Screen LibraryPain and the aesthetics of US literary realism /
The postbellum period saw many privileged Americans pursuing a civilised ideal premised on insulation from pain. Medico-scientific advances in anesthetics and analgesics and emergent religious sects like Christian Science made pain avoidance seem newly possible. The upper classes could increasingly...
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| Main Authors: | |
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| Published: |
Oxford University Press,
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| Publisher Address: | Oxford : |
| Publication Dates: | 2021. |
| Literature type: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Edition: | First edition. |
| Subjects: | |
| Summary: |
The postbellum period saw many privileged Americans pursuing a civilised ideal premised on insulation from pain. Medico-scientific advances in anesthetics and analgesics and emergent religious sects like Christian Science made pain avoidance seem newly possible. The upper classes could increasingly afford to distance themselves from the suffering they claimed to feel more exquisitely than did their supposedly less refined contemporaries and antecedents. The five US literary realists examined in this study resisted this contemporary revulsion from pain without going so far as to join those who celebrated suffering for its invigorating effects. |
| Carrier Form: | vi, 234 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages [207]-228) and index. |
| ISBN: |
9780198858737 0198858736 |
| Index Number: | PS374 |
| CLC: | I712.064 |
| Call Number: | I712.064/D261 |
| Contents: | Introduction: Pain and postbellum American sensibilities -- Part one. High realism -- "The taste of life": suffering, literary mode, and Howellsian realism -- "No pain and no consciousness": the James siblings, anesthesia, and suffering -- "The blind dread of physical pain": Edith Wharton against the New Thought -- Part two. Curious realism -- Stubborn fractions: Mark Twain, Christian Science, and pain -- Charles Chesnutt's realist vision -- Epilogue: "True realism" and a "truer world." |