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Author: Martha Banta
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300122977
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
Martha Banta reaches across several disciplines to investigate America's early quest to shape an aesthetic equal to the nation's belief in its cultural worth. Marked by an unusually wide-ranging sweep, the book focuses on three major "testing grounds" where nineteenth-century Americans responded to Ralph Waldo Emerson's call to embrace "everything" in order to uncover the theoretical principles underlying "the idea of creation." The interactions of those who rose to this urgent challenge?artists, architects, writers, politicians, and the technocrats of scientific inquiry?brought about an engrossing tangle of achievements and failures. The first section of the book traces efforts to advance the status of the arts in the face of the aspersion that America lacked an Art Soul as deep as Europe's. Following that is a hard look at heated political debates over how to embellish the architecture of Washington, D.C., with the icons of cherished republican ideals. The concluding section probes novels in which artists' lives are portrayed and aesthetic principles tested.
Author: Martha Banta
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300122977
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336
Get Book Here
Book Description
Martha Banta reaches across several disciplines to investigate America's early quest to shape an aesthetic equal to the nation's belief in its cultural worth. Marked by an unusually wide-ranging sweep, the book focuses on three major "testing grounds" where nineteenth-century Americans responded to Ralph Waldo Emerson's call to embrace "everything" in order to uncover the theoretical principles underlying "the idea of creation." The interactions of those who rose to this urgent challenge?artists, architects, writers, politicians, and the technocrats of scientific inquiry?brought about an engrossing tangle of achievements and failures. The first section of the book traces efforts to advance the status of the arts in the face of the aspersion that America lacked an Art Soul as deep as Europe's. Following that is a hard look at heated political debates over how to embellish the architecture of Washington, D.C., with the icons of cherished republican ideals. The concluding section probes novels in which artists' lives are portrayed and aesthetic principles tested.
Author: Philipp Schweighauser
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813939046
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
The art of the early republic abounds in representations of deception: the villains of Gothic novels deceive their victims with visual and acoustic tricks; the ordinary citizens of picaresque novels are hoodwinked by quacks and illiterate but shrewd adventurers; and innocent sentimental heroines fall for their seducers' eloquently voiced half-truths and lies. Yet, as Philipp Schweighauser points out in Beautiful Deceptions, deception happens not only within these novels but also through them. The fictions of Charles Brockden Brown, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Susanna Rowson, Hannah Webster Foster, Tabitha Gilman Tenney, and Royall Tyler invent worlds that do not exist. Similarly, Charles Willson Peale's and Raphaelle Peale's trompe l'oeil paintings trick spectators into mistaking them for the real thing, and Patience Wright's wax sculptures deceive (and disturb) viewers. Beautiful Deceptions examines how these and other artists of the era at times acknowledge art's dues to other social realms—religion, morality, politics—but at other times insist on artists' right to deceive their audiences, thus gesturing toward a more modern, autonomous notion of art that was only beginning to emerge in the eighteenth century. Building on Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's definition of aesthetics as "the science of sensuous cognition" and the writings of early European aestheticians including Kant, Schiller, Hume, and Burke, Schweighauser supplements the dominant political readings of deception in early American studies with an aesthetic perspective. Schweighauser argues that deception in and through early American art constitutes a comment on eighteenth-century debates concerning the nature and function of art as much as it responds to shifts in social and political organization.
Author: Robin P. Hoople
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 0838757375
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
This book analyzes the reciprocating collision between Henry James and American journalism during his 1904-1905 tour. It charts James' progress as he gathers the impressions upon which he will base his 'theory of America.' If James arrives as a 'restored absentee' seeking a renewed relationship with his homeland, the press greets his return with reverence for his status combined with disdain for his prose.
Author: MARTHA BANTA
Publisher: Sapienza Università Editrice
ISBN: 8898533772
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 35
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Book Description
Martha Banta’s Henry James: An Alien’s “History” of America is the product of a lifetime of thinking about James and his odd, but oddly productive, relation to the land of his birth. A “biography” of an “autobiography,” it serves as a peripatetic history of the central cross-currents and intersections between Europe and America, memory and history, romance and realism. These diverse elements structure James’s channeling of his own experience as a displaced or “alienated” American into a variety of genres: memoirs and travel writing, novels and tales, letters and literary criticism, social and cultural commentary. Together they constitute the “never completed novel” of his ongoing “autobiographical” project. In its masterful weaving together of materials, text, and time-frames, Henry James: An Alien’s “History” of America moves fluidly back and forth over the intricate tapestry of James’s life and texts. It identifies and analyzes key moments, words, and tropes that echo across the years, tracing the instances of repetition, reversal, self-revelation, and re-vision that underwrite this “life-record.” This study represents a major advance over conventional, sometimes oversimplified readings of James’s “international theme.” His attitudes about both Europe and America emerge here in their full complexity and contradictoriness. The breadth and depth of Banta’s knowledge of James and of the historical America from which he emerged and which he never ceased to engage, however ambivalently, will make this a rich reading experience for general readers as well as scholars. David McWhirter editor of Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship and Henry James in Context.
Author: Herman du Toit
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443815071
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
Nowadays pageants often take the form of parades of effervescent young women competing for popular recognition in hyped up media events. However, these “beauty pageants” are a mere pastiche of the elaborate historical parades of the medieval period that took significant, social, religious, or civic events and their protagonists, as subjects. Pageants were historically characterized by resplendent costuming and elaborate processions that were often given to much pomp and ceremony. Pageantry has formed an important part of the civic life of most societies, both ancient and modern, serving a variety of cultural and political purposes. The use of drama and public spectacle as an instrument of civic, social, and religious activism has recently become the focus of renewed academic inquiry. The essays in this interdisciplinary anthology provide carefully researched insights into the phenomenon of pageantry over the centuries and across broad cultural boundaries.
Author: Patrick J. Quinn
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443884286
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
There can be little doubt that after the American Civil War, a significant number of largely urban American women’s relationships with men began to change. This transition was brought about through many changing conditions in American society that were predicated by socio-economic considerations such as female education, large scale immigration from Europe which challenged traditional American values, the onset of large scale consumerism, and the erosion of the narrow religious moralism which previously restricted the female role in a burgeoning urban landscape. This book examines one particular manifestation of upheaval in American society: the appearance in literature and art of two distinct types of women who challenged the dominant patriarchal culture from the Civil War to just after the conclusion of World War One. The book looks primarily at the literary depiction of the femme fatale and the New Woman, and also dedicates chapters to their influences in fine art and music. The question as to why these two female types precipitated so much intellectual and artistic angst in their educated male readers is further considered. The book traces these two distinct categories of heroines as they make inroads into the preserve of male domination, and examines the various defenses male writers and artists used to slow down the pace of female emancipation both sexually and socially. Along the way, the book looks at the way in which the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago unexpectedly encouraged further female advancement, how Wagner’s operas gave women greater confidence toward self-fulfillment, and how Otto Weininger’s outrageous teachings managed to stem the tide of American female emancipation for a short time. The book surveys how the appearance of the Gibson Girl, the bicycle, and even the advent of bloomers were depicted in literature and supported the advent of this New Woman until she was grudgingly accepted despite philosophical warnings that the female agenda included a plan to destroy masculinity and make men subservient to the female rule. The book concludes with a discussion of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned where the reader observes the complete destruction of the decadent-inclined Anthony Patch by a siren with no heart or introspection.
Author: John Carlos Rowe
Publisher:
ISBN: 019512135X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
An excellent primer to the work and milieu of Henry James, this collection of essays highlights the historical and cultural issues that influenced the great novelist.
Author: Ode Ogede
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000852148
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231
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Book Description
This book considers the evolution and characteristics of Nigeria’s third-generation literature, which emerged between the late 1980s and the early 1990s and is marked by expressive modes and concerns distinctly different from those of the preceding era. The creative writing of this period reflects new sensibilities and anxieties about Nigeria’s changing fortunes in the post-colonial era. The literature of the third generation is startling in its candidness, irreverence as well as the brutal self-disclosure of its characters, and it is governed by an unusually wide-ranging sweep in narrative techniques. This book examines six key texts of the oeuvre: Maria Ajima’s The Web, Okey Ndibe’s Foreign Gods, Inc., Teju Cole’s Open City, Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters Street, Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck. The texts interpret contemporary corruption and other unspeakable social malaise; together, they point to the exciting future of Nigerian literature, which has always been defined by its daring creativity and inventive expressive modes. Even conventional storytelling strategies receive revitalizing energies in these angst-driven narratives. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of contemporary African literature, Sociology, Gender and women’s studies, and post-colonial cultural expression more broadly.
Author: Constance DeVereaux
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131709042X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
The story of arts and cultural policy in the twenty-first century is inherently of global concern no matter how local it seems. At the same time, questions of identity have in many ways become more challenging than before. Narrative, Identity, and the Map of Cultural Policy: Once Upon a Time in a Globalized World explores how and why stories and identities sometimes merge and often clash in an arena in which culture and policy may not be able to resolve every difficulty. DeVereaux and Griffin argue that the role of narrative is key to understanding these issues. They offer a wide-ranging history and justification for narrative frameworks as an approach to cultural policy and open up a wider field of discussion about the ways in which cultural politics and cultural identity are being deployed and interpreted in the present, with deep roots in the past. This timely book will be of great interest not just to students of narrative and students of arts and cultural policy, but also to administrators, policy theorists, and cultural management practitioners.
Author: Nancy Bentley
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201248
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description
Late nineteenth-century America saw an explosion in mass culture—from sensationalist tabloid newspapers to amusement parks to Wild West shows. Historians and critics have traditionally observed the advent of mass culture as undermining literature's central role in the public sphere. Literary writers of the time either reacted with a public show of disdain or retreated to conduct their own private experiments in style and form. In Frantic Panoramas, Nancy Bentley questions these narratives of opposition. For literary writers, Bentley explains, the confrontation with mass culture was less a retreat than a transformation, an ordeal through which habits of contemplative appreciation could be refashioned into new forms of critical thought. By grappling with the energies that marked mass culture, authors came to recognize kinds of human experience that were only then becoming visible as public. William Dean Howells shaped the plots of his novels around tabloid events like rail and trolley accidents and the public chaos of apartment house fires. Although Henry James was distressed at the way dime fiction had changed the very definition of literature, his meditations on mass culture led him to reimagine the novel as a collective "workshop" in which authors and readers jointly discovered new meaning. Bentley offers close readings of these and other writers such as Edith Wharton, James Weldon Johnson, Pauline Hopkins, and Gertrude Bonnin to demonstrate how leading artists took inspiration from commercial culture to create new and distinct literary forms. Drawing on original archival research and a historically grounded theory of realism, Frantic Panoramas is an innovative and comprehensive study of how the emergence of mass culture affected literary culture in America.
