Download or read book The Frontier Roots of American Realism written by Gretchen Martin and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the antebellum South, the «plain folk» maintained social norms, ideals of honor, justice, gender, and liberty that were significantly distinct from town and planter gentility, and the humorists of the Old South captured this important distinction. Southwest humor flourished from the 1830s through the Civil War and this book provides a thorough investigation of the unique and innovative contributions of these humorists to the field of American literary realism, such as use of vernacular authenticity, complex character portraits, and the narrative technique of disclosure. Thus, when the Southwest humorists «tell about the South, » they provide an endlessly entertaining and realistic representation of the vast complexities of the antebellum South and illustrate that the roots of literary realism were sown and nurtured on the southwestern frontier.
Download or read book Southern Frontier Humor written by Ed Piacentino and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2013-05-06 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its inception in the early 1830s, southern frontier humor (also known as the humor of the Old Southwest) has had enduring appeal. The onset of the new millennium precipitated an impressive rejuvenation of scholarly interest. Southern Frontier Humor: New Approaches represents the next step in this revival, providing a series of essays with fresh perspectives and contexts. First, the book shows the importance of Henry Junius Nott, a virtually unknown and forgotten writer who mined many of the principal subjects, themes, tropes, and character types associated with southern frontier humor, followed by an essay addressing how this humor genre and its ideological impact helped to stimulate a national cultural revolution. Several essays focus on the genre's legacy to the post-Civil War era, exploring intersections between southern frontier humor and southern local color writers--Joel Chandler Harris, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Sherwood Bonner. Mark Twain's African American dialect piece "A True Story," though employing some of the conventions of southern frontier humor, is reexamined as a transitional text, showing his shift to broader concerns, particularly in race portraiture. Essays also examine the evolution of the trickster from the Jack Tales to Hooper's Simon Suggs to similar mountebanks in novels of John Kennedy Toole, Mark Childress, and Clyde Edgerton and transnational contexts, the latter exploring parallels between southern frontier humor and the Jamaican Anansi tales. Finally, the genre is situated contextually, using contemporary critical discourses, which are applied to G. W. Harris's Sut Lovingood and to various frontier hunting stories.
Download or read book Downwardly Mobile written by Andrew Lawson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-19 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the unstable economy of the nineteenth-century, few Americans could feel secure. Paper money made values less tangible, while a series of financial manias, panics, and depressions clouded everyday life with uncertainty and risk. In this groundbreaking study, Andrew Lawson traces the origins of American realism to a new structure of feeling: the desire of embattled and aspiring middle class for a more solid and durable reality. The story begins with New England authors Susan Warner and Rose Terry Cooke, whose gentry-class families became insolvent in the wake of the 1837 Panic, and moves to the western frontier, where the early careers of Rebecca Harding Davis and William Dean Howells were shaped by a constant struggle for social position and financial security. We see how the pull of downward social mobility affected even the outwardly successful, bourgeois family of Henry James in New York, while the drought-stricken wheat fields of Iowa and South Dakota produced the most militant American realist, Hamlin Garland. For these writers, realism offered to stabilize an uncertain world by capturing it with a new sharpness and accuracy. It also revealed a new cast of social actors-factory workers, slaves, farm laborers, the disabled, and the homeless, all victims of an unregulated market. Combining economic history and literary analysis to powerful effect, Downwardly Mobile shows how the fluctuating fortunes of the American middle class forced the emergence of a new kind of literature, while posing difficult political choices about how the middle class might remedy its precarious condition.
Download or read book A Literary History of Mississippi written by Lorie Watkins and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2017-05-31 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With contributions by: Ted Atkinson, Robert Bray, Patsy J. Daniels, David A. Davis, Taylor Hagood, Lisa Hinrichsen, Suzanne Marrs, Greg O�Brien, Ted Ownby, Ed Piacentino, Claude Pruitt, Thomas J. Richardson, Donald M. Shaffer, Theresa M. Towner, Terrence T. Tucker, Daniel Cross Turner, Lorie Watkins, and Ellen Weinauer Mississippi is a study in contradictions. One of the richest states when the Civil War began, it emerged as possibly the poorest and remains so today. Geographically diverse, the state encompasses ten distinct landform regions. As people traverse these, they discover varying accents and divergent outlooks. They find pockets of inexhaustible wealth within widespread, grinding poverty. Yet the most illiterate, disadvantaged state has produced arguably the nation�s richest literary legacy. Why Mississippi? What does it mean to write in a state of such extremes? To write of racial and economic relations so contradictory and fraught as to defy any logic? Willie Morris often quoted William Faulkner as saying, �To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.� What Faulkner (or more likely Morris) posits is that Mississippi is not separate from the world. The country�s fascination with Mississippi persists because the place embodies the very conflicts that plague the nation. This volume examines indigenous literature, Southwest humor, slave narratives, and the literature of the Civil War. Essays on modern and contemporary writers and the state�s changing role in southern studies look at more recent literary trends, while essays on key individual authors offer more information on luminaries including Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams, and Margaret Walker. Finally, essays on autobiography, poetry, drama, and history span the creative breadth of Mississippi�s literature. Written by literary scholars closely connected to the state, the volume offers a history suitable for all readers interested in learning more about Mississippi�s great literary tradition.
Download or read book The Word on the Streets written by Brooks E. Hefner and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2017-10-27 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the hard-boiled detective stories of Dashiell Hammett to the novels of Claude McKay, The Word on the Streets examines a group of writers whose experimentation with the vernacular argues for a rethinking of American modernism—one that cuts across traditional boundaries of class, race, and ethnicity. The dawn of the modernist era witnessed a transformation of popular writing that demonstrated an experimental practice rooted in the language of the streets. Emerging alongside more recognized strands of literary modernism, the vernacular modernism these writers exhibited lays bare the aesthetic experiments inherent in American working-class and ethnic language, forging an alternative pathway for American modernist practice. Brooks Hefner shows how writers across a variety of popular genres—from Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner to humorist Anita Loos and ethnic memoirist Anzia Yezierska—employed street slang to mount their own critique of genteel realism and its classist emphasis on dialect hierarchies, the result of which was a form of American experimental writing that resonated powerfully across the American cultural landscape of the 1910s and 1920s.
Download or read book Twain s Omissions written by Gretchen Martin and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-07-18 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Twain utilized a unique literary device throughout his fiction by routinely omitting or suspending crucial information in terms of plot, character portraits, descriptive events, chronology, and other aspects from his texts. Twain often introduces characters with very few details regarding their personal histories; while, other information is withheld in terms of the narrative’s chronology or not addressed at all, thus producing gaps in the narrative. For example, Twain does not provide any significant information about the mothers of two of his most well-known characters, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, nor does he provide detailed information regarding Jim’s personal history, such as how and when he became Miss Watson’s property or specific information regarding the personal history of his relationship with his wife. There are also often substantial chronological gaps in the pace Twain utilizes. There are omissions of several years at a time in Pudd’nhead Wilson and No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, which also create gaps in the plot, particularly regarding information Twain refers to that occurred during the chronological gap, such as an account of the wedding between Morgan and Sandy in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Identifying and exploring gaps in the context of Twain’s fiction yields, as these essays demonstrate, overlooked or under-explored information, ironically generated out of these narrative omissions. The six essays included in this collection explore these issues in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, Pudd’nhead Wilson, “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg,” and Twain’s masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The authors draw from a wide range of theoretical and interpretive perspectives, ranging from reader-response theory to historical and culture studies.
Download or read book Humor and Satire on Contemporary Television written by Silas Kaine Ezell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-26 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines contemporary American animated humor, focusing on popular animated television shows in order to explore the ways in which they engage with American culture and history, employing a peculiarly American way of using humor to discuss important cultural issues. With attention to the work of American humorists, such as the Southwest humorists, Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, and Kurt Vonnegut, and the question of the extent to which modern animated satire shares the qualities of earlier humor, particularly the use of setting, the carnivalesque, collective memory, racial humor, and irony, Humor and Satire on Contemporary Television concentrates on a particular strand of American humor: the use of satire to expose the gap between the American ideal and the American experience. Taking up the notion of ’The Great American Joke’, the author examines the discursive humor of programmes such as The Simpsons, South Park , Family Guy , King of the Hill, Daria, American Dad!, The Boondocks, The PJs and Futurama . A study of how animated television programmes offer a new discourse on a very traditional strain of American humor, this book will appeal to scholars and students of popular culture, television and media studies, American literature and visual studies, and contemporary humor and satire.
Download or read book American Realism written by Gerry Souter and published by Parkstone International. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urban realism, snow-covered streets of New York, boxing matches, children on the banks of a river, the painters of the Ash Can School preferred realistic images. Their paintings are a true hymn to noise and sensations. This unconventional movement enabled the birth of a true national artistic identity which broke free from the establishment. The Ash Can School resolutely promoted the affirmation of the modernist current of American art. Edward Hopper, who was a student of Robert Henri, embraced the principles of this movement and brought them to another level.
Download or read book White Liberal Identity Literary Pedagogy and Classic American Realism written by Phillip Barrish and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: White Liberal Identity, Literary Pedagogy, and Classic American Realism brings literary works from the turn of the last century face to face with some of the dilemmas and paradoxes that currently define white liberal identity in the United States. Phillip Barrish develops fresh analytic and pedagogical tools for probing contemporary white liberalism, while also offering new critical insights and classroom approaches to American literary realism. New ground is broken by using bold close analysis of works by canonical American realist writers such as Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, and Kate Chopin. These contexts include an affirmative-action court case, the liberal arts classroom, and the "war on drugs," as well as current debates about the United States' role on the international scene. Invoking a methodology that he calls "critical presentism," Barrish's book offers a fresh response to that perennial classroom question, often posed most forcefully by students committed to progressive political agendas: why devote so much time and effort to detailed analyses of canonical American literature? This book makes specific contributions not only to American literary and cultural studies, but also to critical race theory, masculinity studies, and critical pedagogy. -- from back cover.
Download or read book The Frontier Experience and the American Dream written by David Mogen and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond the mountains that separated the English colonies from the Great Plains lay the frontier, which produced a set of images, attitudes, and assumptions that have shaped a peculiarly American literary heritage. The eighteen scholars represented here focus on the importance of frontier mythology to many American writers.
Download or read book Literary Research and the American Realism and Naturalism Period written by Linda L. Stein and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary Research and the American Realism and Naturalism Period: Strategies and Sources will help those interested in researching this era. Authors Linda L. Stein and Peter J. Lehu emphasize research methodology and outline the best practices for the research process, paying attention to the unique challenges inherent in conducting studies of national literature.
Download or read book The Frontier in American Literature written by Lucy Lockwood Hazard and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Faces of the Frontier written by Frank H. Goodyear (III) and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faces of the Frontier showcases more than 120 photographic portraits of leaders, statesmen, soldiers, laborers, activists, criminals, and others, all posed before the cameras that made their way to nearly every mining shanty-town and frontier outpost on the prairie. Drawing primarily on the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, this book depicts many of the people who helped transform the West between the end of the Mexican War and passage of the Indian Citizenship Act.
Download or read book Southern Frontier Humor written by Thomas Inge and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2010-05-12 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If, as some suggest, American literature began with Huckleberry Finn, then the humorists of the Old South surely helped us to shape that literature. Twain himself learned to write by reading the humorists’ work, and later writers were influenced by it. This book marks the first new collection of humor from that region published in fifteen years—and the first fresh selection of sketches and tales to appear in over forty years. Thomas Inge and Ed Piacentino bring their knowledge of and fondness for this genre to a collection that reflects the considerable body of scholarship that has been published on its major figures and the place of the movement in American literary history. They breathe new life into the subject, gathering a new selection of texts and adding Twain—the only major American author to contribute to and emerge from the movement—as well as several recently identified humorists. All of the major writers are represented, from Augustus Baldwin Longstreet to Thomas Bangs Thorpe, as well as a great many lesser-known figures like Hamilton C. Jones, Joseph M. Field, and John S. Robb. The anthology also includes several writers only recently discovered to be a part of the tradition, such as Joseph Gault, Christopher Mason Haile, James Edward Henry, and Marcus Lafayette Byrn, and features authors previously overlooked, such as William Gilmore Simms, Ham Jones, Orlando Benedict Mayer, and Adam Summer. Selections are timely, reflecting recent trends in literary history and criticism sensitive to issues of gender, race, and ethnicity. The editors have also taken pains to seek out first printings to avoid the kinds of textual corruptions that often occur in later versions of these sketches. Southern Frontier Humor offers students and general readers alike a broad perspective and new appreciation of this singular form of writing from the Old South—and provides some chuckles along the way.
Download or read book Brutes In Suits written by John Pettegrew and published by Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM. This book was released on 2007-07-16 with total page 667 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] vivid, massively researched history of ‘hyper-masculine’ sensibility . . . An instructive and provocative view of men’s dark side.” —Peter Filene, Men and Masculinities Are men truly predisposed to violence and aggression? Is it the biological fate of males to struggle for domination over women and vie against one another endlessly? These and related queries have long vexed philosophers, social scientists, and other students of human behavior. In Brutes in Suits, historian John Pettegrew examines theoretical writings and cultural traditions in the United States to find that, Darwinian arguments to the contrary, masculine aggression can be interpreted as a modern strategy for taking power. Drawing ideas from varied and at times seemingly contradictory sources, Pettegrew argues that traditionally held beliefs about masculinity developed largely through language and cultural habit—and that these same tools can be employed to break through the myth that brutishness is an inherently male trait. A major re-synthesis of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century manhood, Brutes in Suits develops ambitious lines of research into the social science of sexual difference and professional history’s celebration of rugged individualism; the hunting-and-killing genre of popular men’s literature; that master text of hypermasculinity: college football; military culture, war making, and finding pleasure in killing; and patriarchy, sexual jealousy, and the law. This timely assessment of the evolution of masculine culture will be welcomed and debated by social and intellectual historians for years to come. “Pettegrew’s book remains rigorous and passionate in its narration of the historic appeal as well as the immediate dangers of de-evolutionary masculinity.” —American Historical Review
Download or read book The Significance of the Frontier in American History written by Frederick Jackson Turner and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2008-08-07 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This hugely influential work marked a turning point in US history and culture, arguing that the nation’s expansion into the Great West was directly linked to its unique spirit: a rugged individualism forged at the juncture between civilization and wilderness, which – for better or worse – lies at the heart of American identity today. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves – and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives – and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.
Download or read book Journalism and Realism written by Thomas B. Connery and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2011-07-30 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A paradigm of actuality -- Searching for the real and actual -- Stirrings and roots: urban sketches and America's flaneur -- The storytellers -- Picturing the present -- Carving out the real -- Experiments in reality -- Documenting time and place.
