Realist ecstasy: Enthusiasm in American literature, 1886--1938

Realist Ecstasy uncovers American realism's surprising preoccupation with ecstatic experience and performance, charting the ways in which this apparently dispassionate literature mobilized varieties of excess feeling---or what earlier eras decried as "enthusiasm"---to dramatic effect. I demonstrate how American realism registered widespread anxiety around contagious religiosity (so often fixated on race-, gender-, and class-specific bodies) while transforming ecstatic outbreaks into new modes of social affiliation. Building on what Henry James described as the "ecstasies of method," I argue that American realism imagined ecstasy as method, a means of alienation from categorized selves and, concurrently, an exploration of the possibilities and limitations of fiction's capacity to imagine the experience of the other.;Situated at the intersection of literary, religious, and performance studies, Realist Ecstasy substantially revises the linear secularization narrative embedded in current critical accounts of realism. My first three chapters---which take up texts by Henry James, William James, and Stephen Crane---chart the rhythmic returns of ecstatic subjectivity in American realism. I describe how Henry James's theories of the novel developed alongside the specter of a feminized, enthusiastic porousness; recover William James's pragmatic variety show of ecstatic experience; and read enthusiasm as a theory of history in The Red Badge Courage, where ecstatic performance becomes the medium for reckoning with history's violent excesses. Tracing enthusiasm's proximity to extreme loss and marginalization, my final two chapters examine scenes of enthusiastic collectivity in texts by James Weldon Johnson and Nella Larsen. I demonstrate how these texts attend to the possibilities and dangers of ecstatic communicability, its tendency to shift rapidly from inspired force to ideological enforcement.