Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
313
result(s) for
"Literature and society -- United States -- History -- 20th century"
Sort by:
American literature in transition, 1920-1930
\"American Literature in Transition, 1920-1930 examines the dynamic interactions between social and literary fields during the so-called Jazz Age. It situates the era's place in the incremental evolution of American literature throughout the 20th century. Essays from preeminent critics and historians analyze many overlapping aspects of American letters in the 1920s and re-evaluates an astonishingly diverse group of authors. Expansive in scope and daring in its mixture of eclectic methods, this book extends the most exciting advances made in the last several decades in the fields of modernist studies, ethnic literatures, African-American literature, gender studies, transnational studies, and the history of the book. It examines how the world of literature intersected with other arts, such as cinema, jazz, and theater, and explores the print culture in transition, with focus on new publishing houses, trends in advertising, readership, and obscenity laws\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Politics of Irony in American Modernism
This book shows how American literary culture in the first half of the twentieth century saw \"irony'\" emerge as a term to describe intersections between aesthetic and political practices. Against conventional associations of irony with political withdrawal, Stratton shows how the term circulated widely in literary and popular culture to describe politically engaged forms of writing. It is a critical commonplace to acknowledge the difficulty of defining irony before stipulating a particular definition as a stable point of departure for literary, cultural, and political analysis. This book, by contrast, is the first to derive definitions of \"irony\" inductively, showing how writers employed it as a keyword both before and in opposition to the institutionalization of New Criticism. It focuses on writers who not only composed ironic texts but talked about irony and satire to situate their work politically: Randolph Bourne, Benjamin De Casseres, Ellen Glasgow, John Dos Passos, Ralph Ellison, and many others.
eBook
American literature in transition, 1970-1980
\"American Literature in Transition, 1970-1980' examines the literary developments of the 20th-century's gaudiest decade. For a quarter century, filmmakers, musicians, and historians have returned to the era to explore the legacy of Watergate, stagflation, and Saturday Night Fever, uncovering the unique confluence of political and economic phenomena that make the period such a baffling time. Literary historians have never shown much interest in the era, however - a remarkable omission considering writers as diverse as Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Marilyn French, Adrienne Rich, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Alice Walker, and Octavia E. Butler were active. Over the course of twenty-one essays, contributors explore a range of controversial themes these writers tackled.\"-- Dust jacket.
Book
Urban Underworlds
Urban Underworldsis an exploration of city spaces, pathologized identities, lurid fears, and American literature. Surveying the 1890s to the 1990s, Thomas Heise chronicles how and why marginalized populations immigrant Americans in the Lower East Side, gays and lesbians in Greenwich Village and downtown Los Angeles, the black underclass in Harlem and Chicago, and the new urban poor dispersed across American cities have been selectively targeted as \"urban underworlds\" and their neighborhoods characterized as miasmas of disease and moral ruin.The quarantining of minority cultures helped to promote white, middle-class privilege. Following a diverse array of literary figures who differ with the assessment of the underworld as the space of the monstrous Other, Heise contends that it is a place where besieged and neglected communities are actively trying to take possession of their own neighborhoods.
eBook
American literature in transition, 1910-1920
\"American Literature in Transition: 1910-1920 offers provocative new readings of authors whose innovations are recognized as inaugurating Modernism in US letters, including Robert Frost, Willa Cather, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, H. D., and Marianne Moore. Gathering the voices of both new and established scholars, the volume also reflects the diversity and contradictions of US literature of the 1910s. 'Literature' itself is construed variously, leading to explorations of jazz, the movies, and political writing as well as little magazines, lantern slides, and sports reportage. One section of thematic essays cuts across genre boundaries. Another section oriented to formats drills deeply into the workings of specific media, genres, or forms. Essays on institutions conclude the collection, although a critical mass of contributors throughout explore long-term literary and cultural trends - where political repression, race prejudice, war, and counterrevolution are no less prominent than experimentation, progress, and egalitarianism\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Camp sites : sex, politics, and academic style in postwar America
Reading across the disciplines of the mid-century university, this book argues that the political shift in postwar America from consensus liberalism to New Left radicalism entailed as many continuities as ruptures. Both Cold War liberals and radicals understood the university as a privileged site for \"doing politics,\" and both exiled homosexuality from the political ideals each group favored. Liberals, who advanced a politics of style over substance, saw gay people as unable to separate the two, as incapable of maintaining the opportunistic suspension of disbelief on which a tough-minded liberalism depended. Radicals, committed to a politics of authenticity, saw gay people as hopelessly beholden to the role-playing and duplicity that the radicals condemned in their liberal forebears. Camp Sites considers key themes of postwar culture, from the conflict between performance and authenticity to the rise of the meritocracy, through the lens of camp, the underground sensibility of pre-Stonewall gay life. In so doing, it argues that our basic assumptions about the social style of the postwar milieu are deeply informed by certain presuppositions about homosexual experience and identity, and that these presuppositions remain stubbornly entrenched despite our post-Stonewall consciousness-raising.
eBook
The Dream of the Great American Novel
The first book in many years to take in the full sweep of national fiction, The Dream of the Great American Novel explains why this supposedly antiquated idea continues to thrive. It shows that four G.A.N. \"scripts\" are keys to the dynamics of American literature and identity--and to the myth of a nation perpetually under construction.
eBook
American literature in transition, 1960-1970
\"American Literature in Transition captures the dynamic energies transmitted across the 20th- and 21st-century American literary landscapes. Revisionary and authoritative, the series offers a comprehensive new overview of the established literary landmarks that constitute American literary life. Ambitious in scope and depth, and accommodating new critical perspectives and approaches, this series captures the dynamic energies and ongoing change in 20th- and 21st- century American literature. These are decades of transition, but also periods of epochal upheaval. These decades - the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, the Cold War, the sixties, 9/11 - are turning points of real significance. But in a tumultuous century, these terms can mask deeper structural changes. Each one of these books challenges in different ways the dominant approaches to a period of literature by shifting the focus from what happened to understanding how and why it happened. They elucidate the multifaceted interaction between the social and literary fields and capture that era's place in the incremental evolution of American literature up to the present moment. Taken together, this series of books constitutes a new kind of literary history in a century of intense cultural and literary creation, a century of liberation and also of immense destruction too. As a revisionary project grounded in pre-existing debates, American Literature in Transition offers an unprecedented analysis of the American literary\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Writing against reform : aesthetic realism in the Progressive Era
Throughout the Progressive Era, reform literature became a central feature of the American literary landscape. Works like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's \"The Yellow Wall-Paper,\" and Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives topped bestseller lists and jolted middle-class readers into action. While realism and social reform have a long-established relationship, prominent writers of the period such as Henry James, Edith Wharton, James Weldon Johnson, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Kate Chopin resisted explicit political rhetoric in their own works and critiqued reform aesthetics, which too often rang hollow. Arielle Zibrak reveals that while these writers were often seen as indifferent to the political currents of their time, their work is a part of a little explored debate on the relationship between literature and politics at the heart of Progressive Era publishing. Examining the critique of reform aesthetics within the tradition of American realist literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Writing Against Reform promises to change the way we think about the fiction of this period and many of America's leading writers.
eBook