Search Results

ENGLISH

Unbecoming Americans - Writing Race And Nation From The Shadows Of Citizenship, 1945-1960

by Joseph Keith

51,61€ + 10% CARD

 During the Cold War, Ellis Island no longer served as the largest port of entry for immigrants, but as a prison for holding aliens the state wished to deport. The government criminalized those it considered un-assimilable (from left-wing intellectuals and black radicals to racialized migrant laborers) through the denial, annulment, and curtailment of citizenship and its rights. The island, ceasing to represent the iconic ideal of immigrant America, came to symbolize its very limits. Unbecoming Americans sets out to recover the shadow narratives of un-American writers forged out of the racial and political limits of citizenship. In this collection of Afro-Caribbean, Filipino, and African American writers-C.L.R. James, Carlos Bulosan, Claudia Jones, and Richard Wright-Joseph Keith examines how they used their exclusion from the nation, a condition he terms "alienage," as a standpoint from which to imagine alternative global solidarities and to interrogate the contradictions of the United States as a country, a republic, and an empire at the dawn of the "American Century." Building on scholarship linking the forms of the novel to those of the nation, the book explores how these writers employed alternative aesthetic forms, including memoir, cultural criticism, and travel narrative, to contest prevailing notions of race, nation, and citizenship. Ultimately they produced a vital counter-discourse of freedom in opposition to the new formations of empire emerging in the years after World War II, forms that continue to shape our world today.
ENGLISH

Troublemakers - Power, Representation, And The Fiction Of The Mass Worker

by William Scott

51,61€ + 10% CARD

 Explores how a major change in the nature and forms of working-class power affected novels about U.S. industrial workers in the first half of the twentieth century.
ENGLISH

Main Street And Empire - The Fictional Small Town In The Age Of Globalization

by Ryan Poll

51,61€ + 10% CARD

 The small town has become a national icon that circulates widely in literature, culture, and politics as an authentic American space and community. Yet there are surprisingly few critical studies that analyze the small town's centrality to the United States' identity and imagination. In Main Street and Empire, Ryan Poll addresses this need, arguing that the small town, as evoked by the image of "Main Street," is not a relic of the past but rather a metaphorical screen upon which America's "everyday" stories and subjects are projected on both a national and global scale. Bringing together a broad selection of texts-from Thornton Wilder's Our Town, Grace Metalious's Peyton Place, and Peter Weir's The Truman Show to the speeches of William McKinley, Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin, and Barack Obama-Poll examines how the small town is used to imagine and reproduce the nation throughout the twentieth- and into the twenty-first century. He contends that the dominant small town, despite its innocent, nostalgic appearance, is central to the development of the U.S. empire and global capitalism.
ENGLISH

Loyal Subjects - Bonds Of Nation, Race, And Allegiance In Nineteenth-Century America

by Elizabeth Duquette

51,61€ + 10% CARD

 Loyal Subjects considers how the Civil War complicated the cultural value of emotion, especially the ideal of sympathy.
ENGLISH

Romance Of Race - Incest, Miscegenation, And Multiculturalism In The United States, 1880-1930

by Jolie A. Sheffer

51,61€ + 10% CARD

 <div> <p>In the United States miscegenation is not merely a subject of literature and popular culture. It is in many ways the foundation of contemporary imaginary community. <i>The Romance of Race</i> examines the role of minority women writers and reformers in the creation of our modern American multiculturalism.<br> <br> The national identity of the United States was transformed between 1880 and 1930 due to mass immigration, imperial expansion, the rise of Jim Crow, and the beginning of the suffrage movement. A generation of women writers and reformers—particularly women of color—contributed to these debates by imagining new national narratives that put minorities at the center of American identity. Jane Addams, Pauline Hopkins, Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton), María Cristina Mena, and Mourning Dove (Christine Quintasket) embraced the images of the United States—and increasingly the world—as an interracial nuclear family. They also reframed public debates through narratives depicting interracial encounters as longstanding, unacknowledged liaisons between white men and racialized women that produced an incestuous, mixed-race nation.<br> <br> By mobilizing the sexual taboos of incest and miscegenation, these women writers created political allegories of kinship and community. Through their criticisms of the nation’s history of exploitation and colonization, they also imagined a more inclusive future. As Jolie A. Sheffer identifies the contemporary template for American multiculturalism in the works of turn-of-the century minority writers, she uncovers a much more radical history than has previously been considered.</p> </div>
ENGLISH

Reading Embodied Citizenship - Disability, Narrative, And The Body Politic

by Emily Russell

55,58€ + 10% CARD

 Drawing from major figures in American literature, including Mark Twain, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and David Foster Wallace, as well as introducing texts from the emerging canon of disability studies, Emily Russell demonstrates the place of disability at the core of American ideals.
ENGLISH

Transatlantic Spectacles Of Race - The Tragic Mulatta And The Tragic Muse

by Kimberly Snyder Manganelli

51,61€ + 10% CARD

 <div> <p>The tragic mulatta was a stock figure in nineteenth-century American literature, an attractive mixed-race woman who became a casualty of the color line. The tragic muse was an equally familiar figure in Victorian British culture, an exotic and alluring Jewish actress whose profession placed her alongside the "fallen woman."</p> <p>In <i>Transatlantic Spectacles of Race,</i> Kimberly Manganelli argues that the tragic mulatta and tragic muse, who have heretofore been read separately, must be understood as two sides of the same phenomenon. In both cases, the eroticized and racialized female body is put on public display, as a highly enticing commodity in the nineteenth-century marketplace. Tracing these figures through American, British, and French literature and culture, Manganelli constructs a host of surprising literary genealogies, from <i>Zelica</i> to <i>Daniel Deronda</i>, from <i>Uncle Tom’s Cabin</i> to <i>Lady Audley’s Secret.</i> Bringing together an impressive array of cultural texts that includes novels, melodramas, travel narratives, diaries, and illustrations, <i>Transatlantic Spectacles of Race</i> reveals the value of transcending literary, national, and racial boundaries.</p> </div>
ENGLISH

Urban Underworlds - A Geography Of Twentieth-Century American Literature And Culture

by Thomas Heise

51,61€ + 10% CARD

 <div><i>Urban Underworlds</i> is 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.<br> <br> 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.</div>
ENGLISH

White Negress - Literature, Minstrelsy, And The Black-Jewish Imaginary

by Lori Harrison-Kahan

51,61€ + 10% CARD

 <div> <div>During the first half of the twentieth century, American Jews demonstrated a commitment to racial justice as well as an attraction to African American culture. Until now, the debate about whether such black-Jewish encounters thwarted or enabled Jews’ claims to white privilege has focused on men and representations of masculinity while ignoring questions of women and femininity. The White Negress investigates literary and cultural texts by Jewish and African American women, opening new avenues of inquiry that yield more complex stories about Jewishness, African American identity, and the meanings of whiteness.<br> <br> Lori Harrison-Kahan examines writings by Edna Ferber, Fannie Hurst, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as the blackface performances of vaudevillian Sophie Tucker and controversies over the musical and film adaptations of Show Boat and Imitation of Life. Moving between literature and popular culture, she illuminates how the dynamics of interethnic exchange have at once produced and undermined the binary of black and white.</div> </div>
ENGLISH

Abortion In The American Imagination - Before Life And Choice, 1880-1940

by Karen Weingarten

47,63€ + 10% CARD

 <div> The public debate on abortion stretches back much further than Roe v. Wade, to long before the terms "pro-choice" and "pro-life" were ever invented. Yet the ways Americans discussed abortion in the early decades of the twentieth century had little in common with our now-entrenched debates about personal responsibility and individual autonomy.<br> <br> <i>Abortion in the American Imagination</i> returns to the moment when American writers first dared to broach the controversial subject of abortion. What was once a topic avoided by polite society, only discussed in vague euphemisms behind closed doors, suddenly became open to vigorous public debate as it was represented everywhere from sensationalistic melodramas to treatises on social reform. Literary scholar and cultural historian Karen Weingarten shows how these discussions were remarkably fluid and far-ranging, touching upon issues of eugenics, economics, race, and gender roles.<br> <br> Weingarten traces the discourses on abortion across a wide array of media, putting fiction by canonical writers like William Faulkner, Edith Wharton, and Langston Hughes into conversation with the era’s films, newspaper articles, and activist rhetoric. By doing so, she exposes not only the ways that public perceptions of abortion changed over the course of the twentieth century, but also the ways in which these abortion debates shaped our very sense of what it means to be an American. </div>
ENGLISH

American Hybrid Poetics - Gender, Mass Culture, And Form

by Amy Moorman Robbins

50,28€ + 10% CARD

 <div><i> American Hybrid Poetics</i> explores the ways in which hybrid poetics—a playful mixing of disparate formal and aesthetic strategies—have been the driving force in the work of a historically and culturally diverse group of women poets who are part of a robust tradition in contesting the dominant cultural order. Amy Moorman Robbins examines the ways in which five poets—Gertrude Stein, Laura Mullen, Alice Notley, Harryette Mullen, and Claudia Rankine—use hybridity as an implicitly political strategy to interrupt mainstream American language, literary genres, and visual culture, and expose the ways in which mass culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has had a powerfully standardizing impact on the collective American imagination. By forcing encounters between incompatible traditions—consumer culture with the avant-garde, low culture forms with experimental poetics, prose poetry with linguistic subversiveness—these poets bring together radically competing ideologies and highlight their implications for lived experience. Robbins argues that it is precisely because these poets have mixed forms that their work has gone largely unnoticed by leading members and critics in experimental poetry circles.<br> <br> <br></div>
ENGLISH

Black Resonance - Iconic Women Singers And African American Literature

by Emily J. Lordi

54,26€ + 10% CARD

 Black Resonance analyzes writings by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, and Nikki Giovanni that engage such iconic singers as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, and Aretha Franklin. The book focuses on two generations of artists from the 1920s to the 1970s; each chapter pairs one writer with one singer to crystallize the artistic practice they share: lyricism, sincerity, understatement, haunting, and the creation of a signature voice.
ENGLISH

When Sex Changed - Birth Control Politics And Literature Between The World Wars

by Layne Parish Craig

51,61€ + 10% CARD

 <div> <p>In <i>When Sex Changed</i>, Layne Parish Craig analyzes the ways literary texts responded to the political, economic, sexual, and social values put forward by the birth control movements of the 1910s to the 1930s in the United States and Great Britain.</p> <p>Discussion of contraception and related topics (including feminism, religion, and eugenics) changed the way that writers depicted women, marriage, and family life. Tracing this shift, Craig compares disparate responses to the birth control controversy, from early skepticism by mainstream feminists, reflected in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s <i>Herland</i>, to concern about the movement’s race and class implications suggested in Nella Larsen’s <i>Quicksand</i>, to enthusiastic speculation about contraception’s political implications, as in Virginia Woolf’s <i>Three Guineas</i>.</p> <p>While these texts emphasized birth control’s potential to transform marriage and family life and emancipate women from the "slavery" of constant childbearing, birth control advocates also used less-than-liberatory language that excluded the poor, the mentally ill, non-whites, and others. Ultimately, Craig argues, the debates that began in these early political and literary texts—texts that document both the birth control movement’s idealism and its exclusionary rhetoric—helped shape the complex legacy of family planning and women’s rights with which the United States and the United Kingdom still struggle.</p> </div>
ENGLISH

Twentieth-Century Sentimentalism - Narrative Appropriation In American Literature

by Jennifer A. Williamson

54,26€ + 10% CARD

 Argues that sentimentalism, an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary mode, is alive and well in the modern era. By examining working-class literature that adopts the rhetoric of "feeling right" in order to promote a proletarian or humanist ideology as well as neo-slave narratives that wrestle with the legacy of slavery and cultural definitions of African American families, it explores the ways contemporary authors engage with familiar sentimental cliches and ideals.
ENGLISH

Autobiography Of Citizenship - Assimilation And Resistance In U.S. Education

by Tova Cooper

60,88€ + 10% CARD

 <div>At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States was faced with a new and radically mixed population, one that included freed African Americans, former reservation Indians, and a burgeoning immigrant population. In <i>The Autobiography of Citizenship</i>, Tova Cooper looks at how educators tried to impose unity on this divergent population, and how the new citizens in turn often resisted these efforts, reshaping mainstream U.S. culture and embracing their own view of what it means to be an American. <div><br></div> <div><i>The Autobiography of Citizenship</i> traces how citizenship education programs began popping up all over the country, influenced by the progressive approach to hands-on learning popularized by John Dewey and his followers. Cooper offers an insightful account of these programs, enlivened with compelling readings of archival materials such as photos of students in the process of learning; autobiographical writing by both teachers and new citizens; and memoirs, photos, poems, and novels by authors such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Jane Addams, Charles Reznikoff, and Emma Goldman. Indeed, Cooper provides the first comparative, inside look at these citizenship programs, revealing that they varied wildly: at one end, assimilationist boarding schools required American Indian children to transform their dress, language, and beliefs, while at the other end the libertarian Modern School encouraged immigrant children to frolic naked in the countryside and learn about the world by walking, hiking, and following their whims. </div> <div><br></div> <div>Here then is an engaging portrait of what it was like to be, and become, a U.S. citizen one hundred years ago, showing that what it means to be "American" is never static.</div> </div>
ENGLISH

Abandoning The Black Hero - Sympathy And Privacy In The Postwar African American White-Life Novel

by John C. Charles

51,61€ + 10% CARD

 Examines the motivations that led certain African American authors in mid-twentieth century to shift from writing protest novels about racial injustice to novels focusing primarily, if not exclusively on whites, or white-life novels. These fascinating works have been understudied despite having been written by such defining figures as Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Ann Petry, and Chester Himes.
ENGLISH

Girls Will Be Boys - Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, And American Cinema, 1908-1934

by Laura Horak

OUT OF STOCK OR NOT AVAILABLE

 Examines a rich history of gender-bending film roles, enabling readers to appreciate the wide array of masculinities that these actresses performed - from sentimental boyhood to rugged virility to gentlemanly refinement. Taking us on a guided tour through a treasure-trove of vintage images, Girls Will Be Boys helps us view the histories of gender, sexuality, and film through fresh eyes.
ENGLISH

Writing America - Literary Landmarks From Walden Pond To Wounded Knee (A Reader'S Companion)

by Shelley Fisher Fishkin

OUT OF STOCK OR NOT AVAILABLE

 Writing America takes readers on an eclectic tour of historic sites that have been pivotal to the making of American literature, reflecting the true diversity of the nation and its authors. Profusely illustrated, it is the literary gift book for 2015.
ENGLISH

Real Sister - Stereotypes, Respectability, And Black Women In Reality Tv

OUT OF STOCK OR NOT AVAILABLE

 The first book of scholarship devoted to the issue of how black women are depicted on reality television, Real Sister offers an even-handed consideration of the genre. The book's ten contributors - black female scholars from a variety of disciplines - provide a wide range of perspectives, while considering everything from Basketball Wives to Say Yes to the Dress.
ENGLISH

The New Negro In The Old South

by Gabriel A. Briggs

OUT OF STOCK OR NOT AVAILABLE

 Makes the compelling case that the New Negro first emerged long before the Great Migration to the North. The New Negro in the Old South reconstructs the vibrant black community that developed in Nashville after the Civil War, demonstrating how it played a pivotal role in shaping the economic, intellectual, social, and political lives of African Americans in subsequent decades.
ENGLISH

The New Negro In The Old South

by Gabriel A. Briggs

41,14€

free shipping

OUT OF STOCK OR NOT AVAILABLE

 Makes the compelling case that the New Negro first emerged long before the Great Migration to the North. The New Negro in the Old South reconstructs the vibrant black community that developed in Nashville after the Civil War, demonstrating how it played a pivotal role in shaping the economic, intellectual, social, and political lives of African Americans in subsequent decades.
ENGLISH

Black Female Sexualities

OUT OF STOCK OR NOT AVAILABLE
ENGLISH

Our Aging Bodies

by Gary F. Merrill

OUT OF STOCK OR NOT AVAILABLE

 Provides a clear, scientifically based explanation of what happens to all the major organ systems and bodily processes - such as the cardiovascular and digestive systems - as people age. Throughout the book, Gary F. Merrill weaves in personal anecdotes and stories that help clarify and reinforce the facts and principles of the underlying scientific processes and explanations.
ENGLISH

The Autobiography Of Citizenship - Assimilation And Resistance In U.S. Education

by Tova Cooper

OUT OF STOCK OR NOT AVAILABLE
Loading results...

View more results