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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... Critical Reader . He acknowledges that the term " heterogeneity " has been undertheorized in multicultural debates , which has allowed cultural conservatives to seize on " homogeneity " — the bugbear of multicultural discourse — as ...
... critical analy- sis of the fundamental terms of this debate , namely diversity and its late Victorian equivalent , variety . I am interested in how the equation of Americanism and diversity / variety became naturalized as common sense ...
... had a complicated and contentious history prior to the turn into the twentieth century . The term surfaced at two critical junctures of na- tional unity : in the late eighteenth century during the Americanizing Variety 15.
... critical emphasis that is frequently lacking in standard interpretations of the period . The standard story assumes that late Victorians feared the modern , greeting it with neurasthenic disor- ders and a range of other anxieties in ...
... of conversion , an attempt to redeem heterogeneity by assimilat- ing it to a standard of variety . At the turn of the century , his sociological work was undergoing a paradigmatic shift . His critical focus 22 Introduction.
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 | |