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Author: Ronald Weber
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253363664
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
For a half-century - from Edward Eggleston's pioneering novel The Hoosier Schoolmaster in 1871 through the dazzling early work of Hart Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway in the 1920s - Midwestern literature was at the center of American writing. In The Midwestern Ascendancy in American Writing, Ronald Weber illuminates the sense of lost promise that gives rise to the elegiac note struck in many Midwestern works; he also addresses the deeply divided feelings about the region revealed in the contrary desires to abandon and to celebrate. The period of Midwestern cultural ascendancy was a time of tremendous social and technological change. Midwestern writing was a reflection of these societal changes; it was American literature.
Author: Ronald Weber
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253363664
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
For a half-century - from Edward Eggleston's pioneering novel The Hoosier Schoolmaster in 1871 through the dazzling early work of Hart Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway in the 1920s - Midwestern literature was at the center of American writing. In The Midwestern Ascendancy in American Writing, Ronald Weber illuminates the sense of lost promise that gives rise to the elegiac note struck in many Midwestern works; he also addresses the deeply divided feelings about the region revealed in the contrary desires to abandon and to celebrate. The period of Midwestern cultural ascendancy was a time of tremendous social and technological change. Midwestern writing was a reflection of these societal changes; it was American literature.
Author: Elizabeth J. Van Allen
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253335913
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 412
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Book Description
Van Allen sifts facts from fiction to construct as true a portrait of Riley as possible in the context of the society in which he lived."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Booth Tarkington
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252071133
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 396
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Book Description
A familiar midwestern novel in the tradition of Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis, The Turmoil was the best-selling novel of 1915. It is set in a small, quiet city--never named but closely resembling the author's hometown of Indianapolis--that is quickly being transformed into a bustling, money-making nest of competitors more or less overrun by "the worshippers of Bigness." "There is a midland city in the heart of fair, open country, a dirty and wonderful city nesting dingily in the fog of its own smoke," begins The Turmoil, the first volume of Pulitzer Prize-winner Booth Tarkington's "Growth" trilogy. A narrative of loss and change, a love story, and a warning about the potential evils of materialism, the book chronicles two midwestern families trying to cope with the onset of industrialization. Tarkington believed that culture could flourish even as the country was increasingly fueled by material progress. The Turmoil, the first great success of his career, tells the intertwined stories of two families: the Sheridans, whose integrity wanes as their wealth increases, and the Vertrees, who remain noble but impoverished. Linked by the romance between a Sheridan son and a Vertrees daughter, the story of the two families provides a dramatic view of what America was like on the verge of a new order. An introduction by Lawrence R. Rodgers places the novel squarely in the social and cultural context of the Progressive Era. The book also features illustrations by C. E. Chambers.
Author: Joseph Hogan
Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society
ISBN: 0870209493
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417
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Book Description
This collection of twenty-two essays, a product of recent revivals of interest in both Midwestern history and intellectual history, argues for the contributions of interior thinkers and ideas in forming an American identity. The Midwest has been characterized as a fertile seedbed for the germination of great thinkers, but a wasteland for their further growth. The Sower and the Seer reveals that representation to be false. In fact, the region has sustained many innovative minds and been the locus of extraordinary intellectualism. It has also been the site of shifting interpretations—to some a frontier, to others a colonized space, a breadbasket, a crossroads, a heartland. As agrarian reformed (and Michigander) Liberty Hyde Bailey expressed in his 1916 poem “Sower and Seer,” the Midwestern landscape has given rise to significant visionaries, just as their knowledge has nourished and shaped the region. The essays gathered for this collection examine individual thinkers, writers, and leaders, as well as movements and ideas that shaped the Midwest, including rural school consolidation, women’s literary societies, Progressive-era urban planning, and Midwestern radical liberalism. While disparate in subject and style, these essays taken together establish the irrefutable significance of the intellectual history of the American Midwest.
Author: Jason Stacy
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252052730
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 333
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Book Description
From Main Street to Stranger Things, how poetry changed our idea of small town life A literary and cultural milestone, Spoon River Anthology captured an idea of the rural Midwest that became a bedrock myth of life in small-town America. Jason Stacy places the book within the atmosphere of its time and follows its progress as the poetry took root and thrived. Published by Edgar Lee Masters in 1915, Spoon River Anthology won praise from modernists while becoming an ongoing touchstone for American popular culture. Stacy charts the ways readers embraced, debated, and reshaped Masters's work in literary controversies and culture war skirmishes; in films and other media that over time saw the small town as idyllic then conflicted then surreal; and as the source of three archetypes—populist, elite, and exile—that endure across the landscape of American culture in the twenty-first century. A wide-ranging reconsideration of a literary landmark, Spoon River America tells the story of how a Midwesterner's poetry helped change a nation's conception of itself.
Author: Philip A. Greasley
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253021162
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 1074
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Book Description
The Midwest has produced a robust literary heritage. Its authors have won half of the nation's Nobel Prizes for Literature plus a significant number of Pulitzer Prizes. This volume explores the rich racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of the region. It also contains entries on 35 pivotal Midwestern literary works, literary genres, literary, cultural, historical, and social movements, state and city literatures, literary journals and magazines, as well as entries on science fiction, film, comic strips, graphic novels, and environmental writing. Prepared by a team of scholars, this second volume of the Dictionary of Midwestern Literature is a comprehensive resource that demonstrates the Midwest's continuing cultural vitality and the stature and distinctiveness of its literature.
Author: Andy Oler
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807171603
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
The Midwest holds two conflicting positions in the American cultural imagination, both of which rob the region of its distinctiveness. Often, it is seen as the “heartland,” a pastoral ideal standing in for all of American culture. Alternatively, the Midwest can represent “flyover country,” part of an expansive, undifferentiated mass between the coasts. In Old-Fashioned Modernism: Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature, Andy Oler challenges both views by pairing fiction and poetry from the region with cultural and material texts that illustrate the processes by which regional modernism both opposes and absorbs prevailing models of twentieth-century manhood. Although it acknowledges a tradition of Midwestern urban literature, Old-Fashioned Modernism focuses on representations of life on farms and in small towns that generate specific forms of rural modernity. Oler considers a series of male protagonists who both fulfill and resist conventional American narratives of economic advancement, spatial experience, and gender roles. The writers he studies portray the onset of socioeconomic and mechanical modernity by merging realist and naturalist narratives with upwellings of modernist form and style. His analysis charts a trajectory in which Midwestern literature depicts experiences that appear dependent on nostalgic pastoralism but actually foreground the ongoing fragmentation and emerging anxieties of the countryside. In detailed readings of novels by Sherwood Anderson, William Cunningham, Langston Hughes, Wright Morris, and Dawn Powell, as well as the poetry of Lorine Niedecker, Oler highlights images of men from the rural Midwest who face the tensions between agricultural production and mass industrialization. These works of literature, which Oler examines alongside pieces of material culture like advertisements for farm implements and record labels, feature communities that support self-made as well as corporate identities. As portraits of the Midwest that resist the totalizing trajectory of industrialization, these texts generate spaces that meld rural and urban economics, land use, and affective experiences. Old-Fashioned Modernism reveals how Midwestern regionalism negotiates the anxieties and dominant narratives of early- and midcentury rural masculinities, as regional literature and culture alter the forms and spaces of literary modernism.
Author: Michael C. Steiner
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700629548
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
The Harvard-educated, Jewish American philosopher Horace Meyer Kallen (1882–1974) is commonly credited with the concept of cultural pluralism, which envisioned immigrant and minority groups cultivating their distinctive social worlds and interacting to create an inclusive, ever-changing true American culture. Though living and teaching in Madison, Wisconsin, when he developed this influential theory, Kallen’s seven-year sojourn in the Midwest (1911–1918) rarely figures in accounts of the theory’s origins. And yet, Michael C. Steiner suggests, the Midwest, far from being a mere interruption in Kallen’s thought, was in fact the essential catalyst for the theory of cultural pluralism, a concept that continues to shape public debate a century later. The Midwest in the first decades of the twentieth century was a youthful region experiencing massive immigration and the xenophobic fervor of approaching war. In this milieu Steiner locates a pervasive pluralist zeitgeist rife with urban- and rural-based intellectuals and public figures deeply critical of both the all-absorbing melting pot ideology and white racist Anglo-Saxon exclusionism. Early proponents of diversity who interacted with Kallen to forge a pluralist sensibility and ideology as the Midwest was becoming the nation’s dominant region included public figures Hamlin Garland, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Jane Addams; African American activists Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells; Norwegian American writers Ole E. Rølvaag and Waldemar Ager; and intellectuals Randolph Bourne and John Dewey. Tracing how Kallen’s interaction with these figures and his regional experience expanded his vision and added the final touch and crucial spatial dimension to his theory, Horace M. Kallen in the Heartland enhances our understanding of cultural pluralism. The book has direct bearing on the present, as once again denunciation of diversity and mass migration challenge the tenets and advocates of pluralism.
Author: Shirley Samuels
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470999209
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 488
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Book Description
This Companion presents the current state of criticism in the field of American fiction from the earliest declarations of nationhood to secession and civil war. Draws heavily on historical and cultural contexts in its consideration of American fiction Relates the fiction of the period to conflicts about territory and sovereignty and to issues of gender, race, ethnicity and identity Covers different forms of fiction, including children’s literature, sketches, polemical pieces, historical romances, Gothic novels and novels of exploration Considers both canonical and lesser-known authors, including James Fennimore Cooper, Hannah Foster, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Harriet Beecher Stowe Treats neglected topics, such as the Western novel, science and the novel, and American fiction in languages other than English
Author: Jon K. Lauck
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609384970
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269
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Book Description
During the half-century after the Civil War, intellectuals and politicians assumed the Midwest to be the font and heart of American culture. Despite the persistence of strong currents of midwestern regionalism during the 1920s and 1930s, the region went into eclipse during the post–World War II era. In the apt language of Minnesota’s F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Midwest slid from being the “warm center” of the republic to its “ragged edge.” This book explains the factors that triggered the demise of the Midwest’s regionalist energies, from anti-midwestern machinations in the literary world and the inability of midwestern writers to break through the cultural politics of the era to the growing dominance of a coastal, urban culture. These developments paved the way for the proliferation of images of the Midwest as flyover country, the Rust Belt, a staid and decaying region. Yet Lauck urges readers to recognize persisting and evolving forms of midwestern identity and to resist the forces that squelch the nation’s interior voices.
