Agee Agonistes

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Agee Agonistes

Author : Michael A. Lofaro
Publisher : Univ Tennessee Press
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 392 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (321 download)

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Book Synopsis Agee Agonistes by : Michael A. Lofaro

Download or read book Agee Agonistes written by Michael A. Lofaro and published by Univ Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most widely noted for his acclaimed Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Death in the Family, Tennessee native James Agee was also a journalist, film critic, poet, and screenwriter. More than fifty years after Agee's untimely death, his canon of work continues to grow in popularity, and his ability to capture the human condition in all its forms remains unparalleled. Agee Agonistes is a compilation of seventeen essays from the James Agee Celebration hosted by the University of Tennessee in April 2005. The collection includes some of the best interpretations of Agee's work and explores the influences on his art, delineates the connections and syntheses he makes within his texts, and examines his involvement in music, ethics, surrealism, local and national history, cinema, television, poetry, literature, sociology, and journalism. The volume features never-before-seen pictures of Agee, previously unknown correspondence, and a remembrance by his oldest daughter, Deedee. The volume also includes the most extensive bibliography of secondary sources on Agee assembled to date. The essays are divided into four parts: Agee's Influences and Syntheses-Contributors: Paul Sprecher, William Bruce Wheeler, Jack Neely, Jeffrey J. Folks, Hugh Davis, Paul Ashdown Agee's Films-Contributors: Daniel Feller, Jeffrey Couchman, Mary E. Papke, John Wranovics Agee's Literature-Contributors: Fred Chappell, Angie Maxwell, John H. Summers, James A. Crank, Michael A. Lofaro Agee's Correspondence-Contributor: Brian Gempp. In addition, the volume includes an introductory essay entitled "Mapping Agee's Myriad Mind" by noted author David Madden. Agee Agonistes will be of interest to all those who study twentieth-century America and will introduce a new generation of readers to James Agee. Michael Lofaro is professor of American literature and American and Cultural Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He has authored and edited numerous volumes and is coeditor, with Hugh Davis, of James Agee Rediscovered: The Journals of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Other New Manuscripts. He is also the general editor for the ten-volume series, The Works of James Agee, and the editor of its forthcoming first volume, A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author's Text.

Agee at 100

Author : Michael A. Lofaro
Publisher : Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN 13 : 1572338903
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (723 download)

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Book Synopsis Agee at 100 by : Michael A. Lofaro

Download or read book Agee at 100 written by Michael A. Lofaro and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2012-02-25 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawn mainly from the centennial anniversary symposium on James Agee held at the University of Tennessee in the fall of 2009, the essays of Agee at 100 are as diverse in topic and purpose as is Agee’s work itself. Often devalued during his life by those who thought his breadth a hindrance to greatness, Agee’s achievements as a poet, novelist, journalist, essayist, critic, documentarian, and screenwriter are now more fully recognized. With its use of previously unknown and recently recovered materials as well as established works, this groundbreaking new collection is a timely contribution to the resurgence of interest in Agee’s significance. The essays in this collection range from the scholarly to the personal, and all offer insight into Agee’s writing, his cultural influence, and ultimately Agee himself. Dwight Garner opens with his reflective essay on “Why Agee Matters.” Several essays present almost entirely new material on Agee. Paul Ashdown writes on Agee’s book reviews, which, unlike Agee’s film criticism, have received scant attention. With evidence from two largely unstudied manuscripts, Jeffrey Couchman sets the record straight on Agee’s contribution to the screenplay for The African Queen and delves as well into his television “miniseries” screenplay Mr. Lincoln. John Wranovics treats Agee’s lesser-known films--the documentaries In the Street and The Quiet One and the Filipino epic Genghis Khan. Jeffrey J. Folks wrestles with Agee’s “culture of repudiation” while James A. Crank investigates his perplexing treatment of race in his prose. Jesse Graves and Andrew Crooke provide new analyses of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and Michael A. Lofaro and Philip Stogdon both discuss Lofaro’s recently restored text of A Death in the Family. David Madden closes the collection with his short story “Seeing Agee in Lincoln,” an imagined letter from Agee to his longtime confidante Father Flye. The contributors to Agee at 100 utilize materials new and old to reveal the true importance of Agee's range of cultural sensibility and literary ability. Film scholars will also find this collection particularly engrossing, as will anyone fascinated by the work of the author rightly deemed the “sovereign prince of the English language.” Michael A. Lofaro is Lindsay Young Professor of American Literature and American and Cultural Studies at the University of Tennessee. Most recently, he restored James Agee’s A Death in the Family and is the general editor of the projected eleven-volume The Works of James Agee.

James Agee in Context

Author : Michael A. Lofaro
Publisher : Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN 13 : 1621907430
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (219 download)

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Book Synopsis James Agee in Context by : Michael A. Lofaro

Download or read book James Agee in Context written by Michael A. Lofaro and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2023-01-17 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It’s difficult to overestimate the impact of the many new works by James Agee uncovered and published in the last twenty years. These previously unknown primary works have, in turn, encouraged a parallel explosion of critical evaluation and reevaluation by scholars, to which James Agee in Context is the latest contribution. This superb collection from well-known James Agee scholars features myriad approaches and contexts for understanding the author’s fiction, poetry, journalism, and screenwriting. The essays bring the reader from the streets of James Agee’s New York to travel with the author from Alabama to Hollywood to Havana. Contributors explore overlapping and sometimes unique subjects, themes, and accomplishments (or lack thereof) in Agee’s uncovered works and highlight the diversity of interest that Agee’s complete body of work inspires. The insightful scholarship on influence examines connections between Agee and Wright Morris, Helen Levitt, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and Stephen Crane. Such juxtapositions serve to illustrate how Agee drew on literary influences as a young man, how he used his work as a journalist to craft fiction as he was about to turn thirty, and his influence upon others. The volume concludes with three poems and a short story by Agee, all previously unknown. It seems astonishing that so much remains to be discovered about this protean author, his materials, and his circle. Yet, the recovery and analysis of neglected texts and information mined from newspapers and magazines proves the extent to which Agee kept his mind and his work, as he himself put it, “patiently concentrated upon the essential quietudes of the human soul.”

Phenomenology 2010. Volume 5: Selected Essays from North America, Part 2: Phenomenology beyond Philosophy

Author : Barber, Michael
Publisher : Zeta Books
ISBN 13 : 973199775X
Total Pages : 388 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (319 download)

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Book Synopsis Phenomenology 2010. Volume 5: Selected Essays from North America, Part 2: Phenomenology beyond Philosophy by : Barber, Michael

Download or read book Phenomenology 2010. Volume 5: Selected Essays from North America, Part 2: Phenomenology beyond Philosophy written by Barber, Michael and published by Zeta Books. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

On Essays

Author : Thomas Karshan
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 019870786X
Total Pages : 397 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (987 download)

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Book Synopsis On Essays by : Thomas Karshan

Download or read book On Essays written by Thomas Karshan and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-07-29 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sets out in a new and authoritative way the history of the essay; explains how the essay has come to mean what it does, surveys the widely various incarnations of the form, offers new accounts of major essayists in English, and traces a wide range of significant themes.

On Writing with Photography

Author : Karen Beckman
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 0816688850
Total Pages : 483 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (166 download)

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Book Synopsis On Writing with Photography by : Karen Beckman

Download or read book On Writing with Photography written by Karen Beckman and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2013-02-01 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From James Agee to W. G. Sebald, there has been an explosion of modern documentary narratives and fiction combining text and photography in complex and fascinating ways. However, these contemporary experiments are part of a tradition that stretches back to the early years of photography. Writers have been integrating photographs into their work for as long as photographs have existed, producing rich, multilayered creations; and photographers have always made images that incorporate, respond to, or function as writing. On Writing with Photography explores what happens to texts—and images—when they are brought together. From the mid-nineteenth century to the present, this collection addresses a wide range of genres and media, including graphic novels, children’s books, photo-essays, films, diaries, newspapers, and art installations. Examining the works of Herman Melville, Don DeLillo, Claude McKay, Man Ray, Dare Wright, Guy Debord, Zhang Ailing, and Roland Barthes, among others, the essays trace the relationship between photographs and “reality” and describe the imaginary worlds constructed by both, discussing how this production can turn into testimony of personal and collective history, memory and trauma, gender and sexuality, and ethnicity. Together, these essays help explain how writers and photographers—past and present—have served as powerful creative resources for each other. Contributors: Stuart Burrows, Brown U; Roderick Coover, Temple U; Adrian Daub, Stanford U; Marcy J. Dinius, DePaul U; Marianne Hirsch, Columbia U; Daniel H. Magilow, U of Tennessee, Knoxville; Janine Mileaf; Tyrus Miller, U of California, Santa Cruz; Leah Rosenberg, U of Florida; Xiaojue Wang, U of Pennsylvania.

The Language of Vision

Author : Joseph R. Millichap
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807162795
Total Pages : 215 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis The Language of Vision by : Joseph R. Millichap

Download or read book The Language of Vision written by Joseph R. Millichap and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2016-06-06 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Language of Vision celebrates and interprets the complementary expressions of photography and literature in the South. Southern imagery and text affect one another, explains Joseph R. Millichap, as intertextual languages and influential visions. Focusing on the 1930s, and including significant works both before and after this preeminent decade, Millichap uncovers fascinating convergences between mediums, particularly in the interplay of documentary realism and subjective modernism. Millichap's subjects range from William Faulkner's fiction, perhaps the best representation of literary and graphic tensions of the period, and the work of other major figures like Robert Penn Warren and Eudora Welty to specific novels, including Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Fleshing out historical and cultural background as well as critical and theoretical context, Millichap shows how these texts echo and inform the visual medium to reveal personal insights and cultural meanings. Warren's fictions and poems, Millichap argues, redefine literary and graphic tensions throughout the late twentieth century; Welty's narratives and photographs reinterpret gender, race, and class; and Ellison's analysis of race in segregated America draws from contemporary photography. Millichap also traces these themes and visions in Natasha Trethewey's contemporary poetry and prose, revealing how the resonances of these artistic and historical developments extend into the new century. This groundbreaking study reads southern literature across time through the prism of photography, offering a brilliant formulation of the dialectic art forms.

Film and Literary Modernism

Author : Robert P. McParland
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 144386644X
Total Pages : 255 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (438 download)

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Book Synopsis Film and Literary Modernism by : Robert P. McParland

Download or read book Film and Literary Modernism written by Robert P. McParland and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-08-26 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Film and Literary Modernism, the connections between film, modernist literature, and the arts are explored by an international group of scholars. The impact of cinema upon our ways of seeing the world is highlighted in essays on city symphony films, avant-garde cinema, European filmmaking and key directors and personalities from Charlie Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein and Alain Renais to Alfred Hitchcock and Mae West. Contributors investigate the impact of film upon T. S. Eliot, time and stream of consciousness in Virginia Woolf and Henri Bergson, the racial undercurrents in the film adaptations of Ernest Hemingway’s fiction, and examine the film writing of William Faulkner, James Agee, and Graham Greene. Robert McParland assembles an international group of researchers including independent film makers, critics and professors of film, creative writers, teachers of architecture and design, and young doctoral scholars, who offer a multi-faceted look at modernism and the art of the film.

The Night of the Hunter

Author : Jeffrey Couchman
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
ISBN 13 : 0810125420
Total Pages : 314 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (11 download)

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Book Synopsis The Night of the Hunter by : Jeffrey Couchman

Download or read book The Night of the Hunter written by Jeffrey Couchman and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-12 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reaching simultaneously into the realms of film and literature, "The Night of the Hunter": A Biography of a Film details the transformation of Davis Grubb's 1953 novel into a motion picture. A popular and critical success, the novel spent four months on the New York Times bestseller list, and Hollywood responded to its atmospheric lyricism. In the hands of first-time director Charles Laughton, the story became equal parts thriller, allegory, and fever dream, filled with slow, inexorable suspense. Yet the film initially failed at the box office. In the first major study of the long-lost first-draft screenplay by James Agee, Jeffrey Couchman confronts a fifty-year controversy about the authorship of the film. He explores many levels of artistic convergence-between novelist and director, director and actor, and cinematic form and audience expectations. The talents that clashed or came together along the road from book to movie created a film of rich stylistic contradiction. Combining biographical and historical analysis with a critical study of both the novel and the film, Couchman makes the case that this initially overlooked cinematic gem is a prismatic work that continually reveals new aspects of itself. Book jacket.

The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism

Author : Karin M. Danielsson
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1666915718
Total Pages : 287 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (669 download)

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Book Synopsis The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism by : Karin M. Danielsson

Download or read book The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism written by Karin M. Danielsson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-09-05 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism responds to a need to expand and refine the connections among nonhuman studies and American literary naturalism and to productively expand the scholarly discourse surrounding this vital movement in American literary history. This collection focuses on that which becomes visible when the human subject is skirted, or moved off-center: in other words, the representation of nonhuman animals and other vital or inert species, things, entities, cityscapes and seascapes, that play an important part in American literary naturalism. Informed by animal studies, ecocriticism, posthumanism, new materialism, and other recent theoretical perspectives, the essays in this collection discuss early naturalist texts as well as more recent naturalistic-oriented authors.

Imagining Wild Bill

Author : Paul Ashdown
Publisher : Southern Illinois University Press
ISBN 13 : 0809337886
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis Imagining Wild Bill by : Paul Ashdown

Download or read book Imagining Wild Bill written by Paul Ashdown and published by Southern Illinois University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-05 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wild Bill’s ever-evolving legend When it came to the Wild West, the nineteenth-century press rarely let truth get in the way of a good story. James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok’s story was no exception. Mythologized and sensationalized, Hickok was turned into the deadliest gunfighter of all, a so-called moral killer, a national phenomenon even while he was alive. Rather than attempt to tease truth from fiction, coauthors Paul Ashdown and Edward Caudill investigate the ways in which Hickok embodied the culture of glamorized violence Americans embraced after the Civil War and examine the process of how his story emerged, evolved, and turned into a viral multimedia sensation full of the excitement, danger, and romance of the West. Journalists, the coauthors demonstrate, invented “Wild Bill” Hickok, glorifying him as a civilizer. They inflated his body count and constructed his legend in the midst of an emerging celebrity culture that grew up around penny newspapers. His death by treachery, at a relatively young age, made the story tragic, and dime-store novelists took over where the press left off. Reimagined as entertainment, Hickok’s legend continued to enthrall Americans in literature, on radio, on television, and in the movies, and it still draws tourists to notorious Deadwood, South Dakota. American culture often embraces myths that later become accepted as popular history. By investigating the allure and power of Hickok’s myth, Ashdown and Caudill explain how American journalism and popular culture have shaped the way Civil War–era figures are remembered and reveal how Americans have embraced violence as entertainment.

Southerners on Film

Author : Andrew B. Leiter
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 078648702X
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (864 download)

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Book Synopsis Southerners on Film by : Andrew B. Leiter

Download or read book Southerners on Film written by Andrew B. Leiter and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2011-08-31 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The representation of Southerners on film has been a topic of enduring interest and debate among scholars of both film and Southern studies. These 15 essays examine the problem of Southern identity in film since the civil rights era. Fresh insights are provided on such familiar topics as the redneck image, transitions to modernity and the prevalence of the Southern gothic. Other essays reflect the reinvigorated and expanding field of new Southern studies and topics include the transnational South, the intersection of ethnicity and environment and the cultural significance of Southern identity outside the South.

This Atom Bomb in Me

Author : Lindsey A. Freeman
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 1503607798
Total Pages : 124 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (36 download)

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Book Synopsis This Atom Bomb in Me by : Lindsey A. Freeman

Download or read book This Atom Bomb in Me written by Lindsey A. Freeman and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-12 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Atom Bomb in Me traces what it felt like to grow up suffused with American nuclear culture in and around the atomic city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. As a secret city during the Manhattan Project, Oak Ridge enriched the uranium that powered Little Boy, the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The city was a major nuclear production site throughout the Cold War, adding something to each and every bomb in the United States arsenal. Even today, Oak Ridge contains the world's largest supply of fissionable uranium. The granddaughter of an atomic courier, Lindsey A. Freeman turns a critical yet nostalgic eye to the place where her family was sent as part of a covert government plan. Theirs was a city devoted to nuclear science within a larger America obsessed with its nuclear prowess. Through memories, mysterious photographs, and uncanny childhood toys, she shows how Reagan-era politics and nuclear culture irradiated the late twentieth century. Alternately tender and alarming, her book takes a Geiger counter to recent history, reading the half-life of the atomic past as it resonates in our tense nuclear present.

The Past is Not Dead

Author : Douglas B. Chambers
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 1617033030
Total Pages : 417 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis The Past is Not Dead by : Douglas B. Chambers

Download or read book The Past is Not Dead written by Douglas B. Chambers and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2012 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A collection of [twenty-one representative] literary and historical essays that will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Southern Quarterly . . . (founded in 1962) dedicated to southern studies. . . . this essay collection features the best work published in the journal. Essays represent every decade of the journal's history. Topics range from historical essays . . . to literary essays . . . . Important regional subjects . . . are given special attention" --Publisher's note.

Intellectuals Incorporated

Author : Robert Vanderlan
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812205634
Total Pages : 389 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

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Book Synopsis Intellectuals Incorporated by : Robert Vanderlan

Download or read book Intellectuals Incorporated written by Robert Vanderlan and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-06-06 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publishing tycoon Henry Luce famously championed many conservative causes, and his views as a capitalist and cold warrior were reflected in his glossy publications. Republican Luce aimed squarely for the Middle American masses, yet his magazines attracted intellectually and politically ambitious minds who were moved by the democratic aspirations of the New Deal and the left. Much of the best work of intellectuals such as James Agee, Archibald MacLeish, Daniel Bell, John Hersey, and Walker Evans owes a great debt to their experiences writing for Luce and his publications. Intellectuals Incorporated tells the story of the serious writers and artists who worked for Henry Luce and his magazines Time, Fortune, and Life between 1923 and 1960, the period when the relationship between intellectuals, the culture industry, and corporate capitalism assumed its modern form. Countering the notions that working for corporations means selling out and that the true life of the mind must be free from institutional ties, historian Robert Vanderlan explains how being embedded in the corporate culture industries was vital to the creative efforts of mid-century thinkers. Illuminating their struggles through careful research and biographical vignettes, Vanderlan shows how their contributions to literary journalism and the wider political culture would have been impossible outside Luce's media empire. By paying attention to how these writers and photographers balanced intellectual aspiration with journalistic perspiration, Intellectuals Incorporated advances the idea of the intellectual as a connected public figure who can engage and criticize organizations from within.

The Politics of Truth

Author : John H. Summers
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199711321
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (997 download)

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Book Synopsis The Politics of Truth by : John H. Summers

Download or read book The Politics of Truth written by John H. Summers and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-09-11 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: C. Wright Mills was a radical public intellectual, a tough-talking, motorcycle-riding anarchist from Texas who taught sociology at Columbia University. Mills's three most influential books--The Power Elite, White Collar, and The Sociological Imagination--were originally published by OUP and are considered classics. The first collection of his writings to be published since 1963, The Politics of Truth contains 23 out-of-print and hard-to-find writings which show his growth from academic sociologist to an intellectual maestro in command of a mature style, a dissenter who sought to inspire the public to oppose the drift toward permanent war. Given the political deceptions of recent years, Mills's truth-telling is more relevant than ever. Seminal papers including "Letter to the New Left" appear alongside lesser known meditations such as "Are We Losing Our Sense of Belonging?" John Summers provides fresh insights in his introduction, which gives an overview of Mills's life and career. Summers has also written annotations that establish each piece's context and has drawn up a comprehensive bibliography of Mills's published and unpublished writings.

St. Francis of America

Author : Patricia Appelbaum
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469623757
Total Pages : 287 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (696 download)

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Book Synopsis St. Francis of America by : Patricia Appelbaum

Download or read book St. Francis of America written by Patricia Appelbaum and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-07-28 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did a thirteenth-century Italian friar become one of the best-loved saints in America? Around the nation today, St. Francis of Assisi is embraced as the patron saint of animals, beneficently presiding over hundreds of Blessing of the Animals services on October 4, St. Francis's Catholic feast day. Not only Catholics, however, but Protestants and other Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, and nonreligious Americans commonly name him as one of their favorite spiritual figures. Drawing on a dazzling array of art, music, drama, film, hymns, and prayers, Patricia Appelbaum explains what happened to make St. Francis so familiar and meaningful to so many Americans. Appelbaum traces popular depictions and interpretations of St. Francis from the time when non-Catholic Americans "discovered" him in the nineteenth century to the present. From poet to activist, 1960s hippie to twenty-first-century messenger to Islam, St. Francis has been envisioned in ways that might have surprised the saint himself. Exploring how each vision of St. Francis has been shaped by its own era, Appelbaum reveals how St. Francis has played a sometimes countercultural but always aspirational role in American culture. St. Francis's American story also displays the zest with which Americans borrow, lend, and share elements of their religious lives in everyday practice.