America, History and Life

America, History and Life
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2003
Genre: Canada
ISBN:

Provides historical coverage of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Includes information abstracted from over 2,000 journals published worldwide.

Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour

Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour
Author: Robert Volpicelli
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2021
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0192893386

Many Americans' first encounter with international modernism came, not on the page, but in person--through the widespread phenomenon of the US lecture tour. Attending to these encounters, Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour reroutes our understanding of modernism away from the magazines and other mass media that have so far characterized its circulation and toward the unique form of cultural distribution that coalesced around the tour. Offering many new and compelling archival insights, this volume works across an admirably broad cultural landscape to reveal the US lecture tour as a primary mover of modernism. The study highlights the role this circuit played in the formation of transatlantic modernism by following a diverse group of authors--Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, Gertrude Stein, and W. H. Auden--on their whistle-stop tours across America, illuminating in the process how this extremely physical form of circulation transformed authors into object-like commodities to be sold in a variety of performance venues. Moreover, it shows how these writers responded to such wide-ranging distribution by stretching their own ideas about modernist authorship. In doing so, Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour adds to a critical tradition of exposing those popular dimensions of modernism that far exceeded its standard coterie definition while also uncovering something else: how the circuit's particular diversity of social contexts forced modernists to take on a new authorial flexibility that would allow them to make in-roads with practically any audience--elite, popular, and everything in between.

Agee Agonistes

Agee Agonistes
Author: Michael A. Lofaro
Publisher: Univ Tennessee Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2007
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Most widely noted for his acclaimed Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Death in the Family, Tennessee native James Agee was also a journalist, film critic, poet, and screenwriter. More than fifty years after Agee's untimely death, his canon of work continues to grow in popularity, and his ability to capture the human condition in all its forms remains unparalleled. Agee Agonistes is a compilation of seventeen essays from the James Agee Celebration hosted by the University of Tennessee in April 2005. The collection includes some of the best interpretations of Agee's work and explores the influences on his art, delineates the connections and syntheses he makes within his texts, and examines his involvement in music, ethics, surrealism, local and national history, cinema, television, poetry, literature, sociology, and journalism. The volume features never-before-seen pictures of Agee, previously unknown correspondence, and a remembrance by his oldest daughter, Deedee. The volume also includes the most extensive bibliography of secondary sources on Agee assembled to date. The essays are divided into four parts: Agee's Influences and Syntheses-Contributors: Paul Sprecher, William Bruce Wheeler, Jack Neely, Jeffrey J. Folks, Hugh Davis, Paul Ashdown Agee's Films-Contributors: Daniel Feller, Jeffrey Couchman, Mary E. Papke, John Wranovics Agee's Literature-Contributors: Fred Chappell, Angie Maxwell, John H. Summers, James A. Crank, Michael A. Lofaro Agee's Correspondence-Contributor: Brian Gempp. In addition, the volume includes an introductory essay entitled "Mapping Agee's Myriad Mind" by noted author David Madden. Agee Agonistes will be of interest to all those who study twentieth-century America and will introduce a new generation of readers to James Agee. Michael Lofaro is professor of American literature and American and Cultural Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He has authored and edited numerous volumes and is coeditor, with Hugh Davis, of James Agee Rediscovered: The Journals of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Other New Manuscripts. He is also the general editor for the ten-volume series, The Works of James Agee, and the editor of its forthcoming first volume, A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author's Text.

Transmedia Practices in the Long Nineteenth Century

Transmedia Practices in the Long Nineteenth Century
Author: Christina Meyer
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2022-02-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000542882

This volume provides engaging accounts with transmedia practices in the long nineteenth century and offers model analyses of Victorian media (e.g., theater, advertising, books, games, newspapers) alongside the technological, economic, and cultural conditions under which they emerged in the Anglophone world. By exploring engagement tactics and forms of audience participation, the book affords insight into the role that social agents – e.g., individual authors, publishing houses, theatre show producers, lithograph companies, toy manufacturers, newspaper syndicates, or advertisers – played in the production, distribution, and consumption of Victorian media. It considers such examples as Sherlock Holmes, Kewpie Dolls, media forms and practices such as cut-outs, popular lectures, telephone conversations or early theater broadcasting, and such authors as Nellie Bly, Mark Twain, and Walter Besant, offering insight into the variety of transmedia practices present in the long nineteenth century. The book brings together methods and theories from comics studies, communication and media studies, English and American studies, narratology and more, and proposes fresh ways to think about transmediality. Though the target audiences are students, teachers, and scholars in the humanities, the book will also resonate with non-academic readers interested in how media contents are produced, disseminated, and consumed, and with what implications.

New Perspectives on James Weldon Johnson's "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man"

New Perspectives on James Weldon Johnson's
Author: Noelle Morrissette
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2017-07-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0820350966

James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) exemplified the ideal of the American public intellectual as a writer, educator, songwriter, diplomat, key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and first African American executive of the NAACP. Originally published anonymously in 1912, Johnson’s novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is considered one of the foundational works of twentieth-century African American literature, and its themes and forms have been taken up by other writers, from Ralph Ellison to Teju Cole. Johnson’s novel provocatively engages with political and cultural strains still prevalent in American discourse today, and it remains in print over a century after its initial publication. New Perspectives contains fresh essays that analyze the book’s reverberations, the contexts within which it was created and received, the aesthetic and intellectual developments of its author, and its continuing influence on American literature and global culture. Contributors: Bruce Barnhart, Lori Brooks, Ben Glaser, Jeff Karem, Daphne Lamothe, Noelle Morrissette, Michael Nowlin, Lawrence J. Oliver, Diana Paulin, Amritjit Singh, Robert B. Stepto

Dynamic Form

Dynamic Form
Author: Cara L. Lewis
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2020-07-15
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 1501749196

Dynamic Form traces how intermedial experiments shape modernist texts from 1900 to 1950. Considering literature alongside painting, sculpture, photography, and film, Cara Lewis examines how these arts inflect narrative movement, contribute to plot events, and configure poetry and memoir. As forms and formal theories cross from one artistic realm to another and back again, modernism shows its obsession with form—and even at times becomes a formalism itself—but as Lewis writes, that form is far more dynamic than we have given it credit for. Form fulfills such various functions that we cannot characterize it as a mere container for content or matter, nor can we consign it to ignominy opposite historicism or political commitment. As a structure or scheme that enables action, form in modernism can be plastic, protean, or even fragile, and works by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Evelyn Waugh, and Gertrude Stein demonstrate the range of form's operations. Revising three major formal paradigms—spatial form, pure form, and formlessness—and recasting the history of modernist form, this book proposes an understanding of form as a verbal category, as a kind of doing. Dynamic Form thus opens new possibilities for conversation between modernist studies and formalist studies and simultaneously promotes a capacious rethinking of the convergence between literary modernism and creative work in other media.

Modernism at the Microphone

Modernism at the Microphone
Author: Melissa Dinsman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2015-09-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1472595084

As the Second World War raged throughout Europe, modernist writers often became crucial voices in the propaganda efforts of both sides. Modernism at the Microphone: Radio, Propaganda, and Literary Aesthetics During World War II is a comprehensive study of the role modernist writers' radio works played in the propaganda war and the relationship between modernist literary aesthetics and propaganda. Drawing on new archival research, the book covers the broadcast work of such key figures as George Orwell, Orson Welles, Dorothy L. Sayers, Louis MacNeice, Mulk Raj Anand, T.S. Eliot, and P.G. Wodehouse. In addition to the work of Anglo-American modernists, Melissa Dinsman also explores the radio work of exiled German writers, such as Thomas Mann, as well as Ezra Pound's notorious pro-fascist broadcasts. In this way, the book reveals modernism's engagement with new technologies that opened up transnational boundaries under the pressures of war.

Inventing Tomorrow

Inventing Tomorrow
Author: Sarah Cole
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 455
Release: 2019-10-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0231550162

H. G. Wells played a central role in defining the intellectual, political, and literary character of the twentieth century. A prolific literary innovator, he coined such concepts as “time machine,” “war of the worlds,” and “atomic bomb,” exerting vast influence on popular ideas of time and futurity, progress and decline, and humanity’s place in the universe. Wells was a public intellectual with a worldwide readership. He met with world leaders, including Roosevelt, Lenin, Stalin, and Churchill, and his books were international best-sellers. Yet critics and scholars have largely forgotten his accomplishments or relegated them to genre fiction, overlooking their breadth and diversity. In Inventing Tomorrow, Sarah Cole provides a definitive account of Wells’s work and ideas. She contends that Wells casts new light on modernism and its values: on topics from warfare to science to time, his work resonates both thematically and aesthetically with some of the most ambitious modernists. At the same time, unlike many modernists, Wells believed that literature had a pressing place in public life, and his works reached a wide range of readers. While recognizing Wells’s limitations, Cole offers a new account of his distinctive style as well as his interventions into social and political thought. She illuminates how Wells embodies twentieth-century literature at its most expansive and engaged. An ambitious rethinking of Wells as both writer and thinker, Inventing Tomorrow suggests that he offers a timely model for literature’s moral responsibility to imagine a better global future.