Author:
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 1621968677
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 226
Book Description
Narrating the American West
Author:
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 1621968677
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 226
Book Description
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 1621968677
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 226
Book Description
Narrating the American West
Author: Jordana Finnegan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781624991059
Category : LITERARY CRITICISM
Languages : en
Pages : 225
Book Description
Conventional literary representations of Western American history repress the violent conquest central to U.S. westward expansion through images of open space, autonomous individualism, and masculine heroism. In particular, the genre of autobiography has traditionally reproduced autonomous, transcendent, and masculinist notions of selfhood. This book analyzes New Western autobiographical narratives that contest such colonial understandings of race, gender, and landscape. Through a comparative analysis of memoirs and multiform narratives by diverse Euro-American, Native American, and Chicana writers, this study explores the ways in which "New Western" writing both reproduces and transforms conventional representations of the American West. Through the lens of narrative form, this book closely analyzes contemporary texts that express contradictory historical visions and notions of selfhood, even as they push the boundaries of autobiography. The book's introduction provides a theoretical and historical overview of Western American historiography and literary representations. The book is then divided into four chapters, three of which compare contradictory visions of Western identity in texts by diverse Euro-American and Native American authors from the late twentieth century. The fourth chapter focuses on these issues in the work of a popular Chicana author. Drawing upon a wide array of methodologies and perspectives, Narrating the American West offers valuable insights to students and scholars in a variety of fields, including postcolonial theory, ecocriticism, the New Western History, Native American Studies, American Studies, gender studies, and autobiography theory.
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781624991059
Category : LITERARY CRITICISM
Languages : en
Pages : 225
Book Description
Conventional literary representations of Western American history repress the violent conquest central to U.S. westward expansion through images of open space, autonomous individualism, and masculine heroism. In particular, the genre of autobiography has traditionally reproduced autonomous, transcendent, and masculinist notions of selfhood. This book analyzes New Western autobiographical narratives that contest such colonial understandings of race, gender, and landscape. Through a comparative analysis of memoirs and multiform narratives by diverse Euro-American, Native American, and Chicana writers, this study explores the ways in which "New Western" writing both reproduces and transforms conventional representations of the American West. Through the lens of narrative form, this book closely analyzes contemporary texts that express contradictory historical visions and notions of selfhood, even as they push the boundaries of autobiography. The book's introduction provides a theoretical and historical overview of Western American historiography and literary representations. The book is then divided into four chapters, three of which compare contradictory visions of Western identity in texts by diverse Euro-American and Native American authors from the late twentieth century. The fourth chapter focuses on these issues in the work of a popular Chicana author. Drawing upon a wide array of methodologies and perspectives, Narrating the American West offers valuable insights to students and scholars in a variety of fields, including postcolonial theory, ecocriticism, the New Western History, Native American Studies, American Studies, gender studies, and autobiography theory.
A Companion to the American West
Author: William Deverell
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405138483
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 584
Book Description
A Companion to the American West is a rigorous, illuminating introduction to the history of the American West. Twenty-five essays by expert scholars synthesize the best and most provocative work in the field and provide a comprehensive overview of themes and historiography. Covers the culture, politics, and environment of the American West through periods of migration, settlement, and modernization Discusses Native Americans and their conflicts and integration with American settlers
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405138483
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 584
Book Description
A Companion to the American West is a rigorous, illuminating introduction to the history of the American West. Twenty-five essays by expert scholars synthesize the best and most provocative work in the field and provide a comprehensive overview of themes and historiography. Covers the culture, politics, and environment of the American West through periods of migration, settlement, and modernization Discusses Native Americans and their conflicts and integration with American settlers
The American West and Its Interpreters
Author: Richard W. Etulain
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826364462
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335
Book Description
Distinguished historian Richard W. Etulain brings together a generous selection of essays from his sixty-year career as a specialist on the US West in this essential volume. Each essay provides an invaluable overview of the rise of western literary history and historiography—including insightful evaluations of individual historians—revealing summaries of regional literature and discussions of western stories yet to be told. Together these writings furnish readers with useful considerations of important subjects about the American West. All those interested in the American West and its interpreters will find these illuminative moments of literary history and historiography especially appealing.
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826364462
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335
Book Description
Distinguished historian Richard W. Etulain brings together a generous selection of essays from his sixty-year career as a specialist on the US West in this essential volume. Each essay provides an invaluable overview of the rise of western literary history and historiography—including insightful evaluations of individual historians—revealing summaries of regional literature and discussions of western stories yet to be told. Together these writings furnish readers with useful considerations of important subjects about the American West. All those interested in the American West and its interpreters will find these illuminative moments of literary history and historiography especially appealing.
Frontiers of Historical Imagination
Author: Kerwin Lee Klein
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520924185
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391
Book Description
The American frontier, a potent symbol since Europeans first stepped ashore on North America, serves as the touchstone for Kerwin Klein's analysis of the narrating of history. Klein explores the traditions through which historians, philosophers, anthropologists, and literary critics have understood the story of America's origin and the way those understandings have shaped and been shaped by changing conceptions of history. The American West was once the frontier space where migrating Europe collided with Native America, where the historical civilizations of the Old World met the nonhistorical wilds of the New. It was not only the cultural combat zone where American democracy was forged but also the ragged edge of History itself, where historical and nonhistorical defied and defined each other. Klein maintains that the idea of a collision between people with and without history still dominates public memory. But the collision, he believes, resounds even more powerfully in the historical imagination, which creates conflicts between narration and knowledge and carries them into the language used to describe the American frontier. In Klein's words, "We remain obscurely entangled in philosophies of history we no longer profess, and the very idea of 'America' balances on history's shifting frontiers."
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520924185
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391
Book Description
The American frontier, a potent symbol since Europeans first stepped ashore on North America, serves as the touchstone for Kerwin Klein's analysis of the narrating of history. Klein explores the traditions through which historians, philosophers, anthropologists, and literary critics have understood the story of America's origin and the way those understandings have shaped and been shaped by changing conceptions of history. The American West was once the frontier space where migrating Europe collided with Native America, where the historical civilizations of the Old World met the nonhistorical wilds of the New. It was not only the cultural combat zone where American democracy was forged but also the ragged edge of History itself, where historical and nonhistorical defied and defined each other. Klein maintains that the idea of a collision between people with and without history still dominates public memory. But the collision, he believes, resounds even more powerfully in the historical imagination, which creates conflicts between narration and knowledge and carries them into the language used to describe the American frontier. In Klein's words, "We remain obscurely entangled in philosophies of history we no longer profess, and the very idea of 'America' balances on history's shifting frontiers."
Carol Shields and the Writer-Critic
Author: Brenda Beckman-Long
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442663456
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 174
Book Description
Throughout her literary and critical career, Canadian writer Carol Shields (1935–2003) resisted simple categorization. Her novels are elegant puzzles that confront the reader with the ambiguity of meaning and narrative, yet their position within Shields’ critical feminist project has, until now, been obscured. In Carol Shields and the Writer-Critic, Brenda Beckman-Long illuminates that project through the study of Shields’ extensive oeuvre, including her fiction and criticism. Beckman-Long brings depth to her analysis through close readings of six novels, including the award-winning The Stone Diaries. Elliptical, open-ended, and concerned with women writing about women, these novels reveal Shields’ critique of dominant masculine discourses and her deep engagement with the long tradition of women’s life writing. Beckman-Long’s original archival research attests to Shields’ preoccupation with the changing efforts of waves of feminist activism and writing. A much needed reappraisal of Shields’s innovative work, Carol Shields and the Writer-Critic contributes to the scholarship on life writing and autobiography, literary criticism, and feminist and critical theory.
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442663456
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 174
Book Description
Throughout her literary and critical career, Canadian writer Carol Shields (1935–2003) resisted simple categorization. Her novels are elegant puzzles that confront the reader with the ambiguity of meaning and narrative, yet their position within Shields’ critical feminist project has, until now, been obscured. In Carol Shields and the Writer-Critic, Brenda Beckman-Long illuminates that project through the study of Shields’ extensive oeuvre, including her fiction and criticism. Beckman-Long brings depth to her analysis through close readings of six novels, including the award-winning The Stone Diaries. Elliptical, open-ended, and concerned with women writing about women, these novels reveal Shields’ critique of dominant masculine discourses and her deep engagement with the long tradition of women’s life writing. Beckman-Long’s original archival research attests to Shields’ preoccupation with the changing efforts of waves of feminist activism and writing. A much needed reappraisal of Shields’s innovative work, Carol Shields and the Writer-Critic contributes to the scholarship on life writing and autobiography, literary criticism, and feminist and critical theory.
Leslie Marmon Silko
Author: Mary Ellen Snodgrass
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786485981
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 413
Book Description
This companion, appropriate for the lay reader and researcher alike, provides analysis of characters, plots, humor, symbols, philosophies, and classic themes from the writings and tellings of Leslie Marmon Silko, the celebrated novelist, poet, memoirist and Native American wisewoman. The text opens with an annotated chronology of Silko's multiracial heritage, life and works, followed by a family tree of the Leslie-Marmon families that clarifies relationships of the people who fill her autobiographical musings. In the main text, 87 A-to-Z entries combine literary and cultural commentary with generous citations from primary and secondary sources and comparisons to classic and popular literature. Back matter includes a glossary of Pueblo terms and a list of 43 questions for research, writing projects, and discussion. This much-needed text will aid both scholars and casual readers interested in the work and career of the first internationally-acclaimed native woman author in the United States.
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786485981
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 413
Book Description
This companion, appropriate for the lay reader and researcher alike, provides analysis of characters, plots, humor, symbols, philosophies, and classic themes from the writings and tellings of Leslie Marmon Silko, the celebrated novelist, poet, memoirist and Native American wisewoman. The text opens with an annotated chronology of Silko's multiracial heritage, life and works, followed by a family tree of the Leslie-Marmon families that clarifies relationships of the people who fill her autobiographical musings. In the main text, 87 A-to-Z entries combine literary and cultural commentary with generous citations from primary and secondary sources and comparisons to classic and popular literature. Back matter includes a glossary of Pueblo terms and a list of 43 questions for research, writing projects, and discussion. This much-needed text will aid both scholars and casual readers interested in the work and career of the first internationally-acclaimed native woman author in the United States.
A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West
Author: Nicolas S. Witschi
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118652517
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 582
Book Description
A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West presents a series of essays that explore the historic and contemporary cultural expressions rooted in America's western states. Offers a comprehensive approach to the wide range of cultural expressions originating in the west Focuses on the intersections, complexities, and challenges found within and between the different historical and cultural groups that define the west's various distinctive regions Addresses traditionally familiar icons and ideas about the west (such as cowboys, wide-open spaces, and violence) and their intersections with urbanization and other regional complexities Features essays written by many of the leading scholars in western American cultural studies
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118652517
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 582
Book Description
A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West presents a series of essays that explore the historic and contemporary cultural expressions rooted in America's western states. Offers a comprehensive approach to the wide range of cultural expressions originating in the west Focuses on the intersections, complexities, and challenges found within and between the different historical and cultural groups that define the west's various distinctive regions Addresses traditionally familiar icons and ideas about the west (such as cowboys, wide-open spaces, and violence) and their intersections with urbanization and other regional complexities Features essays written by many of the leading scholars in western American cultural studies
The Cambridge Companion to Literature of the American West
Author: Steven Frye
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107095379
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293
Book Description
This Companion provides a comprehensive introduction to the literature of the American West, one of the most vibrant and diverse literary traditions.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107095379
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293
Book Description
This Companion provides a comprehensive introduction to the literature of the American West, one of the most vibrant and diverse literary traditions.
Re-imagining the Modern American West
Author: Richard W. Etulain
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816544409
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Book Description
From the Mississippi west to the Pacific, from border to border north and south, here is the first thorough overview of novelists, historians, and artists of the modern American West. Examining a full century of cultural-intellectual forces at work, a leading authority on the twentieth-century West brings his formidable talents to bear in this pioneering study. Richard W. Etulain divides his book into three major sections. He begins with the period from the 1890s to the 1920s, when artists and authors were inventing an idealized frontier--especially one depicting initial contacts and conflicts with new landscapes and new peoples. The second section covers the regionalists, who focused on regional (mostly geographical) characteristics that shaped distinctively "western" traits of character and institutions. The book concludes with a discussion of the postregional West from World War II to the ’90s, a period when novelists, historians, and artists stressed ethnicity, gender, and a new environmentalism as powerful forces in the formation of modern western society and culture. Etulain casts a wide net in his new study. He discusses novelists from Jack London to John Steinbeck and on to Joan Didion. He covers historians from Frederick Jackson Turner to Earl Pomeroy and Patricia Nelson Limerick, and artists from Frederic Remington and Charles Russell to Georgia O’Keeffe and R. C. Gorman. The author places emphasis on women painters and authors such as Mary Hallock Foote, Mary Austin, Willa Cather, and Judith Baca. He also stresses important works of ethnic writers including Leslie Marmon Silko, Rudolfo Anaya, and Amy Tan. An intriguing survey of tendencies and trends and a well-defined profile of influences and outgrowths, this book will be valuable to students and scholars of western culture and history, American studies, and related disciplines. General readers will appreciate the book’s balanced structure and spirited writing style. All readers, whatever their level of interest, will discover the major cultural inventions of the American West over the past one hundred years.
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816544409
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Book Description
From the Mississippi west to the Pacific, from border to border north and south, here is the first thorough overview of novelists, historians, and artists of the modern American West. Examining a full century of cultural-intellectual forces at work, a leading authority on the twentieth-century West brings his formidable talents to bear in this pioneering study. Richard W. Etulain divides his book into three major sections. He begins with the period from the 1890s to the 1920s, when artists and authors were inventing an idealized frontier--especially one depicting initial contacts and conflicts with new landscapes and new peoples. The second section covers the regionalists, who focused on regional (mostly geographical) characteristics that shaped distinctively "western" traits of character and institutions. The book concludes with a discussion of the postregional West from World War II to the ’90s, a period when novelists, historians, and artists stressed ethnicity, gender, and a new environmentalism as powerful forces in the formation of modern western society and culture. Etulain casts a wide net in his new study. He discusses novelists from Jack London to John Steinbeck and on to Joan Didion. He covers historians from Frederick Jackson Turner to Earl Pomeroy and Patricia Nelson Limerick, and artists from Frederic Remington and Charles Russell to Georgia O’Keeffe and R. C. Gorman. The author places emphasis on women painters and authors such as Mary Hallock Foote, Mary Austin, Willa Cather, and Judith Baca. He also stresses important works of ethnic writers including Leslie Marmon Silko, Rudolfo Anaya, and Amy Tan. An intriguing survey of tendencies and trends and a well-defined profile of influences and outgrowths, this book will be valuable to students and scholars of western culture and history, American studies, and related disciplines. General readers will appreciate the book’s balanced structure and spirited writing style. All readers, whatever their level of interest, will discover the major cultural inventions of the American West over the past one hundred years.