Download or read book Imagining New England written by Joseph A. Conforti and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-01-14 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Say "New England" and you likely conjure up an image in the mind of your listener: the snowy woods or stone wall of a Robert Frost poem, perhaps, or that quintessential icon of the region--the idyllic white village. Such images remind us that, as Joseph Conforti notes, a region is not just a territory on the ground. It is also a place in the imagination. This ambitious work investigates New England as a cultural invention, tracing the region's changing identity across more than three centuries. Incorporating insights from history, literature, art, material culture, and geography, it shows how succeeding generations of New Englanders created and broadcast a powerful collective identity for their region through narratives about its past. Whether these stories were told in the writings of Frost or Harriet Beecher Stowe, enacted in historical pageants or at colonial revival museums, or conveyed in the pages of a geography textbook or Yankee magazine, New Englanders used them to sustain their identity, revising them as needed to respond to the shifting regional landscape.

Download or read book Imagining America written by Alan M. Ball and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2004-09-09 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Imagining America, historian Alan M. Ball explores American influence in two newborn Russian states: the young Soviet Union and the modern Russian Republic. Ball deftly illustrates how in each era Russians have approached the United States with a conflicting mix of ideas—as a land to admire from afar, to shun at all costs, to emulate as quickly as possible, or to surpass on the way to a superior society. Drawing on a wide variety of sources including contemporary journals, newspapers, films, and popular songs, Ball traces the shifting Russian perceptions of American cultural, social, and political life. As he clearly demonstrates, throughout their history Russian imaginations featured a United States that political figures and intellectuals might embrace, exploit, or attack, but could not ignore.

Download or read book The Political Novel written by Stuart A. Scheingold and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-07-18 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars from a variety of academic disciplines have been drawn into exhaustive analyses of what went wrong in "the terrible 20th Century", as Winston Churchill dubbed it. In this book Stuart Scheingold adds political novels to those inquiries and argues that they make a distinctive and hitherto neglected contribution to the collective memory of the 20th Century. These fictional accounts are the work of some of the century's most celebrated novelists: Kafka, Heller, Boll, Grass, Vonnegut and others. As refracted through the literary imagination, the "terrible" 20th Century takes on new meaning that tends to elude historians and social scientists. Novelists peer into the shattered lives, the moral dilemmas, and the emotional chaos of the century, thus viewing a collective catastrophe through the everyday lives of victims, victimizers, temporizers, opportunists, true believers, and those who simply averted their eyes. In so doing, these novelists reveal, sometimes prophetically, the etiology of catastrophe, and both deepen our memory of the past and help us to think more clearly about the future.

Download or read book Imagining the Book written by Stephen Kelly and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2005 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributors discuss early printed books and manuscripts between the 14th and 16th centuries under the section headings of: 'Imagined compilers and editors', 'Imagined patrons and collectors', Imagined readings and readers' and 'Beyond the book: verbal and visual cultures'.

Download or read book Stranger Than We Can Imagine written by John Higgs and published by Signal. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The extraordinary story of the 20th century, as told from the furthest fringes of science, art and culture. For readers of Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. Before 1900, history was an account of great discoveries that actually made sense. People understand innovations like the steam engine, agriculture, or electricity. The twentieth century, by contrast, gave us quantum entanglement, cubism, relativity, psychedelics, postmodernism, chaos maths, and the Somme. This is the story of that confusing century as told through the ideas produced at the furthest fringes of our sciences, arts, and culture. Its cast includes well-known geniuses such as Albert Einstein, Francis Crick, and Pablo Picasso, lesser known geniuses like Edward Lorenz, Sergey Korolyov, or Shigeru Miyamoto, and infamous but influential ne'er-do-wells like Timothy Leary, Aleister Crowley and Keith Richards. In this company we take a tour through ideas as strange as general relativity, DNA, the subconscious, Gaia theory, and Dada. In this brilliantly written and original book, John Higgs explores, with great clarity and wit, the extremes of twentieth century thought, and in doing so shows how a world of empires became a world of individuals. You will never see the twentieth century in the same way again.

Download or read book The Decisionist Imagination written by Daniel Bessner and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2018-10-19 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades following World War II, the science of decision-making moved from the periphery to the center of transatlantic thought. The Decisionist Imagination explores how “decisionism” emerged from its origins in prewar political theory to become an object of intense social scientific inquiry in the new intellectual and institutional landscapes of the postwar era. By bringing together scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, this volume illuminates how theories of decision shaped numerous techno-scientific aspects of modern governance—helping to explain, in short, how we arrived at where we are today.

Download or read book Fiction Across Borders written by Shameem Black and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-12 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theorists of Orientalism and postcolonialism argue that novelists betray political and cultural anxieties when characterizing "the Other." Shameem Black takes a different stance. Turning a fresh eye toward several key contemporary novelists, she reveals how "border-crossing" fiction represents socially diverse groups without resorting to stereotype, idealization, or other forms of imaginative constraint. Focusing on the work of J. M. Coetzee, Amitav Ghosh, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ruth Ozeki, Charles Johnson, Gish Jen, and Rupa Bajwa, Black introduces an interpretative lens that captures the ways in which these authors envision an ethics of representing social difference. They not only offer sympathetic portrayals of the lives of others but also detail the processes of imagining social difference. Whether depicting the multilingual worlds of South and Southeast Asia, the exportation of American culture abroad, or the racial tension of postapartheid South Africa, these transcultural representations explore social and political hierarchies in constructive ways. Boldly confronting the orthodoxies of recent literary criticism, Fiction Across Borders builds upon such seminal works as Edward Said's Orientalism and offers a provocative new study of the late twentieth-century novel.

Download or read book Liberalism and the Postcolony written by Lisandro E. Claudio and published by NUS Press. This book was released on 2017-03-24 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Extricating liberalism from the haze of anti-modernist and anti-European caricature, this book traces the role of liberal philosophy in the building of a new nation. It examines the role of toleration, rights, and mediation in the postcolony. Through the biographies of four Filipino scholar-bureaucrats—Camilo Osias, Salvador Araneta, Carlos P. Romulo, and Salvador P. Lopez—Lisandro E. Claudio argues that liberal thought served as the grammar of Filipino democracy in the 20th century. By looking at various articulations of liberalism in pedagogy, international affairs, economics, and literature, Claudio not only narrates an obscured history of the Philippine state, he also argues for a new liberalism rooted in the postcolonial experience, a timely intervention considering current developments in politics in Southeast Asia.

Download or read book Thinking the Twentieth Century written by Tony Judt and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-02-02 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An intellectual feast, learned, lucid, challenging and accessible.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Ideas crackle” in this triumphant final book of Tony Judt, taking readers on “a wild ride through the ideological currents and shoals of 20th century thought.” (Los Angeles Times) The final book of the brilliant historian and indomitable public critic Tony Judt, Thinking the Twentieth Century maps the issues and concerns of a turbulent age on to a life of intellectual conflict and engagement. The twentieth century comes to life as an age of ideas—a time when, for good and for ill, the thoughts of the few reigned over the lives of the many. Judt presents the triumphs and the failures of prominent intellectuals, adeptly explaining both their ideas and the risks of their political commitments. Spanning an era with unprecedented clarity and insight, Thinking the Twentieth Century is a tour-de-force, a classic engagement of modern thought by one of the century’s most incisive thinkers. The exceptional nature of this work is evident in its very structure—a series of intimate conversations between Judt and his friend and fellow historian Timothy Snyder, grounded in the texts of the time and focused by the intensity of their vision. Judt's astounding eloquence and range are here on display as never before. Traversing the complexities of modern life with ease, he and Snyder revive both thoughts and thinkers, guiding us through the debates that made our world. As forgotten ideas are revisited and fashionable trends scrutinized, the shape of a century emerges. Judt and Snyder draw us deep into their analysis, making us feel that we too are part of the conversation. We become aware of the obligations of the present to the past, and the force of historical perspective and moral considerations in the critique and reform of society, then and now. In restoring and indeed exemplifying the best of intellectual life in the twentieth century, Thinking the Twentieth Century opens pathways to a moral life for the twenty-first. This is a book about the past, but it is also an argument for the kind of future we should strive for: Thinking the Twentieth Century is about the life of the mind—and the mindful life. Judt's book, Ill Fares the Land, republished in 2021 featuring a new preface by bestselling author of Between the World and Me and The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Download or read book Lies Passions and Illusions written by François Furet and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-09-29 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widely considered one of the leading historians of the French Revolution, Franc̦ois Furet was a maverick for his time, shining a critical light on the entrenched Marxist interpretations that prevailed during the mid-twentieth century. Lies, Passion, and Illusions is a fitting capstone to this celebrated author's oeuvre: a late-career conversation with the philosopher Paul Ricoeur on the twentieth century writ large. This conversation would be, sadly, Furet's last - he died while Ricoeur was completing his edits. Ricoeur did not want to publish his half without Furet's approval, so what remains is Furet's alone, an astonishingly cohesive meditation on the political passions of the twentieth century, a century of violence and turmoil, of unprecendented welath and progress, in which history advanced, for better or worse, in quantum leaps. Whether new to Furet or deeply familiar with his work, readers will find thought-provoking assessments on every page, a deeply moving look back at one of the most tumultuous periods of history and how we might learn and look forward from it. -- from dust jacket.

Download or read book Art of Imagination written by Frank M. Robinson and published by Collectors Press, Inc.. This book was released on 2002 with total page 1 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Imagining the Twentieth Century written by Charles Cameron Stewart and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagining the Twentieth Century pairs stirring black-and-white photographs with thoughtful essays that profile the changes of the past century: in politics and technology but also in childhood and old age, in leisure and work, and in the environment and the movies. Evolving out of a collaboration among seventeen historians at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, this book explores ordinary moments, political events, and cultural fashions around the world, often in very personal terms.

Download or read book Confessional Writing and the Twentieth Century Literary Imagination written by M. Sherwin and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-10-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Far from being a unique, defining property of the confessional poets, confessionalism is a central trope of American literature. This book examines confessional writing not as a private, apolitical art, but rather one that demonstrates an engagement with the politics of literary influence, of gender relations, and of American culture more broadly.

Download or read book The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth Century French Literature written by Alison James and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-03 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature identifies a documentary impulse in French literature that emerges at the end of the nineteenth century and culminates in a proliferation of factual writings in the twenty-first. Focusing on the period bookended by these two moments, it highlights the enduring concern with factual reference in texts that engage either with current events or the historical archive. Specifically, it considers a set of ideas and practices centered on the conceptualization and use of documents. In doing so, it contests the widespread narrative that twentieth-century French literature abandons the realist enterprise, and argues that writers instead renegotiate the realist legacy outside, or at the margins of, the fictional space of the novel. Analyzing works by authors including Gide, Breton, Aragon, Yourcenar, Duras, and Modiano, the book defines a specific documentary mode of literary representation that records, assembles, and investigates material traces of reality. The document is a textual, visual, or material piece of evidence repurposed through its visual insertion, textual transcription, or description within a literary work. It is a fact, but it also becomes a figure, standing for literature's confrontation with the real. The documentary imagination involves a fantasy of direct access to a reality that speaks for itself. At the same time, it gives rise to concrete textual practices that open up new directions for literature, by interrogating the construction and interpretation of facts.

Download or read book Mythic Thinking in Twentieth Century Britain written by M. Sterenberg and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A variety of thinkers used the concept of myth to articulate their anxieties about modernity. By telling the story of mythic thinking in Britain from its origins in Victorian social anthropology to its postwar cultural mainstreaming, this book reveals a yearning for transcendence in an age long assumed to be disenchanted.

Download or read book Imagining Motherhood in the Twenty First Century written by Valerie Heffernan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Images, representations and constructions of mothers have historically shaped and continue to shape the way we imagine the institution of motherhood and the experience of mothering. The various contributions included in this volume consider the diversity of maternal images and narratives that circulate in literature, the arts and popular culture and analyse how they reflect on and influence the cultural meaning of motherhood in the contemporary era. Mindful of the fact that the images of motherhood that we see in popular media, on television, and in literature are not mere background noise to our daily lives, the various chapters explore how they influence our understanding of what it means to be a mother, affect our expectations of motherhood and of mothers, frame our experience of mothering, and even inform our reproductive decisions. Including insights from media studies, cultural studies, literary studies, and the performing and visual arts, this book explores how engaging with diverse representations of mothers and mothering contributes to a broader and deeper interdisciplinary understanding of how motherhood is constructed in our time. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Women: A Cultural Review.

Download or read book Imagination written by Mary Warnock and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1978-10-24 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagination is an outstanding contribution to a notoriously elusive and confusing subject. It skillfully interrelates problems in philosophy, the history of ideas and literary theory and criticism, tracing the evolution of the concept of imagination from Hume and Kant in the eighteenth century to Ryle, Sartre and Wittgenstein in the twentieth. She strongly belies that the cultivation of imagination should be the chief aim of education and one of her objectives in writing the book has been to put forward reasons why this is so. Purely philosophical treatment of the concept is shown to be related to its use in the work of Coleridge and Wordsworth, who she considers to be the creators of a new kind of awareness with more than literary implications. The purpose of her historical account is to suggest that the role of imagination in our perception and thought is more pervasive than may at first sight appear, and that the thread she traces is an important link joining apparently different areas of our experience. She argues that imagination is an essential element in both our awareness of the world and our attaching of value to it.