Popular Entertainment and the Limits of Realism: Howells and James in Barnum's America

Popular Entertainment and the Limits of Realism: Howells and James in Barnum's America
A seminar by Dr Mark Storey, School of American and Canadian Studies and CAS Postdoctoral Researcher 2010/11, University of Nottingham
Seminar 8 in the Centre for Advanced Studies Seminar Programme

Abstract: William Dean Howells and Henry James were two of the most influential and prolific writers in late nineteenth-century America and were, in very different ways, central to the formation of the dominant literary genre of the age: Realism. P.T. Barnum, on the other hand, came to be just as influential  a figure in a somewhat less lofty and elitist cultural industry: the ever-more spectacular and ambitious world of popular entertainment. This seminar brings these seemingly distant figures into dialogue, and through the writings of Howells and James begins to trace the profound and possibly insurmountable challenge that the frenetic excesses of Barnum’s shows posed to literary representation. From the gaudy promises of circus advertising and newspaper reports of goats who could fire revolvers, to the highbrow cultural commentary and nostalgic boyhood memoirs of Howells and James, this seminar begins to explore the ways in which modern spectacles pushed the dominant representational mode of the period to its aesthetic limits.

Dr. Mark Storey completed his PhD in the School of American and Canadian Studies at Nottingham in 2010. He now works as an Associate Lecturer in the same School and in 2010-11 is a Postdoctoral Researcher at The Centre for Advanced Studies.