Argues that Progressive Era reforms had the counterintuitive effect of weakening political parties and their role in representative government.The last twenty years has seen a series of changes to American party politics: polarization, negative partisanship, decreasing voter turnout, and decreasing faith in elections and government. In Primary Elections and American Politics, Chapman Rackaway and Joseph Romance trace the origins of these and other problems...

American literature is profoundly, almost inescapably political. America's most thoughtful authors long ago realized that it was through the novel, the novella, and the story that philosophic education of America's citizens would best be undertaken. In this fascinating new anthology of original essays, ten leading scholars explore the ways in which American civic education has been informally advanced through literature. Delving into the works of authors ranging from Mark Twain to William ...

James Ellroy has mined the darkest corners of the American experience, public and private, to paint a landscape of corrupt hearts, minds, and institutions. Ellroy is particularly notable for exploring the connection between the murder of his own mother, when he was ten years old, and his troubled adolescence and early adulthood struggles with addiction. “Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively,” he wrote in the memoir My Dark Places. Dark Places: Crime and Pol...

What happens when media and politics become forms of entertainment? As our world begins to look more and more like Orwell's 1984, Neil's Postman's essential guide to the modern media is more relevant than ever."It's unlikely that Trump has ever read Amusing Ourselves to Death, but his ascent would not have surprised Postman.” -CNNOriginally published in 1985, Neil Postman’s groundbreaking polemic about the corrosive effects of tel...

J ill Ker Conway, one of our most admired autobiographers--author of The Road from Coorain and True North--looks astutely and with feeling into the modern memoir: the forms and styles it assumes, and the strikingly different ways in which men and women respectively tend to understand and present their lives.In a narrative rich with evocations of memoirists over the centuries--from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and George Sand to W. E. B. Du Bois, Virginia Woolf, Frank McCourt and Katharine ...

Typecasting chronicles the emergence of the "science of first impression" and reveals how the work of its creators—early social scientists—continues to shape how we see the world and to inform our most fundamental and unconscious judgments of beauty, humanity, and degeneracy. In this groundbreaking exploration of the growth of stereotyping amidst the rise of modern society, authors Ewen & Ewen demonstrate "typecasting" as a persistent cultural practice. Drawing on fields as diverse as hist...

It would be easy to assume that, in the eighteenth century, slavery and the culture of taste--the world of politeness, manners, and aesthetics--existed as separate and unequal domains, unrelated in the spheres of social life. But to the contrary, Slavery and the Culture of Taste demonstrates that these two areas of modernity were surprisingly entwined. Ranging across Britain, the antebellum South, and the West Indies, and examining vast archives, including portraits, period painti...

Ethics, Literature, and Theory: An Introductory Reader brings together the work of contemporary scholars, teachers, and writers into lively discussion on the moral role of literature and the relationship between aesthetics, art, and ethics. Do the rich descriptions and narrative shapings of literature provide a valuable resource for readers, writers, philosophers, and everyday people to imagine and confront the ultimate questions of life? Do the human activities of storytelling and complex...

The award-winning Beneath the American Renaissance is a classic work on American literature. It immeasurably broadens our knowledge of our most important literary period, as first identified by F.O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance. With its combination of sharp critical insight, engaging observation, and narrative drive, it represents the kind of masterful cultural history for which David Reynolds is known. Here the major works of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, Hawtho...

How do we know what happened in the past? We cannot go back, and no amount of historical data can enable us to understand with absolute certainty what life was like “then.” It is easy to demolish the very idea of historical knowing, but it is impossible to demolish the importance of historical knowing. In an age of cable television pundits and anonymous bloggers dueling over history, the value of owning history increases at the same time as our confidence in history as a way of...

The Cambridge Companion to American Poets brings together thirty-one essays on some fifty-four American poets, spanning nearly 400 years, from Anne Bradstreet to contemporary performance poetry. This book also examines such movements in American poetry as modernism, the Harlem (or New Negro) Renaissance, 'confessional' poetry, the Black Mountain School, the New York School, the Beats, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. Its reputable host of contributors approach American poetry from perspectives ...

In the 1920s, Americans talked of their times as “modern,” which is to say, fundamentally different, in pace and texture, from what went before—a new era. With the end of World War I, an array of dizzying inventions and trends pushed American society from the Victorian era into modernity.The New Era provides a history of American thought and culture in the 1920s through the eyes of American intellectuals determined to move beyond an older role as gatekeepers of cultural respectabil...