Civilizing America
Manners and Civility in American Literature and Culture
edited by Dietmar Schloss
Hardback (Published)
(January 2009)
ISBN: 9783825356163
5.28 x 8.27 inches
Price: $72.00
In stock
The past three decades have seen a surge of interest in forms of social analysis arising out of the study of conduct and manners – particularly among historians of early modern Europe and the periods prior to the Age of Democratic Revolution. The essays in this collection broaden the line of inquiry to include the American context from the colonial period to the present. Scholars from both the United States and Europe analyse the views of writers and social commentators – assessing, questioning, and re-evaluating the role of manners in American society. Should manners be seen as a particular feature of Old World aristocratic societies that have become obsolete in the New? Or do they continue to shape modern democratic societies, perhaps under a different ‘gestalt’? Is the apparent absence of a sophisticated system of manners in the United States – as many nineteenth-century novelists thought – a sign of cultural and aesthetic impoverishment? Or does this absence signal the emergence of a new ‘natural’ and ‘authentic’ personality? Does the ubiquity of a relaxed or informal style in the twentieth century signal this new freedom of self-expression? Or does it indicate that other, more abstract disciplinary systems have superseded the regime of manners? The essays in this volume make clear that the discourse about American manners and civility – which has been readily engaged by writers and social critics at different moments in American history – was a discourse about the forces that shape the social processes in modern democracy.
- Edited by Dietmar Schloss
Other Titles in this Series
Walking in Deserts, Writing out of Wounds
Jewishness and Deconstruction in Paul Auster's Literary Work
Volume 155
The Culture of Corporeality
Aesthetic Experience and the Embodiment of America, 1945-1960
Volume 151
Walking in the Wilderness
The Peripatetic Tradition in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Painting
Volume 134
American Studies/Shifting Gears
A Publication of the DFG Research Network 'The Futures of (European) American Studies'
Volume 185
Migration – Miscegenation – Transculturation
Writing Multicultural America into the Twentieth Century
Volume 114
Temporality in American Filmic Autobiography
Cinema, Automediality and Grammatology with 'Film Portrait' and 'Joyce at 34'
Volume 187
The Americanization of Human Rights
Iranian, African, and Chinese Lives in American Autobiography
Volume 290
Crossroads in American Studies
Transnational and Biocultural Encounters. Essays in Honor of Rudiger Kunow
Volume 269
The Native American Declaration of Independence
William Apess's Reflections of Ethnic Consciousness
Volume 156
Faith Matters
Religion, Ethnicity, and Survival in Louise Erdrich's and Toni Morrison's Fiction
Volume 149
Narrative Instability
Destabilizing Identities, Realities, and Textualities in Contemporary American Popular Culture
Volume 305
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