Bücher der Reihe Cultural Studies of the United States

Asking why many American intellectuals have had such difficulty accepting wholeheartedly the cultural dimensions of democracy, Robert Dawidoff examines their alienation and ambivalence, a tradition of detachment he identifies as "e;Tocquevillian."e; In the work of three towering American literary figures - Henry Adams, Henry James, and George Santayana -- Dawidoff explores fully this distancing and uneasy response to democratic culture.Linked together by common Harvard, Cambridge, and New England connections, and by an upper-class, Brahmin background, each of these three writers, Dawidoff argues, was at once self-critical and contemptuous of cultural democracy -- especially its indifference to them and what they represented. But their claims to detached observation of democratic culture must be viewed skeptically, Dawidoff warns, and borrowed with caution.An important contribution of the book is its integration of gay issues into American intellectual history. Viewing James's and Santayana's attitudes toward their homosexuality as affecting their views of American society, Dawidoff examines this significant and overlooked element in the American intellectual and cultural mix. Dawidoff also includes powerful new readings of Adams's Democracy and James's The Ambassadors and discusses Santayana's Americanist essays.In his foreward, Alan Trachtenberg notes the "e;taboo"e; that seems to have fallen over the word democracy. "e;It is rarely encountered anymore in humanistic studies,"e; he says, "e; snubbed in favor of gender, class, race, region."e; This trend, he says, may be in part due to an unease about studying the culture in which we participate because the posture of the cutural critic implies a certain detachment. "e;The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage returns the question of democracy to centerstage,"e; he concludes, "e;not as political theory alone but as cultural and personal experience."e;Originally published in 1992.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture

Until now, Eugene O'Neill's psychological dramas have been analysed mainly by critics who relied on obvious parallels between O'Neill's life, his family, and his plays. In this theoretically expansive and interdisciplinary book, Joel Pfister reassesses what was at stake ideologically in O'Neill's staging and modernizing of'psychological' individualism for his social class.

Combining musical analysis and cultural history approaches, Titon examines the origins of downhome blues in African American society. He also explores what happened to the art form when the blues were commercially recorded and became part of the larger American culture.

Examines the phenomenon of images as property, focusing on the legal staus of mechanically produced visual and audio images from popular culture. Bridging the fields of critical legal studies and cultural studies, this analyses copyright, trademark, and intellectual property law, asking how the law constructs works of authorship and who owns the country's cultural heritage.

This work examines the tradition of ethnic impersonators in the United States. It looks at works such as Welsh Baptist Elizabeth Stern's immigrant narrative ""I am a Woman - and a Jew"", and uncovers their surprising influence on American notions of identity.

In this classic study of the relationship between technology and culture, Miles Orvell demonstrates that the roots of contemporary popular culture reach back to the Victorian era, when mechanical replications of familiar objects reigned supreme and realism dominated artistic representation.

Argues for revitalizing the role of literature in civic education. This book defines civic myths as compelling stories about national origin, membership, and values that are generated by conflicts within the concept of citizenship itself. It provides an analysis of the civic mythology surrounding Abraham Lincoln and the case of Ex parte Milligan.

Challenging the conventional wisdom that the 1930s were dominated by literary and photographic realism, this book covers experimental works by politically progressive artists. It argues that these artists drew attention to the country's most vulnerable residents by using ""aesthetic of astonishment,"" focused on graphic images of pain and injury.

Examines struggles over wages to reveal ways in which the wage becomes a critical component in the making of social hierarchies of race, gender, and citizenship. This book addresses the issue of class politics and places the problem of ""interests"" squarely at the center of political economy.

Franny Nudelman analyzes the idealization of mass death and explores ways of depicting the violence of war. Considering martyred soldiers in relation to suffering slaves, she argues that responses to wartime death cannot be fully understood without attention to the brutality directed against African Americans during the antebellum era.

A blend of environmental theory and literary studies, looking behind the myth of Alaska as America's ""last frontier"". It traces how this seemingly marginal space in American culture has in fact functioned to alleviate larger social anxieties about nature, ethnicity and national identity.

Walt Whitman dreamed of inspiring ""a race of singers"" who would celebrate the working class and realize the promise of American democracy. By examining how singers such as Woody Guthrie and Bruce Springstein embraced and reconfigured Whitman's vision, Bryan Garman shows that Whitman succeeded.

California during the gold rush was a place of disputed claims, shoot-outs, gambling halls, and prostitution; a place populated by a rough and rebellious figure; a place that seems utterly unconnected to middle-class culture. This work challenges this stereotypical portrait.

Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford

During the economic depression of the 1890s and the speculative frenzy of the following decade, Wall Street, high finance, and market crises assumed unprecedented visibility in the United States. This book examines how American novelists and their readers imagined - and in one case, incited - market crashes and financial panics.

A discussion of the roots of American terrorism and its impact on American identity. Focusing on the period between 1886 and 1920, it argues that the rise of mass media and the pressures of the industrial wage-labour economy fuelled the development of terrorism and shaped society's response to it.

This text looks back to the 1920s and 1930s to a generation of poets who wrote with the precise hope and the deep conviction that they would move their audiences to action. It offers a different look at the political poetry of Edwin Rolfe, Langston Hughes, Ezra Pound and Muriel Rukeyser.

American football is a great public spectacle with an immense following. The author of this book aims to show how the press projected it: football as pastime, as the sport of gentlemen, as a science, and as a game of rules and their infringements.

This text exposes the social dynamics that shaped American modernism and moved dance to the edges of society. Through their art, modern dancers challenged conventional roles and images of gender, sexuality, race, class, and regionalism with a confrontational view of American democracy.

In this study of the rise of corporate capitalism, the author contends it was a cultural revolution as well as an economic event. He places this revolution in the reconstruction of selfhood, or subjectivity, which attends the ""age of surplus"" under corporate auspices.

Analyzes how American female photographers contributed to a ""doctrine vision"", reinforcing the imperialism and racism of the dawn of the 20th century. This study is relevant to the fields of history of photography and gender studies, and to a growing understanding of US imperialism at the time.

A call for the redesign of Western cultural studies - one that engages issues of gender and race. Surveying work by writers such as Joan Didion and Wanda Coleman, it shows how they have mapped new geographical imaginations upon the cultural and social spaces of today's American West.

Despite its widespread popularity in antebellum America, phrenology has rarely been taken seriously as a cultural phenomenon. Charles Colbert seeks to redress this neglect by demonstrating the important contributions the theory made to artistic developments in the period. He goes on to reveal the links between the tenets of phrenology and the cultural ideals of Jacksonian democracy.

Reveals how documentary photographers have expressed or contested the idea of the American Dream throughout the twentieth century. In James Guimond's formulation issues like growth, equality, and national identity came under the rubric of the Dream as it has been used to measure how well the nation is living up to its social and political ideals.