Recasting the Culture of Ephemera PDF Download

Author: Todd Steven Gernes
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Women
Languages : en
Pages : 438

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Author: Mike Chasar
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231158645
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Exploring poetry scrapbooks, old-time radio show recordings, advertising verse, corporate archives, and Hallmark greeting cards, among other unconventional sources, Mike Chasar casts American poetry as an everyday phenomenon consumed and created by a vast range of readers. He shows how American poetry in the first half of the twentieth century and its reception helped set the stage for the dynamics of popular culture and mass media today. Poetry was then part and parcel of American popular culture, spreading rapidly as the consumer economy expanded and companies exploited its profit-making potential. Poetry also offered ordinary Americans creative, emotional, political, and intellectual modes of expression, whether through scrapbooking, participation in radio programs, or poetry contests. Reenvisioning the uses of twentieth-century poetry, Chasar provides a richer understanding of the innovations of modernist and avant-garde poets and the American reading public's sophisticated powers of feeling and perception.

Author: Gary Burns
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118883357
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 608

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A Companion to Popular Culture is a landmark survey of contemporary research in popular culture studies that offers a comprehensive and engaging introduction to the field. Includes over two dozen essays covering the spectrum of popular culture studies from food to folklore and from TV to technology Features contributions from established and up-and-coming scholars from a range of disciplines Offers a detailed history of the study of popular culture Balances new perspectives on the politics of culture with in-depth analysis of topics at the forefront of popular culture studies

Author: Cassandra A. Good
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199376190
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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"When Harry Met Sally" is only the most iconic of popular American movies, books, and articles that pose the question of whether friendships between men and women are possible. In Founding Friendships, Cassandra A. Good shows that this question was embedded in and debated as far back as the birth of the American nation. Indeed, many of the nation's founding fathers had female friends but popular rhetoric held that these relationships were fraught with social danger, if not impossible. Elite men and women formed loving, politically significant friendships in the early national period that were crucial to the individuals' lives as well as the formation of a new national political system, as Cassandra Good illuminates. Abigail Adams called her friend Thomas Jefferson "one of the choice ones on earth," while George Washington signed a letter to his friend Elizabeth Powel with the words "I am always Yours." Their emotionally rich language is often mistaken for romance, but by analyzing period letters, diaries, novels, and etiquette books, Good reveals that friendships between men and women were quite common. At a time when personal relationships were deeply political, these bonds offered both parties affection and practical assistance as well as exemplified republican values of choice, freedom, equality, and virtue. In so doing, these friendships embodied the core values of the new nation and represented a transitional moment in gender and culture. Northern and Southern, famous and lesser known, the men and women examined in Founding Friendships offer a fresh look at how the founding generation defined and experienced friendship, love, gender, and power.

Author: Katherine D. Harris
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821445200
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 507

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By November 1822, the British reading public had already voraciously consumed both Walter Scott’s expensive novels and Rudolf Ackermann’s exquisite lithographs. The next decade, referred to by some scholars as dormant and unproductive, is in fact bursting with Forget Me Nots, Friendship’s Offerings, Keepsakes, and Literary Souvenirs. By wrapping literature, poetry, and art into an alluring package, editors and publishers saturated the market with a new, popular, and best-selling genre, the literary annual. In Forget Me Not, Katherine D. Harris assesses the phenomenal rise of the annual and its origins in other English, German, and French literary forms as well as its social influence on women, its redefinition of the feminine, and its effects on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century print culture. Harris adopts an interdisciplinary approach that uses textual and social contexts to explore a forum of subversive femininity, where warfare and the masculine hero were not celebrated. Initially published in diminutive, decoratively bound volumes filled with engravings of popularly recognized artwork and “sentimental” poetry and prose, the annuals attracted a primarily middle-class female readership. The annuals were released each November, making them an ideal Christmas gift, lover’s present, or token of friendship. Selling more than 100,000 copies during each holiday season, the annuals were accused of causing an epidemic and inspiring an “unmasculine and unbawdy age” that lasted through 1860 and lingered in derivative forms until the early twentieth century in both the United States and Europe. The annual thrived in the 1820s and after despite—or perhaps because of—its “feminine” writing and beautiful form.

Author: Christopher Hanlon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192647091
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 657

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The Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson is the most expansive collection of critical essays on Emerson to date, a survey that approaches Emerson from the vantages of climate change, racial justice, print culture, the digital humanities, the new religious studies, hemispheric American Studies, health humanities, and affect theory among other critical perspectives. Curated between a forward by editor Christopher Hanlon--who makes the case for a capacious and contemporary Emerson--and Cornel West--the activist-scholar whose influential work on Emerson merges with a career of advocacy for economic and racial justice?this collection assesses the history and state of Emerson scholarship while charting pathways for new work on this most essential American writer. Comprised of new works by leading figures in nineteenth-century Americanist literary studies, the volume suggests directions into underexamined facets of Emerson's writing, life, and reputation. From Emerson's engagements with energy infrastructure and the processes of extraction that undergirded the locomotives he rode and the energy economies he sometimes extolled; to the vicissitudes of age he experienced alongside the romantic tropes of youthful vigour he both re-circulated and re-tooled; to Emerson's poetry, both in its philosophical formulations and in its reflections of the material circumstances of nineteenth-century print culture; to Emerson's resonance beyond the United States, elsewhere in the western hemisphere; to the Black press and its refractions of Emersonian transcendentalism in the midst of ante- and post-bellum justice struggles; to the legacies of Emerson to be found in the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Rachel Carson, and in the versions of ?Emerson? to be found in children's literature; to his often-fraught and often-fruitful engagements with reform movements of various sorts; to the prospects for digital processes of re-reading Emerson and his contemporaries' styles of textual production and engagement, The Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson is a necessary resource for students, scholars, and general readers committed to the study of Emerson, transcendentalism, and current critical approaches to United States literature.

Author: Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022625738X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Runaway slave Sojourner Truth gained fame in the nineteenth century as an abolitionist, feminist, and orator and earned a living partly by selling photographic carte de visite portraits of herself at lectures and by mail. Cartes de visite, similar in format to calling cards, were relatively inexpensive collectibles that quickly became a new mode of mass communication. Despite being illiterate, Truth copyrighted her photographs in her name and added the caption “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance. Sojourner Truth.” Featuring the largest collection of Truth’s photographs ever published, Enduring Truths is the first book to explore how she used her image, the press, the postal service, and copyright laws to support her activism and herself. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby establishes a range of important contexts for Truth’s portraits, including the strategic role of photography and copyright for an illiterate former slave; the shared politics of Truth’s cartes de visite and federal banknotes, which were both created to fund the Union cause; and the ways that photochemical limitations complicated the portrayal of different skin tones. Insightful and powerful, Enduring Truths shows how Truth made her photographic portrait worth money in order to end slavery—and also became the strategic author of her public self.

Author: MaureenDaly Goggin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351536745
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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In contrast to much current scholarship on women and material culture which focuses primarily on women as consumers, this essay collection provides case studies of women who produced material objects. The essays collected here make an original contribution to material culture studies by focusing on women's social practices in relation to material culture. The essays as a whole are concerned with women's complex and active engagement with material culture in the various stages of the material object's life cycle, from design and production to consumption, use, and redeployment. Also, theorized and described are the ways in which women engaged in meaning making, identity formation, and commemoration through their manipulation of materials and techniques, ranging from taxidermy and shell work to collecting autographs and making scrapbooks. This volume takes as its object of investigation the overlooked and often despised categories of women's decorative and craft activities as sites of important cultural and social work. This volume is interdisciplinary with essays by art historians, social historians, literary critics, rhetoricians, and museum curators. The scope of the volume is international with essays on eighteenth-century German silhouettes, Australian aboriginal ritual practices, Brittany mourning rites, and Soviet-era recipes that provide a comparative framework for the majority of essays which focus on British and North American women who lived and worked in the long nineteenth century. This volume will appeal to a broad range of students and scholars in women's history, art history, cultural studies, museum studies, anthropology, cultural and social history, literature, rhetoric, and material culture studies.

Author: Susan Tucker
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 9781592134786
Category : Crafts & Hobbies
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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This book explores the history of scrapbook-making, its origins, uses, changing forms and purposes as well as the human agents behind the books themselves. Scrapbooks bring pleasure in both the making and consuming - and are one of the most enduring yet simultaneously changing cultural forms of the last two centuries. Despite the popularity of scrapbooks, no one has placed them within historical traditions until now. This volume considers the makers, their artefacts, And The viewers within the context of American culture. The volume's contributors do not show the reader how to make scrapbooks or improve techniques but instead explore the curious history of what others have done in the past and why these splendid examples of material and visual culture have such a significant place in many households.

Author: Melanie Hubbard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108599672
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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This book re-assesses Dickinson's manuscripts, style, and statements to arrive at a historically appropriate conception of poetics. It compares her composition practices, such as variant generation and writing on already-marked scraps, with those of her peers in nineteenth-century American popular manuscript culture, tracing them to the pervasive influence of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, Hume's scepticism, and associationism in philosophy of mind and early neuroscience. The argument consults the archives and considers Dickinson's reading, in and out of school, in philosophy, rhetoric, and semiotic theory, as well as her training in inductive science and her familiarity with ideas about electricity, evolution, emotion, sympathy, and the brain. Combining close readings of poems with contextualizing information about contemporary conflicts in intellectual history, the book contends that Dickinson takes the making of poems to be her philosophical praxis. It depicts a Dickinson committed to thinking about the physical constitution of human consciousness and the historicity and materiality of one of its chief modes, language.