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
This book focuses on the experience of the Californian Gold Rush of 1849–1850, not in terms of what happened (a subject much covered by historians) but in terms of how people of various levels of sophistication wrote about it. Drawing on a variety of sources - diaries, journals, letters, and contemporary journalism - Dr Fender explores how both amateur and professional writers attempted to come to terms with the physical wilderness of the transcontinental landscape and the social wilderness of early California. Dr Fender has produced an intriguing and highly readable book, which should prove fascinating not only to a wide range of students in the field of American studies but also to non-specialists who are interested in nineteenth-century American literary and cultural history.
Working through close rhetorical analysis of everything from fiction and journalism to documents and documentaries, this book looks at how popular memory favors the country Depression over the economi
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
It started with an attack on a research station near the frontier region, the furthest portion of the Outer Sphere of Unified space. Then, one by one, subsequent border systems began to fall victim to
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
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
Walden is Thoreau's classic autobiographical account of his experiment in solitary living, his refusal to play by the rules of hard work and the accumulation of wealth, and above all the freedom it g
