor: Charles Lamb and the Vagabondiana

RECENT CRITICISM HAS OFTEN PAIRED CHARLES LAMB'S complaint of Decay of Beggars in Metropolis, published in character of Elia in May 1822 issue of London Magazine, with John Smith and Francis Douce's Vagabondiana. Yet while Simon P. Hull and Gregory Dart only briefly evoke how Lamb's essay to owe to earlier work, a comparison between two publications merits a more sustained attention than hitherto available. (1) Under close analysis, sophistication of both works' engagement with pressing contemporary problem of how to represent--both politically and aesthetically--the urban poor, and beggars in particular, soon becomes apparent. While Vagabondiana mobilizes parliamentary rhetoric, techniques of both antiquarian and catalogue literature, and picturesque mode in an effort to reassure its readers, Lamb takes same approaches and pushes them to their extreme, revealing both their limits and, most disturbingly of all, those of his readership as well. Vagabondiana; or of Mendicant Wanderers through Streets of London; with Portraits of most Remarkable, Drawn from Life by John Thomas Smith, Keeper of Prints in British Museum was published in 1817. Its title begins work's careful engagement with its subject matter. The offer of Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers ... with Portraits of most Remarkable announces deliberate control over selected material, even as scrupulously refrains from using term beggar. The choice of wanderer over a word that makes a profession out of importunity, to mention emphasis on book containing only selected material, helps Smith and his collaborator, antiquarian Francis Douce, give a particularly charming turn to a normally grim aspect of contemporary life in capital. In 1817, two years after end of Napoleonic Wars and right in center of a post-war economic depression, government expenditure on poor relief was close to eight million pounds, (2) while streets of London were filled with destitute, (3) with as much as twenty percent of all outdoor poor in England to be found in capital. (4) The Vagabondiana responds to this context, and attendant interest in urban poor, yet this luxuriously presented book, as is clear from its full title, also aims to insulate its readership from harsher realities of situation. It seems to be a forerunner of a phenomenon Celina Fox finds in late nineteenth-century fiction, in which it was as if scenes of social distress could be tackled without allowing audience to feel a of reassuring emotions: of pathos, sympathy or charity, which left them feeling munificent rather than guilty. (5) The text of Vagabondiana concludes with a homily on charity, and its reassuring glow is all stronger for conceit with which work opens, one that might seem surprising in economic downturn of early nineteenth century: an announcement of imminent disappearance of its mendicant subject matter: Concluding, therefore, from reaction of that several curious characters would disappear by being either compelled to industry, or to partake in parochial rates, provided for them in their respective work-houses, occurred to author of present publication, that likenesses of most remarkable of them, with a few particulars of their habits, would be unamusing to those to whom they have been for several years. (6) Amidst reassuring talk of liberal parochial rates available in workhouses, crucial phrase here is double negative, not be unamusing, which recognizes potential for displeasure even as negates it. This phrase also defines reasoning behind title's insistence on only the most Remarkable subjects being included in work. The imminent vanishing of metropolitan beggars, repeated by Douce and Smith elsewhere, is part of same pattern: does deny existence of problem, but rather--through suggestion of their fast-approaching absence--opens up possibility of a change in attitudes from that which would consider them pests to something more benign, manifested in desire for artistic reproduction and preservation. …

The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism

In this dynamic reappraisal of American literary naturalism, Christophe Den Tandt connects late nineteenth-century fiction to its romantic, urban gothic roots and to recent discussions of the sublime in postmodern theory. Den Tandt focuses on aspects of naturalist novels -- their use of hyperbole and hysteria, of the grotesque and the abject, of uncanniness and mesmerism -- that have often been left in the periphery of naturalist discourse. He argues that realistic strategies of literary representation can never succeed in depicting the urban environment since the logic of the city rests on a network of hidden relations. Naturalist texts try to resolve this dilemma by opposing sublime components and realistic documentary elements.

One hundred years of American women writing, 1848-1948: an annotated bio-bibliography

This bibliography is intended for a broad audience. Scholars, teachers, and students alike will find it useful for giving them ideas for further research, curriculum studies, or dissertation topics. Six chapters group authors under headings such as late-nineteenth century fiction writers; early-twentieth century fiction writers; poets, dramatists and experimental writers; intellectuals, reformists and journalists; and African-American women writers.

Kafka and Hamsun's Mysteries

K NUT HAMSUN'S later political attitudes have obscured much of his earlier literary reputation. Understandable as this is, unfortunately it has often reduced consideration of some highly significant modern novels and their influence to footnotes, more or less appreciative plot summaries, and general speculations on vagabond types. Hamsun's second novel in particular, Mysteries (Mysterier, 1892), is not merely in itself one of the most provocative works of late nineteenthcentury fiction; there are sufficient structural and thematic indications to demonstrate that Mysteries influenced not only Franz Kafka's earliest complete narrative, Beschreibung eines Kampfes, but also Das Schlo. 1 It is not just a possible literary connection between Hamsun's and Kafka's fiction which deserves close study. Parallel readings especially of Mysteries and Das Schlop, and also of a central passage of Beschreibung eines Kampfes, illuminate and reinterpret Kafka's protagonists in their subjective and objective relations to their surroundings. Profound tragicomedies develop as the basic needs of an organically closed community lead to elaborate deceptions of the intruder. At the same time the comparison with Kafka's fiction leads to a deeper understanding of a novel which, true to its title, will always remain elusive where