Günter Leypoldt Books

This collection of essays contributes to the socio-institutional study of literary culture by looking at how writers, artists, and scholars in the United States assert their intellectual authority at various moments within the shifting cultural marketplace between 1790 and 1900. What do we mean when we speak of intellectual authority? How does the intellectual capability to make a difference relate to the nineteenth-century formation and differentiation of literary fields? How do literary intellectuals and their media partake in the economies of symbolic prestige that circulate between the local and transatlantic markets and institutions of Europe and the United States? The authors in this volume wish to inquire into the rituals of consecration and contestation that shaped the production of intellectual authority in the long nineteenth century.

G. Leypoldt introduces a collection examining literary and cultural icons. C. Spahr explores Anne Bradstreet’s literary genealogy as a “fashioned saint.” B. Engler discusses American literary nationalism and the cultural politics of de-nationalizing Shakespeare. A. Alliston and P. Schirmeister analyze James Fenimore Cooper’s reception both domestically and internationally. R. S. Levine highlights Frederick Douglass’s iconic “Little Book.” K. Benesch reflects on Thoreau’s iconicity in relation to place. D. Schulz portrays Ralph Waldo Emerson as a national saint. W. Grünzweig examines Walt Whitman’s Americanness within global culture. M. A. Snyder-Körber addresses sexual and textual iconicity from Henry James to queer interpretations. I. Klaiber investigates the creation of Black icons through Pauline E. Hopkins’ work. G. Hurm discusses James Dean’s rebellion as a post-war American icon. N. Gernalzick analyzes Madonna Ciccone’s performance art. S. Duda focuses on Andy Warhol’s sequences as an icon. P. Löffler critiques the iconization of Miles Davis within ethnic contexts. R. Bauer looks at Squanto’s role in American mythology. J. Stievermann examines Terrence Malick’s Pocahontas iconography. K. Fitz discusses George Washington and Israel Putnam as iconic yeoman farmers. F. Obenland explores Napoleon’s political iconicity in early America. O. Scheiding analyzes Washington Irving’s portrayal of the Indian chief as a Federalist ic

This book traces the aesthetic principles of minimal realism from its controversial beginnings in the 1970s to its decline in popularity in the 1990s. The concept of minimal realism used here provides the theoretical framework necessary to understand the aesthetic similarities of the so-called „literary-minimalism“ (the works of Raymond Carver, and the short fiction and early novels of the New Yorker-school authors Ann Beattie and Bobbie Ann Mason) and the „brat pack“ novels of Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis. The defining features of this literary movement are explored using a comparative approach that showcases the differences between the minimal realist poetics and contemporaneous literary trends (such as neo- and experimental realism, metafiction, and fabulism).