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

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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

Dictionary of Midwestern Literature, Volume Two

Dictionary of Midwestern Literature, Volume Two PDF Author: Philip A. Greasley
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253021162
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 1074

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Book Description
The Midwest has produced a robust literary heritage. Its authors have won half of the nation's Nobel Prizes for Literature plus a significant number of Pulitzer Prizes. This volume explores the rich racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of the region. It also contains entries on 35 pivotal Midwestern literary works, literary genres, literary, cultural, historical, and social movements, state and city literatures, literary journals and magazines, as well as entries on science fiction, film, comic strips, graphic novels, and environmental writing. Prepared by a team of scholars, this second volume of the Dictionary of Midwestern Literature is a comprehensive resource that demonstrates the Midwest's continuing cultural vitality and the stature and distinctiveness of its literature.

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.

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 : 281

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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.

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 Midwestern Ascendancy in American Writing

The Midwestern Ascendancy in American Writing PDF Author: Ronald Weber
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253363664
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
For a half-century - from Edward Eggleston's pioneering novel The Hoosier Schoolmaster in 1871 through the dazzling early work of Hart Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway in the 1920s - Midwestern literature was at the center of American writing. In The Midwestern Ascendancy in American Writing, Ronald Weber illuminates the sense of lost promise that gives rise to the elegiac note struck in many Midwestern works; he also addresses the deeply divided feelings about the region revealed in the contrary desires to abandon and to celebrate. The period of Midwestern cultural ascendancy was a time of tremendous social and technological change. Midwestern writing was a reflection of these societal changes; it was American literature.

The New Midwest

The New Midwest PDF Author: Mark Athitakis
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780997774283
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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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.

Old-Fashioned Modernism

Old-Fashioned Modernism PDF Author: Andy Oler
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807171611
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
The Midwest holds two conflicting positions in the American cultural imagination, both of which rob the region of its distinctiveness. Often, it is seen as the “heartland,” a pastoral ideal standing in for all of American culture. Alternatively, the Midwest can represent “flyover country,” part of an expansive, undifferentiated mass between the coasts. In Old-Fashioned Modernism: Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature, Andy Oler challenges both views by pairing fiction and poetry from the region with cultural and material texts that illustrate the processes by which regional modernism both opposes and absorbs prevailing models of twentieth-century manhood. Although it acknowledges a tradition of Midwestern urban literature, Old-Fashioned Modernism focuses on representations of life on farms and in small towns that generate specific forms of rural modernity. Oler considers a series of male protagonists who both fulfill and resist conventional American narratives of economic advancement, spatial experience, and gender roles. The writers he studies portray the onset of socioeconomic and mechanical modernity by merging realist and naturalist narratives with upwellings of modernist form and style. His analysis charts a trajectory in which Midwestern literature depicts experiences that appear dependent on nostalgic pastoralism but actually foreground the ongoing fragmentation and emerging anxieties of the countryside. In detailed readings of novels by Sherwood Anderson, William Cunningham, Langston Hughes, Wright Morris, and Dawn Powell, as well as the poetry of Lorine Niedecker, Oler highlights images of men from the rural Midwest who face the tensions between agricultural production and mass industrialization. These works of literature, which Oler examines alongside pieces of material culture like advertisements for farm implements and record labels, feature communities that support self-made as well as corporate identities. As portraits of the Midwest that resist the totalizing trajectory of industrialization, these texts generate spaces that meld rural and urban economics, land use, and affective experiences. Old-Fashioned Modernism reveals how Midwestern regionalism negotiates the anxieties and dominant narratives of early- and midcentury rural masculinities, as regional literature and culture alter the forms and spaces of literary modernism.

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.

Imagining the Heartland

Imagining the Heartland PDF Author: Britt E. Halvorson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520387600
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Introduction -- The Midwest and white virtue -- Heartland histories -- Inside out : the global production of insular whiteness -- No place like home : the "ordinary" Midwest through popular fiction and fantasy -- Theater of whitness : mass media discourses on the Midwest region -- Conclusion -- Appendix A : bibliography of films referenced in chapter 4 -- Appendix B : bibliography of media articles referenced in chapter 5.