Author: David Warfield Teague
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 9780816517848
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
By analyzing ways in which indigenous cultures described the American Southwest, David Teague persuasively argues against the destructive approach that Americans currently take to the region. Included are Native American legends and Spanish and Hispanic literature. As he traces ideas about the desert, Teague shows how literature and art represent the Southwest as a place to be sustained rather than transformed. 14 illustrations.
Author: John N. Swift
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803245570
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
The American Southwest was arguably as formative a landscape for Willa Cather?s aesthetic vision as was her beloved Nebraska. Both landscapes elicited in her a sense of raw incompleteness. They seemed not so much finished places as things unassembled, more like countries ?still waiting to be made into [a] landscape.? Cather?s fascination with the Southwest led to its presence as a significant setting in three of her most ambitious novels: The Song of the Lark, The Professor?s House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. This volume focuses a sharp eye on how the landscape of the American Southwest served Cather creatively and the ways it shaped her research and productivity. No single scholarly methodology prevails in the essays gathered here, giving the volume rare depth and complexity.
Author: Keith L. Bryant
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1623492084
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394
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Book Description
If the Southwest is known for its distinctive regional culture, it is not only the indigenous influences that make it so. As Anglo Americans moved into the territories of the greater Southwest, they brought with them a desire to reestablish the highest culture of their former homes: opera, painting, sculpture, architecture, and literature. But their inherited culture was altered, challenged, and reshaped by Native American and Hispanic peoples, and a new, vibrant cultural life resulted. From Houston to Los Angeles, from Tulsa to Tucson, Keith L. Bryant traces the development of "high culture" in the Southwest. Humans create culture, but in the Southwest, Bryant argues, the land itself has also influenced that creation. "Incredible light, natural grandeur, . . . and a geography at once beautiful and yet brutal molded societies that sprang from unique cultural sources." The peoples of the American Southwest share a regional consciousness—an experience of place—that has helped to create a unified, but not homogenized, Southwestern culture. Bryant also examines a paradox of Southwestern cultural life. Southwesterners take pride in their cultural distinctiveness, yet they struggled to win recognition for their achievements in "high culture." A dynamic tension between those seeking to re-create a Western European culture and those desiring one based on regional themes and resources continues to stimulate creativity. Decade by decade and city by city, Bryant charts the growth of cultural institutions and patronage as he describes the contributions of artists and performers and of the elites who support them. Bryant focuses on the significant role women played as leaders in the formation of cultural institutions and as writers, artists, and musicians. The text is enhanced by more than fifty photographs depicting the interplay between the people and the land and the culture that has resulted.
Author: Jada Ach
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1793622027
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 309
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Book Description
In literary and cinematic representations, deserts often betoken collapse and dystopia. Reading Aridity in Western American Literature offers readings of literature set in the American Southwest from ecocritical and new materialist perspectives. This book explores the diverse epistemologies, histories, relationships, futures, and possibilities that emerge from the representation of American deserts in fiction, film, and literary art, and traces the social, cultural, economic, and biotic narratives that foreground deserts, prompting us to reconsider new, provocative modes of human/nonhuman engagement in arid ecogeographies.
Author: Eric Gary Anderson
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292704887
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
Explores a range of conceptions of the Southwest as reflected in American Indian literature and its interactions with, and interpretations by, Anglo literature.
Author: Lloyd Hughes Davies
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786835770
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
The subject matter is topical: madness has universal and enduring appeal. The positive aspects of the irrational, particularly its potential for cultural renewal, are given more prominence than has been the case in the past. The coverage is wide-ranging: new critical angles enrich our understanding of major writers while the appeal of lesser-known figures is highlighted, often by means of a comparative perspective.
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: Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art, American
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
The Southwest has long beckoned the artist. But too often, art made by Euro-Americans drawn to this region has either "basked in the sunny celebration of the picturesque, the exotic, and the sentimental" or appropriated the myths and art of Native Americans. In this collection of essays, Sharyn R. Udall explores the work of some of the painters who have found stimulus in the ideas, people, and myths of the Southwest, among them Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Page Allen, and Woody Gwyn. They saw the Southwest in new ways, drawing inspiration from the very light and topography of the region. Udall's goal is to open and enlarge the discussion by rejecting the "neat, circumscribed way of seeing" common to traditional art history. Thus, she declares, one is able to encourage a fresh look at these painters and their work, and at the larger relationships of nature and culture in the Southwest.
Author: John Graves
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 80
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Book Description
Author: Catrin Gersdorf
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9401206570
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 357
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Book Description
This study explores the ways in which the desert, as topographical space and cultural presence, shaped and reshaped concepts and images of America. Once a territory outside the geopolitical and cultural borders of the United States, the deserts of the West and Southwest have since emerged as canonical American landscapes. Drawing on the critical concepts of American studies and on questions and problems raised in recent debates on ecocriticism, The Poetics and Politics of the Desert investigates the spatial rhetoric of America as it developed in view of arid landscapes since the mid-nineteenth century. Gersdorf argues that the integration of the desert into America catered to the entire spectrum of ideological and political responses to the history and culture of the US, maintaining that the Americanization of this landscape was and continues to be staged within the idiomatic parameters and in reaction to the discursive authority of four spatial metaphors: garden, wilderness, Orient, and heterotopia.
