Download or read book The Fabrication of American Literature written by Lara Langer Cohen and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-11-29 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary histories typically celebrate the antebellum period as marking the triumphant emergence of American literature. But the period's readers and writers tell a different story: they derided literature as a fraud, an imposture, and a humbug, and they likened it to inflated currency, land bubbles, and quack medicine. Excavating a rich archive of magazine fiction, verse satires, comic almanacs, false slave narratives, minstrel song sheets, and early literary criticism, and revisiting such familiar figures as Edgar Allan Poe, Davy Crockett, Fanny Fern, and Herman Melville, Lara Langer Cohen uncovers the controversies over literary fraudulence that plagued these years and uses them to offer an ambitious rethinking of the antebellum print explosion. She traces the checkered fortunes of American literature from the rise of literary nationalism, which was beset by accusations of puffery, to the conversion of fraudulence from a national dilemma into a sorting mechanism that produced new racial, regional, and gender identities. Yet she also shows that even as fraudulence became a sign of marginality, some authors managed to turn their dubious reputations to account, making a virtue of their counterfeit status. This forgotten history, Cohen argues, presents a dramatically altered picture of American literature's role in antebellum culture, one in which its authority is far from assured, and its failures matter as much as its achievements.
Download or read book The Fabrication of America written by Inger Hunnerup Dalsgaard and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting 1834 1853 written by Meredith L. McGill and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2007-04-30 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The antebellum period has long been identified with the belated emergence of a truly national literature. And yet, as Meredith L. McGill argues, a mass market for books in this period was built and sustained through what we would call rampant literary piracy: a national literature developed not despite but because of the systematic copying of foreign works. Restoring a political dimension to accounts of the economic grounds of antebellum literature, McGill unfolds the legal arguments and political struggles that produced an American "culture of reprinting" and held it in place for two crucial decades. In this culture of reprinting, the circulation of print outstripped authorial and editorial control. McGill examines the workings of literary culture within this market, shifting her gaze from first and authorized editions to reprints and piracies, from the form of the book to the intersection of book and periodical publishing, and from a national literature to an internally divided and transatlantic literary marketplace. Through readings of the work of Dickens, Poe, and Hawthorne, McGill seeks both to analyze how changes in the conditions of publication influenced literary form and to measure what was lost as literary markets became centralized and literary culture became stratified in the early 1850s. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 delineates a distinctive literary culture that was regional in articulation and transnational in scope, while questioning the grounds of the startlingly recent but nonetheless powerful equation of the national interest with the extension of authors' rights.
Download or read book Where is American Literature written by Caroline F. Levander and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-16 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where is American Literature? offers a spirited and compelling argument for rethinking the way we view American literature in relation to the nation while powerfully demonstrating why it continues to matter in a global age. A refreshing and accessible investigation into the various locations - linguistic, geographical, virtual, ideological - where American writing is produced and consumed Takes a highly original approach by viewing US literature spatially rather than chronologically or thematically, retuning our understanding of the subject The book offers a vital intervention in current debates over the impact of digital technologies on the production and reception of literature, ensuring that the field remains lively and dynamic Invites readers to reconsider the subject by questioning current perspectives on, and approaches to, US literature, offering a range of fresh perspectives on familiar texts and topics
Download or read book Playing in the Dark written by Toni Morrison and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-07-24 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race—and promises to change the way we read American literature—from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison "reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." Her brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. Written with the artistic vision that has earned the Nobel Prize-winning author a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark is an invaluable read for avid Morrison admirers as well as students, critics, and scholars of American literature.
Download or read book American Literature in Transition 1820 1860 Volume 2 written by Justine S. Murison and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-23 with total page 765 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in American Literature in Transition, 1820-1860 offer a new approach to the antebellum era, one that frames the age not merely as the precursor to the Civil War but as indispensable for understanding present crises around such issues as race, imperialism, climate change, and the role of literature in American society. The essays make visible and usable the period's fecund imagined futures, futures that certainly included disunion but not only disunion. Tracing the historical contexts, literary forms and formats, global coordinates, and present reverberations of antebellum literature and culture, the essays in this volume build on existing scholarship while indicating exciting new avenues for research and teaching. Taken together, the essays in this volume make this era's literature relevant for a new generation of students and scholars.
Download or read book The American Counterfeit written by Mary McAleer Balkun and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2006-01-04 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fakery, authenticity, and identity in American literature and culture at the turn of the 20th century Focusing on texts written between 1880 and 1930, Mary McAleer Balkun explores the concept of the “counterfeit,” both in terms of material goods and invented identities, and the ways that the acquisition of objects came to define individuals in American culture and literature. Counterfeiting is, in one sense, about the creation of something that appears authentic—an invented self, a museum display, a forged work of art. But the counterfeit can also be a means by which the authentic is measured, thereby creating our conception of the true or real. When counterfeiting is applied to individual identities, it fosters fluidity in social boundaries and the games of social climbing and passing that have come to be representative of American culture: the Horatio Alger story, the con man or huckster, the social climber, the ethnically ambiguous. Balkun provides new readings of traditional texts such as The Great Gatsby, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The House of Mirth, as well as readings of less-studied texts, such as Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days and Nella Larsen’s Passing. In each of these texts, Balkun locates the presence of manufactured identities and counterfeit figures, demonstrating that where authenticity and consumerism intersect, the self becomes but another commodity to be promoted, sold, and eventually consumed.
Download or read book American Literature written by Cleanth Brooks and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 1973 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Sketch the Tale and the Beginnings of American Literature written by Lydia G. Fash and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accounts of the rise of American literature often start in the 1850s with a cluster of "great American novels"—Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But these great works did not spring fully formed from the heads of their creators. All three relied on conventions of short fiction built up during the "culture of beginnings," the three decades following the War of 1812 when public figures glorified the American past and called for a patriotic national literature. Decentering the novel as the favored form of early nineteenth-century national literature, Lydia Fash repositions the sketch and the tale at the center of accounts of American literary history, revealing how cultural forces shaped short fiction that was subsequently mined for these celebrated midcentury novels and for the first novel published by an African American. In the shorter works of writers such as Washington Irving, Catharine Sedgwick, Edgar Allan Poe, and Lydia Maria Child, among others, the aesthetic of brevity enabled the beginning idea of a story to take the outsized importance fitted to the culture of beginnings. Fash argues that these short forms, with their ethnic exclusions and narrative innovations, coached readers on how to think about the United States’ past and the nature of narrative time itself. Combining history, print history, and literary criticism, this book treats short fiction as a vital site for debate over what it meant to be American, thereby offering a new account of the birth of a self-consciously national literary tradition.
Download or read book Fab written by Neil Gershenfeld and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2008-07-31 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if you could someday put the manufacturing power of an automobile plant on your desktop? It may sound far-fetched-but then, thirty years ago, the notion of "personal computers" in every home sounded like science fiction. According to Neil Gershenfeld, the renowned MIT scientist and inventor, the next big thing is personal fabrication -the ability to design and produce your own products, in your own home, with a machine that combines consumer electronics with industrial tools. Personal fabricators (PF's) are about to revolutionize the world just as personal computers did a generation ago. PF's will bring the programmability of the digital world to the rest of the world, by being able to make almost anything-including new personal fabricators. In FAB , Gershenfeld describes how personal fabrication is possible today, and how it is meeting local needs with locally developed solutions. He and his colleagues have created "fab labs" around the world, which, in his words, can be interpreted to mean "a lab for fabrication, or simply a fabulous laboratory." Using the machines in one of these labs, children in inner-city Boston have made saleable jewelry from scrap material. Villagers in India used their lab to develop devices for monitoring food safety and agricultural engine efficiency. Herders in the Lyngen Alps of northern Norway are developing wireless networks and animal tags so that their data can be as nomadic as their animals. And students at MIT have made everything from a defensive dress that protects its wearer's personal space to an alarm clock that must be wrestled into silence. These experiments are the vanguard of a new science and a new era-an era of "post-digital literacy" in which we will be as familiar with digital fabrication as we are with the of information processing. In this groundbreaking book, the scientist pioneering the revolution in personal fabrication reveals exactly what is being done, and how. The technology of FAB will allow people to create the objects they desire, and the kind of world they want to live in.
Download or read book Timelines of American Literature written by Cody Marrs and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is our definition of "modernismif we imagine it stretching from 1865 to 1965 instead of 1890 to 1945? How does the captivity narrative change when we consider it as a contemporary, not just a "colonial,genre? What does the course of American literature look like set against the backdrop of federal denials of Native sovereignty or housing policies that exacerbated segregation? Filled with challenges to scholars, inspirations for teachers (anchored by an appendix of syllabi), and entry points for students, Timelines of American Literature gathers some of the most exciting new work in the field to showcase the revelatory potential of fresh thinking about how we organize the literary past.
Download or read book The Fabrication of Louis XIV written by Peter Burke and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Louis XIV was a man like any other, but the money and attention lavished on his public image by the French government transformed him into a godlike figure. In this engrossing book, an internationally respected historian gives an account of contemporary representations of Louis XIV and shows how the making of the royal image illuminates the relationship between art and power. Images of Louis XIV included hundreds of oil paintings and engravings, three-hundred-odd medals struck to commemorate the major events of the reign, sculptures, and bronzes, as well as plays, ballets (in which the king himself sometimes appeared on stage), operas, odes, sermons, official newspapers and histories, fireworks, fountains, and tapestries. Drawing on an analysis of these representations as well as on surviving documentary sources, Peter Burke shows the conscious attempt to "invent" the image of the king and reveals how the supervision of the royal image was entrusted to a commitee, the so-called small academy. This book is not only a fascinating chronological study of the mechanics of the image-making of a king over the course of a seventy-year reign but is also an investigation into the genre of cultural construction. Burke discusses the element of propaganda implicit in image-making, the manipulation of seventeenth-century media of communication (oral, visual, and textual) and their codes (literary and artistic), and the intended audience and its response. He concludes by comparing and contrasting Louis's public image with that of other rulers ranging from Augustus to contemporary American presidents.
Download or read book Still the New World written by Philip Fisher and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative new way of accounting for the spirit of literary tradition, Still the New World makes a persuasive argument against the reduction of literature to identity questions of race, gender, and ethnicity.
Download or read book Beyond The Borders written by Deborah L. Madsen and published by London : Pluto Press. This book was released on 2003-08-20 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges the boundaries of postcolonial theory. Focusing on American literature, it examines how America's own imperial history has shaped the literature that has emerged from America, from Native American, Latino, Black and Asian-American writers. They contrast this with postcolonial literature from countries whose history has been shaped by American colonialism, from Canada, Central America and the Caribbean to Hawaii, Indonesia and Vietnam.It explores questions about national identity and multiculturalism: why, for instance, is a Native writer categorised within 'American literature' if writing on one side of the border, but as 'Canadian' and 'postcolonial' if writing on the other?This is a challenging collection that raises questions not only about the boundaries of postcolonial theory, but also about ethnicity and multiculturalism, and the impact of immigration and assimilation.
Download or read book Industry and the Creative Mind written by Sandra Tomc and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2012-06-19 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Industry and the Creative Mind takes a radically new look at the figure of the eccentric, alienated writer in American literature and entertainment from 1790 to 1860. Traditional scholarship takes for granted that the eccentric writer, modeled by such Romantic beings as Lord Byron and brought to life for American audiences by the gloomy person of Edgar Allan Poe, was a figure of rebellion against the excesses of modern commercial culture and industrial life. By contrast, Industry and the Creative Mind argues that in the United States myths of writerly moodiness, alienation, and irresponsibility predated the development of a commercial arts and entertainment industry and instead of forming a site of rebellion from this industry formed a bedrock for its development. Looking at the careers of a number of early American writers---Joseph Dennie, Nathaniel Parker Willis, Edgar Allan Poe, Fanny Fern, as well as a host of now forgotten souls who peopled the twilight worlds of hack fiction and industrial literature---this book traces the way in which early nineteenth-century American arts and entertainment systems incorporated writerly eccentricity in their "logical" economic workings, placing the mad, rebellious writer at the center of the industry's productivity and success.
Download or read book The Liberation of American Literature written by Victor Francis Calverton and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Inexpressible Privacy written by Milette Shamir and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2008-06-18 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few concepts are more widely discussed or more passionately invoked in American public culture than the concept of privacy. Milette Shamir traces the peculiarly American obsession with privacy back to the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when our modern understanding of the concept took hold.
