The Prison and the American Imagination

2009-09-22 Literary Criticism

Author : Caleb Smith
Release : 2009-09-22
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 308/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Prison and the American Imagination by : Caleb Smith

Download or read book The Prison and the American Imagination written by Caleb Smith. This book was released on 2009-09-22. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did a nation so famously associated with freedom become internationally identified with imprisonment? After the scandals of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and in the midst of a dramatically escalating prison population, the question is particularly urgent. In this timely, provocative study, Caleb Smith argues that the dehumanization inherent in captivity has always been at the heart of American civil society. Exploring legal, political, and literary texts--including the works of Dickinson, Melville, and Emerson--Smith shows how alienation and self-reliance, social death and spiritual rebirth, torture and penitence came together in the prison, a scene for the portrayal of both gothic nightmares and romantic dreams. Demonstrating how the cellular soul has endured since the antebellum age, The Prison and the American Imagination offers a passionate and haunting critique of the very idea of solitude in American life.

War Stars

2008 Fiction

Author : Howard Bruce Franklin
Release : 2008
Genre : Fiction
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 514/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis War Stars by : Howard Bruce Franklin

Download or read book War Stars written by Howard Bruce Franklin. This book was released on 2008. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new and expanded edition of an already classic work, H. Bruce Franklin brings the epic story of the superweapon and the American imagination into the ominous twenty-first century, demonstrating its continuing importance both to comprehending our current predicament and to finding ways to escape from it. Sweeping through two centuries of American culture and military history, Franklin traces the evolution of superweapons from Robert Fulton's eighteenth-century submarine through the strategic bomber, atomic bomb, and Star Wars to a twenty-first century dominated by "weapons of mass destruction," real and imagined. Interweaving culture, science, technology, and history, he shows how and why the American pursuit of the ultimate defensive weapon -- guaranteed to end all war and bring universal triumph to American ideals -- has led our nation and the world into an epoch of terror and endless war.

The Big House

2009 Prisoners

Author : Stephen D. Cox
Release : 2009
Genre : Prisoners
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 083/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Big House by : Stephen D. Cox

Download or read book The Big House written by Stephen D. Cox. This book was released on 2009. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The complex and fascinating history of what it's like "doing time" in the "Big House," and its influence on the American imagination. "The Big House" is America's idea of the prison--a huge, tough, ostentatiously oppressive pile of rock, bristling with rules and punishments, overwhelming in size and the intent to intimidate. Stephen Cox tells the story of the American prison--its politics, its sex, its violence, its inability to control itself--and its idealization in American popular culture. This book investigates both the popular images of prison and the realities behind them: problems of control and discipline, maintenance and reform, power and sexuality. It conveys an awareness of the limits of human and institutional power, and of the symbolic and iconic qualities the "Big House" has attained in America's understanding of itself.

Captive Nation

2014 Law

Author : Dan Berger
Release : 2014
Genre : Law
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 249/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Captive Nation by : Dan Berger

Download or read book Captive Nation written by Dan Berger. This book was released on 2014. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era

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