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Nationhood And Improvised Belief In American Fiction
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Book Synopsis Nationhood and Improvised Belief in American Fiction by : Ann Genzale
Download or read book Nationhood and Improvised Belief in American Fiction written by Ann Genzale and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-01-15 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nationhood and Improvised Belief in American Fiction highlights the ways religious belief and practice intersect with questions of national belonging in the work of major contemporary writers. Through readings of novels by Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Cristina García, and others, this book argues that the representations of syncretic, culturally hybrid, and improvised forms of religious practice operate in these novels as critiques of exclusionary constructions of national identity, providing models for alternate ways of belonging based on shared religious beliefs and practices. Rather than treating the religious history of the U.S. as one of increasing secularization, this book instead calls for greater attention to the diversity of religious experience in the U.S., as well as a deeper understanding of the ways in which these experiences can inform relationships to the national community.
Book Synopsis Danger and Vulnerability in Nineteenth-century American Literature by : Jennifer Travis
Download or read book Danger and Vulnerability in Nineteenth-century American Literature written by Jennifer Travis and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2018-03-12 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-Century Americans saw danger lurking everywhere: in railway cars and trolleys, fireplaces and floods, and amid social and political movements, from the abolition of slavery to suffrage. After the Civil War, Americans were shaken by financial panic and a volatile post-slave economy. They were awe-struck and progressively alarmed by technological innovations that promised speed and commercial growth, but also posed unprecedented physical hazard. Most of all, Americans were uncertain, particularly in light of environmental disasters like hurricanes and wildfires, about their own city on a hill and the once indisputable and protective hand of a beneficent God. The disasters, accidents, and social and political upheavals that characterized nineteenth-century culture had enormous explanatory power, metaphoric and real. Today we speak of similar insecurities: financial, informational, environmental, and political, and we obsessively express our worry and fear for the future. Cultural theorist Paul Virilio refers to these feelings as the “threat horizon,” one that endlessly identifies and produces new dangers.Why, he asks, does it seem easier for humanity to imagine a future shaped by ever-deadlier accidents than a decent future? Danger and Vulnerability in Nineteenth Century American Literature; or, Crash and Burn American invites readers to examine the “threat horizon” through its nascent expression in literary and cultural history. Against the emerging rhetoric of danger in the long nineteenth century, this book examines how a vocabulary of vulnerability in the American imaginary promoted the causes of the structurally disempowered in new and surprising ways, often seizing vulnerability as the grounds for progressive insight. The texts at the heart of this study, from nineteenth-century sensation novels to early twentieth-century journalistic fiction, imagine spectacular collisions, terrifying conflagrations, and all manner of catastrophe, social, political, and environmental. Together they write against illusions of inviolability in a growing technological and managerial culture, and they imagine how the recognition of universal vulnerability may challenge normative representations of social, political, and economic marginality.
Book Synopsis Sports and Nationalism in Latin / o America by : H. Fernández L’Hoeste
Download or read book Sports and Nationalism in Latin / o America written by H. Fernández L’Hoeste and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-05-06 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection interrogates sports in Latin America as a key terrain in which nation is defined and populations are interpellated through emotionally charged practices (state policy, media representations, and sports play itself by professionals, national teams and amateurs) of inclusion and exclusion.
Book Synopsis Major Characters In American Fiction by : Jack Salzman
Download or read book Major Characters In American Fiction written by Jack Salzman and published by Holt Paperbacks. This book was released on 2014-09-23 with total page 1582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Major Characters in American Fiction is the perfect companion for everyone who loves literature--students, book-group members, and serious readers at every level. Developed at Columbia University's Center for American Culture Studies, Major Characters in American Fiction offers in-depth essays on the "lives" of more than 1,500 characters, figures as varied in ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, age, and experience as we are. Inhabiting fictional works written from 1790 to 1991, the characters are presented in biographical essays that tell each one's life story. They are drawn from novels and short stories that represent ever era, genre, and style of American fiction writing--Natty Bumppo of The Leatherstocking Tales, Celie of The Color Purple, and everyone in between.
Book Synopsis Masculinity and Place in American Literature since 1950 by : Vidya Ravi
Download or read book Masculinity and Place in American Literature since 1950 written by Vidya Ravi and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American literature has long celebrated the figure of the self-made man and the idea of establishing selfhood, particularly male selfhood, in nature. However, during the crisis of masculinity that swept across America in the middle of the twentieth century, a generation of writers started exploring a different kind of a man. This was a figure who was concerned not so much with the loss of the West or the desire to recover a wilderness, but with how to live in an ordinary, domesticated continent. Masculinity and Place in American Literature since 1950 explores the role of place in negotiating, reinforcing, and subverting articulations of hegemonic masculinity in the work of four American writers from the latter part of the 20th century—John Cheever, John Updike, Raymond Carver, and Richard Ford. The book argues that American fiction by white male writers between the 1950s and the present day is compelled by the troubled and troubling relationship between masculinity and place. This relationship is deeply embedded in how ideals of masculinity are predicated upon the experience of the physical world, and how the symbolic logic of masculinity is continually subverted by alternative conceptions of dwelling and ecological consciousness.
Book Synopsis The Shadow and the Act by : Walton M. Muyumba
Download or read book The Shadow and the Act written by Walton M. Muyumba and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though often thought of as rivals, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Amiri Baraka shared a range of interests, especially a passion for music. Jazz, in particular, was a decisive influence on their thinking, and, as The Shadow and the Act reveals, they drew on their insights into the creative process of improvisation to analyze race and politics in the civil rights era. In this inspired study, Walton M. Muyumba situates them as a jazz trio, demonstrating how Ellison, Baraka, and Baldwin’s individual works form a series of calls and responses with each other. Muyumba connects their writings on jazz to the philosophical tradition of pragmatism, particularly its support for more freedom for individuals and more democratic societies. He examines the way they responded to and elaborated on that lineage, showing how they significantly broadened it by addressing the African American experience, especially its aesthetics. Ultimately, Muyumba contends, the trio enacted pragmatist principles by effectively communicating the social and political benefits of African Americans fully entering society, thereby compelling America to move closer to its democratic ideals.
Book Synopsis Nationalism and Literature by : Sarah M. Corse
Download or read book Nationalism and Literature written by Sarah M. Corse and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sarah Corse's analysis of nearly two hundred American and Canadian novels offers a theory of national literatures. Demonstrating that national canon formation occurs in tandem with nation-building, and that canonical novels play a symbolic role in this, this 1996 book accounts for cross-national literary differences, addresses issues of mediation and representation in theories of 'reflection', and illuminates the historically constructed nature of the relationship between literature and the nation-state.
Book Synopsis The Michael Eric Dyson Reader by : Michael Eric Dyson
Download or read book The Michael Eric Dyson Reader written by Michael Eric Dyson and published by Civitas Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 590 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a collection of writings that discuss such topics as racism, sexuality, affirmative action, hip hop music, and black intellectuals.
Book Synopsis The Latin American Literary Boom and U.S. Nationalism During the Cold War by : Deborah N. Cohn
Download or read book The Latin American Literary Boom and U.S. Nationalism During the Cold War written by Deborah N. Cohn and published by Vanderbilt University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the dissemination of Latin American literature in the U.S. was "caught between the desire to support the literary revolution of the Boom writers and the fear of revolutionary politics" (John King).
Book Synopsis Liberalism, Theology, and the Performative in Antebellum American Literature by : Patrick McDonald
Download or read book Liberalism, Theology, and the Performative in Antebellum American Literature written by Patrick McDonald and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-19 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1850s United States witnessed a far-reaching political, social, and economic crisis. Symptomatic of this, a wide range of narrative fiction from sentimental novels to sensational drama identifies a foundational link between liberal institutions and performative utterances. Auctions, trials, marriages, and contracts, this fiction contends, all depend on the self-constituting authority of words and performances which anybody and everybody can appropriate and are always subject to misfiring. Rather than viewing this as a liberatory and egalitarian political force, however, writers from Herman Melville and James Fenimore Cooper to Captain Mayne Reid and E.D.E.N. Southworth insist that such naked authority must be supplemented. A broad swath of 1850s literature insists that this supplement ought to come from Christianity. Anticipating thinkers like Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, these works suggest that legitimate political authority depends upon its ability to represent Christian transcendence and account for revealed truth, something firmly outside of speech acts’ and performance’s purview. In so doing, this diverse body of fiction registers a desire to reconstitute political authority on transcendent and representable ground, augmenting institutional reliance on mere words and assuaging the contemporary crises of confidence and authority.
Download or read book Homeland Elegies written by Ayad Akhtar and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "profound and provocative" new work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Disgraced and American Dervish: an immigrant father and his son search for belonging—in post-Trump America, and with each other (Kirkus Reviews). One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2020 Finalist for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction A Best Book of 2020 * Washington Post * O Magazine * New York Times Book Review * Publishers Weekly "Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable." —Salman Rushdie A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home. Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation's unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one—least of all himself—in the process.
Book Synopsis History and Hope in American Literature by : Benjamin Railton
Download or read book History and Hope in American Literature written by Benjamin Railton and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-11-10 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout history, creative writers have often tackled topical subjects as a means to engage and influence public discourse. American authors—those born in the States and those who became naturalized citizens—have consistently found ways to be critical of the more painful pieces of the country’s past yet have done so with the patriotic purpose of strengthening the nation’s community and future. In History and Hope in American Literature: Models of Critical Patriotism, Ben Railton argues that it is only through an in-depth engagement with history—especially its darkest and most agonizing elements—that one can come to a genuine form of patriotism that employs constructive criticism as a tool for civic engagement. The author argues that it is through such critical patriotism that one can imagine and move toward a hopeful, shared future for all Americans. Railton highlights twelve works of American literature that focus on troubling periods in American history, including John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath,David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident, Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Dave Eggers’s What Is the What. From African and Native American histories to the Depression and the AIDS epidemic, Caribbean and Rwandan refugees and immigrants to global climate change, these works help readers confront, understand, and transcend the most sorrowful histories and issues. In so doing, the authors of these books offer hard-won hope that can help point people in the direction of a more perfect union. History and Hope in American Literature will be of interest to students and practitioners of American literature and history.
Book Synopsis African American Nationalist Literature of the 1960s by : Sandra Hollin Flowers
Download or read book African American Nationalist Literature of the 1960s written by Sandra Hollin Flowers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-25 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together political theory and literary works, this study recreates the political climate which made the 1960s an unforgettable era for young black Americans. A chapter on "The Many Shades of Black Nationalism," for instance, explains: why black nationalism is known by more than a dozen different names; how events in Africa influenced black nationalism in America; why Malcolm X's death had a greater impact on nationalism than did his life; and how the United States government unwittingly became nationalism's ally. Another chapter explores the bitter feud between the dominant factions of the 1960s-cultural and revolutionary nationalists. This feud erupted in both verbal and armed warfare and generated an abundance of political theory and literary works, much of which is out of circulation but is examined in the study. Nationalist poetry, theater, and fiction are each treated in separate chapters which exemplify the aesthetic and political concerns of this memorable period in American history and letters. Aside from its unique combination of artistic and political works, what makes this book important is the current revival of nationalist sentiment in African American life and arts. Though this revival is closely identified with the nationalism of the 1960s, it lacks the focus of that period. This study explains what gave the nationalism of the 1960s its focus, how that focus was expressed in art forms, and why 1960s nationalism continues to influence the African American identity and will probably do so well into the twenty-first century.
Book Synopsis John Neal and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture by : Edward Watts
Download or read book John Neal and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture written by Edward Watts and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Neal and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture is a critical reassessment of American novelist, editor, critic, and activist John Neal, arguing for his importance to the ongoing reassessment of the American Renaissance and the broader cultural history of the Nineteenth Century. Contributors (including scholars from the United States, Germany, England, Italy, and Israel) present Neal as an innovative literary stylist, penetrating cultural critic, pioneering regionalist, and vital participant in the business of letters in America over his sixty-year career.
Book Synopsis Cultural Nationalism and Ethnic Music in Latin America by : William H. Beezley
Download or read book Cultural Nationalism and Ethnic Music in Latin America written by William H. Beezley and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music has been critical to national identity in Latin America, especially since the worldwide emphasis on nations and cultural identity that followed World War I. Unlike European countries with unified ethnic populations, Latin American nations claimed blended ethnicities--indigenous, Caucasian, African, and Asian--and the process of national stereotyping that began in the 1920s drew on themes of indigenous and African cultures. Composers and performers drew on the folklore and heritage of ethnic and immigrant groups in different nations to produce what became the music representative of different countries. Mexico became the nation of mariachi bands, Argentina the land of the tango, Brazil the country of Samba, and Cuba the island of Afro-Cuban rhythms, including the rhumba. The essays collected here offer a useful introduction to the twin themes of music and national identity and melodies and ethnic identification. The contributors examine a variety of countries where powerful historical movements were shaped intentionally by music.
Book Synopsis Confluence Narratives by : Antonio Luciano de Andrade Tosta
Download or read book Confluence Narratives written by Antonio Luciano de Andrade Tosta and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-10-19 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confluence Narratives: Ethnicity, History and Nation-Making in the Americas explores how a collection of contemporary novels calls attention to the impact of ethnicity on national identities in the Americas. These historical narratives portray the cultural encounters—the conflicts and alliances, peaceful borrowings and violent seizures—that have characterized the history of the American continents since the colonial period. In the second half of the twentieth century, North and South American readers have witnessed a steady output of novels that revisit moments of cultural confluence as a means of revising national histories. Confluence Narratives proposes that these historical novels, published in such places as Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, and Canada, make up a key literary genre in the Americas. The genre links the various parts of the hemisphere together through three common historical experiences: colonization, slavery, and immigration. Luciano Tosta demonstrates how numerous texts from the United States, Canada, Spanish America, the Caribbean, and Brazil fall into the genre. The book focuses on four case studies from ethnic groups in the Americas: Amerindians, Afro-descendants, Jewish Americans, and Japanese Americans. Tosta uses the experience of the American nations as a springboard to problematize the concept of the contemporary nation, an identity marked by border-crossings and other experiences of deterritorialization. Based on the exploration of “confluence narratives,” Tosta argues that the “contemporary” nation is not as contemporary as one may think. Informed by postcolonial theory and transnational and ethnic studies, this book offers an important comparative study for and of inter-American literature. Its analysis of the representation of cultural encounters within distinctive national histories underscores the complex nature of ‘otherness’ in the Americas, as well as the inherently transcultural aspect of a trans-continental American identity.
Book Synopsis Mexican American Literature by : Elizabeth Jacobs
Download or read book Mexican American Literature written by Elizabeth Jacobs and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-04-18 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting an up-to-date critical perspective as well as a cultural, political and historical context, this book is an excellent introduction to Mexican American literature, affording readers the major novels, drama and poetry. This volume presents fresh and original readings of major works, and with its historiographic and cultural analyses, impressively delivers key information to the reader.
