An American Romance

An American Romance PDF Author: John Lars Zwerenz
Publisher: Abbott Press
ISBN: 1458206246
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
An American Romance is the intimate story of the love between a man named Lawrence and a woman named Renee, two intelligent, intensely romantic people. They approach and discover one another gracefully, with a solemn ardor; a passion which contains both brightness and darkness. They take an unforgettable journey through love and resentment, lust and domination, rapture and blackness, and they find that forgiveness is the key to understanding. Songs of Rapture and Other Poems, included as an appendix within this book, is a mystical journey into the interior of every man and woman's heart. It speaks of things, both of gilded rays and of deep, profound shadows, which surpass the realm of all music. The poet takes the reader through the golden, sunny corners of the psyche's most wondrous daylight to the blackest regions of the human mind.

An American Romance

An American Romance PDF Author: John Lars Zwerenz
Publisher: Abbott Press
ISBN: 1458206246
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 98

Get Book Here

Book Description
An American Romance is the intimate story of the love between a man named Lawrence and a woman named Renee, two intelligent, intensely romantic people. They approach and discover one another gracefully, with a solemn ardor; a passion which contains both brightness and darkness. They take an unforgettable journey through love and resentment, lust and domination, rapture and blackness, and they find that forgiveness is the key to understanding. Songs of Rapture and Other Poems, included as an appendix within this book, is a mystical journey into the interior of every man and woman's heart. It speaks of things, both of gilded rays and of deep, profound shadows, which surpass the realm of all music. The poet takes the reader through the golden, sunny corners of the psyche's most wondrous daylight to the blackest regions of the human mind.

An American Love Story

An American Love Story PDF Author: Rona Jaffe
Publisher: Dell
ISBN: 0804154015
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description
Four smart women . . . and their foolish choice. In love with the same man. The wrong man. Women found him so easy to love. Clay Bowen had it all—charisma, good looks, and power in the glamorous world of television. Laura, the delicate dancer, gave up her dazzling career to marry him and have his child. Nina excelled at everything—except capturing her father’s complete attention. Bambi, his ruthless young “assistant,” thought she was using him. And Susan, a brilliant writer, couldn’t bear to think their twenty-year bicoastal romance was too good to be true. In her most riveting novel since The Best of Everything, Rona Jaffe weaves a compelling story of passion and obsession. Moving from the glittering capitals of the world and the epicenter of the TV and movie industries to the darkest depths of the human heart, she holds her readers captive to the very last page. Praise for An American Love Story “Jaffe comprehends the ambivalence of women in love like few other contemporary novelists.”—New Woman “Compelling . . . a novel of growth, despair, destruction and realization—a novel to read and have a daughter read.”—UPI “Savvy and sharp.”—St. Petersburg Times “Thoughtful, provocative.”—San Antonio Express-News

Pursuing Happiness: Reading American Romance as Political Fiction

Pursuing Happiness: Reading American Romance as Political Fiction PDF Author: Laura Vivanco
Publisher: Humanities-Ebooks
ISBN: 1847603602
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
The dominance of popular romance in the United States fiction market suggests that its trends and themes may reflect the politics of a significant proportion of the population. 'Pursuing Happiness' explores some of the choices, beliefs and assumptions which shape the politics of American Romance novels. In particular, it focuses on what romances reveal about American attitudes towards work, the West, race, gender, community cohesion, ancestral “roots” and a historical connection (or lack of it) to the land.

Revisionary Interventions Into the Americanist Canon

Revisionary Interventions Into the Americanist Canon PDF Author: Donald E. Pease
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822314936
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Throughout the era of the Cold War a consensus reigned as to what constituted the great works of American literature. Yet as scholars have increasingly shown, and as this volume unmistakably demonstrates, that consensus was built upon the repression of the voices and historical contexts of subordinated social groups as well as literary works themselves, works both outside and within the traditional canon. This book is an effort to recover those lost voices. Engaging New Historicist, neo-Marxist, poststructuralist, and other literary practices, this volume marks important shifts in the organizing principles and self-understanding of the field of American Studies. Originally published as a special issue of boundary 2, the essays gathered here discuss writers as diverse as Kate Chopin, Frederick Douglass, Emerson, Melville, W. D. Howells, Henry James, W. E. B. DuBois, and Mark Twain, plus the historical figure John Brown. Two major sections devoted to the theory of romance and to cultural-historical analyses emphasize the political perspective of "New Americanist" literary and cultural study. Contributors. William E. Cain, Wai-chee Dimock, Howard Horwitz, Gregory S. Jay, Steven Mailloux, John McWilliams, Susan Mizruchi, Donald E. Pease, Ivy Schweitzer, Priscilla Wald, Michael Warner, Robert Weimann

The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature

The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature PDF Author: Steven R. Serafin
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9780826417770
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1340

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Book Description
More than ten years in the making, this comprehensive single-volume literary survey is for the student, scholar, and general reader. The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature represents a collaborative effort, involving 300 contributors from across the US and Canada. Composed of more than 1,100 signed biographical-critical entries, this Encyclopedia serves as both guide and companion to the study and appreciation of American literature. A special feature is the topical article, of which there are 70.

Gothic America

Gothic America PDF Author: Teresa A. Goddu
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231108171
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Goddu traces the development of the female, southern, and African-American gothic in literature between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, placing in a new historical context Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, Alcott's ghost stories, and Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

Conspiracy and Romance

Conspiracy and Romance PDF Author: Robert S. Levine
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521366540
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Robert Levine examines the American romance in a new historical context. His book offers a fresh reading of the genre, establishing its importance to American culture between the founding of the Republic and the Civil War. With convincing historical and literary detail, Levine shows that anxieties about foreign elements--French revolutionaries, secret societies, Catholic immigrants, African slaves--are central to the fictional worlds of Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne and Melville. Ormond, The Bravo, The Blithedale Romance, and Benito Cereno are persuasively explicated by Levine to demonstrate that the romance dramatized the same conflicts and ideals that gave rise to the American Republic. Americans conceived "America" as a historical romance, and their romances dramatize the historical conditions of the culture. The fear that reputed conspiracies would subvert the order and integrity of the new nation were recurrent and widespread; Levine illuminates the influence of such fears on the works of major romance writers during this period.

Ambition & Love in Modern American Art

Ambition & Love in Modern American Art PDF Author: Jonathan Weinberg
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300081879
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Focusing on extreme moments in the careers of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Walker Evans, David Hockney, Sally Mann, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Alfred Stieglitz, Andy Warhol, and others, Weinberg explores how these individuals struggled to gain or maintain the attention of an increasingly jaded audience."--BOOK JACKET.

American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque

American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque PDF Author: Dieter Meindl
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 9780826210791
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
By synthesizing Kayser's and Bakhtin's views of the grotesque and Heidegger's philosophy of Being, American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque seeks to demonstrate that American fiction from Poe to Pynchon has tried to convey the existential dimension: the pre-individual totality or flow of life, which defines itself against the mind and its linguistic capacity. Dieter Meindl shows how the grotesque, through its self-contradictory nature, has been instrumental in expressing this reality-conception, an antirationalist stance in basic agreement with existential thought. The historical validity of this new metaphysics, which grants precedence to Being--the context of cognition--over the cognizant subject, must be upheld in the face of deconstructive animadversions upon any metaphysics of presence. The notion of decentering the subject, Meindl argues, did not originate with deconstruction. The existential grotesque confirms the protomodernist character of classic American fiction. Meindl traces its course through a number of well-known texts by Melville, James, Gilman, Anderson, Faulkner, and O'Connor, among others. To convey life conceived as motion, these writers had to capture--that is, immobilize--it in their art: an essentially distortive and, therefore, grotesque device. Melville's "Bartleby," dealing with a mort vivant, is the seminal text in this mode of indirectness. As opposed to the existential grotesque, which grants access to a preverbal realm, the linguistic grotesque of postmodern fiction works on the assumption that all reality is referable to language in a textual universe. American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque will significantly alter our understanding of certain traditions in American literature.

An American Marriage

An American Marriage PDF Author: Michael Burlingame
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1643137352
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
An enlightening narrative exploring an oft-overlooked aspect of the sixteenth president's life, An American Marriage reveals the tragic story of Abraham Lincoln’s marriage to Mary Todd. Abraham Lincoln was apparently one of those men who regarded “connubial bliss” as an untenable fantasy. During the Civil War, he pardoned a Union soldier who had deserted the army to return home to wed his sweetheart. As the president signed a document sparing the soldier's life, Lincoln said: “I want to punish the young man—probably in less than a year he will wish I had withheld the pardon.” Based on thirty years of research, An American Marriage describes and analyzes why Lincoln had good reason to regret his marriage to Mary Todd. This revealing narrative shows that, as First Lady, Mary Lincoln accepted bribes and kickbacks, sold permits and pardons, engaged in extortion, and peddled influence. The reader comes to learn that Lincoln wed Mary Todd because, in all likelihood, she seduced him and then insisted that he protect her honor. Perhaps surprisingly, the 5’2” Mrs. Lincoln often physically abused her 6’4” husband, as well as her children and servants; she humiliated her husband in public; she caused him, as president, to fear that she would disgrace him publicly. Unlike her husband, she was not profoundly opposed to slavery and hardly qualifies as the “ardent abolitionist” that some historians have portrayed. While she providid a useful stimulus to his ambition, she often “crushed his spirit,” as his law partner put it. In the end, Lincoln may not have had as successful a presidency as he did—where he showed a preternatural ability to deal with difficult people—if he had not had so much practice at home.