Synopses & Reviews
In modern culture, the essay is often considered an old-fashioned, unoriginal form of literary styling. The word essay brings to mind the uninspired five-paragraph theme taught in schools around the country or the antiquated, Edwardian meanderings of English gentlemen rattling on about art and old books. These connotations exist despite the fact that Americans have been reading and enjoying personal essays in popular magazines for decades, engaging with a multitude of ideas through this short-form means of expression.
To defend the essay—that misunderstood staple of first-year composition courses—Ned Stuckey-French has written The American Essay in the American Century. This book uncovers the buried history of the American personal essay and reveals how it played a significant role in twentieth-century cultural history.
In the early 1900s, writers and critics debated the “death of the essay,” claiming it was too traditional to survive the era’s growing commercialism, labeling it a bastion of British upper-class conventions. Yet in that period, the essay blossomed into a cultural force as a new group of writers composed essays that responded to the concerns of America’s expanding cosmopolitan readership. These essays would spark the “magazine revolution,” giving a fresh voice to the ascendant middle class of the young century.
With extensive research and a cultural context, Stuckey-French describes the many reasons essays grew in appeal and importance for Americans. He also explores the rise of E. B. White, considered by many the greatest American essayist of the first half of the twentieth century whose prowess was overshadowed by his success in other fields of writing. White’s work introduced a new voice, creating an American essay that melded seriousness and political resolve with humor and self-deprecation. This book is one of the first to consider and reflect on the contributions of E. B. White to the personal essay tradition and American culture more generally.
The American Essay in the American Century is a compelling, highly readable book that illuminates the history of a secretly beloved literary genre. A work that will appeal to fiction readers, scholars, and students alike, this book offers fundamental insight into modern American literary history and the intersections of literature, culture, and class through the personal essay. This thoroughly researched volume dismisses, once and for all, the “death of the essay,” proving that the essay will remain relevant for a very long time to come.
Review
“A splendidly researched and admirably written study of a largely unknown segment of American literary history. Stuckey-French makes a compelling case for the ways the evolution of the personal essay both shaped America’s middle class and was in turn shaped by it.”—Robert Atwan, series editor of The Best American Essays
Review
“Eloquently written and perfectly argued, The American Essay in the American Century provides, through careful analysis and through example, a cogent reminder about the value and the pleasure of nonfiction prose. Always insightfully attuned to the cultural politics negotiated by the American essayist as he or she constructs ideal readers and idealizes the authorial position from which to address them, Ned Stuckey-French deftly examines the history of the essay in American culture. This is a smart, artful discussion of an important American art form.”—Alan Nadel, author of Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age and, most recently, Television in Black-and-White America: Race and National Identity
Review
“I came to Ned Stuckey-French’s The American Essay in the American Century expecting a lucid rendering of the essay as an essential twentieth-century form. I got that and much more. In a splendidly elegant style that E. B. White himself would admire, Stuckey-French opened my mind and even my heart to the rich literary rewards of the essay and to its enduring importance in human discourse. This is an inspiring book, an important book.”—Robert Olen Butler, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
Review
"Ethos and Narrative Interpretation . . . succeeds in presenting a type of narrative reading that opens new directions, while never forgetting to have a new close look at the basic issues of the discipline."—Jan Baetens, Leonardo Reviews
Review
“With its emphasis on ethos and the negotiation of values, this book will have a lasting impact on the way in which narratology redefines its core concerns. By grounding her argument in rhetoric, Korthals Altes offers a methodological alternative to text-oriented readings, while her insistence on the importance of values adds a new dimension to existing rhetorical approaches in narratology.”—Roy Sommer, author of Literature and Memory
Synopsis
In modern culture, the essay is often considered an old-fashioned, unoriginal form of literary styling. The word essay brings to mind the uninspired five-paragraph theme taught in schools around the country or the antiquated, Edwardian meanderings of English gentlemen rattling on about art and old books. These connotations exist despite the fact that Americans have been reading and enjoying personal essays in popular magazines for decades, engaging with a multitude of ideas through this short-form means of expression.To defend the essay that misunderstood staple of first-year composition courses Ned Stuckey-French has written The American Essay in the American Century. This book uncovers the buried history of the American personal essay and reveals how it played a significant role in twentieth-century cultural history.In the early 1900s, writers and critics debated the death of the essay, claiming it was too traditional to survive the era s growing commercialism, labeling it a bastion of British upper-class conventions. Yet in that period, the essay blossomed into a cultural force as a new group of writers composed essays that responded to the concerns of America s expanding cosmopolitan readership. These essays would spark the magazine revolution, giving a fresh voice to the ascendant middle class of the young century.With extensive research and a cultural context, Stuckey-French describes the many reasons essays grew in appeal and importance for Americans. He also explores the rise of E. B. White, considered by many the greatest American essayist of the first half of the twentieth century whose prowess was overshadowed by his success in other fields of writing. White s work introduced a new voice, creating an American essay that melded seriousness and political resolve with humor and self-deprecation. This book is one of the first to consider and reflect on the contributions of E. B. White to the personal essay tradition and American culture more generally.The American Essay in the American Century is a compelling, highly readable book that illuminates the history of a secretly beloved literary genre. A work that will appeal to fiction readers, scholars, and students alike, this book offers fundamental insight into modern American literary history and the intersections of literature, culture, and class through the personal essay. This thoroughly researched volume dismisses, once and for all, the death of the essay, proving that the essay will remain relevant for a very long time to come."
Synopsis
In modern culture, the essay is often considered an old-fashioned, unoriginal form of literary styling. This compelling, highly readable book illuminates the history of the American personal essay and reveals its significant role in twentieth-century cultural history. E. B. White’s contributions to the tradition and American culture more generally are explored. This thoroughly researched volume dismisses, once and for all, the “death of the essay,” proving that the essay will remain relevant for a very long time to come.
Synopsis
The American Essay in the American Century is a compelling, highly readable book that illuminates the history of a secretly beloved literary genre. A work that will appeal to fiction readers, scholars, and students alike, this book offers fundamental insight into modern American literary history and the intersections of literature, culture, and class through the personal essay. This thoroughly researched volume dismisses, once and for all, the “death of the essay,” proving that the essay will remain relevant for a very long time to come.
Synopsis
Ethos and Narrative Interpretation examines the fruitfulness of the concept of ethos for the theory and analysis of literary narrative. The notion of ethos refers to the broadly persuasive effects of the image one may have of a speakers psychology, world view, and emotional or ethical stance. How and why do readers attribute an ethos (of, for example, sincerity, reliability, authority, or irony) to literary characters, narrators, and even to authors? Are there particular conditions under which it is more appropriate for interpreters to attribute an ethos to authors, rather than to narrators? In the answer Liesbeth Korthals Altes proposes to such questions, ethos attributions are deeply implicated in the process of interpreting and evaluating narrative texts.
Demonstrating the extent to which ethos attributions, and hence, interpretive acts, play a tacit role in many methods of narratological analysis, Korthals Altes also questions the agenda and epistemological status of various narratologies, both classical and post-classical. Her approach, rooted in a broad understanding of the role and circulation of narrative art in culture, rehabilitates interpretation, both as a tool and as an object of investigation in narrative studies.
About the Author
Liesbeth Korthals Altes is a professor of general literature in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. She is the author or coeditor of several books including Authorship Revisited: Conceptions of Authorship around 1900 and 2000 and The Autonomy of Literature at the Fins de Siècles (1900 and 2000): A Critical Assessment.