Product Description: Ranging widely over a span of three hundred and fifty years of discussion and controversy, Martha Banta's book makes a fundamental contribution to the continuing debate on the nature of success and failure in a specifically American context...read more

During a portion of the first half of the present century, and more particularly during the latter part of it, there flourished and practised in the city of New York a physician who enjoyed perhaps an exceptional share of the consideration which, in the United States, has always been bestowed upon distinguished members of the medical profession. This profession in America has constantly been held in honour, and more successfully than elsewhere has put forward a claim to the epithet of “liberal.” In a country in which, to play a social part, you must either earn your income or make believe that you earn it, the healing art has appeared in a high degree to combine two recognised sources of credit. It belongs to the realm of the practical, which in the United States is a great recommendation; and it is touched by the light of science—a merit appreciated in a community in which the love of knowledge has not always been accompanied by leisure and opportunity.

Product Description: This critical and scholarly edition presents the complete letters of Henry James, one of the great novelists and letter writers of the English language. Comprising more than ten thousand letters and addressing a remarkably wide range of topics, this edition is an indispensable resource for students and scholars of James, of the European novel and modern literature, and of American and English literature, culture, and criticism...read more

Product Description: Banta draws upon essays in Vanity Fair by noted journalists, literary figures, and cultural critics in order to examine the manner by which major cultural and historical events in the Untied States and Britain led to the invention of previously non-existent words to express the rampant changes within society...read more

Product Description: Martha Banta reaches across several disciplines to investigate America's early quest to shape an aesthetic equal to the nation's belief in its cultural worth. Marked by an unusually wide-ranging sweep, the book focuses on three major "testing grounds" where nineteenth-century Americans responded to Ralph Waldo Emerson's call to embrace "everything" in order to uncover the theoretical principles underlying "the idea of creation...read more

Barbaric Intercourse tells the story of a century of social upheaval and the satiric attacks it inspired in leading periodicals in both England and America. Martha Banta explores the politics of caricature and cartoon from 1841 to 1936, devoting special attention to the original Life magazine. For Banta, Life embodied all the strengths and weaknesses of the Progressive Era, whose policies of reform sought to cope with the frenetic urbanization of New York, the racist laws of the Jim Crow South, and the rise of jingoism in the United States. Barbaric Intercourse shows how Life's take on these trends and events resulted in satires both cruel and enlightened.Banta also deals extensively with London's Punch, a sharp critic of American nationalism, and draws from images and writings in magazines as diverse as Puck,The Crisis,Harper's Weekly, and The International Socialist Review. Orchestrating a wealth of material, including reproductions of rarely seen political cartoons, she offers a richly layered account of the cultural struggles of the age, from contests over immigration and the role of the New Negro in American society, to debates over Wall Street greed, women's suffrage, and the moral consequences of Western expansionism. (view table of contents)

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Traces the development of the portraits of women in American art, literature, and popular culture from the 1870s to the end of World War I