The diminishment of rural life at the hands of urbanization, for many, defines the years between the end of the Civil War and the dawn of the twentieth century in the U.S. Traditional literary histories find this transformation clearly demarcated between rural tales-stories set in the countryside, marked by attention to regional dialect and close-knit communities-and grittier novels and short stories that reflected the harsh realities of America's growing cities. Challenging this conventional division, Mark Storey proffers a capacious, trans-regional version of rural fiction that contains and coexists with urban-industrial modernity. To remap literary representations of the rural, Storey pinpoints four key aspects of everyday life that recur with surprising frequency in late nineteenth-century fiction: train journeys, travelling circuses, country doctors, and lynch mobs. Fiction by figures such as Hamlin Garland, Booth Tarkington, and William Dean Howells use railroads and roving carnivals to signify the deeper incursions of urban capitalism into the American countryside. A similar, somewhat disruptive migration of the urban into the rural occurs with the arrival of modern medicine, as viewed in depictions of the country doctor in novels like Sarah Orne Jewett's A Country Doctor and Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware. This discussion gives way to a far darker interaction between the urban and the rural, with the intricate relationship of vigilante justice to an emerging modernity used to frame readings of rural lynchings in works by writers like Bret Harte, Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Owen Wister. The four arenas-transport, entertainment, medicine, and the law-used to organize the study come together in a coda devoted to utopian fiction, which demonstrates one of the more imaginative methods used to express the social and literary anxieties around the changing nature of urban and rural space at the end of the nineteenth century. Mining a rich variety of long neglected novels and short stories, Rural Fictions, Urban Realities provides a new literary geography of Gilded Age America, and in the process, contributes to our understanding of how we represent and register the cultural complexities of modernization.

Rural Fictions, Urban Realities: A Geography of Gilded Age American Literature

Literature & Fiction

Storey, Mark

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

Robert Southey was a figure of major importance on the literary and political scene from the 1790s to his death in 1843. He lived through the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, the dawn of the industrial age, and the coronation of Queen Victoria. He was the contemporary and friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth, admired and vilified by Byron and Hazlitt, and became the foremost man of letters of his day. Yet his reputation over the years has been eclipsed by that of his better-known peers. This new biography tells the fascinating story of a complex and contradictory man, the mirror of his age, and sets him centre-stage to provide a new perspective on familiar events and figures of the Romantic period.

Robert Southey: A Life

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

This is a book about two empires--America and Rome--and the forms of time we create when we think about them together. Ranging from the eighteenth century to the present day, through novels, journalism, film, and photography, Time and Antiquity in American Empire reconfigures our understanding of how cultural and political life has generated an analogy between Roman antiquity and the imperial US state--both to justify and perpetuate it, and to resist and critique it. The book takes in a wide scope, from theories of historical time and imperial culture, through the twin political pillars of American empire--republicanism and slavery--to the popular genres that have reimagined America's and Rome's sometimes strange orbit: Christian fiction, travel writing, and science fiction. Through this conjunction of literary history, classical reception studies, and the philosophy of history, however, Time and Antiquity in American Empire builds a more fundamental inquiry: about how we imagine both our politics and ourselves within historical time. It outlines a new relationship between text and context, and between history and culture; one built on the oscillating, dialectical logic of the analogy, and on a spatialising of historical temporality through the metaphors of constellations and networks. Offering a fresh reckoning with the historicist protocols of literary study, this book suggests that recognizing the shape of history we step into when we analogize with the past is also a way of thinking about how we have read--and how we might yet read.

Time and Antiquity in American Empire: Roma Redux (Oxford Studies in American Literary History)

The diminishment of rural life at the hands of urbanization, for many, defines the years between the end of the Civil War and the dawn of the twentieth century in the U.S. Traditional literary histories find this transformation clearly demarcated between rural tales-stories set in the countryside, marked by attention to regional dialect and close-knit communities-and grittier novels and short stories that reflected the harsh realities of America's growing cities. Challenging this conventional division, Mark Storey proffers a capacious, trans-regional version of rural fiction that contains and coexists with urban-industrial modernity.To remap literary representations of the rural, Storey pinpoints four key aspects of everyday life that recur with surprising frequency in late nineteenth-century fiction: train journeys, travelling circuses, country doctors, and lynch mobs. Fiction by figures such as Hamlin Garland, Booth Tarkington, and William Dean Howells use railroads and roving carnivals to signify the deeper incursions of urban capitalism into the American countryside. A similar, somewhat disruptive migration of the urban into the rural occurs with the arrival of modern medicine, as viewed in depictions of the country doctor in novels like Sarah Orne Jewett's A Country Doctor and Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware. This discussion gives way to a far darker interaction between the urban and the rural, with the intricate relationship of vigilante justice to an emerging modernity used to frame readings of rural lynchings in works by writers like Bret Harte, Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Owen Wister. The four arenas-transport, entertainment, medicine, and the law-used to organize the study come together in a coda devoted to utopian fiction, which demonstrates one of the more imaginative methods used to express the social and literary anxieties around the changing nature of urban and rural space at the end of the nineteenth century.Mining a rich variety of long neglected novels and short stories, Rural Fictions, Urban Realities provides a new literary geography of Gilded Age America, and in the process, contributes to our understanding of how we represent and register the cultural complexities of modernization.

Storey (English literature, U. of Birmingham) examines the relationship between the various Romantic manifestos and the major poetry of the time, finding that despite the apparent confidence of many writers, there was an underlying unease about the validity of poetry. They often asked what a poet is, he says, and their answers become tangled with issues of identity; eventually they wondered whether poetry could be destructive, and whether poets were best off silent or dead. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

The Problem of Poetry in the Romantic Period

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

The poetry of John Clare: A critical introduction

Macmillan

Poetry and humour from Cowper to Clough

Clare: The Critical Heritage (Critical Heritage Series)

Poetry

Olympic Marketing Corp

To find more information about Rowman and Littlefield titles, please visit www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

Poetry and Humour from Cowper to Clough

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

The Bike Book: Complete Bicycle Maintenance.

Haynes Manuals

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Storey, Mark. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Storey, Mark