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- Volume 24, Issue 1, 2005
European Journal of American Culture - Volume 24, Issue 1, 2005
Volume 24, Issue 1, 2005
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The American culture-industry of image-making; part I
Authors: Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Tatiani RapatzikouThis special issue covers the early history of the American culture-industry of image-making up to the twentieth century. It argues that the expansion of print and visual culture into all realms of American economic and political life was not solely a characteristic of a specifically postmodern form of social organization. Rather this process of acculturation, which dates back to the emergence of consumerism in the eighteenth century, coincided with the foundation of the American state. The articles by Eric Homberger and Edith Thornton see the quest for identity as the very factor by which American realist art and culture have developed a social bond. They suggest that the examination of such a search in relation to developing technologies of image reproduction has serious implications for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literary authorship. Homberger's and Thornton's investigation forms the basis for the exploration of image-making as a technique of self-fashioning, which the next two issues of the European Journal of American Culture will examine in greater depth in relation to gender and (post-)modernist aesthetics.
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Image-making and the circulation of images: Peale, Trumbull and the founding fathers
More LessImages of the founding fathers shaped the way Americans saw their nation and its leading figures. Justly celebrated portraits by Charles Willson Peale, John Trumbull and others, claimed the authority of factual accuracy. Such images were part of the late eighteenth-century world of image-making which spread across Europe and the United States. The financial interests of the painters and engravers, and the changeable market for their images, meant that images were frequently copied from other images, from statue to portrait painting to mezzotint engraving. The experience of the painters (Peale was a radical patriot, Trumbull was a conservative Federalist) influenced the market for their work, but both men regarded their heroic portraits as ‘a means of exciting an Emulation in our Posterity’. John Adams in his Discourses of Davila in 1790 articulated the central role for admiration or emulation in the strengthening of the patriotic impulse. Later social theorists, such as Thorstein Veblen and Charles Horton Cooley, argued that emulation was more important in consumption and the appetite for wealth, than in the transmission of high ideals. The failure of many proposals to create memorials to the founding fathers in New York City, from 1825 to 1850, suggests that the model of emulation endorsed by Adams needs to be reconsidered. New Yorkers were not indifferent to patriotic heroes, as Walt Whitman feared; but the conservative and hierarchical dimensions of emulation aroused scepticism. The origin of so many proposals for civic monuments came from the city's elite. But the public was growing reluctant to accept their leadership in public life.
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‘Innocence’ consumed: packaging Edith Wharton with Kathleen Norris in Pictorial Review magazine, 1920–21
More LessThe article discusses the friction between magazine editors, illustrators, art directors, and authors as a case study of the conflicts of modernity and Wharton's frustrated role in these struggles for interpretive authority. I examine the promotional material and the magazine's efforts to draw Wharton, a ‘literary’ figure, and Norris, a popular romance novelist, to an idealized ‘middle ground’ to appeal to the broadest possible readership. I then consider the illustrations from both serials in the light of filmic and theatrical conventions of representation from the period. This analysis allows me to discuss the uses of realism and melodrama, nostalgia and the modern, to ‘sell’ the two very different books and the two very different authors to the same readers/viewers. It is an example of the clash of authority over texts and images over which no one had sole control; and in the ensuing mixture of messages, readers/viewers were offered multiple points of entry into both texts provided by a host of interested, and competing, producers. This is the first sustained discussion of the original illustrations of The Age of Innocence and the first time they have been published since 1919–20, to the best of my knowledge.
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Policing the Cold War frontier: The Bedford Incident
By David SeedThis essay examines the use of the allusions to Moby-Dick in The Bedford Incident (novel 1963; film 1965) in reinforcing its application of the frontier trope, which underpins the description of how a US destroyer hunts a Soviet nuclear submarine in the Denmark Strait. In particular it focuses on the construction of the Cold War enemy as an unseen alien who, ironically, comes to resemble its American pursuers.
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Nothing happening: Warhol and the negative dialectics of subversion
More LessAndy Warhol is associated with pop art, which is often thought of as an American, populist, commercial, superficial and ahistorical cultural form. Yet both Warhol and pop have historical and intellectual influences that are European, elitist and political. These influences remain largely unexamined, although something of them is registered in a common critical sense that Warhol's art satirizes capitalism. This paper seeks to reconsider Warhol's work with reference to neglected aspects of it. However, it does not simply aim to overturn or reverse received opinion about this work, by, for example, casting it as singularly profound or capitalistic. A negative dialectic will be employed to demonstrate that Warhol's art is both current and backward-looking, American and European, glib and philosophical, right wing and left wing. Negative dialectics will be explained in the process with reference to Adorno, Warhol and others. This will be done in order to show that all of the oppositions mentioned are active in Warhol's work but also that none of them are synthesized in it.
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 42 (2023)
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Volume 41 (2022)
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Volume 40 (2021)
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Volume 39 (2020)
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Volume 38 (2019)
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Volume 37 (2018)
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Volume 36 (2017)
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Volume 35 (2016)
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Volume 34 (2015)
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Volume 33 (2014)
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Volume 32 (2013)
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Volume 31 (2012)
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Volume 30 (2011 - 2012)
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Volume 29 (2010 - 2011)
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Volume 28 (2009)
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Volume 27 (2008)
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Volume 26 (2007 - 2008)
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Volume 25 (2005 - 2007)
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Volume 24 (2005)
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Volume 23 (2004)
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Volume 22 (2003)
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Volume 21 (2002)
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Volume 20 (2001 - 2002)