Paper 1.

Negotiating the Contract: Reception and Genre in the Early Nineteenth Century

Adeline Johns-Putra University of Exeter

I propose a model of genre that shows how receptive shifts shape genre, and how generic innovations influence reception in turn. I intend to apply this model to early nineteenth-century British literature. Genre is a contract not merely between writer and reader but between groups of writers and communities of readers across time. This contract is, furthermore, constantly under negotiation. Thus, though the nineteenth century has been read as the moment of the epic’s death at the hands of the novel, I would argue that both genres are renegotiated at the start of the nineteenth century and that these negotiations stem from, and are part of, the same historical shift in thought. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a growing interest in the poet’s psychology manifests itself in the profoundly personal epic, produced by writers as diverse as Charlotte Smith, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, and Caroline Bowles. A demand for the psychological also transforms the novel, from early eighteenth-century picaresques to sentimental and gothic novels and, eventually, into the interior, character-based narratives of Austen, Scott, and Maria Edgeworth. Both trends may be broadly read as related, though flip-sided, expressions of the increasingly internalised speculations of the age.

Paper 2.

Feminism and Gothic Horror in Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, and Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen

Philip Goldstein University of Delaware (Parallel)

Although Frankenstein and Northanger Abbey are both gothic romances

which depict ordinary life in a realist fashion, Northanger Abbey's

reception differs markedly from that of Frankenstein. Published in 1818,

Northanger Abbey, like other Austen's novels, was not a commercial

success; rather, influential Victorian scholars like Thomas Babington

MacCauley who gave Austen's novels the status of high art. By contrast,

many critical responses to Frankenstein, also published in 1818, were

quite negative. What kept Frankenstein in public view were the many

theatrical performances and film versions of it. Thanks to the critics,

Austen's novel was considered high art, whereas the stage and film

versions of Shelley's Frankenstein have identified it with popular

culture. Ironically, recent criticism has elevated Frankenstein to the rank of

high art and denigrated its stage and film versions. By contrast, critics have

ranked Northanger Abbey lower than Austen's other novels because the novel's tension between parody and realism positions it between canonical high art and popular culture. In these quite different ways, the reception of both novels resists the division of high art and popular culture into

which critics have tried to fit them. The reception of these two novels suggests that what undermines the division between high and popular art is the changing socio-historical contexts of gothic horror fiction.

Paper 3.

American Literary Reception in the 1880s

Rebecca Bowman Otterbein College

The attempt to define a specifically American literature in the 80’s and 90’s became linked with the emergence of realism and rekindled the debate about the moral purpose of the novel. At the same time the literary debated raged, questions about the moral responsibilities of women were also being hotly disputed, often on the pages of these same periodicals. These literary and political debates are important because they create a historical backdrop of uncertainty about what’s “truly American” in literature and about the moral obligations of both the novel and women. My paper will demonstrate that despite--or, in some cases, because of--these literary and political ambiguities and uncertainties, archival documentation from the 1880’s reveals the following: 1) In their search for The Great American Novel, critics believed that it might be authored by a woman, 2) critics believed that a woman’s perspective could actually add a dimension to the American novel, 3) while the criticism itself was gendered, with “virile” indicating force and “feminine” equaling sentiment, sympathy, and sometimes weakness, it was not attributed according to the sex of the writer, and 4) negative reviews of women writers were frequently the result of the debates about the obligations of the American novel and the obligations of the American woman becoming blurred in criticism overtly about a novel.

Paper 4.

Cultural Contexts and Literary Reception of Their Eyes Were Watching God

Stephen Spencer Wilmington College

Although Their Eyes Were Watching God has become one of the most taught and analyzed works of American literature, such was not always the case. This paper traces the reception of Their Eyes Were Watching God and the cultural contexts that have influenced its reception, including: the Harlem Renaissance and Hurston’s contemporaries, the literature of Marxism and social protest, racial politics, and late twentieth century movements in literary theory. The emergence of feminist criticism, black aesthetics, ethnic studies, and New Historicism would blur and break down boundaries established by New Criticism. In the contemporary moment gender, race, and politics are considered appropriate to literary criticism. Thus, Zora Neale Hurston is a writer fitting for the current moment in literary history: a black woman, drawing consciously on a folk tradition in her work, presenting an alternative vision of American life that can be read with and against the visions of her popular contemporaries, such as Margaret Mitchell.