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American Gangster: And Other Tales of New York (Books That Changed the World)
by Mark JacobsonThe “riveting account” of a Harlem drug kingpin—the basis for the Ridley Scott film starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe (Entertainment Weekly).In the 1970s, Frank Lucas was the king of the Harlem drug trade, bringing in over a million dollars a day. So many heroin addicts were buying from him on 116th Street that he claimed the Transit Authority changed the bus routes to avoid them. He lived a glamorous life, hobnobbing with athletes, musicians, and politicians, but Lucas was a ruthless gangster. He was notorious for using the coffins of dead GIs to smuggle heroin into the United States and, before being sentenced to seventy years in prison, he played a major role in the near death of New York City. In American Gangster, Mark Jacobson’s captivating account of the life of Frank Lucas (the basis for the major motion picture) joins other tales of New York City from the past few decades. The collection features a number of Jacobson’s most famous essays, as well as previous unpublished work and recent articles on 9/11 conspiracy theorists, America’s #1 escort, and Harlem’s own Charles Rangel, the retired chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. American Gangster is a vibrant, many-layered portrait of the most fascinating city in the world, by one of the most acclaimed journalists of our time.“Gripping reading . . . Whether covering the high life or lowlifes, Jacobson boasts a novelistic eye and muscular prose in the tradition of urban chroniclers like Joseph Mitchell, A.J. Liebling, and Pete Hamill. A-.”—Entertainment Weekly“Mark Jacobson is a living American Master.”—New York Daily News
American Georgics
by Timothy SweetIn classical terms the georgic celebrates the working landscape, cultivated to become fruitful and prosperous, in contrast to the idealized or fanciful landscapes of the pastoral. Arguing that economic considerations must become central to any understanding of the human community's engagement with the natural environment, Timothy Sweet identifies a distinct literary mode he calls the American georgic.Offering a fresh approach to ecocritical and environmentally-oriented literary studies, Sweet traces the history of the American georgic from its origins in late sixteenth-century English literature promoting the colonization of the Americas through the mid-nineteenth century, ending with George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature (1864), the foundational text in the conservationist movement.
American Ghost Roses
by Kevin SteinIn his first book as the poet laureate of Illinois, Kevin Stein shoulders an array of poetic forms, blending pathos, humor, and social commentary. These poems--ranging from meditative narratives to improvisational lyrics--explore art's capacity to embody as well as express contemporary culture. Stein embraces subjects as various as his father's death, magazine sex surveys, Kandinsky's theory of art, the dangling modifier, Jimi Hendrix's flaming guitar, racial bigotry, and a teacher's comments on a botched poem. Presiding over this miscellany are ghosts of a peculiarly American garden of dreamers and beloved misfits, those redeemed and those left fingering the locked gate
American Gothic Tales
by Joyce Carol OatesThis remarkable anthology of gothic fiction, spanning two centuries of American writing, gives us an intriguing and entertaining look at how the gothic imagination makes for great literature in the works of forty-six exceptional writers.
American Gothic: An Anthology from Salem Witchcraft to H. P. Lovecraft (Blackwell Anthologies)
by Charles L. CrowAmerican Gothic remains an enduringly fascinating genre, retaining its chilling hold on the imagination. This revised and expanded anthology brings together texts from the colonial era to the twentieth century including recently discovered material, canonical literary contributions from Poe and Wharton among many others, and literature from sub-genres such as feminist and ‘wilderness’ Gothic. Revised and expanded to incorporate suggestions from twelve years of use in many countries An important text for students of the expanding field of Gothic studies Strong representation of female Gothic, wilderness Gothic, the Gothic of race, and the legacy of Salem witchcraft Edited by a founding member of the International Gothic Association
American Graphic: Disgust and Data in Contemporary Literature (Post*45)
by Rebecca B. ClarkWhat do we really mean when we call something "graphic"? In American Graphic, Rebecca Clark examines the "graphic" as a term tellingly at odds with itself. On the one hand, it seems to evoke the grotesque; on the other hand, it promises the geometrically streamlined in the form of graphs, diagrams, and user interfaces. Clark's innovation is to ask what happens when the same moment in a work of literature is graphic in both ways at once. Her answer suggests the graphic turn in contemporary literature is intimately implicated in the fraught dynamics of identification. As Clark reveals, this double graphic indexes the unseemliness of a lust—in our current culture of information—for cool epistemological mastery over the bodies of others. Clark analyzes the contemporary graphic along three specific axes: the ethnographic, the pornographic, and the infographic. In each chapter, Clark's explication of the double graphic reads a canonical author against literary, visual and/or performance works by Black and/or female creators. Pairing works by Edgar Allan Poe, Vladimir Nabokov, and Thomas Pynchon with pieces by Mat Johnson, Kara Walker, Fran Ross, Narcissister, and Teju Cole, Clark tests the effects and affects of the double graphic across racialized and gendered axes of differences. American Graphic forces us to face how closely and uncomfortably yoked together disgust and data have become in our increasingly graph-ick world.
American Guides: The Federal Writers’ Project and the Casting of American Culture
by Wendy GriswoldIn the midst of the Great Depression, Americans were nearly universally literate--and they were hungry for the written word. Magazines, novels, and newspapers littered the floors of parlors and tenements alike. With an eye to this market and as a response to devastating unemployment, Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration created the Federal Writers' Project. The Project's mission was simple: jobs. But, as Wendy Griswold shows in the lively and persuasive American Guides, the Project had a profound--and unintended--cultural impact that went far beyond the writers' paychecks. Griswold's subject here is the Project's American Guides, an impressively produced series that set out not only to direct travelers on which routes to take and what to see throughout the country, but also to celebrate the distinctive characteristics of each individual state. Griswold finds that the series unintentionally diversified American literary culture's cast of characters--promoting women, minority, and rural writers--while it also institutionalized the innovative idea that American culture comes in state-shaped boxes. Griswold's story alters our customary ideas about cultural change as a gradual process, revealing how diversity is often the result of politically strategic decisions and bureaucratic logic, as well as of the conflicts between snobbish metropolitan intellectuals and stubborn locals. American Guides reveals the significance of cultural federalism and the indelible impact that the Federal Writers' Project continues to have on the American literary landscape.
American Hangman: MSgt. John C. Woods: The United States Army’s Notorious Executioner in World War II and Nürnberg
by French L. MacLeanThe first biography of MSgt. John C. Woods, infamous US Army hangman of the Nuremberg trials MacLean meticulously separates fact from the mythology surrounding this enigmatic figure This is a follow-on book to The Fifth Field, winner of the 2013 Richard G. Trefry Award from the Army Historical Foundation
American Hebraist: Essays on Agnon and Modern Jewish Literature (Dimyonot)
by Alan MintzAlan Mintz (1947–2017) was a singular figure in the American Jewish literary landscape. In addition to publishing six authoritative books and numerous journal articles on modern and contemporary Jewish culture, Mintz contributed countless reviews and essays to literary journals, including the New Republic, the New York Times Book Review, and the Jewish Review of Books. Scattered in miscellaneous volumes and publications, these writings reveal aspects of Mintz’s scholarly personality that are not evident in his monographs.American Hebraist collects fifteen of Mintz’s most insightful articles and essays. The topics range from the life and work of Nobel Prize winner S. Y. Agnon—including a chapter from Mintz’s unfinished literary biography of that author—to Jewish and Israeli literature, the Holocaust, and a rare autobiographical essay. The chapters are introduced and contextualized by Mintz’s longtime colleague and friend David Stern, who opens the book by tracing the arc of Mintz’s intellectual career; the volume concludes with a personal essay and remembrance written by Beverly Bailis, the last student to complete a doctorate under Mintz’s direction.Brimming with erudition and intriguing biographical notes, American Hebraist provides new insights into the life and work of one of the twentieth century’s most important scholars of modern Hebrew literature. Students and scholars alike will benefit from this essential companion to Mintz’s scholarship.
American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance
by John T. IrwinA sophisticated examination of the American Symbolists, back in print for the first time in more than a decade.The discovery of the Rosetta Stone and the subsequent decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics captured the imaginations of nineteenth-century American writers and provided a focal point for their speculations on the relationships between sign, symbol, language, and meaning. Through fresh readings of classic works by Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, John T. Irwin’s American Hieroglyphics examines the symbolic mode associated with the pictographs. Irwin demonstrates how American Symbolist literature of the period was motivated by what he calls "hieroglyphic doubling," the use of pictographic expression as a medium of both expression and interpretation. Along the way, he touches upon a wide range of topics that fascinated people of the day, including the journey to the source of the Nile and ideas about the origin of language.
American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance
by John T. IrwinHow the discovery of the Rosetta Stone led to new ways of thinking about language: “A brilliant new interpretation of major 19th-century American writers.” —J. Hillis MillerThe discovery of the Rosetta Stone and the subsequent decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics captured the imaginations of nineteenth-century American writers and provided a focal point for their speculations on the relationships between sign, symbol, language, and meaning. Through fresh readings of classic works by Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, John T. Irwin’s American Hieroglyphics examines the symbolic mode associated with the pictographs.Irwin demonstrates how American Symbolist literature of the period was motivated by what he calls “hieroglyphic doubling,” the use of pictographic expression as a medium of both expression and interpretation. Along the way, he touches upon a wide range of topics that fascinated people of the day, including the journey to the source of the Nile and ideas about the origin of language.
American Horror Fiction and Class: From Poe to Twilight (Palgrave Gothic)
by David SimmonsIn this book, Simmons argues that class, as much as race and gender, played a significant role in the development of Gothic and Horror fiction in a national context. From the classic texts of Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne right through to contemporary examples, such as the novels of Stephen King and Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Series, class remains an ever present though understudied element. This study will appeal to scholars of American Studies, English literature, Media and Cultural Studies interested in class representations in the horror genre from the nineteenth century to the present day.
American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840-1945 (20/21 #9)
by Gavin JonesSocial anxiety about poverty surfaces with startling frequency in American literature. Yet, as Gavin Jones argues, poverty has been denied its due as a critical and ideological framework in its own right, despite recent interest in representations of the lower classes and the marginalized. These insights lay the groundwork for American Hungers, in which Jones uncovers a complex and controversial discourse on the poor that stretches from the antebellum era through the Depression. Reading writers such as Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, James Agee, and Richard Wright in their historical contexts, Jones explores why they succeeded where literary critics have fallen short. These authors acknowledged a poverty that was as aesthetically and culturally significant as it was socially and materially real. They confronted the ideological dilemmas of approaching poverty while giving language to the marginalized poor--the beggars, tramps, sharecroppers, and factory workers who form a persistent segment of American society. Far from peripheral, poverty emerges at the center of national debates about social justice, citizenship, and minority identity. And literature becomes a crucial tool to understand an economic and cultural condition that is at once urgent and elusive because it cuts across the categories of race, gender, and class by which we conventionally understand social difference. Combining social theory with literary analysis, American Hungers masterfully brings poverty into the mainstream critical idiom.
American Hybrid Poetics: Gender, Mass Culture, and Form
by Amy Moorman RobbinsAmerican Hybrid Poetics explores the ways in which hybrid poetics--a playful mixing of disparate formal and aesthetic strategies--have been the driving force in the work of a historically and culturally diverse group of women poets who are part of a robust tradition in contesting the dominant cultural order. Amy Moorman Robbins examines the ways in which five poets--Gertrude Stein, Laura Mullen, Alice Notley, Harryette Mullen, and Claudia Rankine--use hybridity as an implicitly political strategy to interrupt mainstream American language, literary genres, and visual culture, and expose the ways in which mass culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has had a powerfully standardizing impact on the collective American imagination. By forcing encounters between incompatible traditions--consumer culture with the avant-garde, low culture forms with experimental poetics, prose poetry with linguistic subversiveness--these poets bring together radically competing ideologies and highlight their implications for lived experience. Robbins argues that it is precisely because these poets have mixed forms that their work has gone largely unnoticed by leading members and critics in experimental poetry circles.
American Imperialism's Undead: The Occupation of Haiti and the Rise of Caribbean Anticolonialism (New World Studies)
by Raphael DalleoAs modern Caribbean politics and literature emerged in the first half of the twentieth century, Haiti, as the region's first independent state, stood as a source of inspiration for imagining decolonization and rooting regional identity in Africanness. Yet at precisely the same moment that anticolonialism was spreading throughout the Caribbean, Haiti itself was occupied by U.S. marines, a fact that regional political and cultural histories too often overlook. In American Imperialism's Undead, Raphael Dalleo examines how Caribbean literature and activism emerged in the shadow of the U.S. military occupation of Haiti (1915-34) and how that presence influenced the development of anticolonialism throughout the region. The occupation was a generative event for Caribbean activists such as C. L. R. James, George Padmore, and Marcus and Amy Jacques Garvey as well as for writers such as Claude McKay, Eric Walrond, and Alejo Carpentier. Dalleo provides new ways of understanding these luminaries, while also showing how other important figures such as Aimé Césaire, Arturo Schomburg, Claudia Jones, Frantz Fanon, Amy Ashwood Garvey, H. G. De Lisser, Luis Palés Matos, George Lamming, and Jean Rhys can be contextualized in terms of the occupation. By examining Caribbean responses to Haiti's occupation, Dalleo underscores U.S. imperialism as a crucial if unspoken influence on anticolonial discourses and decolonization in the region. Without acknowledging the significance of the occupation of Haiti, our understanding of Atlantic history cannot be complete.
American Indian Literature: An Anthology
by Alan R. VelieThe first section of this anthology contains English retellings of songs and narratives from the oral traditions of many tribes. The second half comprises poetry and novel excerpts from contemporary Native American writers, such as Louise Erdrich and N. Scott Momaday.
American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal and Allotment (Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series)
by Jason Edward BlackJason Edward Black examines the ways the US government’s rhetoric and American Indian responses contributed to the policies of Native–US relations throughout the nineteenth century’s removal and allotment eras. Black shows how these discourses together constructed the perception of the US government and of American Indian communities. Such interactions—though certainly not equal—illustrated the hybrid nature of Native–US rhetoric in the nineteenth century. Both governmental, colonizing discourse and indigenous, decolonizing discourse shaped arguments, constructions of identity, and rhetoric in the colonial relationship.American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal and Allotment demonstrates how American Indians decolonized dominant rhetoric through impeding removal and allotment policies. By turning around the US government’s narrative and inventing their own tactics, American Indian communities helped restyle their own identities as well as the government’s. During the first third of the twentieth century, American Indians lobbied for the successful passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 and the Indian New Deal of 1934, changing the relationship once again.In the end, Native communities were granted increased rhetorical power through decolonization, though the US government retained an undeniable colonial influence through its territorial management of Natives. The Indian Citizenship Act and the Indian New Deal—as the conclusion of this book indicates—are emblematic of the prevalence of the duality of US citizenship that fused American Indians to the nation yet segregated them on reservations. This duality of inclusion and exclusion grew incrementally and persists now, as a lasting effect of nineteenth-century Native–US rhetorical relations.
American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability
by Russ CastronovoAn incisive critique that examines the origins of contemporary American ideas about surveillance, terrorism, and white supremacyFor more than three centuries, Americans have pursued strategies of security that routinely make them feel vulnerable, unsafe, and insecure. American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability probes this paradox by examining American attachments to the terror of the sublime, the fear of uncertainty, and the anxieties produced by unending racial threat.Challenging conventional approaches that leave questions of security to policy experts, Russ Castronovo turns to literature, philosophy, and political theory to show how security provides an organizing principle for collective life in ways that both enhance freedom and limit it. His incisive critique ranges from frontier violence and white racial anxiety to insurgent Black print culture and other forms of early American terror, uncovering the hidden logic of insecurity that structures modern approaches to national defense, counterterrorism, cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy. Drawing on examples from fiction, journalism, tracts, and pamphlets, Castronovo uncovers the deep affective attachments that Americans have had since the founding to the sources of fear and insecurity that make them feel unsafe.Timely and urgent, American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability sheds critical light on how and why the fundamental political desire for security promotes unease alongside assurance and fixates on risk and danger while clamoring for safety.
American Journalists in the Great War: Rewriting the Rules of Reporting (Studies in War, Society, and the Military)
by Chris DubbsWhen war erupted in Europe in 1914, American journalists hurried across the Atlantic ready to cover it the same way they had covered so many other wars. However, very little about this war was like any other. Its scale, brutality, and duration forced journalists to write their own rules for reporting and keeping the American public informed.American Journalists in the Great War tells the dramatic stories of the journalists who covered World War I for the American public. Chris Dubbs draws on personal accounts from contemporary newspaper and magazine articles and books to convey the experiences of the journalists of World War I, from the western front to the Balkans to the Paris Peace Conference. Their accounts reveal the challenges of finding the war news, transmitting a story, and getting it past the censors. Over the course of the war, reporters found that getting their scoop increasingly meant breaking the rules or redefining the very meaning of war news. Dubbs shares the courageous, harrowing, and sometimes humorous stories of the American reporters who risked their lives in war zones to record their experiences and send the news to the people back home.
American Journals
by Albert Camus Hugh Levick Roger GuilliotFurnishing tidbits for Camus scholars, providing his take on North and South America, notably New York City and cities of Brazil, along with Buenos Aires and Santiago, Camus seems to have met only a few people he liked, and maybe two or three sites impressed him. He reflects on suicide. No it is not a cheerful work, but it is vivid. For Americans, this work if valuable for he describes our homeland.
American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times
by Andrew Hartman Raymond HaberskiIntellectual history has never been more relevant and more important to public life in the United States. In complicated and confounding times, people look for the principles that drive action and the foundations that support national ideals. American Labyrinth demonstrates the power of intellectual history to illuminate our public life and examine our ideological assumptions.This volume of essays brings together 19 influential intellectual historians to contribute original thoughts on topics of widespread interest. Raymond Haberski Jr. and Andrew Hartman asked a group of nimble, sharp scholars to respond to a simple question: How might the resources of intellectual history help shed light on contemporary issues with historical resonance? The answers—all rigorous, original, and challenging—are as eclectic in approach and temperament as the authors are different in their interests and methods. Taken together, the essays of American Labyrinth illustrate how intellectual historians, operating in many different registers at once and ranging from the theoretical to the political, can provide telling insights for understanding a public sphere fraught with conflict.In order to understand why people are ready to fight over cultural symbols and political positions we must have insight into how ideas organize, enliven, and define our lives. Ultimately, as Haberski and Hartman show in this volume, the best route through our contemporary American labyrinth is the path that traces our practical and lived ideas.
American Landscapes: Meditations on Art and Literature in a Changing World (University of Mississippi Museum and Historic Houses Series)
by Ann J. Abadie and J. Richard GruberAmerican Landscapes: Meditations on Art and Literature in a Changing World is a major contemporary survey of landscapes in art and literature of the United States, especially the American South. Inspired by William Dunlap’s extraordinary landscape Meditations on the Origins of Agriculture in America and a collection of forty paintings and photographs by Southern artists, this volume brings together artists, authors, and scholars to present new perspectives on art and literature both past and present. The volume includes art and text from artists John Alexander, Jason Bouldin, William Dunlap, Carlyle Wolfe Lee, Ke Francis, Linda Burgess, Randy Hayes; photographers Sally Mann, Ed Croom, and Huger Foote; museum directors Betsy Bradley, Jane Livingston, and Julian Rankin; and authors W. Ralph Eubanks, John Grisham, J. Richard Gruber, Jessica B. Harris, Lisa Howorth, Julia Reed, Natasha Trethewey, Curtis Wilkie, Joseph M. Pierce, and Drew Gilpin Faust. This diverse group explores major eras of American history portrayed in Dunlap’s painting, a landscape that evokes the displacement and genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the Civil War, and William Faulkner’s fiction. They examine the history of landscape art in America, connecting art with the works of major writers like William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Natasha Trethewey, and Jesmyn Ward. In eighteen new essays written during the pandemic and since the events of January 6, 2021, the essayists emphasize how the key issues Dunlap addressed in his 1987 artwork have become part of the national discourse and make his work even more vital today.
American Language Supplement 1
by H.L. MenckenPerhaps the first truly important book about the divergence of American English from its British roots, this survey of the language as it was spoken-and as it was changing-at the beginning of the 20th century comes via one of its most inveterate watchers, journalist, critic, and editor HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN (1880-1956).In this replica of the 1921 "revised and enlarged" second edition, Mencken turns his keen ear on:• the general character of American English• loan-words and non-English influences• expletives and forbidden words• American slang• the future of the language• and much, much more.Anyone fascinated by words will find this a thoroughly enthralling look at the most changeable language on the face of the planet.
American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States (Fourth Edition)
by H. L. MenckenThis groundbreaking study clarifies the differences between British and American English and defines the distinguishing characteristics of American English. Cigar-chomping newspaperman H. L. Mencken succeeds not only in providing a lucid description of the American language but also in making his readers laugh, wince, and nod in agreement. It's a readable and fascinating study on why you say "tomayto" and I say "tomahto. " A must read for anyone who loves words. <P><P>[This text is listed as an example that meets Common Core Standards in English language arts in grades 11-12 at http://www.corestandards.org.]
American Lit 101: From Nathaniel Hawthorne to Harper Lee and Naturalism to Magical Realism, an essential guide to American writers and works
by Brianne KeithFrom poetry to fiction to essays, American Lit 101 leaves no page unturned! Edgar Allan Poe. Willa Cather. Henry David Thoreau. Mark Twain. The list of important American writers goes on and on. These voices played a vital role in shaping the scope of American literature, and the United States itself. But too often, textbooks reduce this storied history to dry text that would put even a tenured professor to sleep.American Lit 101 is an engaging and comprehensive guide through the major players in American literature. From colonialism to postmodernism and every literary movement in between, this primer is packed with hundreds of entertaining tidbits and concepts, along with easy-to-understand explanations on why each author's work was important then and still relevant now. So whether you're looking for a refresher course on key American literature or want to learn about it for the first time, American Lit 101 has all the answers--even the ones you didn't know you were looking for.