This article is a broad-spectrum exploration of the reconciliations between fashion choices and masculine anxieties in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. It traces the complex processes where the socially stratified worlds of the male characters are configured, especially through the tropes of clothes and lifestyle. The American 1980s, in times of Reaganomics, are understood as a period of excess, social mores and ‘bigness’. This is reflected in the operatic style of Bonfire, which offers a social critique of New York City in the 1980s. Wolfe’s dispassionate gaze takes in the excesses of the Reagan era, all the time exploring the relationship between men’s clothing and New York City. The central premise of the article pivots on performing masculinity through the 1980s menswear, where garments and lifestyle choices acquire specific meanings as indexes of class, vanity, individuality, identity and social mobility. The focus is on the three masculine protagonists at the forefront, but there are also glancing references to other secondary characters. Fashion, within the scope of this article, is based on the explorations of dress, clothes and style, rather than catwalk.
{"title":"Fashioning masculine anxieties: Clothes and style in The Bonfire of the Vanities","authors":"A. Viswamohan","doi":"10.1386/ejac_00054_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac_00054_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article is a broad-spectrum exploration of the reconciliations between fashion choices and masculine anxieties in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. It traces the complex processes where the socially stratified worlds of the male characters are configured, especially\u0000 through the tropes of clothes and lifestyle. The American 1980s, in times of Reaganomics, are understood as a period of excess, social mores and ‘bigness’. This is reflected in the operatic style of Bonfire, which offers a social critique of New York City in the 1980s. Wolfe’s\u0000 dispassionate gaze takes in the excesses of the Reagan era, all the time exploring the relationship between men’s clothing and New York City. The central premise of the article pivots on performing masculinity through the 1980s menswear, where garments and lifestyle choices acquire specific\u0000 meanings as indexes of class, vanity, individuality, identity and social mobility. The focus is on the three masculine protagonists at the forefront, but there are also glancing references to other secondary characters. Fashion, within the scope of this article, is based on the explorations\u0000 of dress, clothes and style, rather than catwalk.","PeriodicalId":35235,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42880762","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Editorial","authors":"C. Lloyd, J. Wills","doi":"10.1386/ejac_00051_2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac_00051_2","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35235,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48497020","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Review of: Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights, Samantha Pinto (2020) Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 264 pp., ISBN 978-1-47800-832-3, h/bk, $99.95, p/bk, $26.95
{"title":"Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights, Samantha Pinto (2020)","authors":"Rebecca J. Fraser","doi":"10.1386/ejac_00048_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac_00048_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights, Samantha Pinto (2020)\u0000Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 264 pp.,\u0000ISBN 978-1-47800-832-3, h/bk, $99.95, p/bk, $26.95","PeriodicalId":35235,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45548632","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article seeks to investigate Carman Barnes’ initiative to create a study group for young, artistic, well-to-do women in New York City that was based on Claude Bragdon’s lectures and Peter Ouspensky’s philosophy. Although ultimately focused on spiritual health and the evolution of consciousness, Barnes included a strict fitness routine in her groups. Surveying Barnes’ unpublished archival material, her preparatory notes for the study groups and her correspondence with Bragdon and Ouspensky, the author investigates Barnes’ unique contribution to the New York cultural scene in the 1940s and the promotion of Bragdon’s and Ouspensky’s core belief in the evolution of consciousness and based it on ideas of well-being and the harmonious development of spirit and body. Furthermore, this article aims to locate the effect of Barnes’ effort to bring education in spiritual well-being to the American public.
{"title":"Carman Barnes’ vision of the esoteric school ‘of living’ for young Americans: The influence of Peter Ouspensky’s esoteric teaching on American cultural landscape in the second part of the twentieth century","authors":"Antoinette Cannon","doi":"10.1386/ejac_00046_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac_00046_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article seeks to investigate Carman Barnes’ initiative to create a study group for young, artistic, well-to-do women in New York City that was based on Claude Bragdon’s lectures and Peter Ouspensky’s philosophy. Although ultimately focused on spiritual health and the evolution of consciousness, Barnes included a strict fitness routine in her groups. Surveying Barnes’ unpublished archival material, her preparatory notes for the study groups and her correspondence with Bragdon and Ouspensky, the author investigates Barnes’ unique contribution to the New York cultural scene in the 1940s and the promotion of Bragdon’s and Ouspensky’s core belief in the evolution of consciousness and based it on ideas of well-being and the harmonious development of spirit and body. Furthermore, this article aims to locate the effect of Barnes’ effort to bring education in spiritual well-being to the American public.","PeriodicalId":35235,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43361253","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines the recollections of American mountaineers and hikers written between the 1890s and 1920s to interrogate the evolving relationship hikers had with food consumption and physical fitness on the trail. It centres firstly on the trail accounts of Appalachian Mountain Club (1876) and Sierra Club (1892) members, before moving towards articles that appeared in outdoor recreation magazines such as Outing. Contrasting itself with existing scholarly work that has focused on the ecological impact of industrial food systems within environmental history, this article seeks to explore the unexamined social and cultural power of food on early American outdoorsmen and women. By highlighting the high-altitude discourses surrounding food and physical ability on the mountainside, the article demonstrates how potentially productive debates about food and modernity are complicated by contemporary ideas of gender and propriety. It also further demonstrates how early suspicions about nutritional science and the privileged, often-chauvinistic culture of American mountaineering limited the ability of these wealthy fitness communities to communicate a wider message about the nation’s shifting health fortunes.
{"title":"Hungry, hungry hikers: Fitness, cooking, and gender in American hiking, 1890s–1920s","authors":"Nicholas Blower","doi":"10.1386/ejac_00047_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac_00047_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the recollections of American mountaineers and hikers written between the 1890s and 1920s to interrogate the evolving relationship hikers had with food consumption and physical fitness on the trail. It centres firstly on the trail accounts of Appalachian Mountain Club (1876) and Sierra Club (1892) members, before moving towards articles that appeared in outdoor recreation magazines such as Outing. Contrasting itself with existing scholarly work that has focused on the ecological impact of industrial food systems within environmental history, this article seeks to explore the unexamined social and cultural power of food on early American outdoorsmen and women. By highlighting the high-altitude discourses surrounding food and physical ability on the mountainside, the article demonstrates how potentially productive debates about food and modernity are complicated by contemporary ideas of gender and propriety. It also further demonstrates how early suspicions about nutritional science and the privileged, often-chauvinistic culture of American mountaineering limited the ability of these wealthy fitness communities to communicate a wider message about the nation’s shifting health fortunes.","PeriodicalId":35235,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42750786","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction","authors":"Nicholas Blower","doi":"10.1386/ejac_00043_2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac_00043_2","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35235,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42808421","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Review of: Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear, Victoria McCollum (ed.) (2019) New York: Routledge, 230 pp., ISBN 978-1-13849-828-0, h/bk, £120, ISBN 978-0-36772-745-1, p/bk, £36.99
{"title":"Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear, Victoria McCollum (ed.) (2019)","authors":"Harriet Stilley","doi":"10.1386/ejac_00050_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac_00050_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear, Victoria McCollum (ed.) (2019)\u0000New York: Routledge, 230 pp.,\u0000ISBN 978-1-13849-828-0, h/bk, £120, ISBN 978-0-36772-745-1, p/bk, £36.99","PeriodicalId":35235,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42419297","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Examining American fitness entrepreneurs from the 1930s, this article examines efforts to reform young, and white, masculine identities through new bodybuilding systems. Centred on Mark Berry, Bob Hoffman and Charles Atlas, three of the decade’s most successful entrepreneurs, the article examines the communities, methods and discourses used to attract customers and create a highly specified form of self-fashioning. In doing so, the article highlights the masculine communities and multiplicities of masculinities operating during this decade for American weight trainers. Importantly all three entrepreneurs focused on a very specific kind of American body, and stemming from this, American masculinity. For Berry, ‘husky’ men came to represent men of physical, moral and mental standing. The ability to withstand pain in exercise, to engage in strenuous activity and gain bodyweight was presented as a metric of one’s success in the world. Likewise, Bob Hoffman focused on the ‘weight lifter’, said to be an ambitious young man capable of succeeding in multiple terrains. Finally, there was Charles Atlas, who made ‘he men’ using his system of dynamic tension. In highlighting the lengths young, white, often affluent, American men went to in order to achieve these identities, the article contributes to the growing interest in American masculinities and the fitness systems they used during times of considerable upheaval.
{"title":"Building husky men: Strenuous masculinity in post-depression America","authors":"Conor Heffernan","doi":"10.1386/ejac_00044_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac_00044_1","url":null,"abstract":"Examining American fitness entrepreneurs from the 1930s, this article examines efforts to reform young, and white, masculine identities through new bodybuilding systems. Centred on Mark Berry, Bob Hoffman and Charles Atlas, three of the decade’s most successful entrepreneurs, the article examines the communities, methods and discourses used to attract customers and create a highly specified form of self-fashioning. In doing so, the article highlights the masculine communities and multiplicities of masculinities operating during this decade for American weight trainers. Importantly all three entrepreneurs focused on a very specific kind of American body, and stemming from this, American masculinity. For Berry, ‘husky’ men came to represent men of physical, moral and mental standing. The ability to withstand pain in exercise, to engage in strenuous activity and gain bodyweight was presented as a metric of one’s success in the world. Likewise, Bob Hoffman focused on the ‘weight lifter’, said to be an ambitious young man capable of succeeding in multiple terrains. Finally, there was Charles Atlas, who made ‘he men’ using his system of dynamic tension. In highlighting the lengths young, white, often affluent, American men went to in order to achieve these identities, the article contributes to the growing interest in American masculinities and the fitness systems they used during times of considerable upheaval.","PeriodicalId":35235,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48688102","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Review of: American Literature in Transition, 1960–1970, David Wyatt (ed.) (2018) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 385 pp., ISBN 978-1-107-16539-7, h/bk, £89.99
{"title":"American Literature in Transition, 1960–1970, David Wyatt (ed.) (2018)","authors":"Oliver Haslam","doi":"10.1386/ejac_00049_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac_00049_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: American Literature in Transition, 1960–1970, David Wyatt (ed.) (2018)\u0000Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 385 pp.,\u0000ISBN 978-1-107-16539-7, h/bk, £89.99","PeriodicalId":35235,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Culture","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41490967","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The early twentieth century was a time when the US public consciousness recognized an increasing association between their political leaders and sports and athleticism. With an exceptional precedent for this connection set by Theodore Roosevelt (1901–09), his replacement as US president would inevitably find it hard to keep pace. In the modern-day popular consciousness, Roosevelt’s immediate successor, William Howard Taft (1909–13), is often noted more for his obesity than for his physical athleticism or sporting prowess. Yet, as this article shows, as Taft moved closer to the White House, the contemporary US press increasingly associated him with sports, and at least the pursuit of physical fitness. In a post-Rooseveltian America, a rise to national political prominence demanded a portrayal of a president’s links to sports and athleticism, even in the unlikeliest of candidates.
20世纪初，美国公众意识到他们的政治领导人与体育运动之间的联系越来越紧密。由于西奥多•罗斯福(Theodore Roosevelt, 1901-09)开创了这种联系的例外先例，他的继任者将不可避免地发现，很难跟上这种联系的步伐。在现代大众的意识中，罗斯福的直接继任者威廉·霍华德·塔夫脱(William Howard Taft, 1909 - 1913)更常以肥胖著称，而不是他的运动能力或运动能力。然而，正如本文所示，随着塔夫脱离白宫越来越近，当代美国媒体越来越多地将他与体育联系在一起，至少是追求身体健康。在后罗斯福时代的美国，要想在全国政治上获得突出地位，就必须描绘出总统与体育和运动精神的联系，即使是在最不可能的候选人身上。
{"title":"Fit to be president: William Howard Taft, sports and athleticism","authors":"A. Burns","doi":"10.1386/ejac_00045_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac_00045_1","url":null,"abstract":"The early twentieth century was a time when the US public consciousness recognized an increasing association between their political leaders and sports and athleticism. With an exceptional precedent for this connection set by Theodore Roosevelt (1901–09), his replacement as US president would inevitably find it hard to keep pace. In the modern-day popular consciousness, Roosevelt’s immediate successor, William Howard Taft (1909–13), is often noted more for his obesity than for his physical athleticism or sporting prowess. Yet, as this article shows, as Taft moved closer to the White House, the contemporary US press increasingly associated him with sports, and at least the pursuit of physical fitness. In a post-Rooseveltian America, a rise to national political prominence demanded a portrayal of a president’s links to sports and athleticism, even in the unlikeliest of candidates.","PeriodicalId":35235,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of American Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48237254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：