Academic literature on the topic 'American fiction – Themes, motives'
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Journal articles on the topic "American fiction – Themes, motives"
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Karasik-Updike, Olga B. "Contemporary Jewish Prose in the USA." Literature of the Americas, no. 10 (2021): 100–134. http://dx.doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2021-10-100-134.
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The essay presents an overview of Jewish American prose of the second half of the 20th — first two decades of the 21st century within the context of multicultural literature of the USA. The definition of Jewish literature remains a matter of debate. The author of the essay based on the opinions of critics concludes on the criterion for assigning a writer to Jewish literature. It is the artistic embodiment of the personal Jewish experience and identity in the works of literature, the view “from inside,” the perspective of collective memory and the connection to history and culture. Jewish literature today is one of the most developed ethnic segments of multicultural American literature. Writers under study are recognized throughout the world, their works have been translated into many languages, including Russian, they are known to readers and have already become the subject of study by literary scholars. Today, Jewish American literature is represented by two generations of writers. “Senior” generation includes the authors born in the 1920s–30s who began their literary careers in the 60s when there was a generational change in national literature. “Young” generation is represented by the writers who began their literary careers in the 2000s. On the example of the works of the most famous authors of both generations, the author of the essay talks about the factors determining the specific features of Jewish American prose and its characteristic themes, problems, and motives: the search for identity and roots, the representation and rethinking of the Holocaust, ethnic stereotypes, the image of the Jewish family, and the traditions of Jewish humor. The study of the works of modern Jewish writers in the United States allows us to draw conclusions about the display of border consciousness, national and ethnic identity, and collective memory in fiction.
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Frolova, Marina V. "Indonesian Horror Story by Intan Paramaditha." Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Asian and African Studies 12, no. 3 (2020): 368–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.21638/spbu13.2020.304.
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Analysis and interpretation of the short stories by Indonesian female writer Intan Paramaditha (Intan Paramaditha, born in 1979) make it possible to understand that her writing occupies a special niche in the modern Indonesian literary paradigm. Paramaditha’s feminist texts are disguised as horror stories with settings in contemporary Indonesia. The article examines five short stories (“Spinner of Darkness” (Pemintal Kegelapan), “Vampire” (Vampir), “Polaroid’s Mystery” (Misteri Polaroid), “The Blind Woman without a Toe” (Perempuan Buta tanpa Ibu Jari), and “The Obsessive Twist” (Goyang Penasaran)). Using the intertextual method, it was possible to prove the gothic poetics of these literary works. The short stories contain the mosaic of folklore-mythological motives from the Malay Archipelago, Biblical and Quranic narratives, as well as European fairy tales and allusions to American horror fiction and horror films. Her prose is built upon some borrowed European literary forms for expression of authentic Indonesian content. The social themes are intertwined with feminist criticism that is presented as a Kitsch of the Indonesian mass culture. In “The Obsessive Twist” the main conflict is focused on the heated debates on sexuality, politics, violence, and religion. The feminist agenda of her prose is contrasted with the turn of contemporary Indonesia towards a Muslim patriarchal society. Paramaditha’s works represent a unique product of West-East-synthesis aimed not only at the Indonesian, but also the global audience.
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Coombs, Timothy. "Origin stories in CSR: genesis of CSR at British American Tobacco." Corporate Communications: An International Journal 22, no. 2 (2017): 178–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/ccij-01-2016-0007.
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Purpose Graphic novels have a concept known as the origin story. The origin story is background information on how a hero or villain came into being. The purpose of this paper is to explore the origin story of corporate social responsibility at British American Tobacco (BAT). The CSR origin story is unpacked by examining corporate documents from BAT that discuss the initial development of the company’s CSR program. The BAT documents are part of the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL), a searchable, digital archive developed and managed by the University of California, San Francisco. It contains 85,569,326 pages in 14,360,422 documents. The library was created as part of the tobacco company settlement of a major law suit in the USA. Design/methodology/approach For this case study, the authors searched the archive for documents from BAT that had the key words “corporate social responsibility.” The documents were then analyzed using qualitative content analysis to identify key themes related to BAT’s created of its CSR programs. Findings The two dominant themes were business case BAT made for CSR and the environmental factors that shaped CSR. The business case had sub-themes of the new operating environment and reinforcing employees. The environmental sub-themes were the importance of NGOS and the top issues to be addressed in CSR efforts. The themes helped to explain why BAT was engaging in CSR, the factors shaping the start of its CSR programs, and the issues it intended to address through CSR. Research limitations/implications The analysis is limited to one organization and does not include interviews to go with the archived documents. Practical implications The paper considers the implications of the analysis for theory and practice for internal CSR communication. Originality/value The documents provide a rare glimpse inside a corporate decision to begin a CSR program and how the managers “talked” about CSR. Instead of examining external CSR communication, it examines the early days of internal CSR communication at a specific firm. The yields of the document analysis provide insights into how BAT conceptualized CSR and communicated the rationale for creating a CSR program internally. Research has relied primarily upon speculation of corporate motives or corporate public discourse designed to frame their CSR efforts. The internal documents provide an unfiltered examination of the motives for a CSR program. This allows us to better understand why a CSR program was created including the motives, targets, and desired outcomes.
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Sevilla-Vallejo, Santiago. "The Search for Koinos Kosmos in Philip K. Dick’s Fiction." Journal of Critical Studies in Language and Literature 1, no. 3 (2020): 56–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.46809/jcsll.v1i3.28.
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As it has been previously studied, Philip K. Dick's work raises existential questions that do not have a clear answer, but theyinvite us to seek the truth. One of the essential themes in his writings is that our perception about reality is false (IdiosKosmos) In this sense, Philip K. Dick's statements and novels consider that human life is a constant struggle with obstacles.This paper analyses how his biography and readings led him to form a philosophical attitude that was essential in hiswritings. Then, the motives that distort the experience and the process of searching for the true reality are compared in threenovels. On the one hand, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik show different futuristic dystopias where humanvalues are endangered. On the other hand, VALIS is about the search of transcendence from a more realistic andautobiographical approach. The aim of this article is to reflect about the search of the koinos kosmos contained in these threenovels.
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Parker, Joshua. "Formal, geographic and cultural metalepsis: The fiction of Russell Banks." Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 19, no. 3 (2010): 285–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0963947010370257.
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This article investigates how narrative form and thematic content work in conjunction to encourage a reader’s support for specific political, cultural and social views, using examples of metalepsis that mirror and support thematic socio-political stances in Russell Banks’s fiction. Metalepsis (the crossing of a text’s narrative levels) and plot themes of geographic and cultural boundary crossings play together in Banks’s writing, which explores the permeability of divisions between African American and European American, the Caribbean and continental North America, male and female, and parent and child, consistently emphasizing issues surrounding national, cultural, gender and generational borders. Mirroring these more obvious sociological themes and arguments of his plots, Banks’s structural border crossings force us to consider the permeability of conceptual boundaries between author and reader, reader and character, and narrator and narratee. Banks examines these boundaries’ porosity — on both levels — by exploiting an increasingly common technique for shifting focalization in contemporary fiction — episodic use of second-person narration. This metaleptic technique, crossing the borders of narrative levels, not only reflects, but inherently supports Banks’s themes of geographic border crossings as a means of intercultural, interracial and interclass understanding.
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Vorontsova, Galina N. "“Between Heaven and Earth”: A.N. Tolstoy’s Fiction of 1918–1919." Studia Litterarum 6, no. 2 (2021): 128–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.22455/10.22455/2500-4247-2021-6-2-128-143.
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The article is based on the thesis that in the writer’s works it is always possible to trace the existence of periods marked by the emergence of new themes and motives. As a rule, this is due both to external circumstances and the artist’s reaction to them, his internal feeling of the need to change the paradigm of his further development. In the work of A.N. Tolstoy one of such periods was the era of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and, in particular, the first revolutionary years, which are characterized by artistic experiments of the writer, allowing to talk about a definitely new vector of his searches. The article analyzes Tolstoy’s stories Mercy!, Peter’s Day, Count Cagliostro and Delirious in the context of the writer’s artistic searches of the 1918–1919. The writer’s work within the boundaries of small prosaic genres at that time allowed him, already in the second half of 1919, to come close to the creation of a full-scale canvas about the Russian Revolution, the novel The Road to Calvary.
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Vorontsova, Galina N. "“Between Heaven and Earth”: A.N. Tolstoy’s Fiction of 1918–1919." Studia Litterarum 6, no. 2 (2021): 128–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.22455/2500-4247-2021-6-2-128-143.
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The article is based on the thesis that in the writer’s works it is always possible to trace the existence of periods marked by the emergence of new themes and motives. As a rule, this is due both to external circumstances and the artist’s reaction to them, his internal feeling of the need to change the paradigm of his further development. In the work of A.N. Tolstoy one of such periods was the era of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and, in particular, the first revolutionary years, which are characterized by artistic experiments of the writer, allowing to talk about a definitely new vector of his searches. The article analyzes Tolstoy’s stories Mercy!, Peter’s Day, Count Cagliostro and Delirious in the context of the writer’s artistic searches of the 1918–1919. The writer’s work within the boundaries of small prosaic genres at that time allowed him, already in the second half of 1919, to come close to the creation of a full-scale canvas about the Russian Revolution, the novel The Road to Calvary.
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Dawsey, J. "The Literary Unity of Luke-Acts: Questions of Style – a Task for Literary Critics." New Testament Studies 35, no. 1 (1989): 48–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0028688500024498.
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Joseph Tyson's The Death of Jesus in Luke-Acts and Robert Tannehill's The Narrative Unity of Luke-Acts, published in 1986, are good examples of the interpretive wealth being mined by scholars who are adopting literary-critical methods for approaching the Lukan writings. What most distinguishes these critics' approaches from older, more familiar ones is the claim that the Bible's historical narratives are imaginative re-enactments of history – thus, in form, more akin to fiction than to theology, biography, or history. Robert Alter called the Biblical stories ‘historicized fiction’, meaning in our case that the author of Luke and Acts employed the artifices of fiction-writing, among others, supplying feeling and motives and creating speeches and dialogue for his characters. Professors Tyson and Tannehill, and other literary scholars like them, are helping us better discern how these techniques were used in Luke and Acts, thus opening new windows to the characters, the way that the author ascribes intentions to them, the plot, themes, nuances, points of view, uses of irony, and word-plays and associations in the writings.
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Ahmad, Mumtaz, Nighat Ahmad, and Amara Javed. "Environmental Performativity in Native American and Afro-American Womens Fiction: An Ecofeminist Critique of Erdrichs Tracks and Morrisons Beloved." Global Social Sciences Review VI, no. I (2021): 48–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.31703/gssr.2021(vi-i).06.
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This article, evaluating the usefulness and applicability of the ecofeminist tenets upon the environmental fiction of Erdrich and Morrison, creates a new understanding of the preservation of the environment for engendering a more egalitarian relationship between humanity and nature. It presents the critique of the ways Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich engage with the environmental themes and motifs using the historical connections of their communities with nature as a reference point via eco-performative texts. The overall scheme of the article, therefore, denies the anthropocentric approach upheld by the Euro-American world towards the environment and glorifies the biocentric approach revered and celebrated by the Native American and AfroAmerican lifestyle, emphasizing that in the cosmic scheme of nature, not just humans but non-humans, nature and environment are equal partners. The study concludes that Morrison and Erdrich have stressed in their fiction the ecocritical recognition of the inevitable interdependence of man and nature. Their fiction asserts that considering environmental issues to be human issues can positively affect the human attitude towards nature/environment.
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Dwyer, Angelique K. "Simón." PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 16, no. 1-2 (2019): 153–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v16i1-2.6662.
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This creative non-fiction piece written in Spanglish is called "Simón.” The overarching themes of this story are death, spirituality, animals and pets in a non-conventional American family raised in Mexico. The narrative voice in this piece provides a unique perspective broadening dialogue(s) on Mexican American identity.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic "American fiction – Themes, motives"
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Petino, Clara [Verfasser]. "Salem – A Literary Profile : Themes and Motifs in the Depiction of Colonial and Contemporary Salem in American Fiction / Clara Petino." Frankfurt a.M. : Peter Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2021. http://d-nb.info/1234355396/34.
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Stivers, David A. DeMare. "Narrating conspiracy hidden histories and mysterious motives in American literature/." Access to citation, abstract and download form provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company; downloadable PDF file 2.02Mb, 243 p, 2005. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3181876.
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Ashford, Joan Anderson. "Ecocritical Theology Neo-Pastoral Themes in American Fiction from 1960 to the Present." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2009. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_diss/52.
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Ecocritical theology relates to American fiction as it connects nature and spirituality. In my development of the term “neo-pastoral” I begin with Virgil’s Eclogues to serve as examples for spiritual and nature related themes. Virgil’s characters in “The Dispossessed” represent people’s alienation from the land. Meliboeus must leave his homeland because the Roman government has reassigned it to their war veterans. As he leaves Meliboeus wonders why fate has rendered this judgment on him and yet has granted his friend Tityrus a reprieve. Typically, pastoral literature represents people’s longing to leave the city and return to the spiritual respite of the country. When Meliboeus begins his journey he does not travel toward a specific geographical location. Because the gods have forced him from his land and severed his spiritual connection to nature he travels into the unknown. This is the starting point from which I develop neo-pastoral threads in contemporary literature and discuss the alienation that people experience when they are no longer connected to a spirit of the land or genius loci. Neo-pastoralism relates Bakhtin’s idea of chronotope and the expansion of the narrative voice of the novel to include the time/space dialogic. Neo-pastoral fiction shows people in their quest to find spirituality in spite of damage from chemical catastrophic events and suggests they may turn to technology as an ideological base to replace religion. The (anti) heroes of this genre often feel no connection with Judeo-Christian canon yet they do not consider other models of spirituality. Through catastrophes related to the atomic bomb, nuclear waste accidents, and the realization of how chemical pollutants affect the atmosphere, neo-pastoral literature explores the idea of apocalypticism in the event of mass annihilation and the need for canonical reformation. The novels explored in this dissertation are John Updike’s Rabbit, Run; Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49; Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer; Don DeLillo’s White Noise; Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead; Toni Morrison’s Paradise; and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
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Quickelberghe, Y. Van. "Brats, niggers, trembling leaves .motifs and theme in the prose works of Truman Capote." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/212762.
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Martin, Jocelyn S. "Re/membering: articulating cultural identity in Philippine fiction in English." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/210163.
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This dissertation examines how Philippine (or Filipino) authors emphasise the need for articulating or “re/membering” cultural identity. The researcher mainly draws from the theory of Caribbean critic, Stuart Hall, who views cultural identity as an articulation which allows “the fragmented, decentred human agent” to be considered as one who is both “subject-ed” by power but/and one who is capable of acting against those powers (Grossberg 1996 [1986]: 157, emphasis mine). Applied to the Philippine context, this writer argues that, instead of viewing an apparent fragmented Filipino identity as a hindrance to “defining” cultural identity, she views the “damaged” (Fallows 1987) Filipino history as a the material itself which allows articulation of identity. Instead of reducing the cultural identity of a people to what-they-could-have-been-had-history-not-intervened, she puts forward a vision of identity which attempts to transfigure these “damages” through the efforts of coming-to-terms with history. While this point of view has already been shared by other critics (such as Feria 1991 or Dalisay 1998:145), the author’s contribution lies in presenting re/membering to describe a specific type of articulation which neither permits one to deny wounds of the past nor stagnate in them. Moreover, re/membering allows one to understand continuous re-articulations of “new” identities (due to current migration), while putting an “arbitrary closure” (Hall) to simplistic re-articulations which may only further the “lines of tendential forces” (such as black or brown skin bias) or hegemonic practices.<p><p>Written as such (with a slash),“re/membering” encapsulates the following three-fold meaning: (1) a “re-membering”, to indicate “a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present” (Bhabha 1994:63); as (2) a “re-membering” or a re-integration into a group and; as (3) “remembering” which implies possessing “memory or … set [ting] off in search of a memory” (Ricoeur 2004:4). As a morphological unit, “re/membering” designates, the ways in which Filipino authors try to articulate cultural identity through the routes of colonisation, migration and dictatorship. <p><p>The authors studied in this thesis include: Carlos Bulosan, Bienvenido Santos, N.V.M. Gonzalez, Nick Joaquin, Frank Sionil José, Ninotchka Rosca, Jessica Hagedorn, and Merlinda Bobis. Sixty-years separate Bulosan’s America is in the Heart (1943) from Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle (2003). Analysis of these works reveals how articulation is both difficult and hopeful. On the one hand, authors criticize the lack of efforts and seriousness towards articulation of cultural identity as re/membering (coming to terms with the past, fostering belonging and cultivating memory). Not only is re/membering challenged by double-consciousness (Du Bois 1994), dismemberment and forgetting, moreover, its necessity is likewise hard to recognize because of pain, trauma, phenomena of splitting, escapist attitudes and preferences for a “comfortable captivity”. <p><p>On the other hand, re/membering can also be described as hopeful by the way authors themselves make use of literature to articulate identity through research, dialogue, time, reconciliation and re-creation. Although painstaking and difficult, re/membering is important and necessary because what is at stake is an articulated Philippine cultural identity. However, who would be prepared to make the effort?<p>------<p><p>Cette thèse démontre que, pour les auteurs philippins, l’articulation ou « re/membering » l'identité culturelle, est nécessaire. Le chercheur s'appuie principalement sur la théorie de Stuart Hall, qui perçoit l'identité culturelle comme une articulation qui permet de considérer l’homme assujetti capable aussi d'agir contre des pouvoirs (cf. Grossberg 1996 [1986]: 157). Appliquée au contexte philippin, cet auteur soutient que, au lieu de la visualisation d'une identité fragmentée apparente comme un obstacle à une « définition » de l'identité culturelle, elle regarde l’histoire philippine «abîmée» (Fallows 1987) comme le matériel même qui permet l'articulation d’identité. Au lieu de réduire l'identité culturelle d'un peuple à ce qu’ ils auraint pû être avant les interventions de l’histoire, elle met en avant une vision de l'identité qui cherche à transfigurer ces "dommages" par un travail d’acceptation avec l'histoire. <p><p>Bien que ce point de vue a déjà été partagé par d'autres critiques (tels que Feria 1991 ou Dalisay 1998:145), la contribution de l'auteur réside dans la présentation de « re/membering » pour décrire un type d'articulation sans refouler les plaies du passé, mais sans stagner en elles non plus. De plus, « re/membering » permet de comprendre de futures articulations de « nouvelles » identités culturelles (en raison de la migration en cours), tout en mettant une «fermeture arbitraire» (Hall) aux ré-articulations simplistes qui ne font que promouvoir des “lines of tendential forces” (Hall) (tels que des préjugés sur la couleur brune ou noire de peau) ou des pratiques hégémoniques.<p><p>Rédigé en tant que telle (avec /), « re/membering » comporte une triple signification: (1) une «re-membering », pour indiquer une mise ensemble d’un passé fragmenté pour donner un sens au traumatisme du présent (cf. Bhabha, 1994:63); (2) une «re-membering» ou une ré-intégration dans un groupe et finalement, comme (3)"remembering", qui suppose la possession de mémoire ou une recherche d'une mémoire »(Ricoeur 2004:4). Comme unité morphologique, « re/membering » désigne la manière dont les auteurs philippins tentent d'articuler l'identité culturelle à travers les routes de la colonisation, les migrations et la dictature. <p><p>Les auteurs inclus dans cette thèse sont: Carlos Bulosan, Bienvenido Santos, NVM Gonzalez, Nick Joaquin, Frank Sionil José, Ninotchka Rosca, Jessica Hagedorn, et Merlinda Bobis. Soixante ans séparent America is in the Heart (1943) du Bulosan et le Dream Jungle (2003) du Hagedorn. L'analyse de ces œuvres révèle la façon dont l'articulation est à la fois difficile et pleine d'espoir. D'une part, les auteurs critiquent le manque d'efforts envers l'articulation en tant que « re/membering » (confrontation avec le passé, reconnaissance de l'appartenance et cultivation de la mémoire). Non seulement est « re/membering » heurté par le double conscience (Du Bois 1994), le démembrement et l'oubli, en outre, sa nécessité est également difficile à reconnaître en raison de la douleur, les traumatismes, les phénomènes de scission, les attitudes et les préférences d'évasion pour une captivité "confortable" .<p><p>En même temps, « re/membering » peut également être décrit comme plein d'espoir par la façon dont les auteurs eux-mêmes utilisent la littérature pour articuler l'identité à travers la recherche, le dialogue, la durée, la réconciliation et la re-création. Bien que laborieux et difficile, « re/membering » est important et nécessaire car ce qui est en jeu, c'est une identité culturelle articulée des Philippines. Mais qui serait prêt à l'effort? <p><br>Doctorat en Langues et lettres<br>info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished
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Shaik, Zuleika Bibi. "Anthropology and literature: Humanistic themes in the ethnographic fiction of Hilda Kuper and Edith Turner." University of Western Cape, 2021. http://hdl.handle.net/11394/8167.
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Magister Artium - MA<br>This mini-thesis makes an argument for the significance of a female-dominated hidden tradition of experimental ethnographic writing in British social anthropology. It argues that the women anthropologists who experimented with creative forms of ethnography were doubly marginalised: first as women in an androcentric male canon in British social anthropology and American cultural anthropology, and second as creative writers whose work has been consistently undervalued in sombre scholarly circles. The study proposes that Hilda Beemer Kuper (1911-1995) and Edith Turner (1921-2016) should be regarded as significant in a still unexcavated literary tradition or subgenre with Anglo-American anthropology. It showcases the narrative craft of Kuper through a detailed textual analysis of her two most accomplished experimental ethnographies A Witch in My Heart (written in 1954, performed in 1955, and published in siSwati in 1962 and English in London in 1970) and A Bite of Hunger (written in 1958 and published in America in 1965). I highlight Kuper‟s multiple literary techniques in evoking of the fraught position of young Swazi co-wives, modern women and women accused of witchcraft in a patriarchal culture with particular attention to her gifts in creating dramatic plots, complex characters and dialogue rich in vernacular metaphor and proverbs. It then celebrates the even more experimental creative writing of Edith Turner. While Turner has sometimes been acknowledged for her hidden contributions to the co-production of her deeply loved and more famous husband Victor, she has not been given her due as an experimental ethnographer, also placing the experiences of African women centre-stage. In what she overtly advertised as “female literary style”, Turner‟s belatedly published 1987 novel The Spirit and the Drum. A Memoir of Africa is analysed with meticulous attention to the literary techniques by which she seeks to explore an anthropology of experience and empathy. These accomplished but under-acknowledged women creative writers sought to explore what they both explicitly conceived of as gestures of humanist cross-cultural engagement.
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Wise, Heather M. "A studio project in woodcarving : the symbolism of the buffalo in art yesterday, today, and tomorrow." Virtual Press, 2001. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1217379.
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This creative project interpreted and applied the buffalo in Native American culture - its symbolism, significance and virtues - to woodcarvings for the lives of people today. The carvings explored a range of styles, media and symbols but all use buffalo imagery and each piece represents how I have applied the buffalo to my life. Some pieces are based on historical events while others explore personal emotions. Wood surfaces differ from natural or bleached to painted. No style unifies the body of work. In each piece realism and abstraction, positive and negative space is handled differently. Buffalo facts and myths were interpreted to convey what white people can learn from the buffalo. It was a spiritual link and messenger from Native Americans to the Great Spirit. The buffalo was revered and respected as a vital in the life cycle. White man destroyed the buffalo during the nineteenth century through the acts of greed, disrespect and ignorance. It seems to have returned with a message for people of all races. This message is one that must be found within each individual.<br>Department of Art
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Cibalabala, Kalombo Mutshipayi. "L'impact de la tradition dans le roman congolais de langue française (1969-1989): essai d'analyse sociocritique." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/211688.
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Cibalabala, Kalombo Mutshipayi. "L'impact de la tradition dans le roman congolais de langue française (1969-1989): assai d'analyse sociocritique." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/211688.
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Francis, Diana Pharaoh. "Models to the universe : Victorian hegemony and the construction of feminine identity." Virtual Press, 1999. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1159142.
Full textBooks on the topic "American fiction – Themes, motives"
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Hristovska, Violeta. Amerikanskiot roman: Tipološki priod. Matica makedonska, 1994.
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Hristovska, Violeta. Amerikanskiot roman: Tipološki priod. Matica makedonska, 1994.
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Paulauskienė, Aušra. Lost and found: The discovery of Lithuania in American fiction. Rodopi, 2007.
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Antoszek, Patrycja. The carnivalesque muse: The new fiction of Robert Coover. Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL, 2010.
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Steig, Jeanne. The lost art of William Steig: Cats, dogs, men, women, ninnies, & clowns. Abrams, 2011.
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Crews, Frederick C. The sins of the fathers: Hawthorne's psychological themes. University of California Press, 1989.
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El infierno tan temido: Motivo clásico y novela latinoamericana y otros estudios. 2nd ed. El Otro, El Mismo, 2006.
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"This isthmus of a middle state": The suburban fiction of John Cheever, John Updike and Richard Ford. Wydawn. Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2009.
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Gaughenbaugh, Michael. Old house, new house: A child's exploration of American architectural styles. Preservation Press, National Trust for Historic Preservation, 1993.
Find full textBook chapters on the topic "American fiction – Themes, motives"
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Jack, Alison M. "Prodigal Ministers in Fiction." In The Prodigal Son in English and American Literature. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198817291.003.0006.
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In three novels focused on the lives of ordained ministers, J. G. Lockhart’s Adam Blair, James Robertson’s The Testament of Gideon Mack, and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, the meaning of home and the movement from being lost to being found are key themes shared with the parable of the Prodigal Son. In Adam Blair, the paradigm informs the movement towards being found; in Gilead, the minister comes home to himself, to others, and to God; in Gideon Mack, it is the bleakness of being lost which the parable brings into sharp relief. The connection between the parable and this unusual category of literary figures is particularly strong and illuminates the theological context out of which each is drawn.
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Tomek, Beverly C. "The Past, Present, and Future of Colonization Studies." In New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonization. University Press of Florida, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5744/florida/9780813054247.003.0001.
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Introduces the key themes in the book by tracing the historiography on African recolonization. Discusses the connection between colonization and emancipation. Examines the motives for African colonization and the movement’s relationship with the U.S. government.
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Caughie, John. "Filmography of Scottish-themed Fiction Films." In Early Cinema in Scotland. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420341.003.0011.
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A comprehensive filmography of Scottish produced and internationally produced films with significant Scottish themes or characters from 1896 to 1927. The filmography, compiled by John Caughie, is based on reviews and synopses in the main British and American trade journals, and is annotated with trade commentary to indicate how the trade perceived the ‘Scottishness’ of the films.
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Ladyga, Zuzanna. "Inertia and Not-Knowing in the Fiction of Donald Barthelme." In The Labour of Laziness in Twentieth-Century American Literature. Edinburgh University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474442923.003.0007.
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The chapter looks at Barthelme’s literary work through the prism of sloth/laziness variants such as inertia, nausea, and most importantly, Anton Ehrenzweig’s rendition of inoperativity via the concept of unconscious scanning. From Barthelme’s early renditions of the figure of the artist such as the Pollockian Paul in Snow White (1967), through avatars of passive artists in his short stories, to the half-dead-half-alive carcass of D.F. in The Dead Father (1975), there emerges a radical counter-Rosenbergian philosophy of action/inaction. No author of American postmodernism has done more to counteract the Rosenbergian post-Romantic idea of heightened sensibility of passive repose than did Barthelme. The purpose of this chapter is to bring the themes of inertia and sterēsis, understood by Barthelme as Ehrenzweig’s unconscious scanning, as unique insights into creative processes, insights which exceed the classical postmodern ethical and aesthetic regime
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Hantke, Steffen. "Traumatise, Repeat, Finish: Military Science Fiction (Long) after 9/11 and Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow (2014)." In American Cinema in the Shadow of 9/11. Edinburgh University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474413817.003.0016.
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The collection then concludes with Steffen Hantke's illuminating analysis of Doug Liman's Edge of Tomorrow from a variety of critical perspectives: discussing elements of self-reflexivity, star persona, the film's distinctly ludological central narrative conceit (on this point he offers an analysis of how this narrative strategy functions as a commentary on the idea of "getting it right the next time") to the melange of 'War on Terror' and 'greatest generation' themes presented throughout the film. Hantke makes the case that while it proved commercially underwhelming on original release, Edge of Tomorrow is worthy of critical reappraisal and analysis.
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Pak, Chris. "The American Pastoral and the Conquest of Space." In Terraforming. Liverpool University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.5949/liverpool/9781781382844.003.0003.
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This chapter analyses the American Pastoral in the first terraforming boom of the 1950s. Referencing Ernest J. Yanarella’s discussion of terraforming in The Cross, the Plow and the Skyline: Contemporary Science Fiction and the Ecological Imagination, this chapter begins with the image of the pioneer farmer that attracted westward expansion and its obverse, the portrayal of dystopian societies where the promise of the pastoral is co-opted. This section recalls the “Garden of the Chattel” image of American colonialism, in which pastoral themes sublimate and so conceal the historic fact of slavery that underlay agricultural production in the American South. The final section considers the propensity to extend human moral systems to aliens and how the pastoral and elements of the sublime converge to offer counter-narratives highlighting the ecological devastation caused by the human expansion into space.
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Uden, James. "Classical Idols and the Early American Gothic." In Spectres of Antiquity. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190910273.003.0006.
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The fifth chapter of the book moves across the Atlantic to consider the influential author of the early American Gothic, Charles Brockden Brown. Although scholars have examined classical themes in certain branches of his published work, this chapter gives the first comprehensive vision of classicism in Brown, taking into account his novels, short fiction, and periodical writing. Overall, his texts communicate a powerful skepticism about the status and value of antiquity in the new nation, although Brown himself is not reticent about demonstrating his own classical erudition. The chapter centers around readings of two of Brown’s novels: Wieland; or The Transformation (1798), with its sinister vision of superstitious reverence for the Roman orator Cicero, and Ormond (1799), which encourages readers to question the conservative, classicizing vision of American culture voiced by the novel’s own narrator, Sophia. Brown’s novels illustrate well what John C. Shields has called the “acceptance and denial” pattern of American classicism, in which writers assert their own status and learning through the use of classical literature and ideas, and yet simultaneously call for a progressive departure from desiccated European tradition. The Gothic is the perfect genre for capturing that contradiction, since it expresses in sinister terms the lingering power of history over contemporary minds.
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Cantor, Paul A. "Introduction." In Pop Culture and the Dark Side of the American Dream. University Press of Kentucky, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5810/kentucky/9780813177304.003.0001.
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While acknowledging that the American dream does have a bright side, the introduction explains why we can learn more by examining the portrayal of its dark side in popular culture. Works like the Godfather films and Breaking Bad reveal the inner contradictions and tragic tensions in the American dream. The introduction offers an overview of the book and sketches the ways the chapters build on each other, developing a set of common themes, such as self-invention and imposture. All the works point to the western frontier as the mythical space for American self-fulfillment. The chapter discusses the Western as the archetypal American genre and traces the ways it migrates to other genres, such as science fiction and the gangster story. All these genres offer alternatives to the everyday middle-class world that popular culture normally mirrors, and thereby they raise questions about a narrowly middle-class conception of the American dream.
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Hantke, Steffen. "A Bright New Future, With Monsters." In Monsters in the Machine. University Press of Mississippi, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496805652.003.0001.
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This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's key themes. This book focuses on American science fiction films of the 1950s, many of which are fondly remembered, yet critically dismissed. It argues that it is through the intersection of past and present, of unresolved trauma superimposed upon present anxieties, that 1950s science fiction films acquire topical relevance within their historical context. Science fiction films from the 1950s are a belated response to the national trauma of World War II and the Korean War projected onto the unsettling experience of the Cold War. With much of the critical work on the Cold War aspects of the films already delivered by other scholars, this book will weigh in on the side of the argument that has, as yet, remained critically neglected—the side of past trauma: on World War II and the Korean War, and their troubling legacy in the first decade of the American Century.
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Nava, Alejandro. "In Search of Soul." In In Search of Soul. University of California Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520293533.003.0002.
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This chapter follows Virginia Woolf's assessment of soul in Russian fiction, applying it instead to African American and Latin American traditions as its guiding spirits. It operates with an assumption that there is something wildly quixotic about its endurance in the modern world and something surprisingly revelatory in this foolish passion for the soul, something that can school the modern intelligence on the matters of the human spirit. The chapter suggests that we look at these themes and refrains on the soul in two major ways: first, with biblical and theological traditions in mind, and second, in the spirit of the profane, in which “soul” becomes synonymous with exuberant styles, cultures, literatures, and, above all, the powerful currents of music.