Download or read book American Literature and the Universe of Force written by R. E. Martin and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book American Literature and the Universe of Force written by Ronald E. Martin and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the scientific and philosophical expansion of the concept of "force" in the 19th century, particularly in the work of Herbert Spencer, whose "Synthetic Philosophy" made the idea available to a wide range of writers. Details how Spencer helped to shape social ideals, ethical standards and the way people conceived of their place metaphysically in a period that was dominated by secular and scientific thought. Martin scrutinizes the force theory as it influenced the history of science, theological and philosophical discourse, popular culture and fiction. Also studies four American naturalists -- Henry Adams, Frank Norris, Jack London and Theodore Dreiser.
Download or read book American Literature and Science written by Robert Scholnick and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-07-11 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature and science are two disciplines are two disciplines often thought to be unrelated, if not actually antagonistic. But Robert J. Scholnick points out that these areas of learning, up through the beginning of the nineteenth century, "were understood as parts of a unitary endeavor." By mid-century they had diverged, but literature and science have continued to interact, conflict, and illuminate each other. In this innovative work, twelve leaders in this emerging interdisciplinary field explore the long engagement of American writers with science and uncover science's conflicting meanings as a central dimension of the nation's conception of itself. Reaching back to the Puritan poet-minister-physician Edward Taylor, who wrote at the beginning of the scientific revolution, and forward to Thomas Pynchon, novelist of the cybernetic age, this collection of original essays contains essential work on major writers, including Franklin, Jefferson, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Twain, Hart Crane, Dos Passos, and Charles Olson. Through its exploration of the ways that American writers have found in science and technology a vital imaginative stimulus, even while resisting their destructive applications, this book points towards a reconciliation and integration within culture. An innovative look at a neglected dimension of our literary tradition, American Literature and Science stands as both a definition of the field and an invitation to others to continue and extend new modes of inquiry.
Download or read book American Literature and the Destruction of Knowledge written by Ronald E. Martin and published by Durham : Duke University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This challenging study of a number of American writers belongs in the tradition of the history-of-ideas approach to literary history. It offers an analysis of American literary developments and the relationship between writers and the philosophical and social thought of their times. Martin examines the works of Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Crane, Frost, Pound, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Stevens, Williams, and several others with a sharp eye for the artistic consequences of changing epistemological assumptions and for the connection of ideas and form. ISBN 0-8223-1125-9: $29.95.
Download or read book A History of American Literature written by Richard Gray and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-09-23 with total page 933 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Updated throughout and with much new material, A History of American Literature, Second Edition, is the most up-to-date and comprehensive survey available of the myriad forms of American Literature from pre-Columbian times to the present. The most comprehensive and up-to-date history of American literature available today Covers fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction, as well as other forms of literature including folktale, spirituals, the detective story, the thriller, and science fiction Explores the plural character of American literature, including the contributions made by African American, Native American, Hispanic and Asian American writers Considers how our understanding of American literature has changed over the past?thirty years Situates American literature in the contexts of American history, politics and society Offers an invaluable introduction to American literature for students at all levels, academic and general readers
Download or read book American Studies written by Jack Salzman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1986-08-29 with total page 888 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an annotated bibliography of 20th century books through 1983, and is a reworking of American Studies: An Annotated Bibliography of Works on the Civilization of the United States, published in 1982. Seeking to provide foreign nationals with a comprehensive and authoritative list of sources of information concerning America, it focuses on books that have an important cultural framework, and does not include those which are primarily theoretical or methodological. It is organized in 11 sections: anthropology and folklore; art and architecture; history; literature; music; political science; popular culture; psychology; religion; science/technology/medicine; and sociology. Each section contains a preface introducing the reader to basic bibliographic resources in that discipline and paragraph-length, non-evaluative annotations. Includes author, title, and subject indexes. ISBN 0-521-32555-2 (set) : $150.00.
Download or read book Just Six Numbers written by Martin Rees and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2008-08-04 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did a single "genesis event" create billions of galaxies, black holes, stars and planets? How did atoms assemble -- here on earth, and perhaps on other worlds -- into living beings intricate enough to ponder their origins? What fundamental laws govern our universe?This book describes new discoveries and offers remarkable insights into these fundamental questions. There are deep connections between stars and atoms, between the cosmos and the microworld. Just six numbers, imprinted in the "big bang," determine the essential features of our entire physical world. Moreover, cosmic evolution is astonishingly sensitive to the values of these numbers. If any one of them were "untuned," there could be no stars and no life. This realization offers a radically new perspective on our universe, our place in it, and the nature of physical laws.
Download or read book Research Guide to American Literature written by Benjamín Franklin and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents American literature from the beginnings to the Revolutionary War, including essays, narratives and more.
Download or read book Herbert Spencer written by Robert G. Perrin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-24 with total page 1024 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book The Body Electric written by Carolyn Thomas de la Pena and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2005-04 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the years 1850 and 1950, Americans became the leading energy consumers on the planet, expending tremendous physical resources on energy exploration, mental resources on energy exploitation, and monetary resources on energy acquisition. A unique combination of pseudoscientific theories of health and the public’s rudimentary understanding of energy created an age in which sources of industrial power seemed capable of curing the physical limitations and ill health that plagued Victorian bodies. Licensed and “quack” physicians alike promoted machines, electricity, and radium as invigorating cures, veritable “fountains of youth” that would infuse the body with energy and push out disease and death. The Body Electric is the first book to place changing ideas about fitness and gender in dialogue with the popular culture of technology. Whether through wearing electric belts, drinking radium water, or lifting mechanized weights, many Americans came to believe that by embracing the nation's rapid march to industrialization, electrification, and “radiomania,” their bodies would emerge fully powered. Only by uncovering this belief’s passions and products, Thomas de la Peña argues, can we fully understand our culture’s twentieth-century energy enthusiasm.
Download or read book Naturalism in American Fiction written by John J. Conder and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-03-17 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this closely reasoned study, John J. Conder has created a new and more vital understanding of naturalism in American literature. Moving from the Hobbesian dilemma between causation and free will down through Bergson's concept of dual selves, Conder defines a view of determinism so rich in possibilities that it can serve as the inspiration of literary works of astonishing variety and unite them in a single, though developing, naturalistic tradition in American letters. At the heart of this book, beyond its philosophic discussion, is Conder's reading of key works in the naturalistic canon, beginning with Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat" and "The Blue Hotel." The special character of determinism in Crane is, Conder holds, the source of his complexity and striking originality. He finds a stricter determinism in Norris's McTeague. In Dreiser, however, the naturalistic tradition develops toward a fusion of determinism and freedom in a single work, and this fusion in a different guise operates in Dos Passos's view of self in Manhattan Transfer. With Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath the uniting of determinism and freedom finds its fullest realization in the concept of dual selves, one determined, one free. In Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! the concept of the dual self appears in its most complex form. The developments in the work of Steinbeck and Faulkner, Conder believes, bring the classic phase of American literary naturalism to a close. Naturalism in American Fiction illuminates a group of major literary works and revives a theoretic consideration of naturalism. It thus makes a fundamental contribution to American studies.
Download or read book American Literature in Context written by Various Authors and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-13 with total page 915 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published between 1982 and 1983, this series examines the peculiarly American cultural context out of which the nation’s literature has developed. Covering the years from 1620 to 1930, these four volumes present a coherent, consecutive and comprehensive sequence of interpretations of major American texts, including fiction, non-fiction, poetry and drama. Every chapter includes an extract from the chosen text which serves as a springboard for wider discussion and analysis. Each analysis demonstrates how students can move into and then from the pages of literature to a consideration of the whole text, and thence to an understanding of the author’s oeuvre and of the cultural moment in which he or she lived and wrote. This set will be a valuable resource for students of American literature and American studies.
Download or read book America as Second Creation written by David E. Nye and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004-09-17 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the dialogue that emerged after 1776 between different visions of what it meant to use new technologies to transform the land. After 1776, the former American colonies began to reimagine themselves as a unified, self-created community. Technologies had an important role in the resulting national narratives, and a few technologies assumed particular prominence. Among these were the axe, the mill, the canal, the railroad, and the irrigation dam. In this book David Nye explores the stories that clustered around these technologies. In doing so, he rediscovers an American story of origins, with America conceived as a second creation built in harmony with God's first creation. While mainstream Americans constructed technological foundation stories to explain their place in the New World, however, marginalized groups told other stories of destruction and loss. Native Americans protested the loss of their forests, fishermen resisted the construction of dams, and early environmentalists feared the exhaustionof resources. A water mill could be viewed as the kernel of a new community or as a new way to exploit labor. If passengers comprehended railways as part of a larger narrative about American expansion and progress, many farmers attacked railroad land grants. To explore these contradictions, Nye devotes alternating chapters to narratives of second creation and to narratives of those who rejected it.Nye draws on popular literature, speeches, advertisements, paintings, and many other media to create a history of American foundation stories. He shows how these stories were revised periodically, as social and economic conditions changed, without ever erasing the earlier stories entirely. The image of the isolated frontier family carving a homestead out of the wilderness with an axe persists to this day, alongside later images and narratives. In the book's conclusion, Nye considers the relation between these earlier stories and such later American developments as the conservation movement, narratives of environmental recovery, and the idealization of wilderness.
Download or read book American Literature in Context written by Ann Massa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-20 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published between 1982 and 1983, this series examines the peculiarly American cultural context out of which the nation’s literature has developed. Covering the years from 1900 to 1930, this fourth volume of American Literature in Context focuses on how American literature dealt with the challenges of the period including the First World War and the stock market crash. It examines key writers of the time such as Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F Scott Fitzgerald and Eugene O’Neill who, unlike many Americans who sought escape, confronted reality, providing a rich and varied literature that reflects these turbulent years. This book will be of interest to those studying American literature and American studies.
Download or read book Bergson and American Culture written by Tom Quirk and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bergsonian "vitalism" challenged the dominance of Spencerian determinism in the early twentieth century and seemed to offer a new foundation for belief in human freedom and individual possibility. Quirk traces the impact of Bergsonism upon the American sensibility and shows how individual writers -- particularly two such different artists as Willa Cather and Wallace Stevens -- appropriated vitalistic notions and made them serve the peculiar requirements of their own unique creative imaginations. Originally published in 1990. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
Download or read book Literary Neurophysiology written by Randall Knoper and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigating the relations between American literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the sciences of the brain and the nervous system, this volume shows how literary authors investigated, used and challenged this emerging neurophysiology.
Download or read book Narratives and Spaces written by David E. Nye and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nye analyzes the transformation of the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls into tourist sites, the history of light shows at world's fairs, the New Deal programs designed to provide electricity to rural areas, and the Apollo 11 moon to reveal how the spaces we live in and the technology we use are integral to American identity, and a key part of American self-representation. Nye also turns his attention to the Internet, where technology has not simply transformed space, but created a whole new kind of space, and with it, new stories. Nye analyzes the transformation of the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls into tourist sites, the history of light shows at world's fairs, the New Deal programs designed to provide electricity to rural areas, the Apollo 11 moon landing, and the new narratives of the Internet to reveal how the spaces we live in and the technology we use are integral to American identity, and a key part of American self-representation. In examining the interaction of technology, space, and American narrative, Nye argues against the idea that technology is an inevitable and insidious controller of our lives.
