Critically attacked and dubbed scandalous in its own time, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) is one of the earliest American novels that openly confronts the subject of female sexual desire. The novel’s main character, Edna Pontellier, rejects the traditional roles… Read More ›
Often overshadowed by The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), William Dean Howells’s Annie Kilburn (1888) is an important novel for understanding Howells’s development as a novelist and a social critic. More than 100… Read More ›
One of Henry James’s shorter novels, Washington Square ran first as a serial in The Cornhill Magazine in 1880. James considers his trademark displaced protagonist in the form of Catherine Sloper, daughter of a wealthy New York physician. While the… Read More ›
Transcendentalism is a philosophical and religious way of thinking that manifested itself in particular, if not necessarily uniform, ways. Though some of its ideas about individualism and nature can be traced to the late eighteenth century and to European thinkers… Read More ›
Southwestern humor is geographically misnamed, as its most prominent writers (not all of them Southwesterners) resided in states and territories as far east as Georgia and as far north as Tennessee. It is sometimes called “frontier” humor because its plots… Read More ›
The term Gothicism in its literary meaning derives not from the Goths, an ancient Germanic tribe, but from the sense of Gothic as medieval. This literary movement may be seen as a reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment and… Read More ›
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