TY - BOOK AU - Coit,Emily AU - Boggs,Colleen Glenney AU - Doyle,Laura AU - Fumagalli,Maria Cristina TI - American Snobs: Transatlantic Novelists, Liberal Culture and the Genteel Tradition T2 - Edinburgh Critical Studies in Atlantic Literatures and Cultures : ECSALC SN - 9781474475402 AV - PS374.L42 C65 2021eb U1 - 813.009/3581 23 PY - 2022///] CY - Edinburgh PB - Edinburgh University Press KW - American fiction KW - 19th century KW - History and criticism KW - 20th century KW - History and cricitism KW - Liberalism KW - Massachusetts KW - Boston KW - History KW - Literary Studies KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General KW - bisacsh N1 - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Acknowledgements --; Series Editors’ Preface --; Introduction --; Part I: Cultivation After Reconstruction: Impossible Educations --; Part II: The Remnant at Harvard: Whiteness, Higher Education and Democracy --; Conclusion: The Reign of the Genteel --; Notes --; Bibliography --; Index; restricted access N2 - Reassesses American elitisms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Brings together the insights of recent Victorianist and Americanist scholarship in order to show how Adams, James, and Wharton engage with liberal thinking about whiteness, democracy, and citizenship.Locates these authors in disciplinary history, revealing that their critical responses to Bostonian liberalism feed into the ideas that structure the study of US literary history during the twentieth century.Offers a rich portrait of the Harvard intellectual milieu to which these authors respond, bringing fresh attention to their connections with thinkers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles William Eliot, Charles Eliot Norton, and Barrett Wendell. Arguing that Henry Adams, Henry James and Edith Wharton articulated their political thought in response to the liberalism that reigned in Boston and, more specifically, at Harvard University, this book shows how each of these authors interrogated that liberalism's arguments for education, democracy and the political duties of the cultivated elite. Coit shows that the works of these authors contributed to a realist critique of a liberal New England idealism that fed into the narrative about 'the genteel tradition', which shaped the study of US literature during the twentieth century UR - https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474475426 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781474475426 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9781474475426/original ER -