Playing It Straight

Playing It Straight PDF Author: Jennifer A. Greenhill
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520272455
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Outgrowth of the author's thesis (Yale University, 2007) under the title: The plague of jocularity: contesting humor in American art and culture, 1863-1893.

Playing It Straight

Playing It Straight PDF Author: Jennifer A. Greenhill
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520272455
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Outgrowth of the author's thesis (Yale University, 2007) under the title: The plague of jocularity: contesting humor in American art and culture, 1863-1893.

Winslow Homer and the Poetics of Place

Winslow Homer and the Poetics of Place PDF Author: Thomas Andrew Denenberg
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780916857530
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 71

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Book Description
"Published in conjunction with the exhibition, Winslow Homer and the poetics of place, June 5 - September 6, 2010, which was organized by the Portland Museum of Art, Maine." -- p. 71.

Derek Walcott's Encounter with Homer

Derek Walcott's Encounter with Homer PDF Author: Rachel D. Friedman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192523465
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Derek Walcott's Encounter with Homer puts Derek Walcott's epic poem Omeros in conversation with Homer, especially the Odyssey, to show how reading them against each other changes our understanding of the poems of both poets. It explores Walcott's conscious use of the Odyssey and the Homeric persona of Omeros to explore his own deepening relationship with his craft and his identity as a Caribbean poet. Walcott's ability to serve as the vessel of history for his people and their landscapes rests on his transformation into (and self-perception as) Homer's contemporary and equal. Central to the project of Omeros is thus an account of his shift from a diachronic to synchronic relationship with Homer: over the course of the poem his poetic persona, the "Poet", and Homer come to occupy the same temporality and creative space. By locating the poems of Walcott and Homer in a zone of vibrant and unexpected encounter, Rachel Friedman demonstrates how they can be seen as mutually informing texts, each made richer in the presence of the other. The argument follows two intertwined thematic threads. The first focuses on the poems' landscapes and seascapes and the ways in which Omeros reworks the Odyssey's affective geography. While the Odyssey represents the sea as a dangerous space and valorizes life on land, Walcott reverses this trajectory from sea to land, bearing witness to the painful histories carried in the St Lucian soil and relocating homecoming to the space of the Caribbean Sea, a space which accommodates diasporic histories and the imagining of fluid forms of emplacement. The second thread focuses on Walcott's poetic persona: his journey in and out of the poem and his positioning of himself as a "tribal poet" like Homer. Central to the project of Omeros is the Poet's account of the processes by which he becomes the poet who can adequately give voice to the histories of his people and the archipelago they inhabit.

Still the New World

Still the New World PDF Author: Philip Fisher
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674838598
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
A provocative new way of accounting for the spirit of literary tradition, Still the New World makes a persuasive argument against the reduction of literature to identity questions of race, gender, and ethnicity.

New World Poetics

New World Poetics PDF Author: George B. Handley
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820335207
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
A simultaneously ecocritical and comparative study, New World Poetics plumbs the earthly depth and social breadth of the poetry of Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, and Derek Walcott, three of the Americas' most ambitious and epic-minded poets. In Whitman's call for a poetry of New World possibility, Neruda's invocation of an "American love," and Walcott's investment in the poetic ironies of an American epic, the adamic imagination of their poetry does not reinvent the mythical Garden that stands before history's beginnings but instead taps the foundational powers of language before a natural world deeply imbued with the traces of human time. Theirs is a postlapsarian Adam seeking a renewed sense of place in a biocentric and cross-cultural New World through language and nature's capacity for regeneration in the wake of human violence and suffering. The book introduces the environmental history of the Americas and its relationship to the foundation of American and Latin American studies, explores its relevance to each poet's ambition to recuperate the New World's lost histories, and provides a transnational poetics of understanding literary influence and textual simultaneity in the Americas. The study provides much needed in-depth ecocritical readings of the major poems of the three poets, insisting on the need for thoughtful regard for the challenge to human imagination and culture posed by nature's regenerative powers; nuanced appreciation for the difficulty of balancing the demands of social justice within the context of deep time; and the symptomatic dangers as well as healing potential of human self-consciousness in light of global environmental degradation.

A Poetics of Postmodernism

A Poetics of Postmodernism PDF Author: Linda Hutcheon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134986262
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 527

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Book Description
First published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Bloody Promenade

Bloody Promenade PDF Author: Stephen Cushman
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813920412
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
On 5 and 6 May 1864, the Union and Confederate armies met near an unfinished railroad in central Virginia, with Lee outmanned and outgunned, hoping to force Grant to fight in the woods. The name of the battle--Wilderness--suggests the horror of combat at close quarters and an inability to see the whole field of engagement, even from a distance. Indeed, the battle is remembered for its brutality and ultimate futility for Lee: even with 26,000 casualties on both sides, the Wilderness only briefly stemmed Grant's advance. Stephen Cushman lives fifty miles south of this battlefield. A poet and professor of American literature, he wrote Bloody Promenade to confront the fractured legacy of a battle that haunts him through its very proximity to his everyday life. Cushman's personal narrative is not another history of the battle. "If this book is a history of anything," he writes, "it's the history of verbal and visual images of a single, particularly awful moment in the American Civil War." Reflecting on that moment can begin in the present, with the latest film or reenactment, but it leads Cushman back to materials from the past. Writing in an informal, first-person style, he traces his own fascination with the conflict to a single book, a pictorial history he read as a boy. His abiding interest and poetic sensibility yield a fresh perspective on the war's continuing grip on Americans--how it pervades our lives through films and songs; novels such as The Red Badge of Courage, The Killer Angels, and Cold Mountain; Whitman's poetry and Winslow Homer's painting; or the pull of the abstract idea of the triumph of freedom. With maps and a brief discussion of the Battle of the Wilderness for those not familiar with the landscape and actors, Bloody Promenade provides a personal tour of one of the most savage engagements of the Civil War, then offers a lively discussion of its aftermath.

American Poetry: The Twentieth Century Vol. 2 (LOA #116)

American Poetry: The Twentieth Century Vol. 2 (LOA #116) PDF Author: Edward Estlin Cummings
Publisher: Library of America: The Americ
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 1064

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Book Description
Anthology of poems by 20th century American poets.

Giants

Giants PDF Author: John Stauffer
Publisher: Twelve
ISBN: 0446543004
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln were the preeminent self-made men of their time. In this masterful dual biography, award-winning Harvard University scholar John Stauffer describes the transformations in the lives of these two giants during a major shift in cultural history, when men rejected the status quo and embraced new ideals of personal liberty. As Douglass and Lincoln reinvented themselves and ultimately became friends, they transformed America. Lincoln was born dirt poor, had less than one year of formal schooling, and became the nation's greatest president. Douglass spent the first twenty years of his life as a slave, had no formal schooling-in fact, his masters forbade him to read or write-and became one of the nation's greatest writers and activists, as well as a spellbinding orator and messenger of audacious hope, the pioneer who blazed the path traveled by future African-American leaders. At a time when most whites would not let a black man cross their threshold, Lincoln invited Douglass into the White House. Lincoln recognized that he needed Douglass to help him destroy the Confederacy and preserve the Union; Douglass realized that Lincoln's shrewd sense of public opinion would serve his own goal of freeing the nation's blacks. Their relationship shifted in response to the country's debate over slavery, abolition, and emancipation. Both were ambitious men. They had great faith in the moral and technological progress of their nation. And they were not always consistent in their views. John Stauffer describes their personal and political struggles with a keen understanding of the dilemmas Douglass and Lincoln confronted and the social context in which they occurred. What emerges is a brilliant portrait of how two of America's greatest leaders lived.

Nocturne

Nocturne PDF Author: Hélène Valance
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300224141
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
A beautifully illustrated look at the vogue for night landscapes amid the social, political, and technological changes of modern America The turn of the 20th century witnessed a surge in the creation and popularity of nocturnes and night landscapes in American art. In this original and thought-provoking book, Hélène Valance investigates why artists and viewers of the era were so captivated by the night. Nocturne examines works by artists such as James McNeill Whistler, Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, Frederic Remington, Edward Steichen, and Henry Ossawa Tanner through the lens of the scientific developments and social issues that dominated the period. Valance argues that the success of the genre is connected to the resonance between the night and the many forces that affected the era, including technological advances that expanded the realm of the visible, such as electric lighting and photography; Jim Crow–era race relations; America’s closing frontier and imperialism abroad; and growing anxiety about identity and social values amid rapid urbanization. This absorbing study features 150 illustrations encompassing paintings, photographs, prints, scientific illustration, advertising, and popular media to explore the predilection for night imagery as a sign of the times.