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Events
Jan. 9 | Call for papers: Identities and Technocultures
A 2-day conference about American culture and technologies that examines how new technologies dominate and define Americaness in the US and abroad. Co-sponsored by the University of Iowa Center for Ethnic Studies and the Arts (CESA) and the Mid-America American Studies Association (MAASA).
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Casper, Scott Evan. "Constructing American Lives: The Cultural History of Biography in Nineteenth-Century America," Yale University, May 1992. Advisor: Richard H. Brodhead (2, 11, 12)
After examining biography-reading through library records and diaries, this dissertation explores the constructions and uses of biography in nineteenth-century culture. Biographers shaped concepts of history, the public, and the individual. According to authors and critics, biography provided models for post-Revolutionary republican citizens and Jacksonian “self-made men.“ Analyses of campaign biographies and female memoirs suggest the cultural purposes of formulaic narratives; case studies of Hawthorne’s Life of Pierce (1852) and Elizabeth Ellet’s Women of the American Revolution (1848) reveal authorial innovation between literary cultures. By 1860 critics redefined biography as literary art, denigrating popular biographical practice and presaging modern biographical criticism.
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