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.

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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.

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