Overview
- 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
Part of the book series: Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination (PSGALI)
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About this book
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.
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Keywords
- life-writing
- travel writing
- travel memoir
- neurological modernity
- American modernity crisis
- affect theory
- Henry James
- Theodore Dreiser
- The Autobiography of Mark Twain
- Phenomenology and autobiography
- Railroad travel and space-time compression
- spatial distancing in "Rip Van Winkle"
- modernity, alienation, and Henry James' The American Scene
- temporal confusion and A Hoosier Holiday
- the effect of the telephone on the self
- modern technology and the fin-de-siècle autobiography
- The Education and Henry Adams
- Henry Adams' views on historiography
- Railroads, telephones, and 19th-century American autobiography
- American hotel culture and alienation
Table of contents (5 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
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.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Modernity and Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century America
Book Subtitle: Literary Representations of Communication and Transportation Technologies
Authors: James E. Dobson
Series Title: Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67322-6
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-67321-9Published: 02 October 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-88412-7Published: 15 August 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-67322-6Published: 14 September 2017
Series ISSN: 2946-4072
Series E-ISSN: 2946-4080
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VII, 117
Topics: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Literature and Technology/Media, Literary History, Literary Theory