Research Catalog

Title

Legal realisms : the American novel under reconstruction / Christine Holbo.

Author

Holbo, Christine

Publication

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019]

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

x, 452 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

United States historians have long regarded the U.S. Civil War and its Reconstruction as a second American revolution. Literary scholars, however, have yet to show how fully these years revolutionized the American imagination. Emblematic of this moment was the post-war search for a "Great American Novel"-a novel fully adequate to the breadth and diversity of the United States in the era of the Fourteenth Amendment. While the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments declared the ideal of equality before the law a reality, persistent and increasing inequality challenged idealists and realists alike. The controversy over what full representation should mean sparked debates about the value of cultural difference and aesthetic dissonance, and it led to a0thoroughgoing reconstruction of the meaning of "realism" for readers, writers, politics, and law. The dilemmas of incomplete emancipation, which would damage and define American life from the late nineteenth century onwards, would also force novelists to reconsider the definition and possibilities of the novel as a genre of social representation. Legal Realisms examines these transformations in the face of uneven developments in the racial, ethnic, gender and class structure of American0society. Offering provocative new readings of Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Helen Hunt Jackson, Albion Tourgee and others, Christine Holbo explores the transformation of the novel's distinctive modes of social knowledge in relation to developments in art, philosophy, law, politics, and moral theory.

Subjects

• American fiction
• Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1811-1896 > Uncle Tom's cabin
• American fiction > 20th century > History and criticism
• Jackson, Helen Hunt, 1830-1885
• Reconstruction (U.S. history, 1865-1877) in literature
• Howells, William Dean, 1837-1920
• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• 1800-1999
• Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 > Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Reconstruction (United States : 1865-1877) in literature
• American fiction > 19th century > History and cricitism
• Tourgée, Albion W., 1838-1905
• Uncle Tom's cabin (Stowe, Harriet Beecher)
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain, Mark)

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Call Number

JFE 20-160

ISBN

• 9780190604547
• 0190604549

OCLC

1101977662

Author

Holbo, Christine, author.

Title

Legal realisms : the American novel under reconstruction / Christine Holbo.

Publisher

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019]

Type of Content

text

still image

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Chronological Term

1800-1999

Research Call Number

JFE 20-160