Download or read book American Elegy written by Max Cavitch and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most widely practiced and read form of verse in America, “elegies are poems about being left behind,” writes Max Cavitch. American Elegy is the history of a diverse people’s poetic experience of mourning and of mortality’s profound challenge to creative living. By telling this history in political, psychological, and aesthetic terms, American Elegy powerfully reconnects the study of early American poetry to the broadest currents of literary and cultural criticism. Cavitch begins by considering eighteenth-century elegists such as Franklin, Bradstreet, Mather, Wheatley, Freneau, and Annis Stockton, highlighting their defiance of boundaries—between public and private, male and female, rational and sentimental—and demonstrating how closely intertwined the work of mourning and the work of nationalism were in the revolutionary era. He then turns to elegy’s adaptations during the market-driven Jacksonian age, including more obliquely elegiac poems like those of William Cullen Bryant and the popular child elegies of Emerson, Lydia Sigourney, and others. Devoting unprecedented attention to the early African-American elegy, Cavitch discusses poems written by free blacks and slaves, as well as white abolitionists, seeing in them the development of an African-American genealogical imagination. In addition to a major new reading of Whitman’s great elegy for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Cavitch takes up less familiar passages from Whitman as well as Melville’s and Lazarus’s poems following Lincoln’s death. American Elegy offers critical and often poignant insights into the place of mourning in American culture. Cavitch examines literary responses to historical events—such as the American Revolution, Native American removal, African-American slavery, and the Civil War—and illuminates the states of loss, hope, desire, and love in American studies today. Max Cavitch is assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
Download or read book American Elegy written by Jeffrey Simpson and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is a portrait of America, a way of life, and a familiy that are vanishing even while coming to life on the pages. The author is the final descendent of pioneers who braved death to settle a dangerous frontier to found the Western Pennsylvania town of Parnassus.
Download or read book Hillbilly Elegy written by J D Vance and published by Harper Large Print. This book was released on 2024-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hillbilly Elegy recounts J.D. Vance's powerful origin story... From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate now serving as a U.S. Senator from Ohio and the Republican Vice Presidential candidate for the 2024 election, an incisive account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class. THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "You will not read a more important book about America this year."--The Economist "A riveting book."--The Wall Street Journal "Essential reading."--David Brooks, New York Times Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis--that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.'s grandparents were "dirt poor and in love," and moved north from Kentucky's Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.
Download or read book Appalachian Elegy written by Bell Hooks and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2012-08-16 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of poems centered around life in Appalachia addresses topics ranging from the marginalization of the region's people to the environmental degradation it has endured throughout history.
Download or read book Angels in the Architecture written by Heidi Johnson and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2004-02 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intimate photographic journey into 115 years of history inside a nineteenth-century asylum.
Download or read book Hill Women written by Cassie Chambers and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After rising from poverty to earn two Ivy League degrees, an Appalachian lawyer pays tribute to the strong “hill women” who raised and inspired her, and whose values have the potential to rejuvenate a struggling region. “Destined to be compared to Hillbilly Elegy and Educated.”—BookPage (starred review) “A gritty, warm love letter to Appalachian communities and the resourceful women who lead them.”—Slate Nestled in the Appalachian mountains, Owsley County, Kentucky, is one of the poorest places in the country. Buildings are crumbling as tobacco farming and coal mining decline. But strong women find creative ways to subsist in the hills. Through the women who raised her, Cassie Chambers traces her path out of and back into the Kentucky mountains. Chambers’s Granny was a child bride who rose before dawn every morning to raise seven children. Granny’s daughter, Ruth—the hardest-working tobacco farmer in the county—stayed on the family farm, while Wilma—the sixth child—became the first in the family to graduate from high school. Married at nineteen and pregnant with Cassie a few months later, Wilma beat the odds to finish college. She raised her daughter to think she could move mountains, like the ones that kept her safe but also isolated from the larger world. Cassie would spend much of her childhood with Granny and Ruth in the hills of Owsley County. With her “hill women” values guiding her, she went on to graduate from Harvard Law. But while the Ivy League gave her opportunities, its privileged world felt far from her reality, and she moved home to help rural Kentucky women by providing free legal services. Appalachian women face issues from domestic violence to the opioid crisis, but they are also keeping their towns together in the face of a system that continually fails them. With nuance and heart, Chambers breaks down the myth of the hillbilly and illuminates a region whose poor communities, especially women, can lead it into the future.
Download or read book Appalachian Reckoning written by Anthony Harkins and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Hillbilly elegy, J.D. Vance described how his family moved from poverty to an upwardly mobile clan while navigating the collective demons of the past. The book has come to define Appalachia for much of the nation. This collection of essays is a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadow cast over the region and its imagining. But it also moves beyond Vance's book to allow Appalachians to tell their own diverse and complex stories of a place that is at once culturally rich and economically distressed, unique and typically American. -- adapted from back cover
Download or read book Contingent Kinship written by Kathryn A. Mariner and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a small Chicago adoption agency specializing in transracial adoption, Contingent Kinship charts the entanglement of institutional structures and ideologies of family, race, and class to argue that adoption is powerfully implicated in the question of who can have a future in the twenty-first-century United States. With a unique focus on the role that social workers and other professionals play in mediating relationships between expectant mothers and prospective adopters, Kathryn A. Mariner develops the concept of “intimate speculation,” a complex assemblage of investment, observation, and anticipation that shapes the adoption process into an elaborate mechanism for creating, dissolving, and exchanging imagined futures. Shifting the emphasis from adoption’s outcome to its conditions of possibility, this insightful ethnography places the practice of domestic adoption within a temporal, economic, and affective framework in order to interrogate the social inequality and power dynamics that render adoption—and the families it produces—possible.
Download or read book Elegy for Desire written by Luis Omar Salinas and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most difficult poems to write Are those of love and those of death. IÕm half in love and half dead. It stands to reason that IÕve come upon a difficult task. Despite his disclaimer, it seems no difficult task at all. One of the pioneers of Chicano poetry and a highly esteemed artist in the Mexican American community, Luis Omar Salinas is a poet with Tex-Mex bordertown roots whose work is studied at the Sorbonne. Beginning with his legendary first book, Crazy Gypsy, he has been a major figure not only in Chicano literature but in all of American poetryÑboth a poet of the people and a voice for other poets. In Elegy for Desire, Salinas has crafted visionary poems about growing older and looking back on a rich life of poetry. In this quiet yet hallucinatory volume, Salinas offers us a prismatic collection of odes, elegies, and cantos of desireÑcomplex poems about our place in the world. Poems to be savored in solitude, or better still with an intimate companion. Few poets, Latino or otherwise, are as daring with love poetry that is so honestly fierce. Salinas gives us a meditation on gently aging while continuing to celebrate personal experience that draws upon the world. One need only sample these rich, elegant stanzas to recognize the wealth of wisdom found in their words. Elegy for Desire is a testament to a singular talent that has survived for decades . . . and will continue to inspire long beyond his lifetime. The dead canÕt complain, and lovers always do. Well, IÕm here, and that is important. And if life can be as exciting as this, I must be doing something right.
Download or read book Elegy in a Country Churchyard written by Thomas Gray and published by . This book was released on 1888 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Elegy Owed written by Bob Hicok and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. "What Hicok's getting at [in Elegy Owed] is both the necessity and the inadequacy of language, the very bluntness of which (talk about a paradox) makes it all the more essential that we engage with it as a precision instrument, a force of clarity, of (at times) awful grace."—Los Angeles Times "[A] fluid, absorbing new collection. . . . Highly recommended."—Library Journal, starred review When asked in an interview "What would Bob Hicok launch from a giant sling shot?" he answered "Bob Hicok." Elegy Owed—Hicok's eighth book—is an existential game of Twister in which the rules of mourning are broken and salvaged, and "you can never step into the same not going home again twice." From "Notes for a time capsule": The twig in. I'll put the twig in I carry in my pocket and my pocket and my eye, my left eye. A cup of the Ganges and the bacteria from shit in the Ganges and the anyway ablutions of rainbow- robed Hindus in the Ganges. The dawnline of the mountain with contrail above like an accent in a language too large for my mouth. A mirror so whoever opens the past will see themselves in the past and fall back from their face speaking to them across centuries or hours or the nearnevers . . . Bob Hicok's worked as an automotive die designer and a computer system administrator before becoming an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech. He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.
Download or read book Little Million Doors written by Chad Sweeney and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A moving poetic account of grief and record of post-traumatic stress after the loss of a parent.
Download or read book Poetry of Mourning written by Jahan Ramazani and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1994-05-28 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through readings of elegies, self-elegies, war poems and the blues, this book covers a wide range of poets, including Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, W.H. Auden, Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney. It is grounded in genre theory and in the psychoanalysis of mourning.
Download or read book That the People Might Live written by Arnold Krupat and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-15 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The word "elegy" comes from the Ancient Greek elogos, meaning a mournful poem or song, in particular, a song of grief in response to loss. Because mourning and memorialization are so deeply embedded in the human condition, all human societies have developed means for lamenting the dead, and, in "That the People Might Live," Arnold Krupat surveys the traditions of Native American elegiac expression over several centuries. Krupat covers a variety of oral performances of loss and renewal, including the Condolence Rites of the Iroquois and the memorial ceremony of the Tlingit people known as koo’eex, examining as well a number of Ghost Dance songs, which have been reinterpreted in culturally specific ways by many different tribal nations. Krupat treats elegiac "farewell" speeches of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in considerable detail, and comments on retrospective autobiographies by Black Hawk and Black Elk. Among contemporary Native writers, he looks at elegiac work by Linda Hogan, N. Scott Momaday, Gerald Vizenor, Sherman Alexie, Maurice Kenny, and Ralph Salisbury, among others. Despite differences of language and culture, he finds that death and loss are consistently felt by Native peoples both personally and socially: someone who had contributed to the People’s well-being was now gone. Native American elegiac expression offered mourners consolation so that they might overcome their grief and renew their will to sustain communal life.
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 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This "profound and provocative" work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Disgraced and American Dervish followsan immigrant father and his son as they search for belonging—in post-Trump America, and with each other (Kirkus Reviews). "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. 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
Download or read book Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era written by Tiffany Austin and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era is an edited collection of critical essays and poetry that investigates contemporary elegy within the black diaspora. Scores of contemporary writers have turned to elegiac poetry and prose in order to militate against the white supremacist logic that has led to recent deaths of unarmed black men, women, and children. This volume combines scholarly and creative understandings of the elegy in order to discern how mourning feeds our political awareness in this dystopian time, as writers attempt to see, hear, and say something in relation to the bodies of the dead as well as to living readers. Moreover, this book provides a model for how to productively interweave theoretical and deeply personal accounts to encourage discussions about art and activism that transgress disciplinary boundaries, as well as lines of race, gender, class, and nation"--
Download or read book The Beats and the Academy written by Erik Mortenson and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Beats and the Academy marks the first sustained effort to train a scholarly eye on the dynamics of the relationship between Beat writers and the academic institutions in which they taught. Rather than assuming the relationship between Beat writers and institutions of higher education was only a hostile one, The Beats and the Academy begins with the premise that influence between the two flows in both directions. Beat writers' suspicion of established institutions was a significant aspect of their postwar countercultural allure. Their anti-establishment aesthetic and countercultural stance led Beat writers to be critical of postwar academic institutions that tended to dismiss them as a passing social phenomenon. Even today, Beat writing still meets resistance in an academy that questions the relevance of their writing and ideas. But this picture, like any generalization, is far too easy. The Beat relationship to the academy is one of negotiation, rather than negation. Many Beats strove for academic recognition, and quite a few received it. And despite hostility to their work both in the postwar era and today, Beat works have made it into syllabi, conference resentations, journal articles, and monographs. The Beats and the Academy deepens our understanding of this relationship by emphasizing how institutional friction between the Beats and institutions of higher education has shaped our understanding of Beat Generation literature and culture—and what this relationship between Beat writers and the academy might suggest about their legacy for future scholars.
