Cultural History Of Reading American Literature

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Loving Literature

Author : Deidre Shauna Lynch
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022618384X
Total Pages : 335 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (261 download)

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Book Synopsis Loving Literature by : Deidre Shauna Lynch

Download or read book Loving Literature written by Deidre Shauna Lynch and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-12-22 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most common—and wounding—misconceptions about literary scholars today is that they simply don’t love books. While those actually working in literary studies can easily refute this claim, such a response risks obscuring a more fundamental question: why should they? That question led Deidre Shauna Lynch into the historical and cultural investigation of Loving Literature. How did it come to be that professional literary scholars are expected not just to study, but to love literature, and to inculcate that love in generations of students? What Lynch discovers is that books, and the attachments we form to them, have played a vital role in the formation of private life—that the love of literature, in other words, is deeply embedded in the history of literature. Yet at the same time, our love is neither self-evident nor ahistorical: our views of books as objects of affection have clear roots in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century publishing, reading habits, and domestic history. While never denying the very real feelings that warm our relationship to books, Loving Literature nonetheless serves as a riposte to those who use the phrase “the love of literature” as if its meaning were transparent. Lynch writes, “It is as if those on the side of love of literature had forgotten what literary texts themselves say about love’s edginess and complexities.” With this masterly volume, Lynch restores those edges and allows us to revel in those complexities.

A History of American Literature

Author : Richard Gray
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 1444345680
Total Pages : 933 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (443 download)

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Book Synopsis A History of American Literature by : Richard Gray

Download or read book A History of American Literature written by Richard Gray and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-09-23 with total page 933 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Updated throughout and with much new material, A History of American Literature, Second Edition, is the most up-to-date and comprehensive survey available of the myriad forms of American Literature from pre-Columbian times to the present. The most comprehensive and up-to-date history of American literature available today Covers fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction, as well as other forms of literature including folktale, spirituals, the detective story, the thriller, and science fiction Explores the plural character of American literature, including the contributions made by African American, Native American, Hispanic and Asian American writers Considers how our understanding of American literature has changed over the past?thirty years Situates American literature in the contexts of American history, politics and society Offers an invaluable introduction to American literature for students at all levels, academic and general readers

Reading Books

Author : Michele Moylan
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Reading Books by : Michele Moylan

Download or read book Reading Books written by Michele Moylan and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of original essays explores the relationship between publishing and literature in America. "Right at the leading edge of scholarship on the history of the book". -- William Gilmore-Lehne

Facing the Abyss

Author : George Hutchinson
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231545967
Total Pages : 420 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis Facing the Abyss by : George Hutchinson

Download or read book Facing the Abyss written by George Hutchinson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-23 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mythologized as the era of the “good war” and the “Greatest Generation,” the 1940s are frequently understood as a more heroic, uncomplicated time in American history. Yet just below the surface, a sense of dread, alienation, and the haunting specter of radical evil permeated American art and literature. Writers returned home from World War II and gave form to their disorienting experiences of violence and cruelty. They probed the darkness that the war opened up and confronted bigotry, existential guilt, ecological concerns, and fear about the nature and survival of the human race. In Facing the Abyss, George Hutchinson offers readings of individual works and the larger intellectual and cultural scene to reveal the 1940s as a period of profound and influential accomplishment. Facing the Abyss examines the relation of aesthetics to politics, the idea of universalism, and the connections among authors across racial, ethnic, and gender divisions. Modernist and avant-garde styles were absorbed into popular culture as writers and artists turned away from social realism to emphasize the process of artistic creation. Hutchinson explores a range of important writers, from Saul Bellow and Mary McCarthy to Richard Wright and James Baldwin. African American and Jewish novelists critiqued racism and anti-Semitism, women writers pushed back on the misogyny unleashed during the war, and authors such as Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams reflected a new openness in the depiction of homosexuality. The decade also witnessed an awakening of American environmental and ecological consciousness. Hutchinson argues that despite the individualized experiences depicted in these works, a common belief in art’s ability to communicate the universal in particulars united the most important works of literature and art during the 1940s. Hutchinson’s capacious view of American literary and cultural history masterfully weaves together a wide range of creative and intellectual expression into a sweeping new narrative of this pivotal decade.

A Feeling for Books

Author : Janice A. Radway
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 0807863971
Total Pages : 458 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis A Feeling for Books by : Janice A. Radway

Download or read book A Feeling for Books written by Janice A. Radway and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deftly melding ethnography, cultural history, literary criticism, and autobiographical reflection, A Feeling for Books is at once an engaging study of the Book-of-the-Month Club's influential role as a cultural institution and a profoundly personal meditation about the experience of reading. Janice Radway traces the history of the famous mail-order book club from its controversial founding in 1926 through its evolution into an enterprise uniquely successful in blending commerce and culture. Framing her historical narrative with writing of a more personal sort, Radway reflects on the contemporary role of the Book-of-the-Month Club in American cultural history and in her own life. Her detailed account of the standards and practices employed by the club's in-house editors is also an absorbing story of her interactions with those editors. Examining her experiences as a fourteen-year-old reader of the club's selections and, later, as a professor of literature, she offers a series of rigorously analytical yet deeply personal readings of such beloved novels as Marjorie Morningstar and To Kill a Mockingbird. Rich and rewarding, this book will captivate and delight anyone who is interested in the history of books and in the personal and transformative experience of reading.

Cultures of Letters

Author : Richard H. Brodhead
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 9780226075266
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (752 download)

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Book Synopsis Cultures of Letters by : Richard H. Brodhead

Download or read book Cultures of Letters written by Richard H. Brodhead and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard H. Brodhead uses a great variety of historical sources, many of them considered here for the first time, to reconstruct the institutionalized literary worlds that coexisted in nineteenth-century America: the middle-class domestic culture of letters, the culture of mass-produced cheap reading, the militantly hierarchical high culture of the post-Civil War decades, and the literary culture of post-emancipation black education. Moving across a range of writers familiar and unfamiliar, and relating groups of writers often considered in artificial isolation, Brodhead describes how these socially structured worlds of writing shaped the terms of literary practice for the authors who inhabited them.

Reading Fiction in Antebellum America

Author : James L. Machor
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 0801899338
Total Pages : 419 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (18 download)

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Book Synopsis Reading Fiction in Antebellum America by : James L. Machor

Download or read book Reading Fiction in Antebellum America written by James L. Machor and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James L. Machor offers a sweeping exploration of how American fiction was received in both public and private spheres in the United States before the Civil War. Machor takes four antebellum authors—Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Catharine Sedgwick, and Caroline Chesebro'—and analyzes how their works were published, received, and interpreted. Drawing on discussions found in book reviews and in private letters and diaries, Machor examines how middle-class readers of the time engaged with contemporary fiction and how fiction reading evolved as an interpretative practice in nineteenth-century America. Through careful analysis, Machor illuminates how the reading practices of nineteenth-century Americans shaped not only the experiences of these writers at the time but also the way the writers were received in the twentieth century. What Machor reveals is that these authors were received in ways strikingly different from how they are currently read, thereby shedding significant light on their present status in the literary canon in comparison to their critical and popular positions in their own time. Machor deftly combines response and reception criticism and theory with work in the history of reading to engage with groundbreaking scholarship in historical hermeneutics. In so doing, Machor takes us ever closer to understanding the particular and varying reading strategies of historical audiences and how they impacted authors’ conceptions of their own readership.

Literature in America

Author : Peter Conn
Publisher : CUP Archive
ISBN 13 : 9780521303736
Total Pages : 624 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (37 download)

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Book Synopsis Literature in America by : Peter Conn

Download or read book Literature in America written by Peter Conn and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1989-08-25 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professor Conn summarises the distinctive achievements of the American literary heritage from early 1600's to late 1980's.

Gatsby

Author : Bob Batchelor
Publisher : Scarecrow Press
ISBN 13 : 0810891964
Total Pages : 319 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (18 download)

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Book Synopsis Gatsby by : Bob Batchelor

Download or read book Gatsby written by Bob Batchelor and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald produced his third novel, a slim work for which he had high expectations. Despite such hopes, the novel received mixed reviews and lackluster sales. Over the decades, however, the reputation of The Great Gatsby has grown and millions of copies have been sold. One of the bestselling novels of all time, it is also considered one of the most significant achievements in twentieth-century fiction. But what makes Gatsby great? Why do we still care about this book more than eighty-five years after it was published? And how does Gatsby help us make sense of our own lives and times? In Gatsby: The Cultural History of the Great American Novel, Bob Batchelor explores the birth, life, and enduring influence of The Great Gatsby—from the book’s publication in 1925 through today’s headlines filled with celebrity intrigue, corporate greed, and a roller-coaster economy. A cultural historian, Batchelor explains why and how the novel has become part of the fiber of the American ethos and an important tool in helping readers to better comprehend their lives and the broader world around them. A “biography” of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, this book examines The Great Gatsby’s evolution from a nearly-forgotten 1920s time capsule to a revered cultural touchstone. Batchelor explores how this embodiment of the American Dream has become an iconic part of our national folklore, how the central themes and ideas emerging from the book—from the fulfillment of the American Dream to the role of wealth in society—resonate with contemporary readers who struggle with similar uncertainties today. By exploring the timeless elements of reinvention, romanticism, and relentless pursuit of the unattainable, Batchelor confirms the novel’s status as “The Great American Novel” and, more importantly, explains to students, scholars, and fans alike what makes Gatsby so great.

The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel

Author : Stephen Shapiro
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271046732
Total Pages : 382 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel by : Stephen Shapiro

Download or read book The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel written by Stephen Shapiro and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking his cue from Philadelphia-born novelist Charles Brockden Brown's Annals of Europe and America, which contends that America is shaped most noticeably by the international struggle between Great Britain and France for control of the world trade market, Stephen Shapiro charts the advent, decline, and reinvigoration of the early American novel. That the American novel "sprang so unexpectedly into published existence during the 1790s" may be a symptom of the beginning of the end of Franco-British supremacy and a reflection of the power of a middle class riding the crest of a new world economic system. Shapiro's world-systems approach is a relatively new methodology for literary studies, but it brings two particularly useful features to the table. First, it refines the conceptual frameworks for analyzing cultural and social history, such as the rise in sentimentalism, in relation to a long-wave economic history of global commerce; second, it fosters a new model for a comparative American Studies across time. Rather than relying on contiguous time, a world-systems approach might compare the cultural production of one region to another at the same location within the recurring cycle in an economic reconfiguration. Shapiro offers a new way of thinking about the causes for the emergence of the American novel that suggests a fresh way of rethinking the overall paradigms shaping American Studies.

A New Literary History of America

Author : Greil Marcus
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674265815
Total Pages : 1129 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (742 download)

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Book Synopsis A New Literary History of America by : Greil Marcus

Download or read book A New Literary History of America written by Greil Marcus and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-23 with total page 1129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America is a nation making itself up as it goes along—a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history. In more than two hundred original essays, A New Literary History of America brings together the nation’s many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what “Made in America” means. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoric—cultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape. The meeting of minds is extraordinary as T. J. Clark writes on Jackson Pollock, Paul Muldoon on Carl Sandburg, Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, Sarah Vowell on Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Walter Mosley on hard-boiled detective fiction, Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison, Gerald Early on Tarzan, Bharati Mukherjee on The Scarlet Letter, Gish Jen on Catcher in the Rye, and Ishmael Reed on Huckleberry Finn. From Anne Bradstreet and John Winthrop to Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, from Alexander Graham Bell and Stephen Foster to Alcoholics Anonymous, Life, Chuck Berry, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ronald Reagan, this is America singing, celebrating itself, and becoming something altogether different, plural, singular, new.

Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands

Author : Konrad Hirschler
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
ISBN 13 : 0748654216
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (486 download)

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Book Synopsis Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands by : Konrad Hirschler

Download or read book Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands written by Konrad Hirschler and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2011-12-20 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2012 BRISMES book prize. How the written text became accessible to wider audiences in medieval Egypt and Syria. Medieval Islamic societies belonged to the most bookish cultures of their period. Using a wide variety of documentary, narrative and normative sources, Konrad Hirschler explores the growth of reading audiences in a pre-print culture.The uses of the written word grew significantly in Egypt and Syria between the 11th and the 15th centuries, and more groups within society started to participate in individual and communal reading acts. New audiences in reading sessions, school curricula, increasing numbers of endowed libraries and the appearance of popular written literature all bear witness to the profound transformation of cultural practices and their social contexts.

The Word in Black and White

Author : Dana D. Nelson
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0195089278
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (95 download)

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Book Synopsis The Word in Black and White by : Dana D. Nelson

Download or read book The Word in Black and White written by Dana D. Nelson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1994 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dana Nelson provides a study of the ways in which Anglo-American authors constructed "race" in their works from the time of the first British colonists through the period of the Civil War. She focuses on some eleven texts, ranging from widely-known to little-considered, that deal with the relations among Native, African, and Anglo-Americans, and places her readings in the historical, social, and material contexts of an evolving U.S. colonialism and internal imperialism. Nelson shows how a novel such as The Last of the Mohicans sought to reify the Anglo historical past and simultaneously suggested strategies that would serve Anglo-Americans against Native Americans as the frontier pushed farther west. Concluding her work with a reading of Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Nelson shows how that text undercuts the racist structures of the pre-Civil War period by positing a revised model of sympathy that authorizes alternative cultural perspectives and requires Anglo-Americans to question their own involvement with racism.

Reading Books and Prints as Cultural Objects

Author : Evanghelia Stead
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319538322
Total Pages : 317 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (195 download)

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Book Synopsis Reading Books and Prints as Cultural Objects by : Evanghelia Stead

Download or read book Reading Books and Prints as Cultural Objects written by Evanghelia Stead and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-12-20 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contributes significantly to book, image and media studies from an interdisciplinary, comparative point of view. Its broad perspective spans medieval manuscripts to e-readers. Inventive methodology offers numerous insights into visual, manuscript and print culture: material objects relate to meaning and reading processes; images and texts are examined in varied associations; the symbolic, representational and cultural agency of books and prints is brought forward. An introduction substantiates methods and approaches, ten chapters follow along media lines: from manuscripts to prints, printed books, and e-readers. Eleven contributors from six countries challenge the idea of a unified field, revealing the role of books and prints in transformation and circulation between varying cultural trends, ‘high’ and ‘low’. Mostly Europe-based, the collection offers book and print professionals, academics and graduates, models for future research, imaginatively combining material culture with archival data, cultural and reading theories with historical patterns.

Reading Columbus

Author : Margarita Zamora
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520913949
Total Pages : 263 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (29 download)

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Book Synopsis Reading Columbus by : Margarita Zamora

Download or read book Reading Columbus written by Margarita Zamora and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christopher Columbus authored over a hundred documents, many of them letters giving testimony on the Discovery to Isabela and Ferdinand. In this first book in English to focus specifically on these writings, Margarita Zamora offers an original analysis of their textual problems and ideological implications. Her comprehensive study takes into account the newly discovered "Libro Copiador," which includes previously unknown letters from Columbus to the Crown. Zamora examines those aspects of the texts that have caused the most anxiety and disagreement among scholars—questions concerning Columbus's destination, the authenticity and authority of the texts attributed to him, Las Casas's editorial role, and Columbus's views on the Indians. In doing so she opens up the vast cultural context of the Discovery. Exploring the ways in which the first images of America as seen through European eyes both represented and helped shape the Discovery, she maps the inception and growth of a discourse that was to dominate the colonizing of the New World. This 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 1993. Christopher Columbus authored over a hundred documents, many of them letters giving testimony on the Discovery to Isabela and Ferdinand. In this first book in English to focus specifically on these writings, Margarita Zamora offers an original analysis of

Libraries and the Reading Public in Twentieth-Century America

Author : Christine Pawley
Publisher : University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN 13 : 0299293238
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (992 download)

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Book Synopsis Libraries and the Reading Public in Twentieth-Century America by : Christine Pawley

Download or read book Libraries and the Reading Public in Twentieth-Century America written by Christine Pawley and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For well over one hundred years, libraries open to the public have played a crucial part in fostering in Americans the skills and habits of reading and writing, by routinely providing access to standard forms of print: informational genres such as newspapers, pamphlets, textbooks, and other reference books, and literary genres including poetry, plays, and novels. Public libraries continue to have an extraordinary impact; in the early twenty-first century, the American Library Association reports that there are more public library branches than McDonald's restaurants in the United States. Much has been written about libraries from professional and managerial points of view, but less so from the perspectives of those most intimately involved—patrons and librarians. Drawing on circulation records, patron reviews, and other archived materials, Libraries and the Reading Public in Twentieth-Century America underscores the evolving roles that libraries have played in the lives of American readers. Each essay in this collection examines a historical circumstance related to reading in libraries. The essays are organized in sections on methods of researching the history of reading in libraries; immigrants and localities; censorship issues; and the role of libraries in providing access to alternative, nonmainstream publications. The volume shows public libraries as living spaces where individuals and groups with diverse backgrounds, needs, and desires encountered and used a great variety of texts, images, and other media throughout the twentieth century.

Cultural History of Reading: American literature

Author : Gabrielle Watling
Publisher : Greenwood
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 432 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Cultural History of Reading: American literature by : Gabrielle Watling

Download or read book Cultural History of Reading: American literature written by Gabrielle Watling and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 2009 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Explores what people have read and why they have read it at different times and in different places in America and around the world ... Links key cultural changes and events to the reading material of the period ... Traces reading trends through an exploration of types of texts as well as specific examples of books, magazines, and political treatises that were influential and/or widely read ... Each chapter includes a timeline of events and an introduction to the region/time period that point out major events of the time or region that would have influenced what and how people read. An overview of reading trends and practices traces key trends in reading practices, including the development of lending libraries, the rise of the novel, and the impact of technology. The book also explores the relationship between popular reading materials and cultural change"--From Intro., p. [xi].