Author: Lauren S. Cardon
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813938635
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
During the twentieth century, the rise of the concept of Americanization—shedding ethnic origins and signs of "otherness" to embrace a constructed American identity—was accompanied by a rhetoric of personal transformation that would ultimately characterize the American Dream. The theme of self-transformation has remained a central cultural narrative in American literary, political, and sociological texts ranging from Jamestown narratives to immigrant memoirs, from slave narratives to Gone with the Wind, and from the rags-to-riches stories of Horatio Alger to the writings of Barack Obama. Such rhetoric feeds American myths of progress, upward mobility, and personal reinvention. In Fashion and Fiction, Lauren S. Cardon draws a correlation between the American fashion industry and early twentieth-century literature. As American fashion diverged from a class-conscious industry governed by Parisian designers to become more commercial and democratic, she argues, fashion designers and journalists began appropriating the same themes of self-transformation to market new fashion trends. Cardon illustrates how canonical twentieth-century American writers, including Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Nella Larsen, symbolically used clothing to develop their characters and their narrative of upward mobility. As the industry evolved, Cardon shows, the characters in these texts increasingly enjoyed opportunities for individual expression and identity construction, allowing for temporary performances that offered not escapism but a testing of alternate identities in a quest for self-discovery.
Author: Dorri Beam
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139489232
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
In this 2010 book, Dorri Beam presents an important contribution to nineteenth-century fiction by examining how and why a florid and sensuous style came to be adopted by so many authors. Discussing a diverse range of authors, including Margaret Fuller and Pauline Hopkins, Beam traces this style through a variety of literary endeavors and reconstructs the political rationale behind the writers' commitments to this form of prose. Beam provides both close readings of a number of familiar and unfamiliar works and an overarching account of the importance of this form of writing, suggesting new ways of looking at style as a medium through which gender can be signified and reshaped. Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth Century American Women's Writing redefines our understanding of women's relation to aesthetics and their contribution to both American literary romanticism and feminist reform. This illuminating account provides valuable new insights for scholars of American literature and women's writing.
Author: THE EDITORS OF VOGUE
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
ISBN: 0789345129
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The editors of Vogue, the ultimate authority on fashion, document the post-COVID changes happening across the fashion landscape in America. Celebrating creators, artisans, and visionaries across the country, the book pays tribute to the democratization of American fashion and the creativity and artisanship that is no longer confined to the runways of New York and Los Angeles. In their February 2021 issue, Vogue launched “The United States of Fashion,” a project that shines a spotlight on the creativity and craft flourishing throughout the country. Exploring the innovation and entrepreneurialism that defines American fashion, Vogue goes coast to coast from Detroit to El Paso to Indianapolis to Nashville, where the most exciting new designers are creating and designing locally. This book features a wide array of fashion voices across the nation, who share self-generated images and narratives on how they define and identify with fashion now. New, never-before-seen photographs and anecdotes, not published in the pages of Vogue, come from fashion designers Laura and Kate Mulleavy of Rodarte, Jeremy Scott, and Libertine; photographers Alex Webb and June Canedo; and craftspeople Ariana Boussard-Reifel and Ataumbi Metals. The book contains texts by esteemed writers, from Louise Erdrich’s words on Native American fashion and music editor Suzy Exposito’s account of being goth in Miami, to new ways of creating sustainable, recycled fashion. These accounts create a living biography of the evolution and democratization of fashion today. A rich tapestry of style in America, The United States of Fashion will appeal to readers interested in fashion, design, culture, and photography.
Author: Ezra Tawil
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812250370
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
Literature, American Style finds early U.S. authors self-consciously imitating European literary forms even as they claimed radical originality. The notion of style helped them manage this peculiar contradiction. It was their American use of style, they claimed, that marked their departure from literary precedents.
Author: Jessie Redmon Fauset
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780404002572
Category : African American families
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Author: Kate Betts
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
ISBN: 0847859924
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
A visual celebration of Brooks Brothers’ remarkable heritage and how its iconic clothing has been worn and revered by cultural figures, fashionable rule breakers, and pop-culture icons. Since 1818, Brooks Brothers, America’s oldest clothing brand, has grown into a global sartorial institution that has influenced American style through its iconic fashions, which conjure intimate memories of pivotal life events—from your first navy blazer as a child to stepping into a bespoke suit on your wedding day. On the eve of its two-hundredth anniversary, Brooks Brothers remains synonymous with timeless style, the finest quality, and innovative designs that resonate with both old and new generations. This richly illustrated book is replete with photographs of the signature heritage pieces, from the Original Polo® button-down oxford, gray flannel suit, and Rep ties to the camel overcoat, and features an unparalleled roster of high-profile political and cultural icons who have worn and made these pieces their own: from Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy to Madonna, Lady Gaga, Grace Kelly, Katharine Hepburn, Miles Davis, and Andy Warhol, as well as TV and film stars in Glee, Gossip Girl, Mad Men, and Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby. The text comprises interviews and personal anecdotes from the retailer’s loyal clientele—fashion designers, writers, and celebrities—each sharing treasured memories and connections to Brooks Brothers. This dazzling volume invites readers to delve into the world of Brooks Brothers, providing insight into the people, places, and historical moments that have shaped and provoked the innovative yet timeless American institution, and is a must for those interested in fashion and American style.
Author: Richard Gray
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444345680
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 933
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Book Description
Updated throughout and with much new material, A History of American Literature, Second Edition, is the most up-to-date and comprehensive survey available of the myriad forms of American Literature from pre-Columbian times to the present. The most comprehensive and up-to-date history of American literature available today Covers fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction, as well as other forms of literature including folktale, spirituals, the detective story, the thriller, and science fiction Explores the plural character of American literature, including the contributions made by African American, Native American, Hispanic and Asian American writers Considers how our understanding of American literature has changed over the past?thirty years Situates American literature in the contexts of American history, politics and society Offers an invaluable introduction to American literature for students at all levels, academic and general readers
Author: George Cotkin
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801870378
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396
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Book Description
"As Cotkin shows, not only did Americans readily take to existentialism, but they were already heirs to a rich tradition of thinkers - from Jonathan Edwards and Herman Melville to Emily Dickinson and William James - who had wrestled with the problems of existence and the contingency of the world long before Sartre and his colleagues. After introducing the concept of an American existential tradition, Cotkin examines how formal existentialism first arrived in America in the 1930s through discussion of Kierkegaard and the early vogue among New York intellectuals for the works of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus.
Author: Ezra Tawil
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812295293
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
Between 1780 and 1800, authors of imaginative literature in the new United States wanted to assert that their works, which bore obvious connections to anglophone literature on the far side of the Atlantic, nevertheless constituted a properly "American" tradition. No one had yet figured out, however, what it would mean to write like an American, what literature with an American origin would look like, nor what literary characteristics the elusive quality of Americanness could generate. Literature, American Style returns to this historical moment—decades before the romantic nationalism of Cooper, the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, or the iconoclastic poetics of Whitman—when a fantasy about the unique characteristics of U.S. literature first took shape, and when that notion was linked to literary style. While late eighteenth-century U.S. literature advertised itself as the cultural manifestation of a radically innovative nation, Ezra Tawil argues, it was not primarily marked by invention or disruption. In fact, its authors self-consciously imitated European literary traditions while adapting them to a new cultural environment. These writers gravitated to the realm of style, then, because it provided a way of sidestepping the uncomfortable reality of cultural indebtedness; it was their use of style that provided a way of departing from European literary precedents. Tawil analyzes Noah Webster's plan to reform the American tongue; J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's fashioning of an extravagantly naïve American style from well-worn topoi; Charles Brockden Brown's adaptations of the British gothic; and the marriage of seduction plots to American "plain style" in works such as Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette. Each of these works claims to embody something "American" in style yet, according to Tawil, remains legible only in the context of stylistic, generic, and conceptual forms that animated English cultural life through the century.
Author: Kevin R. McNamara
Publisher:
ISBN: 1108841961
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417
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Book Description
This book examines what literature and film reveal about the urban USA. Subjects include culture, class, race, crime, and disaster.
