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"Politics and literature United States History."
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The untold history of the United States : young readers edition. Volume 1, 1898-1945
A people's history of the American Empire, adapted for the next generation of young history buffs.
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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
The untold history of the United States : young readers edition. Volume 2, 1945-1962
Describes historical events of the United States between the years 1945-1962.
Book
Androgynous Democracy
Androgynous Democracy examines how the notions of
gender equality propounded by transcendentalists and other
nineteenth-century writers were further developed and
complicated by the rise of literary modernism. Aaron Shaheen
specifically investigates the ways in which intellectual
discussions of androgyny, once detached from earlier
gonadal-based models, were used by various American authors to
formulate their own paradigms of democratic national cohesion.
Indeed, Henry James, Frank Norris, Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
John Crowe Ransom, Grace Lumpkin, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marita
Bonner all expressed a deep fascination with androgyny—an
interest that bore directly on their thoughts about some of the
most prominent issues America confronted as it moved into the
first decades of the twentieth century. Shaheen not only
considers the work of each of these seven writers individually,
but he also reveals the interconnectedness of their ideas. He
shows that Henry James used the concept of androgyny to make
sense of the discord between the North and the South in the
years immediately following the Civil War, while Norris and
Gilman used it to formulate a new model of citizenship in the
wake of America’s industrial ascendancy. The author next
explores the uses Ransom and Lumpkin made of androgyny in
assessing the threat of radicalism once the Great Depression
had weakened the country’s faith in both capitalism and
religious fundamentalism. Finally, he looks at how androgyny
was instrumental in the discussions of racial uplift and urban
migration generated by Du Bois and Bonner. Thoroughly
documented, this engrossing volume will be a valuable resource
in the fields of American literary criticism, feminism and
gender theory, queer theory, and politics and nationalism.
eBook
The Traumatic Colonel
pIn American political fantasy, the Founding Fathers loom large, at once historical and mythical figures. In The Traumatic Colonel, Michael J. Drexler and Ed White examine the Founders as imaginative fictions, characters in the specifically literary sense, whose significance emerged from narrative elements clustered around them. From the revolutionary era through the 1790s, the Founders took shape as a significant cultural system for thinking about politics, race, and sexuality. Yet after 1800, amid the pressures of the Louisiana Purchase and the Haitian Revolution, this system could no longer accommodate the deep anxieties about the United States as a slave nation. Drexler and White assert that the most emblematic of the political tensions of the time is the figure of Aaron Burr, whose rise and fall were detailed in the literature of his time: his electoral tie with Thomas Jefferson in 1800, the accusations of seduction, the notorious duel with Alexander Hamilton, his machinations as the schemer of a breakaway empire, and his spectacular treason trial. The authors venture a psychoanalytically-informed exploration of post-revolutionary America to suggest that the figure of \"Burr\" was fundamentally a displaced fantasy for addressing the Haitian Revolution. Drexler and White expose how the historical and literary fictions of the nation's founding served to repress the larger issue of the slave system and uncover the Burr myth as the crux of that repression. Exploring early American novels, such as the works of Charles Brockden Brown and Tabitha Gilman Tenney, as well as the pamphlets, polemics, tracts, and biographies of the early republican period, the authors speculate that this flourishing of political writing illuminates the notorious gap in U.S. literary history between 1800 and 1820./p
eBook
Cold War Modernists
European intellectuals of the 1950s dismissed American culture as nothing more than cowboy movies and the A-bomb. In response, American cultural diplomats tried to show that the United States had something to offer beyond military might and commercial exploitation. Through literary magazines, traveling art exhibits, touring musical shows, radio programs, book translations, and conferences, they deployed the revolutionary aesthetics of modernism to prove—particularly to the leftists whose Cold War loyalties they hoped to secure—that American art and literature were aesthetically rich and culturally significant. Yet by repurposing modernism, American diplomats and cultural authorities turned the avant-garde into the establishment. They remade the once revolutionary movement into a content-free collection of artistic techniques and styles suitable for middlebrow consumption. Cold War Modernists documents how the CIA, the State Department, and private cultural diplomats transformed modernist art and literature into pro-Western propaganda during the first decade of the Cold War. Drawing on interviews, previously unknown archival materials, and the stories of such figures and institutions as William Faulkner, Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol, James Laughlin, and Voice of America, Barnhisel reveals how the U.S. government reconfigured modernism as a trans-Atlantic movement, a joint endeavor between American and European artists, with profound implications for the art that followed and for the character of American identity.
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Writing the U.S. Constitution
\"This book for elementary readers highlights the sequence of events from idea to implementation. Engaging photographs and a timeline support each step in the process, from the Articles of Confederation through ratifying the Constitution and the importance it still holds today. A glossary, further resources, and an index are included\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Activism and the American Novel
Since the 1980s, many activists and writers have turned from identity politics toward ethnic religious traditions to rediscover and reinvigorate their historic role in resistance to colonialism and oppression. In her examination of contemporary fiction by women of color-including Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, Toni Cade Bambara, Louise Erdrich, and Leslie Marmon Silko-Channette Romero considers the way these novels newly engage with Vodun, Santería, Candomblé, and American Indian traditions. Critical of a widespread disengagement from civic participation and of the contemporary novel's disconnection from politics, this fiction attempts to transform the novel and the practice of reading into a means of political engagement and an inspiration for social change.
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