A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature

A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature PDF Author: W. Lawrence Hogue
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1785272616
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
This book reconfigures the history of modern America, showing how multiple and, at times, vulnerable social, economic, literary, and political movements, levels, divisions, and conditions such as the emergent middle class, the labor movement, the Progressive Movement, the socialist and communist parties, the Women’s movements, the NAACP, the Garvey movement, Asian and Native American resistance movements, writers, artists, and intellectuals seized upon social, gender, economic, and racial inequalities and challenged a singularly defined modern America. This book re-represents the modern American novel, accenting the different critical literary voices that come out of the mainstream consumer society but also out of the various unequal social, economic, gender, and political movements and situations. In including racial, gender, sexual, colonial, class, and ethnic others—who reject the rigidity, the repression, the racial and ethnic stereotyping, the external and internal colonialism, the complication/rejection of the past/nature, and the violence of the institutionalized, conformist norm—in a discussion of the modern American novel, it effects a fundamental recasting of the modern Americanist paradigm, one that is de-centered, richer, more complex, and more diverse.

A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature

A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature PDF Author: W. Lawrence Hogue
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1785272616
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 505

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book reconfigures the history of modern America, showing how multiple and, at times, vulnerable social, economic, literary, and political movements, levels, divisions, and conditions such as the emergent middle class, the labor movement, the Progressive Movement, the socialist and communist parties, the Women’s movements, the NAACP, the Garvey movement, Asian and Native American resistance movements, writers, artists, and intellectuals seized upon social, gender, economic, and racial inequalities and challenged a singularly defined modern America. This book re-represents the modern American novel, accenting the different critical literary voices that come out of the mainstream consumer society but also out of the various unequal social, economic, gender, and political movements and situations. In including racial, gender, sexual, colonial, class, and ethnic others—who reject the rigidity, the repression, the racial and ethnic stereotyping, the external and internal colonialism, the complication/rejection of the past/nature, and the violence of the institutionalized, conformist norm—in a discussion of the modern American novel, it effects a fundamental recasting of the modern Americanist paradigm, one that is de-centered, richer, more complex, and more diverse.

The Imagined Past

The Imagined Past PDF Author: Alan Holder
Publisher: Lewisburg : Bucknell University Press ; Cranbury, N.J. : Associated University Presses
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
This work examines a significant sampling of those twentieth-century American literary works which focus on the native past. It is the first critical study that deals with a broad range of our modern historical literature -- meditative essays, novels, short stories, poems, and verse.

Wasteland Modernism

Wasteland Modernism PDF Author: Rebeca Gualberto Valverde
Publisher: Universitat de València
ISBN: 8491348468
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
This book proposes a renewed myth-critical approach to the so-called ‘wasteland modernism’ of the 1920s to reassess certain key texts of the American modernist canon from a critical prism that offers new perspectives of analysis and interpretation. Myth-criticism and, more specifically, the critical survey of myth as an aesthetic and ideological strategy fundamental for the comprehension of modernist literature, leads to an engaging discussion about the disenchantment of myth in modernist literary texts. This process of mythical disenchantment, inextricable from the cultural and historical circumstances that define the modernist zeitgeist, offers a possibility for revising from a contemporary standpoint a set of classic texts that are crucial to our understanding of the modern literary tradition in the United States. This study carries out an exhaustive and updated myth-critical examination of works by T.S. Eliot, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and Djuna Barnes to broaden the scope of familiar themes and archetypes, enclosing the textual analysis of these works in a wider exploration about the purpose and functioning of myth in literature, particularly in times of crisis and transformation.

The Great Dismissal

The Great Dismissal PDF Author: Henry Sussman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501392301
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Veteran scholar and critic Henry Sussman deploys anecdote, reportage, and memoir to lament and scrutinize the rise of anti-intellectualism in the past few decades. How are we to reckon with the decline of impartiality and sharp increase in self-interested interference in politic, legal, and cultural spheres; the normalization of pathological narcissism in public life; and the blanket dismissal of scientific findings and their counterparts in the humanities and social sciences? In retracing his own intellectual and experiential steps, Sussman revisits many of his lasting inspirations, including Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Immanuel Kant, and J. Hillis Miller. The result is an intellectual meditation on 'the great dismissal,' in public and political life, of venerable and vital humanistic traditions, ethics, and ways of thinking.

Writing American History

Writing American History PDF Author: John Higham
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description


From Comparison to World Literature

From Comparison to World Literature PDF Author: Longxi Zhang
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438454716
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Reintroduces the concept of “world literature” in a truly global context, transcending past Eurocentrism. The study of world literature is on the rise. Until recently, the term “world literature” was a misnomer in comparative literature scholarship, which typically focused on Western literature in European languages. In an increasingly globalized era, this is beginning to change. In this collection of essays, Zhang Longxi discusses how we can transcend Eurocentrism or any other ethnocentrism and revisit the concept of world literature from a truly global perspective. Zhang considers literary works and critical insights from Chinese and other non-Western traditions, drawing on scholarship from a wide range of disciplines in the humanities, and integrating a variety of approaches and perspectives from both East and West. The rise of world literature emerges as an exciting new approach to literary studies as Zhang argues for the validity of cross-cultural understanding, particularly from the perspective of East-West comparative studies.

The Theory of American Literature

The Theory of American Literature PDF Author: Howard Mumford Jones
Publisher: Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell U. P
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Traces American literary history and criticism from colonial days to the present.

Theory of Literature

Theory of Literature PDF Author: Rene Wellek
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
ISBN: 9781628972832
Category : Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Theory of Literature was born from the collaboration of Ren Wellek, a Vienna-born student of Prague School linguistics, and Austin Warren, an independently minded "old New Critic." Unlike many other textbooks of its era, however, this classic kowtows to no dogma and toes no party line. Wellek and Warren looked at literature as both a social product--influenced by politics, economics, etc.--as well as a self-contained system of formal structures. Incorporating examples from Aristotle to Coleridge, written in clear, uncondescending prose, Theory of Literature is a work which, especially in its suspicion of simplistic explanations and its distrust of received wisdom, remains extremely relevant to the study of literature today.

The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature

The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature PDF Author: Jay Parini
Publisher:
ISBN: 0195156536
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 2273

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Book Description
This set treats the whole of American literature, from the European discovery of America to the present, with entries in alphabetical order. Each of the 350 substantive essays is a major interpretive contribution. Well-known critics and scholars provide clear and vividly written essays thatreflect the latest scholarship on a given topic, as well as original thinking on the part of the critic. The Encyclopedia is available in print and as an e-reference text from Oxford's Digital Reference Shelf.At the core of the encyclopedia lie 250 essays on poets, playwrights, essayists, and novelists. The most prominent figures (such as Whitman, Melville, Faulkner, Frost, Morrison, and so forth) are treated at considerable length (10,000 words) by top-flight critics. Less well known figures arediscussed in essays ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words. Each essay examines the life of the author in the context of his or her times, looking in detail at key works and describing the arc of the writer's career. These essays include an assessment of the writer's current reputation with abibliography of major works by the writer as well as a list of major critical and biographical works about the writer under discussion.A second key element of the project is the critical assessments of major American masterworks, such as Moby-Dick, Song of Myself, Walden, The Great Gatsby, The Waste Land, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Death of a Salesmanr, or Beloved. Each of these essays offers a close reading of the given work,placing that work in its historical context and offering a range of possibilities with regard to critical approach. These fifty essays (ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words) are simply and clearly enough written that an intelligent high school student should easily understand them, but sophisticatedenough that a college student or general reader in a public library will find the essays both informative and stimulating.The final major element of this encyclopedia consists of fifty-odd essays on literary movements, periods, or themes, pulling together a broad range of information and making interesting connections. These essays treat many of the same authors already discussed, but in a different context; they alsogather into the fold authors who do not have an entire essay on their work (so that Zane Grey, for example, is discussed in an essay on Western literature but does not have an essay to himself). In this way, the project is truly "encyclopedic," in the conventional sense. These essays aim forcomprehensiveness without losing anything of the narrative force that makes them good reading in their own right.In a very real fashion, the literature of the American people reflects their deepest desires, aspirations, fears, and fantasies. The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature gathers a wide range of information that illumines the field itself and clarifies many of its particulars.

Tribal Theory in Native American Literature

Tribal Theory in Native American Literature PDF Author: Penelope Myrtle Kelsey
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803227712
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
Scholars and readers continue to wrestle with how best to understand and appreciate the wealth of oral and written literatures created by the Native communities of North America. Are critical frameworks developed by non-Natives applicable across cultures, or do they reinforce colonialist power and perspectives? Is it appropriate and useful to downplay tribal differences and instead generalize about Native writing and storytelling as a whole? ø Focusing on Dakota writers and storytellers, Seneca critic Penelope Myrtle Kelsey offers a penetrating assessment of theory and interpretation in indigenous literary criticism in the twenty-first century. Tribal Theory in Native American Literature delineates a method for formulating a Native-centered theory or, more specifically, a use of tribal languages and their concomitant knowledges to derive a worldview or an equivalent to Western theory that is emic to indigenous worldviews. These theoretical frameworks can then be deployed to create insightful readings of Native American texts. Kelsey demonstrates this approach with a fresh look at early Dakota writers, including Marie McLaughlin, Charles Eastman, and Zitkala-?a and later storytellers such as Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Ella Deloria, and Philip Red Eagle. ø This book raises the provocative issue of how Native languages and knowledges were historically excluded from the study of Native American literature and how their encoding in early Native American texts destabilized colonial processes. Cogently argued and well researched, Tribal Theory in Native American Literature sets an agenda for indigenous literary criticism and invites scholars to confront the worlds behind the literatures that they analyze.