Crisscrossing Borders in Literature of the American West

Crisscrossing Borders in Literature of the American West PDF Author: R. Dyck
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230619541
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Get Book

Book Description
In one consequential volume, Crisscrossing Borders in Literature of the American West presents the cross-section of a fast-changing and greatly expanded field. Through interdisciplinary essays, this volume on the post-national West challenges the idea of a unified national story sustained by strategic exclusions. Contributors analyze the economic and environmental exploitation depicted in working-class Western literature, emphasize the transnational by approaching both the North/South and cross-Atlantic axes grapple with the role of Mormons, and dissect the new masculinity of "Silicon Gunslingers." Each essay successfully and compellingly models a new and fruitful way of engaging the West.

Crisscrossing Borders in Literature of the American West

Crisscrossing Borders in Literature of the American West PDF Author: R. Dyck
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230619541
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Get Book

Book Description
In one consequential volume, Crisscrossing Borders in Literature of the American West presents the cross-section of a fast-changing and greatly expanded field. Through interdisciplinary essays, this volume on the post-national West challenges the idea of a unified national story sustained by strategic exclusions. Contributors analyze the economic and environmental exploitation depicted in working-class Western literature, emphasize the transnational by approaching both the North/South and cross-Atlantic axes grapple with the role of Mormons, and dissect the new masculinity of "Silicon Gunslingers." Each essay successfully and compellingly models a new and fruitful way of engaging the West.

Before the West Was West

Before the West Was West PDF Author: Amy T. Hamilton
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 080325489X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 375

Get Book

Book Description
Before the West Was West examines the extent to which scholars have engaged in-depth with pre-1800 “western” texts and asks what we mean by “western” American literature in the first place and when that designation originated. Calling into question the implicit temporal boundaries of the “American West” in literature, a literature often viewed as having commenced only at the beginning of the 1800s, Before the West Was West explores the concrete, meaningful connections between different texts as well as the development of national ideologies and mythologies. Examining pre-nineteenth-century writings that do not fit conceptions of the Wild West or of cowboys, cattle ranching, and the Pony Express, these thirteen essays demonstrate that no single, unified idea or geography defines the American West. Contributors investigate texts ranging from the Norse Vinland Sagas and Mary Rowlandson’s famous captivity narrative to early Spanish and French exploration narratives, an eighteenth-century English novel, and a play by Aphra Behn. Through its examination of the disparate and multifaceted body of literature that arises from a broad array of cultural backgrounds and influences, Before the West Was West apprehends the literary West in temporal as well as spatial and cultural terms and poses new questions about “westernness” and its literary representation.

Southwestern Women Writers and the Vision of Goodness

Southwestern Women Writers and the Vision of Goodness PDF Author: Catharine Savage Brosman
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476625956
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book

Book Description
This literary history focuses on five women writers--Mary Austin, Willa Cather, Laura Adams Armer, Peggy Pond Church and Alice Marriott--whose work appeared from around 1900 through the 1980s. All came from or lived and worked in California, Arizona, New Mexico or Oklahoma. The book situates them in their time and place and examines their interactions with landscapes, people, art and history. Their interest in fine arts and native arts and crafts is stressed, as well as their concern for the environment.

Lost Homelands

Lost Homelands PDF Author: Audrey Goodman
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816547254
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book

Book Description
Before the 1930s, landscapes of the American Southwest represented the migrant’s dream of a stable and bountiful homeland. Around the time of the Great Depression, however, the Southwest suddenly became integrated into a much larger economic and cultural system. Audrey Goodman examines how—since that time—these southwestern landscapes have come to reveal the resulting fragmentation of identity and community. Through analyzing a variety of texts and images, Goodman illuminates the ways that modern forces such as militarization, environmental degradation, internal migration, and an increased border patrol presence have shattered the perception of a secure homeland in the Southwest. The deceptive natural beauty of the Southwest deserts shields a dark history of trauma and decimation that has remained as a shadow on the region’s psyche. The first to really synthesize such wide-ranging material about the effects of the atomic age in the Southwest, Goodman realizes the value of combined visual and verbal art and uses it to put forth her own original ideas about reconstructing a new sense of homeland. Lost Homelands reminds us of the adversity and dislocation suffered by people of the Southwest by looking at the ways that artists, photographers, filmmakers, and writers have grappled with these problems for decades. In assessing the ruination of the region, however, Goodman argues that those same artists and writers have begun to reassemble a new sense of homeland from these fragments.

William Clark's World

William Clark's World PDF Author: Peter J. Kastor
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300139012
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book

Book Description
By examining the life and career of William Clark, this book explores how the North American West entered the American imagination. Clark was among the most important western officials of his generation, and he worked to represent the West during a period of tremendous uncertainty and change. Without ever calling himself a writer or an artist, Clark nonetheless drew maps, helped to produce books, drafted lengthy reports, surveyed the landscape, and wrote numerous journals that made sense of the West and its future for Americans who were fascinated by the region's potential but also fearful of its dangers. William Clark's World situates the descriptive words and pictures created by Clark and his contemporaries at the center of a discussion of western history and cultural development. The book casts new light on the familiar narrative of manifest destiny and on the nation's view of the West in the early nineteenth century. --Book Jacket.

Professionals in Western Film and Fiction

Professionals in Western Film and Fiction PDF Author: Kenneth E. Hall
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786497297
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book

Book Description
 In American Westerns, the main characters are most often gunfighters, lawmen, ranchers and dancehall girls. Civil professionals such as doctors, engineers and journalists have been given far less representation, usually appearing as background characters in most films and fiction. In Westerns about the 1910 Mexican Revolution, however, civil professionals also feature prominently in the narrative, often as members of the intelligentsia--an important force in Mexican politics. This book compares the roles of civil professionals in most American Westerns to those in films on the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Included are studies on the Santiago Toole novels by Richard Wheeler, Strange Lady in Town with Greer Garson and La sombra del Caudillo by Martin Luis Guzman.

Transatlantic Footholds

Transatlantic Footholds PDF Author: Stephanie Palmer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429537018
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Get Book

Book Description
Transatlantic Footholds: Turn-of-the-Century American Women Writers and British Reviewers analyses British reviews of American women fiction writers, essayists and poets between the periods of literary domesticity and modernism. The book demonstrates that a variety of American women writers were intelligently read in Britain during this era. British reviewers read American women as literary artists, as women and as Americans. While their notion of who counted as "women" was too limited by race and class, they eagerly read these writers for insight about how women around the world were entering debates on women’s place, the class struggle, religion, Indian policy, childrearing, and high society. In the process, by reading American women in varied ways, reviewers became hybrid and dissenting readers. The taste among British reviewers for American women’s books helped change the predominant direction that high culture flowed across the Atlantic from east-to-west to west-to-east. Britons working in London or far afield were deeply invested in the idea of "America." "America," their responses prove, is a transnational construct.

Silent Film and the Formations of U.S. Literary Culture

Silent Film and the Formations of U.S. Literary Culture PDF Author: Sarah Gleeson-White
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197558054
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book

Book Description
Silent Film and the Formations of U.S. Literary Culture: Literature in Motion discovers the considerable impact of motion pictures on literary culture across the early decades of the twentieth century by exploring how motion pictures spurred change in twentieth century literature.

Querencia

Querencia PDF Author: Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826361617
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

Get Book

Book Description
New Mexico cultural envoy Juan Estevan Arellano, to whom this work is dedicated, writes that querencia “is that which gives us a sense of place, that which anchors us to the land, that which makes us a unique people, for it implies a deeply rooted knowledge of place, and for that reason we respect it as our home.” This sentiment is echoed in the foreword by Rudolfo Anaya, in which he writes that “querencia is love of home, love of place.” This collection of both deeply personal reflections and carefully researched studies explores the New Mexico homeland through the experiences and perspectives of Chicanx and indigenous/Genízaro writers and scholars from across the state. The importance of querencia for each contributor is apparent in their work and their ongoing studies, which have roots in the culture, history, literature, and popular media of New Mexico. Be inspired and enlightened by these essays and discover the history and belonging that is querencia.

Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon

Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon PDF Author: Lise Jaillant
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317317769
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Get Book

Book Description
In the 1920s and 1930s the Modern Library series began to bring out cheap editions of modernist works. Jaillant provides a thorough analysis of the series’ mix of highbrow and popular literature and argues that the availability and low cost of modernist works helped to expand modernism's influence as a literary movement.