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Providing a comprehensive overview of American thought in the period following World War II, after which the US became a global military and economic leader, this book explores the origins of American utopianism and provides a trenchant critique from the point of view of those left out of the hegemonic ideal. Centring the voices of those oppressed by or omitted from the consumerist American Dream, this book celebrates alternative ways of thinking about how to create a better world through daily practices of generosity, justice, and care. The chapters collected here emphasize utopianism as a practice of social transformation, not as a literary genre depicting a putatively perfect society, and urgently make the case for why we need utopian thought today. With chapters on climate change, economic justice, technology, and more, alongside chapters exploring utopian traditions outside Western frameworks, this book opens a new discussion in utopian thought and theory.
There is no group of individuals more iconic of 1960s counterculture than the hippies – the long-haired, colorfully dressed youth who rebelled against mainstream societal values, preached and practiced love and peace, and generally sought more meaningful and authentic lives. These 'flower children' are now over sixty and comprise a significant part of the older population in the United States. While some hippies rejoined mainstream American society as they grew older, others still maintain the hippie ideology and lifestyle. This book is the first to explore the aging experience of older hippies by examining aspects related to identity, generativity, daily activities, spirituality, community, end-of-life care, and wellbeing. Based on 40 in-depth interviews with lifelong, returning, and past residents of The Farm, an intentional community in Tennessee that was founded in 1971 and still exists today, insights into the subculture of aging hippies and their keys to wellbeing are shared.
The “occult world,” or occulture, is a term that has developed a very wide meaning in modern academic discourse. The full panoply of occult thinking is enormous. While always mindful of the broader definition of the subject, this essay is largely limited to what the author believes would be an acceptable vernacular definition of the occult as essentially referring to black magic, and most especially to the satanic. This has been a subject with enormous resonance for American history and culture. The argument in this chapter is that Satan has played, and continues to play, a central – and on occasion a decisive – role in American cultural and political life. He is a figure deeply in the American grain, a vivid and personal presence in the lives of many millions of Americans, given powerful and recurring embodiment in American popular culture, in particular. But he is also a presence centrally informing some of the classic works of American literature.
In addition to evoking western lands and democratic politics, the very name of America has also encouraged apocalyptic visions. The “American Dream” has not only been about the prospect of material prosperity; it has also been about the end of the world. Final forecasts constitute one of America’s oldest literary genres, extending from the eschatological theology of the New England Puritans to the revolutionary discourse of the early republic, the emancipatory rhetoric of the Civil War, the anxious fantasies of the atomic age, and the doomsday digital media of today. For those studying the history of America, renditions of the apocalypse are simply unavoidable. This collection brings together two dozen essays by prominent scholars that explore the meanings of apocalypse across different periods, regions, genres, registers, modes, and traditions of American literature and culture. It locates the logic and rhetoric of apocalypse at the very core of American literary history.
Examining Asian American literature from 1968 until the present, what readers encounter is a body of literature and ways of thinking about that literature that have grown rapidly in content, complexity, and contradiction. Within an academic context, the Asian American literary criticism pioneered by Elaine Kim was disruptive in terms of introducing an entirely new body of writers and texts to consider. The emergence of Asian American literature as an academic field, in the end, cannot be separated from the emergence of Asian Americans as a partially excluded and partially included minority in all strata of American life, including literature and the academy. In the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, Asian Americans were mostly excluded from American life and culture, and this exclusion eventually led to a relatively unified and coherent definition of Asian American literature.
Elizabeth Bishop noted that her poetry differed both from the standardized somewhat machine-made Academic poem and from poetry that comes through with a sort of shocking vulgarity and coarseness of mind. Bishop, as Lowell's commentary at the 1964 reading notes, was also a poet who refused to write the standard academic poem fashionable at mid-century, nor did she write the kind of confessional poem that was quickly supplanting it. The critical ambivalence about Losses surfaced in part because Jarrell's postwar subject matter was emerging in that volume, in poems such as Moving. Like Jarrell's late poem The Lost World, moving also frames the perceptions of the child against the more jaded reflections of the adult. The woman's predicament hearkens back to Jarrell's polemical essays criticizing American consumer culture, as she wanders the aisles of the supermarket among the detergents cheer, joy and all vainly seeking their emotional equivalents.
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