Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Lawrimore, David

Titel

Surveyors of Customs: American Literature as Cultural Analysis by Joel Pfister (review)

Ist Teil von

• Studies in the Novel, 2020-10, Vol.52 (3), p.360-362

Ort / Verlag

Denton: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• [...]the majority of the readings here are interested in broad, systemic considerations of American capitalism. The chapter culminates with a reading of Hawthorne’s “Artist of the Beautiful” (1844), which Pfister reads as an allegory for a secular soul-making that creates a sense of self that appears to transcend capitalist value but also blocks class affiliation that could enact structural change. No author was more critical of dress-down soft capitalism than Mark Twain, and the chapter ends with a lengthy consideration of his novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), which, Pfister argues, “explores the characteristics of a modern dress-down ‘democratic’ imperial power that uses colloquial language and an informal style as a cloaking device to conquer and colonize” (140).