Genre And White Supremacy In The Postemancipation United States

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Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States

Author : Travis M. Foster
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192575171
Total Pages : 177 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (925 download)

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Book Synopsis Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States by : Travis M. Foster

Download or read book Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States written by Travis M. Foster and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-28 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How are we to comprehend, diagnose, and counter a system of racist subjugation so ordinary it has become utterly asymptomatic? Challenging the prevailing literary critical inclination toward what makes texts exceptional or distinctive, Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States underscores the urgent importance of genre for tracking conventionality as it enters into, constitutes, and reproduces ordinary life. In the wake of emancipation's failed promise, two developments unfolded: white supremacy amassed new mechanisms and procedures for reproducing racial hierarchy; and black freedom developed new practices for collective expression and experimentation. This new racial ordinary came into being through new literary and cultural genres—including campus novels, the Ladies' Home Journal, Civil War elegies, and gospel sermons. Through the postemancipation interplay between aesthetic conventions and social norms, genre became a major influence in how Americans understood their social and political affiliations, their citizenship, and their race. Travis M. Foster traces this thick history through four decades following the Civil War, equipping us to understand ordinary practices of resistance more fully and to resist ordinary procedures of subjugation more effectively. In the process, he provides a model for how the study of popular genre can reinvigorate our methods for historicizing the everyday.

Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States

Author : Travis M. Foster
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0198838093
Total Pages : 177 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (988 download)

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Book Synopsis Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States by : Travis M. Foster

Download or read book Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States written by Travis M. Foster and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019-11 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How are we to comprehend, diagnose, and counter a system of racist subjugation so ordinary it has become utterly asymptomatic? Challenging the prevailing literary critical inclination toward what makes texts exceptional or distinctive, Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States underscores the urgent importance of genre for tracking conventionality as it enters into, constitutes, and reproduces ordinary life. In the wake of emancipation's failed promise, two developments unfolded: white supremacy amassed new mechanisms and procedures for reproducing racial hierarchy; and black freedom developed new practices for collective expression and experimentation. This new racial ordinary came into being through new literary and cultural genres--including campus novels, the Ladies' Home Journal, Civil War elegies, and gospel sermons. Through the postemancipation interplay between aesthetic conventions and social norms, genre became a major influence in how Americans understood their social and political affiliations, their citizenship, and their race. Travis M. Foster traces this thick history through four decades following the Civil War, equipping us to understand ordinary practices of resistance more fully and to resist ordinary procedures of subjugation more effectively. In the process, he provides a model for how the study of popular genre can reinvigorate our methods for historicizing the everyday.

Slavery, Surveillance and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature

Author : Kelly Ross
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192856278
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (928 download)

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Book Synopsis Slavery, Surveillance and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature by : Kelly Ross

Download or read book Slavery, Surveillance and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature written by Kelly Ross and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-30 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature argues for the existence of deep, often unexamined, interconnections between genre and race by tracing how surveillance migrates from the literature of slavery to crime, gothic, and detective fiction. Attending to the long history of surveillance and policing of African Americans, the book challenges the traditional conception of surveillance as a top-down enterprise, equally addressing the tactics of sousveillance (watching from below) that enslaved people and their allies used to resist, escape, or merely survive racial subjugation. Examining the dialectic of racialized surveillance and sousveillance from fugitive slave narratives to fictional genres focused on crime and detection, the book shows how these genres share a thematic concern with the surveillance of racialized bodies and formal experimentation with ways of telling a story in which certain information is either rendered visible or kept hidden. Through close readings of understudied fugitive slave narratives published in the 1820s and 1830s, as well as texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Hannah Crafts, and Harriet Jacobs, Ross analyzes the different ways white and black authors take up these issues in their writing--from calming white fears of enslaved rebellion to abolishing slavery--and demonstrates how literary representations ultimately destabilize any clear-cut opposition between watching from above and below. In so doing, the book demonstrates the importance of race to surveillance studies and claims a greater role for the impact of surveillance on literary expression in the US during the era of slavery.

Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Author : Thomas Constantinesco
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192668129
Total Pages : 277 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (926 download)

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Book Synopsis Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States by : Thomas Constantinesco

Download or read book Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States written by Thomas Constantinesco and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-17 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States examines how pain is represented in a range of literary texts and genres from the nineteenth-century US. It considers the aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical implications of pain across the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Jacobs, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Alice James, as the national culture of pain progressively transformed in the wake of the invention of anesthesia. Through examining the work of nineteenth-century writers, Constantinesco argues that pain, while undeniably destructive, also generates language and identities, and demonstrates how literature participates in theorizing the problems of mind and body that undergird the deep chasms of selfhood, sociality, gender, and race of a formative period in American history. Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States considers first Emerson's philosophy of compensation, which promises to convert pain into gain. It also explores the limitations of this model, showing how Jacobs contests the division of body and mind that underwrites it and how Dickinson challenges its alleged universalism by foregrounding the unshareability of pain as a paradoxical measure of togetherness. It then investigates the concurrent economies of affects in which pain was implicated during and after the Civil War and argues, through the example of James and Phelps, for queer sociality as a response to the heteronormative violence of sentimentalism. The last chapter on Alice James extends the critique of sentimental sympathy while returning to the book's premise that pain is generative and the site of thought. By linking literary formalism with individual and social formation, Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States eventually claims close reading as a method to recover the theoretical work of literature.

Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature

Author : David Anthony
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192871730
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (928 download)

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Book Synopsis Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature by : David Anthony

Download or read book Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature written by David Anthony and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-08 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the charged but mostly overlooked presence of the sensational Jew in antebellum literature. This stereotyped character appears primarily in the pulpy sensation fiction of popular writers like George Lippard, Ned Buntline, Emerson Bennett, and others. But this figure also plays an important role in the sometimes sensational work of canonical writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman. Whatever the medium, this character, always overdetermined, does consistent cultural work. This book contends that, as the figure who embodies money and capitalism in the antebellum imagination, the sensational Jew is the character who most fully represents a felt anxiety about the increasingly unstable nature of a range of social categories in the antebellum US, and the sense of loss and self-hatred so often lurking in the background of modern Gentile identity. Each chapter examines a different form of sensationalism (urban gothic; sentimental city mysteries; anti-Tom plantation narratives; etc.), and a different set of anxieties (threats to class status; collapsing regional identity; the uncertain status of Whiteness and other racial categories; etc.). Throughout, the sensational Jew acts both as a figure of proteophobia (fear of disorder and ambivalence), and as the figure who embodies in uncanny form a more fulfilling and socially coherent form of identity that predates the modern liberal selfhood of the post-Enlightenment world. The sensational Jew is therefore a revealing figure in antebellum culture, as well as an important antecedent to contemporary antisemitism in the US.

Speculative Time

Author : Paul Crosthwaite
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0198891814
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (988 download)

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Book Synopsis Speculative Time by : Paul Crosthwaite

Download or read book Speculative Time written by Paul Crosthwaite and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-29 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Speculative Time: American Literature in an Age of Crisis examines how a climate of financial and economic speculation and disaster shaped the literary culture of the United States in the early to mid-twentieth century. It argues that speculation's risk-laden and crisis-prone temporalities had major impacts on writing in the period, as well as on important aspects of visual representation. The conceptions of time-and especially futurity-arising from the theory and practice of speculation provided crucial models for writers' and other artists' aesthetic, intellectual, and political concerns and strategies. The attractions and dangers of speculation were most spectacularly apparent in the period's pivotal economic event: the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The book offers an innovative account of how the speculative boom and bust of the "Roaring Twenties" affected literary and cultural production in the United States. It situates the stock market gyrations of the 1920s and 1930s within a wider culture of speculation that was profoundly shaped by, but extended well beyond, the brokerages and trading floors of Wall Street. The early to mid-twentieth century was a “speculative time,” an age characterized by leaps of economic, political, intellectual, and literary speculation; and the notion of speculative time provides a means of understanding the period's characteristic temporal modes and textures, as evident in work by figures including F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Nathan Asch, William Faulkner, Federico García Lorca, James N. Rosenberg, Margaret Bourke-White, Archibald MacLeish, Christina Stead, Claude McKay, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison.

Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies

Author : Cody Marrs
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192871722
Total Pages : 167 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (928 download)

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Book Synopsis Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies by : Cody Marrs

Download or read book Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies written by Cody Marrs and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-25 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating book, Cody Marrs retraces Melville's engagement with beauty and provides a revisionary account of Melville's philosophy, aesthetics, and literary career.

Telling America's Story to the World

Author : EDITOR.
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192864637
Total Pages : 318 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (928 download)

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Book Synopsis Telling America's Story to the World by : EDITOR.

Download or read book Telling America's Story to the World written by EDITOR. and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-09 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Telling America's Story to the World argues that state and state-affiliated cultural diplomacy contributed to the making of postwar US literature. Highlighting the role of liberal internationalism in US cultural outreach, Harilaos Stecopoulos contends that the state mainly sent authors like Ralph Ellison, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, and Maxine Hong Kingston overseas not just to demonstrate the achievements of US civilization but also to broadcast an American commitment to international cross-cultural connection. Those writers-cum-ambassadors may not have helped the state achieve its propaganda goals-indeed, this rarely proved the case-but they did find their assignments an opportunity to ponder the international meanings and possibilities of US literature. For many of those figures, courting foreign publics inspired a reevaluation of the scope and form of their own literary projects. Testifying to the inadvertent yet integral role of cultural diplomacy in the worlding of US letters, works like The Mansion (1959), Life Studies (1959), "Cultural Exchange" (1961, 1967), Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), and Three Days Before the Shooting... (2010) reimagine US literature in a mobile, global, and distinctly political register.

American Tyrannies in the Long Age of Napoleon

Author : Elizabeth Duquette
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192899902
Total Pages : 414 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (928 download)

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Book Synopsis American Tyrannies in the Long Age of Napoleon by : Elizabeth Duquette

Download or read book American Tyrannies in the Long Age of Napoleon written by Elizabeth Duquette and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-29 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if the American experiment is twofold, encompassing both democracy and tyranny? That is the question at the core of this book, which traces some of ways that Americans across the nineteenth century understood the perversions tyranny introduced into both their polity and society. While some informed their thinking with reference to classical texts, which comprehensively consider tyranny's dangers, most drew on a more contemporary source—Napoleon Bonaparte, the century's most famous man and its most notorious tyrant. Because Napoleon defined tyranny around the nineteenth-century Atlantic world—its features and emergence, its relationship to democratic institutions, its effects on persons and peoples—he provides a way for nineteenth-century Americans to explore the parameters of tyranny and their complicity in its cruelties. Napoleon helps us see the decidedly plural forms of tyranny in the US, bringing their fictions into focus. At the same time, however, there are distinctly American modes of tyranny. From the tyrannical style of the American imagination to the usurping potential of American individualism, Elizabeth Duquette shows that tyranny is as American as democracy.

The Haitian Revolution in the Early Republic of Letters

Author : Duncan Faherty
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019288915X
Total Pages : 275 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (928 download)

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Book Synopsis The Haitian Revolution in the Early Republic of Letters by : Duncan Faherty

Download or read book The Haitian Revolution in the Early Republic of Letters written by Duncan Faherty and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-16 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Concerns about Haiti suffused the early American print public sphere from the outbreak of the revolution in 1791 until well after its conclusion in 1804. The gothic, sentimental, and sensationalist undertones of openly speculative periodical accounts were accelerated within the genre of fiction, where the specter of Haiti was a commonplace trope. Haiti was not an enigma occasionally deployed by American writers, but rather the overt bellwether against which the prospects for national futurity were imagined and interrogated. Ideological representations of Haiti infected the imaginations of early American readers in ways that have yet to be accounted for in American literary history. Unfortunately, scholars have long occluded how early Americans understood their nation as entwined with Haiti. Faherty aims to counter this tacit disavowal by registering just how obsessed early American readers were with the seismic force of the Haitian Revolution and its capacity to produce aftershocks in the American domestic sphere. In unraveling how American literary history has silenced certain historical contexts around race, citizenship, belonging, and freedom, The Haitian Revolution in the Early Republic of Letters: Incipient Fevers recuperates lost textual objects while redressing a crucial blind spot in American literary history. For myriad writers in the early Republic, Haiti was both unambiguously familiar and categorically incompatible. Synchronously held fast and rejected, Haiti was the ever-present index of the United States: a distorted reflection of the Republic's past, a troubling echo of its present, and a nightmarish harbinger of divisive futures.

The American House Poem, 1945-2021

Author : Walt Hunter
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192856251
Total Pages : 187 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (928 download)

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Book Synopsis The American House Poem, 1945-2021 by : Walt Hunter

Download or read book The American House Poem, 1945-2021 written by Walt Hunter and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-11 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The house is perhaps the most recognizable emblem of the American ideals of self-making: prosperity, stability, domesticity, and upward mobility. Yet over the years from 1945-2021, the American house becomes more famous for the betrayal of those hopes than for their fulfilment: first, through the segregation of cities and public housing; then through the expansion of private credit that lays the ground for the subprime mortgage crisis of the early twenty-first century. Walt Hunter argues that, as access to housing expands to include a greater share of the US population, the house emerges as a central metaphor for the poetic imagination. From the kitchenette of Gwendolyn Brooks to the duplex of Jericho Brown, and from the suburban imagination of Adrienne Rich to the epic constructions of James Merrill, the American house poem represents the changing abilities of US poets to imagine new forms of life while also building on the past. In The American House Poem, 1945-2021, Hunter focuses on poets who register the unevenly distributed pressures of successive housing crises by rewriting older poetic forms. Writing about the materials, tools, and plans for making a house, these poets express the tensions between making their lives into art and freeing their lives from inherited constraints and conditions.

Climate and the Picturesque in the American Tropics

Author : Michael Boyden
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192694448
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (926 download)

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Book Synopsis Climate and the Picturesque in the American Tropics by : Michael Boyden

Download or read book Climate and the Picturesque in the American Tropics written by Michael Boyden and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-07 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The biggest challenge of the twenty-first century is to bring the effects of public life into relation with the intractable problem of global atmospheric change. Climate and the Picturesque in the American Tropics explains how we came to think of the climate as something abstract and remote rather than a force that actively shapes our existence. The book argues that this separation between climate and sensibility predates the rise of modern climatology and has deep roots in the era of colonial expansion, when the American tropics were transformed into the economic supplier for Euro-American empires. The book shows how the writings of American travellers in the Caribbean registered and pushed forward this new understanding of the climate in a pivotal period in modern history, roughly between 1770 and 1860, which was fraught with debates over slavery, environmental destruction, and colonialism. Offering novel readings of authors including J. Hector St. John de Crevecœur, Leonora Sansay, William Cullen Bryant, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sophia Peabody, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and James McCune Smith in light of their engagements with the American tropics, this book shows that these authors drew on a climatic epistemology that fused science and sentiment in ways that citizen science is aspiring to do today. By suggesting a new genealogy of modern climate thinking, Climate and the Picturesque in the American Tropics thus highlights the urgency of revisiting received ideas of tropicality deeply ingrained in American culture that continue to inform current debates on climate debt and justice.

The Irish and the Imagination of Race

Author : Patrick R. O'Malley
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 0813950554
Total Pages : 278 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (139 download)

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Book Synopsis The Irish and the Imagination of Race by : Patrick R. O'Malley

Download or read book The Irish and the Imagination of Race written by Patrick R. O'Malley and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2023-12-20 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the role of Irishness in nineteenth-century constructions of race and racialization, both in the British Isles and in the United States. Focusing on the years immediately preceding the American Civil War, Patrick O’Malley interrogates the bardic verse epic, the gothic tale, the realist novel, the stage melodrama, and the political polemic to ask how many mid-nineteenth-century Irish nationalist writers with liberationist politics declined to oppose race-based chattel enslavement in the United States and the structures of white supremacy that underpinned and ultimately outlived it. Many of the writers whose work O’Malley examines drew specifically upon the image of Black suffering to generate support for their arguments for Irish political enfranchisement; yet in doing so, they frequently misrepresented the fundamental differences between Irish and Black experience under the regimes of white supremacy, which has had profound consequences.

Going Underground

Author : Lara Langer Cohen
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 1478024127
Total Pages : 190 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis Going Underground by : Lara Langer Cohen

Download or read book Going Underground written by Lara Langer Cohen and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-16 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First popularized by newspaper coverage of the Underground Railroad in the 1840s, the underground serves as a metaphor for subversive activity that remains central to our political vocabulary. In Going Underground, Lara Langer Cohen excavates the long history of this now familiar idea while seeking out versions of the underground that were left behind along the way. Outlining how the underground’s figurative sense first took shape through the associations of literal subterranean spaces with racialized Blackness, she examines a vibrant world of nineteenth-century US subterranean literature that includes Black radical manifestos, anarchist periodicals, sensationalist exposés of the urban underworld, manuals for sex magic, and the initiation rites of secret societies. Cohen finds that the undergrounds in this literature offer sites of political possibility that exceed the familiar framework of resistance, suggesting that nineteenth-century undergrounds can inspire new modes of world-making and world-breaking for a time when this world feels increasingly untenable.

Schools of Fiction

Author : Morgan Day Frank
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192867504
Total Pages : 369 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (928 download)

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Book Synopsis Schools of Fiction by : Morgan Day Frank

Download or read book Schools of Fiction written by Morgan Day Frank and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-09 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Schools of Fiction, Morgan Day Frank considers a bizarre but integral feature of the modern educational experience: that teachers enthusiastically teach literary works that have terrible things to say about school. From Ishmael's insistence in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick that a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard, to the unnamed narrator's expulsion from his southern college in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the most frequently taught books in the English curriculum tend to be those that cast the school as a stultifying and inhumane social institution. Why have educators preferred the anti-scholasticism of the American romance tradition to the didacticism of sentimentalists? Why have they organized African American literature as a discursive category around texts that despaired of the post-Reconstruction institutional system? Why did they start teaching novels, that literary form whose very nature, in Mikhail Bakhtin's words, is not canonic? Reading literature in class is a paradoxical undertaking that, according to Day Frank, has proved foundational to the development of American formal education over the last two centuries, allowing the school to claim access to a social world external to itself. By drawing attention to the transformative effect literature has had on the school, Schools of Fiction challenges some of our core assumptions about the nature of cultural administration and the place of English in the curriculum. The educational system, Day Frank argues, has depended historically on the cultural objects whose existence it is ordinarily thought to govern and the academic subject it is ordinarily thought to have marginalized.

Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874

Author : John Evelev
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192894552
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (928 download)

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Book Synopsis Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874 by : John Evelev

Download or read book Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874 written by John Evelev and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landcape, 1835-1874 recovers the central role that the picturesque, a popular mode of scenery appreciation that advocated for an improved and manipulated natural landscape, played in the social, spatial, and literary history of mid-nineteenth century America. It argues that the picturesque was not simply a landscape aesthetic, but also a discipline of seeing and imaginatively shaping the natural that was widely embraced by bourgeois Americans to transform the national landscape in their own image. Through the picturesque, mid-century bourgeois Americans remade rural spaces into tourist scenery, celebrated the city streets as spaces of cultural diversity, created new urban public parks, and made suburban domesticity a national ideal. This picturesque transformation was promoted in a variety of popular literary genres, all focused on landscape description and all of which trained readers into the protocols of picturesque visual discipline as social reform. Many of these genres have since been dubbed minor or have been forgotten by our literary history, but the ranks of the writers of this picturesque literature include everyone from the most canonical (Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, and Poe), to major authors of the period now less familiar (such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and Margaret Fuller), to those now completely forgotten. Individual chapters of the book link picturesque literary genres to the spaces that the genres helped to transform and, in the process, create what is recognizably our modern American landscape.

The Archive of Fear

Author : Christina Zwarg
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192636073
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (926 download)

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Book Synopsis The Archive of Fear by : Christina Zwarg

Download or read book The Archive of Fear written by Christina Zwarg and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on U.S. slavery and its aftermath in the nineteenth century, The Archive of Fear explores the traumatic force field that continued to inflect discussions of slavery and abolition both before and after the Civil War. It challenges the long-assumed distinction between psychological and cultural-historical theories of trauma, discovering a virtual dialogue between three central U. S. writers and Sigmund Freud concerning the traumatic response of slavery's perpetrators. A strain of trauma theory and practice comes alive in the temporal and spatial disruptions of New World slavery-and The Archive of Fear shows how key elements of that theory still inform the infrastructure of race relations today. It argues that trauma theory before Freud first involves a return to an overlap between crisis, insurrection, and mesmerism found in the work of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Mesmer's "crisis state" has long been read as the precursor to hypnosis, the tool Freud famously rejected when he created psychoanalysis. But the story of what was lost to trauma theory when Freud adopted the "talk cure" can be told through cultural disruptions of New World slavery, especially after mesmerism arrived in Saint Domingue where its implication in the Haitian revolution in both reality and fantasy had an impact on the history of emancipation in the United States.