Literature & the American Urban Experience
Author: Michael C. Jaye
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 1981
Total Pages: 276
ISBN-13: 9780719008481
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Author: Michael C. Jaye
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 1981
Total Pages: 276
ISBN-13: 9780719008481
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: J. Trotter
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2004-03-17
Total Pages: 348
ISBN-13: 1403979162
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom the early years of the African slave trade to America, blacks have lived and laboured in urban environments. Yet the transformation of rural blacks into a predominantly urban people is a relatively recent phenomenon - only during World War One did African Americans move into cities in large numbers, and only during World War Two did more blacks reside in cities than in the countryside. By the early 1970s, blacks had not only made the transition from rural to urban settings, but were almost evenly distributed between the cities of the North and the West on the one hand and the South on the other. In their quest for full citizenship rights, economic democracy, and release from an oppressive rural past, black southerners turned to urban migration and employment in the nation's industrial sector as a new 'Promised Land' or 'Flight from Egypt'. In order to illuminate these transformations in African American urban life, this book brings together urban history; contemporary social, cultural, and policy research; and comparative perspectives on race, ethnicity, and nationality within and across national boundaries.
Author: Frederik Byrn Køhlert
Publisher: Museum Tusculanum Press
Published: 2011
Total Pages: 191
ISBN-13: 8763507765
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Chicago Literary Experience is a concise literary history of the city of Chicago. Taking as its thematic starting point the city's famous World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, the book provides an account of the city's rapid and in many ways unprecedented development from trading post to metropolis, and examines the many literary responses to this new urban environment. By contextualizing literature written about the city in these formative years, the book shows not only how the city influenced its writers, but also how these writers struggled to transform their urban environment into literary forms. Covering such aspect as the emergence of the novel of the businessman as cultural hero, the humorous newspaper columns of the late nineteenth century, and the Depression-era revitalization of Chicago literature from its ethnic neighborhoods, the book moves beyond the obvious "classics" and rediscovers a vibrant literary tradition that restores almost-forgotten writers such as Eugene Field and Floyd Dell to their place in American literary history. Given the historical approach and the breadth of material covered, the book will be valuable to anyone wanting to understand how American literature in this defining period moved from the farm to the city-and what happened to it once it had arrived. Authors discussed include Jane Addams, George Ade, Nelson Algren, Sherwood Anderson, Saul Bellow, Gwendolyn Brooks, Willa Cather, Floyd Dell, Theodore Dreiser, James T. Farrell, Eugene Field, Henry B. Fuller, Hamlin Garland, Robert Herrick, Jack London, Frank Norris, Carl Sandburg, Upton Sinclair and Richard Wright. Frederik Byrn Køhlert is a doctoral student at the University of Montreal. He has an MA in English from the University of Oregon and an MA in English and Scandinavian Literature from the University of Aarhus, Denmark.
Author: Kenneth L. Kusmer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2009-08-01
Total Pages: 552
ISBN-13: 0226465128
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHistorians have devoted surprisingly little attention to African American urban history ofthe postwar period, especially compared with earlier decades. Correcting this imbalance, African American Urban History since World War II features an exciting mix of seasoned scholars and fresh new voices whose combined efforts provide the first comprehensive assessment of this important subject. The first of this volume’s five groundbreaking sections focuses on black migration and Latino immigration, examining tensions and alliances that emerged between African Americans and other groups. Exploring the challenges of residential segregation and deindustrialization, later sections tackle such topics as the real estate industry’s discriminatory practices, the movement of middle-class blacks to the suburbs, and the influence of black urban activists on national employment and social welfare policies. Another group of contributors examines these themes through the lens of gender, chronicling deindustrialization’s disproportionate impact on women and women’s leading roles in movements for social change. Concluding with a set of essays on black culture and consumption, this volume fully realizes its goal of linking local transformations with the national and global processes that affect urban class and race relations.
Author: Nick Yablon
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2010-06-15
Total Pages: 397
ISBN-13: 0226946657
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAmerican ruins have become increasingly prominent, whether in discussions of “urban blight” and home foreclosures, in commemorations of 9/11, or in postapocalyptic movies. In this highly original book, Nick Yablon argues that the association between American cities and ruins dates back to a much earlier period in the nation’s history. Recovering numerous scenes of urban desolation—from failed banks, abandoned towns, and dilapidated tenements to the crumbling skyscrapers and bridges envisioned in science fiction and cartoons—Untimely Ruins challenges the myth that ruins were absent or insignificant objects in nineteenth-century America. The first book to document an American cult of the ruin, Untimely Ruins traces its deviations as well as derivations from European conventions. Unlike classical and Gothic ruins, which decayed gracefully over centuries and inspired philosophical meditations about the fate of civilizations, America’s ruins were often “untimely,” appearing unpredictably and disappearing before they could accrue an aura of age. As modern ruins of steel and iron, they stimulated critical reflections about contemporary cities, and the unfamiliar kinds of experience they enabled. Unearthing evocative sources everywhere from the archives of amateur photographers to the contents of time-capsules, Untimely Ruins exposes crucial debates about the economic, technological, and cultural transformations known as urban modernity. The result is a fascinating cultural history that uncovers fresh perspectives on the American city.
Author: Davies Philip John Davies
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 2019-06-01
Total Pages: 256
ISBN-13: 1474466036
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn America, perhaps more than in any other western society, reality, legend and myth overlap. Americans have always been proprietorial about their country and its presentation. The international authors of this book open a range of windows on our study of the USA. Covering issues of culture and society, literature, politics and history, ethnicity, ideology and democracy, they offer a unique analysis of the way in which we perceive and interpret a country which has become the only truly global force in politics and culture.See also: Journal of Transatlantic Studies
Author: Kevin R. McNamara
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2021-08-05
Total Pages: 417
ISBN-13: 1108901549
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe city's 'Americanness' has been disputed throughout US history. Pronounced dead in the late twentieth century, cities have enjoyed a renaissance in the twenty-first. Engaging the history of urban promise and struggle as represented in literature, film, and visual arts, and drawing on work in the social sciences, The City in American Literature and Culture examines the large and local forces that shape urban space and city life and the street-level activity that remakes culture and identities as it contests injustice and separation. The first two sections examine a range of city spaces and lives; the final section brings the city into conversation with Marxist geography, critical race studies, trauma theory, slow/systemic violence, security theory, posthumanism, and critical regionalism, with a coda on city literature and democracy.
Author: Nan A. Rothschild
Publisher:
Published: 2015
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780813061948
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Unrivaled in scope. An essential work for urban historical archaeologists."--Adrian Praetzellis, author of Dug to Death "An engaging and astonishingly comprehensive work that reveals just how much our knowledge of America's cities and the lives of city dwellers has been enriched through urban archaeology."--Mary C. Beaudry, coeditor of Archaeologies of Mobility and Movement American cities have been built, altered, redeveloped, destroyed, reimagined, and rebuilt for nearly 300 years in order to accommodate growing and shrinking populations and their needs. Urban archaeology is a unique subfield with its own peculiar challenges and approaches to fieldwork. Understanding the social forces that influenced the development of American cities requires more than digging; it calls for the ability to extrapolate from limited data, an awareness of the dynamics that drive urban development, and theories that can build bridges to connect the two. At the forefront of this exciting field of research, Nan Rothschild and Diana Wall are well suited to introduce this fascinating topic to a broad readership. Following a brief introduction, the authors offer specific case studies of work undertaken in New York, Philadelphia, Tucson, West Oakland, and many other cities. Ideal for undergraduates, The Archaeology of American Cities utilizes the material culture of the past to highlight recurring themes that reflect distinctive characteristics of urban life in the United States.
Author: Carme Manuel
Publisher: Universitat de València
Published: 2003
Total Pages: 556
ISBN-13: 9788437055312
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHomenaje a Javier Coy, catedrático jubilado del Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana de la Universitat de València de 1990 a 2000, y uno de los primeros investigadores en introducir los estudios norteamericanos. Se recogen 50 artículos de especialistas en este campo, que reflejan el estado de los estudios sobre la cultura y literatura de los Estados Unidos contemporáneos.