{"product_id":"stephen-cranes-maggie-a-modern-ophelia-von-guido-scholl","title":"Stephen Crane's Maggie: A modern \"Ophelia\"?","description":"\u003cp\u003eSeminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Hannover (Englisches Seminar), course: Progressivism, Modernity, and the ¿New Woman¿ - US-Literature and Culture, 1880-1910¿, language: English, abstract: Stephen Crane¿s first novel, Maggie ¿ A Girl of the Streets (1893), is a characteristic\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003especimen of Naturalist or New Realist Literature. The plot is quite different from Victorian\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRealist literature as well as the Symbolist literature by the likes of Kipling and T.S. Eliott. In\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003efact, Crane purposely wanted to get away from that sort of writing as he states in one of his\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eletters: ¿If I had kept to my clever Rudyard ¿Kipling style, the road might have been shorter\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ebut, ah, it wouldn¿t be the true road.¿ While the early Realists still concentrated on people\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003efrom the middle class upward, Crane¿s characters belonged to the lowest scale in terms of\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003esocial standing. This meant that the young author had to break with some taboos installed by\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eVictorian writers and as a result from that, he had difficulties in publishing the novel in the\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003efirst place and also received a lot of hostility from critics.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe most basic feature that distinguishes Maggie: A Girl of the Streets from Symbolist or\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAestheticist works is its focus on the concept of ¿truth¿. For Symbolist authors, the highest\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eprinciple of art was ¿beauty¿ whereas Naturalists saw the need of objective descriptions of life\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eand nature in order to portray them as close to reality as possible. Helga Quadflieg sees this as\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ea replacement for the divine, which both Symbolists and Naturalists did not believe in:\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e¿Im Gegensatz zum Ästhetizismus stellt der New Realism aber nicht\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e¿beauty¿ an die Stelle früherer Gottheiten, sondern ¿truth¿, die [...] den\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ehöchsten Stellenwert hat.¿ While Symbolist literature in some cases still contained supernatural apparitions, e.g. in\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eKipling¿s The Mystery of Purun Bhagath or The Bull that Thought and Hardy¿s For\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eConscience¿s Sake, Naturalist authors excluded this completely from their works.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSurprisingly, though, the main character in Maggie, in drowning herself as a result from\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eunlucky love, seems to be a counterpart to the figures like the sirens from Greek mythology\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBrentanös Lore Lay, de la Motte Fouqué¿s Undine and Shakespeare¿s Ophelia who make up\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ea group one may call ¿water women¿. Such ¿water women¿ were common literary figures\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eespecially in Romantic poetry and may be considered to have their roots in Homer¿s Odyssey.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis certainly does not fit into Naturalist literary theory but I will try to show how Stephen\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCrane interweaves this theme into the novel without neglecting the Naturalist basis of it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"aw-variant-hidden-subtitle-div\" id=\"aw-variant-subtitle-9783640116430\"\u003e\u003ch3\u003e\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Libri","offers":[{"title":"Softcover - 9783640116430","offer_id":39440448192605,"sku":"9783640116430","price":15.95,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0940\/0622\/files\/db379295-2765-4064-aad7-3d5441743ee4.jpg?v=1777611445","url":"https:\/\/shop.autorenwelt.de\/en\/products\/stephen-cranes-maggie-a-modern-ophelia-von-guido-scholl","provider":"Autorenwelt Shop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}