Author: Megan E. Abbott File Type: pdf This book considers a recurrent figure in American literature the solitary white man moving through urban space. The descendent of 19th-century frontier and western heroes, the figure reemerges in 1930s-50s America as the tough guy. The Street Was Mine looks to the tough guy in the works of hardboiled novelists Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep) and James M. Cain (Double Indemnity) and their popular film noir adaptations. Focusing on the way he negotiates racial and gender otherness, this study argues that the tough guy embodies the promise of an impervious white masculinity amidst the turmoil of the Depression through the beginnings of the Cold War. The book concludes with an analysis of Chester Himes, whose Harlem crime novels (For Love of Imabelle) unleash a ferocious revisionary critique of the tough guy tradition.ReviewAlthough more revisionist than feminist, this book does damage to white boys.--A. Hirsh, ChoiceAbout the AuthorMegan E. Abbott is Assistant Professor of English at State University of New York-Oswego.

Author: Wendy Dasler Johnson File Type: pdf At a time when a woman speaking before a mixed-gender audience risked acquiring the label promiscuous, thousands of women presented their views about social or moral issues through sentimental poetry, a blend of affect with intellect that allowed their participation in public debate. Bridging literary and rhetorical histories, traditional and semiotic interpretations,Antebellum American Womens Poetry A Rhetoric of Sentimentexplores an often overlooked, yet significant and persuasive preCivil War American discourse. Considering the logos, ethos, and pathosaims, writing personae, and audience appealof poems by African American abolitionist Frances Watkins Harper, working-class prophet Lydia Huntley Sigourney, and feminist socialite Julia Ward Howe, Wendy Dasler Johnson demonstrates that sentimental poetry was an inportant component of antebellum social activism. She articulates the ethos of the poems of Harper, who presents herself as a properly domestic black woman, nevertheless stepping boldly into Northern pulpits to insist slavery be abolished the poetry of Sigourney, whose speaker is a feisty, working-class, ambiguously gendered prophet and the works of Howe, who juggles her fame as the reformist Battle Hymn lyricist and motherhood of five children with an erotic Continental sentimentalism. Antebellum American Womens Poetrymakes a strong case for restoration of a compelling system of persuasion through poetry usually dismissed from studies of rhetoric. This remarkable book will change the way we think about womens rhetoric in the nineteenth century, inviting readers to hear and respond to urgent, muffled appeals for justice in our own day.**ReviewWendy Dasler Johnson reverses the condemnation of mid-nineteenth-century women poets by studying the poetry as a category of rhetoricas textbooks of the time claimedrevealing a rhetoric designed to shape public sentiment in a culture that believed morality was motivated by feeling. Johnson reclaims popular women poets and a rhetoric of sentiment as seriously political. Situated in a broad context of canonical poets, political movements, and recent scholarship on pathos and on womens rhetoric, passionately argued, this book is a virtuoso performance.Jane Donawerth, author of Conversational Rhetoric The Rise and Fall of a Womens Tradition, 16001900, editor of Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900 About the Author Wendy Dasler Johnson is an associate professor of English at Washington State University Vancouver whose writing and research focus on women and cultural rhetorics. She has published articles in Rhetoric Review,South Atlantic Review,Rhetorica, Journal of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, and other journals.