Transhistorical Emerson: "Republic of the spirit" in Twain, James, Wharton, and Cather.
Item
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Title
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Transhistorical Emerson: "Republic of the spirit" in Twain, James, Wharton, and Cather.
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Identifier
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AAI3169965
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identifier
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3169965
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Creator
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Polley, Diana Hope.
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Contributor
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Adviser: William P. Kelly
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Date
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2005
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | American Studies | Literature, English
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Abstract
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This dissertation responds to the most widely accepted definitions of American Realism. While critics often read American Realism as a disavowal of earlier American romantic philosophy and as a commitment to recognizing the stark realities of a new postbellum order, this dissertation complicates these fundamental assumptions by examining how American Realism speaks directly to the ideas, often "idealisms," of America's greatest romantic philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The project focuses on Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, and Willa Cather's My Antonia and examines how these texts reread Emerson's "republic of the spirit" philosophy, in light of postbellum history and modern intrusions of capitalism. Rather than accept clear boundaries between romance and realism, this dissertation argues that American Realists struggled between celebrating Emerson's core philosophies of individual possibility and acknowledging the "realities" of American social and historical life. In short, this study recognizes within Realism a divided loyalty between two historical trends and explores how these seemingly contradictory notions---Emerson's romantic philosophy and historical reality---exist, simultaneously, within the literature of the period.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
