American Literature &amp; History, British Studies

Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, Series Number 55)

Literature & Fiction

Fender, Stephen

History & Criticism

Cambridge University Press

The land of the free and home of the brave, America is also the country in which this truth is supposedly self-evident: that we are all equal. It may not seem so at first, but there is a startling gap between these two visions of America, one more evident in today’s fiercely partisan politics that pit free enterprise against social justice. In this fascinating look at America’s most memorable speeches—which have become monuments in national memory—Stephen Fender explores the ways American speechcraft has kept alive a dream of equality and cooperation in the face of economic forces that have favored competition and the pursuit to get ahead. Beginning with the early American settlers and the two contrasting visions they set out—one competitive, the other cooperative—Fender traces the development of the latter through a series of dramatic addresses. He examines the inaugural speeches of early presidents such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, moving to Abraham Lincoln’s arguments—at once logical and passionate—for maintaining the Union, and then on to the twentieth century’s great orators, such as John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. He also looks at the notion of the “great American speech” in popular culture, exploring both the usual places—such as movie courtroom scenes—where it pops up, as well as its unexpected ubiquity in adventure films, thrillers, or any story where equality and justice come under threat. Through his exploration of great speeches, Fender paints the picture of two simultaneous and free-standing visions of American identity, offering a sophisticated look at American ideological history.

The Great American Speech: Words and Monuments

History

Americas

Reaktion Books

The Land of the Free is the country everyone loves to attack. But how much do you really know about the USA? "Hot Rods, Handguns and Huckleberry Finn" is a popular exploration of the real America. This is a country with 50 capital cities, few of which anyone can name; a nation with 65 million gun-owners and 35,000 gun deaths each year; a place where there's one car for every adult, and where twice as many people claim to go to church as actually do. Burning the American flag, so the Supreme Court has ruled, is now a legitimate expression of free speech. One city in Kentucky elected a black Labrador as its mayor. The US produces a quarter of all CO2 emissions, and has a population rising twice as fast as the EU. German might have been the national language, and folk music tops the charts. Republican states especially are generous givers to charity, and they have a world-beating welfare state - the military. Vibrant, proud and yet critical, this is a hugely enjoyable tour of the world's most powerful but least understood nation.

50 Facts You Need to Know: USA: A Tour Through the Real America

Religion & Spirituality

Occult & Paranormal

Icon Books Ltd.

Love, sex, death, boredom, ecstasy, existential angst, political upheaval - the history of literature offers a rich and varied exploration of the human condition across the centuries.

Love, Sex, Death and Words: Surprising Tales From a Year in Literature

Sutherland, Jon

United States

Icon Books

Why was publication of Huckleberry Fin delayed until February 18, 1885? Which great literary love affair came to a tragic end on February 11, 1963? What effect did March 19, 2007 have on Philip Roth’s alter ego? Arranged by days of the year, Love, Sex, Death &amp; Words provides an absorbing companion to literature’s inspiring past.
John Sutherland is a recently retired professor of English literature at University College London, and a past chairman of the Booker Prize panel.
Stephen Fender was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford and in the United Kingdom. He has taught in the United States at Santa Clara, Williams, and Dartmouth colleges.

Within two years of coming out in 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird had been translated into ten languages, won the Pulitzer Prize, and been made into an Oscar-winning film. It spent an astonishing 88 weeks on the American bestseller lists. But while acclaimed by critics it also attracted attention of a different kind. Like The Catcher in the Rye (1951), that other bestseller about childhood, Mockingbird was widely banned from local libraries and school curricula from the 1960s through to the 1980s. One early reviewer called To Kill a Mockingbird “a wholesome book on an unwholesome theme”. Those charged with the care of the youth were hypersensitive about what the fictional young should be made to see and hear in novels: words like “damn”, “piss”, “whore lady” – and (as with Huckleberry Finn) “nigger” – even though in the context of a critique of racial prejudice. But the objections went beyond words alone. The story of children being confronted by a rape case seemed inappropriate in a book to be read by real-life children. So did the book’s portrayal of “institutionalized racism”, as one group of protestors in Indiana put it, “under the guise of ‘good literature’”. In this compelling guide, Stephen Fender looks at why a novel which has been called a “period piece” remains so popular – and examines what it tells us about racism and indeed about the nature of humanity.

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (The Connell Guide To ...)

Connell Publishing

English writers have a way of invoking paternal imagery when thinking of Chaucer. “The Medieval word for a Poet, was a Maker,” said G.K Chesterton, and “there was never a man who was more of a maker than Chaucer. He made a national language; he came very near to making a nation. At least without him it would probably have been neither so fine a language or so great a nation. Shakespeare and Milton were the greatest sons of their country; but Chaucer was the father of his country, rather in the manner of George Washington.” A sweeping claim, maybe, but with a nucleus of truth. Chaucer really was a kind of English founding father. He didn’t invent the language for literature but he chose it – and put his energy into exploiting and developing it. And The Canterbury Tales is where it happened. The Canterbury Tales was truly original. Chaucer’s narrators, pilgrims on the road to Canterbury, range from a knight to a wealthy landowner, a merchant, a miller and minor church officials. They are brought to life by vivid descriptions of their clothing, bodily appearance and behaviour – and through the wide variety of English vernacular they voice. These are the raw materials out of which Chaucer not only produces comedy but develops themes like the condition of the church, the conflict between fate and free will, and what it is that constitutes authority, whether in the Bible or the conventions of courtly-love romance. In 1478, the printer William Caxton thought it to be such an English monument that he invested a fortune in time and money to publish The Canterbury Tales as the first ever book in English to be printed in England. It has never been out of print since.

Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (The Connell Guide To ...)

British & Irish

Connell Short Guide To Of Mice & Men

Teen & Young Adult

Connell Guides

Sea Changes: British Emigration & American Literature

This acclaimed landmark work – in this substantially revised second edition – is a key study of the American cultural experience. It examines the formation of an American personal and national identity through the experience of emigration. It asks what was the ‘American difference’, and what constitutes the American character. It explores in detail the crucial influence of emigration from Europe. It explores American readiness to change, to break with the past, and its faith in future possibilities. Every one of these supposed qualities is traced by Professor Fender to the psychology of emigration. As a new nation, America had to create and define itself. As the rebellious child of a distant but powerful parent America had to struggle against a metropolitan center with which it shared a language and a legal system, but it strenuously defined itself differently. This work is about the power of American ideology and how it unlocked the creative potential in the lives and writings for ‘ordinary’ people. It is a work like no other. It says much that is original on writers such as Cooper, Jefferson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Dreiser and Will Cather, among others. Professor Fender has also examined many accounts of ordinary people through diaries, letters and contemporary documents. The book examines how innovations in structures of life, government and writing entailed key cultural themes. It argues that the rhetoric in which emigration was promoted, defended and attacked became the exhilarations and the anxieties of the American difference. American literature thus returns repeatedly to narratives of captivity, adolescence and initiation as shown in its distinctive literary forms.

Edward Everett Root

This acclaimed landmark work – in this substantially revised second edition – is a key study of the American cultural experience. It examines the formation of an American personal and national identity through the experience of emigration. It asks what was the ‘American difference’, and what constitutes the American character. It explores in detail the crucial influence of emigration from Europe. It explores American readiness to change, to break with the past, and its faith in future possibilities. Every one of these supposed qualities is traced by Professor Fender to the psychology of emigration. As a new nation, America had to create and define itself. As the rebellious child of a distant but powerful parent America had to struggle against a metropolitan center with which it shared a language and a legal system, but it strenuously defined itself differently. This work is about the power of American ideology and how it unlocked the creative potential in the lives and writings for ‘ordinary’ people. It is a work like no other. It says much that is original on writers such as Cooper, Jefferson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Dreiser and Will Cather, among others. Professor Fender has also examined many accounts of ordinary people through diaries, letters and contemporary documents. The book examines how innovations in structures of life, government and writing entailed key cultural themes. It argues that the rhetoric in which emigration was promoted, defended and attacked became the exhilarations and the anxieties of the American difference. American literature thus returns repeatedly to narratives of captivity, adolescence and initiation as shown in its distinctive literary forms.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Fender, Stephen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Fender, Stephen

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Fender, Stephen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, Series Number 55)

The Great American Speech: Words and Monuments

50 Facts You Need to Know: USA: A Tour Through the Real America

Love, Sex, Death and Words: Surprising Tales From a Year in Literature

Love, Sex, Death and Words: Surprising Tales From a Year in Literature

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (The Connell Guide To ...)

Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (The Connell Guide To ...)

Connell Short Guide To Of Mice & Men

Sea Changes: British Emigration & American Literature

Sea Changes: British Emigration & American Literature