Constance Rourke

Constance Mayfield Rourke ( born November 14, 1885 in Cleveland, Ohio, † March 23, 1941 in Grand Rapids, Michigan) was an American cultural and literary scholar. Her works, particularly their 1931 published study of American humor, are among the "founding texts " of American Studies.

Life

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

In her books, she grappled with the interaction between the American high and popular culture, and so paved the way for the interdisciplinary nature of American Studies that was to mark the subject since its establishment in the 1950s. Like the other Americanists of the first generation (or rather avant la lettre, as Van Wyck Brooks, Vernon Louis Parrington, Lewis Mumford ) she tried the formulation of an American " national character. " So you wore in 1931 published book American Humor subtitled A Study of the National character ( " A study on the national character "); it has both the " native " humor of the broad masses on the subject, as he shows himself in pranks, jokes and spectacles such as the minstrel show, but also the humor in the works of the classics of American literature such as Emerson and Emily Dickinson.

In Trumpets of Jubilee ( 1927), she took five icons of American popular culture of the 19th century in inspection, especially the preacher Lyman Beecher, whose 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 operating in the 19th century. Her later books include biographies of the legendary folk hero Davy Crockett, the ornithologist and artist John James Audubon and the painter Charles Sheeler. Furthermore, she wrote numerous articles on various folkloric themes. Her latest 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 digitized )
  • Davy Crockett (1928 )
  • Audubon ( 1936)
  • Charles Sheeler: Artist in the American Tradition ( 1938)
Grand Rapids (Michigan) High culture Folklore Integrated Authority File
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