Alan Trachtenberg

Lincoln's Smile and Other Enigmas (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

A new assemblage of masterly essays from a foremost scholar of American history and culture

Alan Trachtenberg has always been interested in cultural artifacts that register meanings and feelings that Americans share even when they disagree about them. Some of the most beloved ones-like the famous last photograph of Abraham Lincoln, taken at the time of his second inaugural-are downright puzzling, and it is their obscure, riddlelike aspects that draw his attention in the scintillating essays of Lincoln's Smile and Other Enigmas.

With matchless authority, Trachtenberg moves from the daguerreotypes that entranced Americans from the start (and that Hawthorne made much of in The House of Seven Gables) to literary texts of which he is a peerless interpreter: Howell's novels, Horatio Alger's stories, Huckleberry Finn, the cityscapes of Walt Whitman and Stephen Crane. In his exploration of the ways that nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century writers tried to make sense of the modern American city he also addresses subjects as diverse as Louis Sullivan's Auditorium Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the early works of Lewis Mumford. The celebrated author of Reading American Photographs concludes his important new book with "readings" not only of the photographs of Walker Evans, Wright Morris, and Eugene Smith, but of the city images of film noir.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Seitenzahl: 400
• Erscheinungstermin: 22. Januar 2008
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781429923422
• Artikelnr.: 40023005

Autorenporträt

Alan Trachtenberg

Inhaltsangabe

1 Mirror in the Marketplace: American Responses to the Daguerreotype,
1839-51
2 Mute Romance: Stories of a Daguerreotype
3 Seeing and Believing: Hawthorne's Reflections on the Daguerreotype in The
House of the Seven Gables
4 Lincoln's Smile: Ambiguities of the Face in Photography
5 Photographs as Symbolic History
6 Whitman's Lesson of the City
7 Reading the Gilded Age City
8 Horzatio Alger's Ragged Dick
9 The Form of Freedom in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
10 Experiments in Another Country: Stephen Crane's City Sketches
11 Civic Idealism in Stone: Louis Sullivan's Auditorium Building
12 Mumford in the 1920s: The Historian as Artist
13 Brooklyn Bridge as a Cultural Text
14 Photography/Cinematography
15 The FSA File: From Image to Story
16 Walker Evans's Fictions of the South
17 W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh: Rumors of a City
18 Realms of Shadow: Film Noir and the City
19 Things on Film: Wright Morris's Fields of Vision