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David Wyatt - Secret Histories: Reading Twentieth-Century American Literature - 9780801897122 - V9780801897122
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Secret Histories: Reading Twentieth-Century American Literature

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Description for Secret Histories: Reading Twentieth-Century American Literature Paperback. And discovering a usable American past, as Wyatt shows, enables us to confront the urgencies of our present moment. Num Pages: 424 pages. BIC Classification: 1KBB; 2AB; DSBH. Category: (UP) Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly; (UU) Undergraduate. Dimension: 235 x 155 x 25. Weight in Grams: 589.
Secret Histories claims that the history of the nation is hidden-in plain sight-within the pages of twentieth-century American literature. David Wyatt argues that the nation's fiction and nonfiction expose a "secret history" that cuts beneath the "straight histories" of our official accounts. And it does so by revealing personal stories of love, work, family, war, and interracial romance as they were lived out across the decades of the twentieth century. Wyatt reads authors both familiar and neglected, examining "double consciousness" in the post-Civil War era through works by Charles W. Chesnutt, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington. He reveals aspects of the Depression in the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anzia Yezierska, and John Steinbeck. Period by period, Wyatt's nuanced readings recover the felt sense of life as it was lived, opening surprising dimensions of the critical issues of a given time. The rise of the women's movement, for example, is revivified in new appraisals of works by Eudora Welty, Ann Petry, and Mary McCarthy. Running through the examination of individual works and times is Wyatt's argument about reading itself. Reading is not a passive activity but an empathetic act of cocreation, what Faulkner calls "overpassing to love." Empathetic reading recognizes and relives the emotional, cultural, and political dimensions of an individual and collective past. And discovering a usable American past, as Wyatt shows, enables us to confront the urgencies of our present moment.

Product Details

Format
Paperback
Publication date
2010
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press
Number of pages
424
Condition
New
Number of Pages
424
Place of Publication
Baltimore, MD, United States
ISBN
9780801897122
SKU
V9780801897122
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-15

About David Wyatt
David Wyatt is a professor of English at the University of Maryland.

Reviews for Secret Histories: Reading Twentieth-Century American Literature
A useful introduction to a broad canon of 20th-century authors, this book touches on important issues in literary-historical scholarship and uses clear, conversational language deliberately devoid of jargon; a distinctive feature of the discussion is Wyatt's pointed use of a first-person personal voice that blends his autobiographical insights with his critical readings... Highly recommended. Choice 2011

Goodreads reviews for Secret Histories: Reading Twentieth-Century American Literature


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