You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Shortlisted for the 2015 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize This book shows how American literary culture in the first half of the twentieth century saw “irony” emerge as a term to describe intersections between aesthetic and political practices. Against conventional associations of irony with political withdrawal, Stratton shows how the term circulated widely in literary and popular culture to describe politically engaged forms of writing. It is a critical commonplace to acknowledge the difficulty of defining irony before stipulating a particular definition as a stable point of departure for literary, cultural, and political analysis. This book, by contrast, is the first to derive definitions of “irony” inductively, showing how writers employed it as a keyword both before and in opposition to the institutionalization of New Criticism. It focuses on writers who not only composed ironic texts but talked about irony and satire to situate their work politically: Randolph Bourne, Benjamin De Casseres, Ellen Glasgow, John Dos Passos, Ralph Ellison, and many others.
A cultural history of modern lifestyle viewed through film and multimedia experiments of midcentury designers Charles and Ray Eames For the designers Charles and Ray Eames, happiness was both a technical and ideological problem central to the future of liberal democracy. Being happy demanded new things but also a vanguard life in media that the Eameses modeled as they brought film into their design practice. Midcentury modernism is often considered institutionalized, but Happiness by Design casts Eames-era designers as innovative media artists, technophilic humanists, change managers, and neglected film theorists. Happiness by Design offers a fresh cultural history of midcentury modernism th...
A study of how the film industry came to flourish in Detroit in the early years as locals were lured into the new picture theaters. Motor City Movie Culture, 1916–1925 is a broad textured look at Hollywood coming of age in a city with a burgeoning population and complex demographics. Richard Abel investigates the role of local Detroit organizations in producing, distributing, exhibiting, and publicizing films in an effort to make moviegoing part of everyday life. Tapping a wealth of primary source material—from newspapers, spatiotemporal maps, and city directories to rare trade journals, theater programs, and local newsreels—Abel shows how entrepreneurs worked to lure moviegoers from Detroit's diverse ethnic neighborhoods into the theaters. Covering topics such as distribution, programming practices, nonfiction film, and movie coverage in local newspapers, with entr'actes that dive deeper into the roles of key individuals and organizations, this book examines how efforts in regional metropolitan cities like Detroit worked alongside California studios and New York head offices to bolster a mass culture of moviegoing in the United States.
Arguing for a sweeping new consideration of the shift from print to cinema as a governing system for organizing modern American social relations, this book uncovers an intimate connection between Hollywood romances of the silent era and the empowerment of a managerial class. During the 1910s and 1920s, American movies told love stories through what rapidly became ubiquitous images. Again and again, silent features showed lovers separated by seeming happenstance and reunited as if by magical forces. Mark Garrett Cooper argues that this "magic" implies the expertise of the corporate movie studio with its hierarchies of professional experts. In other words, the Hollywood love story amounts to a...
Throughout history, American literature has provided an escape from the classroom; yet authors like Twain, Melville, and Ellison remain key figures in high school and college curricula. This book offers an account of this paradox, examining the contentious but ultimately generative relationship between literary and scholastic culture in the US.
Perhaps no period better clarifies our current crisis of digital information than the nineteenth century. Self-aware about its own epochal telecommunications changes and awash in a flood of print, the nineteenth century confronted the consequences of its media shifts in ways that still define contemporary responses. In this authoritative new work, Paul Fyfe argues that writing about Victorian new media continues to shape reactions to digital change. Among its unexpected legacies are what we call digital humanities, characterized by the self-reflexiveness, disciplinary reconfigurations, and debates that have made us digital Victorians, so to speak, struggling again to resituate humanities pra...
This authoritative collection of introductory and specialized readings explores the rich and innovative history of this period in American cinema. Spanning an essential range of subjects from the early 1900s Nickelodeon to the decline of the studio system in the 1960s, it combines a broad historical context with careful readings of individual films. Charts the rise of film in early twentieth-century America from its origins to 1960, exploring mainstream trends and developments, along with topics often relegated to the margins of standard film histories Covers diverse issues ranging from silent film and its iconic figures such as Charlie Chaplin, to the coming of sound and the rise of film ge...
Examines the first eight cinematic adaptations of Dick's fiction in light of their literary sources.
None