Download or read book Washington Irving s Critique of American Culture written by J. Woodrow McCree and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-06-24 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Washington Irving’s Critique of American Culture: Sketching a Vision of World Citizenship challenges long-standing views of Washington Irving. He has been portrayed as writing in the 18th century style of Addison and Goldsmith, without having much substance of his own. Irving has also been accused of being insufficiently American and adrift in an identity crisis. The author argues that Irving addressed the American cultural context very extensively—he was a writer of substance who articulated an ethic of world citizenship that was found in the philosophy of ancient Greek cynics and stoics. This ethic was united with a love of picturesque travel, which emphasized variety and texture in experience, resulting in an extraordinary affirmation of the value of cultural diversity in the new Republic. Irving was, in fact, a liminal figure straddling Romantic and neoclassical modes of writing and acting. The author draws attention to Irving’s success as a writer in the pictorial mode. Irving also expressed a critique of cultural loss and environmental destruction like that articulated by the artist Thomas Cole. The work embraces an interdisciplinary approach, where insights from philosophy, religion, art history, and social history shed light on an underestimated writer.
Download or read book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon Gent written by Washington Irving and published by . This book was released on 1822 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Original Knickerbocker written by Andrew Burstein and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2008-02-26 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Washington Irving-author, ambassador, Manhattanite, and international celebrity-has largely slipped from America's memory, and yet, his creations are still very well known. With a historian's eye for scope and significance, Andrew Burstein returns Irving to the context of his native nineteenth century where he was a major celebrity-both a colorful comic genius and the first name in our national literature. Though he gave his young nation such enduring tales as “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” he was far more than one of our nation's most outsized literary talents. Irving was an American original and a citizen of the world.
Download or read book Washington Irving written by Brian Jay Jones and published by Skyhorse Publishing Inc.. This book was released on 2011-11-15 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brian Jay Jones crafts a deft biography of the author of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip van Winkle”: quintessential New Yorker, presidential confidant, diplomat, lawyer, and fascinating charmer. The first American writer to make his pen his primary means of support, Washington Irving rocketed to fame at the age of twenty-six. In 1809 he published A History of New York under the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker, to great acclaim. The public’s appetite for all things Irving was insatiable; his name alone guaranteed sales. At the time, he was one of the most famous men in the world, a friend of Dickens, Hawthorne, and Longfellow, as well as Astor, van Buren, and Madison. But his sparkling public persona was only one side of this gentleman author. In brilliant, meticulous strokes, Brian Jay Jones renders Washington Irving in all his flawed splendor—someone who fretted about money and employment, suffered from writer’s block, and doggedly cultivated his reputation. Jones offers a very human portrait of the often contrasting public and private lives of this true American original.
Download or read book A Tour on the Prairies written by Washington Irving and published by London : J. Murray. This book was released on 1835 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Account of an expedition in Oct. and Nov. 1832 through a part of the unorganized Indian country now the state of Oklahoma.
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture written by Jared Gardner and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2012-05-15 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Countering assumptions about early American print culture and challenging our scholarly fixation on the novel, Jared Gardner reimagines the early American magazine as a rich literary culture that operated as a model for nation-building by celebrating editorship over authorship and serving as a virtual salon in which citizens were invited to share their different perspectives. The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture reexamines early magazines and their reach to show how magazine culture was multivocal and presented a porous distinction between author and reader, as opposed to novel culture, which imposed a one-sided authorial voice and restricted the agency of the reader.
Download or read book The Islamic Lineage of American Literary Culture written by Jeffrey Einboden and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uncovering Islam's formative impact on U.S. literary origins, this book traces the influence of Arabic and Persian literature in America, from the Revolution beginnings to Reconstruction. Focusing on informal engagements and intimate exchanges, Jeffrey Einboden excavates fresh witnesses to early American engagement with the Muslim world.
Download or read book The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus written by Washington Irving and published by . This book was released on 1841 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Law and Letters in American Culture written by Robert A. Ferguson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The role of religion in early American literature has been endlessly studied; the role of the law has been virtually ignored. Robert A. Ferguson's book seeks to correct this imbalance. With the Revolution, Ferguson demonstrates, the lawyer replaced the clergyman as the dominant intellectual force in the new nation. Lawyers wrote the first important plays, novels, and poems; as gentlemen of letters they controlled many of the journals and literary societies; and their education in the law led to a controlling aesthetic that shaped both the civic and the imaginative literature of the early republic. An awareness of this aesthetic enables us to see works as diverse as Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia and Irving's burlesque History of New York as unified texts, products of the legal mind of the time. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the great political orations were written by lawyers, and so too were the literary works of Trumbull, Tyler, Brackenridge, Charles Brockden Brown, William Cullen Bryant, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and a dozen other important writers. To recover the original meaning and context of these writings is to gain new understanding of a whole era of American culture. The nexus of law and letters persisted for more than a half-century. Ferguson explores a range of factors that contributed to its gradual dissolution: the yielding of neoclassicism to romanticism; the changing role of the writer; the shift in the lawyer's stance from generalist to specialist and from ideological spokesman to tactician of compromise; the onslaught of Jacksonian democracy and the problems of a country torn by sectional strife. At the same time, he demonstrates continuities with the American Renaissance. And in Abraham Lincoln he sees a memorable late flowering of the earlier tradition.
Download or read book Colonizing the Past written by Edward Watts and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-02-14 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the Revolution, Americans realized they lacked the common, deep, or meaningful history that might bind together their loose confederation of former colonies into a genuine nation. They had been conquerors yet colonials, now politically independent yet culturally subordinate to European history and traditions. To resolve these paradoxes, some early republic "historians" went so far as to reconstruct pre-Columbian, transatlantic adventures by white people that might be employed to assert their rights and ennoble their identities as Americans. In Colonizing the Past, Edward Watts labels this impulse "primordialism" and reveals its consistent presence over the span of nineteenth-century American print culture. In dozens of texts, Watts tracks episodes in which varying accounts of pre-Columbian whites attracted widespread attention: the Welsh Indians, the Lost Tribes of Israel, the white Mound Builders, and the Vikings, as well as two ancient Irish interventions. In each instance, public interest was ignited when representations of the group in question became enmeshed in concurrent conversations about the nation’s evolving identity and policies. Yet at every turn, counternarratives and public resistance challenged both the plausibility of the pre-Columbian whites and the colonialist symbolism that had been evoked to create a sense of American identity. By challenging the rhetoric of primordialism and empire building, dissenting writers from Washington Irving to Mark Twain exposed the crimes of conquest and white Americans’ marginality as ex-colonials.
Download or read book Imitation Nation written by Jason Richards and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2017-12-26 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did early Americans define themselves? The American exceptionalist perspective tells us that the young republic rejected Europeans, Native Americans, and African Americans in order to isolate a national culture and a white national identity. Imitativeness at this time was often seen as antithetical to self and national creation, but Jason Richards argues that imitation was in fact central to such creation. Imitation Nation shows how whites simultaneously imitated and therefore absorbed the cultures they so readily disavowed, as well as how Indians and blacks emulated the power and privilege of whiteness while they mocked and resisted white authority. By examining the republic’s foundational literature--including works by Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, and Martin Delany--Richards argues that the national desire for cultural uniqueness and racial purity was in constant conflict with the national need to imitate the racial and cultural other for self-definition. The book offers a new model for understanding the ways in which the nation’s identity and literature took shape during the early phases of the American republic.
Download or read book Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow written by Washington Irving and published by Orient Blackswan. This book was released on 1963 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A man who sleeps for twenty years in the Catskill Mountains wakes to a much-changed world.
Download or read book Washington Irving s Critique of American Culture written by J. Woodrow McCree and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2023-03-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Washington Irving's Critique of American Culture argues that Irving offers not only a critique of a culture losing rootedness, but also positive multi-cultural vision of world citizenship in the new Republic. American Romantic art contemporary to Irving sheds light on his critique and positive vision of what America could be.
Download or read book The National Uncanny written by Renée L. Bergland and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2000 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique look at Native American ghosts and US literature.
Download or read book The Legend of Sleepy Hollow written by Washington Irving and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-10-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the listless repose of the place, and the peculiar character of its inhabitants, who are descendants from the original Dutch settlers, this sequestered glen has long been known by name of Sleepy Hollow... A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere. Washington Irving
Download or read book The Island at the Center of the World written by Russell Shorto and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2005-04-12 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a riveting, groundbreaking narrative, Russell Shorto tells the story of New Netherland, the Dutch colony which pre-dated the Pilgrims and established ideals of tolerance and individual rights that shaped American history. "Astonishing . . . A book that will permanently alter the way we regard our collective past." --The New York Times When the British wrested New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664, the truth about its thriving, polyglot society began to disappear into myths about an island purchased for 24 dollars and a cartoonish peg-legged governor. But the story of the Dutch colony of New Netherland was merely lost, not destroyed: 12,000 pages of its records–recently declared a national treasure–are now being translated. Russell Shorto draws on this remarkable archive in The Island at the Center of the World, which has been hailed by The New York Times as “a book that will permanently alter the way we regard our collective past.” The Dutch colony pre-dated the “original” thirteen colonies, yet it seems strikingly familiar. Its capital was cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic, and its citizens valued free trade, individual rights, and religious freedom. Their champion was a progressive, young lawyer named Adriaen van der Donck, who emerges in these pages as a forgotten American patriot and whose political vision brought him into conflict with Peter Stuyvesant, the autocratic director of the Dutch colony. The struggle between these two strong-willed men laid the foundation for New York City and helped shape American culture. The Island at the Center of the World uncovers a lost world and offers a surprising new perspective on our own.
Download or read book American Skin written by Leon E. Wynter and published by Crown. This book was released on 2002 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Race has always been America’s first standard and central paradox. From the start, America based its politics on the principle of white supremacy, but it has always lived and dreamed of itself in color. The truth beneath the contradiction has finally emerged and led us to the threshold of a transformation of American identity as profound as slavery was defining. We live in a country where the “King of Pop” was born black and a leading rap M.C. is white, where salsa outsells ketchup and cosmetics firms advertise blond hair dye with black models. Whiteness is in steep decline as the primary measure of Americanness. The new, true American identity rising in its place is transracial, defined by shared cultural and consumer habits, not skin color or ethnicity. And this unprecedented redefinition of what “American” sounds, looks, and feels like is not being driven by the politics of protest or liberal multiculturalism but by a more basic American instinct: the profit motive. Smart marketers discovered that the inherent, subversive appeal of transracial American culture was the perfect boombox for breaking through the noise of a crowded marketplace: Nike and the NBA used unambiguous black style to create modern sports marketing; Pepsi validated Michael Jackson as a superstar while adding millions to its own bottom li≠ Hollywood turned a taboo into a lucrative cliché with black-white buddy films; Oprah Winfrey created the model for the ultimate individual corporate br∧ and Budweiser created a signature series of commercials built around four ordinary black men signaling something ineffably American with one word—“Wassup?” In the end, this is a hopeful but clear-eyed argument that while we fall short of true equality, we are opting to carry on that struggle together within a common American cultural skin. "There’s been a radical shift in the place of race and ethnicity in America. Near revolutionary developments in advertising, media, marketing, technology, and global trade have in the last two decades of the twentieth century nearly obliterated walls that have stood for generations between nonwhites and the image of the American dream. The mainstream, heretofore synonymous with what is considered average for whites, is now equally defined by the preferences, presence, and perspectives of people of color. The much-maligned melting pot, into which generations of European-American identities are said to have dissolved, is bubbling again, but on a higher flame; this time whiteness itself is finally being dissolved into a larger American identity. On its surface, this book tells the story of how and why big business turned up that flame, and a brief history of race and pop culture leading up to this watershed. But at its core American Skin is about the revolution that higher heat on American identity is bringing about: the end of ‘white’ America. This book begins, and my arguments and insights ultimately rest on, one premise and guiding belief about this country: We have always been, and will ever be, of one race—human—and of one culture—American." —From the Introduction
