Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Claudia Stokes’s admirable
Old Style possesses a number of what could be called old fashioned virtues: it is very well-written, impressively researched, and surprisingly generous to a number of largely forgotten or dismissed literary figures. The argument of Old Style, however, is nothing if not timely. Stokes makes a persuasive case for the need to reevaluate our belief in the value of originality....
Old Style is imaginative, original, and unconventional." * Modern Philology *
"Claudia Stokes returns us to a moment when the derivative was not so easily dismissible-when imitation, iteration, and quotation held real cultural cachet. Considering writers both forgotten and familiar, she unfolds an utterly convincing case for the power of the unoriginal in the service of both progressive and conservative causes in the early United States. In so doing, she offers a beautifully researched, impeccably written, and manifestly important corrective to a whole raft of stories that we keep telling about the exceptionality of America and its artists." * William Huntting Howell, Boston University *
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Old Styleis the work of a literary historian, patiently, rigorously demonstrating that the nineteenth century is indeed a foreign country, where today’s precepts of 'novelty, surprise, and topicality' were a stigma, not an asset. We are therefore invited to reconsider whole swaths of books that we tend to find dull, repetitive, formulaic, and therefore unworthy of our consideration as readers, teachers, and scholars. What if, Stokes asks, repetition, secondariness, the compliance with formulas or conventions were dull only if we stick to the diktats of the new, and the often invisible exclusionary bias that goes with them...[W]e owe it to Stokes’s brilliant reconsideration of nineteenth-century literature as the locus of tradition and unoriginality. Few books so alter how and what we read. Claudia Stokes’s
Old Styleis one of them." * American Literary History *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Unoriginality on the Margins
Chapter 1. The Poetics of Unoriginality: The Case of Lucretia Davidson
Chapter 2. Novel Commonplaces: Quotation, Epigraphs, and Literary Authority
Chapter 3. A Few Good Books: Rereading and the Virtues of Familiarity
Part II. Elitist Conservatism and the Defense of Tradition
Chapter 4. Old Friends in New Dress: James Fenimore Cooper and the Politics of the Sequel
Chapter 5. Longfellow's Antiquarianism
Chapter 6. Thomas Bailey Aldrich and the End of Tradition
Notes
Bibliography
Index
