Author: Josh Lukin
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781934110874
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 188
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Book Description
"Were the 1950s an oppressive or a liberating time? Some scholars argue that the Red Scare, newly institutionalized discrimination against gays, and a public discourse saturated with sexism left wounds in American society. Others trace the origins of sixties liberation movements to the fifties and celebrate America's postwar prosperity or argue that such new phenomena as rock 'n' roll, teenage consumerism, and Beat poetry gave Americans a new sense of freedom and identity." "Invisible Suburbs advances a new synthesis of both views from the perspective of literary scholarship. Essayists ask how overlooked literature in the 1950s addressed or anticipated the struggles of disenfranchised groups to receive rights and recognition. Scholars analyze the many ways in which the decade's culture stigmatized women, minorities, and the poor. They uncover work that illustrates how groups and individuals challenged or resisted that oppression, fiction by authors who sometimes found roots in earlier liberation movements and anticipated later struggles."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Marie Bouchet
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1683933036
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
While suburbs provide a rich field of research for sociologists, architects, urbanists and anthropologists, they have not been given much attention in literary and cultural studies. The Suburbs: New Literary Perspectives sets out to enrich the limited existing body of critical analysis on the subject with a landmark collection of essays offering a far larger perspective than the books or collections published so far on the topic. This interdisciplinary and wide-ranging approach includes literary and art studies, philosophy, and cultural comment. It examines the suburbs across cultural differences, contrasting British, South African and North American suburbs. The specificity of this book therefore lies in a cross-national and cross-continental exploration of these unchartered territories. The suburbs are redefined as those rebellious margins whose geographical borders are necessarily fuzzy and sketch out a common place where cultural frontiers can be transcended. They are, to use Sarah Nuttall’s terminology, places of “entanglement” where contraries meet and where new ways of being in the world is reborn. Seen through the prism of art and literature, the suburbs may then be recognized, as philosopher Bruce Bégout argues, as a “new way of thinking and making urban space.”
Author: David Mark Hummon
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791402757
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
This book interprets popular American belief and sentiment about cities, suburbs, and small towns in terms of community ideologies. Based on in-depth interviews with residents of American communities, it shows how people construct a sense of identity based on their communities, and how they perceive and explain community problems (e.g., why cities have more crime than their suburban and rural counterparts) in terms of this identity. Hummon reveals the changing role of place imagery in contemporary society and offers an interpretation of American culture by treating commonplaces of community belief in an uncommon way--as facets of competing community ideologies. He argues that by adopting such ideologies, people are able to "make sense" of reality and their place in the everyday world.
Author: Robert Bennett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317793889
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 142
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Book Description
Situating post-WWII New York literature within the material context of American urban history, this work analyzes how literary movements such as the Beat Generation, the New York poets and Black Arts Moment criticized the spatial restructuring of post-WWII New York City.
Author: Kenneth Goldsmith
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784781576
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 928
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Book Description
Acclaimed artist Kenneth Goldsmith’s thousand-page homage to New York City Here is a kaleidoscopic assemblage and poetic history of New York: an unparalleled and original homage to the city, composed entirely of quotations. Drawn from a huge array of sources—histories, memoirs, newspaper articles, novels, government documents, emails—and organized into interpretive categories that reveal the philosophical architecture of the city, Capital is the ne plus ultra of books on the ultimate megalopolis. It is also a book of experimental literature that transposes Walter Benjamin’s unfinished magnum opus of literary montage on the modern city, The Arcades Project, from nineteenth-century Paris to twentieth-century New York, bringing the streets and its inhabitants to life in categories such as “Sex,” “Central Park,” “Commodity,” “Loneliness,” “Gentrification,” “Advertising,” and “Mapplethorpe.” Capital is a book designed to fascinate and to fail—for can a megalopolis truly ever be captured in words? Can a history, no matter how extensive, ever be comprehensive? Each reading of this book, and of New York, is a unique and impossible project.
Author: Mary Helen Washington
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231526474
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
Mary Helen Washington recovers the vital role of 1950s leftist politics in the works and lives of modern African American writers and artists. While most histories of McCarthyism focus on the devastation of the blacklist and the intersection of leftist politics and American culture, few include the activities of radical writers and artists from the Black Popular Front. Washington's work incorporates these black intellectuals back into our understanding of mid-twentieth-century African American literature and art and expands our understanding of the creative ferment energizing all of America during this period. Mary Helen Washington reads four representative writers—Lloyd Brown, Frank London Brown, Alice Childress, and Gwendolyn Brooks—and surveys the work of the visual artist Charles White. She traces resonances of leftist ideas and activism in their artistic achievements and follows their balanced critique of the mainstream liberal and conservative political and literary spheres. Her study recounts the targeting of African American as well as white writers during the McCarthy era, reconstructs the events of the 1959 Black Writers' Conference in New York, and argues for the ongoing influence of the Black Popular Front decades after it folded. Defining the contours of a distinctly black modernism and its far-ranging radicalization of American politics and culture, Washington fundamentally reorients scholarship on African American and Cold War literature and life.
Author: Gary Gerstle
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197519644
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 441
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Book Description
Gary Gerstle provides a sweeping re-interpretation of the entire era - from the revival of market liberalism in the 1970s to the ruin generated by the 2008 global financial crisis - that places America at the center.--
Author: Irina Lyubchenko
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1848884605
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 176
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Book Description
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2016. The term madness continues to perplex, to puzzle and to provoke. As such, questions about madness circulate around the place of madness across historical, cultural, and social boundaries. Regardless of the place that madness assumes in our world, madness can be understood as having the potential to liberate individuals from a society of control. Because madness can be understood not merely as one end of the binary of reason and unreason but as a form of art that allows us to transcend reason, it provides us with the ultimate liberation: to accept, know and understand the possibilities of a multiplicity of meanings and senses beyond reason, beyond the commonsense. And with such liberation, we gain the power not only to change our own lives, but society as a whole.
Author: Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 0872866793
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 330
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Book Description
A comprehensive selection from Ferlinghetti's famed City Lights Pocket Poets Series, published on the 60th anniversary of its founding.
Author: Tom Perrin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137523956
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
During the Cold War, many popular American novels were labelled "middlebrow," leading to a general belief that these texts held less intellectual merit. Perrin debunks these unfair assumptions through works by James Michener, Harper Lee, and Leon Uris, arguing that such writers made a major contribution to the tradition of American literature.
