Joan Shelley Rubin – författare

Listen to a short interview with Joan Shelley RubinHost: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & CraneIn the years between 1880 and 1950, Americans recited poetry at family gatherings, school assemblies, church services, camp outings, and civic affairs. As they did so, they invested poems--and the figure of the poet--with the beliefs, values, and emotions that they experienced in those settings.Reciting a poem together with others joined the individual to the community in a special and memorable way. In a strikingly original and rich portrait of the uses of verse in America, Joan Shelley Rubin shows how the sites and practices of reciting poetry influenced readers' lives and helped them to find meaning in a poet's words.Emphasizing the cultural circumstances that influenced the production and reception of poets and poetry in this country, Rubin recovers the experiences of ordinary people reading poems in public places. We see the recent immigrant seeking acceptance, the schoolchild eager to be integrated into the class, the mourner sharing grief at a funeral, the grandparent trying to bridge the generation gap--all instances of readers remaking texts to meet social and personal needs. Preserving the moral, romantic, and sentimental legacies of the nineteenth century, the act of reading poems offered cultural continuity, spiritual comfort, and pleasure. Songs of Ourselves is a unique history of literary texts as lived experience. By blurring the boundaries between "high" and "popular" poetry as well as between modern and traditional, it creates a fuller, more democratic way of studying our poetic language and ourselves.

The proliferation of book clubs, reading groups, ""outline"" volumes, and new forms of book reviewing in the first half of the twentieth century influenced the tastes and pastimes of millions of Americans. Joan Rubin here provides the first comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon, the rise of American middlebrow culture, and the values encompassed by it. Rubin centers her discussion on five important expressions of the middlebrow: the founding of the Book-of-the-Month Club; the beginnings of ""great books"" programs; the creation of the New York Herald Tribune 's book-review section; the popularity of such works as Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy ; and the emergence of literary radio programs. She also investigates the lives and expectations of the individuals who shaped these middlebrow institutions--such figures as Stuart Pratt Sherman, Irita Van Doren, Henry Seidel Canby, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, John Erskine, William Lyon Phelps, Alexander Woollcott, and Clifton Fadiman. Moreover, as she pursues the significance of these cultural intermediaries who connected elites and the masses by interpreting ideas to the public, Rubin forces a reconsideration of the boundary between high culture and popular sensibility.

The career of Constance Rourke (1885-1941) is one of the richest examples of the American writer's search for a ""usable past."" In this first full-length study of Rourke, Joan Shelley Rubin establishes the context for Rourke's defense of American culture -- the controversies that engaged her, the books that influenced her thinking, the premises that lay beneath her vocabulary. With the aid of Rourke's unpublished papers, the author explores her responses to issues that were compelling for her generation of intellectuals: the critique of America as materialistic and provincial; the demand for native traditions in the arts; the modern understanding of the nature of culture and myth; and the question of a critic's role in a democracy.Rourke's writings demonstrate that America did not suffer, as Van Wyck Brooks and others had maintained, from a damaging split between ""high-brow"" and ""low-brow"" but was rather a rich, unified culture in which the arts could thrive. Her classic American Humor (1931) and her biographies of Lotta Crabtree, Davy Crockett, Audubon, and Charles Sheeler celebrate the American as mythmaker. To foster what she called the ""possession"" of the national heritage, she used an evocative prose style accessible to a wide audience and depicted the frontier in more abstract terms than did other contempoaray scholars. Her commitment to social reform, acquired in her youth and strengthened at Vassar in the Progressive era, informed her sense of the function of criticism and guided her political activites in the 1930s.Drawing together Rourke's varied discussions of popular heroes, comic lore, literature, and art, Rubin illuminates the delicate balances and sometimes contradictory arguments underlying Rourke's description of America's cultural patterns. She also analyzes the way Rourke's encounters with the ideas of Van Wyck Brooks, Ruth Benedict, Jane Harrison, Bernard DeVoto, and Lewis Mumford shaped her view of America's achievements and possibilities. Rourke emerges not simply as a follower of Brooks or as a colleague of De Voto, nor even as an antiquarian or folklorist. Rather, she assumes her own unique and proper place -- as a pioneer who, more than anyone else of her day, boldly and eloquently showed Americans that they had the resources necessary for the future of both art and society. By placing Constance Rourke within the framework of a debate about the nature of American culture, the author makes a notable contribution to American intellectual history.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

The fifth volume of A History of the Book in America addresses the economic, social, and cultural shifts affecting print culture from World War II to the present. During this period factors such as the expansion of government, the growth of higher education, the climate of the Cold War, globalization, and the development of multimedia and digital technologies influenced the patterns of consolidation and diversification established earlier.The thirty-three contributors to the volume explore the evolution of the publishing industry and the business of bookselling. The histories of government publishing, law and policy, the periodical press, literary criticism, and reading--in settings such as schools, libraries, book clubs, self-help programs, and collectors' societies--receive imaginative scrutiny as well. The Enduring Book demonstrates that the corporate consolidations of the last half-century have left space for the independent publisher, that multiplicity continues to define American print culture, and that even in the digital age, the book endures.Contributors:David Abrahamson, Northwestern UniversityJames L. Baughman, University of Wisconsin-MadisonKenneth Cmiel (d. 2006)James Danky, University of Wisconsin-MadisonRobert DeMaria Jr., Vassar CollegeDonald A. Downs, University of Wisconsin-MadisonRobert W. Frase (d. 2003)Paul C. Gutjahr, Indiana UniversityDavid D. Hall, Harvard Divinity SchoolJohn B. Hench, American Antiquarian SocietyPatrick Henry, New York City College of TechnologyDan Lacy (d. 2001)Marshall Leaffer, Indiana UniversityBruce Lewenstein, Cornell UniversityElizabeth Long, Rice UniversityBeth Luey, Arizona State UniversityTom McCarthy, Beirut, LebanonLaura J. Miller, Brandeis UniversityPriscilla Coit Murphy, Chapel Hill, N.C.David Paul Nord, Indiana UniversityCarol Polsgrove, Indiana UniversityDavid Reinking, Clemson UniversityJane Rhodes, Macalester CollegeJohn V. Richardson Jr., University of California, Los AngelesJoan Shelley Rubin, University of RochesterMichael Schudson, University of California, San Diego, and Columbia UniversityLinda Scott, University of OxfordDan Simon, Seven Stories PressIlan Stavans, Amherst CollegeHarvey M. Teres, Syracuse UniversityJohn B. Thompson, University of CambridgeTrysh Travis, University of FloridaJonathan Zimmerman, New York University