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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... liberal multiculturalism , " in which neo- liberal , free - market financial structures are celebrated in terms of diver- sity and Americanism . He cites a 1993 advertisement in Business Week for the French bank Credit Lyonnais , which ...
... the problem of want but the problem of surplus . " 10 Variety was a way to negotiate the extremes of an expanding capitalist economy through a principle of moderation . For the genteel liberal as well 16 Introduction.
... liberal as well as for the middle classes , the discourse of variety provided a way to save unity from uni- formity while also redeeming it from chaos . It signified social equilib- rium , a modern version of Young's " unoppressive city ...
... liberal version of " smelting " is actually more in- clusive than Crevecoeur's " melting . " In Chapter 2 I broaden the debate between ethnic particularity and blending to include Horace Kallen's " orchestra , " but at this point let me ...
... liberals came to terms with modernity by denying its disturbing underside , by escaping into a therapeutic mode of unreality that yearned for mind - cures and other panaceas . Interestingly , Lears conveys this sense of disorientation ...
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 | |