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This is the first comprehensive assessment of the major periods and varieties of American autobiography. The eleven original essays in this volume do not only survey what has been done; they also point toward what can and should be done in future studies of a literary genre that is now receiving major scholarly attention. Book jacket.
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The Harlem Renaissance is rightly considered to be a moment of creative exuberance and unprecedented explosion. Today, there is a renewed interest in this movement, calling for a re-evaluation and a closer scrutiny of the era and of documents that have only recently become available. Temples for Tomorrow reconsiders the period -- between two world wars -- which confirmed the intuitions of W. E. B. DuBois on the "color line" and gave birth to the "American dilemma," later evoked by Gunnar Myrdal. Issuing from a generation bearing new hopes and aspirations, a new vision takes form and develops around the concept of the New Negro, with a goal: to recreate an African American identity and claim ...
Since the rise of the Native American Renaissance in literature and culture during the American civil rights period, a rich critical discourse has been developed to provide a range of interpretive frameworks for the study, recovery, and teaching of Native American literary and cultural production. For the past few decades the dominant framework has been nationalism, a critical perspective placing emphasis on specific tribal nations and nationalist concepts. While this nationalist intervention has produced important insights and questions regarding Native American literature, culture, and politics, it has not always attended to the important fact that Native texts and writers have also always...
In the beginning there was . . . the beginning. And with the beginning came the power to tell a story. Few book-length studies of narrative beginnings exist, and not one takes a feminist perspective. Opening Acts reveals the important role of beginnings as moments of discursive authority with power and agency that have been appropriated by writers from historically marginalized groups. Catherine Romagnolo argues for a critical awareness of how social identity plays a role in the strategic use and critical interpretation of narrative beginnings. The twentieth-century U.S. women writers whom Romagnolo studies—Edith Wharton, H.D., Toni Morrison, Julia Alvarez, and Amy Tan—have seized the power to disrupt conventional structures of authority and undermine historical master narratives of marriage, motherhood, U.S. nationhood, race, and citizenship. Using six of their novels as points of entry, Romagnolo illuminates the ways in which beginnings are potentially subversive, thereby disrupting the reinscription of hierarchically gendered and racialized conceptions of authorship and agency.
Since the colonial days, American women have traveled, migrated, and relocated, always faced with the challenge of reconstructing their homes for themselves and their families. Women, America, and Movement offers a journey through largely unexplored territory--the experiences of migrating American women. These narratives, both real and imagined, represent a range of personal and critical perspectives; some of the women describe their travels as expansive and freeing, while others relate the dreadful costs and sacrifices of relocating. Despite the range of essays featured in this study, the writings all coalesce around the issues of politics, poetry, and self- identity described by Adrienne R...
This book collects the efforts of a team of scholars working at the University of Torino under the auspices of the Project WWS (World-Wide Style). Focusing on diverse areas of inquiry into the transformations of the American city, the essays in this volume provide perspectives for understanding the complexity of urban cultures in the United States in the late 19th, 20th and early 21st centuries. Organized thematically, this book includes contributions in three main areas. The first area covers studies in U.S. history and history of ideas at the turn of the 20th century, in light of its migration/immigration processes as well as in its representations of national greatness and cultural hegemony as reflected in World's Fairs. The second area covers analyses of American literature in the double perspective of the recent emergence of a new form of «global novel», as well as the developments of new subgenres of urban fiction. A third area on inquiry focuses on new practices of organized religion in North America arising from the regionalization of the American metropolis in recent decades.
Winner of the 2006 Pietro Di Donato and John Fante Literary Award from The Grand Lodge of the Sons of Italy, New York State Robert Viscusi takes a comprehensive look at Italian American writing by exploring the connections between language and culture in Italian American experience and major literary texts. Italian immigrants, Viscusi argues, considered even their English to be a dialect of Italian, and therefore attempted to create an American English fully reflective of their historical, social, and cultural positions. This approach allows us to see Italian American purposes as profoundly situated in relation not only to American language and culture but also to Italian nationalist narratives in literary history as well as linguistic practice. Viscusi also situates Italian American writing within the "eccentric design" of American literature, and uses a multidisciplinary approach to read not only novels and poems, but also houses, maps, processions, videos, and other artifacts as texts.
The book highlights facets of people's experiences since the 19th century with Atlantic space and the design of their stay on board ships. The contributions range from the perspective of pleasure-seeking tourists, who used ships as a temporary, luxurious homes to the perspective of military personnel, who perceived the Atlantic Passage as a transition between homeland security and potentially dangerous professional operations - the risks of sea voyages even on technically sophisticated ocean liners, whose interiors and services often include grand hotels in the metropolises of the late 19th and 20th century, were discreetly ignored by the passengers. The charm of the Atlantic and the ship, unthinkable in earlier times, should not be decimated in any way.
Mary Esteve provides a study of crowd representations in American literature from the antebellum era to the early twentieth century. As a central icon of political and cultural democracy, the crowd occupies a prominent place in the American literary and cultural landscape. Esteve examines a range of writing by Poe, Hawthorne, Lydia Maria Child, Du Bois, James, and Stephen Crane among others. These writers, she argues, distinguish between the aesthetics of immersion in a crowd and the mode of collectivity demanded of political-liberal subjects. In their representations of everyday crowds, ranging from streams of urban pedestrians to swarms of train travellers, from upper-class parties to lower-class revivalist meetings, such authors seize on the political problems facing a mass liberal democracy - problems such as the stipulations of citizenship, nation formation, mass immigration and the emergence of mass media. Esteve examines both the aesthetic and political meanings of such urban crowd scenes.