Feminization of Am Cult
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Book Overview
This modern classic by one of our leading scholars seeks to explain the values prevalent in today's mass culture by tracing them back to their roots in the Victorian era. As religion lost its hold on the public mind, clergymen and educated women, powerless and insignificant in the society of the time, together exerted a profound effect on the only areas open to their influence: the arts and literature. Women wrote books that idealized the very qualities that kept them powerless: timidity, piety, and a disdain for competition. Sentimental values that permeated popular literature continue to influence modern culture, preoccupied as it is with glamour, banal melodrama, and mindless consumption. This new paperback edition, with a new Preface, will reach yet more readers with its persuasive and provocative theory. Richard Bernstein of "The New York Times "said: "Her remarkable scholarship is going to set the standard for a long time to come."
Format:Hardcover
Language:English
ISBN:0394405323
ISBN13:9780394405322
Release Date:May 1977
Publisher:Alfred A. Knopf
Length:403 Pages
Weight:1.25 lbs.
Customer Reviews
2 ratings
A Unique and Important Study
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 16 years ago
This book was a revelation to me. It was also a bit more than I could chew, and though I did finish the book, I wish now that I had held on to it to refer to later. I agree with an earlier comment that the bio of Margaret Fuller is a great perk to this volume. If you read this book, and then observe the shenanigans of the press and street talk surrounding Hillary and the 2008 election, you'll have a much clearer picture of what is driving the misogynystic views of so many women in this country today. I think the book's premise also helps explain how characters counter to the advancement of women such as Ann Coulter or Phyllis Schlafly come about, and particularly, why they have such a devoted following among other women. The book is extremely complex and unravels like a mystery novel. It was obvious to me in just a few pages that it would require my full attention. It is not easy reading, but it is important reading.
masterly
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 21 years ago
One can only imagine the work that has gone into this staggering piece of intellectual history - whose axis is the unforeseeable and fateful rise of the female public in American intellectual life, and contemporaneously the collapse of the old, muscular style of Protestant religiosity and intellect - from the kind and number of sources the author uses. She has apparently trawled through reams and piles of obscure newspapers and magazines, familiarized herself with writing most of us would be glad to avoid, learned to distinguish the various strands of an intellectual and publishing life which is, to modern America, as alien as imperial China or early Sumer. The result is tremendous: not only a resurrection of a past age that does it honour and justice (if anything, one seems to perceive, in this female scholar, a certain sympathy - even nostalgia - for the utra-male, activist, iron-faced world of the old Puritan thinkers, post-Jonathan Edwards and his likes), but a flood of light on the origins of our (not exclusively American) world and society. This simply cannot be praised too much; future historians will not be able to prescind from it.
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