Hemispheric Imaginations
Hemispheric Imaginations

Author: Helmbrecht Breinig

Publisher: Dartmouth College Press

Published: 2016-12-06

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 1611689910

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

What image of Latin America have North American fiction writers created, found, or echoed, and how has the prevailing discourse about the region shaped their work? How have their writings contributed to the discursive construction of our southern neighbors, and how has the literature undermined this construction and added layers of complexity that subvert any approach based on stereotypes? Combining American Studies, Canadian Studies, Latin American Studies, and Cultural Theory, Breinig relies on long scholarly experience to answer these and other questions. Hemispheric Imaginations, an ambitious interdisciplinary study of literary representations of Latin America as encounters with the other, is among the most extensive such studies to date. It will appeal to a broad range of scholars of American Studies.

Aesthetics & Ethics
Aesthetics & Ethics

Author: Thomas Claviez

Publisher: Universitatsverlag Winter

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 136

ISBN-13: 9783825354534

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In a first, theoretical part, this study analyzes what role "otherness" plays in the most influential moral-philosophical approaches to date - from Aristotle and the Neo-Aristotelians (Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum) via Kantianism and its deconstructors (Jean-Francois Lyotard, J. Hillis Miller) to the works of Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas - and sheds light on its highly problematic status in Western notions of justice and aesthetics. Starting from a revised notion of the sublime, the second part uses the different theoretical approaches to interpret four American novels (Harriet Beecher Stowe's 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', Herman Melville's 'Billy Budd, Sailor', Richard Wright's 'Native Son', and N. Scott Momaday's 'House Made of Dawn'), and examines how far the respective moral-philosophical systems carry in elucidating these texts, as well as what role literary-historical and generic strategies play in dramatizing the encounter with "otherness".

Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing
Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing

Author: Celeste-Marie Bernier

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2016-02-15

Total Pages: 752

ISBN-13: 0748692940

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This comprehensive study by leading scholars in an important new field-the history of letters and letter writing-is essential reading for anyone interested in nineteenth-century American politics, history or literature. Because of its mass literacy, population mobility, and extensive postal system, nineteenth-century America is a crucial site for the exploration of letters and their meanings, whether they be written by presidents and statesmen, scientists and philosophers, novelists and poets, feminists and reformers, immigrants, Native Americans, or African Americans. This book breaks new ground by mapping the voluminous correspondence of these figures and other important American writers and thinkers. Rather than treating the letter as a spontaneous private document, the contributors understand it as a self-conscious artefact, circulating between friends and strangers and across multiple genres in ways that both make and break social ties.