Pub Date : 2019-09-26DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.35
Yuping Wang
The study and teaching of American literature and American realism in China mirrored the social development and cultural transformation in China and was often fueled by political incentives. This chapter examines the cultural and political forces affecting the reception of American literature in different stages of Chinese history and investigates the teaching of American literature and of American realism in Chinese university classrooms. Different from the teaching of American literature in English-speaking countries, the American literature course in China serves a twofold purpose: to provide cultural nutrient for the cultivation of a broader mind by highlighting the cultural norms and rubrics in literature and to promote students’ language proficiency by a careful study of the text and formal elements of literary works. The history of the Chinese reception of American literature thus reflects the resilience and openness of Chinese culture in its negotiation with foreign cultures.
{"title":"Teaching and Researching American Literature and American Realism in China","authors":"Yuping Wang","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.35","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.35","url":null,"abstract":"The study and teaching of American literature and American realism in China mirrored the social development and cultural transformation in China and was often fueled by political incentives. This chapter examines the cultural and political forces affecting the reception of American literature in different stages of Chinese history and investigates the teaching of American literature and of American realism in Chinese university classrooms. Different from the teaching of American literature in English-speaking countries, the American literature course in China serves a twofold purpose: to provide cultural nutrient for the cultivation of a broader mind by highlighting the cultural norms and rubrics in literature and to promote students’ language proficiency by a careful study of the text and formal elements of literary works. The history of the Chinese reception of American literature thus reflects the resilience and openness of Chinese culture in its negotiation with foreign cultures.","PeriodicalId":326705,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124380842","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-26DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.4
Anita J. Duneer
This chapter considers slippages in realist and naturalist aesthetics that transcend traditionally defined genres, terrains, and time periods. It examines realism’s and naturalism’s fluctuating acceptances and critiques of the “natural” order, bringing nineteenth-century imperialist discourse into dialogue with Darwinian themes typical of literary naturalism. The chapter proposes better understanding of the relation between realistic and naturalistic modes by examining inclusion and exclusion based on assumptions about the “natural” in analysis of slippages between representations of civilization and savagery in Jack London and Zitkala-Ša; restraint, compulsion, and the beast within the divided self in Frank Norris, Henry James, and Theodore Dreiser; and evolutionary discourse and environmental determinism in Angelina Weld Grimké, Nella Larsen, and Ann Petry. Finally, TV’s Breaking Bad and The Wire suggest that we are still grappling with the intersectional forces of race, class, and gender that define territories of privilege and limitations of the American dream.
{"title":"Aesthetic Slippage in Realism and Naturalism","authors":"Anita J. Duneer","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.4","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter considers slippages in realist and naturalist aesthetics that transcend traditionally defined genres, terrains, and time periods. It examines realism’s and naturalism’s fluctuating acceptances and critiques of the “natural” order, bringing nineteenth-century imperialist discourse into dialogue with Darwinian themes typical of literary naturalism. The chapter proposes better understanding of the relation between realistic and naturalistic modes by examining inclusion and exclusion based on assumptions about the “natural” in analysis of slippages between representations of civilization and savagery in Jack London and Zitkala-Ša; restraint, compulsion, and the beast within the divided self in Frank Norris, Henry James, and Theodore Dreiser; and evolutionary discourse and environmental determinism in Angelina Weld Grimké, Nella Larsen, and Ann Petry. Finally, TV’s Breaking Bad and The Wire suggest that we are still grappling with the intersectional forces of race, class, and gender that define territories of privilege and limitations of the American dream.","PeriodicalId":326705,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133609894","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-26DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.20
Melanie V. Dawson
This chapter explores realist fiction that attempts to imagine a past that remains largely invisible to the viewing eye or that challenges a realist fascination with the visible world. As characters focus on the ancient past, particularly Roman and Greek ruins, they display consternation at the degree to which the past summons an imaginative response that they (and the narratives) find disconcerting. Even more challenging for the realist imagination is the deep, geological past, which enters literary texts via moments of discomfort, so uncomfortably does it fit the parameters of a scenic mode of writing. Nature writing, I argue, fares far better in its capacity to imagine a distant past for the natural world and one that has left its signs on the visible landscape.
{"title":"Realist Temporalities and the Distant Past","authors":"Melanie V. Dawson","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.20","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.20","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores realist fiction that attempts to imagine a past that remains largely invisible to the viewing eye or that challenges a realist fascination with the visible world. As characters focus on the ancient past, particularly Roman and Greek ruins, they display consternation at the degree to which the past summons an imaginative response that they (and the narratives) find disconcerting. Even more challenging for the realist imagination is the deep, geological past, which enters literary texts via moments of discomfort, so uncomfortably does it fit the parameters of a scenic mode of writing. Nature writing, I argue, fares far better in its capacity to imagine a distant past for the natural world and one that has left its signs on the visible landscape.","PeriodicalId":326705,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121978746","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-26DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.14
R. J. Guerra
This chapter examines the development of Latino literature in the United States during the time when realism emerged as a dominant aesthetic representation. Beginning with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and including the migrations resulting from the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Mexican Revolution (1910), Latinos in the United States began to realistically craft an identity served by a sense of displacement. Latinos living in the United States as a result of migration or exile were concerned with similar issues, including but not limited to their predominant status as working-class, loss of homeland and culture, social justice, and racial/ethnic profiling or discrimination. The literature produced during the latter part of the nineteenth century by some Latinos began to merge the influence of romantic style with a more socially conscious manner to reproduce the lives of ordinary men and women, draw out the specifics of their existence, characterize their dialects, and connect larger issues to the concerns of the common man, among other realist techniques.
{"title":"The Politics of US Latino Literature and American Realism","authors":"R. J. Guerra","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.14","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines the development of Latino literature in the United States during the time when realism emerged as a dominant aesthetic representation. Beginning with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and including the migrations resulting from the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Mexican Revolution (1910), Latinos in the United States began to realistically craft an identity served by a sense of displacement. Latinos living in the United States as a result of migration or exile were concerned with similar issues, including but not limited to their predominant status as working-class, loss of homeland and culture, social justice, and racial/ethnic profiling or discrimination. The literature produced during the latter part of the nineteenth century by some Latinos began to merge the influence of romantic style with a more socially conscious manner to reproduce the lives of ordinary men and women, draw out the specifics of their existence, characterize their dialects, and connect larger issues to the concerns of the common man, among other realist techniques.","PeriodicalId":326705,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism","volume":"91 11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128014591","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-26DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.19
A. Hebard
This chapter begins with William Dean Howells’s 1891 comparison of a realist writer to a naturalist observing a grasshopper. Examining a range of writings that made similar comparisons, the chapter asks how and why scientific observation became such a central framework for both critics and defenders of realist aesthetics. In particular, the chapter provides a context for realist aesthetics by tracing shifts in the biological sciences from a natural history methodology based on careful observation and description to a methodology based on measurement and the statistical analysis of large aggregates of facts. This shifting scientific imaginary allowed realists to reconcile realism’s investments in coherent aesthetic forms, particularly the ideals of totality and organic wholeness, with its descriptive practice of heaping up facts and contingent details.
{"title":"Science and Aesthetics in American Realism","authors":"A. Hebard","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.19","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter begins with William Dean Howells’s 1891 comparison of a realist writer to a naturalist observing a grasshopper. Examining a range of writings that made similar comparisons, the chapter asks how and why scientific observation became such a central framework for both critics and defenders of realist aesthetics. In particular, the chapter provides a context for realist aesthetics by tracing shifts in the biological sciences from a natural history methodology based on careful observation and description to a methodology based on measurement and the statistical analysis of large aggregates of facts. This shifting scientific imaginary allowed realists to reconcile realism’s investments in coherent aesthetic forms, particularly the ideals of totality and organic wholeness, with its descriptive practice of heaping up facts and contingent details.","PeriodicalId":326705,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115273083","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-26DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.22
Elif S. Armbruster
This chapter examines the role of houses and interiors in American realist fiction and argues that realist authors were preoccupied with settings and houses in a way unique to their period, the late nineteenth century, when numerous technological and aesthetic developments coincided with the reproduction of “real life” in writing. Offering the lives and literature of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edith Wharton as useful brackets around the realist genre, the chapter illustrates the degree to which these two authors made the motif of the home central to their fiction and nonfiction. It provides detailed readings of Stowe’s Pink and White Tyranny (1871), Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), and Wharton’s rural novel, Summer (1917) in order to showcase how houses personify and encapsulate their characters. In realist fiction, the chapter argues, houses can be read in order to understand the characters who move within them, just as characters can be read by their homes. Finally, the chapter reveals the degree to which Gilded Age excess was replaced by early twentieth-century simplicity, which, in turn, became the linchpin for the era of modernism that evolved in literature and architecture at this time.
{"title":"Dwelling in American Realism","authors":"Elif S. Armbruster","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.22","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.22","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines the role of houses and interiors in American realist fiction and argues that realist authors were preoccupied with settings and houses in a way unique to their period, the late nineteenth century, when numerous technological and aesthetic developments coincided with the reproduction of “real life” in writing. Offering the lives and literature of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edith Wharton as useful brackets around the realist genre, the chapter illustrates the degree to which these two authors made the motif of the home central to their fiction and nonfiction. It provides detailed readings of Stowe’s Pink and White Tyranny (1871), Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), and Wharton’s rural novel, Summer (1917) in order to showcase how houses personify and encapsulate their characters. In realist fiction, the chapter argues, houses can be read in order to understand the characters who move within them, just as characters can be read by their homes. Finally, the chapter reveals the degree to which Gilded Age excess was replaced by early twentieth-century simplicity, which, in turn, became the linchpin for the era of modernism that evolved in literature and architecture at this time.","PeriodicalId":326705,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123381155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-26DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.31
A. Böger
This chapter explores the relationship between realist literature and photography since their emergence in the mid-nineteenth century. Both media responded to the challenges of modernity by contriving new means of representing reality. Whereas photography became the standard for objective reproduction following the pictorial turn, realist authors including Henry James and Paul Laurence Dunbar honed literature’s capacity to focus on inner realities, such as subjective experience and memory, impossible to capture in a photograph. Jacob Riis, in turn, adopted the aesthetic of the urban picturesque for How the Other Half Lives, a photo-textual record of immigrant life in New York serving as a precursor for the documentary books of the Great Depression, which advocated national relief programs to alleviate the distress of rural Americans. Countering such facile approaches to complex realities, James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, finally, presents a fundamental critique of representation itself.
本章探讨了现实主义文学与摄影自19世纪中期出现以来的关系。这两种媒体都通过创造反映现实的新手段来应对现代性的挑战。当摄影成为客观再现的标准之后，绘画转向，现实主义作家包括亨利·詹姆斯和保罗·劳伦斯·邓巴磨练了文学关注内在现实的能力，比如主观经验和记忆，不可能用照片捕捉。反过来，雅各布·里斯(Jacob Riis)在《另一半的生活》(How the Other Half Lives)中采用了城市风景如画的美学。《另一半的生活》以照片为文本记录了纽约移民的生活，是大萧条时期纪实书籍的先驱，这些书倡导国家救济计划，以减轻美国农村居民的痛苦。詹姆斯·阿吉和沃克·埃文斯合著的《让我们现在赞美名人》(Let Us Now Praise Famous Men)最终对再现本身提出了一种根本性的批评，反对这种对复杂现实的肤浅处理。
{"title":"American Realism and Photography","authors":"A. Böger","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.31","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.31","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the relationship between realist literature and photography since their emergence in the mid-nineteenth century. Both media responded to the challenges of modernity by contriving new means of representing reality. Whereas photography became the standard for objective reproduction following the pictorial turn, realist authors including Henry James and Paul Laurence Dunbar honed literature’s capacity to focus on inner realities, such as subjective experience and memory, impossible to capture in a photograph. Jacob Riis, in turn, adopted the aesthetic of the urban picturesque for How the Other Half Lives, a photo-textual record of immigrant life in New York serving as a precursor for the documentary books of the Great Depression, which advocated national relief programs to alleviate the distress of rural Americans. Countering such facile approaches to complex realities, James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, finally, presents a fundamental critique of representation itself.","PeriodicalId":326705,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116699138","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-26DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.21
J. Bird
This chapter examines the ways in which nineteenth-century American humor influenced realist writers. Down East humor and Southwestern humor in the first half of the century and literary comedians and local colorists in the second half provided models for ways to use humor to establish a sense of life, setting, characterization, satire, and social comment. An analysis of key comic scenes and techniques in Henry James’s The American, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, Charles Chesnutt’s “The Goophered Grapevine,” and Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country shows how these writers used humor as a device in their development of realism.
{"title":"Realism and the Uses of Humor","authors":"J. Bird","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.21","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.21","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines the ways in which nineteenth-century American humor influenced realist writers. Down East humor and Southwestern humor in the first half of the century and literary comedians and local colorists in the second half provided models for ways to use humor to establish a sense of life, setting, characterization, satire, and social comment. An analysis of key comic scenes and techniques in Henry James’s The American, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, Charles Chesnutt’s “The Goophered Grapevine,” and Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country shows how these writers used humor as a device in their development of realism.","PeriodicalId":326705,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122294327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-26DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.12
Lori Harrison-Kahan
By focusing on the reception of Yekl, Abraham Cahan’s 1896 novel of immigrant life in New York, this chapter considers the turn-of-the-twentieth-century controversy surrounding depictions of Jews in ghetto literature, arguing that this debate illuminates not only the challenges of ethno-racial representation and self-representation but also the slipperiness of realism itself. The chapter also posits a more inclusive interpretation of Jewish American realism by demonstrating the importance of an overlooked late nineteenth-century realist writer, Emma Wolf. It explores how Wolf’s novels Other Things Being Equal (1892) and Heirs of Yesterday (1900), which focus on experiences of Jewish families in San Francisco during the Progressive Era, offer important alternatives to the New York–centric ghetto genre, expanding the parameters of Jewish American literature in terms of region, class, gender, and religion.
{"title":"Ghetto Realism—and Beyond","authors":"Lori Harrison-Kahan","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.12","url":null,"abstract":"By focusing on the reception of Yekl, Abraham Cahan’s 1896 novel of immigrant life in New York, this chapter considers the turn-of-the-twentieth-century controversy surrounding depictions of Jews in ghetto literature, arguing that this debate illuminates not only the challenges of ethno-racial representation and self-representation but also the slipperiness of realism itself. The chapter also posits a more inclusive interpretation of Jewish American realism by demonstrating the importance of an overlooked late nineteenth-century realist writer, Emma Wolf. It explores how Wolf’s novels Other Things Being Equal (1892) and Heirs of Yesterday (1900), which focus on experiences of Jewish families in San Francisco during the Progressive Era, offer important alternatives to the New York–centric ghetto genre, expanding the parameters of Jewish American literature in terms of region, class, gender, and religion.","PeriodicalId":326705,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121507424","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-26DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.9
J. Cole
When realists engage in comedy, they are hardly ever funny. Their comic efforts strike the reader as clumsy intrusions into a world that is otherwise governed by natural or societal forces. Yet the comic mode, and an aspect of the comic that could be called the comic sensibility, can be contextualized within and against realism. Liminal and transgressive, the comic sensibility solved some of the representative conundrums of realism, disrupting its smooth surfaces and thumbing its nose at determinism. The comic sensibility depended heavily on caricature—specifically, ethnic caricature—and while ethnic caricature usually denigrated its subjects, in notable cases, as in the work of Charles Chesnutt, Stephen Crane, Bruno Lessing (Rudolph Block), vaudeville comedians, and comic-strip artists, the comic sensibility provided openings for ethnic and racial minorities to make meaning, form a collective identity, and foster solidarity.
{"title":"Ethnic Caricature and the Comic Sensibility","authors":"J. Cole","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.9","url":null,"abstract":"When realists engage in comedy, they are hardly ever funny. Their comic efforts strike the reader as clumsy intrusions into a world that is otherwise governed by natural or societal forces. Yet the comic mode, and an aspect of the comic that could be called the comic sensibility, can be contextualized within and against realism. Liminal and transgressive, the comic sensibility solved some of the representative conundrums of realism, disrupting its smooth surfaces and thumbing its nose at determinism. The comic sensibility depended heavily on caricature—specifically, ethnic caricature—and while ethnic caricature usually denigrated its subjects, in notable cases, as in the work of Charles Chesnutt, Stephen Crane, Bruno Lessing (Rudolph Block), vaudeville comedians, and comic-strip artists, the comic sensibility provided openings for ethnic and racial minorities to make meaning, form a collective identity, and foster solidarity.","PeriodicalId":326705,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128215917","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：