Easterns, Westerns, and Private Eyes

Easterns, Westerns, and Private Eyes PDF Author: Marcus Klein
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299143046
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
"Marcus Klein makes major contributions to American studies, literary criticism, and intellectual and social history. In a perfectly crystalline and crystallized way, he brilliantly exhibits how the American imagination was rapidly, unexpectedly, and utterly transformed as we made for the twentieth century. Klein demonstrates how immigration, popular literature, the rise of ethnicity, new psychological fears, and old fables mixed together to make modern America. No one has seen the underside of the American imagination so clearly and originally; but once we are allowed to see what Klein does, our understanding of our history and its vicissitudes is changed for good."--Jay Martin, University of Southern California

Easterns, Westerns, and Private Eyes

Easterns, Westerns, and Private Eyes PDF Author: Marcus Klein
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299143046
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Marcus Klein makes major contributions to American studies, literary criticism, and intellectual and social history. In a perfectly crystalline and crystallized way, he brilliantly exhibits how the American imagination was rapidly, unexpectedly, and utterly transformed as we made for the twentieth century. Klein demonstrates how immigration, popular literature, the rise of ethnicity, new psychological fears, and old fables mixed together to make modern America. No one has seen the underside of the American imagination so clearly and originally; but once we are allowed to see what Klein does, our understanding of our history and its vicissitudes is changed for good."--Jay Martin, University of Southern California

Dirty Words in Deadwood

Dirty Words in Deadwood PDF Author: Melody Graulich
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496210484
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
Dirty Words in "Deadwood" showcases literary analyses of the Deadwood television series by leading western American literary critics. Whereas previous reaction to the series has largely addressed the question of historical accuracy rather than intertextuality or literary complexity, Melody Graulich and Nicolas S. Witschi's edited volume brings a much-needed perspective to Deadwood's representation of the frontier West. As Graulich observes in her introduction: "With its emotional coherence, compelling characterizations, compressed structural brilliance, moral ambiguity, language experiments, interpretation of the past, relevance to the present, and engagement with its literary forebears, Deadwood is an aesthetic triumph as historical fiction and, like much great literature, makes a case for the humanistic value of storytelling." From previously unpublished interviews with series creator David Milch to explorations of sexuality, disability, cinematic technique, and western narrative, this collection focuses on Deadwood as a series ultimately about the imagination, as a verbal and visual construct, and as a literary masterpiece that richly rewards close analysis and interpretation.

Hard-Boiled

Hard-Boiled PDF Author: Erin Smith
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1592139116
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
An examination of the culture that produced and supported pulp-fiction.

Horse Opera

Horse Opera PDF Author: Peter Stanfield
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252070495
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
"In this innovative take on a neglected chapter of film history, Peter Stanfield challenges the commonly held view of the singing cowboy as an ephemeral figure of fun and argues instead that he was one of the most important cultural figures to emerge out of the Great Depression.The rural or newly urban working-class families who flocked to see the latest exploits of Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter, andother singing cowboys were an audience largely ignored by mainstreamHollywood film. Hard hit by the depression, faced with the threat--and often the reality--of dispossession and dislocation, pressured to adapt to new ways of living, these small-town filmgoers saw their ambitions, fantasies, and desires embodied in the singing cowboy and their social and political circumstances dramatized in ""B"" Westerns.Stanfield traces the singing cowboy's previously uncharted roots in the performance tradition of blackface minstrelsy and its literary antecedents in dime novels, magazine fiction, and the novels of B. M. Bower, showing how silent cinema conventions, the developing commercial music media, and the prevailing conditions of film production shaped the ""horse opera"" of the 1930s. Cowboy songs offered an alternative to the disruptive modern effects of jazz music, while the series Western--tapping into aesthetic principles shunned by the aspiring middle class--emphasized stunts, fist fights, slapstick comedy, disguises, and hidden identities over narrative logic and character psychology. Singing cowboys also linked recording, radio, publishing, live performance, and film media.Entertaining and thought-provoking, Horse Opera recovers not only the forgotten cowboys of the 1930s but also their forgotten audiences: the ordinary men and women whose lives were brightened by the sights and songs of the singing Western."

Owen Wister and the West

Owen Wister and the West PDF Author: Gary Scharnhorst
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806149868
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
More than any other pioneer of the genre, Owen Wister turned the Western into a form of social and political critique, touching on such issues as race, the environment, women’s rights, and immigration. In Owen Wister and the West, a biographical-literary account of Wister’s life and writings, Gary Scharnhorst shows how the West shaped Wister’s career and ideas, even as he lived and worked in the East.

Manliness and Militarism

Manliness and Militarism PDF Author: Mark Howard Moss
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780195415940
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Euphoria swept Canada, and especially Ontario, with the outbreak of World War I. But why were people excited by the prospect of war? What popular attitudes about war had become ingrained in the society? This book examines the cult of manliness as it developed in Victorian and Edwardian Ontario, revealing a number of factors that fed the eagerness of youth to prove their mettle on the battlefields of Europe.

Crime and the Rise of Modern America

Crime and the Rise of Modern America PDF Author: Kristofer Allerfeldt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136821538
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
- Contents:The crimes of the century -- Crime and the West -- Hate crime -- Policing and imprisonment -- Conmen, swindlers, and dupes -- Business and financial crime -- Prohibitions -- Sex crime -- Political crime : scandal, sleaze and corruption -- Terrorists : rebels, radicals and freedom fighters and criminals with a cause -- Immigration and crime.

Conserving Words

Conserving Words PDF Author: Daniel J. Philippon
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820327594
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Conserving Words looks at five authors of seminal works of nature writing who also founded or revitalized important environmental organizations: Theodore Roosevelt and the Boone and Crockett Club, Mabel Osgood Wright and the National Audubon Society, John Muir and the Sierra Club, Aldo Leopold and the Wilderness Society, and Edward Abbey and Earth First! These writers used powerfully evocative and galvanizing metaphors for nature, metaphors that Daniel J. Philippon calls “conserving” words: frontier (Roosevelt), garden (Wright), park (Muir), wilderness (Leopold), and utopia (Abbey). Integrating literature, history, biography, and philosophy, this ambitious study explores how “conserving” words enabled narratives to convey environmental values as they explained how human beings should interact with the nonhuman world.

The Recursive Frontier

The Recursive Frontier PDF Author: Michael Docherty
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 143849713X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 451

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Book Description
The Recursive Frontier is an innovative spatial history of both the literature of Los Angeles and the city itself in the mid-twentieth century. Setting canonical texts alongside underexamined works and sources such as census bulletins and regional planning documents, Michael Docherty identifies the American frontier as the defining dynamic of Los Angeles fiction from the 1930s to the 1950s. Contrary to the received wisdom that Depression-era narratives mourn the frontier's demise, Docherty argues that the frontier lives on as a cruel set of rules for survival in urban modernity, governing how texts figure race, space, mobility, and masculinity. Moving from dancehalls to offices to oil fields and beyond, the book provides a richer, more diverse picture of LA's literary production during this period, as well as a vivid account of LA's cultural and social development as it transformed into the multiethnic megalopolis we know today.

The Annotated Big Sleep

The Annotated Big Sleep PDF Author: Raymond Chandler
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
ISBN: 080416889X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
The first fully annotated edition of Raymond Chandler’s 1939 classic The Big Sleep features hundreds of illuminating notes and images alongside the full text of the novel and is an essential addition to any crime fiction fan’s library. A masterpiece of noir, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep helped to define a genre. Today it remains one of the most celebrated and stylish novels of the twentieth century. This comprehensive, annotated edition offers a fascinating look behind the scenes of the novel, bringing the gritty and seductive world of Chandler's iconic private eye Philip Marlowe to life. The Annotated Big Sleep solidifies the novel’s position as one of the great works of American fiction and will surprise and enthrall Chandler’s biggest fans. Including: -Personal letters and source texts -The historical context of Chandler’s Los Angeles, including maps and images -Film stills and art from the early pulps -An analysis of class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity in the novel