Despair, Blurriness, and Change: Rebecca Harding Davis’s Implicit Relational Knowing (2024)

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Volume 36 Issue 4 Winter 2024
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Theo Davis

English Department, Northeastern University

, Boston,

US

Corresponding author: E-mail: theo.davis@gmail.com

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American Literary History, Volume 36, Issue 4, Winter 2024, Pages 995–1015, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajae117

Published:

15 November 2024

Article history

Received:

15 April 2024

Revision received:

21 July 2024

Editorial decision:

22 July 2024

Accepted:

28 August 2024

Published:

15 November 2024

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    Theo Davis, Despair, Blurriness, and Change: Rebecca Harding Davis’s Implicit Relational Knowing, American Literary History, Volume 36, Issue 4, Winter 2024, Pages 995–1015, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajae117

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Abstract

This essay uses attachment and dynamic systems theory to argue that qualities of confusion, despair, and failure in Rebecca Harding Davis’s work are aspects of the process of change. Looking at Margret Howth and her short fiction, especially “John Lamar,” it shows how Davis’s bleak attentions to motion and interaction contain aspects of the implicit relational knowing central to attachment relationships and how they shape her approach to race. In an ideological and aesthetic terrain that does not fall in line with liberal or sentimental approaches to progress, Davis pursues an aesthetic and ethic of attending to compromise, loss, and despair as the grounds of compassion.

© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com

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