Messing with Romance: American Poetics and Antebellum Southern Fiction

ISBN-13: 9783631632451 / Angielski / Twarda / 2012 / 229 str.

Zeno Ackermann

Opis

Messing with Romance is a reinvestigation of southern literary history and a case study in the potentials of genre criticism. Offering contextualized readings of novels produced by representatives of the southern elite between 1824 and 1854, the study traces a development that is as fascinating as it is contradictory: from pretences of -realism- to bold fantasies of fiction s socially transformative power, and eventually toward the collapse of the discourse of -romance- to which southern novelists had contributed with such desperate determination. Along the way, prominent critical cliches come under scrutiny: firstly, that antebellum southern literature followed a clear-cut course of radicalization; secondly, that literary conventions can easily be identified as the determining formats of ideological discourses."

Spis treści

Contents: A Catastrophic Commencement: George Tucker's The Valley of Shenandoah (1824) - Salvational Hybridizations: John P. Kennedy's Swallow Barn (1832) - Tilting the Balance: Kennedy's and Caruthers' Historical Romances (1834-1845) - Sacrificing Dialectics: William G. Simms's The Partisan (1835) - From "Romance" to Real Politics: Nathaniel B. Tucker's The Partisan Leader (1836) - The Breaking Point: "Romance" and the Market Revolution (1837-1851) - From Ethos to Pathos: William G. Simms's Woodcraft (1852-1854) - The "Romance" of Contingency: John E. Cooke's Virginia Comedians (1854).

O autorze

Zeno Ackermann teaches literary and cultural studies at the Department of English at Freie Universität Berlin, where he is involved in a research project on the reception of Shakespeare in post-war Germany. He works on aesthetics and ideology, on problems of remembering war and genocide, and on the interrelationships between the contemporary novel and audiovisual mass media.