Conspiracy and Romance

Conspiracy and Romance PDF Author: Robert S. Levine
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521366540
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Robert Levine examines the American romance in a new historical context. His book offers a fresh reading of the genre, establishing its importance to American culture between the founding of the Republic and the Civil War. With convincing historical and literary detail, Levine shows that anxieties about foreign elements--French revolutionaries, secret societies, Catholic immigrants, African slaves--are central to the fictional worlds of Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne and Melville. Ormond, The Bravo, The Blithedale Romance, and Benito Cereno are persuasively explicated by Levine to demonstrate that the romance dramatized the same conflicts and ideals that gave rise to the American Republic. Americans conceived "America" as a historical romance, and their romances dramatize the historical conditions of the culture. The fear that reputed conspiracies would subvert the order and integrity of the new nation were recurrent and widespread; Levine illuminates the influence of such fears on the works of major romance writers during this period.

Conspiracy and Romance

Conspiracy and Romance PDF Author: Robert S. Levine
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521366540
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Get Book Here

Book Description
Robert Levine examines the American romance in a new historical context. His book offers a fresh reading of the genre, establishing its importance to American culture between the founding of the Republic and the Civil War. With convincing historical and literary detail, Levine shows that anxieties about foreign elements--French revolutionaries, secret societies, Catholic immigrants, African slaves--are central to the fictional worlds of Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne and Melville. Ormond, The Bravo, The Blithedale Romance, and Benito Cereno are persuasively explicated by Levine to demonstrate that the romance dramatized the same conflicts and ideals that gave rise to the American Republic. Americans conceived "America" as a historical romance, and their romances dramatize the historical conditions of the culture. The fear that reputed conspiracies would subvert the order and integrity of the new nation were recurrent and widespread; Levine illuminates the influence of such fears on the works of major romance writers during this period.

Conspiracy Fears and the American Romance, 1789-1860

Conspiracy Fears and the American Romance, 1789-1860 PDF Author: Robert S. Levine
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 534

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Book Description


Jonathan Franzen and the Romance of Community

Jonathan Franzen and the Romance of Community PDF Author: Jesús Blanco Hidalga
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 150131985X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Despite the success and significance of Jonathan Franzen's fiction, his work has received relatively little scholarly attention. Aiming to fill this conspicuous gap, Jonathan Franzen and the Romance of Community analyzes each of Franzen's five novels in chronological order to reveal an interior logic animating his work. Integrating various formal and ideological perspectives to illuminate Franzen's work, Jesús Blanco Hidalga demonstrates that the concepts of salvation and redemption, typical of romance narratives, run throughout Franzen's fiction. Even as he re-assesses and expands the familiar interpretations of Franzen's work, Blanco Hidalga shows how these salvation narratives are used for self-legitimization not only by the characters, but by the writer himself. Combining critical rigor with interpretative boldness, Jonathan Franzen and the Romance of Community offers a new theoretical approach to a major contemporary author.

Charles Brockden Brown

Charles Brockden Brown PDF Author: Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 0708324223
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This study of the works of late eighteenth-century American Gothic author Charles Brockden Brown argues that Brown was a seminal figure in the development of four forms of Gothic fiction: the Frontier Gothic, the Urban Gothic, the Psychological Gothic, and the Female Gothic.

Interior States

Interior States PDF Author: Christopher Castiglia
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 082238924X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
In Interior States Christopher Castiglia focuses on U.S. citizens’ democratic impulse: their ability to work with others to imagine genuinely democratic publics while taking divergent views into account. Castiglia contends that citizens of the early United States were encouraged to locate this social impulse not in associations with others but in the turbulent and conflicted interiors of their own bodies. He describes how the human interior—with its battles between appetite and restraint, desire and deferral—became a displacement of the divided sociality of nineteenth-century America’s public sphere and contributed to the vanishing of that sphere in the twentieth century and the twenty-first. Drawing insightful connections between political structures, social relations, and cultural forms, he explains that as the interior came to reflect the ideological conflicts of the social world, citizens were encouraged to (mis)understand vigilant self-scrutiny and self-management as effective democratic action. In the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth, as discourses of interiority gained prominence, so did powerful counter-narratives. Castiglia reveals the flamboyant pages of antebellum popular fiction to be an archive of unruly democratic aspirations. Through close readings of works by Maria Monk and George Lippard, Walt Whitman and Timothy Shay Arthur, Hannah Webster Foster and Hannah Crafts, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, Castiglia highlights a refusal to be reformed or self-contained. In antebellum authors’ representations of nervousness, desire, appetite, fantasy, and imagination, he finds democratic strivings that refused to disappear. Taking inspiration from those writers and turning to the present, Castiglia advocates a humanism-without-humans that, denied the adjudicative power of interiority, promises to release democracy from its inner life and to return it to the public sphere where U.S. citizens may yet create unprecedented possibilities for social action.

The Scientific Monthly

The Scientific Monthly PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description


Political Liberalism and the Rise of American Romanticism

Political Liberalism and the Rise of American Romanticism PDF Author: Scott M Reznick
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198891954
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This volume traces how American literature evolved in response to widespread conflicts over the very nature of US democracy in the early republic and antebellum eras. It examines how American writers reacted to three moments of profound divisiveness in the 1790s, 1830s, and 1850s.

Conspiracy Theories in the United States and the Middle East

Conspiracy Theories in the United States and the Middle East PDF Author: Michael Butter
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110372991
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
Conspiracy Theories in the United States and the Middle East is the first book to approach conspiracy theorizing from a decidedly comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. Whereas previous studies have engaged with conspiracy theories within national frameworks only, this collection of essays draws attention to the fact that conspiracist visions are transnational narratives that travel between and connect different cultures. It focuses on the United States and the Middle East because these two regions of the world are entangled in manifold ways and conspiracy theories are currently extremely prominent in both. The contributors to the volume are scholars of Middle Eastern Studies, Anthropology, History, Political Science, Cultural Studies, and American Studies, who approach the subject from a variety of different theories and methodologies. However, all of them share the fundamental assumption that conspiracy theories must not be dismissed out of hand or ridiculed. Usually wrong and frequently dangerous, they are nevertheless articulations of and distorted responses to needs and anxieties that must be taken seriously. Focusing on individual case studies and displaying a high sensitivity for local conditions and the cultural environment, the essays offer a nuanced image of the workings of conspiracy theories in the United States and the Middle East.

Introducing Don DeLillo

Introducing Don DeLillo PDF Author: Frank Lentricchia
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822311447
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
This book was originally published as an issue of South Atlantic Quarterly. Beginning with an introduction by Lentricchia, the volume covers every significant element of DeLillo's art, and describes the social and intellectual context in which DeLillo's writings must be understood. It includes general essays on the novelist's work by Daniel Aaron, Hal Crowther, John A. McClure, and Eugene Goodheart and detailed analyses of individual works by Anthony DeCurtis, Charles Molesworth, Dennis A. Foster, and John Frow. The volume reprints Anthony DeCurtis' insightful interview with DeLillo that originally appeared in Rolling Stone, and includes Chapter 10 of DeLillo's Ratner's Star as an example of the author's wit, verbal pyrotechnics, and thematic concerns. ISBN 0-8223-1135-6: $29.95.

The Bantu–Romance Connection

The Bantu–Romance Connection PDF Author: Cécile de Cat
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027290679
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
This landmark volume is the first work specifically designed to explore the extent to which striking surface morpho-syntactic similarities between Bantu and Romance languages actually represent similar syntactic structures. In particular, it explores the timely and much debated issues of verbal morphology and agreement, the structure of DPs, and word order/information structure, with the goal of providing a better understanding of the structure of the different languages investigated, and the implications this holds for syntactic theory more generally. All of the papers draw on data from both Bantu and Romance languages, providing a framework for much-needed further comparative research on the nature of linguistic structure, its diversity and constraints, and the implications this has for learnability/acquisition. The volume also provides an important precedent for incorporating insights from Bantu linguistic structure into mainstream of syntax research.