49 results on '"SOCIAL classes in literature"'
Search Results
2. Other Mothers : Beyond the Maternal Ideal
- Author
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Ellen Rosenman, CLAUDIA C. KLAVER, Ellen Rosenman, and CLAUDIA C. KLAVER
- Subjects
- English literature--19th century--History and, Motherhood in literature, Mothers in literature, Motherhood--Philosophy, Femininity (Philosophy) in literature, Motherhood--Social aspects--Great Britain--H, Motherhood--Political aspects--Great Britain -, Sex role in literature, Social classes in literature, Race in literature
- Abstract
Other Mothers, edited by Ellen Bayuk Rosenman and Claudia C. Klaver, offers a range of essays that open a conversation about Victorian motherhood as a wide-ranging, distinctive experience and idea. In spite of its importance, however, it is one of the least-studied aspects of the Victorian era, subsumed under discussions of femininity and domesticity. This collection addresses this void, revealing the extraordinary diversity of Victorian motherhood. Exploring diaries, novels, and court cases, with contexts ranging from London to Egypt to Australia, these varied accounts take the collection “beyond the maternal ideal” to consider the multiple, unpredictable ways in which motherhood was experienced and imagined in this formative historical period. Other Mothers joins revisionist approaches to femininity that now characterize Victorian studies. Its contents trace intersections among gender, race, and class; question the power of separate spheres ideology; and insist on the context-specific nature of social roles. The fifteen essays in this volume contribute to the fields of literary criticism, history, cultural studies, and history.
- Published
- 2020
3. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Flannery O'Connor
- Author
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Donahoo, Robert, Gentry, Marshall Bruce, Donahoo, Robert, and Gentry, Marshall Bruce
- Subjects
- Sex role in literature, Race in literature, Ecocriticism, Social classes in literature
- Published
- 2019
4. The Resurrection of the «Spectre» : A Marxist Analysis of Race, Class and Alienation in the Post-war British Novel
- Author
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Sercan Hamza Baglama and Sercan Hamza Baglama
- Subjects
- Alienation (Philosophy) in literature, Psychological fiction, English--History and criticism, English fiction--20th century--History and criticism, Race in literature, Gender identity in literature, Social classes in literature
- Abstract
This book analyses the literary works of Alan Sillitoe, Sam Selvon, Doris Lessing and James Kelman since each of them is a representative of a different class or colour or gender or region in post-war Britain. The overall aim of the book is to reconceptualise the broader economic, cultural and social framework of the processes of alienation and of escape mechanisms employed by the individual as defence mechanisms in capitalist cultures. Suggesting that postmodern identity politics is unable to give a materialistic articulation of poverty and subordination, the book develops an anti-establishment, egalitarian and emancipatory framework in reading its authors: one which might also be implemented as part of a movement that aims to critique, resist and overthrow injustice and oppression.
- Published
- 2018
5. Gale Researcher Guide For: F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Age's Avatar
- Author
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Hartwell, Michael, Brady, Mary Pat, Hartwell, Michael, and Brady, Mary Pat
- Subjects
- Nineteen twenties, Race in literature, Social classes in literature
- Abstract
Gale Researcher Guide for: F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Age's Avatar is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.
- Published
- 2018
6. Race and Upward Mobility : Seeking, Gatekeeping, and Other Class Strategies in Postwar America
- Author
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Elda María Román and Elda María Román
- Subjects
- Mexican Americans in literature, African Americans in literature, American literature--Minority authors--History and criticism, Social classes in literature, Race in literature, Ethnicity in literature, Social mobility in literature
- Abstract
Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Mexican American and African American cultural productions have seen a proliferation of upward mobility narratives: plotlines that describe desires for financial solvency, middle-class status, and social incorporation. Yet the terms'middle class'and'upward mobility'—often associated with assimilation, selling out, or political conservatism—can hold negative connotations in literary and cultural studies. Surveying literature, film, and television from the 1940s to the 2000s, Elda María Román brings forth these narratives, untangling how they present the intertwined effects of capitalism and white supremacy. Race and Upward Mobility examines how class and ethnicity serve as forms of currency in American literature, affording people of color material and symbolic wages as they traverse class divisions. Identifying four recurring character types—status seekers, conflicted artists, mediators, and gatekeepers—that appear across genres, Román traces how each models a distinct strategy for negotiating race and class. Her comparative analysis sheds light on the overlaps and misalignments, the shared narrative strategies, and the historical trajectories of Mexican American and African American texts, bringing both groups'works into sharper relief. Her study advances both a new approach to ethnic literary studies and a more nuanced understanding of the class-based complexities of racial identity.
- Published
- 2018
7. Archives of Labor : Working-Class Women and Literary Culture in the Antebellum United States
- Author
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Lori Merish and Lori Merish
- Subjects
- Literature and society--United States--History--19th century, Women textile workers--Massachusetts--Lowell--History--19th century, Working class women--United States--Social conditions--19th century, Working class women in literature, American literature--19th century--History and criticism, Popular culture--United States--History--19th century, Social classes in literature, Race in literature
- Abstract
In Archives of Labor Lori Merish establishes working-class women as significant actors within literary culture, dramatically redrawing the map of nineteenth-century US literary and cultural history. Delving into previously unexplored archives of working-class women's literature—from autobiographies, pamphlet novels, and theatrical melodrama to seduction tales and labor periodicals—Merish recovers working-class women's vital presence as writers and readers in the antebellum era. Her reading of texts by a diverse collection of factory workers, seamstresses, domestic workers, and prostitutes boldly challenges the purportedly masculine character of class dissent during this era. Whether addressing portrayals of white New England'factory girls,'fictional accounts of African American domestic workers, or the first-person narratives of Mexican women working in the missions of Mexican California, Merish unsettles the traditional association of whiteness with the working class to document forms of cross-racial class identification and solidarity. In so doing, she restores the tradition of working women's class protest and dissent, shows how race and gender are central to class identity, and traces the ways working women understood themselves and were understood as workers and class subjects.
- Published
- 2017
8. Dickens and Empire : Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism in the Works of Charles Dickens
- Author
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Grace Moore and Grace Moore
- Subjects
- Colonies in literature, Race in literature, Literature and society--England--History--19th century, Imperialism in literature, Social classes in literature
- Abstract
Dickens and Empire offers a reevaluation of Charles Dickens's imaginative engagement with the British Empire throughout his career. Employing postcolonial theory alongside readings of Dickens's novels, journalism and personal correspondence, it explores his engagement with Britain's imperial holdings as imaginative spaces onto which he offloaded a number of pressing domestic and personal problems, thus creating an entangled discourse between race and class. Drawing upon a wealth of primary material, it offers a radical reassessment of the writer's stance on racial matters. In the past Dickens has been dismissed as a dogged and sustained racist from the 1850s until the end of his life; but here author Grace Moore reappraises The Noble Savage, previously regarded as a racist tract. Examining it side by side with a series of articles by Lord Denman in The Chronicle, which condemned the staunch abolitionist Dickens as a supporter of slavery, Moore reveals that the tract is actually an ironical riposte. This finding facilitates a review and reassessment of Dickens's controversial outbursts during the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, and demonstrates that his views on racial matters were a good deal more complex than previous critics have suggested. Moore's analysis of a number of pre- and post-Mutiny articles calling for reform in India shows that Dickens, as their publisher, would at least have been aware of the grievances of the Indian people, and his journal's sympathy toward them is at odds with his vitriolic responses to the insurrection. This first sustained analysis of Dickens and his often problematic relationship to the British Empire provides fresh readings of a number of Dickens texts, in particular A Tale of Two Cities. The work also presents a more complicated but balanced view of one of the most famous figures in Victorian literature.
- Published
- 2016
9. Immigration, Ethnicity, and Class in American Writing, 1830–1860 : Reading the Stranger
- Author
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Leonardo Buonomo and Leonardo Buonomo
- Subjects
- Literature and society--United States--History--19th century, Nationalism and literature--United States--History--19th century, Immigrants in literature, National characteristics, American, in literature, American literature--19th century--History and criticism, Ethnicity in literature, Group identity in literature, Social classes in literature, Race in literature
- Abstract
This book examines the close relationship between the portrayal of foreigners and the delineation of culture and identity in antebellum American writing. Both literary and historical in its approach, this study shows how, in a period marked by extensive immigration, heated debates on national and racial traits, during a flowering in American letters, encouraged responses from American authors to outsiders that not only contain precious insights into nineteenth-century America's self-construction but also serve to illuminate our own time's multicultural societies. The authors under consideration are alternately canonical (Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville), recently rediscovered (Kirkland), or simply neglected (Arthur). The texts analyzed cover such different genres as diaries, letters, newspapers, manuals, novels, stories, and poems.
- Published
- 2014
10. Feminist Criticism and Social Change (RLE Feminist Theory) : Sex, Class and Race in Literature and Culture
- Author
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Deborah Rosenfelt, Judith Newton, Deborah Rosenfelt, and Judith Newton
- Subjects
- Social classes in literature, Feminist literary criticism, Literature and society--English-speaking countries, American literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc, English literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc, Feminism and literature--English-speaking countries, Feminist criticism, Sex role in literature, Race in literature
- Abstract
This lively and controversial collection of essays sets out to theorize and practice a ‘materialist-feminist'criticism of literature and culture. Such a criticism is based on the view that the material conditions in which men and women live are central to an understanding of culture and society. It emphasises the relation of gender to other categories of analysis, such as class and race, and considers the connection between ideology and cultural practice, and the ways in which all relations of power change with changing social and economic conditions.By presenting a wide range of work by major feminist scholars, this anthology in effect defines as well as illustrates the materialist-feminist tendency in current literary criticism. The essays in the first part of the book examine race, ideology, and the literary canon and explore the ways in which other critical discourse, such as those of deconstruction and French feminism, might be useful to a feminist and materialist criticism. The second part of the book contains examples of such criticism in practice, with studies of individual works, writers and ideas. An introduction by the editors situates the collected essays in relation both to one another and to a shared materialist/feminist project.Feminist Criticism and Social Change demonstrates the important contribution of materialist-feminist criticism to our understanding of literature and society, and fulfils a crucial need among those concerned with gender and its relation to criticism.
- Published
- 2013
11. Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
- Author
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Hadfield, Andrew
- Subjects
- *
EARLY modern English literature , *ENGLISH literature , *LITERARY criticism , *RACE in literature , *RACE relations in literature , *SOCIAL classes in literature , *RELIGION , *RACE - Abstract
This paper emphasizes the need for the issue of race to be foregrounded in early modern literary studies. Topics covered include demand of students for the curriculum to be "decolonized," how thinking about race will affect the understanding of the relationship between religion and race, impact of activist criticism on the value of literary studies, nature of class relations and its relationship to literary culture and public opinion on literary criticism in Great Britain and North America.
- Published
- 2020
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
12. Positioning Gender and Race in (Post)colonial Plantation Space : Connecting Ireland and the Caribbean
- Author
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E. Stoddard and E. Stoddard
- Subjects
- Race in literature, Women in literature, Postcolonialism in literature, English literature--Caribbean authors--History and criticism, English literature--Irish authors--History and criticism, Dwellings in literature, Social classes in literature, Colonies in literature
- Abstract
Stoddard uses the Anglophone Caribbean and Ireland to examine the complex inflections of women and race as articulated in-between the colonial discursive and material formations of the eighteenth century and those of the (post)colonial twentieth century, as structured by the defined spaces of the colonizers'estates.
- Published
- 2012
13. Other Mothers : Beyond the Maternal Ideal
- Author
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Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk, Klaver, Claudia C., Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk, and Klaver, Claudia C.
- Published
- 2020
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
14. (In)subordinadas: raza, clase y filiación en la narrativa de mujeres latinoamericanas
- Author
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Barraza Toledo, Vania and Barraza Toledo, Vania
- Subjects
- Women in literature, Race in literature, Spanish American fiction--20th century--History and criticism, Women and literature--Latin America--History--20th century, Social classes in literature
- Abstract
A partir de una selección de relatos de Rosario Castellanos, Andrea Maturana y Rosario Ferré, entre otras, este texto explora, desde la crítica literaria, formas de insubordinación dentro de la subcultura femenina y pone de manifiesto relaciones menos amables que existen entre mujeres, aquellas que las diferencias se realizan de manera subrepticia, disimulada o encubierta.
- Published
- 2010
15. Strangers in Blood : Relocating Race in the Renaissance
- Author
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Jean Feerick and Jean Feerick
- Subjects
- Blood in literature, English literature--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism, Race in literature, Social classes in literature, Human skin color in literature
- Abstract
Strangers in Blood explores, in a range of early modern literature, the association between migration to foreign lands and the moral and physical degeneration of individuals. Arguing that, in early modern discourse, the concept of race was primarily linked with notions of bloodline, lineage, and genealogy rather than with skin colour and ethnicity, Jean E. Feerick establishes that the characterization of settler communities as subject to degenerative decline constituted a massive challenge to the fixed system of blood that had hitherto underpinned the English social hierarchy.Considering contexts as diverse as Ireland, Virginia, and the West Indies, Strangers in Blood tracks the widespread cultural concern that moving out of England would adversely affect the temper and complexion of the displaced individual, changes that could be fought only through willed acts of self-discipline. In emphasizing the decline of blood as found at the centre of colonial narratives, Feerick illustrates the unwitting disassembling of one racial system and the creation of another.
- Published
- 2010
16. "Where Everything Else Is Starving, Fighting, Struggling": Food and the Politics of Hurricane Katrina in Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones.
- Author
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CRAWFORD, CAMERON WILLIAMS
- Subjects
- *
FOOD in literature , *POLITICS in literature , *RACE in literature , *GENDER in literature , *SOCIAL classes in literature , *STEREOTYPES in literature , *MASCULINITY in literature , *HURRICANE Katrina, 2005 - Abstract
The article explores the link between food, race, class, gender and the politics of Hurricane Katrina in the novel "Salvage of the Bones" by Jesmyn Ward. Topics discussed are racism exposed in the storm's aftermath, food as a tool of resistance and form of empowerment, stereotypes of African Americans, effect of food inequality on low-income minorities in rural areas, use of food to counter cultural assumptions about African American masculinity and food imagery as metaphor of female sexuality.
- Published
- 2018
17. Performance of social class and race in Zoë Wicomb’ s Playing in the Light and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia.
- Author
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BOURAHLA, Djelloul and MAOUI, Houcine
- Subjects
SOCIAL classes in literature ,RACE in literature ,AMERICAN fiction ,SOUTH African fiction ,SOCIAL constructionism ,CRITICAL race theory - Abstract
Copyright of Revue Universitaire des Sciences Humaines et Sociales is the property of University of Kasdi Merbah Ouargla and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)
- Published
- 2018
18. Male Domination, Female Revolt : Race, Class, and Gender in Kuwaiti Women's Fiction
- Author
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Ishaq Tijani and Ishaq Tijani
- Subjects
- Social classes in literature, Race in literature, Patriarchy in literature, Sex role in literature, Arabic fiction--Women authors--History and criticism, Arabic fiction--Kuwait--History and criticism, Women in literature, Arabic fiction--20th century--History and criticism
- Abstract
This book investigates various forms of women's resistance to male domination, as represented in Kuwaiti women's fiction. Drawing on Marxist-feminist literary theory, it closely analyses selected texts (published between 1953 and 2000), which reflect the effects of patriarchal culture and tradition on race, class, and gender relations in Kuwait and the Arabian Gulf region in general. It argues that the selected texts portray the pre-oil generations of Kuwaiti/Arabian Gulf women—born before or in the first half of the twentieth century—as resistant and/or revolutionary figures, contrary to the common notion of their stereotypical passivity and submissiveness. This book demonstrates how Kuwaiti women writers have used literature to work for, and contribute to, social change.
- Published
- 2009
19. Plantation Airs : Racial Paternalism and the Transformations of Class in Southern Fiction, 1945--1971
- Author
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Brannon Costello and Brannon Costello
- Subjects
- Race in literature, American fiction--20th century--History and criticism, Poor in literature, Paternalism--Southern States, Literature and society--Southern States, Paternalism in literature, American fiction--Southern States--History and criticism, Social classes in literature, Race relations in literature
- Abstract
In Plantation Airs, Brannon Costello argues persuasively for new attention to the often neglected issue of class in southern literary studies. Focusing on the relationship between racial paternalism and social class in American novels written after World War II, Costello asserts that well into the twentieth century, attitudes and behaviors associated with an idealized version of agrarian antebellum aristocracy -- especially, those of racial paternalism -- were believed to be essential for white southerners. The wealthy employed them to validate their identities as'aristocrats,'while less-affluent whites used them to separate themselves from'white trash'in the social hierarchy. Even those who were not legitimate heirs of plantation-owning families found that'putting on airs'associated with the legacy of the plantation could align them with the forces of power and privilege and offer them a measure of authority in the public arena that they might otherwise lack.Fiction by Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Ernest Gaines, Walker Percy, and others reveals, however, that the racial paternalism central to class formation and mobility in the South was unraveling in the years after World War II, when the civil rights movement and the South's increasing industrialization dramatically altered southern life. Costello demonstrates that these writers were keenly aware of the ways in which the changes sweeping the South complicated the deeply embedded structures that governed the relationship between race and class. He further contends that the collapse of racial paternalism as a means of organizing class lies at the heart of their most important works -- including Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee and her essay'The'Pet Negro'System,'Welty's Delta Wedding and The Ponder Heart, Faulkner's The Mansion and The Reivers, Gaines's Of Love and Dust and his story'Bloodline,'and Percy's The Last Gentleman and Love in the Ruins.By examining ways in which these works depict and critique the fall of the plantation ideal and its aftermath, Plantation Airs indicates the richness and complexity of the literary responses to this intersection of race and class. Understanding how many of the modern South's best writers imagined and engaged the various facets of racial paternalism in their fiction, Costello confirms, helps readers construct a more comprehensive picture of the complications and contradictions of class in the South.
- Published
- 2007
20. Fantasies of Race: A Transatlantic Approach to Class and Sexuality in Emilia Pardo Bazán's La Tribuna.
- Author
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MATEOS, ANA
- Subjects
- *
RACE in literature , *SOCIAL classes in literature , *SPANISH fiction , *HUMAN sexuality in literature , *PATRIARCHY in literature , *MIDDLE class in literature , *HISTORY , *NINETEENTH century - Abstract
In this essay I propose that the concept of race, especially within a transatlantic context, is fundamental for understanding the interdependent discourses of class and sexuality in Emilia Pardo Bazán's La Tribuna (1883). In this way, I rethink the novel's notorious oscillation between the denunciation of patriarchy and bourgeois hegemony on the one hand, and the portrayal of the working class and Amparo's sexuality as social threats on the other. Both sides of this tension are articulated through racial discourses in the representation of Amparo. This approach sheds light on the novel's silence regarding the question of the abolition of slavery in Cuba, despite conjuring the figure of the slave to highlight Amparo's exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2015
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
21. Archives of Labor : Working-Class Women and Literary Culture in the Antebellum United States
- Author
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Merish, Lori and Merish, Lori
- Published
- 2017
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
22. The Gothic Other : Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination
- Author
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Ruth Bienstock Anolik, Douglas L. Howard, Ruth Bienstock Anolik, and Douglas L. Howard
- Subjects
- Difference (Psychology) in literature, Horror tales--History and criticism, Social classes in literature, American literature--History and criticism, English literature--History and criticism, Gothic revival (Literature)--English-speaking countries, Gothic fiction (Literary genre)--History and criticism, Race in literature, Fear in literature, Difference (Philosophy) in literature
- Abstract
Literary use of the Gothic is marked by an anxious encounter with otherness, with the dark and mysterious unknown. From its earliest manifestations in the turbulent eighteenth century, this seemingly escapist mode has provided for authors a useful ground upon which to safely confront very real fears and horrors. The essays here examine texts in which Gothic fear is relocated onto the figure of the racial and social Other, the Other who replaces the supernatural ghost or grotesque monster as the code for mystery and danger, ultimately becoming as horrifying, threatening and unknowable as the typical Gothic manifestation. The range of essays reveals that writers from many canons and cultures are attracted to the Gothic as a ready medium for expression of racial and social anxieties. The essays are grouped into sections that focus on such topics as race, religion, class, and centers of power.
- Published
- 2004
23. Rewriting White : Race, Class, and Cultural Capital in Nineteenth-Century America
- Author
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Todd Vogel and Todd Vogel
- Subjects
- American literature--Minority authors--History and criticism, Literature and society--United States--History--19th century, American literature--19th century--History and criticism, Minorities--United States--Intellectual life, Social classes in literature, Ethnic groups in literature, Minorities in literature, Ethnicity in literature, Race in literature
- Abstract
What did it mean for people of color in nineteenth-century America to speak or write'white'? More specifically, how many and what kinds of meaning could such'white'writing carry? In ReWriting White, Todd Vogel looks at how America has racialized language and aesthetic achievement. To make his point, he showcases the surprisingly complex interactions between four nineteenth-century writers of color and the'standard white English'they adapted for their own moral, political, and social ends. The African American, Native American, and Chinese American writers Vogel discusses delivered their messages in a manner that simultaneously demonstrated their command of the dominant discourse of their times-using styles and addressing forums considered above their station-and fashioned a subversive meaning in the very act of that demonstration. The close readings and meticulous archival research in ReWriting White upend our conventional expectations, enrich our understanding of the dynamics of hegemony and cultural struggle, and contribute to the efforts of other cutting-edge contemporary scholars to chip away at the walls of racial segregation that have for too long defined and defaced the landscape of American literary and cultural studies.
- Published
- 2004
24. Conflict and Its Manifestations: The Colonizer-Colonized Relationship in Albert Russo's Princes And Gods.
- Author
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Mishra, Lata
- Subjects
RACE in literature ,SOCIAL classes in literature ,CULTURE in literature - Abstract
The article presents a literary criticism of the novel "Princes and Gods," by Albert Russo, focusing on the convergence of races, classes, languages and geographical regions of Rwanda and Burundi. The impact of colonization on African culture and society, the literary genre of the novel, the language used and the development of the protagonist in the character of the American missionary Oswald Radcliffe are discussed. A description of ethnic conflict in the novel is offered.
- Published
- 2015
25. Jump Jim Crow : Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture
- Author
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W. T. Lhamon Jr and W. T. Lhamon Jr
- Subjects
- American literature--19th century, Blackface entertainers--History, African Americans in literature, African Americans--Literary collections, Social classes--Literary collections, Popular literature--United States, Race in literature, Black people in literature, Minstrel shows--History, Social classes in literature
- Abstract
Beginning in the 1830s, the white actor Thomas D. Rice took to the stage as Jim Crow, and the ragged and charismatic trickster of black folklore entered—and forever transformed—American popular culture. Jump Jim Crow brings together for the first time the plays and songs performed in this guise and reveals how these texts code the complex use and abuse of blackness that has characterized American culture ever since Jim Crow's first appearance.Along with the prompt scripts of nine plays performed by Rice—never before published as their original audiences saw them—W. T. Lhamon, Jr., provides a reconstruction of their performance history and a provocative analysis of their contemporary meaning. His reading shows us how these plays built a public blackness, but also how they engaged a disaffected white audience, who found in Jim Crow's sass and wit and madcap dancing an expression of rebellion and resistance against the oppression and confinement suffered by ordinary people of all colors in antebellum America and early Victorian England.Upstaging conventional stories and forms, giving direction and expression to the unruly attitudes of a burgeoning underclass, the plays in this anthology enact a vital force still felt in great fictions, movies, and musics of the Atlantic and in the jumping, speedy styles that join all these forms.
- Published
- 2003
26. The Syntax of Class : Writing Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America
- Author
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Amy Schrager Lang and Amy Schrager Lang
- Subjects
- Race in literature, Sex role in literature, Social classes in literature, American fiction--19th century--History and criticism, Social conflict in literature, Literature and society--United States--History--19th century
- Abstract
The Syntax of Class explores the literary expression of the crisis of social classification that occupied U.S. public discourse in the wake of the European revolutions of 1848. Lacking a native language for expressing class differences, American writers struggled to find social taxonomies able to capture--and manage--increasingly apparent inequalities of wealth and power. As new social types emerged at midcentury and, with them, new narratives of success and failure, police and reformers alarmed the public with stories of the rise and proliferation of the'dangerous classes.'At the same time, novelists as different as Maria Cummins, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frank Webb, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Horatio Alger Jr. focused their attention on dense engagements across the lines of class. Turning to the middle-class idea of'home'as a figure for social harmony and to the lexicons of race and gender in their effort to devise a syntax for the representation of class, these writers worked to solve the puzzle of inequity in their putatively classless nation. This study charts the kaleidoscopic substitution of terms through which they rendered class distinctions and follows these renderings as they circulated in and through a wider cultural discourse about the dangers of class conflict. This welcome book is a finely achieved study of the operation of class in nineteenth-century American fiction--and of its entanglements with the languages of race and gender.
- Published
- 2003
27. American Sensations : Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture
- Author
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Shelley Streeby and Shelley Streeby
- Subjects
- Imperialism in literature, Ethnic groups in literature, Nativism in literature, Race in literature, Popular literature--United States--History and criticism, American fiction--19th century--History and criticism, Literature and society--United States--History--19th century, Sensationalism in literature, Social classes in literature
- Abstract
This innovative cultural history investigates an intriguing, thrilling, and often lurid assortment of sensational literature that was extremely popular in the United States in 1848--including dime novels, cheap story paper literature, and journalism for working-class Americans. Shelley Streeby uncovers themes and images in this'literature of sensation'that reveal the profound influence that the U.S.-Mexican War and other nineteenth-century imperial ventures throughout the Americas had on U.S. politics and culture. Streeby's analysis of this fascinating body of popular literature and mass culture broadens into a sweeping demonstration of the importance of the concept of empire for understanding U.S. history and literature. This accessible, interdisciplinary book brilliantly analyzes the sensational literature of George Lippard, A.J.H Duganne, Ned Buntline, Metta Victor, Mary Denison, John Rollin Ridge, Louisa May Alcott, and many other writers. Streeby also discusses antiwar articles in the labor and land reform press; ideas about Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua in popular culture; and much more. Although the Civil War has traditionally been a major period marker in U.S. history and literature, Streeby proposes a major paradigm shift by using mass culture to show that the U.S.-Mexican War and other conflicts with Mexicans and Native Americans in the borderlands were fundamental in forming the complex nexus of race, gender, and class in the United States.
- Published
- 2002
28. Rereading the Harlem Renaissance : Race, Class, and Gender in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West
- Author
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Sharon L. Jones and Sharon L. Jones
- Subjects
- African Americans in literature, African American women in literature, Sex role in literature, Social classes in literature, African American women--Intellectual life, Women and literature--United States--History--20th century, American fiction--African American authors--History and criticism, American fiction--20th century--History and criticism, American fiction--Women authors--History and criticism, Harlem Renaissance, Race in literature, American literature--Women authors--History and critic
- Abstract
African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance generally fall into three aesthetic categories: the folk, which emphasizes oral traditions, African American English, rural settings, and characters from lower socioeconomic levels; the bourgeois, which privileges characters from middle class backgrounds; and the proletarian, which favors overt critiques of oppression by contending that art should be an instrument of propaganda. Depending on critical assumptions regarding what constitutes authentic African American literature, some writers have been valorized, others dismissed.This rereading of the Harlem Renaissance gives special attention to Fauset, Hurston, and West. Jones argues that all three aesthetics influence each of their works, that they have been historically mislabeled, and that they share a drive to challenge racial, class, and gender oppression. The introduction provides a detailed historical overview of the Harlem Renaissance and the prevailing aesthetics of the period. Individual chapters analyze the works of Hurston, West, and Fauset to demonstrate how the folk, bourgeois, and proletarian aesthetics figure into their writings. The volume concludes by discussing the writers in relation to contemporary African American women authors.
- Published
- 2002
29. Articulating a Geography of Pain: Metaphor, Memory, and Movement in Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them.
- Author
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Muñoz, Alicia
- Subjects
CITIES & towns in literature ,HUMAN geography ,HISPANIC Americans ,RACE in literature ,SOCIAL classes in literature - Abstract
The article analyzes how Helena María Viramontes' novel "Their Dogs Came With Them" articulates East Los Angeles, California through the use of imagery, memory, and movement. It argues that the novel presents multiple experiences of the city which reveal the way the geography affects the community and the ways the Latino community can resist the erasive consequences of race and class by forming independent spatial meaning. It deals with the metaphor that binds the characters to their environment. It analyzes the theme of memory and its impermanence relating to the fractured nature of the city and its disruptive freeways. It also examines what it calls the tactile apprehension in the different modes and velocities of transportation as concurrent but divergent modes of articulation.
- Published
- 2013
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
30. A Medea called Wally: Race, Madness and Fashion in Paul Heyse's Novella Medea.
- Author
-
Bartel, Heike
- Subjects
- *
LITERARY criticism , *RACE in literature , *WOMEN'S sexual behavior , *SOCIAL classes in literature , *FICTION , *LITERARY characters , *WOMEN heroes in literature , *CRITICISM , *MEDEA, consort of Aegeus, King of Athens (Mythological character) in literature , *NINETEENTH century - Abstract
In the extensive tradition of adaptations of the Medea myth in German-speaking literature Paul Heyse's novella Medea (1898) has been often overlooked. However, the fact that it is the first text in German-speaking literature to introduce the tragic heroine from classical mythology as 'black' gives it particular relevance. This contribution provides an analysis of the text with emphasis on Heyse's portrayal of the Medea/Wally character at the interface of late-nineteenth-century discourses about race, colonial politics, female sexuality and social class. Die deutschsprachige Literatur weist eine lange Tradition von Adaptionen des Medea-Mythos auf, in der Paul Heyses Novelle Medea (1898) jedoch häufig übersehen wird. Die Tatsache, dass dieser Text der erste in der deutsch-sprachigen Literatur ist, in dem die tragische Heldin der griechischen Mythologie als 'Schwarze' dargestellt wird, verleiht ihm jedoch eine besondere Bedeutung. Der folgende Beitrag liefert eine Analyse des Textes mit Schwerpunkt auf Heyses Darstellung von Medea/Wally im Schnittpunkt der Diskurse um Kolonialpolitik, Rasse, weibliche Sexualität und soziale Klasse am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2011
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
31. More Than One Way to (Mis)Read a "Mockingbird."
- Author
-
Murray, Jennifer
- Subjects
- *
STORY plots , *FICTION , *LITERARY characters , *RACE in literature , *SOCIAL classes in literature , *DISCOURSE analysis , *NARRATION , *SEXISM in literature - Abstract
This article focuses on the characteristics of the novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee. It discusses some of the aspects of the novel including the structural cohesion of the text, the ideological position of gender, class, and race in the novel, and the status and identification of a main character. It adds that the transformation of the stories concerning the life of the author into the novel is not immediately successful, because Lee spent three years in adjusting her work to meet the requirement of the editor, along with the challenges she faced in finishing the manuscript of the novel. It also mentions that the narrator of the novel adds an element of commentary and embellishes the incident for the sake of comic relief.
- Published
- 2010
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
32. Themes, Topics, Criticism.
- Author
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Stonum, Gary Lee
- Subjects
THEMES in American literature ,AMERICAN literature ,LITERARY criticism ,AMERICAN national character ,AMERICAN nationalism ,RACE in literature ,SOCIAL classes in literature - Abstract
The article focuses on themes, topics, and criticism on American literature. The author notes that with regard to American literary works, the importance of criticism has noticeably declined. Returning to the spotlight that enjoyed popularity half a century ago are themes of broad national identity. More and more specific and localized topics such as race, gender, and class are reportedly being folded in nation-state discussions and writings.
- Published
- 2010
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
33. A Legacy of Trauma: Caribbean Slavery, Race, Class, and Contemporary Identity in Abeng.
- Author
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MURDOCH, H. ADLAI
- Subjects
- *
SLAVE trade , *RACE in literature , *SOCIAL classes in literature , *SOCIAL conditions of Black people - Abstract
The disruptions and transformations caused by the slave trade are largely demographic and cultural. It was through this extended and traumatic forced population transfer that Caribbean colonies across the board became dominantly black communities. For these island nations and territories, the inescapable fact of their blackness had always marked a tangible and material link with their origins in Africa. Jamaica was home to more rebellions than all of the other British islands combined, proof positive of the continuing identitarian role of African culture in the Caribbean during the period of slavery. Colonization's phenomenon of ethnocultural creolization marked an interpenetration of populations and practices originating both from the colonial metropole and from the African continent, such that long-held notions of race and social stratiication would be have to be revised as independence approached, posing a set of complex tensions effectively articulated in Michelle Cliff's novel Abeng. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2009
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
34. BOURGEOIS BLUES: CLASS, WHITENESS, AND SOUTHERN GOTHIC IN EARLY FAULKNER AND CALDWELL.
- Author
-
Palmer, Louis
- Subjects
- *
RACE in literature , *SOCIAL classes in literature , *RACIAL identity of white people , *LITERARY movements - Abstract
This article discusses the emergence of the Southern Gothic literary tradition and how it reflects a shift in culture to a more visible form of whiteness. It discusses the subjects of class and race in William Faulkner's work, how they join together in oppression, the concept of white privilege, and how it is not granted equally to everyone.
- Published
- 2006
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
35. Sex, Race, and Class in Edith Wharton.
- Author
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Hutchinson, Stuart
- Subjects
- *
HUMAN sexuality in literature , *PREJUDICES in literature , *RACE in literature , *SOCIAL classes in literature , *CRITICISM - Abstract
Argues that the acclamation received by author Edith Wharton from feminists in the 1990s ignores her recurrent and creatively unexplored prejudices about sex, race and class. Portrayal of sexuality as a form of deviance in her novels; Desexualization of men to sublimate women.
- Published
- 2000
36. Other Women : The Writing of Class, Race, and Gender, 1832-1898
- Author
-
LEVY, ANITA and LEVY, ANITA
- Published
- 2014
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
37. Class, culture, and the trouble with white skin in Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables.
- Author
-
Anthony, David
- Subjects
- *
SOCIAL classes in literature , *CULTURE in literature , *RACE in literature - Abstract
Focuses on the class, culture and racial undertones in `The House of Seven Gables,' by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ambivalence of Hawthorne towards the lower class; Utilization of racial tropes in class distinction; Reflection of the failure of upper-class whiteness in the paleness of Judge Pyncheon; Resolution of class differences in the marriage of Holgrave into the Pyncheon family.
- Published
- 1999
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
38. Strangers in Blood : Relocating Race in the Renaissance
- Author
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FEERICK, JEAN E. and FEERICK, JEAN E.
- Published
- 2010
39. Caribbean Middlebrow : Leisure Culture and the Middle Class
- Author
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Edmondson, Belinda and Edmondson, Belinda
- Published
- 2009
40. The Syntax of Class : Writing Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America
- Author
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Lang, Amy Schrager and Lang, Amy Schrager
- Published
- 2009
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
41. Rewriting White : Race, Class, and Cultural Capital in Nineteenth-Century America
- Author
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VOGEL, TODD and VOGEL, TODD
- Published
- 2004
42. Jump Jim Crow : Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture
- Author
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Lhamon, W. T. and Lhamon, W. T.
- Published
- 2003
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
43. American Sensations : Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture
- Author
-
Streeby, Shelley and Streeby, Shelley
- Published
- 2002
44. "Sisters separated for much too long": Women's Friendship and Power in Toni Morrison's "Recitatif".
- Author
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Morris, Susana M.
- Subjects
- *
FEMALE friendship in literature , *RACE in literature , *POWER (Social sciences) in literature , *GENDER in literature , *SOCIAL classes in literature - Abstract
This essay considers the paradigms and power structures of women's friendships in Toni Morrison's only short story to date, "Recitatif (1983), an approach missing from current scholarship about the text. The essay argues that imposing a divide between the story as a racial allegory and a meditation on women's connections is a specious separation. By including a rigorous assessment of power dynamics in women's friendship, this article enriches our understanding of the text and underscores the inter-connectedness of race, class, and gender as intersecting subject positions and oppressions. Furthermore, the essay asserts that in "Recitatif women's friendships are fraught with anxiety regarding power but that the imposition of a simple binary of empowered/disempowered lacks efficacy within the text. Morrison's story underscores the notion that friendships predicated upon hegemonic notions of power necessarily fail, as they are fundamentally antithetical to maintaining positive and sustaining relationships between women. This essay ultimately concludes that Morrison indicates the possibility of dismantling normative gender socialization when women begin to question and to reject conventional paradigms of power in their connections to one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2013
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
45. Paydazed and a Song for Shenandoah
- Author
-
Vargas, Richard R.
- Subjects
- American poetry--21st century, American essays--21st century, Race in literature, Social classes in literature, English Language and Literature
- Abstract
My dissertation consists of poetry and two non-fiction essays written during my enrollment in the Creative Writing Master of Fine Arts program at the University of New Mexico. The manuscript begins with an essay detailing the moment in my life when I started to write again, after a writer\u201fs block that lasted fifteen years, from 1980-1995. The following sections of poetry deal with issues that I consider to be main themes throughout my entire body of work: race and class. I specifically explore what it is like to be Latino and working-class at a time when the depressed economy has led to a loss of jobs not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. I give the reader my thoughts and feelings during these times of fear and racial divide, with the hope of shedding light on the common stake we all share as human beings. I close with an essay about the childhood memories I have growing up with a parent who was an addict, and how I came to realize my bitter feelings of abandonment were not the total summation of the relationship I had with my father.
- Published
- 2011
46. It’s Hard Out There For Brooklyn Moms.
- Author
-
LYALL, SARAH
- Subjects
- *
SOCIAL classes in literature , *RACE in literature , *FICTION - Published
- 2017
47. Latin-American Women Writers : Class, Race, and Gender
- Author
-
Jehenson, Myriam Yvonne and Jehenson, Myriam Yvonne
- Subjects
- Latin American fiction--Women authors--History, Latin American fiction--History and criticism. -, Feminism and literature--History--20th century, Women and literature--History--20th century. -, Feminism in literature, Women in literature, Race in literature, Social classes in literature
- Abstract
This book describes how Latin-American women writers of all classes, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, ironize masculinist, classicist, and racist cliches in their narratives.This book provides a much needed grouping of Latin-American women, emphasizing their differences—the diversity of their cultural backgrounds, socio-economic conditions, and literary strategies—as well as their commonalities. Humble writers of the Spanish and Portuguese testimonio and sophisticated postmodernist authors alike are contextualized within a “matriheritage of founding discourses.”Myriam Yvonne Jehenson is Professor and Chair of International Languages and Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Hartford. She is the author of The Golden World of Pastoral: A Comparative Study of Philip Sidney's'Arcadias'and Honore d'Urfe's'L'Astree.
- Published
- 1995
48. Other Women : The Writing of Class, Race, and Gender, 1832-1898
- Author
-
Anita Levy and Anita Levy
- Subjects
- Domestic fiction, English--History and criticism, Difference (Psychology) in literature, English prose literature--19th century--History and criticism, Women and literature--Great Britain--History--19th century, Social classes in literature, Race in literature, Sex role in literature
- Abstract
In this ambitious work Anita Levy exposes certain forms of middle-class power that have been taken for granted as'common sense'and'laws of nature.'Joining an emergent tradition of cultural historians who draw on Gramsci and Foucault, she shows how middle-class hegemony in the nineteenth century depended on notions of gender to legitimize a culture-specific and class-specific definition of the right and wrong ways of being human. The author examines not only domestic fiction, particularly Emily Bront's Wuthering Heights, but also nineteenth-century works of the human sciences, including sociological tracts, anthropological treatises, medical texts, and psychological studies. She finds that British intellectuals of the period produced gendered standards of behavior that did not so much subordinate women to men as they authorized the social class whose women met norms of'appropriate'behavior: this class was considered to be peculiarly fit to care for other social and cultural groups whose women were'improperly'gendered. When Levy reads fiction against the social sciences, she demonstrates that the history of fiction cannot be understood apart from the history of the human sciences. Both fiction and science share common narrative strategies for representing the'essential'female and'other women'--the prostitute, the'primitive,'and the madwoman. Only fiction, however, represented these strategies in an idiom of everyday life that verified'theory'and'science.'Originally published in 1990.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
- Published
- 1991
49. Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells's America
- Author
-
Elsa Nettels and Elsa Nettels
- Subjects
- Speech and social status--United States, National characteristics, American, in literature, English language--United States, Language and languages in literature, Americanisms in literature, Social classes in literature, Race in literature
- Abstract
No other American novelist has written so fully about language—grammar, diction, the place of colloquialism and dialect in literary English, the relation between speech and writing—as William Dean Howells. The power of language to create social, political, and racial identity was of central concern to Americans in the nineteenth century, and the implications of language in this regard are strikingly revealed in the writings of Howells, the most influential critic and editor of his age.In this first full-scale treatment of Howells as a writer about language, Elsa Nettels offers a historical overview of the social and political implications of language in post-Civil War America. Chapters on controversies about linguistic authority, American versus British English, literary dialect, and language and race relate Howells's ideas at every point to those of his contemporaries—from writers such as Henry James, Mark Twain, and James Russell Lowell to political figures such as Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and John Hay.The first book to analyze in depth and detail the language of Howells's characters in more than a dozen novels, this path-breaking sociolinguistic approach to Howells's fiction exposes the fundamental contradiction in his realism and in the America he portrayed. By representing the speech that separates standard from nonstandard speakers, Howells's novels—which champion the democratic ideals of equity and unity—also demonstrate the power of language to reinforce barriers of race and class in American society.Drawing on unpublished letters of Howells, James, Lowell, and others and on scores of articles in nineteenth-century periodicals, this work of literary criticism and cultural history reaches beyond the work of one writer to address questions of enduring importance to all students of American literature and society.
- Published
- 1988
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