Download or read book Masculinity and Place in American Literature since 1950 written by Vidya Ravi and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American literature has long celebrated the figure of the self-made man and the idea of establishing selfhood, particularly male selfhood, in nature. However, during the crisis of masculinity that swept across America in the middle of the twentieth century, a generation of writers started exploring a different kind of a man. This was a figure who was concerned not so much with the loss of the West or the desire to recover a wilderness, but with how to live in an ordinary, domesticated continent. Masculinity and Place in American Literature since 1950 explores the role of place in negotiating, reinforcing, and subverting articulations of hegemonic masculinity in the work of four American writers from the latter part of the 20th century—John Cheever, John Updike, Raymond Carver, and Richard Ford. The book argues that American fiction by white male writers between the 1950s and the present day is compelled by the troubled and troubling relationship between masculinity and place. This relationship is deeply embedded in how ideals of masculinity are predicated upon the experience of the physical world, and how the symbolic logic of masculinity is continually subverted by alternative conceptions of dwelling and ecological consciousness.

Download or read book Negative Masculinity written by James Benson Wirth and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation offers the term "negative masculinity" as an analytic for a variety of ways of thinking about freedom in postwar American literature. This term is built in part by theories of freedom in American political thinking that value individualism and autonomy, and this dissertation connects core aesthetics of American subjectivity to the role of masculinity in a variety of literary narratives. In doing so, this dissertation offers a way to critically analyze postwar American narratives' relationship between freedom and masculinity, and it argues for the ways in which forms of dissent can be legitimized against the totalizing force of hegemonic white masculinity. Its first chapter focuses on the ways in which individuality and community intersect with how freedom is imagined by way of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and John Okada's No-No Boy. In the second chapter, James Baldwin's Another Country and Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days are placed in contrast to consider the historical differences that produce Baldwin's pessimism and Whitehead's utopianism in consideration of the role of negative masculinity for different histories of black masculinity. The third chapter considers how the evolving nature of American military conflict problematizes the war narrative, and it looks to contemporary American literature written by veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the ways in which they attempt to place their narratives within and outside of the history of American war literature. Lastly, this dissertation's fourth chapter considers the modern, regressive form of masculinity in contemporary alt-right movements, and it uses Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho to understand the disconnect between reality and fantasy in the performance of mastery. Each of these chapters are read with this analytic of negative masculinity in mind, and the term proposed here offers a way to reconsider the relationship between freedom, masculinity, and subjectivity throughout the literary narratives of postwar American literature.

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Gender and the American West written by Susan Bernardin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-06-19 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first major collection to remap the American West though the intersectional lens of gender and sexuality, especially in relation to race and Indigeneity. Organized through several interrelated key concepts, The Routledge Companion to Gender and the American West addresses gender and sexuality from and across diverse and divergent methodologies. Comprising 34 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion is divided into four parts: Genealogies Bodies Movements Lands The volume features leading and newer scholars whose essays connect interdisciplinary fields including Indigenous Studies, Latinx and Asian American Studies, Western American Studies, and Queer, Feminist, and Gender Studies. Through innovative methodologies and reclaimed archives of knowledge, contributors model fresh frameworks for thinking about relations of power and place, gender and genre, settler colonization and decolonial resistance. Even as they reckon with the ongoing gendered and racialized violence at the core of the American West, contributors forge new lexicons for imagining alternative Western futures. This pathbreaking collection will be invaluable to scholars and students studying the origins, myths, histories, and legacies of the American West. This is a foundational collection that will become invaluable to scholars and students across a range of disciplines including Gender and Sexuality Studies, Literary Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Latinx Studies.

Download or read book Reading Aridity in Western American Literature written by Jada Ach and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-12-14 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In literary and cinematic representations, deserts often betoken collapse and dystopia. Reading Aridity in Western American Literature offers readings of literature set in the American Southwest from ecocritical and new materialist perspectives. This book explores the diverse epistemologies, histories, relationships, futures, and possibilities that emerge from the representation of American deserts in fiction, film, and literary art, and traces the social, cultural, economic, and biotic narratives that foreground deserts, prompting us to reconsider new, provocative modes of human/nonhuman engagement in arid ecogeographies.

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture written by Lydia R. Cooper and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-26 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recently, the U.S. has seen a rise in misogynistic and race-based violence perpetrated by men expressing a sense of grievance, from "incels" to alt-right activists. Grounding sociological, historical, political, and economic analyses of masculinity through the lens of cultural narratives in many forms and expressions, The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture suggests that how we examine the stories that shape us in turn shapes our understanding of our current reality and gives us language for imagining better futures. Masculinity is more than a description of traits associated with particular performances of gender. It is more than a study of gender and social power. It is an examination of the ways in which gender affects our capacity to engage ethically with each other in complex human societies. This volume offers essays from a range of established, global experts in American masculinity as well as new and upcoming scholars in order to explore not just what masculinity once meant, has come to mean, and may mean in the future in the U.S.; it also articulates what is at stake with our conceptions of masculinity.

Download or read book Anxious Men written by Baldwin Clive Baldwin and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-02 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores representations of men and masculinity in American fiction published after the Second World WarOffers readings of a wide selection of postwar American novels from 1945 to the mid-1950s, including canonical works, from the unique perspective of their representation of male identityProvides rich comparative insights through analysis of fiction by writers of diverse race, class and sexualityDemonstrates how gender theory generates insights into the constitution of American masculinity in fictionFocusing on a complex and contentious period that was formative in shaping American society and culture in the twentieth century, this book sheds new light on the ways in which fiction engaged with contemporary notions of masculinity. It draws on gender theory and analysis of writers from diverse backgrounds of race, class and sexuality to provide rich comparative insights into the constitution of American masculinity in fiction. The extensive range of novels considered includes fresh analyses of key authors such as James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Patricia Highsmith, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Ann Petry, J. D. Salinger and Gore Vidal.

Download or read book Men in the Middle written by James Gilbert and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2005-07 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the 1950s have been popularly portrayed-on television and in the movies and literature-as a conformist and conservative age, the decade is better understood as a revolutionary time for politics, economy, mass media, and family life. Magazines, films, newspapers, and television of the day scrutinized every aspect of this changing society, paying special attention to the lifestyles of the middle-class men and their families who were moving to the suburbs newly springing up outside American cities. Much of this attention focused on issues of masculinity, both to enforce accepted ideas and to understand serious departures from the norm. Neither a period of "male crisis" nor yet a time of free experimentation, the decade was marked by contradiction and a wide spectrum of role models. This was, in short, the age of Tennessee Williams as well as John Wayne. In Men in the Middle, James Gilbert uncovers a fascinating and extensive body of literature that confronts the problems and possibilities of expressing masculinity in the 1950s. Drawing on the biographies of men who explored manhood either in their writings or in their public personas, Gilbert examines the stories of several of the most important figures of the day-revivalist Billy Graham, playwright Tennessee Williams, sociologist David Riesman, sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, Playboy literary editor Auguste Comte Spectorsky, and TV-sitcom dad Ozzie Nelson-and allows us to see beyond the inherited stereotypes of the time. Each of these stories, in Gilbert's hands, adds crucial dimensions to our understanding of masculinity the 1950s. No longer will this era be seen solely in terms of the conformist man in the gray flannel suit or the Marlboro Man.

Download or read book Nature and Literary Studies written by Peter Remien and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-04 with total page 771 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nature and Literary Studies supplies a broad and accessible overview of one of the most important and contested keywords in modern literary studies. Drawing together the work of leading scholars of a variety of critical approaches, historical periods, and cultural traditions, the book examines nature's philosophical, theological, and scientific origins in literature, as well as how literary representations of this concept evolved in response to colonialism, industrialization, and new forms of scientific knowledge. Surveying nature's diverse applications in twenty-first-century literary studies and critical theory, the volume seeks to reconcile nature's ideological baggage with its fundamental role in fostering appreciation of nonhuman being and agency. Including chapters on wilderness, pastoral, gender studies, critical race theory, and digital literature, the book is a key resource for students and professors seeking to understand nature's role in the environmental humanities.

Download or read book Reading Cats and Dogs written by Françoise Besson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-12-30 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the world, people spend much of their time with animal companions of various kinds, frequently with cats and dogs. What meanings do we make of these relationships? In the ecocritical collection Reading cats and Dogs, a diverse array of scholars considers the philosophy, literature, and film devoted to human relationships with companion species. In addition to illuminating famous animal stories by Beatrix Potter, Jack London, Italo Svevo, and Michael Ondaatje, readers are introduced to the dog poems of Shuntarō Tanikawa, a Turkish documentary on stray cats as neighborhood companions, and the representation of diverse animal companions in Cameroonian novels. Focusing on “Stray and Feral Companions,” “The Usefulness of Companion Animals,” and “Problematizing Companion Animals,” Reading Cats and Dogs aims both to confirm and topple readers’ assumptions about the fellow travelers with whom we share our lives, our streets and fields, and our planet. Fifteen contributors from various countries reveal the aesthetic, ethical, and psychological complexities of our multispecies relationships, demonstrating the richness of ecocritical animal studies.

Download or read book Fiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction written by Jonathan Elmore and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-04-01 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction is one of the first works to focus specifically on fiction’s engagements with human driven extinction. Drawing together a diverse group of scholars and approaches, this volume pairs established voices in the field with emerging scholars and traditionally recognized climate fiction ('cli-fi') with texts and media typically not associated with Anthropocene fictions. The result is a volume that both engages with and furthers existing work on Anthropocene fiction as well as laying groundwork for the budding subfield of extinction fiction. This volume takes up the collective insistence on the centrality of story to extinction studies. In various and disparate ways, each chapter engages with the stories we tell about extinction, about the extinction of animal and plant life, and about the extinction of human life itself. Answering the call to action of extinction studies, these chapters explore what kinds of humanity caused this event and what kinds may live through it; what cultural assumptions and values led to this event and which ones could lead out of it; what relationships between human life and this planet allowed the sixth mass extinction and what alternative relationships could be possible.

Download or read book Dwellings of Enchantment written by Bénédicte Meillon and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth offers ecocritical and ecopoetic readings that focus on multispecies dwellings of enchantment and reenchant our rapport with the more-than-human world. It sheds light on the marvelous entanglements between humans and other life forms coexisting with us–entanglements that, when fully perceived, call onto humans to shift perspectives on both the causes and solutions to current ecological crises. Working against the disenchantment of humans’ relationships with and perceptions of the world entailed by a modern ontology, this book illustrates the power of ecopoetics to attune humans to the vibrant matter both within and outside of us. Braiding indigenous with non-indigenous worldviews, this book tackles ecopoetics emerging from varying locations in the world. It underscores the postmodernist, remythologizing processes going on in many ecopoetic texts, via magical realist modes and mythopoeia.

Download or read book Turkish Ecocriticism written by Sinan Akilli and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Turkish Ecocriticism: From Neolithic to Contemporary Timescapes explores the values, perceptions, and transformations of the environment, ecology, and nature in Turkish culture, literature, and the arts. Through these themes, it examines historical and contemporary environmentally engaged literary and cultural traditions in Turkey. The volume re-imagines Turkey in its geo-social and ecocultural narratives of multiple connections and complexities, in its multi-faceted webs of histories, and in its rich multispecies stories.

Download or read book Migrant Ecologies written by Zhou Xiaojing and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-06-17 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Migrant Ecologies investigates the ways in which Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poetry exposes the entanglements of migrant ecologies embedded within local and global networks of capital and labor. The author contends that women migrant workers in particular, as portrayed in Zheng’s poems, are the visible manifestation of the interconnections between the so-called “factories of the world” and slum villages-in-the-city, between urban development and rural decline, and between the local environmental degradation and the global market. By adopting an ecological approach to Zheng’s poems about women migrant workers in China, the author explores what Donna Haraway calls “webbed ecologies” (49). The concept of “ecologies” serves to enhance not only the layered, complex interconnections underlying women migrant workers’ plight and environmental degradation in China, but also the emergence and transformation of migrant spaces, subjects, activism, and networks resulting in part from globalization.

Download or read book Rethinking Nathaniel Hawthorne and Nature written by Steven Petersheim and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-02-14 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A friend and associate of the Transcendentalists in Concord, Nathaniel Hawthorne has rarely been taken seriously as a writer interested in the natural world. This book seeks to redress this omission by elucidating the sense of environmentality that emanates from Hawthorne’s romances and other writings. Hawthorne’s sense of kinship with the natural world runs deep in his work, particularly when his fiction is examined alongside his voluminous notebooks. Rethinking Nathaniel Hawthorne and Nature also contributes to the growing scholarly work aiming to illuminate Hawthorne as a writer deeply engaged in the issues of his day, particularly involving the environment, rather than an author simply interested in reinterpreting colonial history. Today’s readers stand to gain a rich new understanding of Hawthorne by reassessing Hawthorne’s attitude toward the natural world.

Download or read book Ecocritical Concerns and the Australian Continent written by Beate Neumeier and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-11-08 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecocritical Concerns and the Australian Continent investigates literary, historical, anthropological, and linguistic perspectives in connection with activist engagements. The necessary cross-fertilization between these different perspectives throughout this volume emerges in the resonances between essays exploring recurring concerns ranging from biodiversity and preservation policies to the devastating effects of the mining industries, to present concerns and futuristic visions of the effects of climate change. Of central concern in all of these contexts is the impact of settler colonialism and an increasing turn to indigenous knowledge systems. A number of chapters engage with questions of ecological imperialism in relation to specific sociohistorical moments and effects, probing early colonial encounters between settlers and indigenous people, or rereading specific forms of colonial literature. Other essays take issue with past and present constructions of indigeneity in different contexts, as well as with indigenous resistance against such ascriptions, while the importance of an understanding of indigenous notions of “care for country” is taken up from a variety of different disciplinary angles in terms of interconnectedness, anchoredness, living country, and living heritage.

Download or read book Climate Consciousness and Environmental Activism in Composition written by Joseph R. Lease and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now more than ever—in a time when Americans still do not believe that humans are the primary cause of Earth's climate change crisis, the burden on educators to inform, challenge, and motivate students about sustainability is greater than it ever has been. On college campuses, writing intensive courses, often located within First-Year or General Education curricula, are an ideal place to take up this charge because of the flexibility of their content and the high volume of students that they reach. In this volume, a varied group of composition instructors with wide ranges and types of experiences provides best practices for bringing issues surrounding climate change into the writing classroom. From literature-based composition and creative writing courses to design thinking workshops to seminars "against sustainability," the authors in this volume lay out a multitude of possibilities for blending writing and environmental concerns that fellow practitioners can easily adopt or modify for their own use.

Download or read book American Guy written by Saul Levmore and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-04 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Guy examines American norms of masculinity and their role in the law, bringing a range of methodological and disciplinary perspectives to the intersection of American gender, legal, and literary issues. The collection opens with a set of papers investigating "American Guys" -- the heroic nonconformists and rugged individualists that populate much of American fiction. Diverse essays examine the manly men of Hemingway, Dreiser, and others, in their relation to the law, while also highlighting the underlying tensions that complicate this version of masculinity. A second set of papers examines "Outsiders" -- men on the periphery of the American Guys who proclaim a different way of being male. These essays take up counter-traditions of masculinity ranging from gay male culture to Philip Roth's portrait of the Jewish lawyer. American Guy, a follow-up to Subversion and Sympathy, edited by Alison L. LaCroix and Martha Nussbaum, aims at reinvigorating the law-and-literature movement through original, cross-disciplinary insights. It embraces a variety of voices from both within and outside the academy, including several contributions from prominent judges. These contributions are particularly significant, not only as features unique to the field, but also for the light they throw on the federal bench. In the face of a large body of work studying judicial conduct as a function of rigid commitment to ideology, American Guy shows a side of the judiciary that is imaginatively engaged, aware of cultural trends, and reflective about the wider world and the role of the of law in it.