Download or read book American Literature and the Dream written by Frederic I. Carpenter and published by . This book was released on 2013-10 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a new release of the original 1955 edition.
Download or read book The Dream of the Great American Novel written by Lawrence Buell and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-10 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of "the great American novel" continues to thrive almost as vigorously as in its nineteenth-century heyday, defying 150 years of attempts to dismiss it as amateurish or obsolete. In this landmark book, the first in many years to take in the whole sweep of national fiction, Lawrence Buell reanimates this supposedly antiquated idea, demonstrating that its history is a key to the dynamics of national literature and national identity itself. The dream of the G.A.N., as Henry James nicknamed it, crystallized soon after the Civil War. In fresh, in-depth readings of selected contenders from the 1850s onward in conversation with hundreds of other novels, Buell delineates four "scripts" for G.A.N. candidates. One, illustrated by The Scarlet Letter, is the adaptation of the novel's story-line by later writers, often in ways that are contrary to the original author's own design. Other aspirants, including The Great Gatsby and Invisible Man, engage the American Dream of remarkable transformation from humble origins. A third script, seen in Uncle Tom's Cabin and Beloved, is the family saga that grapples with racial and other social divisions. Finally,mega-novels from Moby-Dick to Gravity's Rainbow feature assemblages of characters who dramatize in microcosm the promise and pitfalls of democracy. The canvas of the great American novel is in constant motion, reflecting revolutions in fictional fashion, the changing face of authorship, and the inseparability of high culture from popular. As Buell reveals, the elusive G.A.N. showcases the myth of the United States as a nation perpetually under construction.
Download or read book Am rica s Dream written by Esmeralda Santiago and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: América Gonzalez is a hotel housekeeper on an island off the coast of Puerto Rico, cleaning up after wealthy foreigners who don't look her In the eye. Her alcoholic mother resents her; her married boyfriend, Correa, beats her; and their fourteen-year-old daughter thinks life would be better anywhere but with América. So when América is offered the chance to work as alive-in housekeeper and nanny for a family in Westchester County, New York, she takes it as a sign that a door to escape has been opened. Yet even as América revels in the comparative luxury of her new life, daring to care about a man other than Correa, she is faced with dramatic proof that no matter what she does, she can't get away from her past.
Download or read book American Literature and the Dream written by Frederic Ives Carpenter and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Humanities and the Dream of America written by Geoffrey Galt Harpham and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-02-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this bracing and original book, Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues that today’s humanities are an invention of the American academy in the years following World War II, when they were first conceived as an expression of American culture and an instrument of American national interests. The humanities portray a “dream of America” in two senses: they represent an aspiration of Americans since the first days of the Republic for a state so secure and prosperous that people could enjoy and appreciate culture for its own sake; and they embody in academic terms an idealized conception of the American national character. Although they are struggling to retain their status in America, the concept of the humanities has spread to other parts of the world and remains one of America's most distinctive and valuable contributions to higher education. The Humanities and the Dream of America explores a number of linked problems that have emerged in recent years: the role, at once inspiring and disturbing, played by philology in the formation of the humanities; the reasons for the humanities’ perpetual state of “crisis”; the shaping role of philanthropy in the humanities; and the new possibilities for literary study offered by the subject of pleasure. Framed by essays that draw on Harpham’s pedagogical experiences abroad and as a lecturer at the U.S. Air Force Academy, as well as his vantage as director of the National Humanities Center, this book provides an essential perspective on the history, ideology, and future of this important topic.
Download or read book Psychological Politics of the American Dream written by Lois Tyson and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While it is reasonable to assume that our national literature would offer a fertile field in which to explore the interaction between the ideological and psychological dimensions of American life, critics generally have kept these two domains separate, and the dominant model has consisted of an archaic notion of the individual in society.
Download or read book The American Dream written by Cal Jillson and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2016-11-18 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: these words have long represented the promise of America, a “shimmering vision of a fruitful country open to all who come, learn, work, save, invest, and play by the rules.” In 2004, Cal Jillson took stock of this vision and showed how the nation’s politicians deployed the American Dream, both in campaigns and governance, to hold the American people to their program. “Full of startling ideas that make sense,” NPR's senior correspondent Juan Williams remarked, Jillson's book offered the fullest exploration yet of the origins and evolution of the ideal that serves as the foundation of our national ethos and collective self-image. Nonetheless, in the dozen years since Pursuing the American Dream was published, the American Dream has fared poorly. The decline of social mobility and the rise of income inequality—to say nothing of the extraordinary social, political, and economic developments of the Bush and Obama presidencies—have convinced many that the American Dream is no more. This is the concern that Jillson addresses in his new book, The American Dream: In History, Politics, and Fiction, which juxtaposes the claims of political, social, and economic elite against the view of American life consistently offered in our national literature. Our great novelists, from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville to John Updike, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, and beyond highlight the limits and challenges of life—the difficulty if not impossibility of the dream—especially for racial, ethnic, and religious minorities as well as women. His book takes us through the changing meaning and reality of the American Dream, from the seventeenth century to the present day, revealing a distinct, sustained separation between literary and political elite. The American Dream, Jillson suggests, took shape early in our national experience and defined the nation throughout its growth and development, yet it has always been challenged, even rejected, in our most celebrated literature. This is no different in our day, when what we believe about the American Dream reveals as much about its limits as its possibilities.
Download or read book American Literature and the Dream written by Frederic I. Carpenter and published by . This book was released on 2013-10 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a new release of the original 1955 edition.
Download or read book An American Dream written by Norman Mailer and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2015-02-17 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this wild battering ram of a novel, which was originally published to vast controversy in 1965, Norman Mailer creates a character who might be a fictional precursor of the philosopher-killer he would later profile in The Executioner’s Song. As Stephen Rojack, a decorated war hero and former congressman who murders his wife in a fashionable New York City high-rise, runs amok through the city in which he was once a privileged citizen, Mailer peels away the layers of our social norms to reveal a world of pure appetite and relentless cruelty. One part Nietzsche, one part de Sade, and one part Charlie Parker, An American Dream grabs the reader by the throat and refuses to let go. Praise for An American Dream “Perhaps the only serious New York novel since The Great Gatsby.”—Joan Didion, National Review “A devil’s encyclopedia of our secret visions and desires . . . the expression of a devastatingly alive and original creative mind.”—Life “A work of fierce concentration . . . perfectly, and often brilliantly, realistic [with] a pattern of remarkable imaginative coherence and intensity.”—Harper’s “At once violent, educated, and cool . . . This is our history as Hawthorne might have written it.”—Commentary Praise for Norman Mailer “[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation.”—The New York Times “A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent.”—The New Yorker “Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure.”—The Washington Post “A devastatingly alive and original creative mind.”—Life “Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance.”—The New York Review of Books “The largest mind and imagination [in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book.”—Chicago Tribune “Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream.”—The Cincinnati Post
Download or read book Dreaming Up America written by Russell Banks and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With America ever under global scrutiny, Russell Banks contemplates the questions of our origins, values, heroes, conflicts, and contradictions. He writes with conversational ease and emotional insight, drawing on contemporary politics, literature, film, and his knowledge of American history.
Download or read book The American Dream Revisited written by Gary Sirak and published by Morgan James Publishing. This book was released on 2017-01-06 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: True stories that reveal why hard work and determination still count—and how the promise of America is still very much alive. The book is a collection of compelling stories from people that overcame a variety of adversities to achieve their American Dream. Featuring accounts of people facing a wide variety of challenges and coming from a wide variety of backgrounds, this book will turn skeptics into believers by way of everyday life examples. It instills inspiration and hope—reminding us that no matter the obstacles, this is still the land of opportunity.
Download or read book Americans and the California Dream 1850 1915 written by Kevin Starr and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1986-12-04 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining California's formative years, this innovative study seeks to discover the origins of the California dream and the social, psychological, and symbolic impact it has had not only on Californians but also on the rest of the country.
Download or read book Behold America written by Sarah Churchwell and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Smithsonian Magazine Best History Book of 2018 The unknown history of two ideas crucial to the struggle over what America stands for In Behold, America, Sarah Churchwell offers a surprising account of twentieth-century Americans' fierce battle for the nation's soul. It follows the stories of two phrases--the "American dream" and "America First"--that once embodied opposing visions for America. Starting as a Republican motto before becoming a hugely influential isolationist slogan during World War I, America First was always closely linked with authoritarianism and white supremacy. The American dream, meanwhile, initially represented a broad vision of democratic and economic equality. Churchwell traces these notions through the 1920s boom, the Depression, and the rise of fascism at home and abroad, laying bare the persistent appeal of demagoguery in America and showing us how it was resisted. At a time when many ask what America's future holds, Behold, America is a revelatory, unvarnished portrait of where we have been.
Download or read book American Dream American Nightmare written by Kathryn Hume and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2022-08-15 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this celebration of contemporary American fiction, Kathryn Hume explores how estrangement from America has shaped the fiction of a literary generation, which she calls the Generation of the Lost Dream. In breaking down the divisions among standard categories of race, religion, ethnicity, and gender, Hume identifies shared core concerns, values, and techniques among seemingly disparate and unconnected writers including T. Coraghessan Boyle, Ralph Ellison, Russell Banks, Gloria Naylor, Tim O'Brien, Maxine Hong Kingston, Walker Percy, N. Scott Momaday, John Updike, Toni Morrison, William Kennedy, Julia Alvarez, Thomas Pynchon, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Don DeLillo. Hume explores fictional treatments of the slippage in the immigrant experience between America's promise and its reality. She exposes the political link between contemporary stories of lost innocence and liberalism's inadequacies. She also invites us to look at the literary challenge to scientific materialism in various searches for a spiritual dimension in life. The expansive future promised by the American Dream has been replaced, Hume finds, by a sense of tarnished morality and a melancholy loss of faith in America's exceptionalism. American Dream, American Nightmare examines the differing critiques of America embedded in nearly a hundred novels and points to the source for recovery that appeals to many of the authors.
Download or read book The Long Dream written by Richard Wright and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the powerful tradition of Native Son, Richard Wright's last novel is a stirring story of racial prejudice in the South.
Download or read book Reclaiming the American Dream written by Richard C. Cornuelle and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book was the first to sketch the full dimensions of the nation's voluntary sector, give it a name (the independent sector), explain its unfamiliar metabolism, and imagine its enormous unused potential for defining the central problems of an industrial society accurately and acting on them effectively. Upon publication, George Gallup said the book has sparked "the most dramatic shift in American thinking since the New Deal."
Download or read book My Time Among the Whites written by Jennine Capó Crucet and published by Picador. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of Make Your Home Among Strangers, essays on being an “accidental” American—an incisive look at the edges of identity for a woman of color in a society centered on whiteness In this sharp and candid collection of essays, critically acclaimed writer and first-generation American Jennine Capó Crucet explores the condition of finding herself a stranger in the country where she was born. Raised in Miami and the daughter of Cuban refugees, Crucet examines the political and personal contours of American identity and the physical places where those contours find themselves smashed: be it a rodeo town in Nebraska, a university campus in upstate New York, or Disney World in Florida. Crucet illuminates how she came to see her exclusion from aspects of the theoretical American Dream, despite her family’s attempts to fit in with white American culture—beginning with their ill-fated plan to name her after the winner of the Miss America pageant. In prose that is both fearless and slyly humorous, My Time Among the Whites examines the sometimes hopeful, sometimes deeply flawed ways in which many Americans have learned to adapt, exist, and—in the face of all signals saying otherwise—perhaps even thrive in a country that never imagined them here.
