Exploring the Midwestern Literary Imagination

Exploring the Midwestern Literary Imagination PDF Author: Marcia Noe
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
". . . Noe . . . manages to foreground the social construction of the subject she studies, and consequently the values of those who contribute to our understanding of that subject. . . ."CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES

Exploring the Midwestern Literary Imagination

Exploring the Midwestern Literary Imagination PDF Author: Marcia Noe
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Get Book Here

Book Description
". . . Noe . . . manages to foreground the social construction of the subject she studies, and consequently the values of those who contribute to our understanding of that subject. . . ."CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES

The New Midwest

The New Midwest PDF Author: Mark Athitakis
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 0997774355
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 85

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Book Description
In the public imagination, Midwestern literature has not evolved far beyond heartland laborers and hardscrabble immigrants of a century past. But as the region has changed, so, in many ways, has its fiction. In this book, the author explores how shifts in work, class, place, race, and culture has been reflected or ignored by novelists and short story writers. From Marilynne Robinson to Leon Forrest, Toni Morrison to Aleksandar Hemon, Bonnie Jo Campbell to Stewart O'Nan this book is a call to rethink the way we conceive Midwestern fiction, and one that is sure to prompt some new must-have additions to every reading list.

Chicago Renaissance

Chicago Renaissance PDF Author: Liesl Olson
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030023113X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
A fascinating history of Chicago’s innovative and invaluable contributions to American literature and art from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century This remarkable cultural history celebrates the great Midwestern city of Chicago for its centrality to the modernist movement. Author Liesl Olson traces Chicago’s cultural development from the 1893 World’s Fair through mid-century, illuminating how Chicago writers revolutionized literary forms during the first half of the twentieth century, a period of sweeping aesthetic transformations all over the world. From Harriet Monroe, Carl Sandburg, and Ernest Hemingway to Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks, Olson’s enthralling study bridges the gap between two distinct and equally vital Chicago-based artistic “renaissance” moments: the primarily white renaissance of the early teens, and the creative ferment of Bronzeville. Stories of the famous and iconoclastic are interwoven with accounts of lesser-known yet influential figures in Chicago, many of whom were women. Olson argues for the importance of Chicago’s editors, bookstore owners, tastemakers, and ordinary citizens who helped nurture Chicago’s unique culture of artistic experimentation. Cover art by Lincoln Schatz

The American Midwest in Film and Literature

The American Midwest in Film and Literature PDF Author: Adam R. Ochonicky
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253045991
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
How do works from film and literature—Sister Carrie, Native Son, Meet Me in St. Louis, Halloween, and A History of Violence, for example—imagine, reify, and reproduce Midwestern identity? And what are the repercussions of such regional narratives and images circulating in American culture? In The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism, Adam R. Ochonicky provides a critical overview of the evolution, contestation, and fragmentation of the Midwest's symbolic and often contradictory meanings. Using the frontier writings of Frederick Jackson Turner as a starting point, this book establishes a succession of Midwestern filmic and literary texts stretching from the late-19th century through the beginning of the 21st century and argues that the manifold properties of nostalgia have continually transformed popular understandings and ideological uses of the Midwest's place-identity. Ochonicky identifies three primary modes of nostalgia at play across a set of textual objects: the projection of nostalgia onto physical landscapes and into the cultural sphere (nostalgic spatiality); nostalgia as a cultural force that regulates behaviors, identities, and appearances (nostalgic violence); and the progressive potential of nostalgia to generate an acknowledgment and possible rectification of ways in which the flawed past negatively affects the present (nostalgic atonement). While developing these new conceptions of nostalgia, Ochonicky reveals how an under-examined area of regional study has received critical attention throughout the histories of American film and literature, as well as in related materials and discourses. From the closing of the Western frontier to the polarized political and cultural climate of the 21st century, this book demonstrates how film and literature have been and continue to be vital forums for illuminating the complex interplay of regionalism and nostalgia.

Imagining the Forest

Imagining the Forest PDF Author: John R. Knott
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472051644
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Forests have always been more than just their trees. The forests in Michigan (and similar forests in other Great Lakes states such as Wisconsin and Minnesota) played a role in the American cultural imagination from the beginnings of European settlement in the early nineteenth century to the present. Our relationships with those forests have been shaped by the cultural attitudes of the times, and people have invested in them both moral and spiritual meanings. Author John Knott draws upon such works as Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory and Robert Pogue Harrison's Forests: The Shadow of Civilization in exploring ways in which our relationships with forests have been shaped, using Michigan---its history of settlement, popular literature, and forest management controversies---as an exemplary case. Knott looks at such well-known figures as William Bradford, James Fenimore Cooper, John Muir, John Burroughs, and Teddy Roosevelt; Ojibwa conceptions of the forest and natural world (including how Longfellow mythologized them); early explorer accounts; and contemporary literature set in the Upper Peninsula, including Jim Harrison's True North and Philip Caputo's Indian Country. Two competing metaphors evolved over time, Knott shows: the forest as howling wilderness, impeding the progress of civilization and in need of subjugation, and the forest as temple or cathedral, worthy of reverence and protection. Imagining the Forest shows the origin and development of both.

The American Midwest

The American Midwest PDF Author: Andrew R. L. Cayton
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253003490
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1918

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Book Description
This first-ever encyclopedia of the Midwest seeks to embrace this large and diverse area, to give it voice, and help define its distinctive character. Organized by topic, it encourages readers to reflect upon the region as a whole. Each section moves from the general to the specific, covering broad themes in longer introductory essays, filling in the details in the shorter entries that follow. There are portraits of each of the region's twelve states, followed by entries on society and culture, community and social life, economy and technology, and public life. The book offers a wealth of information about the region's surprising ethnic diversity -- a vast array of foods, languages, styles, religions, and customs -- plus well-informed essays on the region's history, culture and values, and conflicts. A site of ideas and innovations, reforms and revivals, and social and physical extremes, the Midwest emerges as a place of great complexity, signal importance, and continual fascination.

Midwest Futures

Midwest Futures PDF Author: Phil Christman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781953368089
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
A virtuoso book-length essay on Midwestern identity and the future of the region

The Gary Anthology

The Gary Anthology PDF Author: Samuel A. Love
Publisher: Belt City Anthologies
ISBN: 9781948742757
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Instant City," "Magic City of Steel," "Sin City," "Chocolate City," "Plywood City," "Murder Capital." Once the second-largest city in Indiana, and home to the world's largest steel mill, Gary has suffered and shrunk greatly in the postindustrial global economy. Population numbers now approach pre-Great Depression lows. Large swathes of its land are urban prairie, and a recent survey found a quarter of the Gary's built environment is in a dilapidated or dangerous condition. But Gary is also a center of Black culture and political power. It is home to the Indiana Dunes National Park and globally rare ecosystems. Union, community organizing, and environmental justice struggles based in Gary have profoundly shaped social and political life in the United States. It is the setting for everyday joys and tragedies, and very much alive. The Gary Anthology's contributors include not only the essayist, poet, and journalist but also the graffiti writer, the minister, the activist, the singer, the organizer, and of course, the steel worker. Their work complicates standard narratives about steel, violence, and urban decay, and offers readers the chance to hear from those who are reshaping the city from the bottom up. Taken as a whole, the collection is a vibrant rebuke to the notion that Gary is "dead."

Midwestern Literature

Midwestern Literature PDF Author: Ronald Primeau
Publisher: Salem Press
ISBN: 9781619252165
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book provides readers with an exploration of the authors and literary works that identify with the diverse area that covers 12 states, examining the prominent themes and stories of the American Midwest.

Rooted

Rooted PDF Author: David R. Pichaske
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 158729673X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
David Pichaske has been writing and teaching about midwestern literature for three decades. In Rooted, by paying close attention to text, landscape, and biography, he examines the relationship between place and art. His focus is on seven midwestern authors who came of age toward the close of the twentieth century, their lives and their work grounded in distinct places: Dave Etter in small-town upstate Illinois; Norbert Blei in Door County, Wisconsin; William Kloefkorn in southern Kansas and Nebraska; Bill Holm in Minneota, Minnesota; Linda Hasselstrom in Hermosa, South Dakota; Jim Heynen in Sioux County, Iowa; and Jim Harrison in upper Michigan. The writers' intimate knowledge of place is reflected in their use of details of geography, language, environment, and behavior. Yet each writer reaches toward other geographies and into other dimensions of art or thought: jazz music and formalism in the case of Etter; gender issues in the case of Hasselstrom; time past and present in the case of Kloefkorn; ethnicity and the role of the artist in the case of Blei; magical realism in the case of Heynen; the landscape of literature in the case of Holm; and the curious worlds of academia, best-selling novels, and Hollywood films in the case of Harrison. The result, Pichaske notes, is the growing away from roots, the explorations and alter egos of these writers of place, and the tension between the “here” and “there” that gives each writer's art the complexity it needs to transcend provincial boundaries. Quoting generously from the writers, Pichaske employs a practical, jargon-free literary analysis fixed in the text, making Rooted interesting, readable, and especially useful in treating the literary categories of memoir and literary essay that have become important in recent decades.