A History of American Literature and Culture of the First World War

A History of American Literature and Culture of the First World War
Author: Tim Dayton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 749
Release: 2021-02-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108593879

In the years of and around the First World War, American poets, fiction writers, and dramatists came to the forefront of the international movement we call Modernism. At the same time a vast amount of non- and anti-Modernist culture was produced, mostly supporting, but also critical of, the US war effort. A History of American Literature and Culture of the First World War explores this fraught cultural moment, teasing out the multiple and intricate relationships between an insurgent Modernism, a still-powerful traditional culture, and a variety of cultural and social forces that interacted with and influenced them. Including genre studies, focused analyses of important wartime movements and groups, and broad historical assessments of the significance of the war as prosecuted by the United States on the world stage, this book presents original essays defining the state of scholarship on the American culture of the First World War.


Children's Literature and Culture of the First World War

Children's Literature and Culture of the First World War
Author: Lissa Paul
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 410
Release: 2015-12-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317361660

Because all wars in the twenty-first century are potentially global wars, the centenary of the first global war is the occasion for reflection. This volume offers an unprecedented account of the lives, stories, letters, games, schools, institutions (such as the Boy Scouts and YMCA), and toys of children in Europe, North America, and the Global South during the First World War and surrounding years. By engaging with developments in Children’s Literature, War Studies, and Education, and mining newly available archival resources (including letters written by children), the contributors to this volume demonstrate how perceptions of childhood changed in the period. Children who had been constructed as Romantic innocents playing safely in secure gardens were transformed into socially responsible children actively committing themselves to the war effort. In order to foreground cross-cultural connections across what had been perceived as ‘enemy’ lines, perspectives on German, American, British, Australian, and Canadian children’s literature and culture are situated so that they work in conversation with each other. The multidisciplinary, multinational range of contributors to this volume make it distinctive and a particularly valuable contribution to emerging studies on the impact of war on the lives of children.


War and American Literature

War and American Literature
Author: Jennifer Haytock
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 698
Release: 2021-02-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108757162

This book examines representations of war throughout American literary history, providing a firm grounding in established criticism and opening up new lines of inquiry. Readers will find accessible yet sophisticated essays that lay out key questions and scholarship in the field. War and American Literature provides a comprehensive synthesis of the literature and scholarship of US war writing, illuminates how themes, texts, and authors resonate across time and wars, and provides multiple contexts in which texts and a war's literature can be framed. By focusing on American war writing, from the wars with the Native Americans and the Revolutionary War to the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this volume illuminates the unique role representations of war have in the US imagination.


The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro

The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro
Author: Mark Whalan
Publisher:
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2008
Genre: African Americans
ISBN: 9780813045993

Examining the legacy of the Great War on African American culture, this book considers the work of such canonical writers as W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen and Alain Locke. It also considers the legacy of the war for African Americans as represented in film, photography and anthropology.


World War One, American Literature, and the Federal State

World War One, American Literature, and the Federal State
Author: Mark Whalan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2018-09-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108571557

In this book, Mark Whalan argues that World War One's major impact on US culture was not the experience of combat trauma, but rather the effects of the expanded federal state bequeathed by US mobilization. Writers bristled at the state's new intrusions and coercions, but were also intrigued by its creation of new social ties and political identities. This excitement informed early American modernism, whose literary experiments often engaged the political innovations of the Progressive state at war. Writers such as Wallace Stevens, John Dos Passos, Willa Cather, Zane Grey, and Edith Wharton were fascinated by wartime discussions over the nature of US citizenship, and also crafted new forms of writing that could represent a state now so complex it seemed to defy representation at all. And many looked to ordinary activities transformed by the war - such as sending mail, receiving healthcare, or driving a car - to explore the state's everyday presence in American lives.


The First World War as a Clash of Cultures

The First World War as a Clash of Cultures
Author: Frederick George Thomas Bridgham
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2006
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1571133402

Contains essays examining the perceived tensions between British and German cultural traditions and beliefs before 1914 and how popular literature, public debate, cultural distinction, and war-time propaganda determined historical, political, and military events leading to war.


Facing the Abyss

Facing the Abyss
Author: George Hutchinson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2018-01-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0231545967

Mythologized as the era of the “good war” and the “Greatest Generation,” the 1940s are frequently understood as a more heroic, uncomplicated time in American history. Yet just below the surface, a sense of dread, alienation, and the haunting specter of radical evil permeated American art and literature. Writers returned home from World War II and gave form to their disorienting experiences of violence and cruelty. They probed the darkness that the war opened up and confronted bigotry, existential guilt, ecological concerns, and fear about the nature and survival of the human race. In Facing the Abyss, George Hutchinson offers readings of individual works and the larger intellectual and cultural scene to reveal the 1940s as a period of profound and influential accomplishment. Facing the Abyss examines the relation of aesthetics to politics, the idea of universalism, and the connections among authors across racial, ethnic, and gender divisions. Modernist and avant-garde styles were absorbed into popular culture as writers and artists turned away from social realism to emphasize the process of artistic creation. Hutchinson explores a range of important writers, from Saul Bellow and Mary McCarthy to Richard Wright and James Baldwin. African American and Jewish novelists critiqued racism and anti-Semitism, women writers pushed back on the misogyny unleashed during the war, and authors such as Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams reflected a new openness in the depiction of homosexuality. The decade also witnessed an awakening of American environmental and ecological consciousness. Hutchinson argues that despite the individualized experiences depicted in these works, a common belief in art’s ability to communicate the universal in particulars united the most important works of literature and art during the 1940s. Hutchinson’s capacious view of American literary and cultural history masterfully weaves together a wide range of creative and intellectual expression into a sweeping new narrative of this pivotal decade.


American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War

American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War
Author: Steven Belletto
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2012-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1609381130

Authors and artists discussed include: Joseph Conrad, Edwin Denby, Joan Didion, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Allen Ginsberg, Frank Berbert, Richard Kim, Norman Mailer, Malcolm X, Alan Nadel, and John Updike,


The Language of War

The Language of War
Author: James Dawes
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2009-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780674030268

A distinguished and experienced appellate court judge, Posner offers in this new book a unique and, to orthodox legal thinkers, a startling perspective on how judges and justices decide cases.