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Culture Concept: Writing and Difference in the Age of Realism

Paperback / softback

Main Details

Title Culture Concept: Writing and Difference in the Age of Realism
Authors and Contributors      By (author) Michael A. Elliott
SeriesCritical American Studies
Physical Properties
Format:Paperback / softback
Pages:272
Dimensions(mm): Height 229,Width 149
Category/GenreAnthologies
Literary studies - c 1800 to c 1900
ISBN/Barcode 9780816639724
ClassificationsDewey:810.9896073
Audience
Undergraduate
General

Publishing Details

Publisher University of Minnesota Press
Imprint University of Minnesota Press
Publication Date 19 September 2002
Publication Country United States

Description

"Culture" is a term we commonly use to explain the differences in our ways of living. In this book Michael A. Elliott returns to the moment this usage was first articulated, tracing the concept of culture to the writings -- folktales, dialect literature, local color sketches, and ethnographies -- that provided its intellectual underpinnings in turn-of-the-century America.The Culture Concept explains how this now-familiar definition of "culture" emerged during the late nineteenth century through the intersection of two separate endeavors that shared a commitment to recording group-based difference -- American literary realism and scientific ethnography. Elliott looks at early works of cultural studies as diverse as the conjure tales of Charles Chesnutt, the Ghost-Dance ethnography of James Mooney, and the prose narrative of the Omaha anthropologist-turned-author Francis La Flesche. His reading of these works -- which struggle to find appropriate theoretical and textual tools for articulating a less chauvinistic understanding of human difference -- is at once a recovery of a lost connection between American literary realism and ethnography and a productive inquiry into the usefulness of the culture concept as a critical tool in our time and times to come.