Author: Heike Schaefer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108487386
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 327
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Book Description
Demonstrates that the quest for immediacy, or experiences of direct connection and presence, has propelled the development of American literature and media culture.
Author: Thomas Hallock
Publisher: University Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817320830
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
A Road Course in Early American Literature: Travel and Teaching from Atzlán to Amherst explores a two-part question: what does travel teach us about literature, and how can reading guide us to a deeper understanding of place and identity? Thomas Hallock charts a teacher’s journey to answering these questions, framing personal experiences around the continued need for a survey course covering early American literature up to the mid-nineteenth century. Hallock approaches literary study from the overlapping perspectives of pedagogue, scholar, unrepentant tourist, husband, father, friend, and son. Building on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s premise that there is “creative reading as well as creative writing,” Hallock turns to the vibrant and accessible tradition of American travel writing, employing the form of biblio-memoir to bridge the impasse between public and academic discourse and reintroduce the dynamic field of early American literature to wider audiences. Hallock’s own road course begins and ends at the Lowcountry of Georgia and South Carolina, following a circular structure of reflection. He weaves his journey through a wide swath of American literatures and authors: from Native American and African American oral traditions, to Wheatley and Equiano, through Emerson, Poe, and Dickinson, among others. A series of longer, place-oriented narratives explore familiar and lesser-known literary works from the sixteenth-century invasion of Florida through the Mexican War of 1846–1848 and the American Civil War. Shorter chapters bridge the book’s central themes—the mapping of cognitive and physical space, our personal stake in reading, the tensions that follow earlier acts of erasure, and the impossibility of ever fully shutting out the past. Exploring complex cultural histories and contemporary landscapes filled with ghosts and new voices, this volume draws inspiration from a tradition of travel, place-oriented, and literature-based works ranging from William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road to Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, Wendy Lesser’s Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books, and Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch. An accompanying bibliographic essay is periodically updated and available at Hallock’s website: www.roadcourse.us.
Author: Adam Nemmers
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1949979679
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
American Modern(ist) Epic argues that during the 1920s and ‘30s a cadre of minority novelists revitalized the classic epic form in an effort to recast the United States according to modern, diverse, and pluralistic grounds. Rather than adhere to the reification of static culture (as did ancient verse epic), in their prose epics Gertrude Stein and John Dos Passos utilized recursion, bricolage, and polyphony to represent the multifarious immediacy and movement of the modern world. Meanwhile, H. T. Tsiang and Richard Wright created absurd and insipid anti-heroes for their epics, contesting the hegemony of Anglo and capitalist dominance in the United States. In all, I posit, these modern(ist) epic novels undermined and revised the foundational ideology of the United States, contesting notions of individualism, progress, and racial hegemony while modernizing the epic form in an effort to refound the nation. The marriage of this classical form to modernist principles produced transcendent literature and offered a strenuous challenge to the interwar status quo, yet ultimately proved a failure: longstanding American ideology was simply too fixed and widespread to be entirely dislodged.
Author: Sarah E. Chinn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009442694
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
The book is a study of the ways that white radicals deployed the physical and literary image of amputation during the Civil War and Reconstruction to argue for full Black citizenship and against a national reconciliation that reimposed white supremacy. It gives readers a new way to think about the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Author: Justin Parks
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009347837
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239
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Book Description
This book gives readers a fresh take on Depression-era poetry in relation to the idea of modernity experienced as crisis.
Author: Jolene Hubbs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009250655
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205
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Book Description
Shows how representations of poor white southerners helped shape middle-class identity and major American literary movements and genres.
Author: Owen Clayton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009348078
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 359
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Book Description
The most enduring version of the hobo that has come down from the so-called 'Golden Age of Tramping' (1890s to 1940s) is an American cultural icon, signifying freedom from restraint and rebellion to the established order while reinforcing conservative messages about American exceptionalism, individualism, race, and gender. Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos shows that this 'pioneer hobo' image is a misrepresentation by looking at works created by transient artists and thinkers, including travel literature, fiction, memoir, early feminist writing, poetry, sociology, political journalism, satire, and music. This book explores the diversity of meanings that accrue around 'the hobo' and 'the tramp'. It is the first analysis to frame transiency within a nineteenth-century literary tradition of the vagabond, a figure who attempts to travel without money. This book provide new ways for scholars to think about the activity and representation of US transiency.
Author: Randall K. Knoper
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192845500
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
The book investigates the relations between American literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the sciences of the brain and the nervous system, showing how literary authors investigated, used, and challenged this emerging neurophysiology.
Author: S. Lemke
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230101941
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 195
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Book Description
From this study of Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ana Castillo arises a new model for analyzing American literature that highlights commonalities - one in which colloquial and lyrical style and content speak out against oppression.
Author: Walter Kalaidjian
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521829953
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
Original essays by twelve distinguished international scholars offer critical overviews of the major genres, literary culture, and social contexts that define the current state of scholarship. This Companion also features a chronology of key events and publication dates covering the first half of the twentieth century in the United States. The introductory reference guide concludes with a current bibliography of further reading organized by chapter topics.
