Providence Tales and the Birth of American Literature

Providence Tales and the Birth of American Literature PDF Author: James D. Hartman
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801860270
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
In Providence Tales and the Birth of American Literature, James D. Hartman uncovers the genesis of the captivity narrative in the English providence tale and its transformation in the seventeenth century. Exploring the cultural context in which both English providence tales and their American counterparts emerged - focusing in particular on the influence of religious, scientific, and literary developments during this critical period - Hartman offers a provocative reassessment of the origins of American literature.

Providence Tales and the Birth of American Literature

Providence Tales and the Birth of American Literature PDF Author: James D. Hartman
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801860270
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
In Providence Tales and the Birth of American Literature, James D. Hartman uncovers the genesis of the captivity narrative in the English providence tale and its transformation in the seventeenth century. Exploring the cultural context in which both English providence tales and their American counterparts emerged - focusing in particular on the influence of religious, scientific, and literary developments during this critical period - Hartman offers a provocative reassessment of the origins of American literature.

A History of American Literature

A History of American Literature PDF Author: Richard Gray
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444345680
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 933

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Book Description
Updated throughout and with much new material, A History of American Literature, Second Edition, is the most up-to-date and comprehensive survey available of the myriad forms of American Literature from pre-Columbian times to the present. The most comprehensive and up-to-date history of American literature available today Covers fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction, as well as other forms of literature including folktale, spirituals, the detective story, the thriller, and science fiction Explores the plural character of American literature, including the contributions made by African American, Native American, Hispanic and Asian American writers Considers how our understanding of American literature has changed over the past?thirty years Situates American literature in the contexts of American history, politics and society Offers an invaluable introduction to American literature for students at all levels, academic and general readers

Sons of Providence

Sons of Providence PDF Author: Charles Rappleye
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743266889
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
From the author of "American Mafioso" comes the story of the Brown brothers, leading slave merchants of Providence, Rhode Island, during the time of the American Revolution.

American Gothic Literature

American Gothic Literature PDF Author: Ruth Bienstock Anolik
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476633401
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
American Gothic literature inherited many time-worn tropes from its English Gothic precursor, along with a core preoccupation: anxiety about power and property. Yet the transatlantic journey left its mark on the genre--the English ghostly setting becomes the wilderness haunted by spectral Indians. The aristocratic villain is replaced by the striving, independent young man. The dispossession of Native Americans and African Americans adds urgency to traditional Gothic anxieties about possession. The unchanging role of woman in early Gothic narratives parallels the status of American women, even after the Revolution. Twentieth-century Gothic works offer inclusion to previously silent voices, including immigrant writers with their own cultural traditions. The 21st century unleashes the zombie horde--the latest incarnation of the voracious American.

Danger and Vulnerability in Nineteenth-century American Literature

Danger and Vulnerability in Nineteenth-century American Literature PDF Author: Jennifer Travis
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498563422
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
Nineteenth-Century Americans saw danger lurking everywhere: in railway cars and trolleys, fireplaces and floods, and amid social and political movements, from the abolition of slavery to suffrage. After the Civil War, Americans were shaken by financial panic and a volatile post-slave economy. They were awe-struck and progressively alarmed by technological innovations that promised speed and commercial growth, but also posed unprecedented physical hazard. Most of all, Americans were uncertain, particularly in light of environmental disasters like hurricanes and wildfires, about their own city on a hill and the once indisputable and protective hand of a beneficent God. The disasters, accidents, and social and political upheavals that characterized nineteenth-century culture had enormous explanatory power, metaphoric and real. Today we speak of similar insecurities: financial, informational, environmental, and political, and we obsessively express our worry and fear for the future. Cultural theorist Paul Virilio refers to these feelings as the “threat horizon,” one that endlessly identifies and produces new dangers.Why, he asks, does it seem easier for humanity to imagine a future shaped by ever-deadlier accidents than a decent future? Danger and Vulnerability in Nineteenth Century American Literature; or, Crash and Burn American invites readers to examine the “threat horizon” through its nascent expression in literary and cultural history. Against the emerging rhetoric of danger in the long nineteenth century, this book examines how a vocabulary of vulnerability in the American imaginary promoted the causes of the structurally disempowered in new and surprising ways, often seizing vulnerability as the grounds for progressive insight. The texts at the heart of this study, from nineteenth-century sensation novels to early twentieth-century journalistic fiction, imagine spectacular collisions, terrifying conflagrations, and all manner of catastrophe, social, political, and environmental. Together they write against illusions of inviolability in a growing technological and managerial culture, and they imagine how the recognition of universal vulnerability may challenge normative representations of social, political, and economic marginality.

The Origins of African American Literature, 1680-1865

The Origins of African American Literature, 1680-1865 PDF Author: Dickson D. Bruce
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813921937
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
From the earliest texts of the colonial period to works contemporary with Emancipation, African American literature has been a dialogue across color lines, and a medium through which black writers have been able to exert considerable authority on both sides of that racial demarcation. Dickson D. Bruce argues that contrary to prevailing perceptions of African American voices as silenced and excluded from American history, those voices were loud and clear. Within the context of the wider culture, these writers offered powerful, widely read, and widely appreciated commentaries on American ideals and ambitions. The Origins of African American Literature provides strong evidence to demonstrate just how much writers engaged in a surprising number of dialogues with society as a whole. Along with an extensive discussion of major authors and texts, including Phillis Wheatley's poetry, Frederick Douglass's Narrative, Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Martin Delany's Blake, Bruce explores less-prominent works and writers as well, thereby grounding African American writing in its changing historical settings. The Origins of African American Literature is an invaluable revelation of the emergence and sources of the specifically African American literary tradition and the forces that helped shape it.

Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720–1810

Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720–1810 PDF Author: Eve Tavor Bannet
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139497618
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Eve Tavor Bannet explores some of the remarkable stories about the Atlantic world that shaped Britons' and Americans' perceptions of that world. These stories about women, servants, the poor and the dispossessed were frequently rewritten or reframed by editors and printers in America and Britain for changing audiences, times and circumstances. Bannet shows how they were read by examining what contemporaries said about them and did with them; in doing so, she reveals the creatively dynamic and unstable character of transatlantic print culture. Stories include the 'other' Robinson Crusoe and works by Penelope Aubin, Rowlandson, Chetwood, Tyler, Kimber, Richardson, Gronniosaw, Equiano, Cugoano Marrant, Samson Occom, Mackenzie and Pratt.

The Cambridge Introduction to Early American Literature

The Cambridge Introduction to Early American Literature PDF Author: Emory Elliott
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521520416
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
The Cambridge Introduction to Early American Literature offers students a literary history of American writing in English between 1492 and 1820, as well as providing a concise social and cultural history of these three centuries. Emory Elliott traces the impact of race, gender, and ethnic conflict on early American culture, and explores the centrality of American Puritanism in the formation of a distinctively American literature. This highly engaging and comprehensive study will be essential reading for students of the literature, history and culture of early America.

Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660–1830

Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660–1830 PDF Author: Eve Tavor Bannet
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139504649
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
The recently developed field of transatlantic literary studies has encouraged scholars to move beyond national literatures towards an examination of communications between Britain and the Americas. The true extent and importance of these material and literary exchanges is only just beginning to be discovered. This collection of original essays explores the transatlantic literary imagination during the key period from 1660 to 1830: from the colonization of the Americas to the formative decades following political separation between the nations. Contributions from leading scholars from both sides of the Atlantic bring a variety of approaches and methods to bear on both familiar and undiscovered texts. Revealing how literary genres were borrowed and readapted to a different context, the volume offers an index of the larger literary influences going backwards and forwards across the ocean.

Haunted Providence

Haunted Providence PDF Author: Rory Raven
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1614232628
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
The Ocean State’s capital city is awash in ghostly tales told by “mentalist, mindbender, and professional skeptic, the always entertaining Rory Raven” (Providence Daily Dose). Author Rory Raven has collected stories and tales drawn from the history and folklore of one of the oldest cities in the nation. From restless spirits and mysterious deaths, to vampires and shadowy strangers—including H. P. Lovecraft, one of the most influential horror writers of the twentieth century—Haunted Providence explores the events and untold tales that have made this capital city strangely unique . . . and uniquely strange. Includes photos!