Literature in America

Literature in America PDF Author: Peter Conn
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521303736
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 624

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Book Description
Professor Conn summarises the distinctive achievements of the American literary heritage from early 1600's to late 1980's.

Literature in America

Literature in America PDF Author: Peter Conn
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521303736
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 624

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Book Description
Professor Conn summarises the distinctive achievements of the American literary heritage from early 1600's to late 1980's.

A New Literary History of America

A New Literary History of America PDF Author: Greil Marcus
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674064100
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1129

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Book Description
America is a nation making itself up as it goes alongÑa story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history. In more than two hundred original essays, A New Literary History of America brings together the nationÕs many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what ÒMade in AmericaÓ means. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoricÑcultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape. The meeting of minds is extraordinary as T. J. Clark writes on Jackson Pollock, Paul Muldoon on Carl Sandburg, Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, Sarah Vowell on Grant WoodÕs American Gothic, Walter Mosley on hard-boiled detective fiction, Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison, Gerald Early on Tarzan, Bharati Mukherjee on The Scarlet Letter, Gish Jen on Catcher in the Rye, and Ishmael Reed on Huckleberry Finn. From Anne Bradstreet and John Winthrop to Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, from Alexander Graham Bell and Stephen Foster to Alcoholics Anonymous, Life, Chuck Berry, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ronald Reagan, this is America singing, celebrating itself, and becoming something altogether different, plural, singular, new. Please visit www.newliteraryhistory.com for more information.

Writing America

Writing America PDF Author: Shelley Fisher Fishkin
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813576008
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
Winner of the John S. Tuckey 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award for Mark Twain Scholarship from The Center for Mark Twain Studies American novelist E.L. Doctorow once observed that literature “endows places with meaning.” Yet, as this wide-ranging new book vividly illustrates, understanding the places that shaped American writers’ lives and their art can provide deep insight into what makes their literature truly meaningful. Published on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Historic Preservation Act, Writing America is a unique, passionate, and eclectic series of meditations on literature and history, covering over 150 important National Register historic sites, all pivotal to the stories that make up America, from chapels to battlefields; from plantations to immigration stations; and from theaters to internment camps. The book considers not only the traditional sites for literary tourism, such as Mark Twain’s sumptuous Connecticut home and the peaceful woods surrounding Walden Pond, but also locations that highlight the diversity of American literature, from the New York tenements that spawned Abraham Cahan’s fiction to the Texas pump house that irrigated the fields in which the farm workers central to Gloria Anzaldúa’s poetry picked produce. Rather than just providing a cursory overview of these authors’ achievements, acclaimed literary scholar and cultural historian Shelley Fisher Fishkin offers a deep and personal reflection on how key sites bore witness to the struggles of American writers and inspired their dreams. She probes the global impact of American writers’ innovative art and also examines the distinctive contributions to American culture by American writers who wrote in languages other than English, including Yiddish, Chinese, and Spanish. Only a scholar with as wide-ranging interests as Shelley Fisher Fishkin would dare to bring together in one book writers as diverse as Gloria Anzaldúa, Nicholas Black Elk, David Bradley, Abraham Cahan, S. Alice Callahan, Raymond Chandler, Frank Chin, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Countee Cullen, Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jessie Fauset, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Allen Ginsberg, Jovita González, Rolando Hinojosa, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Lawson Fusao Inada, James Weldon Johnson, Erica Jong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Irena Klepfisz, Nella Larsen, Emma Lazarus, Sinclair Lewis, Genny Lim, Claude McKay, Herman Melville, N. Scott Momaday, William Northup, John Okada, Miné Okubo, Simon Ortiz, Américo Paredes, John P. Parker, Ann Petry, Tomás Rivera, Wendy Rose, Morris Rosenfeld, John Steinbeck, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Yoshiko Uchida, Tino Villanueva, Nathanael West, Walt Whitman, Richard Wright, Hisaye Yamamoto, Anzia Yezierska, and Zitkala-Ša. Leading readers on an enticing journey across the borders of physical places and imaginative terrains, the book includes over 60 images, and extended excerpts from a variety of literary works. Each chapter ends with resources for further exploration. Writing America reveals the alchemy though which American writers have transformed the world around them into art, changing their world and ours in the process.

Studies in Classic American Literature

Studies in Classic American Literature PDF Author: D. H Lawrence
Publisher: Atlantic Publishers & Dist
ISBN: 9788171565634
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Studies In Classic American Literature Is Valuable Not Only For The Light It Sheds On Eighteenth And Nineteenth Century American Consciousness, Telling 'The Truth Of The Day', But Also As A Prime Example Of Lawrence'S Learning, Passion And Integrity Of Judgement.To Cite Herbert J. Seligmann, 'Studies In Classic American Literature Alone Is A Foundation For A New American Critical Literature. Lawrence Fertilizes With Fire. No Living American Writing In A Critical Sense From Now On Will Be Able To Ignore Him.'Lawrence Asserted That 'The Proper Function Of A Critic Is To Save The Tale From The Artist Who Created It' In These Highly Individual, Penetrating Essays He Has Exposed 'The American Whole Soul' Within Some Of That Continent'S Major Works Of Literature. In Seeking To Establish The Status Of Writings By Such Authors As Poe, Melville, Fenimore Cooper And Whitman, Lawrence Himself Has Created A Classic Work.

Working Women in American Literature, 1865–1950

Working Women in American Literature, 1865–1950 PDF Author: Miriam S. Gogol
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 149854679X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Working Women in American Literature, 1865–1950 consists of eight original essays by literary, historical, and multicultural critics on the subject of working women in late-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century American literature. The volume examines how the American working woman has been presented, misrepresented, and underrepresented in American realistic and naturalistic literature (1865–1930), and by later authors influenced by realism and naturalism. Points explored include: the historical vocational realities of working women (e.g., factory workers, seamstresses, maids, teachers, writers, prostitutes, etc.); the distortions in literary representations of female work; the ways in which these representations still inform the lives of working women today; and new perspectives from queer theory, immigrant studies, and race and class analyses. These essays draw on current feminist thought while remaining mindful of the historicity of the context. The essayists discuss important women writers of the period (for instance, Ellen Glasgow, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Rachel Crothers, Willa Cather, and the understudied Ann Petry), as well as canonical writers like Theodore Dreiser, Henry James, and William Dean Howells. The discussions touch on a variety of literary and artistic genres: novels, short stories, other forms of fiction, biographies, dramas, and films. In the introductory essay and throughout the collection, the term “working women in the United States” is deconstructed; the historical and cultural definitions of “work,” and the words “work in America” are redefined through the lens of genders.

Asian American Literature

Asian American Literature PDF Author: Elaine Kim
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 0877223521
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
An introduction to the literary works of Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Filipino-Americans, and Korean-Americans, this book focuses on the self-images and social contexts of the nineteenth-century immigrants, their descendants, and the Americanized writers of today.Although the book examines the novels, autobiographies, poems, and plays themselves, the social history of Asians in American is a significant backdrop-as Maxine Hong Kingston herself argues it should be. These racially distinctive Americans have confronted in their lives and writings American stereotypes of the "Oriental," racial discrimination, and the cultural gulf between East and West.After a chapter on Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan, and other Anglo-American caricatures of Asians, the author turns to a discussion of the first immigrant writers, many of whom were educated aristocrats playing the role of cultural ambassadors, and then to the less privileged, more socially critical generations of writers who followed.From works like Flower Drum Song, Eat a Bowl of Tea, The Woman Warrior, China Men, and a host of lesser-known writings, the author shows how portrayals of Chinatown, the Japanese-American family, and the roles of all the Asian-American women and men have changed. Drawing on her personal interviews with Asian-American writers, Kim also conveys their attitudes towards their own group, other Asian-Americans, other racial minorities, and white Americans-a complex mix of bitterness, acceptance, and militance. Author note: Elaine H. Kim is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She directs the Korean Community Center of Oakland and Asian Women United (California).

Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context [4 Volumes]

Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context [4 Volumes] PDF Author: Linda De Roche
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
ISBN: 1440853584
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This four-volume reference work surveys American literature from the early 20th century to the present day, featuring a diverse range of American works and authors and an expansive selection of primary source materials. Bringing useful and engaging material into the classroom, this four-volume set covers more than a century of American literary history--from 1900 to the present. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context profiles authors and their works and provides overviews of literary movements and genres through which readers will understand the historical, cultural, and political contexts that have shaped American writing. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context provides wide coverage of authors, works, genres, and movements that are emblematic of the diversity of modern America. Not only are major literary movements represented, such as the Beats, but this work also highlights the emergence and development of modern Native American literature, African American literature, and other representative groups that showcase the diversity of American letters. A rich selection of primary documents and background material provides indispensable information for student research. Covers significant authors, including those neglected by history, and their works from major historical and cultural periods of the last century, including authors writing today Situates authors' works not only within their own canon but also with the historical and cultural context of the U.S. more broadly Positions primary documents after specific authors or works, allowing readers to read excerpts critically in light of the entries Examines literary movements, forms, and genres that also pay special attention to multi-ethnic and women writers

The North Carolina Roots of African American Literature

The North Carolina Roots of African American Literature PDF Author: William L. Andrews
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807877050
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
The first African American to publish a book in the South, the author of the first female slave narrative in the United States, the father of black nationalism in America--these and other founders of African American literature have a surprising connection to one another: they all hailed from the state of North Carolina. This collection of poetry, fiction, autobiography, and essays showcases some of the best work of eight influential African American writers from North Carolina during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In his introduction, William L. Andrews explores the reasons why black North Carolinians made such a disproportionate contribution (in quantity and lasting quality) to African American literature as compared to that of other southern states with larger African American populations. The authors in this anthology parlayed both the advantages and disadvantages of their North Carolina beginnings into sophisticated perspectives on the best and the worst of which humanity, in both the South and the North, was capable. They created an African American literary tradition unrivaled by that of any other state in the South. Writers included here are Charles W. Chesnutt, Anna Julia Cooper, David Bryant Fulton, George Moses Horton, Harriet Jacobs, Lunsford Lane, Moses Roper, and David Walker.

Luso-American Literature

Luso-American Literature PDF Author: Robert Henry Moser
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813550572
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
Portuguese and Cape Verdean immigrants have had a significant presence in North America since the nineteenth century. Recently, Brazilians have also established vibrant communities in the U.S. This anthology brings together, for the first time in English, the writings of these diverse Portuguese-speaking, or "Luso-American" voices. Historically linked by language, colonial experience, and cultural influence, yet ethnically distinct, Luso-Americans have often been labeled an "invisible minority." This collection seeks to address this lacuna, with a broad mosaic of prose, poetry, essays, memoir, and other writings by more than fifty prominent literary figures--immigrants and their descendants, as well as exiles and sojourners. It is an unprecedented gathering of published, unpublished, forgotten, and translated writings by a transnational community that both defies the stereotypes of ethnic literature, and embodies the drama of the immigrant experience.

Writing the Goodlife

Writing the Goodlife PDF Author: Priscilla Solis Ybarra
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816533830
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Winner of the Western Literature Association’s 2017 Thomas J. Lyon Book Award in Western American Literary and Cultural Studies Mexican American literature brings a much-needed approach to the increasingly urgent challenges of climate change and environmental injustice. Although current environmental studies work to develop new concepts, Writing the Goodlife looks to long-established traditions of thought that have existed in Mexican American literary history for the past century and a half. During that time period, Mexican American writing consistently shifts the focus from the environmentally destructive settler values of individualism, domination, and excess toward the more beneficial refrains of community, non-possessiveness, and humility. The decolonial approaches found in these writings provide rich examples of mutually respectful relations between humans and nature, an approach that Priscilla Solis Ybarra calls “goodlife” writing. Goodlife writing has existed for at least the past century, Ybarra contends, but Chicana/o literary history’s emphasis on justice and civil rights eclipsed this tradition and hidden it from the general public’s view. Likewise, in ecocriticism, the voices of people of color most often appear in deliberations about environmental justice. The quiet power of goodlife writing certainly challenges injustice, to be sure, but it also brings to light the decolonial environmentalism heretofore obscured in both Chicana/o literary history and environmental literary studies. Ybarra’s book takes on two of today’s most discussed topics—the worsening environmental crisis and the rising Latino population in the United States—and puts them in literary-historical context from the U.S.-Mexico War up to today’s controversial policies regarding climate change, immigration, and ethnic studies. This book uncovers 150 years’ worth of Mexican American and Chicana/o knowledge and practices that inspire hope in the face of some of today’s biggest challenges.