scholarly journals For Who the River Carries: Marginalised Perspectives on Twentieth-Century Literature

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Danny Bultitude
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
River Pollution ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Audre Lorde ◽  
James Wright ◽  
Racial History ◽  
American Authors

<p>This thesis examines the representation of rivers from marginalised American authors of the twentieth-century. American rivers are notably diverse and variable natural features, and as symbols they offer extensive metaphorical potential. Rivers also hold a rich literary history in America, notably in the work of canonical nineteenth-century writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry D. Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain. The idealised depictions found in the work of these four authors act as a foundation which the marginalised writers of the following century both develop and subvert. The selected marginalised writers fall into three overlapping categories, to each of which is devoted a chapter. To examine those marginalised by economy and class, I have turned to Cormac McCarthy’s 1979 novel Suttree and the poetry of James Wright. Both concern themselves with poverty, river pollution, theology, suicide, and the desolation of American idealism. In my chapter on African American writing, Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved and selected poems by Sterling A Brown, Audre Lorde, and Margaret Walker are the central texts. These works look to the river and find racial history within its current, evoking varied responses surrounding memory, trauma, creative expression, and recontextualisation. The final chapter explores William S. Burroughs’s 1987 novel The Western Lands and the work of Minnie Bruce Pratt. By “queering nature,” the river becomes both a bitter reminder of their marginalisation and a hopeful symbol of utopia and unity. Together, these texts and the rivers they represent demonstrate the disjuncture between the privileged and marginalised in America, calling for greater consideration of what we deem “American” and why.</p>

scholarly journals For Who the River Carries: Marginalised Perspectives on Twentieth-Century Literature

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Danny Bultitude
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
River Pollution ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Audre Lorde ◽  
James Wright ◽  
Racial History ◽  
American Authors

<p>This thesis examines the representation of rivers from marginalised American authors of the twentieth-century. American rivers are notably diverse and variable natural features, and as symbols they offer extensive metaphorical potential. Rivers also hold a rich literary history in America, notably in the work of canonical nineteenth-century writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry D. Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain. The idealised depictions found in the work of these four authors act as a foundation which the marginalised writers of the following century both develop and subvert. The selected marginalised writers fall into three overlapping categories, to each of which is devoted a chapter. To examine those marginalised by economy and class, I have turned to Cormac McCarthy’s 1979 novel Suttree and the poetry of James Wright. Both concern themselves with poverty, river pollution, theology, suicide, and the desolation of American idealism. In my chapter on African American writing, Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved and selected poems by Sterling A Brown, Audre Lorde, and Margaret Walker are the central texts. These works look to the river and find racial history within its current, evoking varied responses surrounding memory, trauma, creative expression, and recontextualisation. The final chapter explores William S. Burroughs’s 1987 novel The Western Lands and the work of Minnie Bruce Pratt. By “queering nature,” the river becomes both a bitter reminder of their marginalisation and a hopeful symbol of utopia and unity. Together, these texts and the rivers they represent demonstrate the disjuncture between the privileged and marginalised in America, calling for greater consideration of what we deem “American” and why.</p>

The Autonomy of Art and the Legitimization of Biofiction: An Aesthetic Turning Point in Twentieth-Century Literature

2021 ◽  
Vol 82 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-369
Author(s):  
Michael Lackey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Robert Penn Warren ◽  
William Styron ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
One Year ◽  
Century Literature

Abstract Biofiction is literature that names its protagonist after a historical figure, and since the 1990s it has become one of the most dominant literary forms. This is surprising because many prominent scholars, critics, and writers have criticized and even condemned it. This essay hypothesizes that postmodern theories of truth and concomitant transformations in reader sensibilities partly account for the legitimization and now dominance of biofiction. The essay analyzes a 1968 literary debate among Ralph Ellison, William Styron, and Robert Penn Warren, which on the surface concerned the uses of history in literature. But because it happened just one year after the publication of Styron’s controversial novel about Nat Turner, the debate ended up focusing primarily on the nature and value of biofiction. By analyzing the discussion in relation to contemporary formulations about and theorizations of biofiction, this essay illustrates why the forum represents a turning point in literary history, resulting in the decline of a traditional type of literary symbol and the rise of a more anchored and empirical symbol—that is, the type of symbol found in biofiction.

Espionage and Exile

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
John Le Carre ◽  
The Cold War

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.

Filthy Material

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Forster
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Radclyffe Hall ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media

Modernist literature is inextricable from the history of obscenity. The trials of such figures as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Radclyffe Hall loom large in accounts of twentieth-century literature. Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity reveals the ways that debates about obscenity and literature were shaped by changes in the history of media. The emergence of film, photography, and new printing technologies shaped how “literary value” was understood, altering how obscenity was defined and which texts were considered obscene. Filthy Material rereads the history of modernist obscenity to discover the role played by technological media in debates about obscenity. The shift from the intense censorship of the early twentieth century to the effective “end of obscenity” for literature at the middle of the century was not simply a product of cultural liberalization but also of a changing media ecology. Filthy Material brings together media theory and archival research to offer a fresh account of modernist obscenity with novel readings of works of modernist literature. It sheds new light on figures at the center of modernism’s obscenity trials (such as Joyce and Lawrence), demonstrates the relevance of the discourse of obscenity to understanding figures not typically associated with obscenity debates (such as T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis), and introduces new figures to our account of modernism (such as Norah James and Jack Kahane). It reveals how modernist obscenity reflected a contest over the literary in the face of new media technologies.

Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Negro American Authors.

1969 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 133
Author(s):  
Darwin T. Turner ◽  
Edward Margolies
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
American Authors

scholarly journals Michael Katz's Contribution to Social and Social Welfare History

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 768-771
Author(s):  
Mark J. Stern
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Reagan Administration ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Welfare History ◽  
Social Welfare History ◽  
Undeserving Poor ◽  
Century Literature

Michael Katz began work on social welfare during the late 1970s with a project entitled “The Casualties of Industrialization.” That project led to a series of essays, Poverty and Policy in American History (Katz 1983), and a few years later to In the Shadow of the Poorhouse (Katz 1986). His reading in twentieth-century literature for Shadow—and the ideological and policy nostrums of the Reagan administration—allowed Katz to pivot to two books that frame contemporary welfare debates in their historical context—The Undeserving Poor in 1989 and The Price of Citizenship in 2001, as well as a set of essays Improving Poor People (Katz 1995) that he published between the two.

An attempt to relieve oppression through the difficult paths of translation between Catalan and Spanish: The case of Avel·lí Artís-Gener

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesc Galera
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Authors

In the uneasy context of the Francoist regime, some authors tried to alleviate the difficult cultural situation through creation and translation. This is the case of Avel·lí Artís-Gener, commonly known as Tísner, a Catalan writer who was exiled to Mexico for more than twenty years. Translation from Spanish into Catalan played a major role in Tísner’s efforts to keep Catalan culture alive, and this article presents the major translation initiatives in this language combination throughout the twentieth century in order to provide enough context to give Artís-Gener’s endeavours their real weight. In Mexico, he wrote his most famous novel, Paraules d’Opoton el Vell (‘Words of Opoton the elder’), which describes the imagined ‘discovery’ of Europe by the Aztecs and creates a bond between the fate of the Nahuatl and the Catalan people under the yoke of Spanish imperialism. In 1992 Artís-Gener decided that the novel had to be retranslated into Spanish and undertook that task himself. In addition, Tísner translated major Latin American authors from Spanish into Catalan, an experience that gave him the chance to regain control of the language imposed by the Francoist regime and use it as a form of relief from the political oppression.

A Guide to Twentieth-Century Literature in English

1984 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 482
Author(s):  
W. Riggan ◽  
Harry Blamires
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Century Literature
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