Nineteenth-Century Legacies in the Work of Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, Marilynne Robinson, and George Saunders

This thesis examines the afterlives of various canonical figures of the nineteenth-century US in twenty-first-century literature. Focussing on works of fiction, memoir, and poetry by four prominent US authors, Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, Marilynne Robinson, and George Saunders, it suggests that contemporary writers turn to the earlier period in order to harness its idealistic conception of the literary as a mode that facilitates intersubjective communication and thus shapes social life. Over the course of its four chapters this thesis examines texts by these writers through and alongside literary forms, figures, and modes as they appear in the works of nineteenth-century writers and orators Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allen-Poe, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman. These figures are invoked in a variety of ways in the contemporary texts analysed here; they are directly cited, discussed, and actually represented. Through these different types of invocation, the contemporary texts reinvigorate the nineteenth-century literary modes, forms and tropes of the essay, metaphor, realism, and sentimentalism. I suggest that the respective turns by these authors to the literary models of the nineteenth century form a broader trend that is part of the renewed interest in sincerity, idealism, and activism in contemporary literature that has characterised the period after postmodernism.