[PDF] Current Americanisms eBook

Author : Carrie Tirado BRAMEN
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 393 pages
File Size : 45,3 MB
Release : 2009-06-30
Category : History
ISBN : 0674028716

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The turn of the last century, amid the excesses of the Gilded Age, variety became a key notion for Americans'a sign of national progress and development, reassurance that the modern nation would not fall into monotonous dullness or disorderly chaos. Carrie Tirado Bramen pursues this idea through the works of a wide range of regional and cosmopolitan writers, journalists, theologians, and politicians who rewrote the narrative of American exceptionalism through a celebration of variety. Exploring cultural and institutional spheres ranging from intra-urban walking tours in popular magazines to the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago, she shows how the rhetoric of variety became naturalized and nationalized as quintessentially American and inherently democratic. By focusing on the uses of the term in the work of William James, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, Hamlin Garland, and Wong Chin Foo, among many others, Bramen reveals how the perceived innocence and goodness of variety were used to construct contradictory and mutually exclusive visions of modern Americanism. Bramen's innovation is to look at the debates of a century ago that established diversity as the distinctive feature of U.S. culture. In the late-nineteenth-century conception, which emphasized the openness of variety while at the same time acknowledging its limits, she finds a useful corrective to the contemporary tendency to celebrate the United States as a postmodern melange or a carnivalesque utopia of hybridity and difference. Table of Contents: Introduction: Americanizing Variety I. The Ideological Formation of Pluralism 1. William James and the Modern Federal Republic 2. Identity Culture and Cosmopolitanism II. The Aesthetics of Diversity 3. The Uneven Development of American Regionalism 4. The Urban Picturesque and Americanization III. Heterogeneous Unions 5. Biracial Fictions and the Mendelist Allegory 6. East Meets West at the World's Parliament of Religions Afterword: In Defense of Partiality Notes Works Cited Acknowledgments Index Reviews of this book: [Bramen] brings dogged research and steady focus to [a] central ambiguity in the American ethos...Her study delivers several powerful messages even plain-talking people can understand. For one, Bramen shows that issues of ethnic diversity and variety, far from being epiphenomena of the last few decades, course through our history and spotlight the ambiguities in what it means to be an American...The Uses of Variety boasts gems...of past cultural history that remind us these are perennial issues...[Bramen's] penetrating expedition through the nuances of America's breast-beating about 'diversity within unity' concentrates the mind. Out of many examples comes an important book: a flinty challenge to intellectual complacency about ourselves. --Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer The Uses of Variety is a significant addition to and revision of a century of American pragmatist thinking about difference. Bramen brings new conceptual tools to bear on the history of multicultural thought and literature and thereby avoids the common pitfalls to produce an important survey and synthesis. --Tom Lutz, author of American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History and editor of These 'Colored' United States: African American Essays from the 1920s Carrie Bramen offers a compelling, intellectually rigorous history of the protean idea of pluralism, a concept that has been embraced heartily by both liberals and conservatives as essential in defining American identity. Situating pluralism in philosophical, psychological, aesthetic, and political contexts, Bramen brings a fresh perspective to illuminating the meaning of the term for late Victorian America and, significantly, its legacy for us today. --Linda Simon, author of Genuine Reality: A Life of William James Taking William James's 'pluralistic universe' as a starting point, The Uses of Variety takes us through regions, ghettos, religious congresses, and a range of theoretical, philosophical, and literary works to explore the multiple and often conflicting constructions of 'variety' in the context of turn-of-the-century U.S. nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Carrie Tirado Bramen brings together a broad spectrum of historical events and cultural theories in which variety variously expressed, contained, and shaped an increasing diversity that was perceived as threatening national coherence. This insightful, thoroughly researched, and timely work will be indispensable for scholars interested in U.S. nationalism, modernism, cosmopolitanism, and multiculturalism. --Priscilla Wald, author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form

Author : T. Baron Russell
Publisher : Forgotten Books
Page : 164 pages
File Size : 34,50 MB
Release : 2015-06-26
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781330465486

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Excerpt from Current Americanisms: A Dictionary of Words and Phrases in Common Use We have everything in common with the United States, Mr. Oscar Wilde says, "except, of course, the language." The paradox is daring, but not altogether extravagant. A very considerable number of words, phrases, and conventional metaphors are not shared in common by the two brother nations; and a still larger number of such expressions have been coined in America and gradually adopted here. It is an indisputable fact that America is more fertile in neologisms than the old country, and in these days of easy steamer transit, the importation of such words and expressions is inevitable. Many of them have found so hospitable a welcome, that they are with difficulty recognisable as Americanisms. Among the most potent influences which have determined this blending of tongues, must be included the currency which American humour has obtained here. There are literally scores of English comic (or alleged comic) papers which subsist almost entirely on the crumbs which fall from the table of the trans-Atlantic joker; and two American humorous journals (Texas Siftings and The Detroit Free Press have actually published special editions in London, though the former is now "dead." Under these circumstances it is not very surprising that numberless Americanisms have found their way into ordinary, if not into educated speech, and it is a wise word which knows its own fatherland. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Author : V.S. Matyushenkov
Publisher : Xlibris Corporation
Page : 580 pages
File Size : 41,81 MB
Release : 2010-01-30
Category : Reference
ISBN : 145003246X

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The Dictionary Of Americanisms, Canadianisms, Briticisms and Australianisms is a complete, modern, and comprehensive dictionary featuring a large word list of more than 20000 entries. The purpose of this book is to provide a generous sampling of words and expressions of the various spheres of life in the USA, Great Britain, Australia and Canada during the last centuries. The dictionary also features a collection of slang and colloquial expressions in these four countries in the twentieth century. It has a clear, easy-to-use format and is ideal for students, schools, libraries, tourists and anyone who is interested in varieties of English spoken in major English-speaking countries.

Author : H. L. Mencken
Publisher : e-artnow
Page : 341 pages
File Size : 21,6 MB
Release : 2021-05-21
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN :

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The American Language is a multi-volume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States. The book is Menken's research of the differences between English and American language. Mencken wanted to defend "Americanisms" against a steady stream of English critics, who usually isolated Americanisms as borderline "perversions" of the "mother tongue". The book discusses the beginnings of "American" variations from "English", the spread of these variations, American names and slang. According to Mencken, American English was more colorful, vivid, and creative than its British counterpart. The book concludes with the observation in the norms of use of the proper names in America, including surnames, given names, geographical names, Menken's analysis on the American slang, and forecast on the further language development.