Download or read book Regional Fictions written by Stephanie Foote and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2001-03-29 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Out of many, one—e pluribus unum—is the motto of the American nation, and it sums up neatly the paradox that Stephanie Foote so deftly identifies in Regional Fictions. Regionalism, the genre that ostensibly challenges or offers an alternative to nationalism, in fact characterizes and perhaps even defines the American sense of nationhood. In particular, Foote argues that the colorful local characters, dialects, and accents that marked regionalist novels and short stories of the late nineteenth century were key to the genre’s conversion of seemingly dangerous political differences—such as those posed by disaffected Midwestern farmers or recalcitrant foreign nationals—into appealing cultural differences. She asserts that many of the most treasured beliefs about the value of local identities still held in the United States today are traceable to the discourses of this regional fiction, and she illustrates her contentions with insightful examinations of the work of Sarah Orne Jewett, Hamlin Garland, Gertrude Atherton, George Washington Cable, Jacob Riis, and others. Broadening the definitions of regional writing and its imaginative territory, Regional Fictions moves beyond literary criticism to comment on the ideology of national, local, ethnic, and racial identity.
Download or read book Rural Fictions Urban Realities written by Mark Storey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-07 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of late 19th-century American literature uses the period's rural fiction to reveal the increasingly intricate and sometimes problematic connections between urban and rural life.
Download or read book Imperial Fictions written by Todd Kontje and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2018-04-25 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rethinks German literature by challenging the notion that national literature is the narrative of a spiritually united people
Download or read book Regions of Identity written by and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1999-03 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining turn-of-the-century American women's fiction, the author argues that this writing played a crucial role in the production of a national fantasy of a unified American identity in the face of the racial, regional, ethnic, and sexual divisions of the period. Contributing to New Americanist perspectives of nation formation, the book shows that these writers are central to American literary discourses for reconfiguring the relationship among constituent regions in order to reconfigure the nation itself. Analyzing fiction by Sarah Orne Jewett, Florence Converse, Pauline Hopkins, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Kate Chopin, and Sui Sin Far, the book foregrounds the ways each writer's own location on the grid of American identities shapes her attempt to forge an inclusive narrative of America. This disparate group of writers--Northerners, Southerners, Californios, African Americans, Chinese Americans, Anglo Americans, heterosexuals, and lesbians--reflects the widespread nature of concerns over national identity and the importance of regions to representations of that identity. The author argues that femininity as a politicized cultural construct is basic to each of these author's attempts to recast America, because each understands the link between true womanhood and the longstanding equation of New England with the nation. But such attempts to mobilize the naturalized feminine to stabilize a fractured and exclusionary American identity inevitably reveal the fissures that undermine the universality of both categories. The book thus participates in several larger and ongoing conversations within American studies and feminist literary and genre criticism: the reassessment of regional and minor fiction in relation to national identity, the critique of the politics of genre construction, the uses and limits of identity politics, and the connections among all these issues.
Download or read book The Bibliography of Regional Fiction in Britain and Ireland 1800 2000 written by Keith D. M. Snell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pioneering and interdisciplinary in nature, this bibliography constitutes a comprehensive list of regional fiction for every county of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England over the past two centuries. In addition, other regions of a usually topographical or urban nature have been used, such as Birmingham and the Black Country; London; The Fens; the Brecklands; the Highlands; the Hebrides; or the Welsh border. Each entry lists the author, title, and date of first publication. The geographical coverage is encompassing and complete, from the Channel Islands to the Shetlands. An original introduction discusses such matters as definition, bibliographical method, popular readerships, trends in output, and the scholarly literature on regional fiction.
Download or read book Rural Fictions Urban Realities written by Mark Storey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-11 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of late 19th-century American literature uses the period's rural fiction to reveal the increasingly intricate and sometimes problematic connections between urban and rural life.
Download or read book Postregional Fictions written by Clare Chadd and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2021-07-07 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing from recent debates about the validity of regional studies and skepticism surrounding the efficacy of the concept of authenticity, Clare Chadd’s Postregional Fictions focuses on questions of southern regional authenticity in fiction published by Barry Hannah from 1972 to 2001. The first monograph on the Mississippi author’s work to appear since his death, this study considers the ways in which Hannah’s novels and short stories challenge established conceptual understandings of the U.S. South. Hannah’s writing often features elements of metafiction, through which the putative sense of “southernness” his stories dramatize is complicated by an intense self-reflexivity about the extent to which a sense of place has never been foundational or essential but has always been constructed and performed. Such texts locate a productive terrain between the local and the global, with particular relevance for critical apprehensions of the post-South and postsouthern literature. Offering sustained close readings of selected stories, and focusing especially on Hannah’s late work, Chadd argues that his fiction reveals the region constantly shifting in a process of mythmaking, dialogue, and performance. In turn, she uses Hannah’s work to suggest how notions of the “South” and “southernness” might survive the various deconstructive approaches leveled against them in recent decades of southern studies scholarship. Rather than seeing an impasse between the regional and the global, Chadd’s reading of Hannah shows the two existing and flourishing in tandem. In Postregional Fictions, Chadd offers a new interpretation of Hannah based on an appreciation of the vital intersection of southern and postmodern elements in his work.
Download or read book Irish Urban Fictions written by Maria Beville and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-11-01 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection is the first to examine how the city is written in modern Irish fiction. Focusing on the multi-faceted, layered, and ever-changing topography of the city in Irish writing, it brings together studies of Irish and Northern Irish fictions which contribute to a more complete picture of modern Irish literature and Irish urban cultural identities. It offers a critical introduction to the Irish city as it represented in fiction as a plural space to mirror the plurality of contemporary Irish identities north and south of the border. The chapters combine to provide a platform for new research in the field of Irish urban literary studies, including analyses of the fiction of authors including James Joyce, Roddy Doyle, Kate O’Brien, Hugo Hamilton, Kevin Barry, and Rosemary Jenkinson. An exciting and diverse range of fictions is introduced and examined with the aim of generating a cohesive perspective on Irish urban fictions and to stimulate further discussion in this emerging area.
Download or read book Goshen Road written by Bonnie Proudfoot and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Goshen Road is an elegiac, unvarnished, and empathetic portrait of one working-class family over two decades in rural West Virginia, with sisters Dessie and Billie Price as its urgently beating heart. Bonnie Proudfoot captures them, their husbands, and their children as they balance on the divide between Appalachia old and new, struggling for survival and reconciling themselves with past hurts and future uncertainties as the economy and culture shift around them. The story opens in 1967 with a logging accident and the teenaged Lux Cranfield’s headlong plunge into the courtship of Dessie—a leap he takes not only in the wake of his near-death experience but to exchange his bitter home life for a future with the Prices, a family that appears to have the stability and peace that his own lacks. Within the year Lux and Dessie marry. Meanwhile, Dessie’s rebellious younger sister, Billie, fights her way through adolescence with an eye toward an escape of her own, only to land with Lux’s friend Alan Ray Munn and settle into a life of hardship. Ultimately, the voices and passions of Dessie, Billie, Lux, Alan Ray, and the Cranfield children build on one another to create an unforgettable chorus about the promises and betrayals of love—and what it takes to preserve a family when everything else is uncertain.
Download or read book Gospel Fictions written by Randel Helms and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2009-12-02 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are the four canonical Gospels actual historical accounts or are they imaginative literature produced by influential literary artists to serve a theological vision? In this study of the Gospels based upon a demonstrable literary theory, Randel Helms presents the work of the four evangelists as the "supreme fictions" of our culture, self-conscious works of art deliberately composed as the culmination of a long literary and oral tradition.Helms analyzes the best-known and the most powerful of these fictions: the stories of Christ's birth, his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, his betrayal by Judas, his crucifixion, death and resurrection. In Helms' exegesis of the Gospel miracle stories, he traces the greatest of these - the resurrection of Lazarus four days after his death - to the Egyptian myth of the resurrection of Osiris by the god Horus.Helms maintains that the Gospels are self-reflexive; they are not about Jesus so much as they are about the writers' attitudes concerning Jesus. Helms examines each of the narratives - the language, the sources, the similarities and differences - and shows that their purpose was not so much to describe the past as to affect the present.This scholarly yet readable work demonstrates how the Gospels surpassed the expectations of their authors, influencing countless generations by creating a life-enhancing understanding of the nature of Jesus of Nazareth.
Download or read book Migrant Sites written by Dalia Kandiyoti and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2009 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique comparative study of immigrant and diaspora literatures in America
Download or read book California and the Fictions of Capital written by George L. Henderson and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In part a tour of California as a virtual laboratory for refining the circulation of capital, and in part an investigation of how the state's literati, with rare exception, reconceived economy in the name of class, gender, and racial privilege, this study will appeal to all students and scholars of California's—And The American West's—economic, environmental, and cultural past. Author note:George L. Hendersonis Professor of Geography at the University of Minnesota.
Download or read book A World of Fiction written by Katherine Bode and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Proposes a new basis for data-rich literary history
Download or read book Dear Appalachia written by Emily Satterwhite and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2011-10-01 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much criticism has been directed at negative stereotypes of Appalachia perpetuated by movies, television shows, and news media. Books, on the other hand, often draw enthusiastic praise for their celebration of the simplicity and authenticity of the Appalachian region. Dear Appalachia: Readers, Identity, and Popular Fiction since 1878 employs the innovative new strategy of examining fan mail, reviews, and readers’ geographic affiliations to understand how readers have imagined the region and what purposes these imagined geographies have served for them. As Emily Satterwhite traces the changing visions of Appalachia across the decades, from the Gilded Age (1865–1895) to the present, she finds that every generation has produced an audience hungry for a romantic version of Appalachia. According to Satterwhite, best-selling fiction has portrayed Appalachia as a distinctive place apart from the mainstream United States, has offered cosmopolitan white readers a sense of identity and community, and has engendered feelings of national and cultural pride. Thanks in part to readers’ faith in authors as authentic representatives of the regions they write about, Satterwhite argues, regional fiction often plays a role in creating and affirming regional identity. By mapping the geographic locations of fans, Dear Appalachia demonstrates that mobile white readers in particular, including regional elites, have idealized Appalachia as rooted, static, and protected from commercial society in order to reassure themselves that there remains an “authentic” America untouched by global currents. Investigating texts such as John Fox Jr.’s The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908), Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker (1954), James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970), and Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (1997), Dear Appalachia moves beyond traditional studies of regional fiction to document the functions of these narratives in the lives of readers, revealing not only what people have thought about Appalachia, but why.
Download or read book Handbook of the American Novel of the Nineteenth Century written by Christine Gerhardt and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-06-11 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook offers students and researchers a compact introduction to the nineteenth-century American novel in the light of current debates, theoretical concepts, and critical methodologies. The volume turns to the nineteenth century as a formative era in American literary history, a time that saw both the rise of the novel as a genre, and the emergence of an independent, confident American culture. A broad range of concise essays by European and American scholars demonstrates how some of America‘s most well-known and influential novels responded to and participated in the radical transformations that characterized American culture between the early republic and the age of imperial expansion. Part I consists of 7 systematic essays on key historical and critical frameworks ― including debates aboutrace and citizenship, transnationalism, environmentalism and print culture, as well as sentimentalism, romance and the gothic, realism and naturalism. Part II provides 22 essays on individual novels, each combining an introduction to relevant cultural contexts with a fresh close reading and the discussion of critical perspectives shaped by literary and cultural theory.
Download or read book Follow the Angels Follow the Doves written by Sidney Thompson and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-03 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Follow the Angels, Follow the Doves is an origin story in the true American tradition. Before Bass Reeves could stake his claim as the most successful nineteenth-century American lawman, arresting more outlaws than any other deputy during his thirty-two-year career as a deputy U.S. marshal in some of the most dangerous regions of the Wild West, he was a slave. After a childhood picking cotton, he became an expert marksman under his master’s tutelage, winning shooting contests throughout the region. His skill had serious implications, however, as the Civil War broke out. Reeves was given to his master’s mercurial, sadistic, Moby-Dick-quoting son in the hopes that Reeves would keep him safe in battle. The ensuing humiliation, love, heroics, war, mind games, and fear solidified Reeves’s determination to gain his freedom and drew him one step further on his fated path to an illustrious career. Follow the Angels, Follow the Doves is an important historical work that places Reeves in the pantheon of American heroes and a thrilling historical novel that narrates a great man’s exploits amid the near-mythic world of the nineteenth-century frontier.
Download or read book Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction written by Ignacio L—pez-Calvo and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2011-02-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Los Angeles has long been a place where cultures clash and reshape. The city has a growing number of Latina/o authors and filmmakers who are remapping and reclaiming it through ongoing symbolic appropriation. In this illuminating book, Ignacio L—pez-Calvo foregrounds the emotional experiences of authors, implicit authors, narrators, characters, and readers in order to demonstrate that the evolution of the imaging of Los Angeles in Latino cultural production is closely related to the politics of spatial location. This spatial-temporal approach, he writes, reveals significant social anxieties, repressed rage, and deep racial guilt. Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction sets out to reconfigure the scope of Latino literary and cultural studies. Integrating histories of different regions and nations, the book sets the interplay of unresolved contradictions in this particular metropolitan area. The novelists studied here stem from multiple areas, including the U.S. Southwest, Guatemala, and Chile. The study also incorporates non-Latino writers who have contributed to the Latino culture of the city. The first chapter examines Latino cultural production from an ecocritical perspective on urban interethnic relations. Chapter 2 concentrates on the representation of daily life in the barrio and the marginalization of Latino urban youth. The third chapter explores the space of women and how female characters expand their area of operations from the domestic space to the public space of both the barrio and the city. A much-needed contribution to the fields of urban theory, race critical theory, Chicana/oÐLatina/o studies, and Los Angeles writing and film, L—pez-Calvo offers multiple theoretical perspectivesÑincluding urban theory, ecocriticism, ethnic studies, gender studies, and cultural studiesÑ contextualized with notions of transnationalism and post-nationalism.
