The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) is Sarah Orne Jewett's most popular book. In its elegantly constructed sketches, a worldly, anonymous writer spends the summer in a tiny Maine fishing village where she hopes to find peace and solitude. As she gains the acceptance and trust of her hosts, the community's power and complexity are slowly revealed. While its episodes portray the difficulty and loneliness of rural life, they also display its dignity and strength, particularly as expressed in the bonds between women: mothers, daughters, and friends. This centennial edition contains a facsimile of the original text, thereby restoring the novel to Jewett's own version, which had been considerably altered in other published versions, plus four related stories. Further enhancing the importance of this volume is editor Sarah Way Sherman's introduction, which includes a sketch of Jewett's life and professional development, a commentary on textual accuracy, and a discussion of the book's themes and techiques as well as its historical context.

The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories (Hardscrabble Books)

Literature & Fiction

Jewett., Sarah Orne

United States

Univ Of New Hampshire Press

Transatlantic Conversations: Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Encounters with Italy and the Atlantic World (Becoming Modern: New 19th Century Studies)

History & Criticism

In this thematically rich book, Mary Kathleen Eyring examines authors whose writings were connected with their charitable endeavors, which addressed the worst by-products of the brisk maritime commerce in Atlantic seaport cities in the first half of the nineteenth century. She argues that charitable institutions and societies emerged in this era because they captured and contained the discontent of imperiled and impoverished groups, thereby effectively thwarting the development of a revolutionary class in America.According to Eyring, the men and women who most successfully wrote about and engaged in benevolent work strategically connected their work with the affluence generated by maritime commerce. The water trades supported the growth of the American publishing industry, but they also generated both vast inequities in wealth and physically and economically hazardous conditions that, in the absence of a welfare state, required the intervention of benevolent societies. Laborers in Atlantic port cities barred from lucrative professions by gender, race, physical ability, or social status found a way to make a living wage by conjoining the literary with the charitable—and attaching both to a profit structure. In so doing, they transformed the nature of American benevolence and gave rise to the nonprofit sector, which has since its inception provided discontented laborers with a forum in which to express their critique of for-profit American enterprise, by imitating it.In Captains of Charity, Eyring looks at writers who overcame their marginalized status by bringing together the strands of maritime industry, publishing, and benevolence. These include Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, two black clergymen who managed a massive relief effort when refugees fleeing revolution in Haiti transported the yellow fever virus to Philadelphia in 1793; Nancy Prince, a free woman of color who sought her livelihood in the Protestant missions of Jamaica in the years immediately following Britain’s emancipation of laborers in its Caribbean colonies; Sarah Josepha Hale, who parlayed the social influence she had gained as the founder of a seaman’s aid society in Boston into a role as editor of the hugely popular periodical Godey’s Lady’s Book; and Sarah Pogson Smith, who donated the proceeds of her writing to such prominent charitable causes as the New York Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb and then capitalized on the goodwill this charity work generated among her wealthy friends in New York City, Philadelphia, and Charleston.Hardcover is un-jacketed.

Captains of Charity: The Writing and Wages of Postrevolutionary Atlantic Benevolence (Becoming Modern: New 19th Century Studies)

History

Eyring, Mary Kathleen

Americas

New Englanders talk as much about their weather as about all other subjects combined. Anyone who’s scampered for shelter during a summer shower or shoveled a path through snow in May knows that bending to the weather’s whims is a way of life in New England. But what do you actually know about New England’s weather or climate? Combining a scholarly appreciation of weather systems and events with an ability to transmit their passion to a general audience, Gregory A. Zielinski and Barry D. Keim have written a one-of-a-kind guide to New England weather and climate. Not only are weather patterns in New England more changeable and more extreme than almost anywhere in the country, New England is the ultimate destination of nearly all storm tracks nationwide. Recently, newsworthy items such as global warming, El Niño, and La Niña have significantly impacted our local weather, in both the short and long term. Luckily, the science of meteorology and climatology and their tools of observation and analysis have made great strides in the past few years. The authors offer an in-depth explanation of the latest theoretical insights into New England’s weather along with a flurry of stories and lore about the vagaries of our clime. The book is divided into the seasons as we actually experience them—ski season, mud season, beach and lake season, and foliage season. It includes photos and illustrations: some all too familiar, many hard to believe. Zielinski and Keim succeed in providing an illuminating and entertaining analysis and commentary while whole-heartedly embracing our region’s atmospheric peculiarities. This book won’t do anything about New England’s weather or climate but it will help you understand each of them.

New England Weather, New England Climate (Unh Non-Series Title)

Science & Math

Keim, Barry D.

Zielinski, Gregory A.

Earth Sciences

Two Vermonts establishes a little-known fact about Vermont: that the state's fascination with tourism as a savior for a suffering economy is more than a century old, and that this interest in tourism has always been dogged by controversy. Through this lens, the book is poised to take its place as the standard work on Vermont in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. Searls examines the origins of Vermont's contemporary identity and some reasons why that identity (“Who is a Vermonter?”) is to this day so hotly contested. Searls divides nineteenth-century Vermonters into conceptually “uphill,” or rural/parochial, and “downhill,” or urban/cosmopolitan, elements. These two groups, he says, negotiated modernity in distinct and contrary ways. The dissonance between their opposing tactical approaches to progress and change belied the pastoral ideal that contemporary urban Americans had come to associate with the romantic notion of “Vermont.” Downhill Vermonters, espousing a vision of a mutually reinforcing relationship between tradition and progress, unilaterally endeavored to foster the pastoral ideal as a means of stimulating economic development. The hostile uphill resistance to this strategy engendered intense social conflict over issues including education, religion, and prohibition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The story of Vermont's vigorous nineteenth-century quest for a unified identity bears witness to the stirring and convoluted forging of today's “Vermont.” Searls's engaging exploration of this period of Vermont's history advances our understanding of the political, economic, and cultural transformation of all of rural America as industrial capitalism and modernity revolutionized the United States between 1865 and 1910. By the late Progressive Era, Vermont's reputation was rooted in the national yearning to keep society civil, personal, and meaningful in a world growing more informal, bureaucratic, and difficult to navigate. The fundamental ideological differences among Vermont communities are indicative of how elusive and frustrating efforts to balance progress and tradition were in the context of effectively negotiating capitalist transformation in contemporary America.

Two Vermonts: Geography and Identity, 1865-1910 (Revisiting New England)

Searls, Paul

Over the course of the nineteenth century, factory slaughterhouses replaced the hand-slaughter of livestock by individual butchers, who often performed this task in back rooms, letting blood run through streets. A wholly modern invention, the centralized municipal slaughterhouse was a political response to the public’s increasing lack of tolerance for “dirty” butchering practices, corresponding to changing norms of social hygiene and fear of meat-borne disease. The slaughterhouse, in Europe and the Americas, rationalized animal slaughter according to capitalist imperatives. What is lost and what is gained when meat becomes a commodity? What do the sites of animal slaughter reveal about our relationship to animals and nature? Essays by the best international scholars come together in this cutting-edge interdisciplinary volume to examine the cultural significance of the slaughterhouse and its impact on modernity. Contributors include: Dorothee Brantz, Kyri Claflin, Jared Day, Roger Horowitz, Lindgren Johnson, Ian MacLachlan, Christopher Otter, Dominic Pacyga, Richard Perren, Jeffrey Pilcher, and Sydney Watts.

Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse (Becoming Modern: New 19th Century Studies)

Written from aesthetic, sociopolitical, cultural, and literary perspectives, The Cultured Canvas explores myriad ways in which American visual culture can be evaluated through newly conceived thematic and ideological approaches. This book moves beyond our accepted notion of the oil painting on canvas to consider the term as both a literal and figurative surface upon which artists construct or construe the landscape as an intellectual, cultural, or physical entity. It provides an innovative reevaluation of traditional thought concerning the Hudson River School, Luminism, and artists of the Civil War era. As interdisciplinary emphases are employed with increasing frequency in arts and humanities courses, the breadth and depth of topics covered in this collection will provide a much-needed text for scholars in American art history, nineteenth-century American studies, and landscape studies, in addition to serving as a complement to courses in American literature and culture. Hardcover is un-jacketed.

The Cultured Canvas: New Perspectives on American Landscape Painting (Becoming Modern: New 19th Century Studies)

Arts & Photography

Most landscape manuals describe a linear sequence of processes: design, plant selection, installation, and ongoing maintenance. Integrated Landscaping is different. It uses natural ecosystems as models, taking a nonlinear, holistic approach that addresses these processes simultaneously. Integrated Landscaping treats each site as a system of plant and animal communities, considering their interrelationships with each other and their environment. Integrated Landscaping: Following Nature's Lead is a valuable resource for anyone concerned with helping to shape the landscape we all share. When we see ourselves as part of the whole, we can see that what we do in places where we live, work, and play has a ripple effect far beyond the space each of us calls "home."

Integrated Landscaping: Following Nature’s Lead (Unh Non-Series Title)

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Chase-Rowell, Lauren

Davis, Mary Tebo

Hartnett, Katherine

Wyzga, Marilyn

Gardening & Landscape Design

In this rich interdisciplinary study, Hildegard Hoeller argues that nineteenth-century American culture was driven by and deeply occupied with the tension between gift and market exchange. Rooting her analysis in the period’s fiction, she shows how American novelists from Hannah Foster to Frank Norris grappled with the role of the gift based on trust, social bonds, and faith in an increasingly capitalist culture based on self-interest, market transactions, and economic reason. Placing the notion of sacrifice at the center of her discussion, Hoeller taps into the poignant discourse of modes of exchange, revealing central tensions of American fiction and culture. Hardcover is un-jacketed.

From Gift to Commodity: Capitalism and Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Becoming Modern: New 19th Century Studies)

Hoeller, Hildegard

Written a generation apart and rarely treated together by scholars, Little Women (1868) and The House of Mirth (1905) share a deep concern with materialism, moral development, and self-construction. The heroines in both grapple with conspicuous consumption, an aspect of modernity that challenges older beliefs about ethical behavior and core identity. Placing both novels at the historical intersection of modern consumer culture and older religious discourse on materialism and identity, Sarah Way Sherman analyzes how Alcott and Wharton rework traditional Protestant discourse to interpret their heroines’ struggle with modern consumerism. Her conclusion reveals how Little Women’s optimism, still buoyed by otherworldly justice, providential interventions, and the notion of essential identity, ultimately gives way to the much darker vision of modern materialistic culture in The House of Mirth.Hardcover is un-jacketed.

Sacramental Shopping: Louisa May Alcott, Edith Wharton, and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Becoming Modern: New 19th Century Studies)

Sherman, Sarah Way

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Univ Of New Hampshire Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Univ Of New Hampshire Press