Perfecting Friendship PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Perfecting Friendship PDF full book. Access full book title Perfecting Friendship by Ivy Schweitzer. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Ivy Schweitzer
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807876712
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Get Book Here
Book Description
Contemporary notions of friendship regularly place it in the private sphere, associated with feminized forms of sympathy and affection. As Ivy Schweitzer explains, however, this perception leads to a misunderstanding of American history. In an exploration of early American literature and culture, Schweitzer uncovers friendships built on a classical model that is both public and political in nature. Schweitzer begins with Aristotle's ideal of "perfect" friendship that positions freely chosen relationships among equals as the highest realization of ethical, social, and political bonds. Evidence in works by John Winthrop, Hannah Foster, James Fenimore Cooper, and Catharine Sedgwick confirms that this classical model shaped early American concepts of friendship and, thus, democracy. Schweitzer argues that recognizing the centrality of friendship as a cultural institution is critical to understanding the rationales for consolidating power among white males in the young nation. She also demonstrates how women, nonelite groups, and minorities have appropriated and redefined the discourse of perfect friendship, making equality its result rather than its requirement. By recovering the public nature of friendship, Schweitzer establishes discourse about affection and affiliation as a central component of American identity and democratic community.
Author: Ivy Schweitzer
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807876712
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Get Book Here
Book Description
Contemporary notions of friendship regularly place it in the private sphere, associated with feminized forms of sympathy and affection. As Ivy Schweitzer explains, however, this perception leads to a misunderstanding of American history. In an exploration of early American literature and culture, Schweitzer uncovers friendships built on a classical model that is both public and political in nature. Schweitzer begins with Aristotle's ideal of "perfect" friendship that positions freely chosen relationships among equals as the highest realization of ethical, social, and political bonds. Evidence in works by John Winthrop, Hannah Foster, James Fenimore Cooper, and Catharine Sedgwick confirms that this classical model shaped early American concepts of friendship and, thus, democracy. Schweitzer argues that recognizing the centrality of friendship as a cultural institution is critical to understanding the rationales for consolidating power among white males in the young nation. She also demonstrates how women, nonelite groups, and minorities have appropriated and redefined the discourse of perfect friendship, making equality its result rather than its requirement. By recovering the public nature of friendship, Schweitzer establishes discourse about affection and affiliation as a central component of American identity and democratic community.
Author: Michael Kalisch
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526156342
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184
Get Book Here
Book Description
How might our friendships shape our politics? This book examines how contemporary American fiction has rediscovered the concept of civic friendship and revived a long tradition of imagining male friendship as interlinked with the promises and paradoxes of democracy in the United States. Bringing into dialogue the work of a wide range of authors – including Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Dinaw Mengestu, and Teju Cole – this innovative study advances a compelling new account of the political and intellectual fabric of the American novel today.
Author: Reginald Hyatte
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004247017
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Arts of Friendship focusses on literary representations of three categories of ideal friendship — Christian, chivalric, and humanistic — and the writers' strategies of establishing the ethical authority of their contemporary friends and codes on a par with antiquity's amicitia perfecta. The study identifies the extent to which writers acknowledged women as perfect friends. The selected texts under examination include, among others, hagiographies, works of Bernard of Clairvaux and Aelred of Rievaulx, The Quest of the Holy Grail, Thomas' Tristan, the Prose Lancelot, Ami and Amile, the Decameron, and L.B. Alberti's Dell'amicizia. Literary comparatists and historians, ethical historians, and students of rhetoric will find of interest the comparative study of the rhetorical topos of perfect friendship, the varied ethical criteria inherent there, and the writers' strategies for representing and authorizing an idea.
Author: Cassandra A. Good
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199376174
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 303
Get Book Here
Book Description
Elite men and women in America's founding era formed friendships with one another that were vibrant, intimate, and politically significant. These relationships put women on equal footing with the founding fathers and other prominent men. Such friendships, Cassandra Good shows in Founding Friendships, enriched both the lives of individuals and the political fabric of the new nation.
Author: George E. Haggerty
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108311288
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 211
Get Book Here
Book Description
Friendship in the classical world was celebrated as among the highest human achievements: nothing was more likely to lead to the divine than looking for it in the eyes of a friend. In exploring the complexities of male-male relations beyond the simple labels of sexuality, Queer Friendship shows how love between men has a rich and varied history in English literature. The friend could offer a reflection of one's own worth and a celebration of a kind of mutuality that was not connected to family or home. These same-sex friendships are memorable because they give shape to the novels of which they are a part, and question the assumption that the love between friends is different from the love between lovers. Queer Friendship explores English literary friendship in three ways: the elegiac, the erotic, and the platonic, by considering a myriad of works, including Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Tennyson's 'In Memoriam A. H. H.', and Dickens' Great Expectations.
Author: Bernadette Descharmes
Publisher: V&R Unipress
ISBN: 3862341089
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 396
Get Book Here
Book Description
Nahbeziehungen, die über familiäre und verwandtschaftliche Bindungen hinausgehen, haben sich zu einem vielbeachteten Thema interdisziplinärer Forschung entwickelt. Beziehungen wie Freundschaft, Patronage und soziale Netzwerke als Variationen sozialer Bindungen sind das Ergebnis unterschiedlicher historischer wie kultureller Kontexte und stellen deshalb einen wesentlichen, aber immer noch unterrepräsentierten Gegenstand interdisziplinären Forschens dar. Fragen nach sich ändernden Freundschaftssemantiken, historischen und interkulturellen bzw. politischen Praktiken von Freundschaft, Patronage und Loyalität standen im Mittelpunkt einer internationalen Tagung, die eine kritische Diskussion und Neubewertung von Werten und Normen, die z.B. Freundschaft in verschiedenen Kulturen und historischen Epochen konstituieren, sowie der sozialen Umstände, die diese Nahbeziehungen bedingen, vorgenommen hat. Aspekte wie Konstitution und Repräsentation von Körper und Gender und das Entstehen von Vertrauen und Betrug waren dabei ebenso von Interesse wie die kulturell und historisch unterschiedliche Praxis und Semantik von Freundschaft und Patronage sowie deren jeweilige Wahrnehmung in Abhängigkeit von ihrer gesellschaftlichen Situation in verschiedenen sozialen und historischen Kontexten. Die Ergebnisse dieser Tagung werden nun im vorliegenden Band präsentiert.
Author: Penelope Anderson
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748655832
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Get Book Here
Book Description
Penelope Anderson's original study changes our understanding both of the masculine Renaissance friendship tradition and of the private forms of women's friendship of the eighteenth century and after. It uncovers the latent threat of betrayal lurking within politicized classical and humanist friendship, showing its surprising resilience as a model for political obligation undone and remade. Incorporating authors from Cicero to Abraham Cowley and Margaret Cavendish to Mary Astell, the book focuses on two extraordinary women writers, the royalist Katherine Philips and the republican Lucy Hutchinson. And it explores the ways in which they appropriate the friendship tradition in order to address problems of conflicting allegiances in the English Civil Wars and Restoration. As Penelope Anderson suggests, their writings on friendship provide a new account of women's relation to public life, organized through textual exchange rather than bodily reproduction.
Author: Colin Nicolson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351767429
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236
Get Book Here
Book Description
Imaginary Friendship is the first in-depth study of the onset of the American Revolution through the prism of friendship, focusing on future US president John Adams and leading Loyalist Jonathan Sewall. The book is part biography, revealing how they shaped each other’s progress, and part political history, exploring their intriguing dangerous quest to clean up colonial politics. Literary history examines the personal dimension of discourse, resolving how Adams’s presumption of Sewall’s authorship of the Loyalist tracts Massachusettensis influenced his own magnum opus, Novanglus. The mystery is not why Adams presumed Sewall was his adversary in 1775 but why he was impelled to answer him.
Author: Lewis C. Seifert
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317097513
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316
Get Book Here
Book Description
Today the friendships that grab people’s imaginations are those that reach across inequalities of class and race. The friendships that seem to have exerted an analogous level of fascination in early modern France were those that defied the assumption, inherited from Aristotle and patristic sources, that friendships between men and women were impossible. Together, the essays in Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France tell the story of the declining intelligibility of classical models of (male) friendship and of the rising prominence of women as potential friends. The revival of Plato’s friendship texts in the sixteenth century challenged Aristotle’s rigid ideal of perfect friendship between men. In the seventeenth century, a new imperative of heterosociality opened a space for the cultivation of cross-gender friendships, while the spiritual friendships of the Catholic Reformation modeled relationships that transcended the gendered dynamics of galanterie. Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France argues that the imaginative experimentation in friendships between men and women was a distinctive feature of early modern French culture. The ten essays in this volume address friend-making as a process that is creative of self and responsive to changing social and political circumstances. Contributors reveal how men and women fashioned gendered selves, and also circumvented gender norms through concrete friendship practices. By showing that the benefits and the risks of friendship are magnified when gender roles and relations are unsettled, the essays in this volume highlight the relevance of early modern friend-making to friendship in the contemporary world.
Author: Thomas J. Balcerski
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190914610
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Get Book Here
Book Description
The friendship of the bachelor politicians James Buchanan (1791-1868) of Pennsylvania and William Rufus King (1786-1853) of Alabama has excited much speculation through the years. Why did neither marry? Might they have been gay? Or was their relationship a nineteenth-century version of the modern-day "bromance"? In Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King, Thomas J. Balcerski explores the lives of these two politicians and discovers one of the most significant collaborations in American political history. He traces the parallels in the men's personal and professional lives before elected office, including their failed romantic courtships and the stories they told about them. Unlikely companions from the start, they lived together as congressional messmates in a Washington, DC, boardinghouse and became close confidantes. Around the nation's capital, the men were mocked for their effeminacy and perhaps their sexuality, and they were likened to Siamese twins. Over time, their intimate friendship blossomed into a significant cross-sectional political partnership. Balcerski examines Buchanan's and King's contributions to the Jacksonian political agenda, manifest destiny, and the increasingly divisive debates over slavery, while contesting interpretations that the men lacked political principles and deserved blame for the breakdown of the union. He closely narrates each man's rise to national prominence, as William Rufus King was elected vice-president in 1852 and James Buchanan the nation's fifteenth president in 1856, despite the political gossip that circulated about them. While exploring a same-sex relationship that powerfully shaped national events in the antebellum era, Bosom Friends demonstrates that intimate male friendships among politicians were--and continue to be--an important part of success in American politics.
