Van Wyck Research Articles

The Booksellers' School and the Rise of American Independent Bookselling

Abstract: This article analyzes the concerns and activities of the B.W. Huebsch-led Booksellers' School in New York City (1912–1918) to argue how certain fundamentals of bookselling met with a strong emphasis on a national (American) literature, partly through a series of lectures run by Van Wyck Brooks. The School sought to educate sellers in national canons of literature and help them sell the fledgling American one. In bringing together the profession of bookselling and literariness, the Booksellers' School offered a blueprint for a new form of bookselling—one which embraced an idea of literariness as a commercial tactic. By addressing the ideas on bookselling and American literature Huebsch and Brooks forwarded at the School, I show the potential influence it had on the bookselling landscape in the early twentieth century.

Death Comes for the Poets

Death Comes for the Poets

Treatment of indomitable vomiting of pregnant women Harding and van Wyck (according to Veg. Uber die ges. Gyn., Bd. X, H. 3/4)

Harding and van Wyck (according to Veg. Uber die ges. Gyn., Bd. X, H.%) are carried out by the introduction of a large amount of liquid, based on the considerations that with indomitable vomiting, the disease is based on a violation of water metabolism with a decrease in the amount of water in body, which leads to increased blood levels of total nitrogen and uric acid.

Mark Twain in Context

Mark Twain in Context

Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise by James Steichen

Reviewed by: Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise by James Steichen Chantal Frankenbach Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise. James Steichen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 302. $35.00 (cloth). In 1915, less than twenty years before Russian choreographer George Balanchine arrived in the US, literary critic Van Wyck Brooks observed that antithetical "twin values" of "highbrow" and "lowbrow" still divided every aspect of American life. Between the two brows, Brooks concluded, there was "no genial middle ground."1 For ballet in early twentieth-century America, this seemed particularly true. Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova and the touring offshoots of Sergei Diaghilev's Paris-based Ballets Russes had convinced many Americans that, in contrast to the popular dancing on American stages, classical dance came from afar and on high. Yet a growing number of dance scholars are revealing the crevices in this dichotomy.2 Musicologist and dance historian James Steichen joins them with a richly researched and gracefully written book on the tangled origins of the New York City Ballet (NYCB) and its associated School of American Ballet. Steichen illuminates the collision of aesthetic and economic concerns driving Balanchine and his sponsor–benefactor Lincoln Kirstein in the first seven years (1933–40) of their now-fabled quest to create an American ballet institution. This period of "missteps, overlooked achievements, and unsung heroes," Steichen argues, is no less important to understanding American theater dance than the mature Balanchine ballets it eventually spawned (Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise, 11). Steichen's account of these two remarkably persistent modernists stands to correct the received history that has "papered over" their endeavor's inauspicious origins (8). Scholars and students of American culture will find here a narrative that weaves dance history into theater, music, and film from a remarkable trove of materials, reminding us just how much positivist work still awaits historians of American dance. Titling Balanchine and Kirstein's project an "enterprise" fittingly acknowledges the crossed purposes in their effort to institutionalize ballet in America. An enterprise, after all, suggests something sleek, commercial, market-driven, and risky—something antithetical to any elite aesthetic sensibilities these self-proclaimed modernists might have coveted. Noting the absence of this foundational conflict in the legend and lore of the NYCB's founding, Steichen rejects the temptation of "triumphant teleology" and "retrospective coherence" in exchange for a more warts-and-all look at the initial American Ballet's first staggers and stumbles (11, 7). Drawing extensively from the popular press and numerous archives, Steichen makes good storytelling of Kirstein's colorful diaries and correspondence. A thorough literature review in the introduction; images of rehearsals, programs, and promotional materials; and meticulously sourced notes all add up to a volume of scholarly precision that deliberately avoids any deep dive into cultural analysis.3 The pragmatic year-by-year chapter titles are perhaps a sign of missed opportunities to weave more thematic reflections into the tale. Beginning and ending with thoughts on Serenade's place in the development of the symphonic ballet (unquestionably a signature achievement of Balanchine's), chapter three, for instance, might have developed this topic just enough to warrant a title more pledged to its purpose than "1934–1935." Yet the chronological arc and orderly delivery of Steichen's material has clear merits. Chapter one weaves the early biographies of Balanchine and Kirstein into the network of associates (Romola Nijinsky, Virgil Thomson, Chick Austin, Edward Warburg) who helped to bring Balanchine first to Hartford and then to New York City, where their "exhilarating and haphazard journey" of failures and contradictions began (4). As we see in Kirstein's diaries and correspondence—like the newsy October 1933 letter to his mother reporting that his "ballet people" were about to arrive in New York—his machinations with well-to-do Americans set the stage for the enterprise's [End Page 620] start (18). Chapter two traces the first two performances of the American Ballet: one ill-fated exhibition at the White Plains estate of patron Edward Warburg, and a more successful showing at the Avery Memorial Theater in Hartford. The ballets produced for these debuts (Mozartiana, Errante, Dreams, Transcendence, Serenade, and the football-themed Alma Mater) reveal the...

Frances E. W. Harper and the “Quest for a Usable Past”

Frances E. W. Harper and the "Quest for a Usable Past" Kate Adams The quotation in my title is borrowed from Frances Smith Foster's classic 1993 study, Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892. Foster herself takes the phrase from the second edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, where it references, in turn, the original source: Van Wyck Brooks's 1918 essay about the need for literary output and literary criticism that excavate the nation's cultural past for new imaginative resources. She uses it to evoke two aspects of historical literary recovery that both Brooks and the Norton editors overlook. One is the practice of writers like Frances E. W. Harper, who used their poetry and prose to recover African American experiences from obscurity and from obfuscating "literary stereotypes" (132–33). The other is the work done by literary scholars like Foster, who search out, interpret, and recirculate such writing. I want to think about both kinds of quests in relation to Harper's 1857 poem "Free Labor," a work that enacts recovery as resistance in part by resisting modes of recovery that threaten to erase it from the outset. Whenever I teach Harper's works, my students also read scholarship by Foster. In addition to using Foster's insights to guide our own interpretive approach, we talk about how her recovery projects have transformed the field of nineteenth-century US literature. And we talk about what that means for us. Many students, I now find, have read some nineteenth-century African American writing before they arrive in my class. Few, however, can name an early black woman writer other than Harriet Jacobs or Phillis Wheatley. So I ask them to consider how encountering Harper reconfigures their conception of early US literature and history (constituted upon an assumed absence). How do their narratives—about past and present, about silence, voice, and especially progress—have to change with knowledge of Harper's life and career, her large black readership and publishing venues, her impact on white readers and writers? I want them to experience the usable past as dynamic, generative, disruptive, and susceptible to disruption—as a resource we "discover" but also "invent," in Brooks's formulation (339). I want them to recognize historical literary recovery as vital activism. [End Page 263] Of course, we also talk about Harper's dedication to making her work usable for activist purposes in her own time. Written for the free-produce movement, her poem "Free Labor" calls upon antebellum consumers to boycott slaverygrown cotton and support a free-labor alternative. "I wear an easy garment," explains the speaker, O'er it no toiling slaveWept tears of hopeless anguish,In his passage to the grave. And from its ample foldsShall rise no cry to God,Upon its warp and woof shall beNo stain of tears and blood. (lines 1–8) The free-produce movement has been largely forgotten, according to historian Carol Faulkner, because its membership was primarily African American and female and it was derided by powerful white men like William Lloyd Garrison (378–79). Here, then, is some usable past: a poem written for use then in political and economic resistance, that leads us now to recover a neglected history of radical activism. But, looking more closely at "Free Labor," the phrase "usable past" also raises crucial questions about how we approach recovery. It pairs somewhat uneasily with a poem about people—like the cotton workers who haunt Harper's lines—who were subordinated to use by US slavery. What does it mean to seek (or invent) literary and political value from those whose "soul value," as Daina Ramey Berry puts it, was shrouded by "monetary value" in the antebellum racial imaginary (6)? Theorists of racial capitalism assert that efforts to recover its victims—into view, into voice—always threaten to reproduce that system's protocols of erasure and exploitation. Lindon Barrett, for example, argues that, as subjects of the slavery-based political economy, European consumers of sugar and cotton were constitutively incapable of recognizing Africandescended people; they required the imagined subhumanity of "the slave" to sustain their own subject formation within...

Vagus Nerve Stimulation (VNS) vs. Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) Treatment for Major Depressive Disorder and Bipolar Depression: A Comparative Meta-analytic Review Article View

International Journal of Medicine and Public Health,2018,8,3,119-130.DOI:10.5530/ijmedph.2018.3.26Published:October 2018Type:Original ArticleVagus Nerve Stimulation (VNS) vs. Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) Treatment for Major Depressive Disorder and Bipolar Depression: A Comparative Meta-analytic ReviewAli Mahmood Khan, Rizwan Ahmed, Vijaya Padma Kotapati, Sabrina K Dar, Iqra Qamar, Afshan Jafri, Maria Ibrahim, Pawan Kumar, and Gulshan Begum Ali Mahmood Khan1*, Rizwan Ahmed2, Vijaya Padma Kotapati3, Sabrina K Dar4, Iqra Qamar5, Afshan Jafri6, Maria Ibrahim7, Pawan Kumar8, Gulshan Begum9 1University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Texas, USA. 2Liaquat College of Medicine and Dentistry, Karachi, PAKISTAN. 3Manhattan Psychiatric Center, New York, USA. 4Zucker Hillside Hospital, New York, USA. 5Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Massachusetts, USA. 6Panjabrao Deshmukh Memorial Medical College, Amravathi, Maharashtra, INDIA. 7Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, USA. 8Knapp Medical Center, Weslaco, Texas, USA. 9Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, 8900 Van Wyck Expy, Richmond Hill, NY 11418, USAAbstract:Background: Patients who suffer from major depressive episodes and bipolar disorder often exhibit pharmaco-resistance. Therefore, novel treatment methodologies are being proposed to treat the disease or provide symptomatic relief. VNS and DBS are two such techniques, both of which utilize neurostimulation to achieve therapeutic relief. However, it is necessary to establish the comparative efficacies of these methods in treating MDD in patients. Objective: To assess the relative difference in the efficacy of VNS versus DBS for treatment of Major Depressive Disorder and bipolar depression and to provide evidence for the superior technique. Methods: To compare the efficacy of VNS versus DBS for the reduction of depressive symptoms in patients who meet the criteria for a major depressive episode, we conducted a meta-analysis of studies of the subject. Twenty-six studies were selected, consisting of 1160 patients who were treated with either VNS (Mean age = 47.75 years old, mean duration of illness = 22.86 years) or DBS (Mean age = 33.11 years old, mean duration of illness = 9.9 years) treatment arms and analyzed them to determine the amount of improvement in mood. The primary outcome measures were evaluated in terms of change between pre-test and post-test scores over a period of three months, as measured by HDRS and MADRS rating scales. Results: A comparison of the summary effect size produced by VNS (HDRS = 1.247, MADRS = 1.110) to that produced by DBS (HDRS = 2.063, MADRS = 1.996) seems to demonstrate that DBS is the more effective treatment. The effect size for VNS was lower than that of DBS groups, indicating that DBS is more effective than VNS. The finding is corroborated by the tests of heterogeneity; while the VNS group of studies indicated a high level of heterogeneity Vs. DBS group indicated insignificant level of heterogeneity. Conclusion: Current meta-analysis demonstrates that Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is a better treatment modality for Major Depressive Disorder and Bipolar Depression than Vagus Nerve Stimulation (VNS). However, as the VNS and DBS groups differed concerning the clinical profiles of the patients (both in terms of age and regarding the duration of the illness. Research studies with larger, synchronous sample sizes and control groups are required for a meta-analysis to draw a steadfast conclusion. Keywords:Bipolar Depression, DBS, Major Depressive Disorder, Neuro-modulation, VNSView:PDF (766.78 KB)

Writing and Re-writing the Canadian Educational Experience

It is a principle that shines impartially on the just and unjust that once you have a point of view all history will back you up. Van Wyck Brooks

The Scarlet Professor and Me: An Operatic Journey

The Scarlet Professor and Me: An Operatic Journey

Theodora Bosanquet, Virginia Woolf, and the Missing Women

Perhaps because academic Jamesians focus, in studies of James’s reception in the first two decades following his death, on constructions of James within a then virtually all-male academy, important responses to James by women who were not academics—notably Theodora Bosanquet and Virginia Woolf—have shrunk into the background of discussions of James’s critical reputation during the interwar years. A just assessment of responses to James in the years following his death would feature, not de-emphasize, these “missing women,” whose commentaries on James have proved far more valuable than the oft-discussed work of Van Wyck Brooks and Vernon Louis Parrington.

New England beyond Criticism: In Defense of America’s First LiteratureThe Dream of the Great American Novel

New England beyond Criticism: In Defense of America’s First LiteratureThe Dream of the Great American Novel

Van Wyck Brooks: Fenollosa ana His Circle with Other Essays in Biography

Van Wyck Brooks: Fenollosa ana His Circle with Other Essays in Biography

The Present Is a Void: Americanist Criticism, Unfinished and Half in Ruin

The Present Is a VoidAmericanist Criticism, Unfinished and Half in Ruin Matt Tierney (bio) How does a study of national culture refrain from committing to the nation as a natural or given form of political and social life? From the standpoint of a critical method, how might the cultural and textual effects of nationhood be seen not through the acceptance or refusal of nations but rather through learning to read the nation as a difficult and pervasive figure? What is the possibility or impossibility of postnational literary and cultural analysis in a world that can no longer accept the nation as a privileged prior object but that cannot afford to ignore the nation's concrete and ideological force? In responding to these questions, I would test a reading strategy derived from the modernist literary and political thinking of Van Wyck Brooks and test such a strategy on Brooks's own writing first of all. Brooks wrote that "the present is a void," and this is the perspective that I adopt and explore here, whereby a criticism may adopt a formalist perspective only after emptying out, or voiding, its historical presumptions. This is also the perspective from which Brooks's own political impressionism might fruitfully be reread and so brought into the present where its negativity can punch holes in today's hard methodologies and harder geopolitics. To read national cultures from the standpoint of a void present means discarding the nation as a necessary form without ignoring the fact that national signifiers have permeated a world of texts.1 To think transnationally or postnationally, in other words, means learning to read the nation as a rigid and rigidifying category of thought that cannot readily be brushed aside. POSTNATIONALISM What indeed is the other side, the verso, of the nation? If the nation is something that can be transgressed or moved past, then what kinds [End Page 131] of organization are waiting just beyond? Is it possible to reimagine the conditions for a theoretical study of the American literary past that would be capable of moving around, or beyond, or straight into the nation? I want to reenergize Brooks's old phrase "creating a usable past" not to make the old new again but rather the reverse, to demonstrate how the current conjuncture is built up from the longstanding problem of how to engage in historical creation in any given present. Much recent scholarship in U.S. literary history has become transnational or postnational in its focus. But the postnationalist impulse can be paired with a mode of reading that keeps the form of the nation itself in view: not as a real and self-sustaining apparatus in the world but rather as a residue and a legible text. Is it possible to read the nation in a contradictory fashion, where it is both an outmoded institution rotten at its foundations and an incomplete institution still in its youth? In short, can the nation be read textually, both through and as literature? Can a criticism be responsive to the nation's symbolic force, able to describe and disarticulate it, ready to recognize and name it, and yet resistant to identifying itself with it? Is it possible that historians and theoreticians might assemble a range of diverse national pasts whose very multiplicity both displays and disables the most damaging procedures of nationhood? To ask these questions is the implicit task of one of the field's earliest critical models, Van Wyck Brooks's practice of "creating a usable past": to imagine how reading the symbolics of American nationhood make for an interpretive strategy, but more than this, also comprise a worldly form of life and a radical poiesis of art and identity. In order to clear the ground and sweep away the stagnant canons that cluttered it, Brooks demanded that his contemporaries learn to see their present as a field in which texts and concepts could actively circulate and collide. He argued that it is for the literary writer—whether novelist, poet, or critic—to stage diverse and spontaneous encounters among such objects as pour into the present from the past, where the "present is a void" and the past is...

Il sublime nell'età delle avanguardie. Ideale e tradizione artistica nella scena americana

In 1964 the American professor Leo Marx published his fundamental essay entitled The machine in the garden : technology and the pastoral ideal in America . Fifty years after its first edition is very interesting return on the relevance of this text, emphasizing on the one hand its obvious value but, on the other, also highlighting its discontinuities. In this book, Professor Marx dealt with the one of the fundamental issues of American culture: the relationship between landscape, as a central element of literary creation, and the dizzying process of industrial and economic expansion that the United States experienced in the second half of the nineteenth century. The attention of Marx was entirely turned to literature, analyzing and comparing the works of writers such as Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau , Mark Twain , Frank Norris , Henry Adams , Henry James and Francis Scott Fitzgerald . The thesis of the essay was to underline how the entrance of the industrial landscape in natural American had inevitably destroyed nature, creating a lot of tension and opposition between these two polarities. He then proceeded to a detailed analysis of how the writers mentioned above had addressed this issue in their works: according to Leo Marx, in the most successful cases these authors, rather than propose a return to a bucolic ideal - necessarily and inherently better only as pre- industrialized - focused on the many contradictions stemming from this paradigm. This essay aims at analyzing the cultural origins of The machine in the garden , which are rooted in a broader cultural debate that reached its peak between the 1910s and the 1920s. This debate was not limited to writers, but also artists gave their contribution to it: very different personalities, united by a spirit of research of the origins of American culture. Inside - but perhaps it would be more correct to say in parallel – to the avant-garde art and literature that focused its aesthetics on the urban dimension, it developed a spirit of strong resistance to this aggressive modernity which shows strong links with some of the trends Leo Marx identified as characteristic of the nineteenth century. In particular, this essay focuses on the group of artists belonging to the so-called Stieglitz’s circle – formed by the American photographer and some of the painters he supported with his galleries, such as Georgia O’Keeffe, John Marin, and Marsden Hartley – who offered a particular interpretation of the American experience of the sublime, as a distinct element of national identity and as an antecedent to Marx’s position. Not surprisingly, some artists and writers active in the first decades of the twentieth century started to find those elements of modernity as exclusively urban and industrial not exhaustive of the national experience and moreover also very arbitrary. A key moment to understand these deep transformations of American culture are the 1910s, a decade which revealed the sense of deep dissatisfaction with urban theme. Curiously, it was mostly the artists and intellectuals who had formed part of the circle of the photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) - which in the previous decade had contributed to the iconographic fortune of the American metropolis , - the first to show a growing dissatisfaction with the city. Belonging and identity became two key terms of the American cultural debate of that period , in which the circle of the photographer is fully took part. The urgency of those years was all for the identification and definition of the national character of culture, which were traced not only in the experience of the urban metropolis but that, indeed, was increasingly moving away from that subject. The opinions of the circle were undoubtedly influenced by the contemporary cultural debate and by the works of such critics and intellectuals such as Van Wyck Brooks, Randolph Bourne, and Waldo Frank. The work of Leo Marx took shape precisely from the comparison with, and sometimes in direct opposition to those works. So it was already in the 1910s that the natural element was granted an almost mythical status which was not limited to literature and art, but that implied a broader reconsideration of the national identity and experience. It did not represent an anti-modernist stance, rather it should be considered as a complement of a broader, general reflection on modernity: nature, in fact, reconnected to its sublime meaning, taking an heroic character, synonym of resistance to the alienation introduced by modernity and industrialization.

Richard Wright and the Americanism of Lawd Today!

This essay examines Lawd Today!, Richard Wright's posthumously published novel, written in the 1930s but only made available to readers in 1963. Concentrating on the epigraphs that punctuate the novel, the essay demonstrates the significance of the social criticism of the 1910s and 1920s to Wright's formation as literary artist. In particular, Wright was drawn to the writings of the Young American critics, including Van Wyck Brooks and Waldo Frank, whose criticisms of national ideologies furthered a commitment to “Americanism” as a horizon of social and cultural renewal. Wright's intellectual immersion in early twentieth-century US social criticism gave Lawd Today! a Young American critical imprint. Drawing upon the work of Ernesto Laclau on “populism,” the essay reads Wright's novel as invested in an “Americanism” that seeks to describe common features of early twentieth-century black migrant experience in the urban North in terms of larger national and modern dynamics.

Composing cultures: modernism, American literary studies, and the problem of culture

The term has become ubiquitous in both academic and popular conversations, but its usefulness is a point of dispute. Taking the current shift from cultural studies to aesthetics as the latest form of this discussion, Eric Aronoff contends that in American modernism, the concepts of culture and of aesthetics have always been inseparable. The modernist concept of culture, he argues, arose out of an interdisciplinary dialogue about value, meaning, and form among social critics, artists, anthropologists, and literary critics, including figures as diverse as Van Wyck Brooks, Edward Sapir, Willa Cather, Lewis Mumford, John Crowe Ransom, Raymond Weaver, and Allen Tate. These figures proposed new ways to conceive of culture that intertwined theories of aesthetic and literary value with theories of national, racial, and regional identity. Through close readings, Aronoff shows that disciplines and approaches that are often thought of as opposed--cultural anthropology and aesthetics, American literary history and literary criticism, and multiculturalism and regionalism--are in fact engaged in common debate and proceed from shared arguments about culture and form.

A Partial Portrait of James Studies: Anesko’s Monopolizing the Master

A Partial Portrait of James Studies:Anesko’s Monopolizing the Master Daniel Mark Fogel Michael Anesko. Monopolizing the Master: Henry James and the Politics of Modern Literary Scholarship. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012. 272 pp. 8 illustrations. $35 (hardcover), $19.25 (Kindle edition). Michael Anesko’s Monopolizing the Master is an important book. One of the foremost Jamesian archival researchers, Anesko is also a penetrating reader not only of James’s texts but also of networks of relationship and affiliation: within the James family; beyond the family to James’s colleagues and friends, his agent and his publishers, and his acolytes; and among the writers, scholars, publishers, and librarians who for the first six decades after James’s death figure in Anesko’s lively story of often self-serving custodianship of “Henry James.” But as fine an example of Jamesian scholarship as Monopolizing the Master is, its many virtues are vitiated by Anesko’s pervasive cynicism about the profession of letters and by a current of grievance running through the book that affronts the balance and authority it might otherwise have more fully achieved. Anesko lays out a gripping tale of the struggle waged for the “cultural capital” embodied in “Henry James”—that is, in his published work, in the archives of his manuscripts, notebooks, diaries, and letters, and more generally in the evolving cultural construct “Henry James.” Anesko concentrates in the first two-thirds of Monopolizing the Master on the generation of family, friends, and acolytes who began to maneuver for control of “Henry James” even before the novelist’s death, including Henry James [End Page 175] himself, various members of his family, his secretary Theodora Bosanquet, and Edith Wharton and Percy Lubbock. The last third of the book focuses on the next two generations of James scholars. Anesko first covers the Van Wyck Brooks/Parrington period of James’s partially eclipsed reputation in the 1920s and ’30s, with special attention to William Dean Howells (!) and R. P. Blackmur. He then presents the first wave of the James revival as spearheaded by F. O. Matthiessen in the 1940s and continuing into the ’50s, with a veritable school of other scholars, mostly Jews—Leon Edel, Philip Rahv, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Clifton Fadiman—swimming in Matthiessen’s gigantic wake. And he concludes with an indictment of Edel for allegedly villainous efforts to monopolize the cultural capital represented by “Henry James,” chiefly through Edel’s control of access to the James family archives. In his preface, Anesko outlines the two major themes of his study. The first is the trajectory of James’s reputation, beginning with the disappointing sales of the New York Edition, through the posthumous decline of James’s “stock” into the mid-1940s, and concluding with the James Revival that began about 1945 and that continues today (though Anesko’s story essentially concludes on May 4, 1973, when Edel’s priorities on archival materials at Harvard were lifted). The second is the “logic of restriction” that has motivated the custodians of the cultural capital of “Henry James,” a logic rooted in James’s obsession with his own privacy and in his family’s protectiveness of its own intimate affairs (especially, but far from exclusively, its horrors of any imputations about Henry James’s sexuality). This second theme comes to a head in what Anesko presents as Edel’s self-seeking efforts to monopolize access to the James archives and to the whole mass of cultural capital of “Henry James, the Master.” The Preface also introduces somewhat slippery referents for Anesko’s key term “cultural capital.” Sometimes the term simply means literary reputation in the conventional sense. Sometimes, after the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, it more broadly indicates the ways in which the cultural construct “Henry James” has been used by various parties as a fungible currency or property, convertible to position, prestige, wealth, and power. This may seem like a very fine point since an author’s reputation is itself a cultural construct that in part reflects the strivings of others to make something of it for themselves. A writer’s reputation may indeed wax and wane as a result of the efforts of others to exploit, drive down...

Mark Twain, Nietzsche, and Terrible Truths That Can Set Us Free

Mark Twain, Nietzsche, and Terrible Truths That Can Set Us Free

“There's Millions in It!”: The Gilded Age and the Economy of Satire

“There's Millions in It!”: <i>The Gilded Age</i> and the Economy of Satire

Rethinking Transcendentalism: Perry Miller, Truman Nelson, and Thoreau’s “Lost Journal”

Perry Miller’s 1958 edition of Henry David Thoreau’s “lost journal” for 1840–41, with its long and condescending introduction, prompted the leftist novelist Truman Nelson to engage in a bitter correspondence with Van Wyck Brooks and others, critiquing Miller’s approach to Thoreau and transcendentalism and offering a reading that emerged from Nelson’s Marxist outlook. This essay explores Miller’s penchant for existentialist readings of historical-literary figures and movements, which clashed with Nelson’s materialist interpretation of antebellum culture. Although these two approaches seem incommensurate, a more holistic view of transcendentalism results from acknowledging both: Miller’s preference for accounts of individual struggle, self-doubt, and ambiguity and Nelson’s insistence on the transcendentalists’ embrace of movements for social change.