From Warm Center to Ragged Edge

From Warm Center to Ragged Edge PDF Author: Jon K. Lauck
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609384970
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
During the half-century after the Civil War, intellectuals and politicians assumed the Midwest to be the font and heart of American culture. Despite the persistence of strong currents of midwestern regionalism during the 1920s and 1930s, the region went into eclipse during the post–World War II era. In the apt language of Minnesota’s F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Midwest slid from being the “warm center” of the republic to its “ragged edge.” This book explains the factors that triggered the demise of the Midwest’s regionalist energies, from anti-midwestern machinations in the literary world and the inability of midwestern writers to break through the cultural politics of the era to the growing dominance of a coastal, urban culture. These developments paved the way for the proliferation of images of the Midwest as flyover country, the Rust Belt, a staid and decaying region. Yet Lauck urges readers to recognize persisting and evolving forms of midwestern identity and to resist the forces that squelch the nation’s interior voices.

From Warm Center to Ragged Edge

From Warm Center to Ragged Edge PDF Author: Jon K. Lauck
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609384970
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
During the half-century after the Civil War, intellectuals and politicians assumed the Midwest to be the font and heart of American culture. Despite the persistence of strong currents of midwestern regionalism during the 1920s and 1930s, the region went into eclipse during the post–World War II era. In the apt language of Minnesota’s F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Midwest slid from being the “warm center” of the republic to its “ragged edge.” This book explains the factors that triggered the demise of the Midwest’s regionalist energies, from anti-midwestern machinations in the literary world and the inability of midwestern writers to break through the cultural politics of the era to the growing dominance of a coastal, urban culture. These developments paved the way for the proliferation of images of the Midwest as flyover country, the Rust Belt, a staid and decaying region. Yet Lauck urges readers to recognize persisting and evolving forms of midwestern identity and to resist the forces that squelch the nation’s interior voices.

The Haunted States of America

The Haunted States of America PDF Author: James Morgart
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786838788
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
The study highlights several writers who have not received much, if any, attention among Gothic scholars. This allows readers exposure to writers they may have never encountered before or may realize dimensions to the authors’ works they have never considered. The study reconsiders scholarship’s understanding of post-war American literature. This gives readers, students, and scholars a new approach to discussing post-war fiction that is not delimited to widely accepted understanding of how Cold War anxieties were manifested in fiction. The study contextualizes the fiction it examines within each work’s respective region. This allows readers a new way of approaching not just post-war Gothic fiction but Gothic fiction in general.

Violet America

Violet America PDF Author: Jason Arthur
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609381475
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Violet America takes on the long habit among literary historians and critics of thinking about large segments of American literary production in terms of regionalism or "local color" writing, thus marginalizing important literary works. Rather than simply celebrating regional difference, Jason Arthur argues, regional cosmopolitan fiction blends the nation's cultural polarities into a connected, interdependent America. Book jacket.

Mary Austin's Regionalism

Mary Austin's Regionalism PDF Author: Heike Schaefer
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813922737
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Mary Austin's decades-old regionalist work still has the power to fascinate and move a wide audience of contemporary readers.Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism

The Real Negro

The Real Negro PDF Author: Shelly Eversley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135883351
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 118

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Book Description
In this book, Shelly Eversley historicizes the demand for racial authenticity - what Zora Neale Hurston called 'the real Negro' - in twentieth-century American literature. Eversley argues that the modern emergence of the interest in 'the real Negro' transforms the question of what race an author belongs into a question of what it takes to belong to that race. Consequently, Paul Laurence Dunbar's Negro dialect poems were prized in the first part of the century because - written by a black man - they were not 'imitation' black, while the dialect performances by Zora Neale Hurston were celebrated because, written by a 'real' black, they were not 'imitation' white. The second half of the century, in its dismissal of material segregation, sanctions a notion of black racial meaning as internal and psychological and thus promotes a version of black racial 'truth' as invisible and interior, yet fixed within a stable conception of difference. The Real Negro foregrounds how investments in black racial specificity illuminate the dynamic terms that define what makes a text and a person 'black', while it also reveals how 'blackness', spoken and authentic, guards a more fragile, because unspoken, commitment to the purity and primacy of 'whiteness' as a stable, uncontested ideal.

Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance

Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance PDF Author: Cary D. Wintz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135455368
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 708

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Book Description
From the music of Louis Armstrong to the portraits by Beauford Delaney, the writings of Langston Hughes to the debut of the musical Show Boat, the Harlem Renaissance is one of the most significant developments in African-American history in the twentieth century. The Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, in two-volumes and over 635 entries, is the first comprehensive compilation of information on all aspects of this creative, dynamic period. For a full list of entries, contributors, and more, visit the Encyclopedi a of Harlem Renaissance website.

Song of the North Country

Song of the North Country PDF Author: David Pichaske
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441197397
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
A remarkably fresh piece of Dylan scholarship, focusing on the profound impact that his Midwestern roots have had on his songs, politics, and prophetic character.

A Great Plains Reader

A Great Plains Reader PDF Author: Diane Dufva Quantic
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803238022
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 760

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Book Description
The Great Plains are as rich and integral a part of American literature as they are of the North American landscape. In this volume the stories, poems, and essays that have described, celebrated, and defined the region evoke the world of the American prairie from the first recorded days of Native history to the realities of life on a present-day reservation, from the arrival of European explorers to the experience of early settlers, from the splendor of the vast and rolling grasslands to the devastation of the Dust Bowl. Several essays look to the future and explore changes that would embolden the people of the Plains to continue to call home this place they have learned to value in spite of its persistent challenges. ø The infinite variety of the Great Plains landscape and its people unfolds in works by writers as diverse as Willa Cather, Loren Eiseley, Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe), Diane Glancy (Cherokee), Langston Hughes, Wes Jackson, Garrison Keillor, William Least Heat-Moon, Kathleen Norris, Wright Morris, Francis Parkman, O. E. R”lvaag, Mari Sandoz, William Stafford, Mark Twain, Douglas Unger, James Welch (Blackfeet), and Canadians Sharon Butala and Sinclair Ross. From tribal histories to the impressions of travelers today, from tales of isolation and nature?s furious storms to accounts of efforts to build communities, from flights of fancy to nuanced observations of the ecology of the grasslands, this comprehensive volume provides a history of the intricate relationships of land and people in the Great Plains.

Beloved Community

Beloved Community PDF Author: Casey Nelson Blake
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807860425
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
The "Young American" critics -- Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford -- are well known as central figures in the Greenwich Village "Little Renaissance" of the 1910s and in the postwar debates about American culture and politics. In Beloved Community, Casey Blake considers these intellectuals as a coherant group and assesses the connection between thier cultural criticisms and their attempts to forge a communitarian alternative to liberal and socialist poitics. Blake draws on biography to emphasize the intersection of questions of self, culture, and society in their calls for a culture of "personality" and "self-fulfillment." In contrast to the tendency of previous analyses to separate these critics' cultural and autobiographical writings from their politics, Blake argues that their cultural criticism grew out of a radical vision of self-realization through participation in a democratic culture and polity. He also examines the Young American writers' interpretations of such turn-of-the-century radicals as William Morris, Henry George, John Dewey, and Patrick Geddes and shows that this adversary tradition still offers important insights into contemporary issues in American politics and culture. Beloved Community reestablishes the democratic content of the Young Americans' ideal of "personality" and argues against viewing a monolithic therapeutic culture as the sole successor to a Victorian "culture of character." The politics of selfhood that was so critical to the Young Americans' project has remained a contested terrain throughout the twentieth century.

Reading Across the Pacific

Reading Across the Pacific PDF Author: Robert Dixon
Publisher: Sydney University Press
ISBN: 1920899669
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Reading Across the Pacific is a study of literary and cultural engagement between the United States and Australia from a contemporary interdisciplinary perspective. The book examines the relations of the two countries, shifting the emphasis from the broad cultural patterns that are often compared, to the specific networks, interactions, and crossings that have characterised Australian literature in the United States and American literature in Australia. In the 21st century, both American and Australian literatures are experiencing new challenges to the very different paradigms of literary history and criticism each inherited from the 20th century. In response to these challenges, scholars of both literatures are seizing the opportunity to reassess and reconfigure the conceptual geography of national literary spaces as they are reformed by vectors that evade or exceed them, including the transnational, the local and the global. The essays in Reading Across the Pacific are divided into five sections: 'National literatures and transnationalism', 'Poetry and poetics', 'Literature and popular culture', 'The Cold War', and 'Publishing history and transpacific print cultures'.