Regionalism And Realism

Drawing on the history of state and local government in the New York Tri-State metropolitan region, the authors present a pathbreaking new theory about the values reformers must understand and balance in order to tackle the hard challenges of reforming and regionalizing local governance in the complex, dynamic world of American politics and public policy. Their examination of the way 2,179 local governments in the Tri-State region have evolved over more than a century pays special attention to New York City, but is applicable to other metropolitan areas. It brings to life ideas that are crucial to a subject that in the academic literature is often treated in a way that is abstract and hard to grasp. This is a valuable book for scholars, political leaders, and students interested in regionalism in metropolitan America and in the fascinating history and governance of the nation¡¯s largest city and its vast metropolitan region.

Drawing on the history of state and local government in the New York Tri-State metropolitan region, the authors present a pathbreaking new theory about the values reformers must understand and balance in order to tackle the hard challenges of reforming and regionalizing local governance in the complex, dynamic world of American politics and public policy. Their examination of the way 2,179 local governments in the Tri-State region have evolved over more than a century pays special attention to New York City, but is applicable to other metropolitan areas. It brings to life ideas that are crucial to a subject that in the academic literature is often treated in a way that is abstract and hard to grasp. This is a valuable book for scholars, political leaders, and students interested in regionalism in metropolitan America and in the fascinating history and governance of the nation¡¯s largest city and its vast metropolitan region.

Explores the social, cultural, and historical contexts of American literature from 1860 to 1910.

A series of handbooks provides strategies for studying and writing about frequently taught literary topics, with each volume offering study guides, background information, suggestions for areas of research, and a list of secondary sources.

Completely revised and updated. Chapters have been rewritten. Also added in a substantial new chapter on contemporary Maori and Pacific Island painting, as well as an acknowledgement of the coming wave of Asian artists.

Reading for Realism presents a new approach to U.S. literary history that is based on the analysis of dominant reading practices rather than on the production of texts. Nancy Glazener's focus is the realist novel, the most influential literary form of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--a form she contends was only made possible by changes in the expectations of readers about pleasure and literary value. By tracing readers' collaboration in the production of literary forms, Reading for Realism turns nineteenth-century controversies about the realist, romance, and sentimental novels into episodes in the history of readership. It also shows how works of fiction by Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others participated in the debates about literary classification and reading that, in turn, created and shaped their audiences. Combining reception theory with a materialist analysis of the social formations in which realist reading practices circulated, Glazener's study reveals the elitist underpinnings of literary realism. At the book's center is the Atlantic group of magazines, whose influence was part of the cultural machinery of the Northeastern urban bourgeoisie and crucial to the development of literary realism in America. Glazener shows how the promotion of realism by this group of publications also meant a consolidation of privilege--primarily in terms of class, gender, race, and region--for the audience it served. Thus American realism, so often portrayed as a quintessentially populist form, actually served to enforce existing structures of class and power.