Fictions Of Western American Domesticity

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Fictions of Western American Domesticity

Author : Amanda J. Zink
Publisher : University of New Mexico Press
ISBN 13 : 0826359191
Total Pages : 355 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (263 download)

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Book Synopsis Fictions of Western American Domesticity by : Amanda J. Zink

Download or read book Fictions of Western American Domesticity written by Amanda J. Zink and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2018-06-01 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work provides a compelling explanation of something that has bedeviled a number of feminist scholars: Why did popular authors like Edna Ferber continue to write conventional fiction while living lives that were far from conventional? Amanda J. Zink argues that white writers like Ferber and Willa Cather avoided the subject of their own domestic labor by writing about the performance of domestic labor by “others,” showing that American print culture, both in novels and through advertisements, moved away from portraying women as angels in the house and instead sought to persuade other women to be angels in their houses. Zink further explores lesser-known works such as Mexican American cookbooks and essays in Indian boarding school magazines to show how women writers “dialoging domesticity” exemplify the cross-cultural encounters between “colonial domesticity” and “sovereign domesticity.” By situating these interpretations of literature within their historical contexts, Zink shows how these writers championed and challenged the ideology of domesticity.

James Fenimore Cooper versus the Cult of Domesticity

Author : Signe O. Wegener
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 0786421282
Total Pages : 198 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (864 download)

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Book Synopsis James Fenimore Cooper versus the Cult of Domesticity by : Signe O. Wegener

Download or read book James Fenimore Cooper versus the Cult of Domesticity written by Signe O. Wegener and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2005-04-05 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1820 and 1860 a set of established cultural values deemed the "Cult of Domesticity" sought to shape the private and public lives of individuals in a rapidly changing American society. Promoting the ideals of conformity in religious, domestic and personal development, the cult was particularly concerned with maintaining a status quo of piety, purity, obedience and domesticity in 19th century female behavior. While a number a female writers responded through literature to the social standards they were urged to emulate, the prominent male writer James Fenimore Cooper reacted as well, addressing the predominant cultural climate through texts that establish women as an integral part of the plot line. This book provides a comprehensive discussion of James Fenimore Cooper's view of family dynamics and explores his attempts to simultaneously present and critique the forces shaping the social development of the nation. The study places 10 relevant Cooper novels within the context of popular literary works by 19th century writers Lydia Maria Child, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Warner and Maria Cummins to demonstrate how Cooper approaches issues of Victorian domesticity and how his representations compare to those crafted by the contemporary women writers. Opening chapters discuss why Cooper chose the women's fiction genre as his vehicle and present an overview of the "Cult of Domesticity" in fiction and nonfiction, delineating the origins and effects of 19th century domestic life. Remaining chapters address the role of the mother, the father and the central daughter figure in domestic fiction.

Domestic Subjects

Author : Beth H. Piatote
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300189095
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (1 download)

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Book Synopsis Domestic Subjects by : Beth H. Piatote

Download or read book Domestic Subjects written by Beth H. Piatote and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-19 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amid the decline of U.S. military campaigns against Native Americans in the late nineteenth century, assimilation policy arose as the new front in the Indian Wars, with its weapons the deployment of culture and law, and its locus the American Indian home and family. In this groundbreaking interdisciplinary work, Piatote tracks the double movement of literature and law in the contest over the aims of settler-national domestication and the defense of tribal-national culture, political rights, and territory.

Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West

Author : William R. Handley
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139440152
Total Pages : 275 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (394 download)

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Book Synopsis Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West by : William R. Handley

Download or read book Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West written by William R. Handley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-08-15 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West, William R. Handley examines literary interpretations of the Western American past. Handley argues that although scholarship provides a narrative of western history that counters optimistic story of frontier individualism by focusing on the victims of conquest, twentieth-century American fiction tells a different story of intra-ethnic violence surrounding marriages and families. He examines works of historiography,as well as writing by Zane Grey, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner and Joan Didion among others, to argue that these works highlight white Americans' anxiety about what happens to American 'character' when domestic enemies such as Indians and Mormon polygamists, against whom the nation had defined itself in the nineteenth century, no longer threaten its homes. Handley explains that once its enemies are gone, imperialism brings violence home in retrospective narratives that allegorise national pasts and futures through intimate relationships.

Extreme Domesticity

Author : Susan Fraiman
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231543751
Total Pages : 278 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis Extreme Domesticity by : Susan Fraiman

Download or read book Extreme Domesticity written by Susan Fraiman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Domesticity gets a bad rap. We associate it with stasis, bourgeois accumulation, banality, and conservative family values. Yet in Extreme Domesticity, Susan Fraiman reminds us that keeping house is just as likely to involve dislocation, economic insecurity, creative improvisation, and queered notions of family. Her book links terms often seen as antithetical: domestic knowledge coinciding with female masculinity, feminism, and divorce; domestic routines elaborated in the context of Victorian poverty, twentieth-century immigration, and new millennial homelessness. Far from being exclusively middle-class, domestic concerns are shown to be all the more urgent and ongoing when shelter is precarious. Fraiman's reformulation frees domesticity from associations with conformity and sentimentality. Ranging across periods and genres, and diversifying the archive of domestic depictions, Fraiman's readings include novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, Sandra Cisneros, Jamaica Kincaid, Leslie Feinberg, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka; Edith Wharton's classic decorating guide; popular women's magazines; and ethnographic studies of homeless subcultures. Recognizing the labor and know-how needed to produce the space we call "home," Extreme Domesticity vindicates domestic practices and appreciates their centrality to everyday life. At the same time, it remains well aware of domesticity's dark side. Neither a romance of artisanal housewifery nor an apology for conservative notions of home, Extreme Domesticity stresses the heterogeneity of households and probes the multiplicity of domestic meanings.

The Desert Between Us

Author : Phyllis Barber
Publisher : University of Nevada Press
ISBN 13 : 1948908573
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (489 download)

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Book Synopsis The Desert Between Us by : Phyllis Barber

Download or read book The Desert Between Us written by Phyllis Barber and published by University of Nevada Press. This book was released on 2020-04-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2020 Reading the West Book Awards, Longlist for Fiction 2020 Association for Morman Letters Finalist, Fiction The Desert Between Us is a sweeping, multi-layered novel based on the U.S. government’s decision to open more routes to California during the Gold Rush. To help navigate this waterless, largely unexplored territory, the War Department imported seventy-five camels from the Middle East to help traverse the brutal terrain that was murderous on other livestock. Geoffrey Scott, one of the roadbuilders, decides to venture north to discover new opportunities in the opening of the American West when he—and the camels—are no longer needed. Geoffrey arrives in St. Thomas, Nevada, a polygamous settlement caught up in territorial fights over boundaries and new taxation. There, he falls in love with Sophia Hughes, a hatmaker obsessed with beauty and the third wife of a polygamist. Geoffrey believes Sophia wants to be free of polygamy and go away with him to a better life, but Sophia’s motivations are not so easily understood. She had become committed to Mormon beliefs in England and had moved to Utah Territory to assuage her spiritual needs. The death of Sophia’s child and her illicit relationship with Geoffrey generate a complex nexus where her new love for Geoffrey competes with societal expectations and a rugged West seeking domesticity. When faced with the opportunity to move away from her polygamist husband and her tumultuous life in St. Thomas, Sophia becomes tormented by a life-changing decision she must face alone.

Westward the Women

Author : Vicki Piekarski
Publisher : UNM Press
ISBN 13 : 9780826310637
Total Pages : 196 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (16 download)

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Book Synopsis Westward the Women by : Vicki Piekarski

Download or read book Westward the Women written by Vicki Piekarski and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories by Willa Cather, Mary Austin, Mari Sandoz, and Leslie Silko, among other women writers, who have illuminated the Western experience.

Making Home Work

Author : Jane E. Simonsen
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 0807877263
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis Making Home Work by : Jane E. Simonsen

Download or read book Making Home Work written by Jane E. Simonsen and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2006-12-08 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the westward expansion of America, white middle-class ideals of home and domestic work were used to measure differences between white and Native American women. Yet the vision of America as "home" was more than a metaphor for women's stake in the process of conquest--it took deliberate work to create and uphold. Treating white and indigenous women's struggles as part of the same history, Jane E. Simonsen argues that as both cultural workers and domestic laborers insisted upon the value of their work to "civilization," they exposed the inequalities integral to both the nation and the household. Simonsen illuminates discussions about the value of women's work through analysis of texts and images created by writers, women's rights activists, reformers, anthropologists, photographers, field matrons, and Native American women. She argues that women such as Caroline Soule, Alice Fletcher, E. Jane Gay, Anna Dawson Wilde, and Angel DeCora called upon the rhetoric of sentimental domesticity, ethnographic science, public display, and indigenous knowledge as they sought to make the gendered and racial order of the nation visible through homes and the work performed in them. Focusing on the range of materials through which domesticity was produced in the West, Simonsen integrates new voices into the study of domesticity's imperial manifestations.

Driving Women

Author : Deborah Clarke
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780801886171
Total Pages : 244 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (861 download)

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Book Synopsis Driving Women by : Deborah Clarke

Download or read book Driving Women written by Deborah Clarke and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2007-04-15 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description

Homeward Bound

Author : Emily Matchar
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 145166544X
Total Pages : 281 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (516 download)

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Book Synopsis Homeward Bound by : Emily Matchar

Download or read book Homeward Bound written by Emily Matchar and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation into the societal impact of intelligent, high-achieving women who are honing traditional homemaking skills traces emerging trends in sophisticated crafting, cooking and farming that are reshaping the roles of women.

Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City

Author : Kevin Britz
Publisher : University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN 13 : 080616204X
Total Pages : 399 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (61 download)

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Book Synopsis Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City by : Kevin Britz

Download or read book Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City written by Kevin Britz and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2018-08-23 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Shootin’—Lynchin’—Hangin’,” announces the advertisement for Tombstone’s Helldorado Days festival. Dodge City’s Boot Hill Cemetery sports an “authentic hangman’s tree.” Not to be outdone, Deadwood’s Days of ’76 celebration promises “miners, cowboys, Indians, cavalry, bars, dance halls and gambling dens.” The Wild West may be long gone, but its legend lives on in Tombstone, Arizona; Deadwood, South Dakota; and Dodge City, Kansas. In Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City, Kevin Britz and Roger L. Nichols conduct a tour of these iconic towns, revealing how over time they became repositories of western America’s defining myth. Beginning with the founding of the communities in the 1860s and 1870s, this book traces the circumstances, conversations, and clashes that shaped the settlements over the course of a century. Drawing extensively on literature, newspapers, magazines, municipal reports, political correspondence, and films and television, the authors show how Hollywood and popular novels, as well as major historical events such as the Great Depression and both world wars, shaped public memories of these three towns. Along the way, Britz and Nichols document the forces—from business interests to political struggles—that influenced dreams and decisions in Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City. After the so-called rowdy times of the open frontier had passed, town promoters tried to sell these towns by remaking their reputations as peaceful, law-abiding communities. Hard times made boosters think again, however, and they turned back to their communities’ rowdy pasts to sell the towns as exemplars of the western frontier. An exploration of the changing times that led these towns to be marketed as reflections of the Old West, Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City opens an illuminating new perspective on the crafting and marketing of America’s mythic self-image.

Adulthood and Other Fictions

Author : Sari Edelstein
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0198831889
Total Pages : 214 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (988 download)

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Book Synopsis Adulthood and Other Fictions by : Sari Edelstein

Download or read book Adulthood and Other Fictions written by Sari Edelstein and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019-02-10 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the field of childhood studies has blossomed in recent years, few scholars have taken up the question of age more broadly as a lens for reading American literature. Adulthood and Other Fictions shows how a diverse array of nineteenth-century writers, thinkers, and artists responded to the rise of chronological age in social and political life. Over the course of the century, age was added to the census; schools were organized around age groups; birthday cards were mass-produced; geriatrics became a medical specialty. Adulthood and Other Fictions reads American literature as a rich, critical account of this modern culture of age, and it examines how our most well-known writers registeredand often resistedage expectations, particularly as they applied to women and people of color. More than simply adding age to the list of identity categories that have become de rigeur sites of scholarly attention, Adulthood and Other Fictions argues that these other measures of social location (race, gender, sexuality, class) are largely legible through the seemingly more natural and essential identity defined by age. That is, longstanding cultural ideals about maturity and development anchor ideologies of heterosexuality, race, nationalism, and capitalism, and in this sense, age rhetoric serves as one of our most pervasive disciplinary discourses. Writers including Louisa May Alcott, Frederick Douglass, and Henry James anticipated the ageism of our moment, but they also recognized how age norms both structure and limit the lives of individuals at all points on the age continuum. Ultimately, the volume argues for an intersectional understanding of age that challenges the celebration of independence and autonomy imbricated in US fantasies of adulthood and in American identity itself.

Gender in American Literature and Culture

Author : Jean M. Lutes
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108805507
Total Pages : 645 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (88 download)

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Book Synopsis Gender in American Literature and Culture by : Jean M. Lutes

Download or read book Gender in American Literature and Culture written by Jean M. Lutes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-15 with total page 645 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gender in American Literature and Culture introduces readers to key developments in gender studies and American literary criticism. It offers nuanced readings of literary conventions and genres from early American writings to the present and moves beyond inflexible categories of masculinity and femininity that have reinforced misleading assumptions about public and private spaces, domesticity, individualism, and community. The book also demonstrates how rigid inscriptions of gender have perpetuated a legacy of violence and exclusion in the United States. Responding to a sense of 21st century cultural and political crisis, it illuminates the literary histories and cultural imaginaries that have set the stage for urgent contemporary debates.

A Woman Is No Man

Author : Etaf Rum
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 0062699784
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (626 download)

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Book Synopsis A Woman Is No Man by : Etaf Rum

Download or read book A Woman Is No Man written by Etaf Rum and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist for Best Fiction and Best Debut • BookBrowse's Best Book of the Year • A Marie Claire Best Women's Fiction of the Year • A Real Simple Best Book of the Year • A PopSugar Best Book of the Year All Written By Females • A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • A Washington Post 10 Books to Read in March • A Newsweek Best Book of the Summer • A USA Today Best Book of the Week • A Washington Book Review Difficult-To-Put-Down Novel • A Refinery 29 Best Books of the Month • A Buzzfeed News 4 Books We Couldn't Put Down Last Month • A New Arab Best Books by Arab Authors • An Electric Lit 20 Best Debuts of the First Half of 2019 • A The Millions Most Anticipated Books of 2019 “Garnering justified comparisons to Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns... Etaf Rum’s debut novel is a must-read about women mustering up the bravery to follow their inner voice.” —Refinery 29 The New York Times bestseller and Read with Jenna TODAY SHOW Book Club pick telling the story of three generations of Palestinian-American women struggling to express their individual desires within the confines of their Arab culture in the wake of shocking intimate violence in their community. "Where I come from, we’ve learned to silence ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence will save us. Where I come from, we keep these stories to ourselves. To tell them to the outside world is unheard of—dangerous, the ultimate shame.” Palestine, 1990. Seventeen-year-old Isra prefers reading books to entertaining the suitors her father has chosen for her. Over the course of a week, the naïve and dreamy girl finds herself quickly betrothed and married, and is soon living in Brooklyn. There Isra struggles to adapt to the expectations of her oppressive mother-in-law Fareeda and strange new husband Adam, a pressure that intensifies as she begins to have children—four daughters instead of the sons Fareeda tells Isra she must bear. Brooklyn, 2008. Eighteen-year-old Deya, Isra’s oldest daughter, must meet with potential husbands at her grandmother Fareeda’s insistence, though her only desire is to go to college. Deya can’t help but wonder if her options would have been different had her parents survived the car crash that killed them when Deya was only eight. But her grandmother is firm on the matter: the only way to secure a worthy future for Deya is through marriage to the right man. But fate has a will of its own, and soon Deya will find herself on an unexpected path that leads her to shocking truths about her family—knowledge that will force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, the past, and her own future.

Domesticity and Design in American Women’s Lives and Literature

Author : Caroline Hellman
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136674802
Total Pages : 134 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (366 download)

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Book Synopsis Domesticity and Design in American Women’s Lives and Literature by : Caroline Hellman

Download or read book Domesticity and Design in American Women’s Lives and Literature written by Caroline Hellman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-06-06 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Domesticity and Design in American Women’s Lives and Literature explores the ways in which four American women writers from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century inhabited domestic space and portrayed it in their work. Hellman explores independent female authors who had intriguing and autonomous relationships with home, relocating frequently either to begin the creative processes of designing and decorating anew or to avoid domestic obligation altogether by remaining in transit. She also looks at how women authors wrote female characters into existence who had strikingly different relationships with home, and contended with profound burdens of housekeeping in an oppressive domestic sphere. The disjunction between the authors' individual existences and the characters to whom they gave life reveals multiple narratives about women at home in nineteenth- and twentieth- century America. This interdisciplinary inquiry undertakes a dual treatment of domesticity in an effort to synthesize a more complete understanding of the relationships between social history and literary accomplishment. Syncretising domestic literature with domestic practice, Hellman appraises the ways in which the authors appropriate domestic rhetoric to address issues of political import: economy, health, and social welfare in the case of Stowe, material feminism for Alcott, the landscape for Cather, and World War I for Wharton.

West of Everything

Author : Jane Tompkins
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0198023715
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (98 download)

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Book Synopsis West of Everything by : Jane Tompkins

Download or read book West of Everything written by Jane Tompkins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1993-04-29 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading figure in the debate over the literary canon, Jane Tompkins was one of the first to point to the ongoing relevance of popular women's fiction in the 19th century, long overlooked or scorned by literary critics. Now, in West of Everything, Tompkins shows how popular novels and films of the American west have shaped the emotional lives of people in our time. Into this world full of violence and manly courage, the world of John Wayne and Louis L'Amour, Tompkins takes her readers, letting them feel what the hero feels, endure what he endures. Writing with sympathy, insight, and respect, she probes the main elements of the Western--its preoccupation with death, its barren landscapes, galloping horses, hard-bitten men and marginalized women--revealing the view of reality and code of behavior these features contain. She considers the Western hero's attraction to pain, his fear of women and language, his desire to dominate the environment--and to merge with it. In fact, Tompkins argues, for better or worse Westerns have taught us all--men especially--how to behave. It was as a reaction against popular women's novels and women's invasion of the public sphere that Westerns originated, Tompkins maintains. With Westerns, men were reclaiming cultural territory, countering the inwardness, spirituality, and domesticity of the sentimental writers, with a rough and tumble, secular, man-centered world. Tompkins brings these insights to bear in considering film classics such as Red River and Lonely Are the Brave, and novels such as Louis L'Amour's Last of the Breed and Owen Wister's The Virginian. In one of the most moving chapters (chosen for Best American Essays of 1991), Ttompkins shows how the life of Buffalo Bill Cody, killer of Native Americans and charismatic star of the Wild West show, evokes the contradictory feelings which the Western typically elicits--horror and fascination with violence, but also love and respect for the romantic ideal of the cowboy. Whether interpreting a photograph of John Wayne of meditating on the slaughter of cattle, Jane Tompkins writes with humor, compassion, and a provocative intellect. Her book will appeak to many Americans who read or watch Westerns, and to all those interested in a serious approach to popular culture.

Failed Frontiersmen

Author : James J. Donahue
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 0813936845
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (139 download)

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Book Synopsis Failed Frontiersmen by : James J. Donahue

Download or read book Failed Frontiersmen written by James J. Donahue and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2015-02-04 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Failed Frontiersmen, James Donahue writes that one of the founding and most persistent mythologies of the United States is that of the American frontier. Looking at a selection of twentieth-century American male fiction writers—E. L. Doctorow, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Gerald Vizenor, and Cormac McCarthy—he shows how they reevaluated the historical romance of frontier mythology in response to the social and political movements of the 1960s (particularly regarding the Vietnam War, civil rights, and the treatment of Native Americans). Although these writers focus on different moments in American history and different geographic locations, the author reveals their commonly held belief that the frontier mythology failed to deliver on its promises of cultural stability and political advancement, especially in the face of the multicultural crucible of the 1960s. Cultural Frames, Framing Culture American Literatures Initiative