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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Elsket and Other Stories," Thomas Nelson Page masterfully weaves a tapestry of Southern life, exploring themes of love, loss, and the complexities of human relationships. His stories, marked by rich imagery and lyrical prose, evoke a sense of nostalgia while capturing the essence of the post-Civil War South. The collection showcases Page's keen observations of the cultural fabric of the region, presenting characters who reflect the contradictions of Southern society. With a blend of realism and sentimentality, Page elevates commonplace experiences into profound reflections on the human condition. Thomas Nelson Page, a prominent Southern author and a voice of his time, was deeply influenced by the turbulent historical context of the Reconstruction era. His upbringing in Virginia and his law background contributed to a nuanced understanding of societal changes, allowing him to portray the fragility and resilience of Southern life. Page's literary career was marked by his commitment to depicting the South with authenticity and empathy, a mission that is vividly realized in this collection. "Elsket and Other Stories" is a compelling read for anyone interested in Southern literature or the period's socio-cultural dynamics. Page's insightful narratives and evocative language invite readers to explore the depth of human emotion, making it a timeless addition to the literary canon. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Elsket and Other Stories
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume, Elsket and Other Stories, presents a single-author gathering of short fiction by Thomas Nelson Page. Its purpose is not to offer a complete works, but to collect representative tales that show his narrative range, tonal variety, and recurring concerns. Arranged around the title story, it invites readers to encounter Page’s craft in discrete, self-contained episodes that together suggest a coherent artistic profile. As an introduction to his prose, the collection balances accessibility with depth, offering stories that can be read independently while accruing resonance across the volume. It is conceived as a concise showcase of Page’s storytelling in compact form.
The texts included are prose short stories. Among them are Elsket, George Washington’s Last Duel, P’laski’s Tunament, Run to Seed, and A Soldier of the Empire. Each is a stand-alone narrative, varying in length from brief sketches to more developed tales, and together they span comic, romantic, and reflective modes. No plays, poems, letters, or essays appear here; the focus is squarely on fiction. As was common in books of its era, the volume concludes with a brief list of books of fiction published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, 743–745 Broadway, New York, which situates the collection within its contemporary publishing milieu.
Despite their variety, the stories share unifying preoccupations. Page explores character under pressure and the social codes that bind or liberate individuals, whether through rituals of honor, contests of wit, or moments of moral testing. Themes of memory, loyalty, pride, and affection recur, often set against communities whose customs shape personal destiny. Humor softens conflict, while tenderness deepens loss and sacrifice, creating a tonal spectrum that moves from playful to poignant without losing composure. Across the volume, romantic aspiration meets practical consequence, and the claims of tradition negotiate with the demands of conscience, giving the collection its durable emotional coherence.
Placed within the landscape of late nineteenth-century American literature, the collection exemplifies the period’s attraction to the short story as a vehicle for concentrated effect and local observation. Page’s work participates in a broader interest in regional manners and distinctive voices, while also pursuing narrative clarity and shapely design. The brevity of these pieces favors a crisp unveiling of premise and character, allowing settings and situations to be suggested with economy. In this way the book reflects its moment: a confidence that compact tales could capture social milieus, dramatize ethical choice, and deliver aesthetic satisfaction without recourse to extended novelistic architecture.
Stylistically, the stories exhibit Page’s careful modulation of tone, attentive description, and ear for cadence in dialogue and narration. He often frames episodes to heighten contrast and irony, using scene and gesture to register feeling more than authorial argument. His prose privileges clarity and rhythm, favoring images that anchor mood and details that convey social nuance. Variation in speech registers helps distinguish character and community without overwhelming the narrative line. Humor arises from situation and voice; pathos emerges from restraint rather than excess. The result is a clean, humane storytelling surface that supports layered implication beneath its apparent simplicity.
Considered together, these works hold significance as an integrated statement of what Page could accomplish in short form. Their juxtaposition reveals structural inventiveness across recurring motifs, and their diversity demonstrates how a single sensibility can illuminate different kinds of conflict and reconciliation. The collection rewards readers seeking both period atmosphere and enduring questions about choice, duty, and affection. It also offers a compact entry point for study, enabling comparisons of technique across stories without the mediation of longer arcs. The value lies not only in individual tales, but in the way they echo and counterpoint one another within the volume.
Approached sequentially or at leisure, the stories encourage attentive reading for tone, implication, and the play between custom and character. Without requiring prior knowledge, they open with clear premises and invite reflection on how small decisions reverberate within a community. The presence of the publisher’s brief list at the close underscores the volume’s historical context and reminds us of the literary marketplace that first received these pieces. As an anthology of concentrated narrative moments, this book proposes that brevity need not limit depth; instead, it focuses feeling and thought, making each story a distinct portal into Page’s art.
Historical Context
Thomas Nelson Page (1853–1922), born at Oakland in Hanover County, Virginia, came of age as the Civil War (1861–1865) convulsed his world and Reconstruction reshaped the South. Educated at Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) from 1869 to 1872 and at the University of Virginia Law School (1873–1874), he practiced law in Richmond before turning to letters. In the early 1890s he gathered Elsket and Other Stories for Charles Scribner’s Sons, drawing on settings that ranged from Virginia plantations and dueling grounds to European byways. The collection’s varied tales—including Elsket, George Washington’s Last Duel, Run to Seed, P’laski’s Tunament, and A Soldier of the Empire—reflect the breadth of his concerns.
Page wrote amid the consolidation of Lost Cause memory, which idealized the antebellum order and ennobled Confederate sacrifice. Organizations such as the United Confederate Veterans (founded 1889) and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (1894) helped fix public rituals and monuments—Richmond’s Robert E. Lee statue was unveiled in 1890—that shaped popular imagination. Chivalry, honor, and paternalistic relations between planters and the enslaved became literary motifs, casting defeat as moral triumph and social hierarchy as natural. This cultural climate encouraged romances of the Old South and narratives of decline and loyalty, informing Page’s depictions of gentry households, black and white laborers, and the contested meanings of virtue and duty.
The political and social upheavals from Reconstruction (1865–1877) through the Jim Crow era frame Page’s career. The Thirteenth (1865), Fourteenth (1868), and Fifteenth (1870) Amendments and the Reconstruction Acts (1867) redefined citizenship, while the Compromise of 1877 ended federal occupation. Across the 1890s–1902, disfranchisement by poll taxes and literacy tests—embodied in the Virginia Constitution of 1902—coincided with Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and the spread of segregation. Plantation economies gave way to sharecropping and tenancy; debt peonage and the convict-lease system scarred rural life. This broad arc—ruin, adaptation, and the reassertion of white supremacy—undergirds Page’s recurrent themes of decayed estates, shifting labor, and strained codes of honor.
Page’s short fiction flourished within the national taste for regionalism and local color that dominated magazines from the 1870s through the 1890s. Editors such as William Dean Howells promoted distinctive voices—Bret Harte in California, Sarah Orne Jewett in coastal New England, George Washington Cable in Louisiana, Joel Chandler Harris and Mark Twain in the South. Page’s vernacular narrators and plantation scenes entered the same market created by Harper’s, The Century, and Scribner’s Magazine (launched 1887). Debates over dialect—authenticity versus caricature—were already sharpened by contemporaries like Charles W. Chesnutt (The Conjure Woman, 1899) and Paul Laurence Dunbar (Lyrics of Lowly Life, 1896), whose counter-portraits of black life complicated Page’s sentimental frames.
Honor culture, codes of conduct, and ritualized combat shaped many nineteenth-century southern narratives. The Irish Code Duello (1777) influenced American practice; despite statutory limits in Virginia, dueling thrived until the mid-nineteenth century, with the Bladensburg Dueling Grounds near Washington, D.C., notorious for interstate meetings. The Burr–Hamilton duel of 1804 exemplified a broader national preoccupation with reputation and courage. Revival jousts, or tournaments, popular in Virginia and Maryland from the 1840s, celebrated horsemanship and medievalized ideals of gallantry; Revolutionary War memory, including veneration of cavalry hero Casimir Pulaski (killed at Savannah in 1779), fed such pageantry. These customs provide a cultural backdrop for narratives of contests, tests of nerve, and ceremonial courtship.
Although Page was identified with Virginia, his milieu was the Gilded Age’s widening transatlantic world. Steamship routes and guidebooks opened European travel to American professionals by the 1880s; Scandinavian scenes and northern romance circulated through popular travelogues by writers like Bayard Taylor. The vogue for Norse sagas and medievalism—embraced in English by figures such as William Morris—converged with American appetites for picturesque locales. Page’s occasional European or martial settings resonate with that fashion, while his later service as U.S. ambassador to Italy (1913–1919) during World War I heightened his engagement with continental histories of empire, soldiery, and sacrifice, themes that echo across tales situated beyond the American South.
The publishing ecosystem that carried Page’s stories was anchored in New York. Charles Scribner’s Sons, whose imprint at 743–745 Broadway marked many late-1880s and early-1890s volumes, packaged illustrated short fiction for a national audience. Magazines cultivated a disciplined short-story form—tight plots, regional color, sentimental turns—that could be repurposed in collections. Page’s In Ole Virginia (1887) established his reputation; volumes like Elsket and Other Stories in the early 1890s and later works such as The Burial of the Guns (1894) and Red Rock (1898) extended it. Publisher catalogs appended to his books, including brief lists of Scribner’s fiction, reveal how southern romance was marketed alongside international and realist fare.
Contemporary readers praised Page’s elegance and pathos, crediting him with preserving a vanishing society; northern magazines welcomed the civility of his Old South, even as the nation navigated sectional reconciliation. Twentieth-century critics, especially after World War II and during the civil rights movement, scrutinized the plantation myth and the sentimental figure of the faithful slave embedded in such fiction. Historians and literary scholars dismantled Lost Cause narratives, while African American authors and activists from Ida B. Wells to W. E. B. Du Bois exposed the violence masked by nostalgia. Page’s legacy thus sits at a crossroads: aesthetically influential in the short-story tradition, but ideologically bound to a contested memory culture.
Synopsis (Selection)
Elsket
In a remote Norwegian valley, a visiting narrator befriends Elsket, a guileless village girl; their brief attachment highlights the tension between innocent devotion and the obligations that draw him away.
"George Washington's" Last Duel (multi-part story)
A wry Southern reminiscence in which an elderly retainer named George Washington becomes entangled in a ceremonious 'last duel,' while the community contrives to preserve honor without calamity.
P'laski's Tunament
A mock chivalric tournament at a Virginia fair rekindles antebellum ideals of gallantry as rivals contend for a lady’s favor and the town indulges its nostalgia for vanished codes.
Run to Seed (two-part story)
An elegiac portrait of a once-proud family and estate slipping into genteel decline, tracing small acts of dignity amid changing economic and social realities.
A Soldier of the Empire
A character study of a veteran from the European wars of empire living in quiet exile, whose recollections of loyalty, glory, and loss reveal the cost of service after the banners are furled.
Publisher’s List (Charles Scribner’s Sons)
Back-matter catalog of other fiction titles issued by the publisher; informational, not a narrative work.
