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 Or does it indicate that other, more abstract disciplinary systems have superseded the regime of manners?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.
- Edited by Dietmar Schloss
Other Titles in this Series
National Dreams and Rude Awakenings
Essays on American Literature, from the Puritans to the Postmodern
Volume 194
Weird American Music
Case Studies of Underground Resistance, BarlowGirl, Jackalope, Charles Ives, and Waffle House Music
Volume 299
Bodies and/as Technology
Counter-Discourses on Ethnicity and Globalization in the Works of Alejandro Morales, Larissa Lai and Nalo Hopkinson
Volume 211
Aesthetic Transgressions
Modernity, Liberalism, and the Function of Literature: Festschrift fur Winfried Fluck zum 60. Geburtstag
Volume 131
Aesthetic Innovation and the Democratic Principle
Essays on Twentieth-Century American Poetry and Fiction
Volume 279
The Anticipation of Catastrophe
Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture
Volume 247
Jewish Organizations in Transatlantic Perspective
Patterns of Contemporary Jewish Politics in Germany and the United States
Volume 226
Recollection, Memory and Imagination
Selected Autobiographical Novels of Vladimir Nabokov
Volume 132
Seeing and Perceiving
Synesthetic Perception, Embodied Intersubjectivity, and Gender Masquerade in Siri Hustvedt's Works
Volume 311
Mensch als Methode
Allgemeine Hermeneutik und partielle Demokratie: Friedrich Schleiermacher - Ralph Waldo Emerson - Frederick Douglass
Volume 272
Comic Art and Avant-Garde
Bill Watterson's 'Calvin and Hobbes' and the Art of American Newspaper Comic Strips
Volume 295
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