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American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840-1945 (20/21 #9)
by Gavin JonesSocial anxiety about poverty surfaces with startling frequency in American literature. Yet, as Gavin Jones argues, poverty has been denied its due as a critical and ideological framework in its own right, despite recent interest in representations of the lower classes and the marginalized. These insights lay the groundwork for American Hungers, in which Jones uncovers a complex and controversial discourse on the poor that stretches from the antebellum era through the Depression. Reading writers such as Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, James Agee, and Richard Wright in their historical contexts, Jones explores why they succeeded where literary critics have fallen short. These authors acknowledged a poverty that was as aesthetically and culturally significant as it was socially and materially real. They confronted the ideological dilemmas of approaching poverty while giving language to the marginalized poor--the beggars, tramps, sharecroppers, and factory workers who form a persistent segment of American society. Far from peripheral, poverty emerges at the center of national debates about social justice, citizenship, and minority identity. And literature becomes a crucial tool to understand an economic and cultural condition that is at once urgent and elusive because it cuts across the categories of race, gender, and class by which we conventionally understand social difference. Combining social theory with literary analysis, American Hungers masterfully brings poverty into the mainstream critical idiom.
American Hybrid Poetics: Gender, Mass Culture, and Form
by Amy Moorman RobbinsAmerican Hybrid Poetics explores the ways in which hybrid poetics--a playful mixing of disparate formal and aesthetic strategies--have been the driving force in the work of a historically and culturally diverse group of women poets who are part of a robust tradition in contesting the dominant cultural order. Amy Moorman Robbins examines the ways in which five poets--Gertrude Stein, Laura Mullen, Alice Notley, Harryette Mullen, and Claudia Rankine--use hybridity as an implicitly political strategy to interrupt mainstream American language, literary genres, and visual culture, and expose the ways in which mass culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has had a powerfully standardizing impact on the collective American imagination. By forcing encounters between incompatible traditions--consumer culture with the avant-garde, low culture forms with experimental poetics, prose poetry with linguistic subversiveness--these poets bring together radically competing ideologies and highlight their implications for lived experience. Robbins argues that it is precisely because these poets have mixed forms that their work has gone largely unnoticed by leading members and critics in experimental poetry circles.
The American Idea: The Literary Response to American Optimism
by Everett CarterThe American idea," a blend of the Idea of Progress and a belief in the essential goodness of man, has determined the form of much of our significant literature. Carter treats the response to this idea in most of the major and many of the minor writers of the nineteenth century, including Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, William and Henry James, Mark Twain, Howells, and Henry Adams, and sees the persistence of the idea in the novels of Saul Bellow. "Originally published in 1977.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
The American Idea of England, 1776-1840: Transatlantic Writing (Ashgate Series in Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Studies)
by Jennifer ClarkArguing that American colonists who declared their independence in 1776 remained tied to England by both habit and inclination, Jennifer Clark traces the new Americans' struggle to come to terms with their loss of identity as British, and particularly English, citizens. Americans' attempts to negotiate the new Anglo-American relationship are revealed in letters, newspaper accounts, travel reports, essays, song lyrics, short stories and novels, which Clark suggests show them repositioning themselves in a transatlantic context newly defined by political revolution. Chapters examine political writing as a means for Americans to explore the Anglo-American relationship, the appropriation of John Bull by American writers, the challenge the War of 1812 posed to the reconstructed Anglo-American relationship, the Paper War between American and English authors that began around the time of the War of 1812, accounts by Americans lured to England as a place of poetry, story and history, and the work of American writers who dissected the Anglo-American relationship in their fiction. Carefully contextualised historically, Clark's persuasive study shows that any attempt to examine what it meant to be American in the New Nation, and immediately beyond, must be situated within the context of the Anglo-American relationship.
American Imperialism's Undead: The Occupation of Haiti and the Rise of Caribbean Anticolonialism (New World Studies)
by Raphael DalleoAs modern Caribbean politics and literature emerged in the first half of the twentieth century, Haiti, as the region's first independent state, stood as a source of inspiration for imagining decolonization and rooting regional identity in Africanness. Yet at precisely the same moment that anticolonialism was spreading throughout the Caribbean, Haiti itself was occupied by U.S. marines, a fact that regional political and cultural histories too often overlook. In American Imperialism's Undead, Raphael Dalleo examines how Caribbean literature and activism emerged in the shadow of the U.S. military occupation of Haiti (1915-34) and how that presence influenced the development of anticolonialism throughout the region. The occupation was a generative event for Caribbean activists such as C. L. R. James, George Padmore, and Marcus and Amy Jacques Garvey as well as for writers such as Claude McKay, Eric Walrond, and Alejo Carpentier. Dalleo provides new ways of understanding these luminaries, while also showing how other important figures such as Aimé Césaire, Arturo Schomburg, Claudia Jones, Frantz Fanon, Amy Ashwood Garvey, H. G. De Lisser, Luis Palés Matos, George Lamming, and Jean Rhys can be contextualized in terms of the occupation. By examining Caribbean responses to Haiti's occupation, Dalleo underscores U.S. imperialism as a crucial if unspoken influence on anticolonial discourses and decolonization in the region. Without acknowledging the significance of the occupation of Haiti, our understanding of Atlantic history cannot be complete.
The American Indian Intellectual Tradition: An Anthology Of Writings From 1772 To 1972
by David MartinezIn The American Indian Intellectual Tradition, David Martínez presents thirty-one essays that exemplify Native American intellectual culture across two centuries. The occasion for many of the pieces was the exertion of colonial and then federal power to limit or obliterate the authority and autonomy of American Indians. The writers featured were activists for their home communities and for all indigenous people. <p><p> Martínez divides his book into three critical epochs of American Indian history with section introductions that provide political context for the selected readings. Works by Vine Deloria Jr., Elias Johnson, Laura Cornelius Kellogg, Susette La Flesche, D'Arcy McNickle, Samson Occom, John Ross, and twenty-one other writers and community leaders are accompanied by bibliographies. The essays display the diversity and sophistication of American Indian writers; although Martínez's approach is pan-Indian, each author is situated in terms of his or her specific culture, politics, and historical context. At the same time, throughout the book there are significant recurring themes that enable the reader to appreciate the scope of the American Indian intellectual tradition and the common cultural standpoints that bind these various writers together.
American Indian Literature: An Anthology
by Alan R. VelieThe first section of this anthology contains English retellings of songs and narratives from the oral traditions of many tribes. The second half comprises poetry and novel excerpts from contemporary Native American writers, such as Louise Erdrich and N. Scott Momaday.
American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal and Allotment (Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series)
by Jason Edward BlackJason Edward Black examines the ways the US government’s rhetoric and American Indian responses contributed to the policies of Native–US relations throughout the nineteenth century’s removal and allotment eras. Black shows how these discourses together constructed the perception of the US government and of American Indian communities. Such interactions—though certainly not equal—illustrated the hybrid nature of Native–US rhetoric in the nineteenth century. Both governmental, colonizing discourse and indigenous, decolonizing discourse shaped arguments, constructions of identity, and rhetoric in the colonial relationship.American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal and Allotment demonstrates how American Indians decolonized dominant rhetoric through impeding removal and allotment policies. By turning around the US government’s narrative and inventing their own tactics, American Indian communities helped restyle their own identities as well as the government’s. During the first third of the twentieth century, American Indians lobbied for the successful passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 and the Indian New Deal of 1934, changing the relationship once again.In the end, Native communities were granted increased rhetorical power through decolonization, though the US government retained an undeniable colonial influence through its territorial management of Natives. The Indian Citizenship Act and the Indian New Deal—as the conclusion of this book indicates—are emblematic of the prevalence of the duality of US citizenship that fused American Indians to the nation yet segregated them on reservations. This duality of inclusion and exclusion grew incrementally and persists now, as a lasting effect of nineteenth-century Native–US rhetorical relations.
American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability
by Russ CastronovoAn incisive critique that examines the origins of contemporary American ideas about surveillance, terrorism, and white supremacyFor more than three centuries, Americans have pursued strategies of security that routinely make them feel vulnerable, unsafe, and insecure. American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability probes this paradox by examining American attachments to the terror of the sublime, the fear of uncertainty, and the anxieties produced by unending racial threat.Challenging conventional approaches that leave questions of security to policy experts, Russ Castronovo turns to literature, philosophy, and political theory to show how security provides an organizing principle for collective life in ways that both enhance freedom and limit it. His incisive critique ranges from frontier violence and white racial anxiety to insurgent Black print culture and other forms of early American terror, uncovering the hidden logic of insecurity that structures modern approaches to national defense, counterterrorism, cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy. Drawing on examples from fiction, journalism, tracts, and pamphlets, Castronovo uncovers the deep affective attachments that Americans have had since the founding to the sources of fear and insecurity that make them feel unsafe.Timely and urgent, American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability sheds critical light on how and why the fundamental political desire for security promotes unease alongside assurance and fixates on risk and danger while clamoring for safety.
The American Isherwood
by Chris Freeman James J. BergNovelist, memoirist, diarist, and gay pioneer Christopher Isherwood left a wealth of writings. Known for his crisp style and his camera-like precision with detail, Isherwood gained fame for his Berlin Stories, which served as source material for the hit stage musical and Academy Award-winning film Cabaret. More recently, his experiences and career in the United States have received increased attention. His novel A Single Man was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film; his long relationship with the artist Don Bachardy, with whom he shared an openly gay lifestyle, was the subject of an award-winning documentary, Chris & Don: A Love Story; and his memoir, Christopher and His Kind, was adapted for the BBC. Isherwood's colorful journeys took him from post-World War I England to Weimar Germany to European exile to Golden Age Hollywood to Los Angeles in the full flower of gay liberation. After the publication of his diaries, which run to more than one million words and span nearly a half century, it is possible to fully assess his influence. This collection of essays considers Isherwood's diaries, his vast personal archive, and his published works and offers a multifaceted appreciation of a writer who spent more than half of his life in southern California. James J. Berg and Chris Freeman have brought together the most informative scholarship of the twenty-first century to illuminate the craft of one of the singular figures of the twentieth century. Isherwood, the American, emerges from the shadow of his English reputation to stake his claim as a significant force in late twentieth-century American culture whose legacy continues in the twenty-first century.Contributors: Joshua Adair, Murray State U; Jamie Carr, Niagara U; Robert L. Caserio, Pennsylvania State U; Niladri Chatterjee, U of Kalyani, India; Lisa Colletta, American U of Rome; Lois Cucullu, U of Minnesota; Mario Faraone; Peter Edgerly Firchow; Rebecca Gordon Stewart; William R. Handley, U of Southern California; Jaime Harker, U of Mississippi; Sara S. Hodson, Huntington Library; Carola M. Kaplan, California State U, Pomona; Benjamin Kohlmann, U of Freiburg, Germany; Victor Marsh, U of Queensland; Tina Mascara; Stephen McCauley; Paul M. McNeil, Columbia U; Guido Santi, College of the Canyons, California; Kyle Stevens, Brandeis U.
The American Jeremiad
by Sacvan BercovitchWhen Sacvan Bercovitch'sThe American Jeremiadfirst appeared in 1978, it was hailed as a landmark study of dissent and cultural formation in America, from the Puritans' writings through the major literary works of the antebellum era. For this long-awaited anniversary edition, Bercovitch has written a deeply thoughtful and challenging new preface that reflects on his classic study of the role of the political sermon, or jeremiad, in America from a contemporary perspective, while assessing developments in the field of American studies and the culture at large.
The American Journalist in the 21st Century: U.S. News People at the Dawn of a New Millennium (Routledge Communication Series)
by David H. Weaver Randal A. Beam Bonnie J. Brownlee Paul S. Voakes G. Cleveland WilhoitAn authoritative and detailed illustration of the state of journalistic practice in the United States today, The American Journalist in the 21st Century sheds light on the demographic and educational backgrounds, working conditions, and professional and ethical values of print, broadcast, and Internet journalists at the beginning of the 21st century. Providing results from telephone surveys of nearly 1,500 U.S. journalists working in a variety of media outlets, this volume updates the findings published in the earlier report, The American Journalist in the 1990s, and reflects the continued evolution of journalistic practice and professionalism. The scope of material included here is extensive and inclusive, representing numerous facets of journalistic practice and professionalism, and featuring separate analyses for women, minority, and online journalists. Many findings are set in context and compared with previous major studies of U.S. journalists conducted in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Serving as a detailed snapshot of current journalistic practice, The American Journalist in the 21st Century offers an intriguing and enlightening profile of professional journalists today, and it will be of great interest and value to working journalists, journalism educators, media managers, journalism students, and others seeking insights into the current state of the journalism profession.
American Journalists in the Great War: Rewriting the Rules of Reporting (Studies in War, Society, and the Military)
by Chris DubbsWhen war erupted in Europe in 1914, American journalists hurried across the Atlantic ready to cover it the same way they had covered so many other wars. However, very little about this war was like any other. Its scale, brutality, and duration forced journalists to write their own rules for reporting and keeping the American public informed.American Journalists in the Great War tells the dramatic stories of the journalists who covered World War I for the American public. Chris Dubbs draws on personal accounts from contemporary newspaper and magazine articles and books to convey the experiences of the journalists of World War I, from the western front to the Balkans to the Paris Peace Conference. Their accounts reveal the challenges of finding the war news, transmitting a story, and getting it past the censors. Over the course of the war, reporters found that getting their scoop increasingly meant breaking the rules or redefining the very meaning of war news. Dubbs shares the courageous, harrowing, and sometimes humorous stories of the American reporters who risked their lives in war zones to record their experiences and send the news to the people back home.
American Journals
by Albert Camus Hugh Levick Roger GuilliotFurnishing tidbits for Camus scholars, providing his take on North and South America, notably New York City and cities of Brazil, along with Buenos Aires and Santiago, Camus seems to have met only a few people he liked, and maybe two or three sites impressed him. He reflects on suicide. No it is not a cheerful work, but it is vivid. For Americans, this work if valuable for he describes our homeland.
American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times
by Raymond Haberski Andrew HartmanIntellectual history has never been more relevant and more important to public life in the United States. In complicated and confounding times, people look for the principles that drive action and the foundations that support national ideals. American Labyrinth demonstrates the power of intellectual history to illuminate our public life and examine our ideological assumptions.This volume of essays brings together 19 influential intellectual historians to contribute original thoughts on topics of widespread interest. Raymond Haberski Jr. and Andrew Hartman asked a group of nimble, sharp scholars to respond to a simple question: How might the resources of intellectual history help shed light on contemporary issues with historical resonance? The answers—all rigorous, original, and challenging—are as eclectic in approach and temperament as the authors are different in their interests and methods. Taken together, the essays of American Labyrinth illustrate how intellectual historians, operating in many different registers at once and ranging from the theoretical to the political, can provide telling insights for understanding a public sphere fraught with conflict.In order to understand why people are ready to fight over cultural symbols and political positions we must have insight into how ideas organize, enliven, and define our lives. Ultimately, as Haberski and Hartman show in this volume, the best route through our contemporary American labyrinth is the path that traces our practical and lived ideas.
American Landscapes: Meditations on Art and Literature in a Changing World (University of Mississippi Museum and Historic Houses Series)
by Ann J. Abadie and J. Richard GruberAmerican Landscapes: Meditations on Art and Literature in a Changing World is a major contemporary survey of landscapes in art and literature of the United States, especially the American South. Inspired by William Dunlap’s extraordinary landscape Meditations on the Origins of Agriculture in America and a collection of forty paintings and photographs by Southern artists, this volume brings together artists, authors, and scholars to present new perspectives on art and literature both past and present. The volume includes art and text from artists John Alexander, Jason Bouldin, William Dunlap, Carlyle Wolfe Lee, Ke Francis, Linda Burgess, Randy Hayes; photographers Sally Mann, Ed Croom, and Huger Foote; museum directors Betsy Bradley, Jane Livingston, and Julian Rankin; and authors W. Ralph Eubanks, John Grisham, J. Richard Gruber, Jessica B. Harris, Lisa Howorth, Julia Reed, Natasha Trethewey, Curtis Wilkie, Joseph M. Pierce, and Drew Gilpin Faust. This diverse group explores major eras of American history portrayed in Dunlap’s painting, a landscape that evokes the displacement and genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the Civil War, and William Faulkner’s fiction. They examine the history of landscape art in America, connecting art with the works of major writers like William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Natasha Trethewey, and Jesmyn Ward. In eighteen new essays written during the pandemic and since the events of January 6, 2021, the essayists emphasize how the key issues Dunlap addressed in his 1987 artwork have become part of the national discourse and make his work even more vital today.
American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States (Fourth Edition)
by H. L. MenckenThis groundbreaking study clarifies the differences between British and American English and defines the distinguishing characteristics of American English. Cigar-chomping newspaperman H. L. Mencken succeeds not only in providing a lucid description of the American language but also in making his readers laugh, wince, and nod in agreement. It's a readable and fascinating study on why you say "tomayto" and I say "tomahto. " A must read for anyone who loves words. <P><P>[This text is listed as an example that meets Common Core Standards in English language arts in grades 11-12 at http://www.corestandards.org.]
The American Lawrence
by Lee M. JenkinsKnown as a distinctly English author, D. H. Lawrence is reevaluated as a creator and critic of American literature in this imaginative study. From 1922 to 1925, during his "savage pilgrimage" in Mexico and New Mexico, Lawrence completed the core of what Lee Jenkins terms his "American oeuvre"--including his major volume of criticism, Studies in Classic American Literature. By examining Lawrence's experiences in the Americas, including his fascination with indigenous cultures, Jenkins illustrates how the modernist writer helped shape both American literary criticism and the American literary canon. Reassessing Lawrence's relationship to American modernism and his literary contemporaries in the New World, Jenkins portrays Lawrence as a transatlantic writer whose significant body of work embraces and adapts both English and American traditions and innovations.
American Lit 101: From Nathaniel Hawthorne to Harper Lee and Naturalism to Magical Realism, an essential guide to American writers and works
by Brianne KeithFrom poetry to fiction to essays, American Lit 101 leaves no page unturned! Edgar Allan Poe. Willa Cather. Henry David Thoreau. Mark Twain. The list of important American writers goes on and on. These voices played a vital role in shaping the scope of American literature, and the United States itself. But too often, textbooks reduce this storied history to dry text that would put even a tenured professor to sleep.American Lit 101 is an engaging and comprehensive guide through the major players in American literature. From colonialism to postmodernism and every literary movement in between, this primer is packed with hundreds of entertaining tidbits and concepts, along with easy-to-understand explanations on why each author's work was important then and still relevant now. So whether you're looking for a refresher course on key American literature or want to learn about it for the first time, American Lit 101 has all the answers--even the ones you didn't know you were looking for.
American Literary Criticism Since the 1930s
by Vincent B. LeitchAmerican Literary Criticism Since the 1930s fully updates Vincent B. Leitch’s classic book, American Literary Criticism from the 30s to the 80s following the development of the American academy right up to the present day. Updated throughout and with a brand new chapter, this second edition: provides a critical history of American literary theory and practice, discussing the impact of major schools and movements examines the social and cultural background to literary research, considering the role of key theories and practices provides profiles of major figures and influential texts, outlining the connections among theorists presents a new chapter on developments since the 1980s, including discussions of feminist, queer, postcolonial and ethnic criticism. Comprehensive and engaging, this book offers a crucial overview of the development of literary studies in American universities, and a springboard to further research for all those interested in the development and study of Literature.
American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract
by Brook ThomasThis title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in `1997.
American Literary Studies
by Michael A. Elliott Claudia StokesAmerican Literary Studies: A Methodological Reader gathers together leading scholars of American literature to address the questions of methodology that have invigorated and divided their field: the rise of interdisciplinarity and the wealth of theoretical methods now available to the critic of American literature. Their engagement with these issues takes a unique form in this book: Each scholar has chosen a methodologically innovative essay, which he or she then introduces, explaining why it is both exemplary in its approach and central to the issues that most engage American literary scholarship today. The book includes both an introduction to the controversial interdisciplinary methods that have made American literary studies such a vibrant field, as well as groundbreaking scholarship on topics as diverse as James Fenimore Cooper, minstrel songs, and Lakota Indian stories. This volume has been designed to serve as a starting point for teachers and students to explore the fundamental questions of American literary scholarship: What does "method" mean in literary studies? Which texts should it study? What makes literary study unique? What should literary scholarship do? American Literary Studies argues that these questions can only be answered through a discussion of the interdisciplinary methods currently in use by scholars today. Finally, an original introduction by Michael A. Elliott and Claudia Stokes explains why questions of method are crucial to American literary studies and how past scholars of American literature have tried to answer them. Contributors include: Lauren Berlant, Russ Castronovo, Wai Chee Dimock, Ann duCille, Michael A. Elliott, Frances Smith Foster, Elaine A. Jahner, Rob Kroes, Arnold Krupat, Paul Lauter, Marilee Lindemann, W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Christopher J. Looby, David Palumbo-Liu, Roy Harvey Pearce, Lora Romero, Ramón Saldívar, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Werner Sollors, Claudia Stokes, Claudia Tate, Paula A. Treichler, Priscilla Wald, Michael Warner, Laura Wexler, Sau-ling C. Wong
American Literature: A History
by Hans Bertens Theo D'haenThis comprehensive history of American Literature traces its development from the earliest colonial writings of the late 1500s through to the present day. This lively, engaging and highly accessible guide: <p><p> offers lucid discussions of all major influences and movements such as Puritanism, Transcendentalism, Realism, Naturalism, Modernism and Postmodernism <p> draws on the historical, cultural, and political contexts of key literary texts and authors <p> covers the whole range of American literature: prose, poetry, theatre and experimental literature <p> includes substantial sections on native and ethnic American literatures <p> explains and contextualises major events, terms and figures in American history. <p> This book is essential reading for anyone seeking to situate their reading of American Literature in the appropriate religious, cultural, and political contexts.
American Literature: A Thematic Approach
by G. Robert Carlsen Edgar H. Schuster Anthony TovattA thematically arranged anthology of poems, short stories, plays, novellas, and excerpts from longer works by American authors.
American Literature
by Molly Harrington DuganThis book is an anthology of American Literature. An anthology is a collection of literature written by different authors. The literature can be poems, plays, short stories, essays, parts of novels, folktales, legends, or myths.