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Book European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance

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

Book Righteous Violence

Download or read book Righteous Violence written by Larry John Reynolds and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Righteous Violence examines the struggles with the violence of slavery and revolution that engaged the imaginations of seven nineteenth-century American writers--Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. These authors responded not only to the state terror of slavery and the Civil War but also to more problematic violent acts, including unlawful revolts, insurrections, riots, and strikes that resulted in bloodshed and death. Rather than position these writers for or against the struggle for liberty, Larry J. Reynolds examines the profoundly contingent and morally complex perspectives of each author. Tracing the shifting and troubled moral arguments in their work, Reynolds shows that these writers, though committed to peace and civil order, at times succumbed to bloodlust, even while they expressed ambivalence about the very violence they approved. For many of these authors, the figure of John Brown loomed large as an influence and a challenge. Reynolds examines key works such as Fuller's European dispatches, Emerson's political lectures, Douglass's novella The Heroic Slave, Thoreau's Walden, Alcott's Moods, Hawthorne's late unfinished romances, and Melville's Billy Budd. In addition to demonstrating the centrality of righteous violence to the American Renaissance, this study deepens and complicates our understanding of political violence beyond the dichotomies of revolution and murder, liberty and oppression, good and evil.

Book Catholics  Lost Cause

    Book Details:
  • Author : Adam L. Tate
  • Publisher : University of Notre Dame Pess
  • Release : 2018-09-30
  • ISBN : 0268104204
  • Pages : 350 pages

Download or read book Catholics Lost Cause written by Adam L. Tate and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2018-09-30 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the fascinating Catholics’ Lost Cause, Adam Tate argues that the primary goal of clerical leaders in antebellum South Carolina was to build a rapprochement between Catholicism and southern culture that would aid them in rooting Catholic institutions in the region in order to both sustain and spread their faith. A small minority in an era of prevalent anti-Catholicism, the Catholic clergy of South Carolina engaged with the culture around them, hoping to build an indigenous southern Catholicism. Tate’s book describes the challenges to antebellum Catholics in defending their unique religious and ethnic identities while struggling not to alienate their overwhelmingly Protestant counterparts. In particular, Tate cites the work of three antebellum bishops of the Charleston diocese, John England, Ignatius Reynolds, and Patrick Lynch, who sought to build a southern Catholicism in tune with their specific regional surroundings. As tensions escalated and the sectional crisis deepened in the 1850s, South Carolina Catholic leaders supported the Confederate States of America, thus aligning themselves and their flocks to the losing side of the Civil War. The war devastated Catholic institutions and finances in South Carolina, leaving postbellum clerical leaders to rebuild within a much different context. Scholars of American Catholic history, southern history, and American history will be thoroughly engrossed in this largely overlooked era of American Catholicism.

Book Writing Revolution

Download or read book Writing Revolution written by Peter J. Bellis and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, formalist and deconstructive approaches to literary studies have been under attack, charged by critics with isolating texts as distinctive aesthetic or linguistic objects, separate from their social and historical contexts. Historicist and cultural approaches have often responded by simply reversing the picture, reducing texts to no more than superstructural effects of historical or ideological forces. In Writing Revolution, Peter J. Bellis explores the ways in which literature can engage with--rather than escape from or obscure--social and political issues. Bellis argues that a number of nineteenth-century American writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, saw their texts as spaces where alternative social and cultural possibilities could be suggested and explored. All writing in the same historical moment, Bellis's subjects were responding to the same cluster of issues: the need to redefine American identity after the Revolution, the problem of race slavery, and the growing industrialization of American society. Hawthorne, Bellis contends, sees the romance as "neutral territory" where the Imaginary and the Actual--the aesthetic and the historical--can interpenetrate and address crucial issues of class, race, and technological modernity. Whitman conceives of Leaves of Grass as a transformative democratic space where all forms of meditation, both political and literary, are swept away. Thoreau oscillates between these two approaches. Walden, like the romance, aims to fashion a mediating space between nature and society. His abolitionist essays, however, shift sharply away from both linguistic representation and the political, toward an apocalyptic cleansing violence. In addition to covering selected works by Hawthorne, Whitman, and Thoreau, Bellis also examines powerful works of social and political critique by Louisa May Alcott and Margaret Fuller. With its suggestions for new ways of reading antebellum American writing, Writing Revolution breaks through the thickets of contemporary literary discourse and will spark debate in the literary community.

Book Revolutions  a Very Short Introduction

Download or read book Revolutions a Very Short Introduction written by Jack A. Goldstone and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the 20th and 21st century revolutions have become more urban, often less violent, but also more frequent and more transformative of the international order. Whether it is the revolutions against Communism in Eastern Europe and the USSR; the "color revolutions" across Asia, Europe and North Africa; or the religious revolutions in Iran, Afghanistan, and Syria; today's revolutions are quite different from those of the past. Modern theories of revolution have therefore replaced the older class-based theories with more varied, dynamic, and contingent models of social and political change. This new edition updates the history of revolutions, from Classical Greece and Rome to the Revolution of Dignity in the Ukraine, with attention to the changing types and outcomes of revolutionary struggles. It also presents the latest advances in the theory of revolutions, including the issues of revolutionary waves, revolutionary leadership, international influences, and the likelihood of revolutions to come. This volume provides a brief but comprehensive introduction to the nature of revolutions and their role in global history"--

Book Literature and Music in the Atlantic World  1767 1867

Download or read book Literature and Music in the Atlantic World 1767 1867 written by Catherine Jones and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-16 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new study looks at the relationship of rhetoric and music in the era's intellectual discourses, texts and performance cultures principally in Europe and North America. Catherine Jones begins by examining the attitudes to music and its performance by leading figures of the American Enlightenment and Revolution, notably Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. She also looks at the attempts of Francis Hopkinson, William Billings and others to harness the Orphean power of music so that it should become a progressive force in the creation of a new society. She argues that the association of rhetoric and music that reaches back to classical Antiquity acquired new relevance and underwent new theorisation and practical application in the American Enlightenment in light of revolutionary Atlantic conditions. Jones goes on to consider changes in the relationship of rhetoric and music in the nationalising milieu of the nineteenth century; the connections of literature, music and music theory to changing models of subjectivity; and Romantic appropriations of Enlightenment visions of the public ethical function of music.

Book The Cambridge History of American Literature  Volume 2  Prose Writing 1820 1865

Download or read book The Cambridge History of American Literature Volume 2 Prose Writing 1820 1865 written by Sacvan Bercovitch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 930 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the fullest and richest account of the American Renaissance available in any literary history. The narratives in this volume made for a four-fold perspective on literature: social, cultural, intellectual and aesthetic. Michael D. Bell describes the social conditions of the literary vocation that shaped the growth of a professional literature in the United States. Eric Sundquist draws upon broad cultural patterns: his account of the writings of exploration, slavery, and the frontier is an interweaving of disparate voices, outlooks and traditions. Barbara L. Packer's sources come largely from intellectual history: the theological and philosophical controversies that prepared the way for transcendentalism. Jonathan Arac's categories are formalist: he sees the development of antebellum fiction as a dialectic of prose genres, the emergence of a literary mode out of the clash of national, local and personal forms. Together, these four narratives constitute a basic reassessment of American prose-writing between 1820 and 1865. It is an achievement that will remain authoritative for our time and that will set new directions for coming decades in American literary scholarship.

Book American Literature Before 1880

Download or read book American Literature Before 1880 written by Robert Lawson-Peebles and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-11-13 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Literature Before 1880 attempts to place its subject in the broadest possible international perspective. It begins with Homer looking westward, and ends with Henry James crossing the Atlantic eastwards. In between, the book examines the projection of images of the East onto an as-yet unrecognised West; the cultural consequences of Viking, Colombian, and then English migration to America; the growth and independence of the British American colonies; the key writers of the new Republic; and the development of the culture of the United States before and after the Civil War. It is intended both as an introduction for undergraduates to the richness and variety of American Literature, and as a contribution to the debate about its distinctive nature. The book therefore begins with a lengthy survey of earlier histories of American Literature.

Book The Black Romantic Revolution

Download or read book The Black Romantic Revolution written by Matt Sandler and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the pitched battle over slavery in the United States, Black writers - enslaved and free - allied themselves with the cause of abolition and used their art to advocate for emancipation and to envision the end of slavery as a world-historical moment of possibility. These Black writers borrowed from the European tradition of Romanticism - lyric poetry, prophetic visions - to write, speak, and sing their hopes for what freedom might mean. At the same time, they voiced anxieties about the expansion of global capital and U.S. imperial power in the aftermath of slavery. They also focused on the ramifications of slavery’s sexual violence. Authors like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, George Moses Horton, Albery Allson Whitman, and Joshua McCarter Simpson conceived the Civil War as a revolutionary upheaval on par with Europe’s stormy Age of Revolutions. The Black Romantic Revolution proposes that the Black Romantics’ cultural innovations have shaped Black radical culture to this day, from the blues and hip hop to Black nationalism and Black feminism. Their expressions of love and rage, grief and determination, dreams and nightmares, still echo into our present.

Book Fighting for the Higher Law

    Book Details:
  • Author : Peter Wirzbicki
  • Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
  • Release : 2021-03-26
  • ISBN : 0812252918
  • Pages : 336 pages

Download or read book Fighting for the Higher Law written by Peter Wirzbicki and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2021-03-26 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Fighting for the Higher Law, Peter Wirzbicki explores how important black abolitionists joined famous Transcendentalists to create a political philosophy that fired the radical struggle against American slavery. In the cauldron of the antislavery movement, antislavery activists, such as William C. Nell, Thomas Sidney, and Charlotte Forten, and Transcendentalist intellectuals, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, developed a "Higher Law" ethos, a unique set of romantic political sensibilities—marked by moral enthusiasms, democratic idealism, and a vision of the self that could judge political questions from "higher" standards of morality and reason. The Transcendentalism that emerges here is not simply the dreamy philosophy of privileged white New Englanders, but a more populist movement, one that encouraged an uncompromising form of politics among a wide range of Northerners, black as well as white, working-class as well as wealthy. Invented to fight slavery, it would influence later labor, feminist, civil rights, and environmentalist activism. African American thinkers and activists have long engaged with American Transcendentalist ideas about "double consciousness," nonconformity, and civil disobedience. When thinkers like Martin Luther King, Jr., or W. E. B. Du Bois invoked Transcendentalist ideas, they were putting to use an intellectual movement that black radicals had participated in since the 1830s.

Book Periodical Literature in Nineteenth century America

Download or read book Periodical Literature in Nineteenth century America written by Kenneth M. Price and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering the decades from the 1830s through the end of the century, as well as the eastern, southern, and western regions of the United States, these essays, by a diverse group of scholars, examine a variety of periodicals from the well-known Atlantic Monthly to small papers such as The National Era. They illustrate how literary analysis can be enriched by consideration of social history, publishing contexts, the literary marketplace, and the relationships between authors and editors.

Book Antislavery Discourse and Nineteenth Century American Literature

Download or read book Antislavery Discourse and Nineteenth Century American Literature written by J. Husband and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-02-01 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Antislavery Discourse and Nineteenth-Century American Literature examines the relationship between antislavery texts and emerging representations of "free labor" in mid-nineteenth-century America. Husband shows how the images of families split apart by slavery, circulated primarily by women leaders, proved to be the most powerful weapon in the antislavery cultural campaign and ultimately turned the nation against slavery. She also reveals the ways in which the sentimental narratives and icons that constituted the "family protection campaign" powerfully influenced Americans sense of the role of government, gender, and race in industrializing America. Chapters examine the writings of ardent abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, non-activist sympathizers, and those actively hostile to but deeply immersed in antislavery activism including Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Book The Revolution of 1861

    Book Details:
  • Author : Andre M. Fleche
  • Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
  • Release : 2012-03-01
  • ISBN : 0807869929
  • Pages : 224 pages

Download or read book The Revolution of 1861 written by Andre M. Fleche and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was no coincidence that the Civil War occurred during an age of violent political upheaval in Europe and the Americas. Grounding the causes and philosophies of the Civil War in an international context, Andre M. Fleche examines how questions of national self-determination, race, class, and labor the world over influenced American interpretations of the strains on the Union and the growing differences between North and South. Setting familiar events in an international context, Fleche enlarges our understanding of nationalism in the nineteenth century, with startling implications for our understanding of the Civil War. Confederates argued that European nationalist movements provided models for their efforts to establish a new nation-state, while Unionists stressed the role of the state in balancing order and liberty in a revolutionary age. Diplomats and politicians used such arguments to explain their causes to thinkers throughout the world. Fleche maintains that the fight over the future of republican government in America was also a battle over the meaning of revolution in the Atlantic world and, as such, can be fully understood only as a part of the world-historical context in which it was fought.

Book Prospects for the Study of American Literature

Download or read book Prospects for the Study of American Literature written by Richard Kopley and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1997-08 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What can there possibly be left to say about . . .? This common litany, resonant both in and outside of academia, reflects a growing sense that the number of subjects and authors appropriate for literary study is rapidly becoming exhausted. Take heart, admonishes Richard Kopley in this dynamic new anthology--for this is decidedly not the case. While generations of literary study have unquestionably covered much ground in analyzing canonical writers, many aspects of even the most well-known authors--both their lives and their work-- remain underexamined. Among the authors discussed are T. S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Faulkner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, Edith Wharton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry James, Willa Cather, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, and Mark Twain.

Book Transnationalism and American Literature

Download or read book Transnationalism and American Literature written by Colleen G. Boggs and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-05-26 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is transnationalism and how does it affect American literature? This book examines nineteenth century contexts of transnationalism, translation and American literature. The discussion of transnationalism largely revolves around the question of what role nationalism plays in the spaces and temporalities of the transatlantic. Boggs demonstrates that the assumption that American literature has become transnational only recently – that there is such a thing as an "era" of transnationalism – marks a blindness to the intrinsic transatlanticism of American literature.

Book Being American in Europe  1750   1860

Download or read book Being American in Europe 1750 1860 written by Daniel Kilbride and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2013-05-15 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans made their Grand Tour of Europe, what did they learn about themselves? While visiting Europe In 1844, Harry McCall of Philadelphia wrote to his cousin back home of his disappointment. He didn’t mind Paris, but he preferred the company of Americans to Parisians. Furthermore, he vowed to be “an American, heart and soul” wherever he traveled, but “particularly in England.” Why was he in Europe if he found it so distasteful? After all, travel in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was expensive, time consuming, and frequently uncomfortable. Being American in Europe, 1750–1860 tracks the adventures of American travelers while exploring large questions about how these experiences affected national identity. Daniel Kilbride searched the diaries, letters, published accounts, and guidebooks written between the late colonial period and the Civil War. His sources are written by people who, while prominent in their own time, are largely obscure today, making this account fresh and unusual. Exposure to the Old World generated varied and contradictory concepts of American nationality. Travelers often had diverse perspectives because of their region of origin, race, gender, and class. Americans in Europe struggled with the tension between defining the United States as a distinct civilization and situating it within a wider world. Kilbride describes how these travelers defined themselves while they observed the politics, economy, morals, manners, and customs of Europeans. He locates an increasingly articulate and refined sense of simplicity and virtue among these visitors and a gradual disappearance of their feelings of awe and inferiority.

Book The Routledge History of Nineteenth Century America

Download or read book The Routledge History of Nineteenth Century America written by Jonathan Daniel Wells and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-14 with total page 741 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge History of Nineteenth-Century America provides an important overview of the main themes within the study of the long nineteenth century. The book explores major currents of research over the past few decades to give an up-to-date synthesis of nineteenth-century history. It shows how the century defined much of our modern world, focusing on themes including: immigration, slavery and racism, women's rights, literature and culture, and urbanization. This collection reflects the state of the field and will be essential reading for all those interested in the development of the modern United States.