The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for National DistinctivenessHarvard University Press, 2000 - 380 من الصفحات The turn of the last century, amid the excesses of the Gilded Age, variety became a key notion for Americans—a sign of national progress and development, reassurance that the modern nation would not fall into monotonous dullness or disorderly chaos. Carrie Tirado Bramen pursues this idea through the works of a wide range of regional and cosmopolitan writers, journalists, theologians, and politicians who rewrote the narrative of American exceptionalism through a celebration of variety. Exploring cultural and institutional spheres ranging from intra-urban walking tours in popular magazines to the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago, she shows how the rhetoric of variety became naturalized and nationalized as quintessentially American and inherently democratic. By focusing on the uses of the term in the work of William James, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, Hamlin Garland, and Wong Chin Foo, among many others, Bramen reveals how the perceived innocence and goodness of variety were used to construct contradictory and mutually exclusive visions of modern Americanism. |
من داخل الكتاب
النتائج 1-5 من 51
... attempts to theorize them have also suffered from undertheorization . This reveals the extent to which these terms have become so firmly embedded in a national structure of feeling that their innocence , benevolence , and inclusivity ...
... attempt to manage it . Variety was both a product of an age of excessive abundance and dire scarcity and its moral antidote . Van Wyck Brooks , for instance , considered surplus a " prob- lem , " writing in 1915 that a " familiar ...
... attempted to break with his late - nineteenth - century preoccupation with the benefits of social and cultural sameness in order to discuss the attributes of immigration . He spoke not in terms of " melt- ing " but of " smelting ...
... attempt to reclaim variety as the organic and authentic discourse of the geographical margins . It demonstrated that rural localities were the exceptional spaces of an otherwise uniform nation because they could still maintain their ...
... attempts to define the particularity of variety by contrasting it with its anarchic variation — heterogeneity ( which was the modern antecedent of Lyotard's postmodern notion of boundless plurality ) . For late Victorians , the ...
المحتوى
William James and the Modern Federal Republic | 29 |
Identity Culture and Cosmopolitanism | 67 |
The Uneven Development of American Regionalism | 115 |
The Urban Picturesque and Americanization | 156 |
Biracial Fictions and the Mendelist Allegory | 201 |
East Meets West at the Worlds Parliament of Religions | 250 |
In Defense of Partiality | 293 |
Notes | 307 |
337 | |
Acknowledgments | 361 |
365 | |