Manacled to Identity

Cosmopolitanism, Class, and 'The Culture Concept' in Stephen Crane

Bibliographic Data

ID3852337
AuthorsMichael J Collins (0000-0001-5226-5498, University of Kent, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume11
Issue4
Pages404-417
Publication date2013-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueComparative American Studies An International Journal (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1477-5700 • E-ISSN: 1741-2676
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1179/1477570013z.00000000053
OpenAlexW2117744390
LanguageEN
References cited14

This article begins with a close reading of Stephen Crane’s short story ‘Manacled’ from 1900, which situates this rarely considered short work within the context of contemporary debates about realism. I then proceed to argue that many of the debates raised by the tale have an afterlife in our own era of American literary studies, which has frequently focused on questions of ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ in its reading of realism and naturalism to the exclusion of the importance of cosmopolitan discourses of diffusion and exchange across national borders. I then offer a brief reading of Crane’s novel George’s Mother, which follows Walter Benn Michaels in suggesting that the recent critical attention paid to particularities of cultural difference in American studies have come to conflate ideas of class and social position with ideas of culture in ways that have ultimately obscured the presence of genuine historical inequalities in US society. In order to challenge this critical commonplace, I situate Crane’s work within a history of transatlantic cosmopolitanism associated with the ideas of Franz Boas and Matthew Arnold to demonstrate the ways in which Crane’s narratives sought out an experience of the universal within their treatments of the particular

Aesthetics · Afterlife · Art · Cosmopolitanism · Epistemology · Literature · Narrative · Naturalism · Political science · Politics · Realism · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Race, History, and American Society

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