Informace o publikaci
Domestic Renaissance
| Autoři | |
|---|---|
| Rok publikování | 2013 |
| Druh | Další prezentace na konferencích |
| Fakulta / Pracoviště MU | |
| Citace | |
| Popis | A surge of studies in the past few decades has countered the protracted scholarly amnesia regarding domestic fiction, dismissed for most of the twentieth century as a histrionic indulgence geared towards under-educated female readers. Today domestic fiction and the middle-class creed associated with it are considered fundamental to the social and intellectual life of Victorian America. Analysts now describe meaningful intersections between domestic fiction and American Renaissance classics, identifying the pervasive presence of domestic themes in the fiction of Hawthorne, Poe and other canonized writers. Yet, even within these studies, the overwhelming trend is to consider the use of domestic formulas by male authors as scornful, oppositional or exploitative. So consistently are these adaptations described as derisive appropriations that the potential status of domestic fiction as a formative influence appears nearly absent from the critical speculations. My account of Hawthorne and Poe's domestic borrowings thus figures an unorthodox literary genealogy, identifying domestic conventions as crucial foundations for both authors. Hawthorne was deeply indebted to the domestic plot’s anti-market imperatives. Through key transformations, Hawthorne uses the domestic ideal as a primary means to critique modern forms of specularity which he found sinister and that he identified with patriarchy: voyeurism, display, consumerism, aestheticism, abstraction. In Seven Gables and Blithedale and in numerous tales, a feminine-centered domesticity (however difficult to achieve) is the only corrective which Hawthorne can imagine for the alienations of mass culture. While equally obligated to the domestic plot, Poe's mode of appropriation was quite different. Poe violently eradicated female characters in order to masculinize the cultural positioning of private life originally developed as a female franchise in the pages of domestic novels. |