Download or read book Gender in American Literature and Culture written by Jean M. Lutes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-15 with total page 645 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gender in American Literature and Culture introduces readers to key developments in gender studies and American literary criticism. It offers nuanced readings of literary conventions and genres from early American writings to the present and moves beyond inflexible categories of masculinity and femininity that have reinforced misleading assumptions about public and private spaces, domesticity, individualism, and community. The book also demonstrates how rigid inscriptions of gender have perpetuated a legacy of violence and exclusion in the United States. Responding to a sense of 21st century cultural and political crisis, it illuminates the literary histories and cultural imaginaries that have set the stage for urgent contemporary debates.

Download or read book Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture written by Will Fisher and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-07-06 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyses the construction of gender through bodily elements and clothing in early modern England.

Download or read book Gender and the Self in Latin American Literature written by Emma Staniland and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores six texts from across Spanish America in which the coming-of-age story ('Bildungsroman') offers a critique of gendered selfhood as experienced in the region’s socio-cultural contexts. Looking at a range of novels from the late twentieth century, Staniland explores thematic concerns in terms of their role in elucidating a literary journey towards agency: that is, towards the articulation of a socially and personally viable female gendered identity, mindful of both the hegemonic discourses that constrain it, and the possibility of their deconstruction and reconfiguration. Myth, exile and the female body are the three central themes for understanding the personal, social and political aims of the Post-Boom women writers whose work is explored in this volume: Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, Ángeles Mastretta, Sylvia Molloy, Cristina Peri Rossi and Zoé Valdés. Their adoption, and adaptation, of an originally eighteenth-century and European literary genre is seen here to reshape the global canon as much as it works to reshape our understanding of gendered identities as socially constructed, culturally contingent, and open-ended.

Download or read book Images of Women in 20th Century American Literature and Culture written by Janina Corda and published by . This book was released on 2015-12-09 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Mark Twain Culture and Gender written by J. D. Stahl and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often regarded as the quintessential American author, Mark Twain in fact mined his knowledge and experience of Europe as assiduously as he did his adventures on the Mississippi and in the American West. In this challenging and original study, J. D. Stall looks closely at various Twain works with European settings and traces the manner in which the great writer redefined European notions of class into American concepts of gender, identity, and society. Stahl not only examines such famous writings as The Innocents Abroad, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and the "Mysterious Stranger" manuscripts but also treats a number of neglected works, including 1601, "A Memorable Midnight Experience", and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. In these writings, Stahl shows, Twain utilized the terms and symbols of European society and history to express his deepest concerns involving father–son relationships, the legitimation of parentage, female political and sexual power, the victimization of "good" women, and, ultimately, the desire to bridge or even destroy the barriers between the sexes. The "exoticism" of foreign culture—with its kings and queens, priests, and aristocrats—furnished Twain with some especially potent images of power, authority, and tradition. These images, Stahl argues, were "plastic material in Mark Twain's hands", enabling the writer to explore the uncertainties and ambiguities of gender in America: what it meant to be a man in Victorian America; what Twain thought it meant to be a woman; how men and women did, could, and should relate to each other. Stahl's approach yields a wealth of fresh insights into Twain's work. In discussing The Innocents Abroad, for example, he analyzes the emergence of the "Mark Twain" persona as part of a quest for cultural authority that often took the form of sexual role-playing. He also demonstrates that The Prince and the Pauper, even more strikingly than Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, embodies the writer's central myth of orphaned sons searching for surrogate fathers. His reading of A Connecticut Yankee is a tour de force, uncovering the psychological contradictions in Twain's political aspirations toward democratic equality. Stahl's book is an important contribution to literary scholarship, informed by psychology, gender study, cultural theory, and traditional Twain criticism. It confirms Mark Twain's debt to European culture even as it illuminates his re-envisioning of that culture in his own uniquely American way.

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture written by Lydia R. Cooper and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-26 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recently, the U.S. has seen a rise in misogynistic and race-based violence perpetrated by men expressing a sense of grievance, from "incels" to alt-right activists. Grounding sociological, historical, political, and economic analyses of masculinity through the lens of cultural narratives in many forms and expressions, The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture suggests that how we examine the stories that shape us in turn shapes our understanding of our current reality and gives us language for imagining better futures. Masculinity is more than a description of traits associated with particular performances of gender. It is more than a study of gender and social power. It is an examination of the ways in which gender affects our capacity to engage ethically with each other in complex human societies. This volume offers essays from a range of established, global experts in American masculinity as well as new and upcoming scholars in order to explore not just what masculinity once meant, has come to mean, and may mean in the future in the U.S.; it also articulates what is at stake with our conceptions of masculinity.

Download or read book Ethnicity and Gender Debates written by Tatiani G. Rapatzikou and published by . This book was released on 2020-02-07 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributions in this collection underline the vibrancy as well as complexity that characterizes the study of American literature and culture in the twenty-first century with regard to the exploration and understanding of ethnicity and gender. The book aims at contributing to the research already taking place within American Studies, while opening up the texts discussed to further literary and cultural evaluations and interpretations. America is viewed here not in isolation but as part of a fluctuating as well as geographically and culturally expansive reality as testified by the Asian, European, and American background of the volume contributors.

Download or read book Style Gender and Fantasy in Nineteenth Century American Women s Writing written by Dorri Beam and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-03 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this 2010 book, Dorri Beam presents an important contribution to nineteenth-century fiction by examining how and why a florid and sensuous style came to be adopted by so many authors. Discussing a diverse range of authors, including Margaret Fuller and Pauline Hopkins, Beam traces this style through a variety of literary endeavors and reconstructs the political rationale behind the writers' commitments to this form of prose. Beam provides both close readings of a number of familiar and unfamiliar works and an overarching account of the importance of this form of writing, suggesting new ways of looking at style as a medium through which gender can be signified and reshaped. Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth Century American Women's Writing redefines our understanding of women's relation to aesthetics and their contribution to both American literary romanticism and feminist reform. This illuminating account provides valuable new insights for scholars of American literature and women's writing.

Download or read book Domestic Subjects written by Beth H. Piatote and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-19 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amid the decline of U.S. military campaigns against Native Americans in the late nineteenth century, assimilation policy arose as the new front in the Indian Wars, with its weapons the deployment of culture and law, and its locus the American Indian home and family. In this groundbreaking interdisciplinary work, Piatote tracks the double movement of literature and law in the contest over the aims of settler-national domestication and the defense of tribal-national culture, political rights, and territory.

Download or read book Hospitality in American Literature and Culture written by Ana Maria M. Manzanas Calvo and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-11-03 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines hospitality in American immigrant literature and culture, situating this ancient virtue at the crossroads of space and border theory, and exploring the relationship among the intersecting themes of migration, citizenship, identity formation, and spatiality. Assessing the conditions, duration, and shifting roles of hosts and guests in the United States, the book concentrates on the ways the US administers protocols of belonging and non-belonging, and distinguishes between those who can feel at home from those who will always be outside the body politic, even if they were the original "hosts." The volume opens with a genealogy of hospitality through a focus on its sites, from its origins in the Bible, to its national and post-national renditions in contemporary American literature and culture. The authors explore recent representations of immigrant spatiality, from the space of the body in Spielberg’s The Terminal and Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things, to the different ways in which immigrants are incorporated into the United States in Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer, Karen T. Yamashita’s I Hotel, Junot Díaz’s "Invierno," and Ernesto Quiñonez’s Chango’s Fire, concluding with the spectrality of the immigrant body in George Saunders’ "The Semplica Girl Diaries." Timely and imperative in light of the legacies of colonialism, and the realities of modern-day globalization, this book will be of value to specialists in post-colonialism; American Studies; immigration, diaspora, and border studies; and critical race and gender studies for its innovative approaches to media and literary texts.

Download or read book Seeking the Region in American Literature and Culture written by Robert Jackson and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2005-10-10 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Regionalism often evokes provinciality and an affiliation with minor literary genres, but Robert Jackson shows that region is an integral part of American identity, providing grounding for major independent voices. Jackson offers a new critical model of region that contributes to literary and cultural study across a wide range of topics. He addresses American literature since the Civil War with particular attention to Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison. In advancing their own diverse aesthetic and social agendas -- reactionary and progressive, theological and secular, gender-based, race-based, and above all, dissident -- these writers, Jackson argues, articulate some of the most perceptive and innovative expressions of the American region in the literary history of the United States. According to Jackson, the region transcends both rigidly defined spatial categories -- the South of slavery, the North of freedom, the West of unlimited possibility -- and derivative cultural connotations of local color to reveal subtle and powerful insights. He provides a regional reading of Twain's greatest novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and a meaningful new interpretation of the work and its place in the American canon. He explores Faulkner's obsession with regional identity and places the Mississippian's work in problematic relation to the Depression-era Nashville Agrarian movement. O'Connor, searching for a critical vocabulary to confront mainstream American literature, religion, and gender, transforms the region from a hothouse of sentimentality into a sharp, deadly weapon in her short fiction. Morrison's brilliant appropriation of region enables her to fashion an aesthetic that is both race-conscious and endowed with revisionist agency; through the region she imagines a new grounding for American identity. Jackson illuminates the importance of rethinking long-established assumptions and demonstrates the vast potential of the region in critical considerations of American literature and culture. Even as he devotes significant attention to realism, modernism, southern literature, and African American literature, he speaks to a wide range of fields in American Cultural studies.

Download or read book The Routledge Introduction to American Women Writers written by Wendy Martin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-28 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Introduction to American Women Writers considers the important literary, historical, cultural, and intellectual contexts of American women authors from the seventeenth century to the present and provides readers with an analysis of current literary trends and debates in women’s literature. This accessible and engaging guide covers a variety of essential topics, such as: the transatlantic and transnational origins of American women's literary traditions the colonial period and the Puritans the early national period and the rhetoric of independence the nineteenth century and the Civil War the twentieth century, including modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Civil Rights era trends in twenty-first century American women's writing feminism, gender and sexuality, regionalism, domesticity, ethnicity, and multiculturalism. The volume examines the ways in which women writers from diverse racial, social, and cultural backgrounds have shaped American literary traditions, giving particular attention to the ways writers worked inside, outside, and around the strictures of their cultural and historical moments to create space for women’s voices and experiences as a vital part of American life. Addressing key contemporary and theoretical debates, this comprehensive overview presents a highly readable narrative of the development of literature by American women and offers a crucial range of perspectives on American literary history.

Download or read book Invalid Women written by Diane Price Herndl and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A fine example of politically engaged literary criticism.--Belles Lettres "Price Herndl's compelling individual readings of works by major writers (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Hawthorne, Wharton, James, Fitzgerald) and minor ones complement her examination of germ theory, psychic and somatic cures, medicine's place in the rise of capitalism, and the cultural forms in which men and women used the trope of female illness.--Choice "A rich and provocative study of female illnesses and their textual representations. . . . A major contribution to the feminist agenda of literature and medicine.--Medical Humanities Review "[An] important book.--Nineteenth-Century Literature "[This] sophisticated new study . . . brings the best current strategies of a thoroughly historicized feminist literary criticism to bear on textual representations of female invalidism.--Feminist Studies "An outstanding study of the representation of female invalidism in American culture and literature. There emerges from this work a striking sense of the changing meanings of female invalidism even as the conjunction of these terms has remained a constant in American cultural history. . . . Moreover, Invalid Women provides fascinating readings of female illness in a variety of texts.--Gillian Brown, University of Utah "A provocative study based on imaginative historical research and very fine close readings. The book provides a useful American complement to Helena Michie's The Flesh Made Word and Margaret Homans's Bearing the World. It should prove enlightening and otherwise useful not just to scholars of American literature, but also to those engaged in American studies, feminist criticism and theory, women's studies, the sociology of medicine and illness, and the history of science and medicine.--Cynthia S. Jordan, Indiana University

Download or read book Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture written by Sarah N. Roth and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-21 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades leading to the Civil War, popular conceptions of African American men shifted dramatically. The savage slave featured in 1830s' novels and stories gave way by the 1850s to the less-threatening humble black martyr. This radical reshaping of black masculinity in American culture occurred at the same time that the reading and writing of popular narratives were emerging as largely feminine enterprises. In a society where women wielded little official power, white female authors exalted white femininity, using narrative forms such as autobiographies, novels, short stories, visual images, and plays, by stressing differences that made white women appear superior to male slaves. This book argues that white women, as creators and consumers of popular culture media, played a pivotal role in the demasculinization of black men during the antebellum period, and consequently had a vital impact on the political landscape of antebellum and Civil War-era America through their powerful influence on popular culture.

Download or read book Female Physicians in American Literature written by Margaret Jay Jessee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-28 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Female Physicians in American Literature traces the woman physician character throughout her varying depictions in 19th-century literature, from her appearance in sensational fiction as an evil abortionist to her more well-known idyllic, feminine presence in novels of realism and regionalism. "Murderess," "hag," "She-Devil," "the instrument of the very vilest crime known in the annals of hell"—these are just a few descriptions of women abortionists in popular 19th-century sensational fiction. In novels of regionalism, however, she is often depicted as moral, feminine, and self-sacrificing. This dichotomy, Jessee argues, reveals two opposing literary approaches to registering the national fears of all that both women and abortion evoke: the terrifying threats to white, masculine, Anglo-American male supremacy.

Download or read book Facing the Abyss written by George Hutchinson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-23 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mythologized as the era of the “good war” and the “Greatest Generation,” the 1940s are frequently understood as a more heroic, uncomplicated time in American history. Yet just below the surface, a sense of dread, alienation, and the haunting specter of radical evil permeated American art and literature. Writers returned home from World War II and gave form to their disorienting experiences of violence and cruelty. They probed the darkness that the war opened up and confronted bigotry, existential guilt, ecological concerns, and fear about the nature and survival of the human race. In Facing the Abyss, George Hutchinson offers readings of individual works and the larger intellectual and cultural scene to reveal the 1940s as a period of profound and influential accomplishment. Facing the Abyss examines the relation of aesthetics to politics, the idea of universalism, and the connections among authors across racial, ethnic, and gender divisions. Modernist and avant-garde styles were absorbed into popular culture as writers and artists turned away from social realism to emphasize the process of artistic creation. Hutchinson explores a range of important writers, from Saul Bellow and Mary McCarthy to Richard Wright and James Baldwin. African American and Jewish novelists critiqued racism and anti-Semitism, women writers pushed back on the misogyny unleashed during the war, and authors such as Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams reflected a new openness in the depiction of homosexuality. The decade also witnessed an awakening of American environmental and ecological consciousness. Hutchinson argues that despite the individualized experiences depicted in these works, a common belief in art’s ability to communicate the universal in particulars united the most important works of literature and art during the 1940s. Hutchinson’s capacious view of American literary and cultural history masterfully weaves together a wide range of creative and intellectual expression into a sweeping new narrative of this pivotal decade.

Download or read book Women on the Edge written by Corinne H. Dale and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.