Modernity and Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century America: Literary Representations of Communication and Transportation Technologies 2017 Edition Contributor(s): E. Dobson, James (Author) |
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ISBN: 3319673211 ISBN-13: 9783319673219 Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan OUR PRICE: $56.99 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: October 2017 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | Modern - 19th Century - Literary Criticism | Semiotics & Theory - Language Arts & Disciplines |
Dewey: 801 |
Series: Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination |
Physical Information: 0.38" H x 5.83" W x 8.27" (0.67 lbs) 117 pages |
Themes: - Chronological Period - 19th Century |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: This book examines temporal and formal disruptions found in American autobiographical narratives produced during the end of the nineteenth century. It argues that disruptions were primarily the result of encounters with new communication and transportation technologies. Through readings of major autobiographical works of the period, James E. Dobson argues that the range of affective responses to writing, communicating, and traveling at increasing speed and distance were registered in this literature's formal innovation. These autobiographical works, Dobson claims, complicate our understanding of the lived experience of time, temporality, and existing accounts of periodization. This study first examines the competing views of space and time in the nineteenth century and then moves to examine how high-speed train travel altered American literary regionalism, the region, and history. Later chapters examine two narratives of failed homecoming that are deeply ambivalent about modernity and technology, Henry James's The American Scene and Theodore Dreiser's A Hoosier Holiday, before a reading of the telephone network as a metaphor for historiography and autobiography in Henry Adams's The Education of Henry Adams. |