Writing America

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

Get Book

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.

Writing America

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

Get Book

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.

Writing America

Writing America PDF Author: David A. Jolliffe
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780132748803
Category : English language
Languages : en
Pages : 1012

Get Book

Book Description


Writing the Nation: A Concise Introduction to American Literature 1865 to Present

Writing the Nation: A Concise Introduction to American Literature 1865 to Present PDF Author: Amy Berke
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 742

Get Book

Book Description
Writing the Nation displays key literary movements and the American authors associated with the movement. Topics include late romanticism, realism, naturalism, modernism, and modern literature. Contents: Late Romanticism (1855-1870) Realism (1865-1890) Local Color (1865-1885) Regionalism (1875-1895) William Dean Howells Ambrose Bierce Henry James Sarah Orne Jewett Kate Chopin Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Charles Waddell Chesnutt Charlotte Perkins Gilman Naturalism (1890-1914) Frank Norris Stephen Crane Turn of the Twentieth Century and the Growth of Modernism (1893 - 1914) Booker T. Washington Zane Grey Modernism (1914 - 1945) The Great War Une Generation Perdue... (a Lost Generation) A Modern Nation Technology Modernist Literature Further Reading: Additional Secondary Sources Robert Frost Wallace Stevens William Carlos Williams Ezra Pound Marianne Moore T. S. Eliot Edna St. Vincent Millay E. E. Cummings F. Scott Fitzgerald Ernest Hemingway Arthur Miller Southern Renaissance – First Wave Ellen Glasgow William Faulkner Eudora Alice Welty The Harlem Renaissance Jessie Redmon Fauset Zora Neale Hurston Nella Larsen Langston Hughes Countee Cullen Jean Toomer American Literature Since 1945 (1945 - Present) Southern Literary Renaissance - Second Wave (1945-1965) The Cold War and the Southern Literary Renaissance Economic Prosperity The Civil Rights Movement in the South New Criticism and the Rise of the MFA Program Innovation Tennessee Williams James Dickey Flannery O'Connor Postmodernism Theodore Roethke Ralph Ellison James Baldwin Allen Ginsberg Adrienne Rich Toni Morrison Donald Barthelme Sylvia Plath Don Delillo Alice Walker Leslie Marmon Silko David Foster Wallace

Writing of America

Writing of America PDF Author: Geoff Ward
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 9780745626222
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book

Book Description
In this lively and provocative study, Geoff Ward puts forward the bold claim that the founding documents of American identity are essentially literary. America was invented, not discovered, and it remains in thrall to the myth of an earthly Paradise. This is Paradise, and American ideology imprisons as it inspires. The Writing of America shows the tension between these forces in a wide range of literary and other texts, from Puritan sermons and the Declaration of Independence, through nineteenth-century classics, to folk and blues lyrics and the popular novel. Alongside his provocative reassessments of canonical writers, Ward offers new material on lost or neglected figures from the world of literature, film and music. His acute and often startling analyses of American literature and culture make this an essential guide to what Lincoln termed the last best hope of earth.

Mapping Region in Early American Writing

Mapping Region in Early American Writing PDF Author: Edward Watts
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820373702
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Get Book

Book Description
Mapping Region in Early American Writing is a collection of essays that study how early American writers thought about the spaces around them. The contributors reconsider the various roles regions—imagined politically, economically, racially, and figuratively—played in the formation of American communities, both real and imagined. These texts vary widely: some are canonical, others archival; some literary, others scientific; some polemical, others simply documentary. As a whole, they recreate important mental mappings and cartographies, and they reveal how diverse populations imagined themselves, their communities, and their nation as occupying the American landscape. Focusing on place-specific, local writing published before 1860, Mapping Region in Early American Writing examines a period often overlooked in studies of regional literature in America. More than simply offering a prehistory of regionalist writing, these essays offer new ways of theorizing and studying regional spaces in the United States as it grew from a union of disparate colonies along the eastern seaboard into an industrialized nation on the verge of overseas empire building. They also seek to amplify lost voices of diverse narratives from minority, frontier, and outsider groups alongside their more well-known counterparts in a time when America’s landscapes and communities were constan

The Writing of American History

The Writing of American History PDF Author: Michael Kraus
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806122342
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Get Book

Book Description
Events which become historical, says Michael Kraus, do not live on because of their mere occurrence. They survive when writers re-create them and thus preserve for posterity their otherwise fleeting existence. Paul Revere's ride, for example, might well have vanished from the records had not Longfellow snatched it from approaching oblivion and given it a dramatic spot in American history. Now Revere rides on in spirited passages in our history books. In this way the recorder of events becomes almost as important as the events themselves. In other words, historiography-the study of historians and their particular contributions to the body of historical records-must not be ignored by those who seriously wish to understand the past.When the first edition of Michael Kraus's Writing of American History was published, a reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune wrote: "No serious study of our national origins and development can afford not to have such an aid as this at his elbow." The book quickly came to be regarded as one of the few truly standard general surveys of American historiography, invaluable as a reference book, as a textbook, and as a highly readable source of information for the interested general reader. This new edition with coauthor Davis D. Joyce confirms its position as the definitive work in the field.Concise yet comprehensive, here is an analysis of the writers and writings of American history from the Norse voyages to modern times. The book has its roots in Kraus's pioneering History of American History, published in 1937, a unique and successful attempt to cover in one volume the entire sweep of American historical activity. Kraus revised and updated the book in 1953, when it was published under the present title. Now, once again, the demand for its revision has been met.Davis D. Joyce, with the full cooperation and approval of Kraus, has thoroughly revised and brought up to date the text of the 1953 edition. The clarity and evenhandedness of Kraus's text has been carefully preserved. The last three chapters add entirely new material, surveying the massive and complex body of American historical writing since World War II: "Consensus: American Historical Writing in the 1950s," "Conflict: American Historical Writing in the 1960s," and "Complexity: American Historical Writing in the 1970s-and Beyond."Michael Kraus, Professor Emeritus at City College of New York, received the Ph.D. from Columbia University and in his long career established himself as one of America's foremost historiographers.Davis D.Joyce is Professor Emeritus of History, East Central University, Ada, Oklahoma, and is the author of HOWARD ZINN: A RADICAL AMERICAN VISION and ALTERNATIVE OKLAHOMA: CONTRARIAN VIEWS OF THE SOONER STATE. He teaches part-time at Rogers State University, Claremore, Oklahoma.

Writing the South

Writing the South PDF Author: Richard Gray
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807122174
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Get Book

Book Description
In this major reconsideration of a regional consciousness, Richard Gray explores how generations of southerners have been engaged in "writing the South", in reinventing their place even as they describe it. "Humane and learned, informative and analytical, WRITING THE SOUTH is a most impressive addition to cultural inquiry".--THE LISTENER. 12 photos.

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

Get Book

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.

American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (LOA #182)

American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (LOA #182) PDF Author: Bill McKibben
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1598530208
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
As America and the world grapple with the consequences of global environmental change, writer and activist Bill McKibben offers this unprecedented, provocative, and timely anthology, gathering the best and most significant American environmental writing from the last two centuries. Classics of the environmental imagination, the essays of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and John Burroughs; Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac; Rachel Carson's Silent Spring - are set against the inspiring story of an emerging activist movement, as revealed by newly uncovered reports of pioneering campaigns for conservation, passages from landmark legal opinions and legislation, and searing protest speeches. Here are some of America's greatest and most impassioned writers, taking a turn toward nature and recognizing the fragility of our situation on earth and the urgency of the search for a sustainable way of life. Thought-provoking essays on overpopulation, consumerism, energy policy, and the nature of nature, join ecologists - memoirs and intimate sketches of the habitats of endangered species. The anthology includes a detailed chronology of the environmental movement and American environmental history, as well as an 80-page color portfolio of illustrations.

The American Way of Writing

The American Way of Writing PDF Author: Steven D. Stark
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Get Book

Book Description
Explains the uniquely American cultural references that appear in American English for students and professionals to increase their written command of the language. Language is a window into the soul of a culture. The hardest part for newcomers who want to master American English is not learning the alphabet, grammar, or vocabulary — it's understanding the distinctive way Americans approach the world. This book shows readers how to do just that. The American Way of Writing guides readers through the nuances of American English, providing a toolkit for non-native speakers who come to the United States to study, as well as international business and legal professionals who have to work and communicate with Americans in a professional or business context. Understanding what makes Americans uniquely "American" is a challenging subject for anyone to master. Such characteristics are always in flux and a source of constant debate. Steven D. Stark's comprehensive approach to American English in The American Way of Writing is suited to Americans and foreigners alike, offering a deeper understanding of the ties that bind rather than divide.