Love and Depth in the American Novel

From Stowe to James

Ashley C. Barnes

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780813944203
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Love and Depth in the American Novel seeks to change how we think about the American love story and how we imagine the love of literature. By examining classics of nineteenth-century American literature, Ashley Barnes offers a new approach to literary theory that encompasses both New Historicism and the ethical turn in literary studies.

Couples like Huck and Jim and Ishmael and Queequeg have grounded the classic account of the American novel as exceptionally gothic and antisocial. Barnes argues instead for a model of shared intimacy that connects the evangelical sentimental best seller to the high art of psychological realism. In her reading of works by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Elizabeth Stoddard, Henry James, and others in the context of nineteenth-century Protestant-Catholic debates about how to know and love God, what emerges is an alternate tradition of the American love story that pictures intimacy as communion rather than revelation. Barnes uses that unacknowledged love story to propose a model of literary critical intimacy that depends on reading fiction in its historical context.

Index

Abbott, Lyman, 56

aesthetics: antisentimental, 23; of collage, 132–41, 151, 153–56, 159, 167; ethics and, 166; Protestant, 48; restraint in, 30. See also beauty; sublime

affect theory, 25

Agnes of Sorrento (Stowe), 71, 195n5

Ahlstrom, Sydney, 33–34

Allston, Washington, 95

American Renaissance (Matthiessen), 16, 19

American Tract Society, 31

American Woman’s Home, The (Catherine Beecher), 131

Angus, Joseph, Bible Hand-Book, 63–64, 66

anti-Catholicism, 12, 18–19, 23, 28–30, 35, 42, 44, 48–52, 60, 61, 71, 91–96, 103, 128, 130, 162–67, 188; conservative, 28–30, 51; love story of, 32; rationale of, 116; in reviews of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 72. See also Catholicism; Protestantism

antihistoricism: in literary studies, 48, 176, 187; in reading, 41; theological, 23, 28. See also historicism

antisentimentalism: in aesthetics, 23; in literary studies, 28, 46, 48–52, 163. See also sentimentalism

Approach to Literature, An (Brooks et al.), 48–49

Arabian Nights, The, 148

Armstrong, Nancy, 17, 182, 183; Desire and Domestic Fiction, 17

Arnold, Matthew, 28

Art of Beauty, The (Haweis), 139

Art of Decoration, The (Haweis), 139, 146

Art of Dress, The (Haweis), 139

Athenaeum portrait, 100, 102, 103. See also p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One • Love and Depth Canonized: Anti-Catholicism and the Shaping of American Literary Standards
• Two • Sentimental Communion: Protestant Reading Meets Catholic Worship in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Gates Ajar
• Three • Romantic Spectatorship: Self-Portrait as a Stranger’s Head in The Blithedale Romance and Pierre
• Four • Realistic Intercourse: Arranging Oneself for Another in The Morgesons and The Golden Bowl
• Five • Love and Depth Revisited: History and the Ethics of Reading American Literature Now
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index