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Beginning in the 1870s, the short-lived fad of “Authors’ Carnivals” swept through American cities. At each carnival, hundreds of locals costumed themselves as famous literary characters, performing amateur theatricals and tableaux vivants based on their favorite books. Unexpected character combinations frequently appeared on the same stage. Shakespeare’s Falstaff stood beside Dickens’s Little Nell; Longfellow’s Hiawatha rubbed shoulders with Old Mother Goose. For attendees, these events offered peculiar thrills. Similar to today’s fan conventions and cosplay events, participants engaged their cherished texts anew through physical enactment. Meanwhile, spectators could witness the totality of their reading experiences within a single shared space. Amateur play suddenly brought so many literary works to three-dimensional life—and all at once. Despite their amusements, however, the carnivals also fell short of loftier goals. First, organizers sought to advance a definitive literary canon in America, but they only affirmed Eurocentric texts that no longer dominated the marketplace. Second, the events might have produced an innovative form of theater, yet clumsy staging and spectatorial disorientation stymied these efforts. Thus, the authors’ carnivals left behind not only a legacy of spectacular fandom but also one of squandered cultural potential.US authors’ carnivals finally demonstrate[d] both the possibilities and the shortcomings of the nineteenth-century cultural imagination. . . . [D]espite their estimable amusements . . . the carnivals ultimately proved resistant to the literary and theatrical cultures they intended to bolster.
Beginning in the 1870s, the short-lived fad of “Authors’ Carnivals” swept through American cities. At each carnival, hundreds of locals costumed themselves as famous literary characters, performing amateur theatricals and tableaux vivants based on their favorite books. Unexpected character combinations frequently appeared on the same stage. Shakespeare’s Falstaff stood beside Dickens’s Little Nell; Longfellow’s Hiawatha rubbed shoulders with Old Mother Goose. For attendees, these events offered peculiar thrills. Similar to today’s fan conventions and cosplay events, participants engaged their cherished texts anew through physical enactment. Meanwhile, spectators could witness the totality of their reading experiences within a single shared space. Amateur play suddenly brought so many literary works to three-dimensional life—and all at once. Despite their amusements, however, the carnivals also fell short of loftier goals. First, organizers sought to advance a definitive literary canon in America, but they only affirmed Eurocentric texts that no longer dominated the marketplace. Second, the events might have produced an innovative form of theater, yet clumsy staging and spectatorial disorientation stymied these efforts. Thus, the authors’ carnivals left behind not only a legacy of spectacular fandom but also one of squandered cultural potential.US authors’ carnivals finally demonstrate[d] both the possibilities and the shortcomings of the nineteenth-century cultural imagination. . . . [D]espite their estimable amusements . . . the carnivals ultimately proved resistant to the literary and theatrical cultures they intended to bolster.
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.
Recent scholarship has conceptualized solidarity as a human right allowing individuals to protect themselves against social vulnerabilities. As with other human rights, the claims they imply need to be anchored in a sense of social cohesion-a common feeling of commitment and support, which ultimately has to be produced by cultural forms and institutions. This article examines how various types of mutual support have been imagined in the history of U.S.-American literature and culture. It distinguishes between semantic, performative, and communicative functions of fictional texts to explore how the idea of social cohesion has been discussed and performed in and through fiction. I focus on three modes emerging in the nineteenth century: the sentimental, the utopian, and the postmetaphysical. Looking closely at their narrative and rhetorical design, I argue that they aimed to contain two major opposing forces working against the idea of mutual support and solidaristic communities: a destructive individualism as the cause of social vulnerabilities and a sense of distance limiting the feeling of connection and interdependency.
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