Racism and Xenophobia in Early Twentieth-Century American Fiction

Racism and Xenophobia in Early Twentieth-Century American Fiction PDF Author: Wisam Abughosh Chaleila
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000328228
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
"The Melting Pot," "The Land of The Free," "The Land of Opportunity." These tropes or nicknames apparently reflect the freedom and open-armed welcome that the United States of America offers. However, the chronicles of history do not complement that image. These historical happenings have not often been brought into the focus of Modernist literary criticism, though their existence in the record is clear. This book aims to discuss these chronicles, displaying in great detail the underpinnings and subtle references of racism and xenophobia embedded so deeply in both fictional and real personas, whether they are characters, writers, legislators, or the common people. In the main chapters, literary works are dissected so as to underline the intolerance hidden behind words of righteousness and blind trust, as if such is the norm. Though history is taught, it is not so thoroughly examined. To our misfortune, we naively think that bigoted ideas are not a thing we could become afflicted with. They are antiques from the past – yet they possessed many hundreds of people and they surround us still. Since we’ve experienced very little change, it seems discipline is necessary to truly attempt to be rid of these ideas.

Racism and Xenophobia in Early Twentieth-Century American Fiction

Racism and Xenophobia in Early Twentieth-Century American Fiction PDF Author: Wisam Abughosh Chaleila
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000328228
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Get Book Here

Book Description
"The Melting Pot," "The Land of The Free," "The Land of Opportunity." These tropes or nicknames apparently reflect the freedom and open-armed welcome that the United States of America offers. However, the chronicles of history do not complement that image. These historical happenings have not often been brought into the focus of Modernist literary criticism, though their existence in the record is clear. This book aims to discuss these chronicles, displaying in great detail the underpinnings and subtle references of racism and xenophobia embedded so deeply in both fictional and real personas, whether they are characters, writers, legislators, or the common people. In the main chapters, literary works are dissected so as to underline the intolerance hidden behind words of righteousness and blind trust, as if such is the norm. Though history is taught, it is not so thoroughly examined. To our misfortune, we naively think that bigoted ideas are not a thing we could become afflicted with. They are antiques from the past – yet they possessed many hundreds of people and they surround us still. Since we’ve experienced very little change, it seems discipline is necessary to truly attempt to be rid of these ideas.

Global Ambiguity in Nineteenth-Century American Gothic

Global Ambiguity in Nineteenth-Century American Gothic PDF Author: Wanlin Li
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000391841
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
As part of a larger attempt to understand the dynamic interactions between gothic form and ideology, this volume focuses on a strong formal feature of the American gothic, "global ambiguity," and examines the important cultural work it performs in the nineteenth-century history of the genre. The author defines "global ambiguity" as occurring in texts whose internal evidence supports equally plausible and yet mutually exclusive interpretations. Combining insights from narrative theory and cultural studies, she investigates the narrative origin of global ambiguity and the ways in which it produces culturally meaningful readings. Canonical works and obscure ones from American gothic authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Louisa May Alcott, and Henry James are reexamined. This study reveals that the nineteenth-century American gothicists developed the gothic into an aesthetically sophisticated mode that engaged intensely with the pressing problems of American society, including moral citizenship, slavery, and the social status of women, and reimagined social realities in politically constructive manners. Literary scholars, students, and general readers interested in gothic literature, American literature, or narrative theory will find this book informative and inspiring.

Alzheimer’s Disease in Contemporary U.S. Fiction

Alzheimer’s Disease in Contemporary U.S. Fiction PDF Author: Cristina Garrigós
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000410625
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
This volume seeks to bring readers to a deeper understanding of contemporary cultural and social configurations of Alzheimer’s disease by analyzing 21st-century U.S. novels in which the disease plays a key narrative role. Via analysis of selected works, Garrigós considers how the erasure of memory in a person with Alzheimer’s affects our idea of the identity of that person and their sense of belonging to a group. Starting out from three different types of memory (individual, social and cultural), the study focuses on the narrative strategies that authors use to configure how the disease is perceived and represented. This study is significant not only because of what the texts reveal about those with Alzheimer’s, but also for what they say about us - about the authors and readers who are producing and consuming these texts, about how we see this disease, and what our attitudes to it say about contemporary U.S. society.

Rethinking Fiction after the 2007/8 Financial Crisis

Rethinking Fiction after the 2007/8 Financial Crisis PDF Author: Mirosław Aleksander Miernik
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000368920
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
This book provides insight into the impact the 2007/8 financial crisis and subsequent Great Recession had on American fiction. Employing an interdisciplinary approach which combines literary studies with anthropology, economics, sociology, and psychology, the author attempts to gauge the changes that the crisis facilitated in the American novel. Focusing on four books, Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton, Philipp Meyer’s American Rust, Sophie McManus’s The Unfortunates, and William Gibson’s The Peripheral, the study traces how they present such issues as poverty, wealth, equality, distinction, opportunity, and how they relate both to traditional criticisms of consumer culture and the US economy, particularly those issues that have received more attention as a result of the crisis. It also tackles the issue of genre and interpretation in this period, as well as what methods the analyzed novels employ in order to highlight the decreasing social mobility of Americans.

Racism and Xenophobia in Early Twentieth-Century American Fiction

Racism and Xenophobia in Early Twentieth-Century American Fiction PDF Author: Wisam Abughosh Chaleila
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100032818X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
"The Melting Pot," "The Land of The Free," "The Land of Opportunity." These tropes or nicknames apparently reflect the freedom and open-armed welcome that the United States of America offers. However, the chronicles of history do not complement that image. These historical happenings have not often been brought into the focus of Modernist literary criticism, though their existence in the record is clear. This book aims to discuss these chronicles, displaying in great detail the underpinnings and subtle references of racism and xenophobia embedded so deeply in both fictional and real personas, whether they are characters, writers, legislators, or the common people. In the main chapters, literary works are dissected so as to underline the intolerance hidden behind words of righteousness and blind trust, as if such is the norm. Though history is taught, it is not so thoroughly examined. To our misfortune, we naively think that bigoted ideas are not a thing we could become afflicted with. They are antiques from the past – yet they possessed many hundreds of people and they surround us still. Since we’ve experienced very little change, it seems discipline is necessary to truly attempt to be rid of these ideas.

America for Americans

America for Americans PDF Author: Erika Lee
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541672593
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
This definitive history of American xenophobia is "essential reading for anyone who wants to build a more inclusive society" (Ibram X. Kendi, New York Times-bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist). The United States is known as a nation of immigrants. But it is also a nation of xenophobia. In America for Americans, Erika Lee shows that an irrational fear, hatred, and hostility toward immigrants has been a defining feature of our nation from the colonial era to the Trump era. Benjamin Franklin ridiculed Germans for their "strange and foreign ways." Americans' anxiety over Irish Catholics turned xenophobia into a national political movement. Chinese immigrants were excluded, Japanese incarcerated, and Mexicans deported. Today, Americans fear Muslims, Latinos, and the so-called browning of America. Forcing us to confront this history, Lee explains how xenophobia works, why it has endured, and how it threatens America. Now updated with an epilogue reflecting on how the coronavirus pandemic turbocharged xenophobia, America for Americans is an urgent spur to action for any concerned citizen.

Interpreting Susan Sontag’s Essays

Interpreting Susan Sontag’s Essays PDF Author: Mark K. Fulk
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000375366
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Interpreting Susan Sontag’s Essays: Radical Contemplative offers its readers a scholarly examination of her essays within the context of philosophy and aesthetic theory. This study sets up a dialogue between her works and their philosophical counterparts in France and Germany, including the works of Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Walter Benjamin. Artists and concepts discussed in relation to Sontag’s essays include the works of Andy Warhol, Pop Art, French New Wave Cinema, the music of John Cage, and the cinematic art of Robert Bresson, Leni Riefenstahl, Ingmar Bergman, and Jean-Luc Godard. Her aesthetic formalism is compared with Harold Bloom, and this is the first volume to examine her late works and their position within the American events of 9/11/01 and the War on Terror(ism).

Trauma and Fictions of the "War on Terror"

Trauma and Fictions of the Author: Sarah O'Brien
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000386422
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
This book explores the ways in which transnational fiction in the post-9/11 era can intervene in discourse surrounding the "war on terror" to advocate for marginalised perspectives. Trauma and Fictions of the "War on Terror" conceptualises global political discourse about the "war on terror" as incongruous, with transnational memory frames instituted in Western nations centralising 9/11 as uniquely traumatic, excluding the historical and present-day experiences of Afghans under Western—specifically American—hegemonic violence. Recent developments in trauma studies explain how dominant Western trauma theory participates in this exclusion, failing to account for the ongoing suffering common to non-Western, colonial, and postcolonial contexts. O’Brien explores how Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner), Nadeem Aslam (The Wasted Vigil, The Blind Man’s Garden), and Kamila Shamsie (Burnt Shadows) represent marginalised perspectives in the context of the "war on terror".

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.

The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First Century American Fiction

The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First Century American Fiction PDF Author: Joshua Miller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108976859
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
Reading lists, course syllabi, and prizes include the phrase '21st-century American literature,' but no critical consensus exists regarding when the period began, which works typify it, how to conceptualize its aesthetic priorities, and where its geographical boundaries lie. Considerable criticism has been published on this extraordinary era, but little programmatic analysis has assessed comprehensively the literary and critical/theoretical output to help readers navigate the labyrinth of critical pathways. In addition to ensuring broad coverage of many essential texts, The Cambridge Companion to 21st Century American Fiction offers state-of-the field analyses of contemporary narrative studies that set the terms of current and future research and teaching. Individual chapters illuminate critical engagements with emergent genres and concepts, including flash fiction, speculative fiction, digital fiction, alternative temporalities, Afro-futurism, ecocriticism, transgender/queer studies, anti-carceral fiction, precarity, and post-9/11 fiction.