Contesting the Past, Reconstructing the Nation: American Literature and Culture in the Gilded Age 1876–1893 (review)

2010 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-282
Author(s):  
Bruce Ronda
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
The Past

Uncommon Grounds

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Latin American Literature ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Song Of Solomon ◽  
The Past ◽  
The North ◽  
The Us

This chapter turns from a historical account of the development of the US literature of experience and the Latin American literature of reading to a textual analysis of the US and Latin American historical novel. Hemispheric/inter-American scholars often cite William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) as exemplifying instances of literary borrowing across the North–South divide. As I demonstrate, however, each of the later texts also realigns its predecessor’s historical imaginary according to the dominant logics of the US and Latin American literary fields. Whereas the American works foreground experiential models of reconstructing the past and conveying knowledge across generations, García Márquez’s Latin American novel presents reading as the fundamental mode of comprehending and transmitting history.

Building Asian Canadian Literary Studies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleanor Ty
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
American Literature ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Canadian Literature ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Statistics Canada

Asian Canadian Literary Studies is a relatively new field of study which began in the mid to late 1990s. Even though literature written by Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian Canadians had been published in literary magazines and anthologies since the 1970s, the identification of a distinct body of works called “Asian Canadian literature,” as Donald Goellnicht has noted (in “A Long Labour”), began only when there was a sociopolitical movement focused on identity politics. The literature includes early experiences of Chinese in Gum San or “gold mountain”; Japanese Canadian internment during the Second World War; South Asian Canadians diasporic writing from former British colonies like India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Trinidad, Guyana, Tanzania, and Kenya; feminist experimental and genre writing; and writing from the post-1975 wave of first- and 1.5-generation immigrants and refugees. Early 21st-century works have moved from mainly autoethnographic stories to those that include larger sociocultural concerns, such as poverty, domestic violence, the environment, lesbian, queer, and transgender issues, and other intersectional systems of oppression that face Asian Canadians and other marginalized groups. Genres include memoirs, films, short stories, autobiographies, realist novels, science fiction, graphic novels, poetry, plays, and historical novels. In the past, without naming the field “Asian Canadians,” many critics have engaged with Asian Canadian literary texts. For example, articles and chapters about Joy Kogawa’s Obasan can be found in journals and books on Canadian, postcolonial, ethnic, and Asian American literature. South Asian Canadian literature also has strong links with postcolonial studies and institutions, such as the book publisher TSAR Publications, which began as the literary journal, The Toronto South Asian Review. In Canadian English usage, Asian usually refers to people from East and Southeast Asian while the term South Asian Canadian is a subgroup of Asian Canadian, according to Statistics Canada. In literary studies, it has only been in the past ten or fifteen years that the term “Asian Canadian” is used as a pan-ethnic term for all peoples who are originally from or have roots in Asia.

Habsburg Studies in Europe

1967 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 296-307
Author(s):  
Fritz Fellner ◽  
Friedrich Gottas
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Late Spring ◽  
Huge Number ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Standard Set ◽  
Western European ◽  
The University

At this moment I understand how Ludwig August von Benedek must have felt in the late spring of 1866 when charged with a task for which he felt inadequate, because find myself in a similar situation. In no way can my remarks meet the standard set in the paper which Prof. Schroeder has presented to the conference. The reason for this difference partly to be found in the topic itself, for in a certain way. I think, Mr. Schroeder's assignment to examine the American literature was an easy one. He had to read a huge number studies published in the past years by American scholars specializing in research on the Habsburg monarchy; his task was to select and to organize. My task turned out to be completely different. When I tried to find studies of the Habsburg monarchy published in Western Europe after 1945, instead selecting from a plethora of material, I had to determine whether there actually was as little material available as there appeared to be. When, at my request, Dr. Friedrich Gottas, of the Historical Institute of the University of Salzburg, checked my findings through a careful search of bibliographies and periodicals, his research supported my theory that after 1945 the history of the Habsburg monarchy was not a favorite topic among historians in Western Europe. Given this circumstance, I thought it best to concentrate my informal observations on certain trends which in my opinion have been noticeable in Western European historiography since 1945.

Early American Religion in a Postsecular Age

PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (4) ◽  
pp. 989-996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Rivett
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Belief System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Right ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Early American Literature ◽  
Early American ◽  
The Past ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Religious Nature

A survey of the journal early american literature from the mid-1980s to today reveals a curious phenomenon: religion disappears from the tables of contents during the 1990s. Beginning in 2000, religion returns with measured consistency, culminating with a special issue devoted to “methods for the study of religion” in 2010 (Stein and Murison). This resurgence of interest in religion, not only as a topic of inquiry but also as an analytic category, coincides with the “religious turn” that for the past decade has shaped literary studies and the disciplines intersecting with it. In the wake of 9/11 and the political revival of the religious right, Americanists were surprised at the intense and exceptionally religious nature of the United States. Given the religious and political inflections of the war on terror to follow, the academic study of religion could not remain the “invisible domain” that it had been in American and literary studies throughout the 1990s (Franchot). The context demanded a critical response, particularly because the largely liberal and secular academy could not understand the visible fervor of the religious right at the turn of the twenty-first century. Across disparate fields and disciplines, scholars and critics have revisited religion as a serious topic of intellectual inquiry. Over the past decade, work on religion has focused on how literary forms mediate between the human and the divine, the role of a transcendent belief system in relation to political or social formations, and the conjunction between spirit and matter, the supernatural and the natural. In reflecting on such connections between the secular and the sacred, scholars also elicited a concomitant revision of the narrative of secularization that had long impeded the study of religion by defining modernity through religion's absence, irrelevance, and inevitable replacement by competing paradigms.

The Homelessness of Immigrant American Ghosts: Hauntings and Photographic Narrative in Oscar Hijuelos's The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien

PMLA ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 117 (2) ◽  
pp. 252-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maya Socolovsky
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Camera Lucida ◽  
Cuban American ◽  
The Past ◽  
Immigration Experience ◽  
Immigrant Experiences

Cuban American literature and Oscar Hijuelos's texts in particular have generally been approached through a consideration of their material, multicultural aspects. This essay analyzes Hijuelos's The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien, on which there is little critical work, by combining the novel's descriptions of photography and immigrant experiences with theories of photography. My reading considers the placing of ghosts and memory in the narrative and problematizes the undialectical presence of death in it. Referring to Hijuelos's text as an “imagetext” (photographs exist in it only through descriptions, never appearing visually), I read it through Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida and his development of the wounding punctum of a photograph, which produces a melancholy lingering trace of the past in the present moment. In this reading, the immigration experience in Hijuelos's novel exceeds narrativization and is unrepresentable by it.

scholarly journals YOUNG ADULTS' PROBLEMS REFLECTED IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

2019 ◽  
pp. 33-39
Keyword(s):  
Young Adults ◽  
Young People ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
20Th Century Literature ◽  
Contemporary American Literature ◽  
Research Issues ◽  
Community Impact ◽  
The Past

The problems of young people attract the scholars of different spheres, and literature in particular. Young people were depicted under the influence of psychological, social and economic situations. The 20th century literature pays more attention to the psychological aspects of young people’s development. In previous studies on young adults’ literature, different social aspects have been found to be related to the development of young people’s psyche. However, not enough attention has been paid to an individual as the part of the whole social strata. Early examples of research into young adults’ literature include Ya. N. Zasurskiy, A.S. Mulyarchik, T. Morozova. Only in the past 50 years of studies literature directly addressed the problem, on how an individual represents the whole society. The article investigates some essential youth problems at the turn of 20-21st centuries reflected in contemporary American literature. The article highlights some important research issues conducted in this field as well as the literary works which need to be studied. The issues like teenagers’ behavior at school, their relationships inside their families,community impact on teenagers’ world vision are reflected. In addition, the impacts of socially abandoned people, who united into groups and developed a subculture, on young people’s lives are shown.

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