American snobs : transatlantic novelists, liberal culture and the genteel tradition / Emily Coit.

Includes bibliographies and index.

Reassesses American elitisms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Brings together the insights of recent Victorianist and Americanist scholarship in order to show how Adams, James, and Wharton engage with liberal thinking about whiteness, democracy, and citizenship. Locates these authors in disciplinary history, revealing that their critical responses to Bostonian liberalism feed into the ideas that structure the study of US literary history during the twentieth century. Offers a rich portrait of the Harvard intellectual milieu to which these authors respond, bringing fresh attention to their connections with thinkers such as and W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles William Eliot, Charles Eliot Norton, and Barrett Wendell. Arguing that Henry Adams, Henry James and Edith Wharton articulated their political thought in response to the liberalism that reigned in Boston and, more specifically, at Harvard University, this book shows how each of these authors interrogated that liberalism's arguments for education, democracy and the political duties of the cultivated elite. Coit shows that the works of these authors contributed to a realist critique of a liberal New England idealism that fed into the narrative about 'the genteel tradition', which shaped the study of US literature during the twentieth century.

Intro -- Acknowledgements -- Series Editors' Preface -- Introduction -- Part I: Cultivation After Reconstruction: Impossible Educations -- 1. Slavery, Subjection and Culture in Adams's Democracy and Esther -- The Virgin and the Favourite -- Beasts and Things that Crawl -- Struggle for Mastery: Pedagogies, Marriage Plots -- 2. The Education of the People in James's The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima -- The People and the Freedmen -- The Schoolmarm and the Southerner -- The Happier Few and the Miserable Many -- 3. The Professor and the Mob in Wharton's The Valley of Decision

Born Readers: Race and the Reading Citizenry -- Idealism and Realism -- The Learned Lady -- Part II: The Remnant at Harvard: Whiteness, Higher Education and Democracy -- 4. Universal White: Discrimination and Selection in James's American Scene -- Numbers and the Remnant -- Diversity, Distinction and the Note of the Exclusive -- Serene Puritan Crânerie: James and the Genteel Tradition -- 5. The Tenth Mind: Adams and the Action of the Remnant -- Better Men: The Talented Tenth and the Remnant at Harvard -- Bostonian Calm and the Action of the Scholar

Education and Power: Schools, Schoolmasters, Truants -- The Type of Passivity: Adams and the Genteel Tradition -- 6. Pure English: Wharton and the Elect -- Aristocracies: The Value of Duration -- Doctrines of Election: The Puritan Liberal and the Last Calvinist -- Purement Anglo-Saxonne: Puritans and Patroons -- Colonial Mansions: Wharton and the Genteel Tradition -- Conclusion: The Reign of the Genteel -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

COPYRIGHT NOT covered - Click this link to request copyright permission:

https://lib.ciu.edu/copyright-request-form