Author: Wisam Abughosh Chaleila Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000328228 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 277
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.
Author: Wanlin Li Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000391841 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 147
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.
Author: Cristina Garrigós Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000410625 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 205
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.
Author: Mirosław Aleksander Miernik Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1000368920 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 196
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.
Author: Erika Lee Publisher: Basic Books ISBN: 1541672593 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 432
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.
Author: Wisam Abughosh Chaleila Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 9780367689100 Category : American fiction Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
This book aims to display the underpinnings and subtle references of racism and xenophobia embedded deep into literary works and personas both fictional and real. In the main chapters, literary works are dissected to underline the intolerance hidden behind words of righteousness and blind trust, as if such is the norm.
Author: Linda De Roche Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 1440853592 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 1563
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.
Author: David Fine Publisher: University of Nevada Press ISBN: 0874174600 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 219
Book Description
The literary image of Los Angeles has evolved since the 1880s from promotional literature that hyped the region as a New Eden to contemporary visions of the city as a perplexing, sometimes corrupt, even apocalyptic place that reflects all that is wrong with America. In Imagining Los Angeles, the first literary history of the city in more than fifty years, critic David Fine traces the history and mood of the place through the work of writers as diverse as Helen Hunt Jackson, Mary Austin, Norman Mailer, Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, Carolyn See, and many others. His lively and engaging text focuses on the way these writers saw Los Angeles and used the image of the city as an element in their work, and on how that image has changed as the city itself became ever larger, more complex, and more socially and ethnically diverse. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the literature and changing image of Southern California.
Author: Christopher McBride Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135877408 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 153
Book Description
Chapter Introduction -- chapter 1 Melville's Typee and the Development of the American Colonial Imagination -- chapter 2 The Colonizing Voice in Cuba: Richard Henry Dana, Jr.'s To Cuba and Back: A Vacation Voyage -- chapter 3 The Kings of the Sandwich Islands: Mark Twain's Letters from Hawaii and Postbellum American Imperialism -- chapter 4 Charles Warren Stoddard and the American Homocolonial Literary Excursion -- chapter 5 And Who Are These White Men?: Jack London's The House of Pride and American Colonization of the Hawaiian Islands.
Author: Bryan M. Santin Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1009034561 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 397
Book Description
Surveying the relationship between American politics and the twentieth-century novel, this volume analyzes how political movements, ideas, and events shaped the American novel. It also shows how those political phenomena were shaped in turn by long-form prose fiction.
Author: Wisam Abughosh Chaleila
Author: Wanlin Li
Author: Cristina Garrigós
Author: Mirosław Aleksander Miernik
Author: Erika Lee
Author: Wisam Abughosh Chaleila![Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context [4 volumes] PDF](https://books.google.com/books/content/images/frontcover/QETPEAAAQBAJ?fife=w80-h100)
Author: Linda De Roche
Author: David Fine
Author: Christopher McBride
Author: Bryan M. Santin