On Native Grounds

On Native Grounds PDF Author: Alfred Kazin
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 054426374X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 573

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Book Description
“With On Native Grounds [Kazin] takes his place in the first rank of American practitioners of the higher literary criticism” (The New York Times). An important historian of American literature, Alfred Kazin delivers an exhaustive—yet accessible—analysis of modernist fiction from the tail end of the Victorian period to the beginning of WWII. America’s golden age—from 1890 to 1940—included the work of Howells, Wharton, Lewis, Cather, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Their struggle for realism served as the basis for Kazin’s interpretation. Kazin’s debut was impressive in its scope for such a young author and became a part of his renowned trilogy of literary criticism, which also includes An American Procession and God and the American Writer. “Not only a literary but a moral history . . . The best and most complete treatment we have.” —Lionel Trilling, The Nation

On Native Grounds

On Native Grounds PDF Author: Alfred Kazin
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 054426374X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 573

Get Book Here

Book Description
“With On Native Grounds [Kazin] takes his place in the first rank of American practitioners of the higher literary criticism” (The New York Times). An important historian of American literature, Alfred Kazin delivers an exhaustive—yet accessible—analysis of modernist fiction from the tail end of the Victorian period to the beginning of WWII. America’s golden age—from 1890 to 1940—included the work of Howells, Wharton, Lewis, Cather, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Their struggle for realism served as the basis for Kazin’s interpretation. Kazin’s debut was impressive in its scope for such a young author and became a part of his renowned trilogy of literary criticism, which also includes An American Procession and God and the American Writer. “Not only a literary but a moral history . . . The best and most complete treatment we have.” —Lionel Trilling, The Nation

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: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1440853592
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1563

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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.

A Note on Literary Criticism

A Note on Literary Criticism PDF Author: James Thomas Farrell
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231082570
Category : Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
James T. Farrell's compelling defense of the Marxist principles of literary criticism was hailed by Edmund Wilson as ""a remarkable event"." Now available in its entirety for the first time is more than five decades, A Note On Literary Criticism liberated a section of the Great Depression's radical intelligentsia from vulgar, over politicized approaches to cultural criticism.

Seasoned Authors for a New Season

Seasoned Authors for a New Season PDF Author: Louis Filler
Publisher: Popular Press
ISBN: 9780879721435
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This collection of essays probes the values in a variety of authors who have had in common the fact of popularity and erstwhile reputation. Why were they esteemed? Who esteemed them? And what has become of their reputations, to readers, to the critic himself? No writer here has been asked to justify the work of his subject, and reports and conclusions about this wide variety of creative writers vary, sometimes emphasizing what the critic believes to be enduring qualities in the subject, in several cases finding limitations in what that writer has to offer us today.

Lewis Mumford

Lewis Mumford PDF Author: Shuxue Li
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039115570
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Lewis Mumford's achievements as an architectural critic, literary critic and urbanist are well known. However, his contribution to the American studies movement and to cultural studies in general has almost been forgotten in recent years. By situating Mumford's work in its contemporary intellectual context and by considering some of its legacies for the study of 'culture and civilization' - especially in the nascent field of American studies - this book considers Mumford as an 'author', drawing out some of the expressive, political and methodological significance of this term. In an attempt to counter frequent arguments that Mumford's works are inconsistent, repetitive and derivative, the author argues that, taken as a whole, they demonstrate a consistent inter-disciplinary or trans-disciplinary critical project, and that Mumford's thought is comparable with that of Marx and Weber. The book traces this critical project through Mumford's works from the early twentieth century and also through his formal process of writing. The author aims to show that Mumford's project was neither provincial nor reactionary, as some have argued, but was instead a dynamic juxtaposition of past and present that enabled him to imagine a future where humans might fulfil their potential in a more perfectly republican, even utopian, urban space.

The Gospel of Wealth in the American Novel (Routledge Revivals)

The Gospel of Wealth in the American Novel (Routledge Revivals) PDF Author: Arun Mukherjee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317629132
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Business and the businessman have had a fundamental place in American society since the inception of the nation. This tenet, the ‘gospel of wealth’, is a central concern in the novels of Theodore Dreiser and his contemporaries. First published in 1987, this study sets this group of writers in their historical context and shows how they elaborated the idea of wealth as an object of quasi-religious quest. What had previously been associated with disease and darkness, avarice and dishonour, now came to emblematise the virtues of thrift, prudence and diligence. The underlying argument is that the dominant group of a society legitimises its power through the appropriation of the vocabulary of religion, and the American business leaders were successful in doing this both in their own practice and through the more insidious medium of art. A detailed analysis, this reissue will be of particular value to students of American literature with an interest in the relationship between linguistic symbols and social order, and historical attitudes towards wealth in literature.

The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism

The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism PDF Author: Donald Pizer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139825100
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
This Companion examines a number of issues related to the terms realism and naturalism. The introduction seeks both to discuss the problems in the use of these two terms in relation to late nineteenth-century fiction and to describe the history of previous efforts to make the terms expressive of American writing of this period. The Companion includes ten essays which fall into four categories: essays on the historical context of realism and naturalism by Louis Budd and Richard Lehan; essays on critical approaches to the movements since the early 1970s by Michael Anesko, essays on the efforts to expand the canon of realism and naturalism by Elizabeth Ammons; and a full-scale discussion of ten major texts, from W. D. Howell's The Rise of Silas Lapham to Jack London's The Call of the Wild, by John W. Crowley, Tom Quirk, J. C. Levenson, Blanche Gelfant, Barbara Hochman, and Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin.

Exiles on Main Street

Exiles on Main Street PDF Author: Julian Levinson
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253000289
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
How have Jews reshaped their identities as Jews in the face of the radical newness called America? Julian Levinson explores the ways in which exposure to American literary culture -- in particular the visionary tradition identified with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman -- led American Jewish writers to a new understanding of themselves as Jews. Discussing the lives and work of writers such as Emma Lazarus, Mary Antin, Ludwig Lewisohn, Waldo Frank, Anzia Yezierska, I. J. Schwartz, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Howe, Levinson concludes that their interaction with American culture led them to improvise new and meaningful ways of being Jewish. In contrast to the often expressed view that the diaspora experience leads to assimilation, Exiles on Main Street traces an arc of return to Jewish identification and describes a vital and creative Jewish American literary culture.

The Cambridge History of American Modernism

The Cambridge History of American Modernism PDF Author: Mark Whalan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108808026
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 948

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Book Description
The Cambridge History of American Modernism examines one of the most innovative periods of American literary history. It offers a comprehensive account of the forms, genres, and media that characterized US modernism: coverage ranges from the traditional, such as short stories, novels, and poetry, to the new media that shaped the period's literary culture, such as jazz, cinema, the skyscraper, and radio. This volume charts how recent methodologies such as ecocriticism, geomodernism, and print culture studies have refashioned understandings of the field, and attends to the contestations and inequities of race, sovereignty, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity that shaped the period and its cultural production. It also explores the geographies and communities wherein US modernism flourished-from its distinctive regions to its metropolitan cities, from its hemispheric connections to the salons and political groupings that hosted new cultural collaborations.

Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature and Music

Retrospection and Revision in Modern and Contemporary Art, Literature and Music PDF Author: Mette Gieskes
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031395980
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
This interdisciplinary book investigates the various ways in which North American and European modern and contemporary artists, authors, and musicians have returned to earlier works of their own, engaging in inventive revivals and transformations of the past in the present. The book is distinctive in its focus on such revisits, as well as in the diversity of art forms under review: in addition to visual art, the book explores fiction, poetry, literary criticism, film, rock music, and philosophy. This scope, together with the time-span covered in the book, from the 1850s to the twenty-first century, allows for a broad view on retrospection and revision. The case studies presented here offer a multifaceted exploration of the widely different goals to which practitioners of the arts have made retrospection and revision functional against the background of cultural, social, political, and personal forces.