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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
For submission guidelines, click here
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Utz, John Fredric. "The Ugly Truth: Mystery, Fear and Manhood in the Age of Realism," American Studies, Yale University, May 2000.
This dissertation traces the influence of Gothic conventions on the development of American literary realism within the works of John W. De Forest, Julian Hawthorne and Henry James in the 1840s and ‘50s. It argues that these writers traded the supernatural overtones of the Gothic unknown for the more secular threats of crime, war, social unrest and interpersonal misery, crafting a fiction that makes a claim to verisimilitude while retaining the vital charge of their romantic predecessors making the sensational aspect of their fiction the very ground for their claims to realism. Traditional interpretations of realism look to the Civil War as a clear boundary in American literary history, neatly severing ties with the idealism of the Romantics and explaining our sudden preoccupation with hard fact. This study argues instead that the struggle to map and control the threatening forces at work in the antebellum city prefigured the means through which the war itself would be represented and interpreted - specifically, through the detailed manipulation of scenes of suffering and violence. While order, control and authority were cultural legacies of the war, so were mystery, alienation and fear - Gothic themes that undermined those more conservative values and lent an ominous tone to the realists’ depictions of live in Victorian America.
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