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Feeling Real: Emotion in the Novels of William Dean Howells and Henry James

Langendorfer, Anne Therese
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3172-4226
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1499858033212105

Abstract Details

2017, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English.
Feeling Real: Emotion in the Novels of William Dean Howells and Henry James argues that emotion is an important aspect of American literary realism, revising received wisdom in American literary studies that locates emotion in sentimentalism. As canonical examples of American literary realism, William Dean Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Hazard of New Fortunes and Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors offer compelling evidence of how realist authors deployed emotion in their narrative progressions. This project demonstrates—through rhetorical narrative readings of these novels—that the emotional dimension of their narratives has remained under-examined and under-theorized. The long-established scholarly view that American literary realism emerged in large part as a reaction to sentimentalism has nevertheless obscured realism’s own significant investment in the representation and evocation of emotion. This dissertation adds to recent work on emotion in American literary realism, complicating the conventional narrative that realism is anti-emotional or unconcerned with emotion, by suggesting that emotion in these novels is portrayed as complex, uncertain, and difficult and by arguing that character emotion affects the authorial audience in ways that can lead to ambivalence and frustration but also pleasure. This project contributes to the growing scholarly interest in the emotions represented and provoked by American realist novels by demonstrating the importance of emotion as a crucial component of the rhetorical narrative experience. The novels of Howells and James offer particularly rich examples of the complications of portraying and evoking emotion as a part of their respective projects to create narrative realism. Close narrative readings demonstrate that James’s and Howells’s well-known disdain for sentimentalism offers a paradoxical clue to their own commitment to examining and evoking emotion in the novel, albeit in a variety of unsentimental ways.
James Phelan (Advisor)
Steven Fink (Committee Member)
Robyn Warhol (Committee Member)
244 p.
American History; American Literature; Gender Studies; Literature; Rhetoric
American; literature; realism; American literary realism; realist; emotion; feeling; affect; sentimentalism; sentimental; William Dean Howells; Henry James; narrative; novel; fiction; rhetoric; narrative theory; Howells; James; 19th century

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Langendorfer, A. T. (2017). Feeling Real: Emotion in the Novels of William Dean Howells and Henry James [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1499858033212105

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Langendorfer, Anne. Feeling Real: Emotion in the Novels of William Dean Howells and Henry James. 2017. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1499858033212105.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Langendorfer, Anne. "Feeling Real: Emotion in the Novels of William Dean Howells and Henry James." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1499858033212105

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1499858033212105
320
© 2017, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License Feeling Real: Emotion in the Novels of William Dean Howells and Henry James by Anne Therese Langendorfer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.
Release 3.2.12