Author: Ulrich Baer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781735778983
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
An unprecedented compendium of milestones in the history of American literature. Presents all of the "first" literary works that broke barriers and inaugurated new traditions; with concise introductions.
Author: Ed Simon
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1785358464
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
At a moment of cultural and political crisis, with forces of reaction seemingly ascendant throughout the West, it's fair to ask what use does anyone have for America, God, or any other similar fictions? What use does theological language have for the radical facing the apocalypse? Among the subjects considered: the need for an Augustinian left, legacies of American violence, speaking in tongues, the humanities facing climate change, the maturity of realizing that you will die, how to sail towards Utopia, and witches.
Author: Robert A. Ferguson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674070704
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176
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Book Description
Robert A. Ferguson investigates the nature of loneliness in American fiction, from its mythological beginnings in Rip Van Winkle to the postmodern terrors of 9/11. At issue is the dark side of a trumpeted American individualism. The theme is a vital one because a greater percentage of people live alone today than at any other time in U.S. history. The many isolated characters in American fiction, Ferguson says, appeal to us through inward claims of identity when pitted against the social priorities of a consensual culture. They indicate how we might talk to ourselves when the same pressures come our way. In fiction, more visibly than in life, defining moments turn on the clarity of an inner conversation. Alone in America tests the inner conversations that work and sometimes fail. It examines the typical elements and moments that force us toward a solitary state—failure, betrayal, change, defeat, breakdown, fear, difference, age, and loss—in their ascending power over us. It underlines the evolving answers that famous figures in literature have given in response. Figures like Mark Twain’s Huck Finn and Toni Morrison’s Sethe and Paul D., or Louisa May Alcott’s Jo March and Marilynne Robinson’s John Ames, carve out their own possibilities against ruthless situations that hold them in place. Instead of trusting to often superficial social remedies, or taking thin sustenance from the philosophy of self-reliance, Ferguson says we can learn from our fiction how to live alone.
Author: Helmbrecht Breinig
Publisher: Dartmouth College Press
ISBN: 1611689910
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 410
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Book Description
What image of Latin America have North American fiction writers created, found, or echoed, and how has the prevailing discourse about the region shaped their work? How have their writings contributed to the discursive construction of our southern neighbors, and how has the literature undermined this construction and added layers of complexity that subvert any approach based on stereotypes? Combining American Studies, Canadian Studies, Latin American Studies, and Cultural Theory, Breinig relies on long scholarly experience to answer these and other questions. Hemispheric Imaginations, an ambitious interdisciplinary study of literary representations of Latin America as encounters with the other, is among the most extensive such studies to date. It will appeal to a broad range of scholars of American Studies.
Author: Doris Sommer
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520913868
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 460
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Book Description
National consolidation and romantic novels go hand in hand in Latin America. Foundational Fictions shows how 19th century patriotism and heterosexual passion historically depend on one another to engender productive citizens.
Author: D. Asher Ghertner
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501753746
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
Land Fictions explores the common storylines, narratives, and tales of social betterment that justify and enact land as commodity. It interrogates global patterns of property formation, the dispossessions property markets enact, and the popular movements to halt the growing waves of evictions and land grabs. This collection brings together original research on urban, rural, and peri-urban India; rapidly urbanizing China and Southeast Asia; resource expropriation in Africa and Latin America; and the neoliberal urban landscapes of North America and Europe. Through a variety of perspectives, Land Fictions finds resonances between local stories of land's fictional powers and global visions of landed property's imagined power to automatically create value and advance national development. Editors D. Asher Ghertner and Robert W. Lake unpack the dynamics of land commodification across a broad range of political, spatial, and temporal settings, exposing its simultaneously contingent and collective nature. The essays advance understanding of the politics of land while also contributing to current debates on the intersections of local and global, urban and rural, and general and particular. Contributors Erik Harms, Michael Watts, Sai Balakrishnan, Brett Christophers, David Ferring, Sarah Knuth, Meghan Morris, Benjamin Teresa, Mi Shih, Michael Levien, Michael L. Dwyer, Heather Whiteside
Author: Victoria Saramago
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810142619
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
Finalist, 2022 ASLE Ecocritical Book Award Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America investigates how fictional works have become sites for the production of knowledge, imagination, and intervention in Latin American environments. It investigates the dynamic relationship between fictional images and real places, as the lasting representations of forests, rural areas, and deserts in novels clash with collective perceptions of changes like deforestation and urbanization. From the backlands of Brazil to a developing Rio de Janeiro, and from the rainforests of Venezuela and Peru to the Mexican countryside, rapid deforestation took place in Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century. How do fictional works and other cultural objects dramatize, resist, and intervene in these ecological transformations? Through analyses of work by João Guimarães Rosa, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, Clarice Lispector, and Mario Vargas Llosa, Victoria Saramago shows how novels have inspired conservationist initiatives and offered counterpoints to developmentalist policies, and how environmental concerns have informed the agendas of novelists as essayists, politicians, and public intellectuals. This book seeks to understand the role of literary representation, or mimesis, in shaping, sustaining, and negotiating environmental imaginaries during the deep, ongoing transformations that have taken place from the 1950s to the present.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781942185697
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 172
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Book Description
From the author of Welcome to Camp America, an eerie exploration of America's performance of power and identity in the post-9/11 era What are the stories we tell ourselves, the games we play, to manage unsettling realities? Made on ten military bases across the United States since 2016, Necessary Fictionsdocuments mock-village landscapes in the fictional country of "Atropia" and its denizens, roleplayers who enact versions of their past or future selves in realistic training scenarios. Costumed Afghan and Iraqi civilians, many of whom have fled war, now recreate it in the service of the US military. Real soldiers pose in front of camouflage backdrops, dressed by Hollywood makeup artists in "moulage"--fake wounds--as they prepare to deploy. Brooklyn-based conceptual documentary artist and former civil rights lawyer Debi Cornwall (born 1973) photographs this meta-reality--the artifice of war--presented in the book with a variety of texts to provoke critical inquiry about America's fantasy industrial complex. The book includes an essay by PEN Award-winning critical theorist Sarah Sentilles.
Author: Christopher P. Wilson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820336971
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
In White Collar Fictions Christopher P. Wilson explores how turn-of-the-century literary representations of "white collar" Americans--the "middle" social strata H.L. Mencken dismissed as boobus Americanus--were actually part and parcel of a new social class coming to terms with its own power, authority, and contradictions. An innovative study that integrates literary analysis with social-history research, the book reexamines the life and work of Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis--as well as such nearly forgotten authors as O. Henry, Edna Ferber, Robert Grant, and Elmer Rice. Between 1885 and 1925 America underwent fundamental social changes. The family business faded with the rise of the modern corporation; mid-level clerical work grew rapidly; the "white collar" ranks--sales clerks, accountants, lawyers, advertisers, "middle managers, and professionals--expanded between capital and labor. During this same period, Wilson shows, white collar characters took on greater prominence within American literature and popular culture. Magazines like the Saturday Evening Post idolized "average Americans," while writers such as Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis produced portraits of "middle America" in Winesburg, Ohio and Babbitt. By investigating the material experience and social vocabularies within white collar life itself, Wilson uncovers the ways in which writers helped create a new cultural vocabulary--"Babbittry," the "little people," the "Average American"--That served to redefine power, authority, and commonality in American society.
Author: Heather Houser
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231165145
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 330
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Book Description
The 1970s brought a new understanding of the biological and intellectual impact of environmental crises on human beings, and as efforts to prevent ecological and human degradation aligned, a new literature of sickness emerged. “Ecosickness fiction” imaginatively rethinks the link between ecological and bodily endangerment and uses affect and the sick body to bring readers to environmental consciousness. Tracing the development of ecosickness through a compelling archive of modern U.S. novels and memoirs, this study demonstrates the mode’s crucial role in shaping thematic content and formal and affective literary strategies. Examining works by David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Leslie Marmon Silko, Marge Piercy, Jan Zita Grover, and David Wojnarowicz, Heather Houser shows how these authors unite experiences of environmental and somatic damage through narrative affects that draw attention to ecological phenomena, organize perception, and convert knowledge into ethics. Traversing contemporary cultural studies, ecocriticism, affect studies, and literature and medicine, Houser juxtaposes ecosickness fiction against new forms of environmentalism and technoscientific innovations such as regenerative medicine and alternative ecosystems. Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction recasts recent narrative as a laboratory in which affective and perceptual changes both support and challenge political projects.
