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. |
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... contemporary debates on multiculturalism and those focused more on the historical substance of my argument . These two au- diences frequently intersect . My premise is that we cannot understand the self - evidential nature of American ...
... contemporary debates on multicultur- alism by stepping back from them . I offer a historical and critical analy- sis of the fundamental terms of this debate , namely diversity and its late Victorian equivalent , variety . I am ...
... contemporary age . In forgetting that concepts have histories , even concepts that appear " contemporary , " we also forget the strengths and weaknesses of their earlier formulations . To study the uses of variety in the modern period ...
... contemporary times . Instead , to quote James , it is in " some ways connected , in some other ways not connected " ( PU 666 ) . When I began research on this topic , I was primarily interested in how turn - of - the - century pluralism ...
... contemporary debates and even late Victorian ones are not en- tirely novel or unique . Origins also serve as points of emphasis that de- fine and circumscribe particular traditions . The tradition that I want to trace includes three ...
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 | |