Books in the Cultural Studies of the United States series

This text exposes the social dynamics that shaped American modernism and moved dance to the edges of society. Through their art, modern dancers challenged conventional roles and images of gender, sexuality, race, class, and regionalism with a confrontational view of American democracy.

This text looks back to the 1920s and 1930s to a generation of poets who wrote with the precise hope and the deep conviction that they would move their audiences to action. It offers a different look at the political poetry of Edwin Rolfe, Langston Hughes, Ezra Pound and Muriel Rukeyser.

A discussion of the roots of American terrorism and its impact on American identity. Focusing on the period between 1886 and 1920, it argues that the rise of mass media and the pressures of the industrial wage-labour economy fuelled the development of terrorism and shaped society's response to it.

A call for the redesign of Western cultural studies - one that engages issues of gender and race. Surveying work by writers such as Joan Didion and Wanda Coleman, it shows how they have mapped new geographical imaginations upon the cultural and social spaces of today's American West.

Walt Whitman dreamed of inspiring ""a race of singers"" who would celebrate the working class and realize the promise of American democracy. By examining how singers such as Woody Guthrie and Bruce Springstein embraced and reconfigured Whitman's vision, Bryan Garman shows that Whitman succeeded.

Analyzes how American female photographers contributed to a ""doctrine vision"", reinforcing the imperialism and racism of the dawn of the 20th century. This study is relevant to the fields of history of photography and gender studies, and to a growing understanding of US imperialism at the time.

Franny Nudelman analyzes the idealization of mass death and explores ways of depicting the violence of war. Considering martyred soldiers in relation to suffering slaves, she argues that responses to wartime death cannot be fully understood without attention to the brutality directed against African Americans during the antebellum era.

Examines struggles over wages to reveal ways in which the wage becomes a critical component in the making of social hierarchies of race, gender, and citizenship. This book addresses the issue of class politics and places the problem of ""interests"" squarely at the center of political economy.

Challenging the conventional wisdom that the 1930s were dominated by literary and photographic realism, this book covers experimental works by politically progressive artists. It argues that these artists drew attention to the country's most vulnerable residents by using ""aesthetic of astonishment,"" focused on graphic images of pain and injury.

Argues for revitalizing the role of literature in civic education. This book defines civic myths as compelling stories about national origin, membership, and values that are generated by conflicts within the concept of citizenship itself. It provides an analysis of the civic mythology surrounding Abraham Lincoln and the case of Ex parte Milligan.

In this study of the rise of corporate capitalism, the author contends it was a cultural revolution as well as an economic event. He places this revolution in the reconstruction of selfhood, or subjectivity, which attends the ""age of surplus"" under corporate auspices.

This work examines the tradition of ethnic impersonators in the United States. It looks at works such as Welsh Baptist Elizabeth Stern's immigrant narrative ""I am a Woman - and a Jew"", and uncovers their surprising influence on American notions of identity.

Examines the phenomenon of images as property, focusing on the legal staus of mechanically produced visual and audio images from popular culture. Bridging the fields of critical legal studies and cultural studies, this analyses copyright, trademark, and intellectual property law, asking how the law constructs works of authorship and who owns the country's cultural heritage.

Combining musical analysis and cultural history approaches, Titon examines the origins of downhome blues in African American society. He also explores what happened to the art form when the blues were commercially recorded and became part of the larger American culture.

In this classic study of the relationship between technology and culture, Miles Orvell demonstrates that the roots of contemporary popular culture reach back to the Victorian era, when mechanical replications of familiar objects reigned supreme and realism dominated artistic representation.

Asking why many American intellectuals have had such difficulty accepting wholeheartedly the cultural dimensions of democracy, Robert Dawidoff examines their alienation and ambivalence, a tradition of detachment he identifies as "e;Tocquevillian."e; In the work of three towering American literary figures - Henry Adams, Henry James, and George Santayana -- Dawidoff explores fully this distancing and uneasy response to democratic culture.Linked together by common Harvard, Cambridge, and New England connections, and by an upper-class, Brahmin background, each of these three writers, Dawidoff argues, was at once self-critical and contemptuous of cultural democracy -- especially its indifference to them and what they represented. But their claims to detached observation of democratic culture must be viewed skeptically, Dawidoff warns, and borrowed with caution.An important contribution of the book is its integration of gay issues into American intellectual history. Viewing James's and Santayana's attitudes toward their homosexuality as affecting their views of American society, Dawidoff examines this significant and overlooked element in the American intellectual and cultural mix. Dawidoff also includes powerful new readings of Adams's Democracy and James's The Ambassadors and discusses Santayana's Americanist essays.In his foreward, Alan Trachtenberg notes the "e;taboo"e; that seems to have fallen over the word democracy. "e;It is rarely encountered anymore in humanistic studies,"e; he says, "e; snubbed in favor of gender, class, race, region."e; This trend, he says, may be in part due to an unease about studying the culture in which we participate because the posture of the cutural critic implies a certain detachment. "e;The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage returns the question of democracy to centerstage,"e; he concludes, "e;not as political theory alone but as cultural and personal experience."e;Originally published in 1992.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.