Susanna Ashton | Clemson University (original) (raw)

Papers by Susanna Ashton

Collaborators in Literary America, 1870–1920, 2003

College English, Nov 1, 2006

American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography, 2015

Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 2012

Early African American Print Culture, 2012

American Book Review, 2007

Susanna Ashton Writers in Retrospect: The Rise of American Literary History, 1875-1910 Claudia St... more Susanna Ashton Writers in Retrospect: The Rise of American Literary History, 1875-1910 Claudia Stokes University of North Carolina Press http://www.uncpress.unc.edu 256 pages; cloth, 59.95;paper,59.95; paper, 59.95;paper,19.95 Claudia Stokes's study of the motivations, context, craft, and construction of literary histories composed in the US between 1875 and 1910 demonstrates that professionalization wasn't a smooth history in which amateur writers grew to become agent-represented, copyright-holding professionals. Rather, she argues that the many literary histories assembled during this period can serve as a source for apprehending how the very role of intellectual life in America might be understood. Stokes's study is not as much an examination of, say, James Fenimore Cooper or Margaret Fuller (although she does devote some considerable time to analyzing the ways in which Fuller's autobiography was selectively culled to place her within a particular American narrative and how Cooper's oeuvre was variably received by late-nineteenth-century scholars) as much as it is an examination ofhow and why writers such as Cooper, Washington Irving, of Fuller caught the attention of late-nineteenth-century literary scholars and what precisely was at stake in such resurrections. Stokes's narrative style and compellingly thorough scholarship is terrific throughout. Most notable of all, however, might be the overall framing of her historical work with contemporary conflicts over the role of public intellectuals, which is a heady and graceful application of seemingly arcane scholarship to immediate cultural relevance. Stokes argues that the "fad" for literary history in the late nineteenth century was part of an "urgency of literary workers and professors to allay public suspicions of aristocratic elitism by marketing themselves as accessible, valuable contributors to the public welfare, more akin to doctors and civil servants than to aloof, unintelligible priests ofhigh culture." She also traces, however, the double-edged sword ofhow such departure from elitist ivory towers results not in populist popularity but often in demands for yet more relevance and wide appeal. She characterizes as a "terrible irony" the way in which literary scholars are "caught in an irresolvable , Sisyphean struggle, for the more we comply with American anti-intellectualism, the more we are expected to." Citing the ways in which globalization studies now represent a turn for literary scholars to reaffirm political and cultural relevance that previously nationalist studies ofAmerican exceptionalism had demonstrated, Stokes ends her study by noting how the historical attempts to pander to anti-intellectualism have tended to reify hostilities rather than disperse them. Nonetheless, her epilogue ends with a compelling affirmation of the value of intellectual work and its need to be recognized and honored in its own right. She...

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The Southern Literary Journal, 2007

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 1996

Each town along the road running out of Fen Cho fu, China, paid to avoid having foreigners murder... more Each town along the road running out of Fen Cho fu, China, paid to avoid having foreigners murdered within its boundaries.' No one wanted the difficul-ties likely to arise from having a group of foreign missionaries beheaded in his or her village. Therefore the party of eight missionaries, ...

American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography, 2007

Now that Random House is willing to reimburse customers who mistakenly purchased James Frey'... more Now that Random House is willing to reimburse customers who mistakenly purchased James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces" thinking it was a work of non-fiction and the tragic effects of Judith Miller's spectacularly inaccurate and misleading reports about Iraq's possession of ...

SHORT TERM library fellowships are quite likely the single most common kind of national research ... more SHORT TERM library fellowships are quite likely the single most common kind of national research grant given out to scholars in the humanities. The Massachusetts Historical Society alone gives out twenty short-term library fellowships. Almost every major private university and scholarly library (including the Huntington, Newberry, Yale’s Beinecke, Harvard’s Houghton, and the New- York Historical Society), many public universities (such as the University of Texas, Austin), many major pub- lic libraries (such as the Boston Public Library and the New York Public Library), and many small specialized research libraries administrate these types of grants. They are often modest in their monetary amounts (ranging from 1,500to1,500 to 1,500to4,000) and almost always distributed directly to the individual scholar.  They rarely cause much of a blip on the radar of most college and university accountsthat track billion-dollar National Science Foundation grants or large institution-sponsored foundation awa...