Ed White - Böcker

Roland Barthes is one of the most influential cultural theorists of the postwar period and Image-Music-Text collects his most influential essays. Ed White provides students with a clear guide to this essential but difficult text.As students are increasingly expected to write across a range of media, Barthes' work can be understood as an early mapping of what we now call interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary study. The book's detailed section-by-section readings makes Barthes' most important writings accessible to undergraduate readers.This book is a perfect companion for teaching and learning Barthes' ideas in cultural studies and literary theory.

Roland Barthes is one of the most influential cultural theorists of the postwar period and Image-Music-Text collects his most influential essays. Ed White provides students with a clear guide to this essential but difficult text.As students are increasingly expected to write across a range of media, Barthes' work can be understood as an early mapping of what we now call interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary study. The book's detailed section-by-section readings makes Barthes' most important writings accessible to undergraduate readers.This book is a perfect companion for teaching and learning Barthes' ideas in cultural studies and literary theory.

What would an account of early America look like if it were based on examining rural insurrections or Native American politics instead of urban republican literature? Offering a new interpretation of eighteenth-century America, The Backcountry and the City focuses on the agrarian majority as distinct from the elite urban minority. Ed White explores the backcountry-city divide as well as the dynamics of indigenous peoples, bringing together two distinct bodies of scholarship: one stressing the political culture of the Revolutionary era, the other taking an ethnohistorical view of white–Native American contact. White concentrates his study in Pennsylvania, a state in which the majority of the population was rural, and in Philadelphia, a city that was a center of publishing and politics and the national capital for a decade. Against this backdrop, White reads classic political texts such as Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, Franklin's Autobiography, and Paine's "Agrarian Justice," alongside missionary and captivity narratives, farmers' petitions, and Native American treaties. Using historical and ethnographic sources to enrich familiar texts, White demonstrates the importance of rural areas in the study of U.S. nation formation and finds unexpected continuities between the early colonial period and the federal ascendancy of the 1790s. Ed White is associate professor of English at the University of Florida.

It was only after serving as a chaplain in the American Revolution, playing an important role in the Whiskey Rebellion, and serving (often controversially) on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, that Hugh Henry Brackenridge composed his great comic epic. Published in installments over the twenty-eight–year period beginning with Washington's presidency ending with that of Madison, this irreverent and ribald novel, relating the misadventures of Captain Farrago and his sidekick, Teague O'Regan, leaves no major ethnic, racial, religious, or political issue of the period unscathed.

It was only after serving as a chaplain in the American Revolution, playing an important role in the Whiskey Rebellion, and serving (often controversially) on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, that Hugh Henry Brackenridge composed his great comic epic. Published in installments over the twenty-eight–year period beginning with Washington's presidency ending with that of Madison, this irreverent and ribald novel, relating the misadventures of Captain Farrago and his sidekick, Teague O'Regan, leaves no major ethnic, racial, religious, or political issue of the period unscathed.

InAmerican political fantasy, the Founding Fathers loom large, at once historicaland mythical figures. In The Traumatic Colonel, Michael J. Drexler andEd White examine the Founders as imaginative fictions, characters in thespecifically literary sense, whose significance emerged from narrative elementsclustered around them. From the revolutionary era through the 1790s, the Founderstook shape as a significant cultural system for thinking about politics, race,and sexuality. Yet after 1800, amid the pressures of the Louisiana Purchase andthe Haitian Revolution, this system could no longer accommodate the deepanxieties about the United States as a slave nation.Drexlerand White assert that the most emblematic of the political tensions of the timeis the figure of Aaron Burr, whose rise and fall were detailed in theliterature of his time: his electoral tie with Thomas Jefferson in 1800,the accusations of seduction, the notorious duel with Alexander Hamilton, hismachinations as the schemer of a breakaway empire, and his spectacular treasontrial. The authors venture a psychoanalytically-informed exploration of post-revolutionaryAmerica to suggest that the figure of "Burr" was fundamentally a displacedfantasy for addressing the Haitian Revolution. Drexler and White expose how thehistorical and literary fictions of the nation's founding served to repress thelarger issue of the slave system and uncover the Burr myth as the crux of thatrepression. Exploring early American novels, such as the works of CharlesBrockden Brown and Tabitha Gilman Tenney, as well as the pamphlets, polemics,tracts, and biographies of the early republican period, the authors speculatethat this flourishing of political writing illuminates the notorious gap inU.S. literary history between 1800 and 1820.

InAmerican political fantasy, the Founding Fathers loom large, at once historicaland mythical figures. In The Traumatic Colonel, Michael J. Drexler andEd White examine the Founders as imaginative fictions, characters in thespecifically literary sense, whose significance emerged from narrative elementsclustered around them. From the revolutionary era through the 1790s, the Founderstook shape as a significant cultural system for thinking about politics, race,and sexuality. Yet after 1800, amid the pressures of the Louisiana Purchase andthe Haitian Revolution, this system could no longer accommodate the deepanxieties about the United States as a slave nation.Drexlerand White assert that the most emblematic of the political tensions of the timeis the figure of Aaron Burr, whose rise and fall were detailed in theliterature of his time: his electoral tie with Thomas Jefferson in 1800,the accusations of seduction, the notorious duel with Alexander Hamilton, hismachinations as the schemer of a breakaway empire, and his spectacular treasontrial. The authors venture a psychoanalytically-informed exploration of post-revolutionaryAmerica to suggest that the figure of "Burr" was fundamentally a displacedfantasy for addressing the Haitian Revolution. Drexler and White expose how thehistorical and literary fictions of the nation's founding served to repress thelarger issue of the slave system and uncover the Burr myth as the crux of thatrepression. Exploring early American novels, such as the works of CharlesBrockden Brown and Tabitha Gilman Tenney, as well as the pamphlets, polemics,tracts, and biographies of the early republican period, the authors speculatethat this flourishing of political writing illuminates the notorious gap inU.S. literary history between 1800 and 1820.