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2 results

  • Chapter 11 - Fictions of Health after Miasma

  • from Part II - American Literary Climates
  • Edited by Michael Boyden, Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
  • Book:
    Climate and American Literature
    Published online:
    18 February 2021
    Print publication:
    04 March 2021, pp 194-209

  • Summary

    This chapter reads the late nineteenth-century genres of American naturalism and regionalism through the prism of climate, and finds that their authors depict characters whose characteristics are shaped by their responses to their ambient environments, including climate, and by the inherited effects of their ancestors’ adaptations to theirs. It argues that their thinking about climate was informed by the popular Lamarckian science of their post-Darwinian evolutionary era, by the climate theory of the historian Hippolyte Taine, and by turn-of-the-century geography. In the decades during which Frank Norris, Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, and Hamlin Garland were at work on questions of determinism and/or a “determined indeterminacy,” climatic, genetic, medico-psychiatric, and sociological models of identity vied for authority. The writers drew their representations of the making of Americans from these competing claims.

  • 26 - Theories of genre

  • from VI - Genre criticism
  • Edited by M. A. R. Habib, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    07 February 2013, pp 481-505

  • Summary

    From his early youth Hippolyte Taine's ambition was to be a philosopher. Sainte-Beuve recognized Taine's approach as an artifice with surprising results, for what the doctoral thesis on La Fontaine actually provided was an indirect method of discussing the nature of Taine's hobby-horse: the self. Leaving aside his youthful search for the mysterious origin or hypothetical purpose of the self, Taine here claims to offer a scientific analysis of its operation through the imagination and the language of the poet. Taine's thinking was unquestionably informed by his reading of philosophy both at the Lycée Bourbon and at the Ecole Normale. Taine's idea concerned the nature of the self. His ambition was to be a philosopher but his method of inquiry was that of science and he applied it to all aspects of humanity, to literature, to art, to history and to psychology.