Urban Underworlds

Urban Underworlds PDF Author: Thomas Heise
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813547849
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
Urban Underworlds is an exploration of city spaces, pathologized identities, lurid fears, and American literature. Surveying one hundred years of history, and fusing sociology, urban planning, and criminology with literary and cultural studies, it chronicles how and why marginalized populations-immigrant Americans in the Lower East Side, gays and lesbians in Greenwich Village and downtown Los Angeles, the black underclass in Harlem and Chicago, and the new urban poor dispersed across American cities-have been selectively targeted as "urban underworlds" and their neighborhoods.

Urban Underworlds

Urban Underworlds PDF Author: Thomas Heise
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813547849
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
Urban Underworlds is an exploration of city spaces, pathologized identities, lurid fears, and American literature. Surveying one hundred years of history, and fusing sociology, urban planning, and criminology with literary and cultural studies, it chronicles how and why marginalized populations-immigrant Americans in the Lower East Side, gays and lesbians in Greenwich Village and downtown Los Angeles, the black underclass in Harlem and Chicago, and the new urban poor dispersed across American cities-have been selectively targeted as "urban underworlds" and their neighborhoods.

The Twentieth-Century American Fiction Handbook

The Twentieth-Century American Fiction Handbook PDF Author: Christopher MacGowan
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405160233
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 410

Get Book Here

Book Description
THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN FICTION Accessibly structured with entries on important historical contexts, central issues, key texts and the major writers, this Handbook provides an engaging overview of twentieth-century American fiction. Featured writers range from Henry James and Theodore Dreiser to contemporary figures such as Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Pynchon, and Sherman Alexie, and analyses of key works include The Great Gatsby, Lolita, The Color Purple, and The Joy Luck Club, among others. Relevant contexts for these works, such as the impact of Hollywood, the expatriate scene in the 1920s, and the political unrest of the 1960s are also explored, and their importance discussed. This is a stimulating overview of twentieth-century American fiction, offering invaluable guidance and essential information for students and general readers.

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.

Sounding Real

Sounding Real PDF Author: Cristina L. Ruotolo
Publisher: University Alabama Press
ISBN: 9780817317980
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182

Get Book Here

Book Description
Examining American realist fiction as it was informed and shaped by the music of the period, Sounding Real sheds new light on the profound musical and cultural change at the turn of the twentieth century. Sounding Real by Cristina L. Ruotolo examines landmark changes in American musical standards and tastes in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and the way they are reflected in American literature of the period. Whereas other interdisciplinary approaches to music and literature often focus on more recent popular music and black music that began with blues and jazz, Ruotolo addresses the literary response to the music that occurred in the decades before the Jazz Age. By bringing together canonical and lesser-known works by authors like Theodore Dreiser, Kate Chopin, Harold Fredric, James Weldon Johnson, Willa Cather, and Gertrude Atherton, Ruotolo argues that new, emerging musical forms were breaking free from nineteenth-century constraints, and that the elemental authenticity or real-ness that this new music articulated sparked both interest and anxiety in literature: What are the effects of an emancipated musicality on self and society? How can literature dramatize musical encounters between people otherwise segregated by class, race, ethnicity, or gender? By examining the influence of an increasingly aggressive and progressive musical marketplace on the realm of literature, Sounding Real depicts a dynamic dialogue between two art forms that itself leads to a broader discussion of how art speaks to society.

Ghetto Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature

Ghetto Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature PDF Author: Tyrone R. Simpson II
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113701489X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores how six American writers have artistically responded to the racialization of U.S. frostbelt cities in the twentieth century. Using the critical tools of spatial theory, critical race theory, urban history and sociology, Simpson explains how these writers imagine the subjective response to the race-making power of space.

Twentieth-century American Literary Naturalism

Twentieth-century American Literary Naturalism PDF Author: Donald Pizer
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809310272
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Get Book Here

Book Description
Pizer explores six novels to define naturalism and explain its tenacious hold throughout the twentieth century on the American creative imagination.

Driving Women

Driving Women PDF Author: Deborah Clarke
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801886171
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
Publisher description

Apocalyptic Patterns in Twentieth-century Fiction

Apocalyptic Patterns in Twentieth-century Fiction PDF Author: David J. Leigh
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book Here

Book Description
Leigh succeeds in providing his readers with a general survey of twentieth-century novels that retrieve the thematic and formal elements of premodern apocalyptic literature.

Fashion and Fiction

Fashion and Fiction PDF Author: Lauren S. Cardon
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813938622
Category : LITERARY CRITICISM
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
During the twentieth century, the rise of the concept of Americanization--shedding ethnic origins and signs of "otherness" to embrace a constructed American identity--was accompanied by a rhetoric of personal transformation that would ultimately characterize the American Dream. The theme of self-transformation has remained a central cultural narrative in American literary, political, and sociological texts ranging from Jamestown narratives to immigrant memoirs, from slave narratives to Gone with the Wind, and from the rags-to-riches stories of Horatio Alger to the writings of Barack Obama. Such rhetoric feeds American myths of progress, upward mobility, and personal reinvention. In Fashion and Fiction, Lauren S. Cardon draws a correlation between the American fashion industry and early twentieth-century literature. As American fashion diverged from a class-conscious industry governed by Parisian designers to become more commercial and democratic, she argues, fashion designers and journalists began appropriating the same themes of self-transformation to market new fashion trends. Cardon illustrates how canonical twentieth-century American writers, including Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Nella Larsen, symbolically used clothing to develop their characters and their narrative of upward mobility. As the industry evolved, Cardon shows, the characters in these texts increasingly enjoyed opportunities for individual expression and identity construction, allowing for temporary performances that offered not escapism but a testing of alternate identities in a quest for self-discovery.

Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century

Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century PDF Author: Edward James
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book Here

Book Description
Explores this popular literary genre as a cultural phenomenon which has had a considerable impact upon the the way in which the modern world is viewed