Author: Paul Fisher
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135706581
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
This study investigates the paradoxical dynamics of American high culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by examining the strategies of Americans who wrote about European art in order to promote and legitimize literary careers. Contrary to the myths they themselves disseminated, American writers in Europe did not escape American culture but rather created and participated in US. Cultural institutions like journals, museums, and universities. Transatlantic careers articulated a cult of Europe in a privileged American space, served social and aesthetic hierarchies, and constructed formidable versions of professional authority of American writers. The book focuses on four art careers Americans practiced in Europe: travel writing, art reviewing, connoisseurship, and salon hosting. It illuminates the careers of William Dean Howells, Henry James, Bernard and Mary Berenson, Celia Thaxter, and Gertrude Stein as itineraries of high-cultural formation and self-definition. In four chapters, the study examines these paradigmatic careers as both literary and cultural history, relating them to a diverse American society as well as Bostonian high culture. Americans created and deployed expatriate art careers, the author argues, in a landscape of gender, ethnic, and class relations. The use of Europe was both figural and practical: writers created a fantasized Europe that both enacted social repression and enabled social liberation. Ultimately, as the example of James Weld Johnson demonstrates, elitist and Europhile high culture reflected a much larger America as well as the narrower cultural institutions that historically fostered it.
Author: Bertram D. Ashe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136711139
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 164
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Book Description
The book explores the written representation of African-American oral storytelling from Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison to James Alan McPherson, Toni Cade Bambara and John Edgar Wideman. At its core, the book compares the relationship of the "frame tale"-an inside-the-text storyteller telling a tale to an inside-the-text listener-with the relationship between the outside-the-text writer and reader. The progression is from Chesnutt's 1899 frame texts, in which the black spoken voice is contained by a white narrator/listener, to Bambara's sixties-era example of a "frameless" spoken voice text, to Wideman's neo-frame text of the late 20th century.
Author: Lisa Yaszek
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136716092
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
First Published in 2002. Advanced technologies challenge conventional understandings of the human subject by transforming the body into a conduit between external forces and the internal psyche. This title discusses the intense controversy about how to best understand and represent human subjectivity in a technology-intensive era. Yaszek provides an overview by linking specific modes of identity and agency to engagement with specific manifestations of technology itself.
Author: William G. Little
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136746838
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 194
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Book Description
First published in 2002. This book explores the philosophical, social, and aesthetic implications of twentieth-century America's obsession with eliminating waste. Through interdisciplinary engagement with fiction and popular culture, William Little traces the way this obsession finds expression in powerful social forces (e.g., the drive to consume conspicuously; the Progressive-era campaign to manage scientifically; the current demand to "reduce, reuse, recycle"), and shows how such forces are governed by an idealism that links proper treatment of waste with the promise of salvation.
Author: Susanne M. Skubal
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136713360
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182
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Book Description
An examination of the importance of oral experience as reflected in literature, Word of Mouth extends psychoanalytic theory as forwarded by Freud, Karl Abraham, Melanie Klein, and Julia Kristeva. The meaning of oral experience is explored with reference to several texts, looking at the oral bond between mother and child in Proust and questions of disordered eating, raised by aggressive orality, found in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Throughout, the author draws forth the myriad expressions relating the desires and dramas of the mouth, its pervasive pleasures and its dreads.
Author: Tricia Cusack
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351566741
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 302
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Book Description
Before the eighteenth century, the ocean was regarded as a repulsive and chaotic deep. Despite reinvention as a zone of wonder and pleasure, it continued to be viewed in the West and elsewhere as ?uninhabited?, empty space. This collection, spanning the eighteenth century to the present, recasts the ocean as ?social space?, with particular reference to visual representations. Part I focuses on mappings and crossings, showing how the ocean may function as a liminal space between places and cultures but also connects and imbricates them. Part II considers ships as microcosmic societies, shaped for example by the purpose of the voyage, the mores of shipboard life, and cross-cultural encounters. Part III analyses narratives accreted to wrecks and rafts, what has sunk or floats perilously, and discusses attempts to recuperate plastic flotsam. Part IV plumbs ocean depths to consider how underwater creatures have been depicted in relation to emergent disciplines of natural history and museology, how mermaids have been reimagined as a metaphor of feminist transformation, and how the symbolism of coral is deployed by contemporary artists. This engaging and erudite volume will interest a range of scholars in humanities and social sciences, including art and cultural historians, cultural geographers, and historians of empire, travel, and tourism.
Author: Lidia Yuknavitch
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136707131
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 148
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Book Description
Allegories of Violence demilitarizes the concept of war and asks what would happen if we understood war as discursive via late 20th Century novels of war.
Author: Kevin J. Hayes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107009979
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 431
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Book Description
Spend the holidays with the Master of the Macabre
Author: Andrew R. Casper
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 027109107X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 339
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Book Description
Winner of the 2022 Roland H. Bainton Book Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society & Conference In 1578, a fourteen-foot linen sheet bearing the faint bloodstained imprint of a human corpse was presented to tens of thousands of worshippers in Turin, Italy, as one of the original shrouds used to prepare Jesus Christ’s body for entombment. From that year into the next century, the Shroud of Turin emerged as Christianity’s preeminent religious artifact. In an unprecedented new look, Andrew R. Casper sheds new light on one of the world’s most famous and controversial religious objects. Since the early twentieth century, scores of scientists and forensic investigators have attributed the Shroud’s mysterious images to painterly, natural, or even supernatural forces. Casper, however, shows that this modern opposition of artifice and authenticity does not align with the cloth’s historical conception as an object of religious devotion. Examining the period of the Shroud’s most enthusiastic following, from the late 1500s through the 1600s, he reveals how it came to be considered an artful relic—a divine painting attributed to God’s artistry that contains traces of Christ’s body. Through probing analyses of materials created to perpetuate the Shroud’s cult following—including devotional, historical, and theological treatises as well as printed and painted reproductions—Casper uncovers historicized connections to late Renaissance and Baroque artistic cultures that frame an understanding of the Shroud’s bloodied corporeal impressions as an alloy of material authenticity and divine artifice. This groundbreaking book introduces rich, new material about the Shroud’s emergence as a sacred artifact. It will appeal to art historians specializing in religious and material studies, historians of religion, and to general readers interested in the Shroud of Turin.
Author: Jill M. Kress
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136711287
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
Through analysis of metaphors of consciousness in the philosophy and fiction of William James, Henry James and Edith Wharton, this work traces the significance of representations of knowledge, gender and social class, revealing how writers conceived of the self in modern literature.
