Constance Rourke

Constance Mayfield Rourke (born November 14, 1885 in Cleveland , Ohio ; died March 23, 1941 in Grand Rapids , Michigan ) was an American cultural and literary scholar. Her works, especially her study of American humor published in 1931, are among the founding texts of American studies .

life and work

Rourke studied at the Sorbonne and at Vassar College , where she taught from 1907 to 1915 as a lecturer in English language and literature. She eventually settled in Michigan, where she devoted herself to writing.

In her books, she dealt with the interaction between American high and pop culture and thus paved the way for the interdisciplinary orientation of American studies, which should have shaped the subject since it was established in the 1950s. Like the other Americanists of the first generation (or better avant la lettre , so Van Wyck Brooks , Vernon Louis Parrington , Lewis Mumford ) she tried to formulate an American “national character.” Her work American Humor , published in 1931, was subtitled A Study of the National Character ("A Study of National Character "); it has both the “down-to-earth” humor of the masses on the subject, as it is shown in pranks, jokes and spectacles such as the Minstrel Show , but also the humor in works by classics of American literature such as Emerson and Emily Dickinson .

In Trumpets of Jubilee (1927) she examined five icons of American popular culture of the 19th century, namely the preacher Lyman Beecher , his children Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe , the publisher Horace Greeley and the circus pioneer PT Barnum . In Troupers of the Gold Coast (1928) she examined the American theater business in the 19th century. Her later books include biographies of the legendary folk hero Davy Crockett , ornithologist and draftsman John James Audubon, and the painter Charles Sheeler . She also wrote numerous essays on various folkloric topics. Her last work The Roots of American Culture remained unfinished; Excerpts were published in 1942.

Works

• Trumpets of Jubilee (1927)
• Troupers of the Gold Coast (1928)
• American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931)
  • E-text on the University of Virginia pages
  • New edition with an introduction by Marcus Greil: New York Review Books, New York 2004, ISBN 1590170792 .
• Davy Crockett (1928)
• Audubon (1936)
• Charles Sheeler: Artist in the American Tradition (1938)

Secondary literature

• Samuel Irving Bellman: Constance Rorke . Twayne, Boston 1981, ISBN 080577341X (= Twayne's United States Authors Series 412).
• Joan Shelley Rubin: Constance Rourke and American Culture . University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1980, ISBN 0807814024 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Constance Rourke in the catalog of the German National Library