The book takes as its point of departure the notion that a nation's music and performance culture was, in the nineteenth century, conceived of as the voice of its people. From ballads to parades to plays to orations, these cultural forms carried the burden of staging an identity for the national community and for the onlooking eyes of outsiders.
Whether you're a would-be entrepreneur, a hard-core geek, or just a gadget lover, it is hard to imagine a bigger thrill than inventing something and sharing your creation with the world--and maybe even making a profit somewhere along the way. Gadget Nation celebrates that spirit through the irresistible, often quirky stories of more than 100 amateur inventors and their gizmos, from lighted slippers to an alarm clock that rolls away from you when you reach for the snooze button.
What if we ascribe significance to aesthetic and social divergences rather than waving them aside as anomalous? What if we look closely at what does not appear central, or appears peripherally, or does not appear at all, viewing ellipses, outliers, absences, and outtakes as significant? Eccentric Modernisms places queer demands on art history, tracing the relational networks connecting cosmopolitan eccentrics who cultivated discrepant strains of modernism in America during the 1930s and 1940s. Building on the author’s earlier studies of Gertrude Stein and other lesbians who participated in transatlantic cultural exchanges between the world wars, this book moves in a different direction, focusing primarily on the gay men who formed Stein’s support network and whose careers, in turn, she helped to launch, including the neo-romantic painters Pavel Tchelitchew and writer-editor Charles Henri Ford. Eccentric Modernisms shows how these “eccentric modernists” bucked trends by working collectively, reveling in disciplinary promiscuity and sustaining creative affiliations across national and cultural boundaries.
Vaudeville is often viewed as the source of some of the crude stereotypes that positioned the Irish immigrant in America as the antithesis of native-born American citizens. Using primary archival material, Mooney argues that the vaudeville stage was an important venue in which an Irish-American identity was constructed, negotiated, and refined.
