scholarly journals Review: Twentieth-Century American-Jewish Fiction Writers edited by Daniel Walden

1985 ◽  
Vol ESS-5 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-86
Author(s):  
Steward Rodnon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
American Jewish

Passion, Memory, and Identity: Twentieth-Century Latin American Jewish Writers

2000 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 185
Author(s):  
Leora Lev ◽  
Marjorie Agosin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Jewish Writers

scholarly journals Deceived by orchids: sex, science, fiction and Darwin

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
JIM ENDERSBY
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
New Science ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
The Many

AbstractBetween 1916 and 1927, botanists in several countries independently resolved three problems that had mystified earlier naturalists – including Charles Darwin: how did the many species of orchid that did not produce nectar persuade insects to pollinate them? Why did some orchid flowers seem to mimic insects? And why should a native British orchid suffer ‘attacks’ from a bee? Half a century after Darwin's death, these three mysteries were shown to be aspects of a phenomenon now known as pseudocopulation, whereby male insects are deceived into attempting to mate with the orchid's flowers, which mimic female insects; the males then carry the flower's pollen with them when they move on to try the next deceptive orchid. Early twentieth-century botanists were able to see what their predecessors had not because orchids (along with other plants) had undergone an imaginative re-creation: Darwin's science was appropriated by popular interpreters of science, including the novelist Grant Allen; then H.G. Wells imagined orchids as killers (inspiring a number of imitators), to produce a genre of orchid stories that reflected significant cultural shifts, not least in the presentation of female sexuality. It was only after these changes that scientists were able to see plants as equipped with agency, actively able to pursue their own, cunning reproductive strategies – and to outwit animals in the process. This paper traces the movement of a set of ideas that were created in a context that was recognizably scientific; they then became popular non-fiction, then popular fiction, and then inspired a new science, which in turn inspired a new generation of fiction writers. Long after clear barriers between elite and popular science had supposedly been established in the early twentieth century, they remained porous because a variety of imaginative writers kept destabilizing them. The fluidity of the boundaries between makers, interpreters and publics of scientific knowledge was a highly productive one; it helped biology become a vital part of public culture in the twentieth century and beyond.

Writing from the Margins: Towards an Epistemology of Contemporary African Brazilian Fiction

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID BROOKSHAW
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Skin Colour ◽  
Black Fiction ◽  
Fiction Writers

This chapter discusses the extent to which it is feasible to talk of a black Brazilian literary tradition that is somehow cohesive, conscious of itself and self-reflective. In looking at works by black fiction writers during the second half of the twentieth century, such as Romeu Crusoé, Oswaldo de Camargo, Cuti, Geni Guimarães, Marilene Felinto and Muniz Sodré, it suggests that writers of African descent who self-identify as black Brazilians are to a large extent bound by identification with region as much as they are with skin colour, in a similar way to other ‘ethnic’ writers in Brazil.

The Sin of Art and the Problem of American Realism: William Dean Howells

Prospects ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 115-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Davitt Bell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
William Dean Howells ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Historical Importance ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
American Romanticism

Warner berthoff begins The Ferment of Realism (1965), his study of American literature from 1884 to 1919, with a succinct restatement of an idea long accepted by literary critics: “The great collective event in American letters during the 1880s and 1890s was the securing of ‘realism’ as the dominant standard of value.” This is the customary interpretation of the American literary generation that included William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James; indeed, these men viewed their own historical importance in much the same terms. Thus James, in his 1879 book on Hawthorne, condescended toward the “absence in Hawthorne of that quality of realism which is now so much in fashion.” Twain's novels are laced with attacks, launched supposedly in the name of “realism,” against “romance” and the “romantic,” which is also the serious point behind the humor of such essays as “Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses.” And Howells, in the 1880s, emerged as the most overt American spokesman for the new standard of “realism.” “Let fiction cease to lie about life,” he demanded in Criticism and Fiction (1891); “let it portray men and women as they are, actuated by the motives and the passions in the measure we all know; let it leave off painting dolls and working them by springs and wires.” Twentieth-century literary historians have for the most part been content to accept and perpetuate these claims; they have told us again and again that in the works of our best fiction writers after the Civil War, American “romanticism” gave way to American “realism.”

scholarly journals Living with Speculative Infrastructures

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 27-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Ziser
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Growth And Development ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ray Bradbury ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Century Science

This article looks at the California origins of much of Twentieth Century science fiction. It examines how the exploding growth and development of postwar California informed science fiction writers like Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Philip K. Dick, and looks to their books for answers to twenty-first century dilemmas such as the uses of technology, the environment, and infrastructure.

LATIN AMERICAN JEWISH EDUCATION AT THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

1989 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-38
Author(s):  
Leon Trahtemberg Siederer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Jewish Education ◽  
American Jewish

Mediating Judaism: Mind, Body, Spirit, and Contemporary North American Jewish Fiction

AJS Review ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-253
Author(s):  
Sara R. Horowitz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
North American ◽  
Traditional Practices ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Women Novelists ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
Canadian Culture

That Jewish literature in North America is an altogether secular venue has long been regarded as a truism among many influential literary scholars. Indeed, for much of the twentieth century, the fiction of Jewish immigrants and their progeny wrote its way into American and Canadian culture through narratives that captured the process of acculturation by distancing itself from Jewish traditional practices, construed mockingly or nostalgically as relics of a European life left behind, a wellspring of historical or textual memories that oppress or elevate. The few departures from this trend—fiction that represents Judaic ritual and experience sympathetically, with complexity and depth—are exceptions that prove the rule: Chaim Potok’s novels, for example, beginning in the late 1960s and continuing through the close of the twentieth century, and a handful of women novelists negotiating Jewish feminism in stories and novels of the 1980s and 1990s.

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