From Girl to Woman

From Girl to Woman PDF Author: Christy Rishoi
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791486885
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
From Girl to Woman examines the coming-of-age narratives of a diverse group of American women writers, including Annie Dillard, Zora Neale Hurston, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Mary McCarthy, and explores the crucial role of such narratives in the development of American feminism. Women have long known that identity is complex and contradictory, but in the twentieth century their coming-of-age narratives finally voice this knowledge. Addressing a variety of themes—awakening sexuality, the body's metamorphosis in puberty, consciousness of difference from males, and the socialization into feminine gender roles—these narratives reject the heroine's narrative ending in romance, allowing American women writers to create alternative subjectivities by rejecting the notion that identity is ever fixed. While activists have succeeded in winning legal battles that have changed the legal status of women, these narratives perform the cultural work of exposing the painful contradictions faced by women as they come of age.

From Girl to Woman

From Girl to Woman PDF Author: Christy Rishoi
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791486885
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215

Get Book Here

Book Description
From Girl to Woman examines the coming-of-age narratives of a diverse group of American women writers, including Annie Dillard, Zora Neale Hurston, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Mary McCarthy, and explores the crucial role of such narratives in the development of American feminism. Women have long known that identity is complex and contradictory, but in the twentieth century their coming-of-age narratives finally voice this knowledge. Addressing a variety of themes—awakening sexuality, the body's metamorphosis in puberty, consciousness of difference from males, and the socialization into feminine gender roles—these narratives reject the heroine's narrative ending in romance, allowing American women writers to create alternative subjectivities by rejecting the notion that identity is ever fixed. While activists have succeeded in winning legal battles that have changed the legal status of women, these narratives perform the cultural work of exposing the painful contradictions faced by women as they come of age.

The Other Fifties

The Other Fifties PDF Author: Joel Foreman
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252065743
Category : Nineteen fifties
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
From the Edsel to Eisenhower, from Mau Mau to Doris Day, and from Ayn Rand to Elvis, contributors to The Other Fifties topple the decade's already weakened image as a time of unprecedented peace, prosperity, and conformity. Representing the fifties as a period of cultural transformation, contributors reveal the gradual "unmaking" of traditions and value systems that took place as American culture prepared itself for the more easily observed cultural turbulence of the 1960s. Well known contributors demonstrate how television, the novel, the Hollywood movie, the Broadway musical, and rock and roll assaulted midcentury American attitudes toward sexuality, race, gender, and class, so altering public sensibilities that what was novel or shocking in the fifties seems tame or even downright difficult to grasp today. They also rebut the widely held view that 1950s consumerism led to cultural homogeneity, replacing this view with a picture of robust popular markets that defied conservative controls and actively subverted conventional norms and values. Brushing away the haze of an era, The Other Fifties will help readers understand the decade not as placid or repressed, but as a time when emancipatory desires struggled to articulate themselves.

An Introduction to Literature

An Introduction to Literature PDF Author: Sylvan Barnet
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780316082273
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 1252

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Book Description
Fiction, poetry, & drama.

A Brief History of American Literature

A Brief History of American Literature PDF Author: Richard Gray
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444392468
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
A Brief History of American Literature offers students and general readers a concise and up-to-date history of the full range of American writing from its origins until the present day. Represents the only up-to-date concise history of American literature Covers fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction, as well as looking at other forms of literature including folktales, spirituals, the detective story, the thriller and science fiction Considers how our understanding of American literature has changed over the past twenty years Offers students an abridged version of History of American Literature, a book widely considered the standard survey text Provides an invaluable introduction to the subject for students of American literature, American studies and all those interested in the literature and culture of the United States

Rebels

Rebels PDF Author: Leerom Medovoi
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822387298
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
Holden Caulfield, the beat writers, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and James Dean—these and other avatars of youthful rebellion were much more than entertainment. As Leerom Medovoi shows, they were often embraced and hotly debated at the dawn of the Cold War era because they stood for dissent and defiance at a time when the ideological production of the United States as leader of the “free world” required emancipatory figures who could represent America’s geopolitical claims. Medovoi argues that the “bad boy” became a guarantor of the country’s anti-authoritarian, democratic self-image: a kindred spirit to the freedom-seeking nations of the rapidly decolonizing third world and a counterpoint to the repressive conformity attributed to both the Soviet Union abroad and America’s burgeoning suburbs at home. Alongside the young rebel, the contemporary concept of identity emerged in the 1950s. It was in that decade that “identity” was first used to define collective selves in the politicized manner that is recognizable today: in terms such as “national identity” and “racial identity.” Medovoi traces the rapid absorption of identity themes across many facets of postwar American culture, including beat literature, the young adult novel, the Hollywood teen film, early rock ‘n’ roll, black drama, and “bad girl” narratives. He demonstrates that youth culture especially began to exhibit telltale motifs of teen, racial, sexual, gender, and generational revolt that would burst into political prominence during the ensuing decades, bequeathing to the progressive wing of contemporary American political culture a potent but ambiguous legacy of identity politics.

A History of American Literature

A History of American Literature PDF Author: Richard Gray
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444345680
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 933

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Book Description
Updated throughout and with much new material, A History of American Literature, Second Edition, is the most up-to-date and comprehensive survey available of the myriad forms of American Literature from pre-Columbian times to the present. The most comprehensive and up-to-date history of American literature available today Covers fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction, as well as other forms of literature including folktale, spirituals, the detective story, the thriller, and science fiction Explores the plural character of American literature, including the contributions made by African American, Native American, Hispanic and Asian American writers Considers how our understanding of American literature has changed over the past?thirty years Situates American literature in the contexts of American history, politics and society Offers an invaluable introduction to American literature for students at all levels, academic and general readers

Pícaros, Madmen, Naïfs, and Clowns

Pícaros, Madmen, Naïfs, and Clowns PDF Author: William Riggan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Air bases, American
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description


Twain, Alcott, and the Birth of the Adolescent Reform Novel

Twain, Alcott, and the Birth of the Adolescent Reform Novel PDF Author: Roberta S. Trites
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587297701
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Trites argues that Twain and Alcott wrote on similar topics because they were so deeply affected by the Civil War, by cataclysmic emotional and financial losses in their families, by their cultural immersion in the tenets of Protestant philosophy, and by sexual tensions that may have stimulated their interest in writing for adolescents, Trites demonstrates how the authors participated in a cultural dynamic that marked the changing nature of adolescence in America, provoking a literary sentiment that continues to inform young adult literature. Both intuited that the transitory nature of adolescence makes it ripe for expression about human potential for change and reform.

American Fiction In PerspectiveContemporary Essays

American Fiction In PerspectiveContemporary Essays PDF Author: Ed. Satish K. Gupta
Publisher: Atlantic Publishers & Dist
ISBN: 9788171566945
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
The Book Contains Well Researched Articles By Scholars From Indian Universities. The Articles Offer A Comprehensive View Of What American Fiction Has Been Like During The Last Hundred Years Or So. American Culture, Society, Family, Cities Of Blacks And Whites Have Been Variously Framed Into The Narrative Art Form By A Galaxy Of Talented American Novelists : Mark Twain, Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, Faulkner, Hemingway, Saul Bellow, Salinger, Norman Mailer, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Ernest J. Gaines, Among Others. The Editor Has Adopted A Chronological Approach And The Emphasis In Articles Has Fallen Upon Providing A Synoptic View Of American Fiction Rather Than Giving A Historical Account Of It. The Approaches Covered Here Are Multi-Disciplinary As Well As Intertextual. The Reader, Teacher And Scholar Should Find The Book Full Of Fresh Insights.

New Essays on The Catcher in the Rye

New Essays on The Catcher in the Rye PDF Author: Jack Salzman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521377980
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Book Description
Five essays focus on various aspects of the novel from its ideology within the context of the Cold War and portrait of a particular American subculture to its account of patterns of adolescent crisis and rich and complex narrative structure.