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 Or does it indicate that other, more abstract disciplinary systems have superseded the regime of manners?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
Beyond the ‘Imaginary Indian’
Zur Aushandlung von Stereotypen, kultureller Identitat & Perspektiven in/mit indigener Gegenwartsliteratur
Volume 171
The Chutneyfication of History
Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Bharati Mukherjee and the Postcolonial Debate
Volume 95
The Kitchen and the Factory
Spaces of Women's Work and the Negotiation of Social Difference in Antebellum American Literature
Volume 280
Provincializing the United States
Colonialism, Decolonization, and (Post)Colonial Governance in Transnational Perspective
Volume 248
Toward a New Metropolitanism
Reconstituting Public Culture, Urban Citizenship, and the Multicultural Imaginery in New York and Berlin
Volume 142
Time(s) of Lives
(Non-)Normative Temporalities, Age(ing), and Kinship Narratives in Contemporary U.S. American Culture
Volume 310
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
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