Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. xviii-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Gerald Kennedy ◽  
Scott Peeples
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
First Century ◽  
Global Literature ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Critical Approaches

Edgar Allan Poe has long occupied a problematic place in discussions of American literature. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, an intensive reexamination of his relationship to nineteenth-century print culture and the controversies of Jacksonian America reframed our understanding of his work. Whereas scholars once regarded his dark fantasies as extraneous to American experience, we now recognize the complex and nuanced ways in which Poe’s work responded to and questioned core assumptions of American culture. The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe offers a wide-ranging exploration of Poe, rereading his works through a variety of critical approaches and illuminating his ultimate impact on global literature, art, and culture. The introduction to the volume traces the development of scholarship on Poe from the time of his death in 1849 to the beginning of the twenty-first century, exploring the future possibilities for the study of Poe in the digital era.

scholarly journals THE EXISTENTIAL EGOS IN DUONG NGHIEM MAU’S PROSE

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (Special) ◽  
pp. 77-85
Author(s):  
Thi Huong Le
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Context ◽  
First Century ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Lost Generation ◽  
Global Literature ◽  
Southern Vietnam ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Voice

Taking its shape in the 1920s of the twentieth century, existentialism has pervaded into a wide range of world literatures. In Southern Vietnam (1955 – 1975), the reception of existentialism theories underwent no crack and proved to be compatible with the social context full of volatility. Existentialism is a “humanitarian theory” (J.P.Sartre). Existentialism theories have permeated the writers’ consciousness and works in terms of their views of the human fate in the period when "God is dead”. Duong Nghiem Mau was a pioneer writer in receiving and expressing existential themes in his works, paving the way for the existential literature of Southern Vietnam. His works reflected various social aspects of life in Southern Vietnam, featuring the voice of a lost generation. The return of Duong Nghiem Mau's fiction at the beginning of the twentieth-first century emerged as a piece of evidence for the durability of existentialism and its pervasiveness in the global literature.

The Souls of Black Folk

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejandro Nava
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Black Writers ◽  
Black American ◽  
Black Music ◽  
Black Musicians ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Literature And Religion ◽  
The Way

This chapter explores some of the synergies between Spanish soul and black American traditions through Ralph Ellison's depiction of soul. In turning to Ellison, a contemporary of Lorca, this chapter falls in the thick of musical and cultural currents of soul. Like many black writers of the twentieth century, Ellison brought musical cadences and flows into the mighty river of American literature, injecting some of its stagnant waters with a fresh tributary of style. By adding his lyrical voice to American literature, he used his pen the way black musicians used their instruments, making it sing on behalf of a black American experience that was invisible in many parts of America. He not only honored conceptions of soul in black music, folklore, literature, and religion in this way, but also simultaneously exposed the blindness and tone deafness of many Americans.

After Du Bois

2019 ◽  
pp. 205-212
Author(s):  
Daniel Hack
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Internationalism ◽  
Racial Authenticity ◽  
Special Space

This concluding chapter explores African American literature and print culture in the following century. Here, the prestige and popularity of most Victorian literature—and of Victorian literature as a category—diminished rapidly in the first half of the twentieth century, thanks in good part to the rise of modernism. Moreover, when twentieth-century African American writers looked abroad for cultures that seemed freer from racial prejudice or even the pressures of racialized identity than the United States, their gaze shifted from Britain elsewhere. France in particular took on this role, while also becoming the privileged site of black internationalism, with Paris viewed as “a special space for black transnational interaction, exchange, and dialogue.” Beginning with the Harlem Renaissance, notions of racial authenticity also reinforced this turn away from Victorian literature, not only for its whiteness but also for its association with gentility and middle-class values. Indeed, these same attitudes have shaped the dominant critical reception of the Victorian presence in African American literature and print culture until quite recently.

Literature, Society, and Politics

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Werner Mackenbach
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Literature History ◽  
The 1960S

The historiography of Central American literature from the early nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century, focusing on the relationships between literature, (literary) history, and the political field, especially within the context of projects centered on national construction, is essential. The approach here analyzes the different periods—or moments of change or transition—regarding the relations between politics, society, and culture from the perspective of historical change, concentrating on “microperiods” characterized by a paradigm shift with respect to the relationships between literature, history, politics and society: the nineteenth century (the post-independence moment); the late nineteenth/early twentieth century; the 1930s–1960s; the 1960s–1990s; and the end of the twentieth century/beginning of the twenty-first. A set of proposals aims at filling the gaps, developing the desiderata, and coping with the challenges in literary historiography in and about Central America at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The African Americanization of Victorian Literature

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Daniel Hack
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Artistic Expression ◽  
Political Strategy

This introductory chapter demonstrates how nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African American literature and print culture used Victorian literature to conduct acts of “African Americanization.” Here, close engagement with Victorian literature represented no mere capitulation to existing constraints, but instead constituted a deliberate political strategy and means of artistic expression. The chapter shows that this practice did not impede or undercut the development of a distinctive African American literary culture and tradition, but on the contrary contributed directly to its development. It did so through the very repetition of African Americanizing engagements, repetition that grew increasingly self-conscious and self-referential, as writers and editors built on, responded to, and positioned themselves in relation to prior instances. Victorian literature's role as an important archive for the production of African American literature and print culture, the chapter also argues, makes African American literature and print culture an important archive for the study of Victorian literature.

A short history of written Wu, Part II: Written Shanghainese

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don Snow ◽  
Shen Senyao ◽  
Zhou Xiayun
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Hong Kong ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Receive

AbstractThe recent publication of the novelMagnificent Flowers(Fan Hua繁花) has attracted attention not only because of critical acclaim and market success, but also because of its use of Shanghainese. WhileMagnificent Flowersis the most notable recent book to make substantial use of Shanghainese, it is not alone, and the recent increase in the number of books that are written partially or even entirely in Shanghainese raises the question of whether written Shanghainese may develop a role in Chinese print culture, especially that of Shanghai and the surrounding region, similar to that attained by written Cantonese in and around Hong Kong.This study examines the history of written Shanghainese in print culture. Growing out of the older written Suzhounese tradition, during the early decades of the twentieth century a distinctly Shanghainese form of written Wu emerged in the print culture of Shanghai, and Shanghainese continued to play a role in Shanghai’s print culture through the twentieth century, albeit quite a modest one. In the first decade of the twenty-first century Shanghainese began to receive increased public attention and to play a greater role in Shanghai media, and since 2009 there has been an increase in the number of books and other kinds of texts that use Shanghainese and also the degree to which they use it.This study argues that in important ways this phenomenon does parallel the growing role played by written Cantonese in Hong Kong, but that it also differs in several critical regards. The most important difference is that, to date, written Shanghainese appears almost exclusively in texts that look back to “old Shanghai” and/or to traditional alley life in Shanghai, and that a role of the type written Cantonese has in Hong Kong is not likely to be attained unless or until Shanghainese texts that are associated with modern urban Shanghai life, especially youth culture, begin to appear.

scholarly journals Science of giants: China and India in the twentieth century

BJHS Themes ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAHNAVI PHALKEY ◽  
TONG LAM
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
American Experience ◽  
China And India ◽  
The World ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The One

AbstractHow might one tell the histories of China and India – two countries that have come to be seen as twenty-first-century giants? How might one tell of how they look to the world and to each other? In this issue we juxtapose, connect and compare the two. Ours is an attempt at a historiography of twentieth-century modernity in China and India beyond the encouragement of Euro-American historiography. We seize this opportunity provided by the contemporary engagement and concern with the two countries to reinterpret the narratives of their twentieth-century transformation, which are far from settled at the moment. We bring historical knowledge to speak usefully to the excitement, anxiety and aspiration around science and technology in China and India. We bring the same to speak meaningfully to the cynicism, admonition and expectations that the world has of them. We use China and India as a method of exploring new historiographical questions of science. We are invested in extending the relevance of studying China and India to the world at large through connections, references and juxtaposition, and by raising questions that, on the one hand, expose the limits of the Euro-American experience and, on the other, open up the intellectual and historiographical space for narratives and theoretical frameworks that are not tied to geopolitical significance. This paper sets out these issues and introduces the papers of the collection.

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Quan Manh Ha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Black Voices ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
One Year ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

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