Civilizing America
Manners and Civility in American Literature and Culture
edited by Dietmar Schloss
Hardback (Published)
(January 2009)
ISBN: 9783825356163
5.31 x 8.31 inches
Price: $72.00
On back order
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 Or does it indicate that other, more abstract disciplinary systems have superseded the regime of manners?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.
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
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Volume 116
Renegotiating American Nationalism
The Proxy War over Marriage Equality through the Lens of Un-Americanism
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Physicians of Culture
Healing Catharsis in the Fiction of Toni Morrison and the Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
Volume 287
Dis/United States of Vulnerability
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Volume 330
Die Tragodie und Komodie des amerikanischen Lebens
Eine Studie zu Zuckermans Amerika in Philip Roths Amerika-Trilogie
Volume 137
TIME in American and East Asian Thinking
A Comparative Study of Temporality in American Transcendentalism, Pragmatism and (Zen) Buddhist Thought
Volume 193
Modern Domestic Fiction
Popular Feminism, Mass-Market Magazines, and Middle-Class Culture, 1905-1925
Volume 229
The Holocaust, Art, and Taboo
Transatlantic Exchanges on the Ethics and Aesthetics of Representation
Volume 189
Native North American Theater in a Global Age
Sites of Identity Construction and Transdifference
Volume 147
Temporality in American Filmic Autobiography
Cinema, Automediality and Grammatology with 'Film Portrait' and 'Joyce at 34'
Volume 187
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