Critical Reception and Reputation

1. Critical Reception and Reputation Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frank Norris, and Edith Wharton

2. Broad Trends in American Literary Criticism • Beginnings through the 1920s • Textual criticism and book history approaches (still important): editions and their quality, differences among editions, reception history • “Appreciation” (book reviews) • Judging the plot and characters • Promoted morality and maintained the bounds of good taste? • True to life?

3. Broad Trends, 1920s-1950s • Techniques derived from (Russian) formalism: elements of structure, symmetry, and the functions of various elements in the text • Enabled interpretation of fragmented modernist texts • Techniques derived from (French) symbolistesand representations of the unconscious • Freud and Jung (archetypes and archetypal symbolism) • Mythic patterns in literature • Classical and Christian symbolism • The “myth and symbol” school • Rediscovery of Herman Melville at this time

4. Broad Trends, 1930s-1960s • 1930s: Marxist and socially conscious criticism judged literature based on its realism and its representations of class struggle (Granville Hicks). Work was judged on its political content. • 1940s-1960s: New Criticism (Cleanth Brooks, Wimsatt and Beardsley) was a type of formalism that focused on the unity of individual work of art without reference to external information. New Criticism saw political content as antithetical to art.

5. Broad Trends, 1970s-1990s • Influential French theories: Deconstruction, Semiotics, Structuralism • Reader-response theory • Psychoanalytic theory • Feminist theory—roles of women, women authors, and gender politics within work • Class, race, and gender—reversed the trend away from ignoring the politics of a work; rediscovery of minority and women authors ignored by “classic” New Critics.

6. Broad Trends, 1990s - 2010 • Postcolonial theory: colonialism and imperialism and their legacies of oppression (Edward Said, GayatriSpivak); voices silenced (the subalterns) by dominant forces. • Cultural studies (Stuart Hall, Antonio Gramsci): study and critique of power relations within a given culture. • Gender criticism

7. How does this relate to the three authors considered here? • Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Norris • Edith Wharton

8. Hawthorne • Nina Baym, The Shape of Hawthorne’s Career • Hawthorne considered a great writer of “sketches” in his time. • 1920s on: the “myth and symbol” aspect of his work appealed to New Critics. • 1970s on: strong female characters appealed to feminist critics. • 1990s on: interest in Hawthorne, representations of race in his fiction, etc.

9. Frank Norris’s Reputation • Through the 1920s: praised for his bold, raw representation of America. • Fell into a decline during modernism. • Late 1950s and early 1960s: rediscovery of Norris’s symbols and structures—a Norris revival • 1970s-1990s: Interest in Norris continues for his presentation of a literary West and his problematic conceptions of race.

10. Edith Wharton’s Reputation • Considered a great novelist during her lifetime, although her critical reputation declined with the rise of modernism and her post-1920 books. • 1930s: Attacked by Marxist critics for writing about the upper class. • 1950s: Considered to be an imitator of Henry James, who (being male) was a greater writer; also, EW was attacked for being “cruel” to her characters (Lionel Trilling)

11. Edith Wharton’s Reputation • 1975: First modern biography of EW and a subsequent rise in interest in her work. • 1970s-1980s: Feminist critics start rereading Wharton for her critique of woman’s place in a restrictive culture. • 1990s- on: Continuing interest from feminist critics but also postcolonial criticism, race criticism, etc.