Modernity and Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century America - Literary Representations of Communication and Transportation Technologies

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.

Sommario

Introduction: The American Modernity Crisis and Technology.- Chapter One: Modernity and the Dialectic of Detachment.- Chapter Two: Henry James' Failed Homecoming.- Chapter Three: Theodore Dreiser, Temporary Homes, and the Compensatory "Commemorative State".- Chapter Four: The Telephonic Self: Non-Systemic Systems and Autobiographical Self-Representation.

Info autore

James E. Dobson is Lecturer at Dartmouth College where he conducts research on American literature, autobiography, and the digital humanities. He is the author of essays on Mark Twain, Lucy Larcom, Shirley Jackson, and Ambrose Bierce and several addressing computational methods and text mining. 

Riassunto

Examines disruptions to the self and the world by new technologies Deepens our understanding of technology’s impact on late-nineteenth-century writing
Highlights the phenomenological and physiological within the modernity crisis

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: James E. Dobson, James E Dobson, James E. Dobson
• Editore: Springer, Berlin
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Copertina rigida
• Pubblicazione: 01.01.2017
• EAN: 9783319673219
• ISBN: 978-3-31-967321-9
• Pagine: 117
• Dimensioni: 154 mm x 220 mm x 14 mm
• Peso: 265 g
• Illustrazioni: VII, 117 p.
• Serie: Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination; Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination
• Categorie: Scienze umane, arte, musica > Scienze linguistiche e letterarie > Letteratura generale e comparata; Literaturtheorie, C, Literatur: Geschichte und Kritik, Literaturwissenschaft, allgemein, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature: history & criticism, Literary studies: general, Literary theory, Literature and Technology, Literature and Technology/Media, Technology in literature, Literature, Modern—19th century, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Literature—History and criticism, Literary History, Literature—Philosophy, modern technology and the fin-de-siècle autobiography, Henry Adams' views on historiography, temporal confusion and A Hoosier Holiday, American hotel culture and alienation, The Education and Henry Adams, the effect of the telephone on the self