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Describing Italy as "the only region of the earth that I truly love," James Fenimore Cooper used the style of picturesque impressionism to convey his vision of Italy as the microcosm of an ordered and a beautiful world. In theory, the picturesque style of writing could produce verbal sketches that embodied a visual complexity similar to that of the great Baroque and Romantic landscape paintings. In practice, the hundreds of travel books written in the picturesque style in the early 1900s communicated rapturous enthusiasm with blurred or even false reports of actual scenes. Cooper, with his scrupulous fidelity to the seen world, intended to alter this practice decisively. The response of his ...
A Town & Country Must-Read Book of Spring 2024 “Fashion, photography, and pop culture aficionados will be captivated” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) by this riveting dual biography of the McLaughlins—identical twin sisters who became groundbreaking magazine photographers in New York during the glamorous golden age of the 1930s and ’40s. In Double Click, author Carol Kino “has interwoven a biography of the McLaughlins with an authoritative, detailed history of fashion, the art world and photography in midcentury New York” (The Wall Street Journal). The McLaughlin twins were trailblazing female photographers, celebrated in their time as stars in their respective fields, but ha...
The Redskins, James Fenimore Cooper's 1846 novel about the Anti-Rent Wars in upstate New York, is now available in a scholarly edition. The final work in the "Littlepage trilogy," The Redskins includes Cooper's enduring theme of Indigenous-White relations but examines it in the context of contemporary tensions between wealthy landlords and their tenant farmers in the Hudson Valley region. The work is narrated in the voice of a privileged landowner who presents an impassioned defense of the aristocratic class in America and thus raises cardinal questions regarding Cooper's own intentions and authorial control. Cooper himself was often derided as an "aristocrat" in this later phase of his care...
Traveling to Unknown Places presents a compelling, incisive analysis of how French and American writers reshaped their personal and collective identities as they traveled in foreign countries after the social upheavals of the eighteenth-century Atlantic revolutions. Delving into the experiences of renowned figures like Flora Tristan and Margaret Fuller alongside lesser-known postrevolutionary travelers, this book illuminates how cross-cultural encounters pushed writers to redefine their views of nationality, language, race, slavery, gender, religion, science, and political ideologies. Lloyd Kramer deftly demonstrates how unsettling journeys challenged cultural preconceptions and fostered int...
A cosmopolitan author who spent nearly a decade in Europe and was versed in the works of his British and French contemporaries, James Fenimore Cooper was also deeply concerned with the America of his day and its history. His works embrace themes that have dominated American literature since: the frontier; the oppression of Native Americans by Europeans; questions of race, gender, and class; and rugged individualism, as represented by figures like the pirate, the spy, the hunter, and the settler. His most memorable character, Natty Bumppo, has entered into American popular culture. The essays in this volume offer students bridges to Cooper's novels, which grapple with complex moral issues that are still crucial today. Engaging with film adaptations, cross-culturalism, animal studies, media history, environmentalism, and Indigenous American poetics, the essays offer new ways to bring these novels to life in the classroom.
Crossing borders – both physically and imaginatively – is part of our ‘nomadic’ postmodern identity, but transcultural and transnational exchanges have also played a major role in the centuries-long processes of hybridisation that helped to fashion the vast geographic, political and imaginative container of diversity we call Europe. This volume gathers together the work of scholars from several European countries in an attempt to encourage a collective reflection upon historical – and often ‘mythical’ – locations and landscapes, as well as upon the thresholds and faultlines that unite or separate them. The issues the volume tackles are delicate and complex, for the encounter of differences engenders both curiosity and suspicion and there is no easy way to create a new synthesis while respecting and promoting diversity. However, since Europe is inevitably a cultural and political entity ‘in the making’, Europeans should embrace the ‘great narrative’ of a ‘utopian project’, uniting their efforts to work towards a civilisation that is grounded on plurality and openness.
"Theoretically and historically grounded, Literary Memory will appeal to all those interested in the writings of Scott, the Scottish Enlightenment, Romantic cultural history, the history of the novel, narrative theory, and literature in relation to psychology and psychoanalysis."--BOOK JACKET.
"Dividing Paris: Urban Renewal and Social Inequality, 1852-1870 offers a new look at the ambitious urban changes that transformed the city of Paris during the Second Empire, when Paris became a template for urban renewal in many large cities in Europe, North, and South America. Esther da Costa Meyer looks at the social and historical of context of these urban changes--what Napoleon III, his prefect Georges-Eugene Haussman, and their team of engineers planned, as well as how the diverse and deeply stratified public responded to them. Along with broad streets and boulevards intended to enable crowds and merchandise to circulate and, also, impede the chances of popular insurgency, Haussman's pr...
James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) was America’s first novelist, celebrated for his masterpiece, The Last of the Mohicans. Over a prolific career he created a national mythology that endures to this day. According to Daniel Webster, “We may read the nation’s history in his life.” Yet Cooper was also a provocative figure, ultimately disillusioned with American democracy. He spent his boyhood in the wilds of the frontier, served as a merchant sailor and naval officer, traveled the courts of Europe in an age of upheaval and returned home to scandal and controversy. He conquered the literary world only to fall victim to his own fame. In the first popular biography of Cooper in a generation, historian Nick Louras brings the man and his age vividly to life.
This first-ever biography of American painter Grace Hartigan traces her rise from virtually self-taught painter to art-world fame, her plunge into obscurity after leaving New York to marry a scientist in Baltimore, and her constant efforts to reinvent her style and subject matter. Along the way, there were multiple affairs, four troubled marriages, a long battle with alcoholism, and a chilly relationship with her only child. Attempting to channel her vague ambitions after an early marriage, Grace struggled to master the basics of drawing in night-school classes. She moved to New York in her early twenties and befriended Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and other artists who were pioneerin...