Download or read book From Warm Center to Ragged Edge written by Jon Lauck and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2017-06 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the half-century after the Civil War, intellectuals and politicians assumed the Midwest to be the font and heart of American culture. Despite the persistence of strong currents of midwestern regionalism during the 1920s and 1930s, the region went into eclipse during the post–World War II era. In the apt language of Minnesota’s F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Midwest slid from being the “warm center” of the republic to its “ragged edge.” This book explains the factors that triggered the demise of the Midwest’s regionalist energies, from anti-midwestern machinations in the literary world and the inability of midwestern writers to break through the cultural politics of the era to the growing dominance of a coastal, urban culture. These developments paved the way for the proliferation of images of the Midwest as flyover country, the Rust Belt, a staid and decaying region. Yet Lauck urges readers to recognize persisting and evolving forms of midwestern identity and to resist the forces that squelch the nation’s interior voices.
Download or read book From Warm Center to Ragged Edge written by Jon K. Lauck and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2017-06-01 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the half-century after the Civil War, intellectuals and politicians assumed the Midwest to be the font and heart of American culture. Despite the persistence of strong currents of midwestern regionalism during the 1920s and 1930s, the region went into eclipse during the post–World War II era. In the apt language of Minnesota’s F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Midwest slid from being the “warm center” of the republic to its “ragged edge.” This book explains the factors that triggered the demise of the Midwest’s regionalist energies, from anti-midwestern machinations in the literary world and the inability of midwestern writers to break through the cultural politics of the era to the growing dominance of a coastal, urban culture. These developments paved the way for the proliferation of images of the Midwest as flyover country, the Rust Belt, a staid and decaying region. Yet Lauck urges readers to recognize persisting and evolving forms of midwestern identity and to resist the forces that squelch the nation’s interior voices.
Download or read book Spoon River America written by Jason Stacy and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Main Street to Stranger Things, how poetry changed our idea of small town life A literary and cultural milestone, Spoon River Anthology captured an idea of the rural Midwest that became a bedrock myth of life in small-town America. Jason Stacy places the book within the atmosphere of its time and follows its progress as the poetry took root and thrived. Published by Edgar Lee Masters in 1915, Spoon River Anthology won praise from modernists while becoming an ongoing touchstone for American popular culture. Stacy charts the ways readers embraced, debated, and reshaped Masters's work in literary controversies and culture war skirmishes; in films and other media that over time saw the small town as idyllic then conflicted then surreal; and as the source of three archetypes—populist, elite, and exile—that endure across the landscape of American culture in the twenty-first century. A wide-ranging reconsideration of a literary landmark, Spoon River America tells the story of how a Midwesterner's poetry helped change a nation's conception of itself.
Download or read book Amos Oz s Two Pens written by Arie M. Dubnov and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-02-28 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hebrew novelist and political essayist, Amoz Oz (1939-2018), arguably Israel’s leading intellectual, was fond of describing himself as using two different pens - the first used to write works of prose and fiction, and the other to criticize the government and advocate for a political change. This volume revisits the two pens parable. It brings together scholars from various disciplines who assess Amos Oz's dual role in Israeli culture and society as an immensely popular novelist and a leading public intellectual. Next to offering an intellectual portrait, the chapters in this book highlight some of Oz's seminal works, examine their reception, evaluate key political and literary debates he was involved in, as well as trace some of the connections between the two realms of his activity. This book is a fascinating read for students, researchers, and academics of Israeli politics, history, literature, and culture. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Israeli History and are accompanied by a new afterword by the Israeli novelist Lilah Nethanel.
Download or read book The Center of the World written by June Howard and published by Oxford Studies in American Lit. This book was released on 2018 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is a study of literary regionalism. It focuses on the fiction of the United States and considers the place of the genre in world literature. Regionalism is usually understood to be a literature bound to the local, but this study explores how regional writing shapes ways of imagining not only the neighborhood or the province, but also the nation, and ultimately the world. Its key premise is that thinking about place always entails imagining time. It analyzes how concepts crystallize across disciplines and in everyday discourse and proposes ways of revising American literary history and close readings of particular authors' work. It demonstrates, for example, the importance of the figure of the school-teacher and the one-room schoolhouse in local color and subsequent place-focused writing. Such representations embody the contested relation in modernity between localities and the knowledge they produce, and books that carry metropolitan and cosmopolitan learning. The volume discusses fiction from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, including works by Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton, Sarah Orne Jewett, Ernest Gaines, Wendell Berry, and Ursula LeGuin as well as romance novels and regional mysteries.
Download or read book The Great Gatsby written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2003-05-27 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The only edition of the beloved classic that is authorized by Fitzgerald’s family and from his lifelong publisher. This edition is the enduring original text, updated with the author’s own revisions, a foreword by his granddaughter, and with a new introduction by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. First published by Scribner in 1925, this quintessential novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.
Download or read book The Conservative Heartland written by Jon K. Lauck and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2020-04-17 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of the 2016 presidential election there was widespread shock that the Midwest, the Democrats’ so-called blue wall, had been so effectively breached by Donald Trump. But the blue wall, as The Conservative Heartland makes clear, was never quite as secure as so many observers assumed. A deep look at the Midwest’s history of conservative politics, this timely volume reveals how conservative victories in state houses, legislatures, and national elections in the early twenty-first century, far from coming out of nowhere, in fact had extensive roots across decades of political organization in the region. Focusing on nine states, from Iowa and the Dakotas to Indiana and Ohio, the essays in this collection detail the rise of midwestern conservatism after World War II—a trend that coincided with the transformation of the prewar Republican Party into the New Right. This transformation, the authors contend, involved the Midwest and the Sunbelt states. Through the lenses of race, class, gender, and sexuality, their essays explore the development of midwestern conservative politics in light of deindustrialization, environmentalism, second wave feminism, mass incarceration, privatization, and debates over same-sex marriage and abortion, among other issues. Together these essays map the region’s complex patchwork of viable rural and urban areas, variously subject to a wide array of conflicting interests and concerns; the perspective they provide, at once broad and in-depth, offers unique historical insight into the Midwest’s political complexity—and its status as the last real competitive battleground in presidential elections.
Download or read book North Country written by Jon K. Lauck and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2023-05-04 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Travel north from the upper Midwest’s metropolises, and before long you’re “Up North”—a region that’s hard to define but unmistakable to any resident or tourist. Crops give way to forests, mines (or their remains) mark the landscape, and lakes multiply, becoming ever clearer until you reach the vastness of the Great Lakes. How to characterize this region, as distinct from the agrarian Midwest, is the question North Country seeks to answer, as a congenial group of scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals explores the distinctive landscape, culture, and history that define the northern margins of the American Midwest. From the glacial past to the present day, these essays range across the histories of the Dakota and Ojibwe people, colonial imperial rivalries and immigration, and conflicts between the economic imperatives of resource extraction and the stewardship of nature. The book also considers literary treatments of the area—and arguably makes its own contributions to that literature, as some of the authors search for the North Country through personal essays, while others highlight individuals who are identified with the area, like Sigurd Olson, John Barlow Martin, and Russell Kirk. From the fur trade to tourism, fisheries to supper clubs, Finnish settlers to Native treaty rights, the nature of the North Country emerges here in all its variety and particularity: as clearly distinct from the greater Midwest as it is part of the American heartland.
Download or read book Finding a New Midwestern History written by Jon K. Lauck and published by University of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2018-11-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In comparison to such regions as the South, the far West, and New England, the Midwest and its culture have been neglected both by scholars and by the popular press. Historians as well as literary and art critics tend not to examine the Midwest in depth in their academic work. And in the popular imagination, the Midwest has never really ascended to the level of the proud, literary South; the cultured, democratic Northeast; or the hip, innovative West Coast. Finding a New Midwestern History revives and identifies anew the Midwest as a field of study by promoting a diversity of viewpoints and lending legitimacy to a more in-depth, rigorous scholarly assessment of a large region of the United States that has largely been overlooked by scholars. The essays discuss facets of midwestern life worth examining more deeply, including history, religion, geography, art, race, culture, and politics, and are written by well-known scholars in the field such as Michael Allen, Jon Butler, and Nicole Etcheson.
Download or read book The Sower and the Seer written by Joseph Hogan and published by Wisconsin Historical Society. This book was released on 2021-02-17 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of twenty-two essays, a product of recent revivals of interest in both Midwestern history and intellectual history, argues for the contributions of interior thinkers and ideas in forming an American identity. The Midwest has been characterized as a fertile seedbed for the germination of great thinkers, but a wasteland for their further growth. The Sower and the Seer reveals that representation to be false. In fact, the region has sustained many innovative minds and been the locus of extraordinary intellectualism. It has also been the site of shifting interpretations—to some a frontier, to others a colonized space, a breadbasket, a crossroads, a heartland. As agrarian reformed (and Michigander) Liberty Hyde Bailey expressed in his 1916 poem “Sower and Seer,” the Midwestern landscape has given rise to significant visionaries, just as their knowledge has nourished and shaped the region. The essays gathered for this collection examine individual thinkers, writers, and leaders, as well as movements and ideas that shaped the Midwest, including rural school consolidation, women’s literary societies, Progressive-era urban planning, and Midwestern radical liberalism. While disparate in subject and style, these essays taken together establish the irrefutable significance of the intellectual history of the American Midwest.
Download or read book Kansas History written by and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Midwestern Ascendancy in American Writing written by Ronald Weber and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a half-century - from Edward Eggleston's pioneering novel The Hoosier Schoolmaster in 1871 through the dazzling early work of Hart Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway in the 1920s - Midwestern literature was at the center of American writing. In The Midwestern Ascendancy in American Writing, Ronald Weber illuminates the sense of lost promise that gives rise to the elegiac note struck in many Midwestern works; he also addresses the deeply divided feelings about the region revealed in the contrary desires to abandon and to celebrate. The period of Midwestern cultural ascendancy was a time of tremendous social and technological change. Midwestern writing was a reflection of these societal changes; it was American literature.
Download or read book The Plea written by Patricia L. Bryan and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2022-07-21 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2023 Midwest Book Awards in Nonfiction - History, Regional, winner On a moonlit night in 1889, Iowa farmer John Elkins and his young wife, Hattie, were brutally murdered in their bed. Eight days later, their son, eleven-year-old Wesley Elkins, was arrested and charged with murder. The community reeled with shock by both the gruesome details of the homicides and the knowledge of the accused perpetrator—a small, quiet boy weighing just 75 pounds. Accessible and fast-moving, The Plea delivers a complete, complex, and nuanced narrative of this horrific crime, while shedding light on the legal, social, and political environment of Iowa and the country in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Download or read book The American Midwest in Film and Literature written by Adam R. Ochonicky and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical overview of the evolution, contestation, and fragmentation of the Midwest’s symbolic (and often contradictory) meanings in American culture. How do works from film and literature—Sister Carrie, Native Son, Meet Me in St. Louis, Halloween, and A History of Violence, for example—imagine, reify, and reproduce Midwestern identity? And what are the repercussions of such regional narratives and images circulating in American culture? In The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism, Adam R. Ochonicky provides a critical overview of the evolution, contestation, and fragmentation of the Midwest’s symbolic and often contradictory meanings. Using the frontier writings of Frederick Jackson Turner as a starting point, this book establishes a succession of Midwestern filmic and literary texts stretching from the late-19th century through the beginning of the 21st century and argues that the manifold properties of nostalgia have continually transformed popular understandings and ideological uses of the Midwest’s place-identity. Ochonicky identifies three primary modes of nostalgia at play across a set of textual objects: the projection of nostalgia onto physical landscapes and into the cultural sphere (nostalgic spatiality); nostalgia as a cultural force that regulates behaviors, identities, and appearances (nostalgic violence); and the progressive potential of nostalgia to generate an acknowledgment and possible rectification of ways in which the flawed past negatively affects the present (nostalgic atonement). While developing these new conceptions of nostalgia, Ochonicky reveals how an under-examined area of regional study has received critical attention throughout the histories of American film and literature, as well as in related materials and discourses. From the closing of the Western frontier to the polarized political and cultural climate of the 21st century, this book demonstrates how film and literature have been and continue to be vital forums for illuminating the complex interplay of regionalism and nostalgia. “Ochonicky presents an important reading of how nostalgia shapes the Midwest in the American imagination as a place of identity and violence. Past and present slip in this compelling and well-researched approach to the workings of contemporary culture.” —Vera Dika, author of Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film: The Use of Nostalgia “By centering the concept of region, Adam Ochonicky provides an insightful and refreshing reading of American popular culture. In texts ranging from Richard Wright’s Native Son to John Carpenter’s Halloween, Ochonicky demonstrates the complex terrain of the Midwest in our cultural imaginary and the diverse memories and meanings we project upon it.” —Kendall R. Phillips, author of A Place of Darkness: The Rhetoric of Horror in Early American Cinema, Syracuse University
Download or read book Willa Cather written by Kelsey Squire and published by Literary Criticism in Perspect. This book was released on 2020 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A contextualizing overview of the polarized critical reception of Willa Cather, one of the pre-eminent US authors of the twentieth-century.
Download or read book Reconsidering Regions in an Era of New Nationalism written by Alex Finkelstein and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Regions connect and divide us even as global economies, weather, and germs batter us. Historians, literary scholars, and social scientists use region to ground and challenge ideas about national belonging. In Reconsidering Regions in an Era of New Nationalism Alexander Finkelstein and Anne F. Hyde have assembled leading scholars of regionalism to discuss the relationship of region to nation. The contributors explore how historical forces have changed regional associations and how regional associations have changed culture and history. The themes of culture, space, and institutions organize this volume: contributors historicize how race and racial thinking have evolved as a major force to define region and nation over time; the essays raise questions about the stability and validity of "canonical regions" in U.S. history to find new complexity in how these blocs form and how they understand themselves; and they focus on historicist and conjunctural trends and how institutions and ordinary people shape regional identities through politics and cultural change throughout history. Challenging ideas about both national belonging and local association, the contributors emphasize how regional analysis deepens understanding of migration, race, borders, infrastructure, climate, and Native sovereignty. Alexander Finkelstein teaches at Western Colorado University. He has published articles with the Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive Era and Southern California Quarterly. Anne F. Hyde teaches at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800-1860 (Nebraska, 2011), winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History.
Download or read book Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest 1870 1920 written by Sara Egge and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2018-02-15 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2019 Gita Chaudhuri Prize Winner of the 2019 Benjamin F. Shambaugh Award Historian Sara Egge offers critical insights into the woman suffrage movement by exploring how it emerged in small Midwestern communities--in Clay County, Iowa; Lyon County, Minnesota; and Yankton County, South Dakota. Examining this grassroots activism offers a new approach that uncovers the sophisticated ways Midwestern suffragists understood citizenship as obligation. By investigating civic responsibility, Egge reorients scholarship on woman suffrage and brings attention to the Midwest, a region overlooked by most historians of the movement. In doing so, she sheds new light onto the ways suffragists rejuvenated the cause in the twentieth century.
