To work in the world: Anne frank and American literary history

1998 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Martha Ravits
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
The World ◽  
Anne Frank

The Center of the World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
June Howard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Local Color ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
The World ◽  
Literary Regionalism ◽  
Multiple Media ◽  
The One

The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is a study of literary regionalism. It focuses on but is not limited to fiction in the United States, also considering the place of the genre in world literature. It argues that regional writing shapes ways of imagining not only the neighborhood, the province, and nation, but also the world. It argues that thinking about place always entails imagining time. It demonstrates the importance of the figure of the schoolteacher and the one-room schoolhouse in local color writing and subsequent place-focused writing. These representations embody the contested relation between localities and the knowledge they produce, and books that carry metropolitan and cosmopolitan learning, in modernity. The book undertakes analysis of how concepts work across disciplines and in everyday discourse, coordinating that work with proposals for revising American literary history and close readings of particular authors’ work. Works from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries are discussed, and the book’s analysis of the form is extended into multiple media.

The Place of Imagination

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Gatta
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
The World ◽  
Contemporary Writers

“Imagination,” a word evidently central to the vocation and sensibility of English Romantic poets, is likewise invoked often as a defining term in American literary history. But what are the theological implications of this crucial category, beginning with Coleridge’s seminal statements about it? How might the human faculty of imagination—often but doubtfully associated with an abstractly ethereal quality of mind—bear upon concrete facts of the world humans experience? And how, in the light of philosophic perspectives, together with Wendell Berry’s provocative reflections on “imagination in place,” might Imagination be understood as integral with the phenomenology of place? Such questions are addressed here by means of themes bearing on the Earthiness of Imagination, the Contemplative Reach of Imagination, and Numinous Layers of Place as Palimpsest. Literary texts analyzed to develop these themes include Whitman’s verse and works by two contemporary writers—poet Marilyn Nelson and novelist Alfred Véa.

World-Making Words, by Edith Eaton and Sui Sin Far

2018 ◽  
pp. 121-160
Author(s):  
June Howard
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Sui Sin Far ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
The World ◽  
Literary Regionalism ◽  
Recent Addition ◽  
Edith Eaton

The fourth chapter of The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is titled “World-Making Words, by Edith Eaton and Sui Sin Far.” It considers the work of this doubly named author, a comparatively recent addition to the canon of literary regionalism. It offers a sketch of Eaton’s life and works, attending closely to recent research and discussing her place in North American literary history. It argues that the author’s success as “Sui Sin Far” depended on her connection to the global locality “Chinatown,” but also that she claims multiple national literatures and writes herself into a world literature beyond their horizons.

scholarly journals American Incunabula: 'Grotesque Genesis' and the Genealogical Genre

AmeriQuests ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian J. MacRae
Keyword(s):  
William Faulkner ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Gabriel Garcia Marquez ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Patrick Chamoiseau ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
The World ◽  
Book Of Genesis ◽  
Os Sertoes ◽  
Euclides Da Cunha

Analysis of Os Sertões (Euclides da Cunha, Brazil, 1902), Absalom, Absalom! (William Faulkner, USA, 1936), Cien años de soledad (Gabriel García Márquez, Colombia, 1967), The Invention of the World (Jack Hodgins, Canada, 1977), and Texaco (Patrick Chamoiseau, Martinique, 1992) as a generic ensemble enables diverse treatments of race, class, gender and sexuality to resolve over time and across cultures into the meaningful patterns of American literary history. Each text incorporates the origin in writing and exposes it to difference—plurality, ambiguity, discontinuity. With this, the perpetual rewriting of the strong poem (the Book of Genesis) at the symbolic founding, the originary tradition transforms itself through incorporation of non-canonical elements, as the ‘same’ turns endlessly different: hybrid, ex-centric, grotesque, increasingly Creolized.

Forming Provisional Identities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Story Cycle ◽  
Narrative Techniques

The introduction argues that the short story cycle is the preeminent genre for articulating the uncertainty that characterizes literary responses to modernity. The introduction outlines two vital contributions of the cycle to American literary history: 1. the absence of textual harmony in the cycle initiated new, pervasive narrative techniques of proliferating perspectives and disrupting chronology that inflect modern and contemporary fiction and 2. the form of the cycle enables the expression of subjectivity without fixity. Contingency and multiplicity are so central to our social-media infused culture that provisionality is its defining characteristic, but this book shows that the seeds for this go back almost to the nation’s founding.

White Writers, Race Matters

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory S. Jay
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Cultural Narratives ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
The Social ◽  
White Writers ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Taking Action

White liberal race fiction has been an enduringly popular genre in American literary history. It includes widely read and taught works such as Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird along with period bestsellers now sometimes forgotten. Hollywood regularly adapted them into blockbusters, reinforcing their cultural influence. These novels and films protest slavery, confront stereotypes, dramatize social and legal injustices, engage the political controversies of their time, and try to move readers emotionally toward taking action. The literary forms and arguments of these books derive from the cultural work they intend to do in educating the minds and hearts, and propelling the actions, of those who think they are white—indeed, in making the social construction of that whiteness readable and thus more susceptible of reform. The white writers of these fictions struggle with their own place in systems of oppression and privilege while asking their readers to do the same. The predominance of women among this tradition’s authors leads to exploring how their critiques of gender and race norms often reinforced each other. Each chapter provides a case study combining biography, historical analysis, close reading, and literary theory to map the significance of this genre and its ongoing relevance. This tradition remains vital because every generation must relearn the lessons of antiracism and formulate effective cultural narratives for passing on the intellectual and emotional tools useful in fighting injustice.

Crumbling into Dust

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Levi Barnard
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Unfinished Business ◽  
Black Newspapers ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Antebellum Period ◽  
David Walker ◽  
Historical Times

This chapter situates Chesnutt’s writing within a tradition of black classicism as political engagement and historical critique extending from the antebellum period to the twentieth century and beyond. Reading Chesnutt as a figure at the crossroads of multiple historical times and cultural forms, the chapter examines his manipulation of multiple mythic traditions into a cohesive and unsettling vision of history as unfinished business. In the novel The Marrow of Tradition and the late short story “The Marked Tree,” Chesnutt echoes a nineteenth-century tradition that included David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, and writers and editors for antebellum black newspapers, while at the same time anticipating a later anti-imperial discourse generated by writers such as Richard Wright and Toni Morrison. Chesnutt provides a fulcrum for a collective African American literary history that has emerged as a prophetic counterpoint to the prevailing historical consciousness in America.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna-Maria Hartmann
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Related Material ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
Early English

Mythographies were books that collected, explained, and interpreted myth-related material. Extremely popular during the Renaissance, these works appealed to a wide range of readers. While the European mythographies of the sixteenth century have been utilized by scholars, the short, early English mythographies, written from 1577 to 1647, have puzzled critics. The first generation of English mythographers did not, as has been suggested, try to compete with their Italian predecessors. Instead, they made mythographies into rhetorical instruments designed to intervene in topical debates outside the world of classical learning. Because English mythographers brought mythology to bear on a variety of contemporary issues, they unfold a lively and historically well-defined picture of the roles myth was made to play in early modern England. Exploring these mythographies can contribute to previous insights into myth in the Renaissance offered by studies of iconography, literary history, allegory, and myth theory.

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