Search results for ""Author Brian Yothers""

A pathbreaking consideration of the intertwined critical responses to Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass, giants of abolitionist literature. Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass represent a crucial strand in nineteenth-century American literature: the struggle for the abolition of slavery. Yet there has been no thoroughgoing discussion of the critical receptionof these two giants of abolitionist literature. Reading Abolition narrates and explores the parallels between Stowe's critical reception and Douglass's. The book begins with Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, considering its initial celebration as a work of genius and conscience, its subsequent dismissal in the early twentieth century as anti-Southern and in the mid-twentieth century as racially stereotypical, and finally its recent recovery as a classic of women's, religious, and political fiction. It also considers the reception of Stowe's other, less well-known novels, non-fictional works, and poetry, and how engaging the full Stowe canon has changed the shape of Stowe studies. The second half of the study deals with the reception of Douglass both as a writer of three autobiographies that helped to define the contours of African American autobiography for later writers and critics and as an extraordinarily eloquent and influential orator and journalist. Reading Abolition shows that Stowe's and Douglass's critical destinies have long been intertwined, with questions about race, gender, nationalism, religion, and thenature of literary and rhetorical genius playing crucial roles in critical considerations of both figures. Brian Yothers is Frances Spatz Leighton Endowed Distinguished Professor and Associate Chair of the Department ofEnglish at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Read more less

This book is a history of the nineteenth-century poetry of slavery and freedom framed as an argument about the nature of poetry itself: why we write it, why we read it, how it interacts with history. The poetry of the transatlantic abolitionist movement represented a powerful alliance across racial and religious boundaries; today it challenges the demarcation in literary studies between cultural and aesthetic approaches. Now is a particularly apt moment for its study. This book is a history of the nineteenth-century poetry of slavery and freedom framed as an argument about the nature of poetry itself: why we write it, why we read it, how it interacts with history. Poetry that speaks to a broad cross-section of society with moral authority, intellectual ambition, and artistic complexity mattered in the fraught years of the mid nineteenth century; Brian Yothers argues that it can and must matter today. Yothers examines antislavery poetry in light of recent work by historians, scholars in literary, cultural, and rhetorical studies, African-Americanists, scholars of race and gender studies, and theorists of poetics. That interdisciplinary sweep is mirrored by the range of writers he considers: from the canonical - Whitman, Barrett Browning, Beecher Stowe, DuBois, Melville - to those whose influence has faded - Longfellow, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, John Pierpont, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell - to African American writers whose work has been recovered in recent decades - James M. Whitfield, William Wells Brown, George Moses Horton, Frances E. W. Harper.

Read more less

Herman Melville’s The Piazza Tales is the only collection of short fiction that he published in hislifetime, and it includes his two most famous short stories, Bartleby, the Scrivener and Benito Cerenoalong with the less well-known but deeply engaging sketches of the Galapagos Islands that make up TheEncantadas and three more short stories: The Piazza, The Bell-Tower, and The Lightning-Rod Man. This edition places these stories in the context of nineteenth-century debates over slavery, free willand determinism, science and technology, and the nature and value of literary artistry. The stories in ThePiazza Tales demonstrate the global range of Melville’s cultural and aesthetic concerns, as Melville sethis stories in locales ranging from rural western Massachusetts and Wall Street in the United States to thePacific coast of South America and southern Europe.This edition is especially concerned with Melville’s engagement with both political questions related toslavery and imperialism and aesthetic questions germane to the short story tradition as developed by hisnear contemporaries Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.

Read more less