Modernity and Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century America
Literary Representations of Communication and Transportation Technologies
Authors: Dobson, James
Free Preview- Examines disruptions to the self and the world by new technologies
- Deepens our understanding of technology’s impact on late-nineteenth-century writing
- Highlights the phenomenological and physiological within the modernity crisis
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- About this book
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This book examines temporal and formal disruptions found in American autobiographical narratives produced during the end of the nineteenth century. It argues that disruptions were primarily the result of encounters with new communication and transportation technologies. Through readings of major autobiographical works of the period, James E. Dobson argues that the range of affective responses to writing, communicating, and traveling at increasing speed and distance were registered in this literature’s formal innovation. These autobiographical works, Dobson claims, complicate our understanding of the lived experience of time, temporality, and existing accounts of periodization. This study first examines the competing views of space and time in the nineteenth century and then moves to examine how high-speed train travel altered American literary regionalism, the region, and history. Later chapters examine two narratives of failed homecoming that are deeply ambivalent about modernity and technology, Henry James’s The American Scene and Theodore Dreiser’s A Hoosier Holiday, before a reading of the telephone network as a metaphor for historiography and autobiography in Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams.
- About the authors
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James E. Dobson is Lecturer at Dartmouth College where he conducts research on American literature, autobiography, and the digital humanities. He is the author of essays on Mark Twain, Lucy Larcom, Shirley Jackson, and Ambrose Bierce and several addressing computational methods and text mining.
- Table of contents (5 chapters)
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The American Modernity Crisis and Disruptive Technologies
Pages 1-15
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Modernity and the Dialectic of Detachment
Pages 17-40
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“An Alien at Home”: Henry James’s Failed Homecoming
Pages 41-61
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Theodore Dreiser, Temporary Homes, and the Compensatory Commemorative State
Pages 63-79
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The Telephonic Self: Non-Systemic Systems and Autobiographical Self-Representation
Pages 81-107
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Table of contents (5 chapters)
Bibliographic Information
- Bibliographic Information
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- Book Title
- Modernity and Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century America
- Book Subtitle
- Literary Representations of Communication and Transportation Technologies
- Authors
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- James Dobson
- Series Title
- Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination
- Copyright
- 2017
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan
- Copyright Holder
- The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s)
- eBook ISBN
- 978-3-319-67322-6
- DOI
- 10.1007/978-3-319-67322-6
- Hardcover ISBN
- 978-3-319-67321-9
- Softcover ISBN
- 978-3-319-88412-7
- Edition Number
- 1
- Number of Pages
- VII, 117
- Topics
