Reading Reality

Nineteenth-Century American Experiments in the Real

E. Thomas Finan

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780813945590
• eBook ISBN: 9780813945613
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the early 1800s, American critics warned about the danger of literature as a distraction from reality. Later critical accounts held that American literature during the antebellum period was idealistic and that literature grew more realistic after the horrors of the Civil War. By focusing on three leading American authors—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson— Reading Reality challenges that analysis.

Thomas Finan reveals how antebellum authors used words such as "real" and "reality" as key terms for literary discourse and claimed that the "real" was, in fact, central to their literary enterprise. He argues that for many Americans in the early nineteenth century, the "real" was often not synonymous with the physical world. It could refer to the spiritual, the sincere, or the individual's experience. He further explains how this awareness revises our understanding of the literary and conceptual strategies of American writers.

By unpacking antebellum senses of the "real," Finan casts new light on the formal traits of the period's literature, the pressures of the literary marketplace in nineteenth-century America, and the surprising possibilities of literary reading.

Index

Abrams, M. H., 88

Addison, Joseph, 32

American Dictionary of the English Language (Webster), 31, 107, 110, 148

Americanist criticism, 4–5, 133

American philosophy, 25, 52

appearance: compared to the real, 9, 13, 15, 27–30, 135; interrogation of, 9, 13–15, 37, 43, 101–3, 125, 129–30, 151, 159; linguistic, 29, 136; of nature, 144; relationship between being and, 8–9; surface and, 9, 42, 46, 130, 134–35

Arsić, Branka, 61, 152; On Leaving, 10–11, 39, 65, 164n31

Atlantic Monthly, 108, 179n25

Austen, Jane, Persuasion, 20

Bacon, Francis, 26

Bailey, John, 80

beauty, 9, 47, 123; apotheosized, 140; creation of, 145; ideal, 144; unfolding of, 144. See also sublime, the

being: appearance and, 151; reality and, 24–25, 28–33; relationship between appearance and, 8–9, 27, 42–43; revelation of, 65; stances of, 125. See also reality/the real

Belknap, Robert E., The List, 77–78

Bell, Michael Davitt, 5

Bercovitch, Sacvan, 146–47

Berkeley, George, 52

Best, Stephen, 156–57

Blackwood, Sarah, 107

Blake, William, 138–39

Boston Olive Branch, 20

British empiricism, 33

British Romanticism, 3, 26, 88, 139. See also Romanticism

Brown, Lee Rust, The Emerson Museum, 11–12, 43, 68

Brown, William Wells, Clotel, 28–29

Browne, Thomas, 3

Brownson, Orestes, 26; “The Community System,” 30; “Synthetic Philosophy,” 33

Bryson, Norman, 10–11

Burke, Edmund, 149

Byron, Lord (George Gordon), 17–18

Cady, Edwin H., The Light of Common Day, 12

Cameron, Sharon, 39, 47, 54, 164n31...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One • Real Excavations
• Two • The Drops of Summer Rain
• Three • In and Out of the Game with Walt Whitman
• Four • Disjunction—Disclosure—Dickinson
• Five • Challenging Appearances
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index