Women and Death: Linkages in Western Thought and Literature, and: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: The Writer as Heroine in American Literature, and: Insatiable Appetites: Twentieth-Century American Women's Bestsellers, and: Fantasy and Reconciliation: Contemporary Formulas of Women's Romance Fiction, and: Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (review)

1986 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 353-358
Author(s):  
Sharon O'Brien
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Young Woman ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
Romance Fiction

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Quan Manh Ha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Black Voices ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
One Year ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

The Academic Study of Sufism at American Universities

2007 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 24-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcia Hermansen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Current Situation ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
Academic Institutions ◽  
Academic Context ◽  
American Universities ◽  
Islamic Studies ◽  
Academic Study

This article provides an overview of the history and current situation of the academic study of Sufism (Islamic mysticism) at American universities. It examines Sufism’s place within the broader curriculum of Islamic studies as well as some of the main themes and approaches employed by American scholars. In addition, it explains both the academic context in which Sufi studies are located and the role of contemporary positions in Islamic and western thought in shaping its academic study.1 Topics and issues of particular interest to a Muslim audience, as well as strictly academic observations, will be raised. In comparison to its role at academic institutions in the traditional Muslim world,2 Sufi studies has played a larger role within the western academic study of Islam during the twentieth century, especially the later decades. I will discuss the numerous reasons for this in the sections on the institutional, intellectual, and pedagogical contexts.

Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Shaheen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
First World War ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Prosthetic Devices ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
First World

Drawing on rehabilitation publications, novels by both famous and lesser-known American writers, and even the prosthetic masks of a classically trained sculptor, Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture addresses the ways in which prosthetic devices were designed, promoted, and depicted in America in the years during and after the First World War. The war’s mechanized weaponry ushered in an entirely new relationship between organic bodies and the technology that could both cause and attempt to remedy hideous injuries. This relationship was evident in the realm of prosthetic development, which by the second decade of the twentieth century promoted the belief that a prosthesis should be a spiritual extension of the person who possessed it. This spiritualized vision of prostheses held a particular resonance in American postwar culture. Relying on some of the most recent developments in literary and disability studies, the book’s six chapters explain how a prosthesis’s spiritual promise was largely dependent on its ability to nullify an injury and help an amputee renew (or even improve upon) his prewar life. But if it proved too cumbersome, obtrusive, or painful, the device had the long-lasting power to efface or distort his “spirit” or personality.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. xviii-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Gerald Kennedy ◽  
Scott Peeples
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
First Century ◽  
Global Literature ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Critical Approaches

Edgar Allan Poe has long occupied a problematic place in discussions of American literature. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, an intensive reexamination of his relationship to nineteenth-century print culture and the controversies of Jacksonian America reframed our understanding of his work. Whereas scholars once regarded his dark fantasies as extraneous to American experience, we now recognize the complex and nuanced ways in which Poe’s work responded to and questioned core assumptions of American culture. The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe offers a wide-ranging exploration of Poe, rereading his works through a variety of critical approaches and illuminating his ultimate impact on global literature, art, and culture. The introduction to the volume traces the development of scholarship on Poe from the time of his death in 1849 to the beginning of the twenty-first century, exploring the future possibilities for the study of Poe in the digital era.

XVI * American Literature: The Twentieth Century

2007 ◽  
Vol 86 (1) ◽  
pp. 906-967
Author(s):  
L. Rumsey ◽  
E. Nolan ◽  
A. Rice ◽  
S. Bolaki ◽  
A. R. Lee
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature
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