Author: Kevin R. McNamaraPublisher:
ISBN: 1108841961
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417
Book Description
This book examines what literature and film reveal about the urban USA. Subjects include culture, class, race, crime, and disaster.
The City in American Literature and Culture
Author: Kevin R. McNamaraPublisher:
ISBN: 1108841961
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417
Book Description
This book examines what literature and film reveal about the urban USA. Subjects include culture, class, race, crime, and disaster.
American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction
Author: Robert YeatesPublisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1800080980
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212
Book Description
Visions of the American city in post-apocalyptic ruin permeate literary and popular fiction, across print, visual, audio and digital media. American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction explores the prevalence of these representations in American culture, drawing from a wide range of primary and critical works from the early-twentieth century to today. Beginning with science fiction in literary magazines, before taking in radio dramas, film, video games and expansive transmedia franchises, Robert Yeates argues that post-apocalyptic representations of the American city are uniquely suited for explorations of contemporary urban issues. Examining how the post-apocalyptic American city has been repeatedly adapted and repurposed to new and developing media over the last century, this book reveals that the content and form of such texts work together to create vivid and immersive fictional spaces in ways that would otherwise not be possible. Chapters present media-specific analyses of these texts, situating them within their historical contexts and the broader history of representations of urban ruins in American fiction. Original in its scope and cross-media approach, American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction both illuminates little-studied texts and provides provocative new readings of familiar works such as Blade Runner and The Walking Dead, placing them within the larger historical context of imaginings of the American city in ruins.
Gender in American Literature and Culture
Author: Jean M. LutesPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108805507
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 645
Book Description
Gender in American Literature and Culture introduces readers to key developments in gender studies and American literary criticism. It offers nuanced readings of literary conventions and genres from early American writings to the present and moves beyond inflexible categories of masculinity and femininity that have reinforced misleading assumptions about public and private spaces, domesticity, individualism, and community. The book also demonstrates how rigid inscriptions of gender have perpetuated a legacy of violence and exclusion in the United States. Responding to a sense of 21st century cultural and political crisis, it illuminates the literary histories and cultural imaginaries that have set the stage for urgent contemporary debates.
Urban Underworlds
Author: Thomas HeisePublisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813547849
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Book Description
Urban Underworlds is an exploration of city spaces, pathologized identities, lurid fears, and American literature. Surveying one hundred years of history, and fusing sociology, urban planning, and criminology with literary and cultural studies, it chronicles how and why marginalized populations-immigrant Americans in the Lower East Side, gays and lesbians in Greenwich Village and downtown Los Angeles, the black underclass in Harlem and Chicago, and the new urban poor dispersed across American cities-have been selectively targeted as "urban underworlds" and their neighborhoods.
Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture
Author: John HayPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316997421
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 590
Book Description
The idea of America has always encouraged apocalyptic visions. The 'American Dream' has not only imagined the prospect of material prosperity; it has also imagined the end of the world. 'Final forecasts' constitute one of America's oldest literary genres, extending from the eschatological theology of the New England Puritans to the revolutionary discourse of the early republic, the emancipatory rhetoric of the Civil War, the anxious fantasies of the atomic age, and the doomsday digital media of today. For those studying the history of America, renditions of the apocalypse are simply unavoidable. This book brings together two dozen essays by prominent scholars that explore the meanings of apocalypse across different periods, regions, genres, registers, modes, and traditions of American literature and culture. It locates the logic and rhetoric of apocalypse at the very core of American literary history.
At Home in the City
Author: Elizabeth KlimasmithPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 293
Book Description
The City in African-American Literature
Author: Yoshinobu HakutaniPublisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838635650
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274
Book Description
More recent African-American literature has also been noteworthy for its largely affirmative vision of urban life. Amiri Baraka's 1981 essay "Black Literature and the Afro-American Nation: The Urban Voice" argues that, from the Harlem Renaissance onward, African-American literature has been "urban shaped," producing a uniquely "black urban consciousness." And Toni Morrison, although stressing that the American city in general has often induced a sense of alienation in many African-American writers, nevertheless adds that modern African-American literature is suffused with an "affection" for "the village within" the city.
The City in American Literature and Culture
Author: Kevin R. McNamaraPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108901549
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 417
Book Description
The city's 'Americanness' has been disputed throughout US history. Pronounced dead in the late twentieth century, cities have enjoyed a renaissance in the twenty-first. Engaging the history of urban promise and struggle as represented in literature, film, and visual arts, and drawing on work in the social sciences, The City in American Literature and Culture examines the large and local forces that shape urban space and city life and the street-level activity that remakes culture and identities as it contests injustice and separation. The first two sections examine a range of city spaces and lives; the final section brings the city into conversation with Marxist geography, critical race studies, trauma theory, slow/systemic violence, security theory, posthumanism, and critical regionalism, with a coda on city literature and democracy.
Urban Rehearsals and Novel Plots in the Early American City
Author: Betsy KlimasmithPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192661353
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276
Book Description
Urban Rehearsals and Novel Plots in the Early American City sheds new light on the literature of the early US by exploring how literature, theatre, architecture, and images worked together to allow readers to imagine themselves as urbanites even before cities developed. In the four decades following the Revolutionary War, the new nation was a loose network of nascent cities connected by print. Before a national culture could develop, local city cultures took shape; literary texts played key roles in helping new Americans become city people. Drawing on extensive archival research, Urban Rehearsals argues that literature, particularly novels and plays, allowed Bostonians to navigate the transition from colonial town to post-revolution city, enabled Philadelphians to grieve their experiences of the 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic and rebuild in the epidemic's aftermath, and showed New Yorkers how the domestic practices that reinforced their urbanity could be opened to the broader public. Throughout, attention to underrepresented voices and texts calls attention to the possibilities for women, immigrants, and Black Americans in developing urban spaces, while showing how those possibilities would be foreclosed as the nation developed. Balancing attention to canonical texts of the early Republic, including The Power of Sympathy, Charlotte Temple, and Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, with novels whose depiction of early cities deserves greater attention, such as Ormond, The Boarding-School, Monima, and Kelroy, this volume shows how US cities developed on the pages and stages of the early Republic, building urban imaginations that would construct the nation's early cities.
Bearing the Bad News
Author: Sanford PinskerPublisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 9781587291906
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Book Description
Critic and poet Pinsker offers 11 essays exploring such topics as the decline of formative reading, unifying themes in American literature, the cultural value of humor (but not vice versa), and the place of the college novel. No bibliography or index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR