Tara Penry

The Short, Happy Life of the California Partnership Tale

Tara Penry — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 07:43:38 PST

OSHER Institute 5-week course on Wallace Stegner

Tara Penry — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:23:31 PST

Bret Harte, Mark Twain and the Art of Western Storytelling

Tara Penry — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:23:30 PST

Many clichés of the U.S. western mythos have been traced to nineteenth-century California writer Bret Harte, including the gambler, the prostitute with a heart of gold, and more. Harte's reputation languishes today largely because of his association with clichés. This lecture offers fresh reasons for appreciating this short-story writer and compares his vision of America and humanity with the vision of the friend-turned-detractor whose reputation outshines Harte's today: Mark Twain. The lecture provides some insight into how the Harte-Twain relationship might have contributed to Harte's eclipse. Enrollees may expect to leave the lecture ready to read both Harte and Twain with keener historical awareness and to appreciate the contributions of both writers to our inherited stories about the American west.

Past President’s Address: Edgewalking with Feeling

Tara Penry — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:23:28 PST

Stegner’s Sensational Pedagogy: Regional Literacy for Mind and Body

Tara Penry — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:23:27 PST

Sentiment and Style

Tara Penry — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:23:25 PST

"Tennessee's Partner" as Sentimental Western Metanarrative

Tara Penry — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:23:24 PST

Book History Comes West

Tara Penry — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:23:22 PST

As specialists defined it in the 1970s and '80s, "book history" was a field of inquiry with little connection to the American West. Following the lead of French academics, scholars of early modern English used the phrase "book history" to study the shift from manuscript to print in Europe. But others saw applications beyond Europe. By 1983, the Library of Congress and the American Antiquarian Society had established programs promoting the study of books as material objects in the United States. Despite the intent of these institutions to inspire national research, by the early 1990s, a group of scholars at the University of Wisconsin–Madison observed that the first wave of scholarship in US book history "tended to concentrate on white people living in the northeast, mostly before the Civil War"—a demographic particularly well represented by the collections of the American Antiquarian Society (Pawley 708). Now, some twenty years later, a short stack of twenty-first-century publications gives evidence that book history has quietly made the journey west.

In this essay, I am particularly interested in how a handful of national studies of book history represent the West and what they suggest for future directions in western literary, textual, and cultural scholarship. All five volumes selected for this review use the phrases book history and print culture more or less interchangeably to study relationships between authors, publishers, readers, government and private institutions, and print. Three of the volumes under review belong to the History of the Book in America series, a monumental project conceived at the American Antiquarian Society in 1993 and due to issue its last volume from the University of North Carolina Press as this review is being completed. ¹

Sketching California: The ethnographic work of Gold Rush literature, 1850-1870

Tara Penry — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:23:21 PST

This study proposes reading small-press "regional" periodicals to discover a more diverse set of traditions in U.S. literary history. In particular, it compares the complex representations of western culture in the literary modes of Gold Rush California magazines with the simplified "local color" view of the west that northeastern magazines disseminated. Chapter one surveys Gold Rush demographics and the history of publishing and related institutions in California of the 1850s and '60s. In chapter two, the picturesque mode is shown to encourage immigration by portraying California as a worthy destination for people of taste. The sentimental mode (chapter 3) offers a sympathetic community of readers and writers to ease the homesickness of immigrants. Both the picturesque and sentimental discourses attest to the "civilization" and sophistication of California by importing middle-class, eastern American values to the frontier west. The parodies and satires of Sam Clemens and Bret Harte in the 1860s (chapter 4) depict versions of a "wild west." With the "manners and customs" genre and its corresponding mode of ethnographic realism (chapter 5), post-Gold Rush essayists affirm the highly-evolved status of Anglo "civilization," compared with other nations and races. The same mode, in the hands of self-conscious literary artists such as Clemens, Harte, and Louise Clappe, also provides an authenticating rhetoric which allows eastern readers to trust in the "realism" of selective western sketches. In reviews, reprints, and articles about California (chapter 6), contemporaneous Boston and New York magazines filtered California literature to the exoticizing mode of "local color"--a subset of "realism" which northeastern readers understood more in a sociological or ethnographic sense--as a "real" account of western life--than in a literary sense (as a Jamesian "illusion of life"). In the twentieth century, critical appraisals of "local color" have followed the northeastern model, evaluating early western writing as "informative" rather than artistic.

The Chinese in Bret Harte’s Overland: A Context for Truthful James

Tara Penry — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:23:19 PST

For the first two years of its existence, the Overland displayed at least as much interest in Chinese culture as in any other single subject, if we can judge from the quantity of articles devoted to the topic. In the magazine's first twenty-four numbers, under the editorial guidance of Harte himself, fifteen substantial articles were published on the language, folkways, and industries of the Chinese or on political questions concerning their presence in California. By the time that Harte's "Plain Language" appeared in volume five, the magazine and its contributors seem to have exhausted what they had to say about the Chinese, offering no new articles in that volume. Lacking the context of such articles, new readers of the Overland nonetheless would have found a few cues directing them to a satiric reading of the poem; with the help of the earlier articles, established readers could hardly have missed Harte's intended tone.

The Literate West of Nineteenth-Century Periodicals

Tara Penry — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:23:17 PST

Asked to picture a western scene, most literate Americans in the nineteenth century, as today, would describe an outdoor landscape, with or without people in it. Few would conjure up a picture of a young woman writing by lamplight at her home, a girl searching her father's pockets for a book from the circulating library, a married couple reading letters in their one-room cabin, or a printer leaning over his typecase. Yet these images, if not uniquely western, belonged to the nineteenth-century West as much as did sublime mountainscapes, buckskinned hunters, or battle scenes between Plains Indians and the US army. In the popular imagination, literacy was crucial to eastern sentiment - allowing colonists to organize themselves with documents like the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, and the US Constitution - but unimportant to a region of armed conflict, oral, negotiation, lynching, and squatters' rights.

Manly Domesticity on the Gold Rush Frontier: Recovering California’s Honest Miner

Tara Penry — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:23:16 PST

Sentimental Eco-Memoir: Refuge, Hole in the Sky, and the Necessary Reader

Tara Penry — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:23:14 PST

In the recent issue of Western American Literature devoted to the subject of "Western Autobiography and Memoir", a recurring theme asserts itself: according to the issue editors as well as several contributing essayists and reviewers, "the project of identity is relational," as demonstrated even in the autobiography of a Victorian cowboy.¹ In making this claim, editors Kathleen Boardman and Gioia Woods join recent autobiographical critics in defining the genre's subject as "encumbered," not solitary or autonomous.² In this regard, theorists of autobiography echo literary historians who are recovering a nineteenth-century sentimental tradition. The sentimental subject, according to critic Joanne Dobson, responds to "the tragedy of separation, of severed human ties" by envisioning the "self-in-relation."³ Such a self, as Mary Louise Kete elaborates, "exists only by and through others."⁴ While autobiographical theorists have begun to recognize a number of "relations" that define the textual "self", sentimental literary historians have best theorized the relation most significant for two prominent western memoirs in which the presentations of a "self" serves an eco-political agenda.