Elsa Nettels's Books

Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells's America

By: Elsa Nettels

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Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells's America

By: Elsa Nettels

No other American novelist has written so fully about language—grammar, diction, the place of colloquialism and dialect in literary English, the relation between speech and writing—as William Dean Howells. The power of language to create social, political, and racial identity was of central concern to Americans in the nineteenth century, and the implications of language in this regard are strikingly revealed in the writings of Howells, the most influential critic and editor of his age. In this first full-scale treatment of Howells as a writer about language, Elsa Nettels offers a historical overview of the social and political implications of language in post-Civil War America. Chapters on controversies about linguistic authority, American versus British English, literary dialect, and language and race relate Howells's ideas at every point to those of his contemporaries—from writers such as Henry James, Mark Twain, and James Russell Lowell to political figures such as Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and John Hay. The first book to analyze in depth and detail the language of Howells's characters in more than a dozen novels, this path-breaking sociolinguistic approach to Howells's fiction exposes the fundamental contradiction in his realism and in the America he portrayed. By representing the speech that separates standard from nonstandard speakers, Howells's novels—which champion the democratic ideals of equity and unity—also demonstrate the power of language to reinforce barriers of race and class in American society. Drawing on unpublished letters of Howells, James, Lowell, and others and on scores of articles in nineteenth-century periodicals, this work of literary criticism and cultural history reaches beyond the work of one writer to address questions of enduring importance to all students of American literature and society.

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279

Publisher

University Press of Kentucky

Published Date

ISBN 10

0813185521

ISBN 13

9780813185521

Language and Gender in American Fiction

Howells, James, Wharton, and Cather

By: Elsa Nettels

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Language and Gender in American Fiction

Howells, James, Wharton, and Cather

By: Elsa Nettels

Between January 1880 and December 1889, Harper's Monthly Magazine published 263 works of fiction; half of these were written by women. Judging by the popularity of contemporary mass-circulation magazines. women writers of the late nineteenth century enjoyed equal opportunity in the world of commercial publishing. Yet although they wrote best-sellers and won prizes, the institutions that keep writers and their reputations alive chose not to sustain these writers, and few are familiar today; Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton. Elsa Nettels suggests that this lack of parity is not surprising in a culture that for centuries has used" masculine" to describe all things strong and dominant, while "feminine" has signified weakness and inferiority. In Victorian America, the relation of literary style to gender became of increasing interest as women writers became ever more prominent. In the influential magazines of the late nineteenth century -- Harper's, Century, Scribner's, Atlantic Monthly, Cosmopolitan, and Ladies' Home Journal -- writers directly or implicitly reflected society's views of the sexes and the proper roles of men and women. In this intelligent and accessible book, the author examines how William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather helped both to perpetuate and to subvert Victorian America's ideology of language and gender. All had fruitful careers as novelists, editors, and critics, and she demonstrates that each was in a unique position to affect popular language and gender stereotypes. To gauge their responses to the pervasive assumptions held by the magazines that published them, Nettels traces how these writersdefined "masculine" and "feminine" in their works, how they characterized women's speech and language, how they distinguished male and female discourse, and where they invested authority in matters of usage. Taking into account others engaged in the Victorian construction of gender such as grammarians, linguists, sociologists, and writers on etiquette, Nettels offers a compelling look at the cultural perpetuation of ideologies, as well as fascinating scholarship on four authors who manipulated social mores to establish their place in American literature.

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230

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University of Virginia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0813917247

ISBN 13

9780813917245

Language and Gender in American Fiction

Howells, James, Wharton, and Cather

By: Elsa Nettels

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Language and Gender in American Fiction

Howells, James, Wharton, and Cather

By: Elsa Nettels

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N/A

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

230

Publisher

University of Virginia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0813917247

ISBN 13

9780813917245

Book's by Elsa Nettels

Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells's America

Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells's America

Language and Gender in American Fiction

Language and Gender in American Fiction

Language and Gender in American Fiction

Language and Gender in American Fiction

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