Modern American Literature

Modern American Literature PDF Author: Catherine Morley
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748630724
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
An incisive study of modern American literature, casting new light on its origins and themes. Exploring canonical American writers such as Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner alongside less familiar writers like Djuna Barnes and Susan Glaspell, the guide takes readers though a diverse literary landscape. It considers how the rise of the American metropolis contributed to the growth of American modernism; and also examines the ways in which regional writers responded to an accelerated American modernity. Taking in African American modernism, cultural and geographical exile, as well as developments in modern American drama, the guide introduces readers to current critical trends in modernist studies.

Modern Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction

Modern Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction PDF Author: Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199912963
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
This Very Short Introduction chronicles the trends and traditions of modern Latin American literature, arguing that Latin American literature developed as a continent-wide phenomenon, not just an assemblage of national literatures, in moments of political crisis. With the Spanish American War came Modernismo, the end of World War I and the Mexican Revolution produced the avant-garde, and the Cuban Revolution sparked a movement in the novel that came to be known as the Boom. Within this narrative, the author covers all of the major writers of Latin American literature, from Andr?s Bello and Jos? Mar?a de Heredia, through Borges and Garc?a M?rquez, to Fernando Vallejo and Roberto Bola?o.

The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism

The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism PDF 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.

Postwar American Fiction and the Rise of Modern Conservatism

Postwar American Fiction and the Rise of Modern Conservatism PDF Author: Bryan M. Santin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108974236
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Bryan M. Santin examines over a half-century of intersection between American fiction and postwar conservatism. He traces the shifting racial politics of movement conservatism to argue that contemporary perceptions of literary form and aesthetic value are intrinsically connected to the rise of the American Right. Instead of casting postwar conservatives as cynical hustlers or ideological fanatics, Santin shows how the long-term rhetorical shift in conservative notions of literary value and prestige reveal an aesthetic antinomy between high culture and low culture. This shift, he argues, registered and mediated the deeper foundational antinomy structuring postwar conservatism itself: the stable social order of traditionalism and the creative destruction of free-market capitalism. Postwar conservatives produced, in effect, an ambivalent double register in the discourse of conservative literary taste that sought to celebrate neo-aristocratic manifestations of cultural capital while condemning newer, more progressive manifestations revolving around racial and ethnic diversity.

Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context [4 Volumes]

Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context [4 Volumes] PDF Author: Linda De Roche
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
ISBN: 1440853584
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This four-volume reference work surveys American literature from the early 20th century to the present day, featuring a diverse range of American works and authors and an expansive selection of primary source materials. Bringing useful and engaging material into the classroom, this four-volume set covers more than a century of American literary history--from 1900 to the present. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context profiles authors and their works and provides overviews of literary movements and genres through which readers will understand the historical, cultural, and political contexts that have shaped American writing. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context provides wide coverage of authors, works, genres, and movements that are emblematic of the diversity of modern America. Not only are major literary movements represented, such as the Beats, but this work also highlights the emergence and development of modern Native American literature, African American literature, and other representative groups that showcase the diversity of American letters. A rich selection of primary documents and background material provides indispensable information for student research. Covers significant authors, including those neglected by history, and their works from major historical and cultural periods of the last century, including authors writing today Situates authors' works not only within their own canon but also with the historical and cultural context of the U.S. more broadly Positions primary documents after specific authors or works, allowing readers to read excerpts critically in light of the entries Examines literary movements, forms, and genres that also pay special attention to multi-ethnic and women writers

Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture

Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture PDF Author: Tara Stubbs
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317446429
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
This study develops the important work carried out on American literature through the frameworks of transnational, transatlantic, and trans-local studies to ask what happens when these same aspects become intrinsic to the critical narrative. Much cultural criticism since the 1990s has sought to displace perceptions of American exceptionalism with broader notions of Atlanticism, transnationalism, world-system, and trans-localism as each has redefined the US and the world more generally. This collection shows how the remapping of America in terms of global networks, and as a set of particular localities, or even glocalities, now plays out in Americanist scholarship, reflecting on the critical consequences of the spatial turn in American literary and cultural studies. Spanning twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry, fiction, memoir, visual art, publishing, and television, and locating the US in Caribbean, African, Asian, European, and other contexts, this volume argues for a re-modelling of American-ness with the transnational as part of its innate rhetoric. It includes discussions of travel, migration, disease, media, globalization, and countless other examples of inflowing. Essays focus on subjects tracing the contemporary contours of the transnational, such as the role of the US in the rise of the global novel, the impact of Caribbean history on American thought (and vice versa), transatlantic cultural and philosophical genealogies and correspondences, and the exchanges between the poetics of American space and those of other world spaces. Asking questions about the way the American eye has traversed and consumed the objects and cultures of the world, but how that world is resistant, this volume will make an important contribution to American and Transatlantic literary studies.

American Modern(ist) Epic

American Modern(ist) Epic PDF 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.

A Rose for Emily and Other Stories

A Rose for Emily and Other Stories PDF Author: William Faulkner
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0307799697
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
Here is a classic collection from one of America’s greatest authors. Though these short stories have universal appeal, they are intensely local in setting. With the exception of “Turn About,” which derives from the time of the First World War, all these tales unfold in a small town in Mississippi, William Faulkner’s birthplace and lifelong home. Some stories—such as “A Rose for Emily,” “The Hound,” and “That Evening Sun”—are famous, displaying an uncanny blend of the homely and the horrifying. But others, though less well known, are equally colorful and characteristic. The gently nostalgic “Delta Autumn” provides a striking contrast to “Dry September” and “Barn Burning,” which are intensely dramatic. As the editor, Saxe Commins, states in his illuminating Foreword: “These eight stories reflect the deep love and loathing, the tenderness and contempt, the identification and repudiation William Faulkner has felt for the traditions and the way of life of his own portion of the world.”

At Home in the City

At Home in the City PDF Author: Elizabeth Klimasmith
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781584654971
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
A lucidly written analysis of urban literature and evolving residential architecture.

The Bonfire of the Vanities

The Bonfire of the Vanities PDF Author: Tom Wolfe
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429960566
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 708

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Book Description
Vintage Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities, the #1 bestseller that will forever define late-twentieth-century New York style. "No one has portrayed New York Society this accurately and devastatingly since Edith Wharton" (The National Review) “A page-turner . . . Brilliant high comedy.” (The New Republic) Sherman McCoy, the central figure of Tom Wolfe's first novel, is a young investment banker with a fourteen-room apartment in Manhattan. When he is involved in a freak accident in the Bronx, prosecutors, politicians, the press, the police, the clergy, and assorted hustlers high and low close in on him, licking their chops and giving us a gargantuan helping of the human comedy, of New York in the 1980s, a city boiling over with racial and ethnic hostilities and burning with the itch to Grab It Now. Wolfe's novel is a big, panoramic story of the metropolis that reinforces the author's reputation as the foremost chronicler of the way we live in America. Adapted to film in 1990 by director Brian De Palma, the movie stars Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, and Morgan Freeman.