Jackson Pollock, Georgia O'Keeffe, Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, and Laurie Anderson are just some of the major American artists of the twentieth century. From the 1893 Chicago World's Fair to the 2000 Whitney Biennial, a rapid succession of art movements and different styles reflected the extreme changes in American culture and society, as well as America's position within the international art world. This exciting new look at twentieth century American art explores the relationships between American art, museums, and audiences in the century that came to be called the 'American century'. Extending beyond New York, it covers the emergence of Feminist art in Los Angeles in the 1970s; the Black art movement; the expansion of galleries and art schools; and the highly political public controversies surrounding arts funding. All the key movements are fully discussed, including early American Modernism, the New Negro movement, Regionalism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Neo-Expressionism.

This Concise Companion gives readers a rich sense of how thepoetry produced in the United States during the twentieth centuryis connected to the country’s intellectual life more broadly. Helps readers to fully appreciate the poetry of the period bytracing its historical and cultural contexts. Written by prominent specialists in the field. Places the poetry of the period within contexts such as: war;feminism and the female poet; poetries of immigration andmigration; communism and anti-communism; philosophy andtheory. Each chapter ranges across the entire century, comparing poetsfrom one part of the century to those of another. New syntheses make the volume of interest to scholars as wellas students and general readers.

Written by a leading critic, this invigorating introduction to modernist American poetry conveys the excitement that can be generated by a careful reading of modernist poems. Encourages readers to identify with the modernists’ sense of the revolutionary possibilities of their art. Embraces four generations of modernist American poets up through to the 1980s. Gives readers a sense of the ambitions, the disillusionments and the continuities of modernist poetry. Includes close readings of particular poems which show how readers can use these works to connect with what concerns them.

THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN FICTION Accessibly structured with entries on important historical contexts, central issues, key texts and the major writers, this Handbook provides an engaging overview of twentieth-century American fiction. Featured writers range from Henry James and Theodore Dreiser to contemporary figures such as Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Pynchon, and Sherman Alexie, and analyses of key works include The Great Gatsby, Lolita, The Color Purple, and The Joy Luck Club, among others. Relevant contexts for these works, such as the impact of Hollywood, the expatriate scene in the 1920s, and the political unrest of the 1960s are also explored, and their importance discussed. This is a stimulating overview of twentieth-century American fiction, offering invaluable guidance and essential information for students and general readers.

"Harrowing in their frank detail and desperate tone, the selections in this anthology pack an emotional wallop...Should be required reading for anyone concerned about the violence in our society and the high rate of recidivism."—Publishers Weekly. Includes work by: Jack London, Nelson Algren, Chester Himes,Jack Henry Abbott, Robert Lowell, Malcolm X, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Piri Thomas.

Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America revolutionizes how we think about confession and its ubiquitous place in American culture. It argues that the sheer act of labeling a text a confession has become one of the most powerful, and most overlooked, forms of intervening in American cultural politics. In the twentieth century alone, the genre of confession has profoundly shaped (and been shaped by) six of America’s most intractable cultural issues: sexuality, class, race, violence, religion, and democracy.

Now available in a new paperback edition, this survey is different in both breadth and scope from all other reports on sexuality in the United States. It covers every topic imaginable, from a multicultural point of view, in order to reflect fully the complex society in which we live: the biological, psychological, social, and spiritual aspects of our sexual lives.

Through moments of social protest, policy debate, and popular mobilization, this book follows the campaign for economic democracy and the fight for full employment in the United States. Starting in the 1930s, Dennis explores its intellectual and philosophical underpinnings, the class struggle that determined the fate of legislation and the role of left-wing civil rights activists in its revival. Demonstrating how the campaign for full employment intersected with movements for women's liberation and civil rights, it explores how social groups and oppressed minorities interpreted and appropriated the promise of full employment. For many, full employment provided an indispensable path to racial and gender emancipation. In this book, Dennis uncovers the class dimensions and the resistance to full employment in the US. He demonstrates how the recurring debates over full employment consistently exposed the contradictions inherent in a capitalist society and challenged the assertion that an allegedly free enterprise system automatically generated employment for all.

If America has been an unsympathetic environment for conservatism, conservatism has, nevertheless, demonstrated an extraordinary tenacity in politics, literature, law, religion, economics, and social thought. Conservatism forms a dissent within the liberal tradition, and also deserves a hearing from any serious student of American history. William F. Buckley, Jr. brought this issue to the forefront in this outstanding collection featuring some of the greatest political thinkers of the twentieth century.This volume illuminates many aspects of the elusive 'conservatism' of which so much has been written, and helps to explain why it is that conservatism survives in politics, economics, social sciences, and the arts. Buckley has drawn from the works of renowned scholars and from those of relatively obscure figures, whose contributions he persuasively puts forward as deeply influential in the crystallization of modern conservative thought.This collection of essays begins by analyzing the history and background of American institutions. It then goes on to inspect strong American presumption in favor of the private sector and the nature of specific challenges to modern society, as well as the response of conservative thought and analysis to those challenges. Pluralists will welcome the approach in this book, and others will be excited by prestigious authors.