Spirits of Place in American Literary Culture

Spirits of Place in American Literary Culture PDF Author: John Gatta
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780190646578
Category : LITERARY CRITICISM
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
What might it mean, existentially and spiritually, to form an intimate relation with discrete sites or dwelling places on earth? This book offers a uniquely integrative perspective on the matter. Blending theological and cultural analysis, it focuses on the multi-layered witness enshrined in American literary texts and demonstrates that hallowed geography and the sacramentality of place have mattered throughout our history.

Spirits of Place in American Literary Culture

Spirits of Place in American Literary Culture PDF Author: John Gatta
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780190646578
Category : LITERARY CRITICISM
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
What might it mean, existentially and spiritually, to form an intimate relation with discrete sites or dwelling places on earth? This book offers a uniquely integrative perspective on the matter. Blending theological and cultural analysis, it focuses on the multi-layered witness enshrined in American literary texts and demonstrates that hallowed geography and the sacramentality of place have mattered throughout our history.

Spirits of Place in American Literary Culture

Spirits of Place in American Literary Culture PDF Author: John Gatta
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190646543
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
"What might it mean, existentially and spiritually, to form an intimate relation with discrete places on earth? This book offers a uniquely integrative perspective on the matter. Centered on analyzing US literatures, it reflects a theological phenomenology cognizant of the spiritualities grounded in First Nature as well as settled spaces" --

Spirits of Place in American Literary Culture

Spirits of Place in American Literary Culture PDF Author: John Gatta
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190646551
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
What might it mean, existentially and spiritually, for humans to form an intimate relation with particular sites or dwelling places on earth? In ancient Rome, the notion of a locale's genius loci signaled recognition of its enchanted, enspirited identity. But in a digitalized America of unprecedented mobility can place still matter as seed ground for the soul? Such questions have been broached by ecocritics concerned with how place-inflected experience figures in literature, and by theologians concerned with ecotheology and ecospirituality. This book offers a uniquely integrative perspective, informed by a theological phenomenology of place that takes fuller account of the spiritualities associated with built environments than ecocriticism typically does. Spirits of Place blends theological and cultural analysis with personal reflection, while focusing on the multi-layered witness presented by American literature. John Gatta's interpretive readings range across texts by an array of canonical as well as lesser-known writers. Along the way, it addresses such themes as the religious implications of localism vs. globalism; the diverse spiritualities associated with long-term residency, resettlement, and pilgrimage; why some sites seem more hallowed than others; and how the creative spirit of Imagination figures in place-identified perceptions of the numinous. Whether in Christian or other religious terms, no discrete place matters absolutely. Yet this study demonstrates how and why hallowed geography and the sacramentality of place have mattered throughout our cultural history.

Spirit of Place

Spirit of Place PDF Author: Frederick Turner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Award-winning author Frederick Turner examines the lives and careers of nine American authors, the locales they made famous, and the ways in which landscape played a role in the creation of their finest works. Spirit of Place is both a testament to the creative genius of nine of America's most important writers and an insightful investigation of the vital role of the physical landscape in the cultural development of the United States.

Writing Out of Place

Writing Out of Place PDF Author: Judith Fetterley
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252027673
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
"In a series of sketches, regionalist writers such as Alice Cary, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Grace King, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Sui Sin Far, and Mary Austin critique the approach to regional subjects characteristic of local color and present narrators who serve as cultural interpreters for persons often considered "out of place" by urban readers. In their approach to these writers, Fetterley and Pryse offer contemporary readers an alternative vantage point from which to consider questions of regions and regionalism in the global economy of our own time."--Jacket.

Spirits of Defiance

Spirits of Defiance PDF Author: Kathleen Morgan Drowne
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 0814209971
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description


Spirit in the Dark

Spirit in the Dark PDF Author: Josef Sorett
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199844933
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
While many of the most significant black intellectual movements of the second half of the twentieth century have been perceived as secular, Josef Sorett demonstrates in this book that religion was actually a fertile, fluid and formidable force within these movements. Spirit in the Dark examines how African American literary visions were animated and organized by religion and spirituality, from the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s to the Black Arts movement of the 1960s.

Spirits of the Ordinary

Spirits of the Ordinary PDF Author: Kathleen Alcalá
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156005685
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
In the tradition of Isabel Allende and Laura Esquivel, Alcala presents a magical, multigenerational tale of family passions set along the Mexican-American border in the 1870s. "A strong and finely rendered book in which passions both ordinary and extraordinary are made vivid and convincing".--Larry McMurtry.

Spirits of America

Spirits of America PDF Author: Nicholas O. Warner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780806118734
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Warner analyzes the literary treatment of alcoholism, drunkenness, "normal" drinking, drug addiction, and intoxicant choice, showing how these issues tie in with larger, crucial questions in American culture such as personal and political freedom, gender roles, individualism versus conformity, and the American Dream. In demonstrating both the literal and symbolic significance of intoxication in antebellum literature, the author reveals the surprising extent to which intoxication became associated with literature itself and with supposedly literary values, as opposed to those of the emerging industrial-capitalist nation.

Out There Somewhere

Out There Somewhere PDF Author: Simon J. Ortiz
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816550751
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
He has been out there somewhere for a while now, a poet at large in America. Simon Ortiz, one of our finest living poets, has been a witness, participant, and observer of interactions between the Euro-American cultural world and that of his Native American people for many years. In this collection of haunting new work, he confronts moments and instances of his personal past—and finds redemption in the wellspring of his culture. A writer known for deeply personal poetry, Ortiz has produced perhaps his most personal work to date. In a collage of journal entries, free-verse poems, and renderings of poems in the Acoma language, he draws on life experiences over the past ten years—recalling time spent in academic conferences and writers' colonies, jails and detox centers—to convey something of the personal and cultural history of dislocation. As an American Indian artist living at times on the margins of mainstream culture, Ortiz has much to tell about the trials of alcoholism, poverty, displacement. But in the telling he affirms the strength of Native culture even under the most adverse conditions and confirms the sustaining power of Native beliefs and connections: "With our hands, we know the sacred earth. / With our spirits, we know the sacred sky." Like many of his fellow Native Americans, Ortiz has been "out there somewhere"—Portland and San Francisco, Freiburg, Germany, and Martinique—away from his original homeland, culture, and community. Yet, as these works show, he continues to be absolutely connected socially and culturally to Native identity: "We insist that we as human cultural beings must always have this connection," he writes, "because it is the way we maintain a Native sense of existence." Drawing on this storehouse of places, times, and events, Out There Somewhere is a rich fusion taking readers into the heart and soul of one of today's most exciting and original American poets.