Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism

Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism
Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Total Pages : 227
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781139501248
ISBN-13 : 1139501240
Rating : 4/5 (48 Downloads)

Synopsis Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism by : Greg Forter

American modernist writers' engagement with changing ideas of gender and race often took the form of a struggle against increasingly inflexible categories. Greg Forter interprets modernism as an effort to mourn a form of white manhood that fused the 'masculine' with the 'feminine'. He argues that modernists were engaged in a poignant yet deeply conflicted effort to hold on to socially 'feminine' and racially marked aspects of identity, qualities that the new social order encouraged them to disparage. Examining works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and Willa Cather, Forter shows how these writers shared an ambivalence toward the feminine and an unease over existing racial categories that made it difficult for them to work through the loss of the masculinity they mourned. Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism offers a bold reading of canonical modernism in the United States.

The Illegible Man

The Illegible Man
Author :
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Total Pages : 210
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780253071811
ISBN-13 : 025307181X
Rating : 4/5 (11 Downloads)

Synopsis The Illegible Man by : WillKanyusik

How does the sudden onset of disability impact the sense of self in a person whose identity was, at least in part, predicated on the possession of what is culturally understood to be an "able" body? How does this experience make visible the structures enabling society's shared notions of heteronormative masculinity? In the United States, the Second World War functioned as a key moment in the emergence of modern understandings of disability, demonstrating that an increased concern with disability in the postwar period would ultimately lead to greater incoherence in the definitions and cultural meanings of disability in America. The Illegible Man examines depictions of disability in American film and literature in twentieth-century postwar contexts, beginning with the first World War and continuing through America's war in Vietnam. Will Kanyusik searches for the origin of discourse surrounding disability and masculinity after the Second World War, examining both literature and film—both fiction and documentary—their depictions of disability and masculinity, and how many of these texts were created by the relationship between the culture industry and the Office of War Information in the 1940s. Supported by original archival research, The Illegible Man presents a new understanding of disability, masculinity, and war in American culture.

The New Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner

The New Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner
Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Total Pages : 259
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781107050389
ISBN-13 : 1107050383
Rating : 4/5 (89 Downloads)

Synopsis The New Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner by : John T. Matthews

This new Companion offers a sample of innovative approaches to interpreting and appreciating William Faulkner in the twenty-first century.

Race and New Modernisms

Race and New Modernisms
Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages : 225
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781350030428
ISBN-13 : 1350030422
Rating : 4/5 (28 Downloads)

Synopsis Race and New Modernisms by : K. Merinda Simmons

From the Harlem and Southern Renaissances to postcolonial writing in the Caribbean, Race and New Modernisms introduces and critically explores key issues and debates on race and ethnicity in the study of transnational modernism today. Topics covered include: · Key terms and concepts in scholarly discussions of race and ethnicity · European modernism and cultural appropriation · Modernism, colonialism, and empire · Southern and Harlem Renaissances · Social movements and popular cultures in the modernist period Covering writers and artists such as Josephine Baker, W.E.B. Du Bois, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Marcus Garvey, Édouard Glissant, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Paul Robeson, the book considers the legacy of modernist discussions of race in twenty-first century movements such as Black Lives Matter.

Emotional Reinventions

Emotional Reinventions
Author :
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Total Pages : 319
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780472121151
ISBN-13 : 0472121154
Rating : 4/5 (51 Downloads)

Synopsis Emotional Reinventions by : Melanie V. Dawson

Focusing on representational approaches to emotion during the years of American literary realism’s dominance and in the works of such authors as Edith Wharton, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, W. D. Howells, Charles Chesnutt, and others, Emotional Reinventions: Realist-Era Representations Beyond Sympathy contends that emotional representations were central to the self-conscious construction of high realism (in the mid-1880s) and to the interrogation of its boundaries. Based on realist-era authors’ rejection of “sentimentalism” and its reduction of emotional diversity (a tendency to stress what Karen Sanchez-Eppler has described as sentimental fiction’s investment in “overcoming difference”), Melanie Dawson argues that realist-era investments in emotional detail were designed to confront differences of class, gender, race, and circumstance directly. She explores the ways in which representational practices that approximate scientific methods often led away from scientific theories and rejected rigid attempts at creating emotional taxonomies. She argues that ultimately realist-era authors demonstrated a new investment in individuated emotional histories and experiences that sought to honor all affective experiences on their own terms.

Commemorative Modernisms

Commemorative Modernisms
Author :
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages : 377
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781474459938
ISBN-13 : 1474459935
Rating : 4/5 (38 Downloads)

Synopsis Commemorative Modernisms by : Kelly Alice Kelly

Reconsiders the relationship between the Great War and modernism through women's literary representations of deathProvides the first sustained study of death and commemoration in women's literature in the wartime and postwar periodOffers a reconsideration of the relationship between the First World War and literary modernism through the lens of women's writing Considers the literary impact of the vast mortality of the First World War and the culture of war commemoration on British and American women's writingOne of the key questions of modern literature was the problem of what to do with the war dead. Through a series of case studies focusing on nurse narratives, Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, H.D., and Virginia Woolf, as well as visual and material culture, this book provides the first sustained study of women's literary representations of death and the culture of war commemoration that underlie British and American literary modernism. Considering previously neglected writing by women in the war zones and at home, as well as the marginalised writings of well-known modernist authors, and drawing on international archival research, this book demonstrates the intertwining of modernist, war, and memorial culture, and broadens the canon of war writing.

Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture

Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture
Author :
Publisher :
Total Pages : 261
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780198857785
ISBN-13 : 0198857780
Rating : 4/5 (85 Downloads)

Synopsis Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture by : Aaron Shaheen

This volume addresses the ways in which prosthetic devices were designed, promoted, and depicted in America in the years during and after the First World War.

Cultural Melancholia: US Trauma Discourses Before and After 9/11

Cultural Melancholia: US Trauma Discourses Before and After 9/11
Author :
Publisher : BRILL
Total Pages : 424
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9789004305984
ISBN-13 : 900430598X
Rating : 4/5 (84 Downloads)

Synopsis Cultural Melancholia: US Trauma Discourses Before and After 9/11 by : Christina Cavedon

In Cultural Melancholia: US Trauma Discourses Before and After 9/11, Christina Cavedon frames her examination of 9/11 fiction, especially Jay McInerney’s The Good Life and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, with a thorough discussion of what US reactions to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 disclose about American culture. Offering a comparative reading of pre- and post-9/11 literary, public, and academic discourses, she deconstructs the still commonly held belief that cultural repercussions of the attacks primarily testify to a cultural trauma in the wake of the collectively witnessed media event. She innovatively re-interprets discourses to be symptomatic of a malaise which had afflicted American culture already prior to 9/11 and can best be approached with melancholia as an analytical concept.

In a Strange Room

In a Strange Room
Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Total Pages : 290
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780199333899
ISBN-13 : 0199333890
Rating : 4/5 (99 Downloads)

Synopsis In a Strange Room by : David Sherman

Literary modernism emerged as death, stripped in the developing world of traditional meanings and practices, became strange. The sea-change over the first part of the twentieth century in how people died and tended corpses-the modernization of death-was a crucial context in which modernist writers developed their new novelistic and poetic techniques. They sought ways to renovate mortal obligations in an age of the obsolescence of the dead. For many years, the flesh-and-blood body has been a central protagonist in literary scholarship--the body in pain, the body as spectacle and performance, embodiments of social identity--but the body in its mortality, as corpse, has not received sustained critical attention. Filling this gap, In a Strange Room investigates modernism's preoccupation with corpses, death rituals, and the ethical demands the dead make on the living who survive them. Informed by insights from psychology, anthropology, political theory, and philosophy, David Sherman shows how modernist aesthetics sought to re-animate the complex meanings and values of dead bodies during an era of their efficient, medical administration and hygienic disposal. The modernist imagination reckoned with the processes by which the modern corpse became a secularized object increasingly subject to scientific inquiry, governmental regulation, specialized medical technologies, and new forms of market exchange. Chapters explore representations of state power over the war dead in Virginia Woolf and Wilfred Owen, the narrative problem of the unburied corpse in As I Lay Dying and Ulysses, mortal obligation as erotic desire in Eliot's The Waste Land and Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, and mortuary pedagogies embedded in elegies by Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. Gathering examples from fiction, poetry, and the visual arts, In a Strange Room considers the changing relationship between aesthetics and mortality during the first half of the twentieth century. New attitudes toward dying and dead bodies demanded modernism's strange, bracing ways of representing ethics at the limits of life.

American Literature in Transition, 1920–1930

American Literature in Transition, 1920–1930
Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Total Pages : 514
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781108307802
ISBN-13 : 1108307809
Rating : 4/5 (02 Downloads)

Synopsis American Literature in Transition, 1920–1930 by : Ichiro Takayoshi

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 twentieth century. Essays from preeminent critics and historians analyze many overlapping aspects of American letters in the 1920s and re-evaluate 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 a focus on new publishing houses, trends in advertising, readership, and obscenity laws.