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Most books on the American musical are little more than exercises
in nostalgia. The specially commissioned essays that make up
Approaches to the American Musical take a different view of the
form. Going beyond the common assertion that musicals are simply
escapist; these examinations of American stage and film musicals
argue that Porgy and Bess, Top Hat, Kiss Me Kate and All That Jazz
were popular precisely because they engaged with such important
American issues as ethnicity, commerce and international relations.
American Literature Before 1880 attempts to place its subject in
the broadest possible international perspective. It begins with
Homer looking westward, and ends with Henry James crossing the
Atlantic eastwards. In between, the book examines the projection of
images of the East onto an as-yet unrecognised West; the cultural
consequences of Viking, Colombian, and then English migration to
America; the growth and independence of the British American
colonies; the key writers of the new Republic; and the development
of the culture of the United States before and after the Civil War.
It is intended both as an introduction for undergraduates to the
richness and variety of American Literature, and as a contribution
to the debate about its distinctive nature. The book therefore
begins with a lengthy survey of earlier histories of American
Literature.
This book attempts an interpretation of Revolutionary American
culture. It argues that the cultural identity of the United States,
like its political identity, emerged from a quarrel with the Old
World. Europeans believed that the Revolution had 'turned the world
upside down'. American intellectuals tried to construct a republic
which refuted European criticism. They failed, but in failing they
created an attitude to the terrain which became a central theme in
American culture. The book employs the methods of perceptual
geography and close textual analysis to examine images of the
terrain and to propose close links between imaginative literature
and a wide range of non-literary writing.
This book is about the ways American and British writers, painters
and photographers have represented the American environment. It
brings together essays by American, British and European scholars
which consider the one hundred and twenty years following the
Revolution and examine the preconceptions, ideologies, rhetorical
and aesthetic conventions that shaped attitudes to the North
American continent. While ranging widely, the essayists focus on
such figures as Jefferson, Crevecoeur, John Neal, James Fenimore
Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, Thomas Cole, Samuel Morse, Fanny
Kemble, Dickens, Hawthorne, Clarence King and Edward Curtis.
Amongst the places featured in the discussions are the Niagara
Falls, the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, Virginia's Natural Bridge,
Mount Ktaadn and a Broadway omnibus. The book contains numerous
illustrations, including early photographs of the western United
States, and will be of interest to specialists and students of
American literature, history and culture.
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