Download or read book American European Literary Imagination written by and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Western culture is composed of a subtle and complex mixture of influences: religious, philosophical, linguistic, political, social, and sociological. American culture is a particular strain, but unless European antecedents and contemporary leanings are duly noted, any resulting history is predestined to provincialism and distortion. In his account of American literature during the period 1919 to 1932, McCormick deals with the extraordinary work of artists who wrested imaginative order from a world in which the abyss was never out of sight. McCormick's volume is intended as a critical, rather than encyclopedic history of literature on both sides of the Atlantic between the end of World War I and the political and social crises that arose in the 1930s. Although he emphasizes American writers, the emergence of a vital and distinctly modern American literature is located in the cultural encounter with Europe and the rejection of national bias by the major figures of the period. McCormick deals with Gertrude Stein and the mythology of the "lost generation," the tensions and ambivalences of traditionalism and modernity in the work of Sherwood Anderson and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the effect and qualities of Hemingway's style as compared to that of Henry de Montherlant, and the provincial iconoclasm of Sinclair Lewis juxtaposed with the more telling satire of Italo Svevo. The formal innovations in the work of John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, and William Faulkner, the poetic revolution against cultural parochialism and genteel romanticism is given extensive consideration with regard to the work of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore are also discussed. The concluding chapters discuss literary and social criticism and assess the influence of psychoanalysis, philosophical pragmatism, and radical historiography on the intellectual climate of the period. Teachers and students in English and American Literature, American History, and Comparative Literature, and the general reader interested in the writing of the period, may gain new insights from these valuations, devaluations, and re-evaluations. John McCormick is professor emeritus of comparative literature at Rutgers University and Honorary Fellow of English and Literature at the University of York. He is author of many books, including Catastrophe and Imagination, Fiction as Knowledge, and George Santayana: A Biography.

Download or read book American and European Literary Imagination written by John McCormick and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Western culture is composed of a subtle and complex mixture of influences: religious, philosophical, linguistic, political, social, and sociological. American culture is a particular strain, but unless European antecedents and contemporary leanings are duly noted, any resulting history is predestined to provincialism and distortion. In his account of American literature during the period 1919 to 1932, McCormick deals with the extraordinary work of artists who wrested imaginative order from a world in which the abyss was never out of sight.McCormick's volume is intended as a critical, rather than encyclopedic history of literature on both sides of the Atlantic between the end of World War I and the political and social crises that arose in the 1930s. Although he emphasizes American writers, the emergence of a vital and distinctly modern American literature is located in the cultural encounter with Europe and the rejection of national bias by the major figures of the period.McCormick deals with Gertrude Stein and the mythology of the "lost generation," the tensions and ambivalences of traditionalism and modernity in the work of Sherwood Anderson and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the effect and qualities of Hemingway's style as compared to that of Henry de Montherlant, and the provincial iconoclasm of Sinclair Lewis juxtaposed with the more telling satire of Italo Svevo. The formal innovations in the work of John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, and William Faulkner, the poetic revolution against cultural parochialism and genteel romanticism is given extensive consideration with regard to the work of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore are also discussed. The concluding chapters discuss literary and social criticism and assess the influence of psychoanalysis, philosophical pragmatism, and radical historiography on the intellectual climate of the period.Teachers and students in English and American Literature, American History, and Comparative Literature, and the general reader interested in the writing of the period, may gain new insights from these valuations, devaluations, and re-evaluations.

Download or read book European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance written by Larry J. Reynolds and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1988-01-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political issues and events have always acted as a catalyst on thought and art. In this pioneering study, Larry J. Reynolds argues that the European revolutions of 1848-49 quickened the American literary imagination and shaped the characters, plots, and themes of the American renaissance. He traces the impact of the revolutions on Emerson, Fuller, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Thoreau, showing that the upheavals abroad both inspired and disturbed. Extraordinarily well informed and creative treatment of the influences of the 1848-49 European revolutions on writers of the American Renaissance...The book is especially effective in providing a historical context for reading major writings. It demonstrates influences at work at a number of levels and presents historical narrative and subtle readings of literary texts with equal clarity. Highly recommended.- Choice

Download or read book Languages of the Night written by Barry McCrea and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-01 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that the sudden decline of old rural vernaculars – such as French patois, Italian dialects, and the Irish language – caused these languages to become the objects of powerful longings and projections that were formative of modernist writing. Seán Ó Ríordáin in Ireland and Pier Paolo Pasolini in Italy reshaped minor languages to use as private idioms of poetry; the revivalist conception of Irish as a lost, perfect language deeply affected the work of James Joyce; the disappearing dialects of northern France seemed to Marcel Proust to offer an escape from time itself. Drawing on a broad range of linguistic and cultural examples to present a major reevaluation of the origins and meaning of European literary modernism, Barry McCrea shows how the vanishing languages of the European countryside influenced metropolitan literary culture in fundamental ways.

Download or read book Gothic Imagination in Latin American Fiction and Film written by Carmen A. Serrano and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work traces how Gothic imagination from the literature and culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and twentieth-century US and European film has impacted Latin American literature and film culture. Serrano argues that the Gothic has provided Latin American authors with a way to critique a number of issues, including colonization, authoritarianism, feudalism, and patriarchy. The book includes a literary history of the European Gothic to demonstrate how Latin American authors have incorporated its characteristics but also how they have broken away or inverted some elements, such as traditional plot lines, to suit their work and address a unique set of issues. The book examines both the modernistas of the nineteenth century and the avant-garde writers of the twentieth century, including Huidobro, Bombal, Rulfo, Roa Bastos, and Fuentes. Looking at the Gothic in Latin American literature and film, this book is a groundbreaking study that brings a fresh perspective to Latin American creative culture.

Download or read book Playing in the Dark written by Toni Morrison and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-07-24 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race—and promises to change the way we read American literature—from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison "reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." Her brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. Written with the artistic vision that has earned the Nobel Prize-winning author a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark is an invaluable read for avid Morrison admirers as well as students, critics, and scholars of American literature.

Download or read book Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination written by Farrell O'Gorman and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: O'Gorman presents a study of the role of Catholicism in American Gothic literature, exploring its influence as a religion without a country and its ability to permeate borders and American traditions.

Download or read book Imagined Dialogues written by Gordana Crnković and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By conducting imagined dialogues between selected literary works - Eastern European on one hand, American and English on the other - this book proposes an effective way of reading literature, one that goes beyond the narrowing categories of contemporary critical trends.

Download or read book Apples and Ashes written by Coleman Hutchison and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Apples and Ashes offers the first literary history of the Civil War South. The product of extensive archival research, it tells an expansive story about a nation struggling to write itself into existence. Confederate literature was in intimate conversation with other contemporary literary cultures, especially those of the United States and Britain. Thus, Coleman Hutchison argues, it has profound implications for our understanding of American literary nationalism and the relationship between literature and nationalism more broadly. Apples and Ashes is organized by genre, with each chapter using a single text or a small set of texts to limn a broader aspect of Confederate literary culture. Hutchison discusses an understudied and diverse archive of literary texts including the literary criticism of Edgar Allan Poe; southern responses to Uncle Tom's Cabin; the novels of Augusta Jane Evans; Confederate popular poetry; the de facto Confederate national anthem, “Dixie”; and several postwar southern memoirs. In addition to emphasizing the centrality of slavery to the Confederate literary imagination, the book also considers a series of novel topics: the reprinting of European novels in the Confederate South, including Charles Dickens's Great Expectations and Victor Hugo's Les Misérables; Confederate propaganda in Europe; and postwar Confederate emigration to Latin America. In discussing literary criticism, fiction, poetry, popular song, and memoir, Apples and Ashes reminds us of Confederate literature's once-great expectations. Before their defeat and abjection—before apples turned to ashes in their mouths—many Confederates thought they were in the process of creating a nation and a national literature that would endure.

Download or read book Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination written by Farrell O'Gorman and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination, Farrell O'Gorman presents the first study of the recurrent role of Catholicism in a Gothic tradition that is essential to the literature of the United States. In this tradition, Catholicism is depicted as threatening to break down borders separating American citizens—or some representative American—from a larger world beyond. While earlier studies of Catholicism in the American literary imagination have tended to highlight the faith's historical association with Europe, O'Gorman stresses how that imagination often responds to a Catholicism associated with Latin America and the Caribbean. On a deeper level, O'Gorman demonstrates how the Gothic tradition he traces here builds on and ultimately transforms the persistent image in modern Anglophone literature of Catholicism as “a religion without a country; indeed, a religion inimical to nationhood.” O'Gorman focuses on the work of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, Herman Melville, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Cormac McCarthy, and selected contemporary writers including Toni Morrison. These authors, representing historical periods from the early republic to the present day, have distinct experiences of borders within and around their nation and hemisphere, itself an ever-emergent “America.” As O'Gorman carefully documents, they also have distinct experiences of Catholicism and distinct ways of imagining the faith, often shaped at least in part within the Church itself. In their narratives, Catholicism plays a complicated and profound role that ultimately challenges longstanding notions of American exceptionalism and individual autonomy. This analysis contributes not only to discourse regarding Gothic literature and nationalism but also to a broader ongoing dialogue regarding religion, secularism, and American literature.

Download or read book Race and Gender in the Making of an African American Literary Tradition written by Aimable Twagilimana and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the ways in which race and gender have shaped and continue to inform African American literature. African American texts create a black literary and cultural identity interpreting and recording the survival of their cultures shattered by years of slavery. Black women writers, who have to deal with both racism and sexism, use additional strategies to undo this double reduction. They strive to invent a new language to talk about their experience and their lives as black and as women. After a typology of the African American text, the book proposes a reading of major African American writers including Phyllis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, Charles Chesnutt, Booker T. Washington, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison.

Download or read book The Idea of Florida in the American Literary Imagination written by Anne E. Rowe and published by . This book was released on 1991-10-20 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From reviews of the first edition: "Scrupulous yet enjoyable literary criticism, and most enjoyable because it is so surefooted and so strongly practical: It helps you think about what you read about Florida."--St. Petersburg Times "Suggests how our national imagination has seized upon one aspect of the South and found therein a richness that it can continue to mine."--Modern Fiction Studies "Highly recommended."--Choice For Ernest Hemingway, the semitropics of Key West offered "the last wild country"; Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings recaptured a sense of home at Cross Creek that she had not experienced since childhood; Henry James vacationed in Palm Beach and St. Augustine and was torn between "the velvet air, the colour of the sea, the 'royal' palms clustered here and there" and his repugnance for the masses who transformed great hotels into "Vanity Fair in full blast." They--along with others--came to Florida, and they expressed their experiences in poems, stories, and nonfiction. Beginning with the premise that Florida has been perceived in the American imagination as "not merely a geographic region but an image, a garden, Eden-like," Rowe analyzes representative works of writers from the early national period to the present who were attracted to the state and who found it without parallel in the rest of the country. Arranged in roughly chronological order, the book opens with a chapter on Ralph Waldo Emerson's soothing winter in St. Augustine in 1827 and moves on to accounts by Washington Irving of the Seminole Indian wars and by Harriet Beecher Stowe on the leisurely life-style she enjoyed in Florida after the Civil War. It concludes with a chapter on Wallace Stevens, who found the state an enchantress--"erotic, willful, and seductive." Though the contour of the imaginative landscape gives way at times to a view of Florida as a haven for invalids and a playground for the rich, Rowe discovers that a singular image of the state persists and writes that "the Land of Opportunity has been tempered and diverted by the languors of a tropical climate washed by the Gulf Stream and the balm of an always warm sun." Anne E. Rowe is professor of English at Florida State University and author of The Enchanted Country: Northern Writers in the South, 1865-1910.

Download or read book Witness Through the Imagination written by S. Lilian Kremer and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-05 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Criticism of Holocaust literature is an emerging field of inquiry, and as might be expected, the most innovative work has been concentrated on the vanguard of European and Israeli Holocaust literature. Now that American fiction has amassed an impressive and provocative Holocaust canon, the time is propitious for its evaluation. Witness Through the Imagination presents a critical reading of themes and stylistic strategies of major American Holocaust fiction to determine its capacity to render the prelude, progress, and aftermath of the Holocaust. The unifying critical approach is the textual explication of themes and literary method, occasional comparative references to international Holocaust literature, and a discussion of extra-literary Holocaust sources that have influenced the creative writers' treatment of the Holocaust universe.

Download or read book Frontiers of Historical Imagination written by Kerwin Lee Klein and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American frontier, a potent symbol since Europeans first stepped ashore on North America, serves as the touchstone for Kerwin Klein's analysis of the narrating of history. Klein explores the traditions through which historians, philosophers, anthropologists, and literary critics have understood the story of America's origin and the way those understandings have shaped and been shaped by changing conceptions of history. The American West was once the frontier space where migrating Europe collided with Native America, where the historical civilizations of the Old World met the nonhistorical wilds of the New. It was not only the cultural combat zone where American democracy was forged but also the ragged edge of History itself, where historical and nonhistorical defied and defined each other. Klein maintains that the idea of a collision between people with and without history still dominates public memory. But the collision, he believes, resounds even more powerfully in the historical imagination, which creates conflicts between narration and knowledge and carries them into the language used to describe the American frontier. In Klein's words, "We remain obscurely entangled in philosophies of history we no longer profess, and the very idea of 'America' balances on history's shifting frontiers."

Download or read book The Liberal Imagination written by Lionel Trilling and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2012-07-18 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling’s essays examine the promise —and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism. Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote.

Download or read book The Revolutionary Imagination written by Alan M. Wald and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 1983 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revolutionary Imagination: The Poetry and Politics of John Wheelwright and Sherry Mangan

Download or read book Catastrophe and Imagination written by John McCormick and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 1971 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Catastrophe and Imagination explores fiction in America and England from 1870 to 1950, measuring the impact of the twentieth century's wars on the literary imagination. McCormick holds that the novel has a unique relationship to society, and defines this in relation to the many catastrophes of his era - wars, revolutions, and other outrages on the social order. After an initial survey of society in the novels of Jane Austen, Dickens, and Thackeray, to name only a few, he analyzes what the novel is not, with reference to the work of Virginia Woolf, John Steinbeck, and D. H. Lawrence.