The Social Self

Hawthorne, Howells, William James, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology

Joseph Alkana

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780813119717
• eBook ISBN: 9780813157337
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

American literary history of the nineteenth-century as a conflict between individualistic writers and a conformist society. In The Social Self, Joseph Alkana argues that such a dichotomy misrepresents the views of many authors.

Sudden changes caused by the industrial revolution, urban development, increased immigration, and regional conflicts were threatening to fragment the community, and such writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, William James, and William Dean Howells were deeply concerned about social cohesion. Alkana persuasively reintroduces Common Sense philosophy and Jamesian psychology as ways to understand how the nineteenth-century self/society dilemma developed.

All three writers believed that introspection was the proper path to the discovery of truth. They also felt, Alkana argues, that such discoveries had to be validated by society. In these sophisticated readings of Hawthorne's short stories and The Scarlet Letter, Howells's utopian Altrurian romances, and James's The Principles of Psychology, it becomes obvious that characters who isolate themselves from the community do so at considerable psychological risk.

The Social Self links these writers' interest in contemporary psychology to their concern for history and society. Alkana's argument that nineteenth-century expressions of individualism were defensive responses to the fear of social chaos radically revises the traditional narrative of American literary culture.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Translating the Self: Between Discord and Individualism in American Literary History
• 2 Hawthorne's Drama of the Self: Antebellum Psychology and Sociality
• 3 "But the Past Was Not Dead": Aesthetics, History, and Community in Grandfather's Chair and The Scarlet Letter
• 4. The Altrurian Romances: Evolution and Immigration in Howells's Utopia
• 5 The Ironic Construction of Selfhood: William James's Principles of Psychology
• 6 Selfhood, Pragmatism, and Literary Studies: Who Do We Think We Are? And What Do We Think We're Doing?
• Notes
• Index