Evolution and Eugenics in American Literature and Culture, 1880-1940

Evolution and Eugenics in American Literature and Culture, 1880-1940 PDF

Author: Lois A. Cuddy

Publisher: Bucknell University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9780838755556

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Charles Darwin's theory of descent suggested that man is trapped by biological determinism and environment, which requires the fittest specimens to struggle and adapt without benefit of God in order to survive. Tthis volume focusses on how American literature appropriated and aesthetically transformed this, and related, theories.

American Literature in Transition, 1910–1920

American Literature in Transition, 1910–1920 PDF

Author: Mark W. Van Wienen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-12-28

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 1108548598

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

American Literature in Transition, 1910–1920 offers provocative new readings of authors whose innovations are recognized as inaugurating Modernism in US letters, including Robert Frost, Willa Cather, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, H. D., and Marianne Moore. Gathering the voices of both new and established scholars, the volume also reflects the diversity and contradictions of US literature of the 1910s. 'Literature' itself is construed variously, leading to explorations of jazz, the movies, and political writing as well as little magazines, lantern slides, and sports reportage. One section of thematic essays cuts across genre boundaries. Another section oriented to formats drills deeply into the workings of specific media, genres, or forms. Essays on institutions conclude the collection, although a critical mass of contributors throughout explore long-term literary and cultural trends - where political repression, race prejudice, war, and counterrevolution are no less prominent than experimentation, progress, and egalitarianism.

Westerns

Westerns PDF

Author: Victoria Lamont

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2016-08-01

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0803237626

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

At every turn in the development of what we now know as the western, women writers have been instrumental in its formation. Yet the myth that the western is male-authored persists. Westerns: A Women’s History debunks this myth once and for all by recovering the women writers of popular westerns who were active during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the western genre as we now know it emerged. Victoria Lamont offers detailed studies of some of the many women who helped shape the western. Their novels bear the classic hallmarks of the western—cowboys, schoolmarms, gun violence, lynchings, cattle branding—while also placing female characters at the center of their western adventures and improvising with western conventions in surprising and ingenious ways. In Emma Ghent Curtis’s The Administratrix a widow disguises herself as a cowboy and infiltrates the cowboy gang responsible for lynching her husband. Muriel Newhall’s pulp serial character, Sheriff Minnie, comes to the rescue of a steady stream of defenseless female victims. B. M. Bower, Katharine Newlin Burt, and Frances McElrath use cattle branding as a metaphor for their feminist critiques of patriarchy. In addition to recovering the work of these and other women authors of popular westerns, Lamont uses original archival analysis of the western-fiction publishing scene to overturn the long-standing myth of the western as a male-dominated genre.

Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children's Literature

Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children's Literature PDF

Author: Jessica Straley

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-06-06

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1316531325

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Evolutionary theory sparked numerous speculations about human development, and one of the most ardently embraced was the idea that children are animals recapitulating the ascent of the species. After Darwin's Origin of Species, scientific, pedagogical, and literary works featuring beastly babes and wild children interrogated how our ancestors evolved and what children must do in order to repeat this course to humanity. Exploring fictions by Rudyard Kipling, Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Charles Kingsley, and Margaret Gatty, Jessica Straley argues that Victorian children's literature not only adopted this new taxonomy of the animal child, but also suggested ways to complete the child's evolution. In the midst of debates about elementary education and the rising dominance of the sciences, children's authors plotted miniaturized evolutions for their protagonists and readers and, more pointedly, proposed that the decisive evolutionary leap for both our ancestors and ourselves is the advent of the literary imagination.

Susan Glaspell in Context

Susan Glaspell in Context PDF

Author: J. Ellen Gainor

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-06-30

Total Pages: 573

ISBN-13: 110880487X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Susan Glaspell in Context provides new, accessible, and informative essays by leading international scholars and artists on Pulitzer Prize winner Susan Glaspell's life, career development, writing, and ongoing global creative impact. The collection features wide-ranging discussions of Glaspell's fiction, plays, and non-fiction in both historical and contemporary critical contexts, and demonstrates the significance of Glaspell's writing and other professional activities to a range of academic disciplines and artistic engagements. The volume also includes the first analyses of six previously unknown Glaspell short stories, as well as interviews with contemporary stage and film artists who have produced Glaspell's works or adapted them for audiences worldwide. Organized around key locations, influences, and phases in Glaspell's career, as well as core methodological and pedagogical approaches to her work, the collection's thirty-one essays place Glaspell in historical, geographical, political, cultural, and creative contexts of value to students, scholars, teachers, and artists alike.

The Robert E. Howard Reader

The Robert E. Howard Reader PDF

Author: Darrell Schweitzer

Publisher: Wildside Press LLC

Published: 2010-08-01

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 1434411656

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This anthology presents a wide range of analysis, criticism, and opinion about one of the most influential fantasy authors of the twentieth century, with contributions by such well-known writers and critics as: Poul Anderson, Fritz Leiber, George H. Scithers, L. Sprague de Camp, S. T. Joshi, Howard Waldrop, Steve Tompkins, Darrell Schweitzer, Leo Grin, Robert Weinberg, Mark Hall, Charles Hoffman, Don D'Ammassa, Robert M. Price, Gary Romeo, and Scott Connors. A "must buy" for every fan of Robert E. Howard.

Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination

Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination PDF

Author: Ewa Barbara Luczak

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-04-29

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1137545798

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A disturbing but ultimately discredited strain in American thought, eugenics was a crucial ideological force in the early twentieth century. Luczak investigates the work of writers like Jack London and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, to consider the impact of eugenic racial discourse on American literary production from 1900-1940.

The Essential Lectures of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1890–1894

The Essential Lectures of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1890–1894 PDF

Author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Published: 2024-07-16

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0817361502

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The first collection of lectures and sermons that Charlotte Perkins Gilman delivered in the first four years of her career The last decades have seen a resurgence of interest in Charlotte Perkins Gilman, now considered among the most important thinkers in US history. She is best known for fiction—such as the classic short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892)—and nonfiction, including her manifesto Women and Economics (1898), a work of intersectional sociology avant la lettre. Nevertheless, as a young writer, Gilman made her living delivering lectures. One cannot know Gilman without some knowledge of this body of lectures; this book fills that critical gap in Gilman scholarship. Since the recovery of Charlotte Perkins Gilman began in the late 1960s and continued with the republication of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” in the 1970s, her image in cultural memory has been increasingly celebrated. Andrew J. Ball presents here fifty previously unpublished texts. They trace the development of Gilman’s thoughts on diverse subjects like gender, education, labor, science, theology, and politics—forming an intellectual diary of her growth. These lectures are not just a testament to Gilman’s personal evolution, but also a crucial contribution to the foundations of American sociology and philosophy. The Essential Lectures of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1890–1894 marks a historic moment, unveiling the hidden genius of Gilman's oratory legacy.

A Companion to American Fiction, 1865 - 1914

A Companion to American Fiction, 1865 - 1914 PDF

Author: Robert Paul Lamb

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2008-04-15

Total Pages: 640

ISBN-13: 1405178310

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A Companion to American Fiction, 1865-1914 is a groundbreaking collection of essays written by leading critics for a wide audience of scholars, students, and interested general readers. An exceptionally broad-ranging and accessible Companion to the study of American fiction of the post-civil war period and the early twentieth century Brings together 29 essays by top scholars, each of which presents a synthesis of the best research and offers an original perspective Divided into sections on historical traditions and genres, contexts and themes, and major authors Covers a mixture of canonical and the non-canonical themes, authors, literatures, and critical approaches Explores innovative topics, such as ecological literature and ecocriticism, children’s literature, and the influence of Darwin on fiction