Showing 1-15 of 21 items.

The New Negro in the Old South

Rutgers University Press

This groundbreaking historical study makes the compelling case that the culturally sophisticated and upwardly mobile figure of the New Negro first emerged long before the Harlem Renaissance or the twentieth-century Great Migration to the North. Drawing from extensive archival research, Gabriel A. Briggs reconstructs the vibrant black community that developed in Nashville after the Civil War, showing how it played a pivotal role in shaping the economic, intellectual, social, and political lives of African Americans in subsequent decades. 

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The Autobiography of Citizenship

Assimilation and Resistance in U.S. Education

Rutgers University Press

At the turn of the twentieth century, America was faced with a radically mixed population, one with a disturbing new mix of races and religions. In The Autobiography of Citizenship, Tova Cooper looks at how citizen education programs tried to impose unity on this divergent population, and how the new citizens in turn often resisted these efforts, embracing their own view of what it means to be an American. 

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American Hybrid Poetics

Gender, Mass Culture, and Form

Rutgers University Press

 American Hybrid Poetics explores the ways in which hybrid poetics—a playful mixing of disparate formal and aesthetic strategies—have been the driving force in the work of a historically and culturally diverse group of women poets who are part of a robust tradition in contesting the dominant cultural order. Amy Moorman Robbins examines the ways in which five poets—Gertrude Stein, Laura Mullen, Alice Notley, Harryette Mullen, and Claudia Rankine—use hybridity as an implicitly political strategy to interrupt and contest the language of the dominant culture as it is reproduced in genres of mainstream mass culture.

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Abortion in the American Imagination

Before Life and Choice, 1880-1940

Rutgers University Press

Abortion in the American Imagination takes us back to the early twentieth century, when American writers first dared to broach the controversial subject of abortion. Putting authors like Wharton and Faulkner into conversation with the era’s films and non-fiction, Karen Weingarten uncovers a vigorous public debate decades before Roe v. Wade. Along the way, she discovers not only how discourses on abortion have changed dramatically, but also how they’ve shaped our very sense of what it means to be an American.   

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Twentieth-Century Sentimentalism

Narrative Appropriation in American Literature

Rutgers University Press

This book argues that sentimentalism, an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary mode, is alive and well in the modern era. By examining working-class literature that adopts the rhetoric of “feeling right” in order to promote a proletarian or humanist ideology as well as neo-slave narratives that wrestle with the legacy of slavery and cultural definitions of African American families, it explores the ways contemporary authors engage with familiar sentimental clichés and ideals.

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Black Resonance

Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature

Rutgers University Press

Black Resonance analyzes writings by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, and Nikki Giovanni that engage such iconic singers as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, and Aretha Franklin. The book focuses on two generations of artists from the 1920s to the 1970s; each chapter pairs one writer with one singer to crystallize the artistic practice they share: lyricism, sincerity, understatement, haunting, and the creation of a signature voice.

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When Sex Changed

Birth Control Politics and Literature between the World Wars

Rutgers University Press

When Sex Changed analyzes the ways literary texts responded to the political, economic, sexual, and social values put forward by the birth control movements of the 1910s to the 1930s in the United States and Great Britain. The book compares disparate responses to the birth control controversy, from early skepticism by mainstream feminists, to concerns about the movement’s race and class implications, to enthusiastic speculation about contraception’s political implications.

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Unbecoming Americans

Writing Race and Nation from the Shadows of Citizenship, 1945-1960

Rutgers University Press

Unbecoming Americans identifies a canon of writers who, during the years after World War II, explored forms of belonging in the world outside the domain of modern citizenship. It examines works by C.L.R. James, Richard Wright, Claudia Jones, and Carlos Bulos that show how these writers employed aesthetic alternative forms to the novel, including memoir, cultural criticism, and travel narrative, to contest prevailing notions of race, nation, and citizenship.

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The Romance of Race

Incest, Miscegenation, and Multiculturalism in the United States, 1880-1930

Rutgers University Press

The national identity of the United States was transformed between 1880 and 1930 due to mass immigration, imperial expansion, the rise of Jim Crow, and the beginning of the suffrage movement. The Romance of Race examines the role of minority women writers and reformers in the creation of modern American multiculturalism by placing minorities at the center of American identity and imagining a new national narrative based on the model of an interracial nuclear family.

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Abandoning the Black Hero

Sympathy and Privacy in the Postwar African American White-Life Novel

Rutgers University Press

Abandoning the Black Hero examines the motivations that led certain African American authors in mid-twentieth century to shift from writing protest novels about racial injustice to novels focusing primarily, if not exclusively on whites, or white-life novels. These fascinating works have been understudied despite having been written by such defining figures as Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Ann Petry, and Chester Himes, as well as lesser known but formerly best-selling authors Willard Motley and Frank Yerby.

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Reading Embodied Citizenship

Disability, Narrative, and the Body Politic

Rutgers University Press

Drawing from major figures in American literature, including Mark Twain, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and David Foster Wallace, as well as introducing texts from the emerging canon of disability studies, Emily Russell demonstrates the place of disability at the core of American ideals. The narratives prompted by the encounter between physical difference and the body politic require a new understanding of embodiment as a necessary conjunction of physical, textual, and social bodies. Russell examines literature to explore and unsettle long-held assumptions about American citizenship.

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Main Street and Empire

The Fictional Small Town in the Age of Globalization

Rutgers University Press

In Main Street and Empire, Ryan Poll argues that the small town, as evoked by the image of “Main Street,” is not a relic of the past but rather a metaphorical screen upon which the nation’s “everyday” stories and subjects are projected on both a national and global level. It brings together a wide range of literary, cultural, and political texts to examine how the small town is used to imagine and reproduce the nation throughout the twentieth- and into the twenty-first century.

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Transatlantic Spectacles of Race

The Tragic Mulatta and the Tragic Muse

Rutgers University Press

In Transatlantic Spectacles of Race, Kimberly Manganelli argues that the tragic mulatta and tragic muse, who have heretofore been read separately, must be understood as two sides of the same phenomenon. Bringing together an impressive array of cultural texts that includes novels, melodramas, travel narratives, diaries, and illustrations, the book reveals the value of transcending literary, national, and racial boundaries.

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Transatlantic Spectacles of Race

The Tragic Mulatta and the Tragic Muse

Rutgers University Press

In Transatlantic Spectacles of Race, Kimberly Manganelli argues that the tragic mulatta and tragic muse, who have heretofore been read separately, must be understood as two sides of the same phenomenon. Bringing together an impressive array of cultural texts that includes novels, melodramas, travel narratives, diaries, and illustrations, the book reveals the value of transcending literary, national, and racial boundaries.

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Troublemakers

Power, Representation, and the Fiction of the Mass Worker

Rutgers University Press

William Scott’s Troublemakers explores how a major change in the nature and forms of working-class power affected novels about U.S. industrial workers in the first half of the twentieth century. Analyzing portrayals of workers in such novels as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Ruth McKenney’s Industrial Valley, and Jack London’s The Iron Heel, William Scott moves beyond narrow depictions of these laborers to show their ability to resist exploitation through their direct actions—sit-down strikes, sabotage, and other spontaneous acts of rank-and-file “troublemaking” on the job—often carried out independently of union leadership.

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