Nightmare Envy and Other Stories: American Culture and European Reconstruction

Author:   George Blaustein (Assistant Professor, Assistant Professor, Amsterdam University)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press Inc
ISBN:  

9780190209216


Pages:   296
Publication Date:   22 March 2018
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   To order   Availability explained
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.

Our Price $101.95 Quantity:  
Add to Cart

Share |

Nightmare Envy and Other Stories: American Culture and European Reconstruction


Add your own review!

Overview

"What has it meant to be an Americanist? What did it mean to be an Americanist through fascism, war, and occupation? Nightmare Envy and Other Stories is a study of Americanist writing and institutions in the 20th century. Four chapters trace four routes through the mid-twentieth century. The first chapter is the hidden history of American Studies in the United States, Europe and Japan. The second is the strange career of ""national character"" in anthropology. The third is a contest between military occupation and cultural diplomacy in Europe. The fourth is the emergence and fate of the ""American Renaissance,"" as the scholar and literary critic F.O. Matthiessen carried a canon of radical literature across the Iron Curtain. Each chapter culminates in the postwar period, when the ruin of postwar Europe led writers and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic to understand America in new ways. Many of our modern myths of the United States and Europe were formed in this moment. Some saw the United States assume the mantle of cultural redeemer. Others saw a stereotypical America, rich in civilization but poor in culture, overtake a stereotypical Europe, rich in culture and equally rich in disaster. Drawing on American and European archives, the book weaves cultural, intellectual, and diplomatic history, with portraits of Matthiessen, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, David Riesman, Alfred Kazin, and Ralph Ellison. It excavates the history of the Salzburg Seminar in American Civilization, where displaced persons, former Nazis, budding Communists, and glad-handing Americans met on the common ground of American culture. Others found keys to their own contexts in American books, reading Moby-Dick in the ruins. Nightmare Envy and Other Stories chronicles American encounters with European disaster, European encounters with American fiction, and the chasms over which culture had to reach."

Full Product Details

Author:   George Blaustein (Assistant Professor, Assistant Professor, Amsterdam University)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press Inc
Imprint:   Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions:   Width: 23.40cm , Height: 1.80cm , Length: 16.00cm
Weight:   0.440kg
ISBN:  

9780190209216


ISBN 10:   0190209216
Pages:   296
Publication Date:   22 March 2018
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Undergraduate
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order   Availability explained
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.

Table of Contents

Introduction Chapter 1: Americanists in Unexpected Places Chapter 2: The Predicament of National Character Chapter 3: Pictures from an Institution: The Salzburg Seminar & Postwar Mitteleuropa Chapter 4: To the Heart of Europe: F.O. Matthiessen's Baedeker Epilogue Bibliography

Reviews

Does the 'American Dream' also rest on a secret yearning for catastrophe? Addressing this question in four elegantly and breezily narrated 'stories, ' George Blaustein's Nightmare Envy succeeds brilliantly in recasting our understanding of the democratization of Germany after World War II and the so-called 'Americanization' of Europe. --Werner Sollors, Harvard University, author of The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s Just after World War II, when the US was a shiny new global power, American Studies was fashioned as therapy for a ruined world. Now that the United States is exhibit A in a newly ruined world, George Blaustein offers a well-timed and insightful reappraisal of that earlier moment of odd American trauma-envy. --Joyce Chaplin, Harvard University


Does the 'American Dream' also rest on a secret yearning for catastrophe? Addressing this question in four elegantly and breezily narrated 'stories, ' George Blaustein's Nightmare Envy succeeds brilliantly in recasting our understanding of the democratization of Germany after World War II and the so-called 'Americanization' of Europe. --Werner Sollors, Harvard University, author of The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s Just after World War II, when the US was a shiny new global power, American Studies was fashioned as therapy for a ruined world. Now that the United States is exhibit A in a newly ruined world, George Blaustein offers a well-timed and insightful reappraisal of that earlier moment of odd American trauma-envy. --Joyce Chaplin, Harvard University


Author Information

George Blaustein is Assistant Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Amsterdam.

Tab Content 6

Author Website:  

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

No review item found!

Add your own review!

Countries Available

All regions
Latest Reading Guide

MRG2025CC

 

Shopping Cart
Your cart is empty
Shopping cart
Mailing List