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"Realism in literature History 20th century."
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Realism for the Masses
Realism for the Masses,is an exploration of how the concept of realism entered mass culture, and from there, how it tried to remake \"America.\" The literary and artistic creations of American realism are generally associated with the late nineteenth century. But this book argues that the aesthetic actually saturated American culture in the 1930s and 1940s and that the left social movements of the period were in no small part responsible. The book examines the prose of Carlos Bulosan and H. T. Tsiang; the photo essays of Margaret Bourke-White inLifemagazine; the bestsellers of Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Mitchell; the boxing narratives of Clifford Odets, Richard Wright, Nelson Algren; and the Hollywood boxing film, radio soap operas, and the domestic dramas of Lillian Hellman and Shirley Graham, and more.
These writers and artists infused realist aesthetics into American mass culture to an unprecedented degree and also built on a tradition of realism in order to inject influential definitions of \"the people\" into American popular entertainment. Central to this book is the relationship between these mass cultural realisms and emergent notions of pluralism. Significantly, Vials identifies three nascent pluralisms of the 1930s and 1940s: the New Deal pluralism of \"We're the People\" inThe Grapes of Wrath; the racially inclusive pluralism of Vice President Henry Wallace's \"The People's Century\"; and the proto-Cold War pluralism of Henry Luce's \"The American Century.\"
eBook
Pulp Surrealism
In addition to its more well known literary and artistic origins,
the French surrealist movement drew inspiration from currents of
psychological anxiety and rebellion running through a shadowy side
of mass culture, specifically in fantastic popular fiction and
sensationalistic journalism. The provocative nature of this
insolent mass culture resonated with the intellectual and political
preoccupations of the surrealists, as Robin Walz demonstrates in
this fascinating study. Pulp Surrealism weaves an
interpretative history of the intersection between mass print
culture and surrealism, re-evaluating both our understanding of
mass culture in early twentieth-century Paris and the revolutionary
aims of the surrealist movement. Pulp Surrealism presents
four case studies, each exploring the out-of the-way and
impertinent elements which inspired the surrealists. Walz discusses
Louis Aragon's Le paysan de Paris, one of the great
surrealist novels of Paris. He goes on to consider the popular
series of Fantômes crime novels; the Parisan press coverage of the
arrest, trial, and execution of mass-murderer Landru; and the
surrealist inquiry \"Is Suicide a Solution?\", which Walz juxtaposes
with reprints of actual suicide faits divers
(sensationalist newspaper blurbs). Although surrealist interest in
sensationalist popular culture eventually waned, this exploration
of mass print culture as one of the cultural milieux from which
surrealism emerged ultimately calls into question assumptions about
the avant-garde origins of modernism itself.
eBook
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
Magic(al) Realism
Bestselling novels by Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a multitude of others have enchanted us by blurring the lines between reality and fantasy. Their genre of writing has been variously defined as 'magic', 'magical' or 'marvellous' realism and is quickly becoming a core area of literary studies. This guide offers a first step for those wishing to consider this area in greater depth, by:
exploring the many definitions and terms used in relation to the genre
tracing the origins of the movement in painting and fiction
offering an historical overview of the contexts for magic(al) realism
providing analysis of key works of magic(al) realist fiction, film and art.
This is an essential guide for those interested in or studying one of today's most popular genres.
'[Bower's] overall purpose is \"to guide the non-expert through the minefield of terms, to identify the origins of the terms and concepts in art, literature and film and to introduce readers to a range of innovative and engaging fictions\". All of this she achieves: the text is easily understood without being simplistic, and the glossary, though short, is clear and very helpful.' British Bulletin of Publications
'What renders Bower's Magic(al) Realism such a valuable and comprehensive introduction is that in addition to literature, she also considers artefacts from other fields of cultural production ... Bower's analysis of magical realism also proves exceptional in that she repeatedly draws attention to the importance of the cultural location of the audience in receiving a work as magic realist.' - Wasafiri
Introduction 1. Origins of Magic(al) Realism 2. Delimiting the Terms 3. Locations of the Magic(al) Realism 4. Transgressive Variants of Magical Realism 5. Cross-cultural variants of Magical realism 6. Magic(al) Realism and Cultural Productions 7. The Future of Magic(al) Realism Glossary Bibliography Index
Maggie Ann Bowers teaches American and Canadian literature at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. She has published numerous articles on contemporary American and Canadian authors, and is the co-editor of Convergences and Interferences (2002).
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Configurations of the real in Chinese literary and aesthetic modernity
\"Tracing the formation of the modern concept of literature in 20th century China, this book examines the emergence of the Chinese socialist realist novel in relation to the literary and philosophical currents globalized in the wake of capitalist modernity\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Modernism and the Ordinary
The book overturns conventional accounts of the modernist period as primarily drawn toward the new, the transcendent, and the extraordinary. The book shows how modernist writers were preoccupied, instead, with the unselfconscious actions of everyday life, even in times of political crisis and war. Experiences like walking to work, eating a sandwich, or mending a dress were often resistant to shock, and these daily activities presented a counter-force to the aesthetic of heightened affect with which the period is often associated. The book examines works by Joyce, Woolf, Stein, Stevens, Proust, Beckett, and Auden alongside the ideas of philosophers such as Henri Bergson and William James. The book shows how these writers responded to the difficulty of representing the ordinary without defamilarizing it or making it transcendent. The book also connects this problem to earlier modes of literary realism on both sides of the Atlantic, and situates modernism’s preoccupation with ordinary experience within the major historical events of the period, especially the two world wars. Ultimately, the book reveals the non-transformative power of the ordinary as one of modernism’s most compelling attributes: day-to-day experience comes to stand not as an impediment to the creative life, but as a satisfaction with the material rather than the spiritual, the local rather than the exotic, the constant rather than the unknown, and the democratic rather than the privileged.
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