Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Negative Cap-abilities: Keats’s Apollonian Afterlives
- The Sublime of Man: Neoplatonic Interactions in Coleridge’s “Religious Musings”
- Liberty and Revolution: Mary Robinson’s Epic Vision in The Progress of Liberty
- Byron’s Don Juan as a Horatian Poem: Citations, Themes and Poetic Ethics
- “Let Me Converse with Spirits”: Haunting Interactions in P. B. Shelley’s Disembodied Dialogues
- Coleridge’s Interaction with Wordsworth: The “Dejection” Dialogue
- The Art of Ellipsis: The Early Keats and B. R. Haydon
- “Negative Capability”: Keats Informing the “Existince” of Shakespeare
- Keats, the Grotesque, and the Victorian Visual Imagination: “Isabella; or the Pot of Basil”
- Keats’s Negative Capability: The Afterlife of the Concept from Romanticism to Roberto Unger and José Saramago
- Romantic Interactions across the Atlantic: F. W. J. Schelling’s Concept of the “Indivisible Remainder” and Herman Melville’s Idea of the “Ungraspable Phantom of Life”
- Interactions between Science and Literature: Ludwik Zejszner’s Anxiety of Literary Influence
- Shelley’s “Subtler Language” and Its Modern Echoes
- Challenging Rousseau, Challenging Conquest: Wales in Maria Edgeworth’s “Angelina; or L’Amie Inconnue” and Helen
- Feminine Law and Ableness Endangered in the Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Emily Brontë, and Rachel Whiteread
- Textual Intercourses of Women Playwrights with Their Audiences at the Turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- “We love Jane Austen more and more”: William Dean Howells and the Rise of American Janeitism
- Cultural Interaction: The Construct of the “Noble Savage” in the Poetry of Goethe, Seume, and Chamisso
- Margaret Fuller between America and Europe: Dispatches from Britain, France, and Italy as Exercises in Cultural Criticism
- Bettina von Arnim and Her Writings on Poland
“We love Jane Austen more and more”: William Dean Howells and the Rise of American Janeitism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Negative Cap-abilities: Keats’s Apollonian Afterlives
- The Sublime of Man: Neoplatonic Interactions in Coleridge’s “Religious Musings”
- Liberty and Revolution: Mary Robinson’s Epic Vision in The Progress of Liberty
- Byron’s Don Juan as a Horatian Poem: Citations, Themes and Poetic Ethics
- “Let Me Converse with Spirits”: Haunting Interactions in P. B. Shelley’s Disembodied Dialogues
- Coleridge’s Interaction with Wordsworth: The “Dejection” Dialogue
- The Art of Ellipsis: The Early Keats and B. R. Haydon
- “Negative Capability”: Keats Informing the “Existince” of Shakespeare
- Keats, the Grotesque, and the Victorian Visual Imagination: “Isabella; or the Pot of Basil”
- Keats’s Negative Capability: The Afterlife of the Concept from Romanticism to Roberto Unger and José Saramago
- Romantic Interactions across the Atlantic: F. W. J. Schelling’s Concept of the “Indivisible Remainder” and Herman Melville’s Idea of the “Ungraspable Phantom of Life”
- Interactions between Science and Literature: Ludwik Zejszner’s Anxiety of Literary Influence
- Shelley’s “Subtler Language” and Its Modern Echoes
- Challenging Rousseau, Challenging Conquest: Wales in Maria Edgeworth’s “Angelina; or L’Amie Inconnue” and Helen
- Feminine Law and Ableness Endangered in the Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Emily Brontë, and Rachel Whiteread
- Textual Intercourses of Women Playwrights with Their Audiences at the Turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- “We love Jane Austen more and more”: William Dean Howells and the Rise of American Janeitism
- Cultural Interaction: The Construct of the “Noble Savage” in the Poetry of Goethe, Seume, and Chamisso
- Margaret Fuller between America and Europe: Dispatches from Britain, France, and Italy as Exercises in Cultural Criticism
- Bettina von Arnim and Her Writings on Poland
Summary
My subject, like that of Mary Jacobus, is afterlives: in my case, the reception of Jane Austen in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite recent work by Devoney Looser and myself, among others, this is an area in which much remains to be discovered and determined.
My impetus for investigating William Dean Howells arose from a passing comment made by a fellow conference delegate, an Americanist, a few years ago, while I was writing Reading Austen in America. I explained that I was researching Austen's early publication and reception in North America and how Americans contributed to the rise of Austen's international fame. “Oh,” said the Americanist, “I always figured that was mostly Howells's doing.” Though my work at the time concentrated on the decades before William Dean Howells, her comment stayed with me. I realized I did not have a full conception of what Howells had written about Austen, and I went looking for the authoritative study of that subject, so that I could be well informed the next time I encountered an Americanist.
To my surprise, I found that such a study did not exist. The second volume of Brian Southam's Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage contains excerpts from a handful of Howells's publication and discussion of a few more. Mary A. Favret's essay “Free and Happy: Jane Austen in America,” in Deidre Lynch's groundbreaking collection Janeites, points out that Howells conceived of Austen as being “amazingly Emersonian and American.” Katie Halsey's reception history Jane Austen and Her Readers, 1786–1945 treats the famous back-and-forth between Mark Twain, who professed to despise Austen, and his friend Howells, who adored her. But no one, it seemed, had produced a comprehensive account of Howells and his Janeitism.
As I found when researching Reading Austen in America, American reception of British authors often represents quite a gap in scholarship, for reasons both practical and disciplinary.
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- Romantic Dialogues and Afterlives , pp. 277 - 302Publisher: Jagiellonian University PressPrint publication year: 2021