Sensationalism And The Jew In Antebellum American Literature

Author : David Anthony,Professor and Director of the School of Literature Writing and Digital Humanities David Anthony
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 209 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2023-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780192871732

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Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature by David Anthony,Professor and Director of the School of Literature Writing and Digital Humanities David Anthony Pdf

This book examines the charged but mostly overlooked presence of the sensational Jew in antebellum literature. This stereotyped character appears primarily in the pulpy sensation fiction of popular writers like George Lippard, Ned Buntline, Emerson Bennett, and others. But this figure also plays an important role in the sometimes sensational work of canonical writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman. Whatever the medium, this character, always overdetermined, does consistent cultural work. This book contends that, as the figure who embodies money and capitalism in the antebellum imagination, the sensational Jew is the character who most fully represents a felt anxiety about the increasingly unstable nature of a range of social categories in the antebellum US, and the sense of loss and self-hatred so often lurking in the background of modern Gentile identity. Each chapter examines a different form of sensationalism (urban gothic; sentimental city mysteries; anti-Tom plantation narratives; etc.), and a different set of anxieties (threats to class status; collapsing regional identity; the uncertain status of Whiteness and other racial categories; etc.). Throughout, the sensational Jew acts both as a figure of proteophobia (fear of disorder and ambivalence), and as the figure who embodies in uncanny form a more fulfilling and socially coherent form of identity that predates the modern liberal selfhood of the post-Enlightenment world. The sensational Jew is therefore a revealing figure in antebellum culture, as well as an important antecedent to contemporary antisemitism in the US.

Author : Justine S. Murison
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 765 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2022-06-23
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781108675567

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American Literature in Transition, 1820–1860: Volume 2 by Justine S. Murison Pdf

The essays in American Literature in Transition, 1820-1860 offer a new approach to the antebellum era, one that frames the age not merely as the precursor to the Civil War but as indispensable for understanding present crises around such issues as race, imperialism, climate change, and the role of literature in American society. The essays make visible and usable the period's fecund imagined futures, futures that certainly included disunion but not only disunion. Tracing the historical contexts, literary forms and formats, global coordinates, and present reverberations of antebellum literature and culture, the essays in this volume build on existing scholarship while indicating exciting new avenues for research and teaching. Taken together, the essays in this volume make this era's literature relevant for a new generation of students and scholars.

Author : Stephen Schryer
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2024-06-14
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9780198886204

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National Review's Literary Network by Stephen Schryer Pdf

Stephen Schryer traces the careers of novelists, journalists, and literary critics who wrote for William F. Buckley, Jr.'s National Review and highlights these writers' enduring impact on movement conservatism.

Author : Scott M. Reznick
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2024-05-09
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780198891970

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Political Liberalism and the Rise of American Romanticism by Scott M. Reznick Pdf

Political Liberalism and the Rise of American Romanticism explores how American Romanticism developed in response to pervasive conflicts over democracy's moral dimensions in the early republic and antebellum eras. By recovering the long-under-examined tradition of political liberalism for literary studies, it traces how US writers reacted to ongoing moral and political conflict by engaging with liberal thinkers and ideas as they endeavored to understand how individuals beholden to a divergent array of moral convictions might nevertheless share a stable and just political world—the very dilemma at the core of political liberalism. This study demonstrates how those philosophical engagements sparked Romanticism's rise and eventual flourishing as US writers increasingly embraced Romantic literary modes emphasizing the imagination's capacity for creative synthesis and the role it plays in shoring up the habits of mind and feeling that are vital to a meaningful democratic culture. It offers revisionary readings of works by Charles Brockden Brown, Robert Montgomery Bird, James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Nathaniel Hawthorne to show how these Romantic writers were preoccupied with how individuals come to embrace their deepest convictions and what happens when they encounter others who see the world differently.

Author : Sandra M. Gustafson
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2023-09-21
Category : History
ISBN : 9780192884770

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Peace in the US Republic of Letters, 1840-1900 by Sandra M. Gustafson Pdf

Peace in the US Republic of Letters, 1840-1900 explores the early peace movement as it captured the imagination of leading writers. The book charts the rise of the peace cause from its sources in the works of William Penn and John Woolman, through the founding of the first peace societies in 1815 and the mid-century peace congresses, to the postbellum movement's consequential emphasis on arbitration. The Civil War is the central axis for the book, with three chapters organized around readings of novels by James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne spanning the period from 1840 to 1865. Cooper had personal connections to the movement and thought deeply about the issues it addressed. Literary interest in peace at times overlapped with abolitionism, as was true for Stowe. And, in the case of Hawthorne, attention to peace advocacy arose out of a mixture of skepticism regarding perfectionist impulses, a desire to explore the nature and limits of violence, and fear of civil conflict. The volume also explores fiction engaged with problems that arose in the aftermath of that war, including novels by Henry Adams and John Hay on political corruption and class conflict; works on the failures of Reconstruction by Albion Tourgée and Charles Chesnutt; and the varied treatments of Indigenous experience in Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona and Simon Pokagon's Queen of the Woods. All of these writers focused on issues related to the cause of peace, expanding its thematic reach and anticipating key insights of twentieth-century peace scholars.

Author : Efraim Sicher
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 323 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2017-05-04
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781498527798

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The Jew's Daughter by Efraim Sicher Pdf

A new approach to thinking about the representation of the Other in Western society, The Jew’s Daughter: A Cultural History of a Conversion Narrative offers an insight into the gendered difference of the Jew. Focusing on a popular narrative of “The Jew’s Daughter,” which has been overlooked in conventional studies of European anti-Semitism, this innovative study looks at canonical and neglected texts which have constructed racialized and sexualized images that persist today in the media and popular culture. The book goes back before Shylock and Jessica in TheMerchant of Venice and Isaac and Rebecca in Ivanhoe to seek the answers to why the Jewish father is always wicked and ugly, while his daughter is invariably desirable and open to conversion. The story unfolds in fascinating transformations, reflecting changing ideological and social discourses about gender, sexuality, religion, and nation that expose shifting perceptions of inclusion and exclusion of the Other. Unlike previous studies of the theme of the Jewess in separate literatures, Sicher provides a comparative perspective on the transnational circulation of texts in the historical context of the perception of both Jews and women as marginal or outcasts in society. The book draws on examples from the arts, history, literature, folklore, and theology to draw a complex picture of the dynamics of Jewish-Christian relations in England, France, Germany, and Eastern Europe from 1100 to 2017. In addition, the responses of Jewish authors illustrate a dialogue that has not always led to mutual understanding. This ground-breaking work will provoke questions about the history and present state of prejudiced attitudes in our society.

Author : Louis Harap
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 628 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 1974
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : STANFORD:36105002586837

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The Image of the Jew in American Literature by Louis Harap Pdf

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 586 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 1974
Category : Electronic
ISBN : OCLC:251664046

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The Image of the Jew in American Literature by Anonim Pdf

Author : David Anthony
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : UOM:39076002900350

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Paper Money Men by David Anthony Pdf

Paper Money Men: Commerce, Manhood, and the Sensational Public Sphere in Antebellum America by David Anthony outlines the emergence of a "sensational public sphere" in antebellum America. It argues that this new representational space reflected and helped shape the intricate relationship between commerce and masculine sensibility in a period of dramatic economic upheaval. Looking at a variety of sensational media--from penny press newspapers and pulpy dime novels to the work of well-known writers such as Irving, Hawthorne, and Melville--this book counters the common critical notion that the period's sensationalism addressed a primarily working-class audience. Instead, Paper Money Men shows how a wide variety of sensational media was in fact aimed principally at an emergent class of young professional men. "Paper money men" were caught in the transition from an older and more stable mercantilist economy to a panic-prone economic system centered on credit and speculation. And, Anthony argues, they found themselves reflected in the sensational public sphere, a fantasy space in which new models of professional manhood were repeatedly staged and negotiated. Compensatory in nature, these alternative models of manhood rejected fiscal security and property as markers of a stable selfhood, looking instead toward intangible factors such as emotion and race in an effort to forge a secure sense of manhood in an age of intense uncertainty.

Author : Bernard Smith
Publisher : UNSW Press
Page : 388 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 1998
Category : Art, Modern
ISBN : 0868407445

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Modernism's History by Bernard Smith Pdf

Encompassing movements from post-impressionism to post-modernism, eminent and widely published art historian Bernard Smith has written a sweeping history, a reformulation of art history in the twentieth century.

Author : Louis Harap
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 608 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 1974
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : UOM:39015003756288

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The Image of the Jew in American Literature by Louis Harap Pdf

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 674 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 1999
Category : American periodicals
ISBN : STANFORD:36105111459504

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American Periodicals by Anonim Pdf

Author : Lindsay V. Reckson
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2020-01-28
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781479868926

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Realist Ecstasy by Lindsay V. Reckson Pdf

Honorable Mention, Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Theater Research Explores the intersection and history of American literary realism and the performance of spiritual and racial embodiment. Recovering a series of ecstatic performances in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American realism, Realist Ecstasy travels from camp meetings to Native American ghost dances to storefront church revivals to explore realism’s relationship to spiritual experience. In her approach to realism as both an unruly archive of performance and a wide-ranging repertoire of media practices—including literature, photography, audio recording, and early film—Lindsay V. Reckson argues that the real was repetitively enacted and reenacted through bodily practice. Realist Ecstasy demonstrates how the realist imagining of possessed bodies helped construct and naturalize racial difference, while excavating the complex, shifting, and dynamic possibilities embedded in ecstatic performance: its production of new and immanent forms of being beside. Across her readings of Stephen Crane, James Weldon Johnson, and Nella Larsen, among others, Reckson triangulates secularism, realism, and racial formation in the post-Reconstruction moment. Realist Ecstasy shows how post-Reconstruction realist texts mobilized gestures—especially the gestures associated with religious ecstasy—to racialize secularism itself. Reckson offers us a distinctly new vision of American realism as a performative practice, a sustained account of how performance lives in and through literary archives, and a rich sense of how closely secularization and racialization were linked in Jim Crow America.

Author : Franco Moretti
Publisher : Verso Books
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2013-06-04
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781781680858

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The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature by Franco Moretti Pdf

Who – and what – are the Bourgeois? “The bourgeois ... Not so long ago, this notion seemed indispensable to social analysis; these days, one might go years without hearing it mentioned. Capitalism is more powerful than ever, but its human embodiment seems to have vanished. ‘I am a member of the bourgeois class, feel myself to be such, and have been brought up on its opinions and ideals,’ wrote Max Weber, in 1895. Who could repeat these words today? Bourgeois ‘opinions and ideals’—what are they?” Thus begins Franco Moretti’s study of the bourgeois in modern European literature—a major new analysis of the once-dominant culture and its literary decline and fall. Moretti’s gallery of individual portraits is entwined with the analysis of specific keywords—“useful” and “earnest,” “efficiency,” “influence,” “comfort,” “roba”—and of the formal mutations of the medium of prose. From the “working master” of the opening chapter, through the seriousness of nineteenth-century novels, the conservative hegemony of Victorian Britain, the “national malformations” of the Southern and Eastern periphery, and the radical self-critique of Ibsen’s twelve-play cycle, the book charts the vicissitudes of bourgeois culture, exploring the causes for its historical weakness, and for its current irrelevance.

Author : Howard Friel
Publisher : Interlink Publishing
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2013-09-21
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781623710354

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Chomsky and Dershowitz by Howard Friel Pdf

Through the lens of a careful assessment of the political views of MIT’s Noam Chomsky and Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz—the two protagonists of a Cambridge-based feud over the past forty years—author Howard Friel chronicles an American intellectual history from the U.S. war in Vietnam in the 1960s to the contemporary debate about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Major findings reveal the consistency of Chomsky’s principled support of international law, human rights, and civil liberties, and a reversal by Dershowitz from support in the 1960s to opposition of those legal standards today. Friel’s volume argues that a Chomskyan adherence by the United States to international law and human rights would reduce the threat of terrorism and preserve civil liberties, that the Dershowitz-backed war on terrorism increases the threat of terrorism and undermines civil liberties, and that the incremental but steady transition toward a preventive state threatens the permanent suspension of civil liberties in the United States.