This book provides a stimulating account of the dominant cultural forms of 1950s America: fiction and poetry; theatre and performance; film and television; music and radio; and the visual arts. ...Through detailed commentary and focused case studies of influential texts and events -- from Invisible Man to West Side Story, from Disneyland to the Seattle World's Fair, from Rear Window to The Americans -- the book examines the way in which modernism and the cold war offer two frames of reference for understanding the trajectory of postwar culture.
How did literary artists confront the middle of a century already
defined by two global wars and newly faced with a nuclear future?
Midcentury Suspension argues that a sense of suspension-a
feeling ...of being between beginnings and endings, recent horrors and
opaque horizons-shaped transatlantic literary forms and cultural
expression in this singular moment. Rooted in extensive archival
research in literary, print, and public cultures of the Anglophone
North Atlantic, Claire Seiler's account of midcentury suspension
ranges across key works of the late 1940s and early 1950s by
authors such as W. H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bishop,
Elizabeth Bowen, Ralph Ellison, and Frank O'Hara. Seiler reveals
how these writers cultivated modes of suspension that spoke to the
felt texture of life at midcentury. Running counter to the tendency
to frame midcentury literature in the terms of modernism or of our
contemporary, Midcentury Suspension reorients
twentieth-century literary study around the epoch's fraught middle.
This is a major study of the 1549 rebellions, the largest and most important risings in Tudor England. Based upon extensive archival evidence, the book sheds fresh light on the causes, course and ...long-term consequences of the insurrections. Andy Wood focuses on key themes in the social history of politics, concerning the end of medieval popular rebellion; the Reformation and popular politics; popular political language; early modern state formation; speech, silence and social relations; and social memory and the historical representation of the rebellions. He examines the long-term significance of the rebellions for the development of English society, arguing that the rebellions represent an important moment of discontinuity between the late medieval and the early modern periods. This compelling history of Tudor politics from the bottom up will be essential reading for late medieval and early modern historians as well as early modern literary critics.
Rising out of the American art music movement of the late 1950s and
1960s, minimalism shook the foundations of the traditional
constructs of classical music, becoming one of the most important
and ...influential trends of the twentieth century. The emergence of
minimalism sparked an active writing culture around the
controversies, philosophies, and forms represented in the music's
style and performance, and its defenders faced a relentless
struggle within the music establishment and beyond. Focusing on how
facts about music are constructed, negotiated, and continually
remodeled, We Have Always Been Minimalist retraces the
story of these battles that-from pure fiction to proven truth-led
to the triumph of minimalism. Christophe Levaux's critical analysis
of literature surrounding the origins and transformations of the
stylistic movement offers radical insights and a unique new
history.
An in-depth analysis of the relationship between art and design, which led to the creation of 'pop'. Challenging accepted boundaries and definitions, the authors seek out various commonalities and ...points of connection between these two exciting areas.
Hard sell Nixon, Sean
2016, 2016., 20160516, 2013, 2016-05-16
eBook
Focusing on advertising's relationship to the mass market housewife, this study shows how advertising promoted new standards of material comfort in the selling of a range of everyday consumer goods ...and, in the process, generalised a cross-class image of the 'modern housewife' across the new medium of television. Nixon shows how the practices through which advertising understood and represented the 'modern housewife' and domestic consumption were influenced by American advertising and commercial culture. In doing so, he challenges the way critics and historians have often understood Anglo-American relations, and shows how American influences across a range of areas of advertising practice were not only a source of inspiration, but were also adapted and reworked to speak more effectively to the British consumer. Now available in paperback, Hard sell offers a major new analysis of the techniques of advertising in the decades of post-war affluence and advertising's relationship to the social changes associated with growing prosperity.
A Mirror for England Durgnat, Raymond
2011, 2017-11-07, 2019-07-25, 20110101
eBook
Raymond Durgnat's classic study of British films from the 1940s to the 1960s, first published in 1970, remains one of the most important books ever written on British cinema. In his introduction, ...Kevin Gough-Yates writes: 'Even now, it astounds by its courage and its audacity; if you think you have an 'original' approach to a filmor a director's work and check it against A Mirror for England, you generally discover that Raymond Durgnat had said it already.' Durgnat himself said about the book that 'the main point was arranging a kind of rendezvous between thinking about movies and thinking, not so much about sociology, as about the experiences that people are having all the time.'Durgnat used Mirror to assert the validity of British cinema against its dismissal by the critics of Cahiers du cinéma and Sight and Sound. His analysis takes in classics such as In Which We Serve (1942), A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and The Blue Lamp (1949), alongside 'B' films and popular genres such as Hammer horror. Durgnat makes a cogent and compelling case for the success of British films in reflecting British predicaments, moods and myths, at the same time as providing some disturbing new insights into a national character by whose enigmas and contradictions we continue to be perplexed and fascinated.
'Daily Life in 1950s America shows that the era was anything but uneventful. Apart from revolutionary changes during the decade itself, it was in the 1950s that the seeds took root for the social ...turmoil of the 1960s and the technological world of today. The book's interdisciplinary format looks at the domestic, economic, intellectual, material, political, recreational, and religious life of average Americans. Readers can look at sections separately according to their interests or classroom assignment, or can read them as an ongoing narrative. By entering the homes of average Americans, far from the corridors of power, we can make sense of the 1950s and see how the headlines of the era translated into their daily lives.This readable and informative book is ideal for anyone interested in this formative decade in American life. Well-researched factual material is presented in an engaging way, along with lively sidebars to humanize each section. It is unique in blending the history, popular culture, and sociology of American daily life, including those of Americans who were not white, middle class, and prosperous.
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