Download or read book Bret Harte written by Gary Scharnhorst and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bret Harte was the best-known and highest paid writer in America in the early 1870s, yet his vexed attempts to earn a living by his pen led to the failure of his marriage and, in 1878, his departure for Europe. Gary Scharnhorst’s biography of Harte traces the growing commercial appeal of western fiction and drama on both sides of the Atlantic during the Gilded Age, a development in which Harte played a crucial role. Harte’s pioneering use of California local color in such stories as "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" challenged genteel assumptions about western writing and helped open eastern papers to contributions by Mark Twain and others. The popularity of Bret Harte’s writings was driven largely by a literary market that his western stories helped create. The first Harte biography in nearly seventy years to be written entirely from primary sources, this book documents Harte’s personal relationships and, in addition, his negotiations with various publishers, agents, and theatrical producers as he exploited popular interest in the American West.
Download or read book The American Literary West written by Richard W. Etulain and published by . This book was released on 1980-01-01 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Literary West written by Thomas Jefferson Lyon and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1999 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With more than forty selections, including essays, short stories, poetry, excerpts from novels and diaries, and a complete play, this authoritative and adventuresome collection shows why the West has occupied such a prominent place in the national consciousness, and reveals that western writers may currently be mapping out a significant development in American thought.
Download or read book Updating the Literary West written by and published by TCU Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 1072 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Western writers," says Thomas J. Lyon in his epilogue to Updating the Literary West, "have grown up with the frontier myth but now find themselves in the early stages of creating a new western myth." The editors of the Literary History of the American West (TCU Press, 1987) hoped that the first volume would begin, not conclude, their exploration of the West's literary heritage. Out of this hope comes Updating the Literary West, a comprehensive reference anthology including essays by over one hundred scholars. A selected bibliography is included with each piece. In the ten years since publication of LHAW, western writing has developed a significantly larger presence in the national literary stream. A variety of cultural viewpoints have developed, along with new tactics for literary study. New authors have risen to prominence, and the range of subjects has changed and widened. Updating the Literary West looks at topics ranging from western classics to cowboys and Cadillacs and considers children's literature, ethnicity, environmental writing, gender issues and other topics in which change has been rapid since publication of LHAW. This volume again affirms the West's literary legitimacy--status hard earned by the Western Literary Association--and the lasting place of popular western writing as part of the growing and changing literary--and American--experience. An excellent reference for a wide range of readers and an invaluable resource for scholars and libraries. Selected list of contributors: James Maguire Fred Erisman Susan J. Rosowski Gerald Haslam Tom Pilkington A. Carl Bredahl Richard Slotkin John G. Cawelti Robert F. Gish Ann Ronald Mick McAllister
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Literature of the American West written by Steven Frye and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion provides a comprehensive introduction to the literature of the American West, one of the most vibrant and diverse literary traditions.
Download or read book Marriage Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West written by William R. Handley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-08-15 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West, William R. Handley examines literary interpretations of the Western American past. Handley argues that although scholarship provides a narrative of western history that counters optimistic story of frontier individualism by focusing on the victims of conquest, twentieth-century American fiction tells a different story of intra-ethnic violence surrounding marriages and families. He examines works of historiography,as well as writing by Zane Grey, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner and Joan Didion among others, to argue that these works highlight white Americans' anxiety about what happens to American 'character' when domestic enemies such as Indians and Mormon polygamists, against whom the nation had defined itself in the nineteenth century, no longer threaten its homes. Handley explains that once its enemies are gone, imperialism brings violence home in retrospective narratives that allegorise national pasts and futures through intimate relationships.
Download or read book A Contested West written by and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Zora Neale Hurston American Literary Culture written by Margaret Genevieve West and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Genevieve West examines the cultural history of Zora Neale Hurston’s writing and the reception of her work, in an attempt to explain why Hurston died in obscure poverty only to be reclaimed as an important Harlem Renaissance writer decades after her death. Unlike other books on Hurston, this study focuses on how Hurston was marketed and reviewed during her career and how literary scholars reappraised her after her death. While her publisher's approach to marketing Hurston as an African American fiction writer and folklorist increased her popularity among the general reading public, her fellow Harlem Renaissance authors often excoriated her as an exploiter of African American culture and a propagator of black stereotypes. Eventually, the criticism outweighed the popularity, and her writing fell out of fashion. It was only after critics reconsidered her work in the 1960s and 1970s that she eventually regained her status as one of the best writers of her generation. No other book has focused on this aspect of Hurston's career, nor has any book so systematically used marketing materials and reviews to track Hurston's literary reputation. As a result, West's study will provide a new perspective on Hurston and on the ways that the politics of race, class, and gender impact canon formation in American literary culture. This study is based on numerous interviews, short fiction previously undocumented in Hurston scholarship, an innovative analysis of advertisements and dust jackets, examinations of letters by and about Hurston, and the examination of historical/literary contexts, including the Harlem Renaissance, the protest movement, the assimilationist movement, the Black Arts movement, and the rise of black feminist thought.
Download or read book Unsettling the Literary West written by Nathaniel Lewis and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The test of western literature has invariably been Is it real? Is it accurate? Authentic? The result is a standard anything but literary, as Nathaniel Lewis observes in this ambitious work, a wholesale rethinking of the critical terms and contexts?and thus of the very nature?of western writing. ø Why is western writing virtually missing from the American literary canon but a frequent success in the marketplace? The skewed status of western literature, Lewis contends, can be directly attributed to the strategies of the region?s writers, and these strategies depend consistently on the claim of authenticity. A perusal of western American authorship reveals how these writers effectively present themselves as accurate and reliable recorders of real places, histories, and cultures?but not as stylists or inventors. The imaginative qualities of this literature are thus obscured in the name of authentic reproduction. Through a study of a set of western authors and their relationships to literary and cultural history, Lewis offers a reconsideration of the deceptive and often undervalued history of western American literature. ø With unequivocal admiration for the literature under scrutiny, Lewis exposes the potential for startling new readings once western writing is freed from its insistence on a questionable authenticity. His book sets out a broader system of inquiry that points writers and critics of western literature in the direction of a new and truly sustaining literary tradition.
Download or read book A History of Western American Literature written by Susan Kollin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-11 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American West is a complex region that has inspired generations of writers and artists. Often portrayed as a quintessential landscape that symbolizes promise and progress for a developing nation, the American West is also a diverse space that has experienced conflicting and competing hopes and expectations. While it is frequently imagined as a place enabling dreams of new beginnings for settler communities, it is likewise home to long-standing indigenous populations as well as many other ethnic and racial groups who have often produced different visions of the land. This History encompasses the intricacy of Western American literature by exploring myriad genres and cultural movements, from ecocriticism, settler colonial studies and transnational theory, to race, ethnic, gender and sexuality studies. Written by a host of leading historians and literary critics, this book offers readers insight into the West as a site that sustains canonical and emerging authors alike, and as a region that exceeds national boundaries in addressing long-standing global concerns and developments.
Download or read book American Authors and the Literary Marketplace Since 1900 written by James L. W. West and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of professional authorship in the US during the 20th century. West (English, Pennsylvania State U.) describes the changing professional situation faced by writers of fiction and poetry. He includes discussions of authorship, publishing, book distribution, the trade editor, the literary agent, the magazine market, subsidiary rights, and the blockbuster mentality. He deals with both well-known and lesser-known literary figures, but always with the "public" author, the serious artist intent on reaching a large audience and making a living from writing. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Writing the Goodlife written by Priscilla Solis Ybarra and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2016-05-12 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Western Literature Association’s 2017 Thomas J. Lyon Book Award in Western American Literary and Cultural Studies Mexican American literature brings a much-needed approach to the increasingly urgent challenges of climate change and environmental injustice. Although current environmental studies work to develop new concepts, Writing the Goodlife looks to long-established traditions of thought that have existed in Mexican American literary history for the past century and a half. During that time period, Mexican American writing consistently shifts the focus from the environmentally destructive settler values of individualism, domination, and excess toward the more beneficial refrains of community, non-possessiveness, and humility. The decolonial approaches found in these writings provide rich examples of mutually respectful relations between humans and nature, an approach that Priscilla Solis Ybarra calls “goodlife” writing. Goodlife writing has existed for at least the past century, Ybarra contends, but Chicana/o literary history’s emphasis on justice and civil rights eclipsed this tradition and hidden it from the general public’s view. Likewise, in ecocriticism, the voices of people of color most often appear in deliberations about environmental justice. The quiet power of goodlife writing certainly challenges injustice, to be sure, but it also brings to light the decolonial environmentalism heretofore obscured in both Chicana/o literary history and environmental literary studies. Ybarra’s book takes on two of today’s most discussed topics—the worsening environmental crisis and the rising Latino population in the United States—and puts them in literary-historical context from the U.S.-Mexico War up to today’s controversial policies regarding climate change, immigration, and ethnic studies. This book uncovers 150 years’ worth of Mexican American and Chicana/o knowledge and practices that inspire hope in the face of some of today’s biggest challenges.
Download or read book Exploring the American Literary West written by David Río Raigadas and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The American Adam written by R.W.B. Lewis and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-09-04 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intellectual history is viewed in this book as a series of "great conversations"—dramatic dialogues in which a culture's spokesmen wrestle with the leading questions of their times. In nineteenth-century America the great argument centered about De Crèvecoeur's "new man," the American, an innocent Adam in a bright new world dissociating himself from the historic past. Mr. Lewis reveals this vital preoccupation as a pervasive, transforming ingredient of the American mind, illuminating history and theology as well as art, shaping the consciousness of lesser thinkers as fully as it shaped the giants of the age. He traces the Adamic theme in the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, and others, and in an Epilogue he exposes their continuing spirit in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, J. D. Salinger, and Saul Bellow.
Download or read book True West written by William R. Handley and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2007-05-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In no other region of the United States has the notion of authenticity played such an important yet elusive role as it has in the West. Though pervasive in literature,øpopular culture, and history, assumptions about western authenticity have not received adequate critical attention. Given the ongoing economic and social transformations in this vast region, the persistent nostalgia and desire for the ?real? authentic West suggest regional and national identities at odds with themselves. True West explores the concept of authenticity as it is used to invent, test, advertise, and read the West. The fifteen essays collected here apply contemporary critical and cultural theory to western literary history, Native American literature and identities, the visual West, and the imagining of place. Ranging geographically from the Canadian Prairies to Buena Park?s Entertainment Corridor in Southern California, and chronologically from early tourist narratives to contemporary environmental writing, True West challenges many assumptions we make about western writing and opens the door to an important new chapter in western literary history and cultural criticism.
Download or read book When We Arrive written by and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most readers and critics view Mexican American writing as a subset of American literatureÑor at best as a stream running parallel to the main literary current. JosŽ Aranda now reexamines American literary history from the perspective of Chicano/a studies to show that Mexican Americans have had a key role in the literary output of the United States for one hundred fifty years. In this bold new look at the American canon, Aranda weaves the threads of Mexican American literature into the broader tapestry of Anglo American writing, especially its Puritan origins, by pointing out common ties that bind the two traditions: narratives of persecution, of immigration, and of communal crises, alongside chronicles of the promise of America. Examining texts ranging from Mar’a Amparo Ruiz de Burton's 1872 critique of the Civil War, Who Would Have Thought It?, through the contemporary autobiographies of Richard Rodriguez and Cherr’e Moraga, he surveys Mexican American history, politics, and literature, locating his analyses within the context of Chicano/a cultural criticism of the last four decades. When We Arrive integrates Early American Studies and Chicano/a Studies into a comparative cultural framework by using the Puritan connection to shed new light on dominant images of Chicano/a narrative, such as Aztl‡n and the borderlands. Aranda explores the influence of a nationalized Puritan ethos on nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers of Mexican descent, particularly upon constructions of ethnic identity and aesthetic values. He then frames the rise of contemporary Chicano/a literature within a critical body of work produced from the 1930s through the 1950s, one that combines a Puritan myth of origins with a literary history in which American literature is heralded as the product and producer of social and political dissent. Aranda's work is a virtual sourcebook of historical figures, texts, and ideas that revitalizes both Chicano/a studies and American literary history. By showing how a comparative study of two genres can produce a more integrated literary history for the United States, When We Arrive enables critics and readers alike to see Mexican American literature as part of a broader tradition and establishes for its writers a more deserving place in the American literary imagination.
Download or read book The neglected West contemporary approaches to Western American literature written by and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
