Download or read book The Committed Word written by James Engell and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the past century, literary education, often divorced from rhetoric, has grown increasingly distant from the practice of language in statecraft, law, religion, and ethics. Yet literature and rhetoric retain open, independent powers to enhance what Emerson calls &"the conduct of life.&" In these provocative essays, James Engell argues that a more complete literary training can foster a heightened sense of shared social experience, an awareness of diverse views, a love of language, and a more powerful ability to express the values we enshrine or debate. Revealing a set of deep intersections among literature, politics, rhetoric, and the public deliberation of values, he explores how dedicated individuals of different callings resort to heightened language in order to secure knowledge, test beliefs, consider policy, and promote action. Through profiles of Lincoln, Burke, Swift, Hume, Lowth, Vico, and others, Engell explores the political and ethical involvement of writers with their culture in order to reestablish links between literary qualities of language and the means by which we challenge power and secure liberty. He presents a cogent argument for a different, expanded kind of literary education, suggesting that training in rhetoric, now often misunderstood or neglected, can serve the common good without becoming mired in partisan squabbles or academic pedantry. Despite the dominance of visual media in our society, observes Engell, the difficult problems we face must be resolved through language. By presenting writers who use resourceful language to engage political contests and cultural issues, he contributes to ongoing debates in education, politics, and culture without subscribing to easy labels of &"left&" and &"right&" or &"traditional&" versus &"innovative.&" He demonstrates imaginative ways to apply time-tested literary techniques to a changing world, making use of the past yet in a way that the past could not predict. This passionately argued book calls for a shift in the ways we teach and regard literature.

Download or read book Literature Intertextuality and the American Revolution written by Steven Blakemore and published by Fairleigh Dickinson. This book was released on 2012-08-31 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dealing with Thomas Paine's Common Sense (1776), John Trumbull's M'Fingal (1776-82), Philip Freneau's "The British-Prison Ship" (1781), J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782), and Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" (1819-20), Steven Blakemore breaks new ground in assessing the strategies of subversion and intertextuality used during the American Revolution. Blakemore also crystallizes the historical contexts that link these works together – contexts that have been missed or overlooked by critics and scholars. The five works additionally illuminate issues of history (The Norman Conquest, the English Civil War, and the French Revolution) and gender as they impinge on American-revolutionary discourse. The result is five new readings of significant revolutionary-era works that suggest fruitful entries into other literatures of the Revolution. Blakemore demonstrates the nexus between literature and history in the revolutionary era and how it created an intertextual dialogue in the formation of the first postcolonial critiques of the British Empire.

Download or read book Philip Freneau written by Jacob Axelrad and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-01-13 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philip Freneau was a poet, editor, and mariner. A graduate of Princeton, he was the roommate of James Madison and a classmate of Hugh Henry Brackenridge and Aaron Burr. When the colonies rebelled against England, he supported his newly born nation as a privateer, spending some time in a British prison as a result. He also served, more effectively, as “the poet of the Revolution.” Later he became the journalistic voice of the democrats. Ardently devoted to liberty, he believed himself to be a defender of the common man, for whom he fought selflessly and often vitriolicly throughout his life. In newspapers such as The Freeman’s Journal, The New York Daily Advertiser, The National Gazette, The Jersey Chronicle, and The Time-Piece, he published articles, letters, and poems, instructing the citizens of the new Republic about their rights, and attacking those who, he believed, were infringing on those rights. In the midst of the controversy in which he was so often involved, he also found time to write a small body of poetry whose sensitivity and beauty mark him as the poetic equal of his European contemporaries, and, in fact, as a precursor of the new Romantic movement In Philip Freneau: Champion of Democracy Jacob Axelrad provides a detailed biography of this pensman of the Revolution and early Republic. He gives a sympathetic, imaginative, perceptive, yet objective interpretation of Freneau and his place in history, and at the same time he presents a delightfully readable and clear picture of the period during which the poet lived. These pages not only re-create the battles between Whig and Tory, federalist and democrat, but they also are alive with the activities and philosophies of the men who made American history. James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, John Adams, James Monroe go about the business of creating and shaping a new country, and as they do, they move into and out of the life of the poet of Monmouth, influencing him in a variety of ways. Above all, Axelrad brings to life for the reader the man Freneau: simple, direct, often uncritical in his devotion to the cause he believed in; courageous in sustaining his stand against strong opposition; disillusioned and pessimistic about human nature, yet boldly optimistic about the future of humanity and of his country. And always behind the furor the reader is aware of the man struggling to provide a living for himself and his family, and never quite succeeding.

Download or read book The Devil and Doctor Dwight written by Colin Wells and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the close of the eighteenth century, Timothy Dwight--poet, clergyman, and, later, president of Yale College--waged a literary and intellectual war against the forces of "infidelity." The Devil and Doctor Dwight reexamines this episode by focusing on The Triumph of Infidelity (1788), the verse satire that launched Dwight's campaign and, Colin Wells argues, the key to recovering the deeper meaning of the threat of infidelity in the early years of the American Republic. The book also features the first modern, annotated edition of this important but long-overlooked poem. Modeled after Alexander Pope's satiric masterpiece, the Dunciad, Dwight's poem took aim at a number of his contemporaries, but its principal target was Congregationalist Charles Chauncy, author of a controversial treatise asserting "the salvation of all men." To Dwight's mind, a belief in universal salvation issued from the same naive faith in innate human virtue and inevitable progress that governed all forms of Enlightenment thought, political as well as religious. Indeed, in subsequent works he traced with increasing dismay a shift in the idea of universal salvation from a theological doctrine to a political belief and symbol of American national identity. In this light, Dwight's campaign against infidelity must also be seen as an early and prescient critique of the ideological underpinnings of Jeffersonian democracy.

Download or read book Revolutionary Writers written by Emory Elliott and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1986-02-27 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elliott demonstrates how America's first men of letters--Timothy Dwight, Joel Barlow, Philip Freneau, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and Charles Brockden Brown--sought to make individual genius in literature express the collective genius of the American people. Without literary precedent to aid them, Elliott argues, these writers attempted to convey a vision of what America ought to be; and when the moral imperatives implicit in their writings were rejected by the vast number of their countrymen they became pioneers of another sort--the first to experience the alienation from mainstream American culture that would become the fate of nearly all serious writers who would follow.

Download or read book The Life and Times of T H Gallaudet written by Edna Edith Sayers and published by Brandeis University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look into the complex life of an icon of deaf education

Download or read book A Speaking Aristocracy written by Christopher Grasso and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As cultural authority was reconstituted in the Revolutionary era, knowledge reconceived in the age of Enlightenment, and the means of communication radically altered by the proliferation of print, speakers and writers in eighteenth-century America began to describe themselves and their world in new ways. Drawing on hundreds of sermons, essays, speeches, letters, journals, plays, poems, and newspaper articles, Christopher Grasso explores how intellectuals, preachers, and polemicists transformed both the forms and the substance of public discussion in eighteenth-century Connecticut. In New England through the first half of the century, only learned clergymen regularly addressed the public. After midcentury, however, newspapers, essays, and eventually lay orations introduced new rhetorical strategies to persuade or instruct an audience. With the rise of a print culture in the early Republic, the intellectual elite had to compete with other voices and address multiple audiences. By the end of the century, concludes Grasso, public discourse came to be understood not as the words of an authoritative few to the people but rather as a civic conversation of the people.

Download or read book Executing Democracy written by Stephen John Hartnett and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Executing Democracy: Capital Punishment & the Making of America, 1683-1807 is the first volume of a rhetorical history of public debates about crime, violence, and capital punishment in America. This examination begins in 1683, when William Penn first struggled to govern the rowdy indentured servants of Philadelphia, and continues up until 1807, when the Federalists sought to impose law-and-order upon the New Republic. This volume offers a lively historical overview of how crime, violence, and capital punishment influenced the settling of the New World, the American Revolution, and the frantic post-war political scrambling to establish norms that would govern the new republic. By presenting a macro-historical overview, and by filling the arguments with voices from different political camps and communicative genres, Hartnett provides readers with fresh perspectives for understanding the centrality of public debates about capital punishment to the history of American democracy.

Download or read book Random Miracles written by Edward Martin Cifelli and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2009-11-10 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The French Enlightenment in America written by Paul Merrill Spurlin and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The French Enlightenment in America offers an overview of French American cultural relations during the French Enlightenment. The essays in this volume explore the literary presence of French authors in America between 1760 and 1800 and the reception of their writings by the Founding Fathers and other Americans. These essays explore such topics as the Founding Fathers’ knowledge of French, the philosophes, Voltaire in the South, and more. The Georgia Open History Library has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this collection, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Download or read book The Literature of the United States of America written by Marshall Walker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 1988-09-15 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American literature over the last four hundred years has developed distinctive qualities and traditions, partly engendered by the land itself. The rich variety of literature flourished as the land was colonised and cultivated. In this new edition Marshall Walker has updated his wide-ranging study of American literature by giving greater attention to poets from Hart Crane and e.e.Cummings to John Ashbery and A.R.Ammons and to novelists from William Burroughs and Kurt Vonnegut to John Irving. More space is given to drama, from the later works of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller to the plays of Sam Shepard and David Mamet. The special concerns of Black, Jewish and Women writers are explored as this book demonstrates that American literary history can no longer be considered largely in terms of regional dominances.

Download or read book Food in the Arts written by Harlan Walker and published by Oxford Symposium. This book was released on 1999 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A further volume in this series, this year discussing not so much food or its preparation as its portrayal in any number of art forms such as popular music, crime novels, film, theatre, literature, and fine art. There are also some papers which concentrate on the art of food, or art relating to food: an instance is the art of tissue-paper orange wrappers (a recondite but riveting item). My impression, when this subject was first mooted, was that all contributions would revolve around paintings and high arts. I was mistaken, there is a remarkable spread: the arrangement of 18th-century desserts; cookery and the Cuban Santeria religion; drink in 19th-century English fiction; food in film noir; the cook as artist in 18th-century England; architectural food design in France and Italy; popcorn poetry; food and eating in Bronte novels; and much more. These volumes are sometimes indigestible fricassees if swallowed at once, but think of them as platters of oysters - each may contain a pearl. By the finish a bracelet at least, perhaps a necklace, is the consequence.

Download or read book This Sacred Trust written by Paul C. Nagel and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1971-01-02 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nagel's classic work deals with nineteenth-century America's coming awareness as a nation and its agonizing struggle to turn itself into a model republic. He perceptively explores the growth of American nationalism in its political, social, religious, economic, and literary implications. The resulting book is a vivid portrait of how America viewed itself, what concerned it deeply, and ultimately, of those forces in society that led to a new spirit of militant nationalism.

Download or read book Sam Patch the Famous Jumper written by Paul E. Johnson and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2004-06-16 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true history of a legendary American folk hero In the 1820s, a fellow named Sam Patch grew up in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, working there (when he wasn't drinking) as a mill hand for one of America's new textile companies. Sam made a name for himself one day by jumping seventy feet into the tumultuous waters below Pawtucket Falls. When in 1827 he repeated the stunt in Paterson, New Jersey, another mill town, an even larger audience gathered to cheer on the daredevil they would call the "Jersey Jumper." Inevitably, he went to Niagara Falls, where in 1829 he jumped not once but twice in front of thousands who had paid for a good view. The distinguished social historian Paul E. Johnson gives this deceptively simple story all its deserved richness, revealing in its characters and social settings a virtual microcosm of Jacksonian America. He also relates the real jumper to the mythic Sam Patch who turned up as a daring moral hero in the works of Hawthorne and Melville, in London plays and pantomimes, and in the spotlight with Davy Crockett—a Sam Patch who became the namesake of Andrew Jackson's favorite horse. In his shrewd and powerful analysis, Johnson casts new light on aspects of American society that we may have overlooked or underestimated. This is innovative American history at its best.

Download or read book King and People in Provincial Massachusetts written by Richard L. Bushman and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American revolutionaries themselves believed the change from monarchy to republic was the essence of the Revolution. King and People in Provincial Massachusetts explores what monarchy meant to Massachusetts under its second charter and why the momentous change to republican government came about. Richard L. Bushman argues that monarchy entailed more than having a king as head of state: it was an elaborate political culture with implications for social organization as well. Massachusetts, moreover, was entirely loyal to the king and thoroughly imbued with that culture. Why then did the colonies become republican in 1776? The change cannot be attributed to a single thinker such as John Locke or to a strain of political thought such as English country party rhetoric. Instead, it was the result of tensions ingrained in the colonial political system that surfaced with the invasion of parliamentary power into colonial affairs after 1763. The underlying weakness of monarchical government in Massachusetts was the absence of monarchical society -- the intricate web of patronage and dependence that existed in England. But the conflict came from the colonists' conception of rulers as an alien class of exploiters whose interest was the plundering of the colonies. In large part, colonial politics was the effort to restrain official avarice. The author explicates the meaning of "interest" in political discourse to show how that conception was central in the thinking of both the popular party and the British ministry. Management of the interest of royal officials was a problem that continually bedeviled both the colonists and the crown. Conflict was perennial because the colonists and the ministry pursued diverging objectives in regulating colonial officialdom. Ultimately the colonists came to see that safety against exploitation by self-interested rulers would be assured only by republican government.

Download or read book Yankee Theatre written by Francis Hodge and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The famous "Stage Yankees," with their eccentric New England dialect comedy, entertained audiences from Boston to New Orleans, from New York to London in the years between 1825 and 1850. They provided the creative energy for the development of an American-type character in early plays of native authorship. This book examines the full range of their theatre activity, not only as actors, but also as playmakers, and re-evaluates their contribution to the growth of the American stage. Yankee theatre was not an oddity, a passing fad, or an accident of entertainment; it was an honest exploitation of the materials of American life for an audience in search of its own identification. The delineation of the American character—a full-length realistic portrait in the context of stage comedy—was its projected goal; and though not the only method for such delineation, the theatre form was the most popular and extensive way of disseminating the American image. The Yankee actors openly borrowed from what literary sources were available to them, but because of their special position as actors, who were required to give flesh-and-blood imitations of people for the believable acceptance of others viewing the same people about them, they were forced to draw extensively on their actors' imaginations and to present the American as they saw him. If the image was too often an external one, it still revealed the Yankee as a hardy individual whose independence was a primary assumption; as a bargainer, whose techniques were more clever than England's sharpest penny-pincher; as a country person, more intelligent, sharper and keener in dealings than the city-bred type; as an American freewheeler who always landed on top, not out of naive honesty but out of a simple perception of other human beings and their gullibility. Much new evidence in this study is based on London productions, where the view of English audiences and critics was sharply focused on what Americans thought about themselves and the new culture of democracy emerging around them. The shift from America, the borrower, to America, the original doer, can be clearly seen in this stager activity. Yankee theatre, then, is an epitome of the emerging American after the Second War for Independence. Emerging nationalism meant emerging national definition. Yankee theatre thus led to the first cohesive body of American plays, the first American actors seen in London, and to a new realistic interpretation of the American in the "character" plays of the 1870s and 1880s.

Download or read book Guide to the Study of United States Imprints written by George Thomas Tanselle and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1971 with total page 1146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: