Author: Jack P. Greene
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801830556
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 526
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Book Description
"Taken together, these essays constitute a better summing up--part critique, part appreciation--than anything else in print of work done in any field of American history. Nowhere else can we learn so easily and so well what to read about colonial America. . . . A very useful volume of considerable distinction".--William Abbott, editor, "The Papers of George Washington".
Author: Ned Stuckey-French
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 082621925X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
In modern culture, the essay is often considered an old-fashioned, unoriginal form of literary styling. The word essay brings to mind the uninspired five-paragraph theme taught in schools around the country or the antiquated, Edwardian meanderings of English gentlemen rattling on about art and old books. These connotations exist despite the fact that Americans have been reading and enjoying personal essays in popular magazines for decades, engaging with a multitude of ideas through this short-form means of expression. To defend the essay—that misunderstood staple of first-year composition courses—Ned Stuckey-French has written The American Essay in the American Century. This book uncovers the buried history of the American personal essay and reveals how it played a significant role in twentieth-century cultural history. In the early 1900s, writers and critics debated the “death of the essay,” claiming it was too traditional to survive the era’s growing commercialism, labeling it a bastion of British upper-class conventions. Yet in that period, the essay blossomed into a cultural force as a new group of writers composed essays that responded to the concerns of America’s expanding cosmopolitan readership. These essays would spark the “magazine revolution,” giving a fresh voice to the ascendant middle class of the young century. With extensive research and a cultural context, Stuckey-French describes the many reasons essays grew in appeal and importance for Americans. He also explores the rise of E. B. White, considered by many the greatest American essayist of the first half of the twentieth century whose prowess was overshadowed by his success in other fields of writing. White’s work introduced a new voice, creating an American essay that melded seriousness and political resolve with humor and self-deprecation. This book is one of the first to consider and reflect on the contributions of E. B. White to the personal essay tradition and American culture more generally. The American Essay in the American Century is a compelling, highly readable book that illuminates the history of a secretly beloved literary genre. A work that will appeal to fiction readers, scholars, and students alike, this book offers fundamental insight into modern American literary history and the intersections of literature, culture, and class through the personal essay. This thoroughly researched volume dismisses, once and for all, the “death of the essay,” proving that the essay will remain relevant for a very long time to come.
Author: Michael S. Kimmel
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791483827
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
In this collection, one of the world's leading scholars in the field of masculinity studies explores the historical construction of American and British masculinities. Tracing the emergence of American and British masculinities, the forms they have taken, and their development over time, Michael S. Kimmel analyzes the various ways that the ideology of masculinity—the cultural meaning of manhood—has been shaped by the course of historical events, and, in turn, how ideas about masculinity have also served to shape those historical events. He also considers newly emerging voices of previously marginalized groups such as women, the working class, people of color, gay men, and lesbians to explore the marginalized and de-centered notions of masculinity and the political processes and dynamics that have enabled this marginalization to occur.
Author: Charlotte Erickson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501734261
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301
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Book Description
The British Isles provided more overseas settlers than any country in continental Europe during the nineteenth century, but English emigrants to North America have remained largely invisible, partly for lack of records about their departure or their experiences. Here Charlotte Erickson uses new sources to understand this long-neglected group and the nature of their lives in a new land.
Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Publisher: Library of America
ISBN: 9780940450196
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1572
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Book Description
Gathers Poe's essays on the theory of poetry, the art of fiction, the role of the critic, leading nineteenth-century writers, and the New York literary world.
Author: Joseph Stancliffe Davis
Publisher: Cambridge, Harvard U. P
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 572
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Book Description
Author: Hilaire Belloc
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
ISBN: 1473392462
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 56
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Book Description
This classic volume contains a collection of essays written by Hilaire Belloc. Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc (1870–1953) was an Anglo-French historian and author, considered to be one of the most productive English writers of the early twentieth century. The essays cover a range of topics, and were originally published in other works, including “The Path to Rome” (1903) and “The Eye-Witness” (1908). Contents include: “The Fog”, “Ronsard”, “The Apprentice”, “Valmy”, “Barbary”, “The Second of November, 1902”, and “London River”. This collection is highly recommended for fans of Belloc’s work, and is not to be missed by the discerning collector. Many classic books such as this are becoming increasingly rare and expensive. We are republishing this book now in an affordable, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.
Author: Jack P. Greene
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813914084
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 422
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Book Description
This work brings together 16 essays in cultural history. Taken together, the essays aim to provide a reassessment of the complex process of cultural adjustment among the settler societies of colonial British and revolutionary America.
Author: Phillip Lopate
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0525436278
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 929
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Book Description
A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith—selected by acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate "Not only an education but a joy. This is a book for the ages." —Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances The essay form is an especially democratic one, and many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves—sometimes critically—to American values. We see the Puritans, the Founding Fathers and Mothers, and the stars of the American Renaissance struggle to establish a national culture. A grand tradition of nature writing runs from Audubon, Thoreau, and John Muir to Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard. Marginalized groups use the essay to assert or to complicate notions of identity. Lopate has cast his net wide, embracing critical, personal, political, philosophical, literary, polemical, autobiographical, and humorous essays. Americans by birth as well as immigrants appear here, famous essayists alongside writers more celebrated for fiction or poetry. The result is a dazzling overview of the riches of the American essay.
Author: Pauline Maier
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307828069
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408
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Book Description
Maintaining that the outbreak of revolution in 1775 was not the result of secret planning by radicals but rather the end product of years of painful evolution, Pauline Maier brilliantly traces the American colonists’ road to independence from 1765 to 1776 and examines the role of popular violence as political allegiances corroded and once-loyal subjects were gradually transformed into revolutionaries. Mrs. Maier presents a view of the American leaders different from that which prevailed a generation ago, when historians saw them as lawless demagogues who, already set upon independence at the outset of the conflict with England, manipulated the public toward their goal through propaganda and mob violence. She shows that none of the men in the forefront of American opposition to British policies favored independence when the colonies blocked England’s efforts to impose a tamp Tax upon them in 1765. Their love of British institutions was undermined gradually and for reasons beyond their opposition to legislation affecting American interest. Developments in England itself, in Ireland, Corsica, and the West Indies also fed American disillusionment with imperial rule, until leading colonists came to believe that just government required casting loose from Britain and monarchy. Indeed, Mrs. Maier demonstrates that participants saw the American Revolution as part of an international struggle between freedom and despotism. Like independence, violence was a last resort. Arguing that colonial leaders, like many present-day “revolutionaries,” quickly learned that popular violence was counterproductive, Mrs. Maier makes it clear that they organized resistance in part to contain disorder. Building association to discipline opposition, they gradually made self-rule founded upon carefully designed “social compacts” a reality. Out of the struggle with Britain emerged not merely separation, but the beginnings of American republican government.
