Download or read book The Revolt from the Village 1915 1930 written by Anthony Channell Hilfer and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-08-25 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This incisive book traces the attack on American provincialism that ended the myth of the Happy Village. Replacing the idyllic life as a theme, American writers in revolt turned to a more realistic interpretation of the town, stressing its repressiveness, dullness, and conformity. This book analyzes the literary technique employed by these writers and explores their sensibilities to evaluate both their artistic accomplishments and their contributions to American thought and feeling. Originally published 1969. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
Download or read book American Small Town Fiction 1940 1960 written by Nathanael T. Booth and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In literature and popular culture, small town America is often idealized as distilling the national spirit. Does the myth of the small town conceal deep-seated reactionary tendencies or does it contain the basis of a national re-imagining? During the period between 1940 and 1960, America underwent a great shift in self-mythologizing that can be charted through representations of small towns. Authors like Henry Bellamann and Grace Metalious continued the tradition of Sherwood Anderson in showing the small town--by extension, America itself--profoundly warping the souls of its citizens. Meanwhile, Ray Bradbury, Toshio Mori and Ross Lockridge, Jr., sought to identify the small town's potential for growth, away from the shadows cast by World War II toward a more inclusive, democratic future. Examined together, these works are key to understanding how mid-20th century America refashioned itself in light of a new postwar order, and how the literary small town both obscures and reveals contradictions at the heart of the American experience.
Download or read book The American Midwest written by Andrew R. L. Cayton and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-08 with total page 1918 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first-ever encyclopedia of the Midwest seeks to embrace this large and diverse area, to give it voice, and help define its distinctive character. Organized by topic, it encourages readers to reflect upon the region as a whole. Each section moves from the general to the specific, covering broad themes in longer introductory essays, filling in the details in the shorter entries that follow. There are portraits of each of the region's twelve states, followed by entries on society and culture, community and social life, economy and technology, and public life. The book offers a wealth of information about the region's surprising ethnic diversity -- a vast array of foods, languages, styles, religions, and customs -- plus well-informed essays on the region's history, culture and values, and conflicts. A site of ideas and innovations, reforms and revivals, and social and physical extremes, the Midwest emerges as a place of great complexity, signal importance, and continual fascination.
Download or read book The Death and Life of Main Street written by Miles Orvell and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than a century, the term "Main Street" has conjured up nostalgic images of American small-town life. Representations exist all around us, from fiction and film to the architecture of shopping malls and Disneyland. All the while, the nation has become increasingly diverse, exposing tensions within this ideal. In The Death and Life of Main Street, Miles Orvell wrestles with the mythic allure of the small town in all its forms, illustrating how Americans continue to reinscribe these images on real places in order to forge consensus about inclusion and civic identity, especially in times of crisis. Orvell underscores the fact that Main Street was never what it seemed; it has always been much more complex than it appears, as he shows in his discussions of figures like Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Frank Capra, Thornton Wilder, Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans. He argues that translating the overly tidy cultural metaphor into real spaces--as has been done in recent decades, especially in the new urbanist planned communities of Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany--actually diminishes the communitarian ideals at the center of this nostalgic construct. Orvell investigates the way these tensions play out in a variety of cultural realms and explores the rise of literary and artistic traditions that deliberately challenge the tropes and assumptions of small-town ideology and life.
Download or read book The American Small Town written by John A. Jakle and published by Hamden, Conn. : Archon Books. This book was released on 1982 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Haunted States of America written by James Morgart and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2022-05-15 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prior studies of post-war American Gothic literature (and even American horror films) have primarily interpreted Gothic cultural production of the post-war period through a Cold War lens. Despite legitimate reasons for such an approach, this emphasis has limited inquiries into post-war fiction as well as our understanding of the nation’s complicated identity. While the federal government and its investigative agencies may have been preoccupied with the so-called ‘red menace’ that threatened to spread across the planet, each region of the country already possessed major strains of Gothic fiction that focused on regional anxieties – namely of those connected to women and minorities that threatened the region’s constructed identity and balance of power. The Haunted States of America shifts the focus to these Gothic strains by examining how the anxieties, fears and concerns illustrated in the works of several post-World War II writers can be best understood through regional history and identity.
Download or read book Dictionary of Midwestern Literature Volume Two written by Philip A. Greasley and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-08 with total page 1074 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Midwest has produced a robust literary heritage. Its authors have won half of the nation's Nobel Prizes for Literature plus a significant number of Pulitzer Prizes. This volume explores the rich racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of the region. It also contains entries on 35 pivotal Midwestern literary works, literary genres, literary, cultural, historical, and social movements, state and city literatures, literary journals and magazines, as well as entries on science fiction, film, comic strips, graphic novels, and environmental writing. Prepared by a team of scholars, this second volume of the Dictionary of Midwestern Literature is a comprehensive resource that demonstrates the Midwest's continuing cultural vitality and the stature and distinctiveness of its literature.
Download or read book A Place Called Home written by Richard O. Davies and published by Minnesota Historical Society Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2004 Minnesota Book Award Winner The Midwestern small town has long held an iconic place in American culture--from the imaginings of Sinclair Lewis's Main Street and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio to Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon. But the reality is much more complex, as the small town has been a study in transition from its very inception. In A Place Called Home, editors Richard O. Davies, Joseph A. Amato, and David R. Pichaske offer the first comprehensive examination of the Midwestern small town and its evolving nature from the 1800s to the present. This rich collection, gleaned from the best writings of historians, novelists, social scientists, poets, and journalists, features not only such well-known authors as Sherwood Anderson, Carol Bly, Willa Cather, Hamlin Garland, Langston Hughes, Garrison Keillor, William Kloefkorn, Sinclair Lewis, Susan Allen Toth, and Mark Twain but also many lesser known and exceptionally talented writers. Five chronological sections trace the founding, growth, and decline of the Midwestern town, and introductory comments illuminate its ever-changing face. The result is a wide-ranging collection of writings on the community at the heart of America.
Download or read book Landscape and Images written by John R. Stilgoe and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2015-02-12 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Stilgoe is just looking around. This is more difficult than it sounds, particularly in our mediated age, when advances in both theory and technology too often seek to replace the visual evidence before our own eyes rather than complement it. We are surrounded by landscapes charged with our past, and yet from our earliest schooldays we are instructed not to stare out the window. Someone who stops to look isn’t only a rarity; he or she is suspect. Landscape and Images records a lifetime spent observing America’s constructed landscapes. Stilgoe’s essays follow the eclectic trains of thought that have resulted from his observation, from the postcard preference for sunsets over sunrises to the concept of "teen geography" to the unwillingness of Americans to walk up and down stairs. In Stilgoe's hands, the subject of jack o’ lanterns becomes an occasion to explore centuries-old concepts of boundaries and trespassing, and to examine why this originally pagan symbol has persisted into our own age. Even something as mundane as putting the cat out before going to bed is traced back to fears of unwatched animals and an untended frontier fireplace. Stilgoe ponders the forgotten connections between politics and painted landscapes and asks why a country whose vast majority lives less than a hundred miles from a coast nonetheless looks to the rural Midwest for the classic image of itself. At times breathtaking in their erudition, the essays collected here are as meticulously researched as they are elegantly written. Stilgoe’s observations speak to specialists—whether they be artists, historians, or environmental designers—as well as to the common reader. Our landscapes constitute a fascinating history of accident and intent. The proof, says Stilgoe, is all around us.
Download or read book Kansas Quarterly written by and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book From Warm Center to Ragged Edge written by Jon K. Lauck and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2017-06-01 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the half-century after the Civil War, intellectuals and politicians assumed the Midwest to be the font and heart of American culture. Despite the persistence of strong currents of midwestern regionalism during the 1920s and 1930s, the region went into eclipse during the post–World War II era. In the apt language of Minnesota’s F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Midwest slid from being the “warm center” of the republic to its “ragged edge.” This book explains the factors that triggered the demise of the Midwest’s regionalist energies, from anti-midwestern machinations in the literary world and the inability of midwestern writers to break through the cultural politics of the era to the growing dominance of a coastal, urban culture. These developments paved the way for the proliferation of images of the Midwest as flyover country, the Rust Belt, a staid and decaying region. Yet Lauck urges readers to recognize persisting and evolving forms of midwestern identity and to resist the forces that squelch the nation’s interior voices.
Download or read book A Certain Slant of Light Regionalism and the Form of Southern and Midwestern Fiction written by and published by LSU Press. This book was released on with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book American Literature and Culture 1900 1960 written by Gail McDonald and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This introduction to American literature and culture from 1900 to 1960 is organized around four major ideas about America: that is it “big”, “new”, “rich”, and “free”. Illustrates the artistic and social climate in the USA during this period. Juxtaposes discussion of history, popular culture, literature and other art forms in ways that foster discussion, questioning, and continued study. An appendix lists relevant primary and secondary works, including websites. An ideal supplement to primary texts taught in American literature courses.
Download or read book Kansas History written by and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 676 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book White Diaspora written by Catherine Jurca and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2001-03-04 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In novels as disparate as Tarzan (written by Tarzana, California, real-estate developer Edgar Rice Burroughs), Richard Wright's Native Son, and recent fiction by John Updike and Richard Ford, Jurca finds an emphasis on the suburb under siege, a place where the fortunate tend to see themselves as powerless. From Babbitt to Rabbit, the suburban novel casts property owners living in communities of their choosing as dispossessed people. Material advantages become artifacts of oppression, and affluence is fraudulently identified as impoverishment. The fantasy of victimization reimagines white flight as a white diaspora.
Download or read book American Novel Crane to Faulkner written by Frank Northen Magill and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History written by Joan Shelley Rubin and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 1551 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History brings together in one two-volume set the record of the nation's values, aspirations, anxieties, and beliefs as expressed in both everyday life and formal bodies of thought. Over the past twenty years, the field of cultural history has moved to the center of American historical studies, and has come to encompass the experiences of ordinary citizens in such arenas as reading and religious practice as well as the accomplishments of prominent artists and writers. Some of the most imaginative scholarship in recent years has emerged from this burgeoning field. The scope of the volume reflects that development: the encyclopedia incorporates popular entertainment ranging from minstrel shows to video games, middlebrow ventures like Chautauqua lectures and book clubs, and preoccupations such as "Perfectionism" and "Wellness" that have shaped Americans' behavior at various points in their past and that continue to influence attitudes in the present. The volumes also make available recent scholarly insights into the writings of political scientists, philosophers, feminist theorists, social reformers, and other thinkers whose works have furnished the underpinnings of Americans' civic activities and personal concerns. Anyone wishing to understand the hearts and minds of the inhabitants of the United States from the early days of settlement to the twenty-first century will find the encyclopedia invaluable.
