Simon J. Bronner.Folk Nation: Folklore in the Creation of American Tradition. Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2002. 283 pp.Karen E. Beardslee.Literary Legacies, Folklore Foundations: Selfhood and Cultural Tradition in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Literature. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001. 202 pp.

2007 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-144
Author(s):  
Kathy M’Closkey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
University Of Tennessee ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
Twentieth Century American Literature ◽  
The Creation

The Labour of Laziness in Twentieth-Century American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zuzanna Ladyga
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Ernest Hemingway ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Value System ◽  
John Barth ◽  
The Status ◽  
Twentieth Century American Literature ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Historical Moment

The Labour of Laziness in Twentieth-Century American Literature focuses on the issue of productivity, using the figure of laziness to negotiate the relation between the ethical and the aesthetic. This book argues that major twentieth-century American writers such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, John Barth, Donald Barthelme and David Foster Wallace provocatively challenge the ethos of productivity by filtering their ethical interventions through culturally stigmatised imagery of laziness. Ladyga argues that when the motif of laziness appears, it invariably reveals the underpinnings of an emerging value system at a given historical moment, while at the same time offering a glimpse into the strategies of rebelling against the status quo

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