Intellectual Authority and Literary Culture in the US, 1790-1900

Edited by Günter Leypoldt.

This collection of 14 essays contributes to the socio-institutional study of literary culture by looking at how writers, artists, and scholars in the United States assert their intellectual authority at various moments within the shifting cultural marketplace between 1790 and 1900. What do we mean when we speak of intellectual authority? How does the intellectual capability to make a difference relate to the nineteenth-century formation and differentiation of literary fields? How do literary intellectuals and their media partake in the economies of symbolic prestige that circulate between the local and transatlantic markets and institutions of Europe and the United States? The authors in this volume wish to inquire into the rituals of consecration and contestation that shaped the production of intellectual authority in the long nineteenth century. - Contents: Lawrence Buell: Inventing the Public Intellectual. Conflicting Models. - Catherine O'Donnell Kaplan: Joseph Dennie, John Carroll, and the Quest for a Limited Authority. - Dietmar Schloss: Shifting Positions. The Literary Intellectual in Charles Brockden Brown's "Walstein's School of History" and "Arthur Mervyn". - Jonathan Arac: The Authority of the Novel within Literature and of Literature within Culture. An American Case. - Martin Klepper: The Development of Literature as Art and the Authority of Fiction. - John Evelev: Alternatives to Professional Autonomy. N.P. Willis and Margaret Fuller in the Antebellum American Literary Field. - Günter Leypoldt: Specters of Feminization in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture. - Christa Buschendorf: »Properly speaking, there are in the world no such men as self-made men«. Frederick Douglass's Exceptional Position in the Field of Slavery. - Isabell Klaiber: Women Intellectuals in Nineteenth-Century Domestic Fiction. - Herwig Friedl: Out of Bounds. American Visions of the Thinker and of Thinking. - Michael Anesko: Collected Editions and the Consolidation of Cultural Authority. The Case of Henry James. - Timo Müller: »The Short Cut to Posterity«. Authority and Representation in Henry James's Literary Tales. - Jan Stievermann: »A Blackguard's Faulty Vision«. Ambrose Bierce's Modern Cynicism and Its Claim for Intellectual Authority. - Winfried Fluck: Thomas Eakins. Superiority and Inferiority as Sources of Symbolic Capital. - VII,333 Seiten mit 11 Abb., gebunden (American Studies - A Monograph Series; Vol. 242/Universitätsverlag Winter 2013)