Romance of the Road

Romance of the Road PDF Author: Ronald Primeau
Publisher: Popular Press
ISBN: 9780879726980
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
"Americans have treated the highway as sacred space," says Primeau (English, Central Michigan U.) introducing the rich tradition of prose and non-fiction road narratives that include On the Road, Grapes of Wrath, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, and the Journals of Lewis and Clark. Primeau critically examines these and other works from the position of travel as pilgrimage resulting in identifiable themes of protest, self discovery, picaresque parody, and myth making. Paper edition (unseen), $17.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Romance of the Road

Romance of the Road PDF Author: Ronald Primeau
Publisher: Popular Press
ISBN: 9780879726980
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Americans have treated the highway as sacred space," says Primeau (English, Central Michigan U.) introducing the rich tradition of prose and non-fiction road narratives that include On the Road, Grapes of Wrath, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, and the Journals of Lewis and Clark. Primeau critically examines these and other works from the position of travel as pilgrimage resulting in identifiable themes of protest, self discovery, picaresque parody, and myth making. Paper edition (unseen), $17.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

American Road Literature

American Road Literature PDF Author: Ronald Primeau
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781429838191
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Examines the prominent themes and stories of the American road narrative, beginning with the westward thrust of early America's seaboard colonies to the romanticized and philosophical road narratives of the Beat Generation, the American experience--its ideals, dreams, and subsequent disillusionments--has been quintessentially linked to the road.

American Road Narratives

American Road Narratives PDF Author: Ann Brigham
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813937515
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
The freedom to go anywhere and become anyone has profoundly shaped our national psyche. Transforming our sense of place and identity--whether in terms of social and economic status, or race and ethnicity, or gender and sexuality—American mobility is perhaps nowhere more vividly captured than in the image of the open road. From pioneer trails to the latest car commercial, the road looms large as a form of expansiveness and opportunity. Too often it is the celebratory idea of the road as a free-floating zone moving the traveler beyond the typical concerns of space and time that dominates the discussion. Rather than thinking of mobility as an escape from cultural tensions, however, Ann Brigham proposes that we understand mobility as a mode of engagement with them. She explores the genre of road narratives to show how mobility both thrives on and attempts to manage shifting conflicts about space and society in the United States. From the earliest transcontinental automobile narratives from the 1910s, through classics like Jack Kerouac's On the Road and the film Thelma & Louise, up to post-9/11 narratives, Brigham traces the ways in which mobility has been imagined, created, and interrogated over the past century and shows how mobility promises, and threatens, to incorporate the outsider and to blur boundaries. Bringing together textual and cultural analysis, theories of spatiality, and sociohistorical frameworks, this book offers an invigoratingly different view of mobility and a new understanding of the road narrative’s importance in American culture. Choice Outstanding Academic Title from American Library Association

The American Road Trip and American Political Thought

The American Road Trip and American Political Thought PDF Author: Susan McWilliams Barndt
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498556876
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Book Description
Americans love road trips. They love to go on road trips. They love to read about road trips. They love to watch road trip stories unfold on television and film. Road trip stories are a consistent feature of the American landscape, a central part of American mythology, and an important piece of the American dream. In The American Road Trip and American Political Thought, Susan McWilliams argues that the American fascination with road trip stories is about more than mere escapism or wanderlust. She shows, in walking through stories like On the Road and The Grapes of Wrath, that American road trip stories are a key expression of American political thought. They are not just stories of personal journeys. They are stories of the American nation. McWilliams Barndt shows how Americans have long used road trip stories to raise and explore central questions about American politics in theory and practice. They talk about freedom and equality and diversity and take those vaunted American ideals for a test drive. American road trip stories are where the rubber meets the road in American political thought. The American Road Trip and American Political Thought includes explorations of a wide variety of American authors, from Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau to Erika Lopez and Cheryl Strayed, from Mark Twain and John Steinbeck to Solomon Northup and Hunter S. Thompson. It covers topics including gender, labor, place, race, and technology in American political life. This is a book that will change the way you think about the great American road trip and the great American story.

Narrating a New Mobility Landscape in the Modern American Road Story, 1893–1921

Narrating a New Mobility Landscape in the Modern American Road Story, 1893–1921 PDF Author: Andrew Vogel
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031511794
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description


Road-book America

Road-book America PDF Author: Rowland A. Sherrill
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252025464
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
In Road-Book America, Rowland A. Sherrill explores how the old picaresque tradition, embodied in such novels as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, opens to include a number of recent American texts, both fiction and nonfiction. Sketching the socially marginal, ingenuous, travelling characters common to old and new versions of the genre, Road-Book America is a wide-ranging and sophisticated discussion of the "new American picaresque", exemplified by William Least HeatMoon's Blue Highways, John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, James Leo Herlihy's Midnight Cowboy, Bill Moyers's Listening to America, E. L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate, and hundreds of other narratives published in the past four decades. Open, resilient, adaptable, and perennially hopeful, the protagonist of the new American picaresque follows a therapeutic path for the alienated modern self and lays the groundwork for spiritual renewal.

Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy PDF Author: Markus Wierschem
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 1628955155
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
This definitive assessment of Cormac McCarthy’s novels captures the interactions among the literary and mythic elements, the social dynamics of violence, and the natural world in The Orchard Keeper, Child of God, Outer Dark, Blood Meridian, and The Road. Elegantly written and deeply engaged with previous scholarship as well as interviews with the novelist, this study provides a comprehensive introduction to McCarthy’s work while offering an insightful new analysis. Drawing on René Girard’s mimetic theory, mythography, thermodynamics, and information science, Markus Wierschem identifies a literary apocalypse at the center of McCarthy’s work, one that unveils another buried deep within the history, religion, and myths of American and Western culture.

Roadscapes, a Sociopoetics of the Road

Roadscapes, a Sociopoetics of the Road PDF Author: Catherine Morgan-Proux
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527530086
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 116

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Book Description
How do we imagine the road? If the road inspires freewheeling adventure in the spirit of Jack Kerouac, it can also be a site of our vulnerabilities. This collection highlights the work of artists, writers, and filmmakers from the Anglophone world who have drawn upon the road as a cultural landscape. The road reveals our sense of curiosity, our anxieties, our sorrows, and our disquiet with modern technology or the power dynamics of class and gender. This volume, with a foreword by Jeremy Bassetti, host of the award-winning podcast “Travel Writing World,” brings together international researchers and writers, including two original poems by the French-New Zealander poet, Lynette Thorstensen. This book will be of interest to students and scholars interested in 20th and 21st century art and culture, particularly road narratives.

Fast Cars and Bad Girls

Fast Cars and Bad Girls PDF Author: Deborah Paes de Barros
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820470870
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Fast Cars and Bad Girls: Nomadic Subjects and Women's Road Stories explores the road narratives of women and the various ways their work re-maps American space. Moving from Mary Rowlandson's famous captivity narrative to the frontier texts of the American West to the postapocalyptic novels of postmodern experience, Fast Cars and Bad Girls interrogates the intersections of nomadic theory and contemporary feminism. What would happen, the text queries the reader, if Jack Kerouac had gone on the road with a baby in the back seat? Women's road texts are different, insists author Deborah Paes de Barros; notions such as resistance to the West, the revision of the natural world, mother-daughter relationships, avant-garde angst, and feminist utopias construct this discussion of women travel writers.

The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture

The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture PDF Author: Lydia R. Cooper
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000504956
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
Recently, the U.S. has seen a rise in misogynistic and race-based violence perpetrated by men expressing a sense of grievance, from "incels" to alt-right activists. Grounding sociological, historical, political, and economic analyses of masculinity through the lens of cultural narratives in many forms and expressions, The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture suggests that how we examine the stories that shape us in turn shapes our understanding of our current reality and gives us language for imagining better futures. Masculinity is more than a description of traits associated with particular performances of gender. It is more than a study of gender and social power. It is an examination of the ways in which gender affects our capacity to engage ethically with each other in complex human societies. This volume offers essays from a range of established, global experts in American masculinity as well as new and upcoming scholars in order to explore not just what masculinity once meant, has come to mean, and may mean in the future in the U.S.; it also articulates what is at stake with our conceptions of masculinity.