Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies

Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies PDF Author: Cody Marrs
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192871722
Category : Aesthetics in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
In this fascinating book, Cody Marrs retraces Melville's engagement with beauty and provides a revisionary account of Melville's philosophy, aesthetics, and literary career.

Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies

Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies PDF Author: Cody Marrs
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192871722
Category : Aesthetics in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
In this fascinating book, Cody Marrs retraces Melville's engagement with beauty and provides a revisionary account of Melville's philosophy, aesthetics, and literary career.

Timelines of American Literature

Timelines of American Literature PDF Author: Cody Marrs
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 1421427133
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
A collection of engaging essays that seeks to uniquely reperiodize American literature. It is all but inevitable for literary history to be divided into periods. "Early American," "antebellum," "modern," "post-1945"—such designations organize our knowledge of the past and shape the ways we discuss that past today. These periods tend to align with the watershed moments in American history, even as the field has shifted its perspective away from the nation-state. It is high time we rethink these defining periods of American literary history, as the drawing of literary timelines is a necessary—even illuminating—practice. In these short, spirited, and imaginative essays, 23 leading Americanists gamely fashion new, unorthodox literary periods—from 600 B.C.E. to the present, from the Age of Van Buren to the Age of Microeconomics. They bring to light literary and cultural histories that have been obscured by traditional timelines and raise provocative questions. What is our definition of "modernism" if we imagine it stretching from 1865 to 1965 instead of 1890 to 1945? How does the captivity narrative change when we consider it as a contemporary, not just a "colonial," genre? What does the course of American literature look like set against the backdrop of federal denials of Native sovereignty or housing policies that exacerbated segregation? Filled with challenges to scholars, inspirations for teachers (anchored by an appendix of syllabi), and entry points for students, Timelines of American Literature gathers some of the most exciting new work in the field to showcase the revelatory potential of fresh thinking about how we organize the literary past.

Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies

Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies PDF Author: Robert S. Levine
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107095069
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
This book offers new perspectives on race and transnationalism in nineteenth-century American literary studies, and ranges widely in developing new approaches to canonical and non canonical authors. It will appeal to graduates and scholars working on nineteenth-century American literature, transnationalism, and African American literary studies.

Not Even Past

Not Even Past PDF Author: Cody Marrs
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 1421436655
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
How the Civil War endures in American life through literature and culture. Recipient of the Eric Hoffer Award's Montaigne Medal The American Civil War lives on in our collective imagination like few other events. The story of the war has been retold in countless films, novels, poems, memoirs, plays, sculptures, and monuments. Often remembered as an emancipatory struggle, as an attempt to destroy slavery in America now and forever, it is also memorialized as a fight for Southern independence; as a fratricide that divided the national family; and as a dark, cruel conflict defined by its brutality. What do these stories, myths, and rumors have in common, and what do they teach us about modern America? In this fascinating book, Cody Marrs reveals how these narratives evolved over time and why they acquired such lasting power. Marrs addresses an eclectic range of texts, traditions, and creators, from Walt Whitman, Abram Ryan, and Abraham Lincoln to Margaret Mitchell, D. W. Griffith, and W. E. B. Du Bois. He also identifies several basic plots about the Civil War that anchor public memory and continually compete for cultural primacy. In other words, from the perspective of American cultural memory, there is no single Civil War. Whether they fill us with elation or terror; whether they side with the North or the South; whether they come from the 1860s, the 1960s, or today, these stories all make one thing vividly clear: the Civil War is an ongoing conflict, persisting not merely as a cultural touchstone but as an unresolved struggle through which Americans inevitably define themselves. A timely, evocative, and beautifully written book, Not Even Past is essential reading for anyone interested in the Civil War and its role in American history.

The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story

The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story PDF Author: Michael J. Collins
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009292811
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
Comprising new work by leading scholars, this book traces the history of American short fiction and provides original avenues for research.

American Literature in Transition, 1851–1877

American Literature in Transition, 1851–1877 PDF Author: Cody Marrs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108682014
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 631

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Book Description
Between 1851 and 1877, the U.S. underwent a whirlwind of change. This volume offers a fresh account of this important era, assessing the many developments - both major and minor - that transformed American literature. In a wide range of chapters, scholars re-examine literary history before, during, and after the Civil War, revealing significant changes not only in how literature is written but also in how it is conceived, distributed, and consumed. Cutting across literary periods that are typically considered separate and distinct, and incorporating an array of methods and approaches, this volume discloses the Long Civil War to be an era of ongoing struggle and cultural contestation. It thus captures the dynamism of this period in American literary history as well as its ever-evolving field of study.

National Review's Literary Network

National Review's Literary Network PDF Author: Stephen Schryer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198886209
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Stephen Schryer traces the careers of novelists, journalists, and literary critics who wrote for William F. Buckley, Jr.'s National Review and highlights these writers' enduring impact on movement conservatism.

Environmental Reflections on the Anthropocene

Environmental Reflections on the Anthropocene PDF Author: Gabriel R. Ricci
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040224946
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Incorporating the intellectual history of disciplines from across the humanities, including environmental anthropology, philosophy, ethics, literature, history, science and technology studies, this volume provides a select orientation to the experience of nature from the ancient world to the Anthropocene. Taking its momentum from the emerging environmental humanities, this collection integrates Western, Indigenous, postcolonial, feminist and eco-spiritual perspectives that address pressing environmental concerns and reimagine the place of humans within the natural world. Across thirteen chapters, the contributors discuss the blending of environmental concerns with political and moral questions and encourage collaborative methods across disciplines to address dialectical tensions between culture and nature. They draw on a wide range of critical perspectives, provide a historical framework and speak to global environmental pressures from multiple standpoints. The global approach adopted throughout highlights the various realities of the growing ecological crisis experienced across the world. Written to appeal to a broad range of readers across the environmental humanities, this edited book will be particularly useful to academics, scholars and researchers in philosophy, anthropology, literature, history and critical theory.

The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction

The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction PDF Author: Kathleen Diffley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009178555
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 638

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Book Description
The legacies of the Civil War and Reconstruction remain a central part of American life a century and a half later. Drawing together leading scholars in literary studies and history, this volume offers accessible treatments of major authors and genres of this period, including Walt Whitman, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Rebecca Harding Davis, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Chesnutt, as well as fiction, poetry, drama, and life-writing. Although focused on literature, this Companion also canvases battlefields, homefronts, and hospitals, and discusses a range of topics, including constitutional reform and presidential impeachment; emancipation and Africa; material culture and monuments; education, civil rights, and reenactment. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction speaks powerfully to literature's ability to help readers come to terms with a violent, oppressive history while also imagining a different future.

Political Liberalism and the Rise of American Romanticism

Political Liberalism and the Rise of American Romanticism PDF Author: Scott M. Reznick
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198891970
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Political Liberalism and the Rise of American Romanticism explores how American Romanticism developed in response to pervasive conflicts over democracy's moral dimensions in the early republic and antebellum eras. By recovering the long-under-examined tradition of political liberalism for literary studies, it traces how US writers reacted to ongoing moral and political conflict by engaging with liberal thinkers and ideas as they endeavored to understand how individuals beholden to a divergent array of moral convictions might nevertheless share a stable and just political world—the very dilemma at the core of political liberalism. This study demonstrates how those philosophical engagements sparked Romanticism's rise and eventual flourishing as US writers increasingly embraced Romantic literary modes emphasizing the imagination's capacity for creative synthesis and the role it plays in shoring up the habits of mind and feeling that are vital to a meaningful democratic culture. It offers revisionary readings of works by Charles Brockden Brown, Robert Montgomery Bird, James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Nathaniel Hawthorne to show how these Romantic writers were preoccupied with how individuals come to embrace their deepest convictions and what happens when they encounter others who see the world differently.