The uses of variety
Subtitle: modern Americanism and the quest for national distinctiveness
By: Carrie Tirado Bramen.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2000
Place of publication: Cambridge, MA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 380
Subjects: American fiction -- History and criticism; Difference (Psychology) in literature; Literature and society -- United States -- History -- 20th century; American fiction -- Minority authors -- History and criticism; National characteristics, American, in literature; Pluralism (Social sciences) in literature; Multiculturalism in literature; Ethnic relations in literature; Minorities in literature; United States -- Intellectual life -- 20th century
Description: "Carrie Tirado Bramen pursues the idea of variety through the works of a wide range of regional and cosmopolitan writers, journalists, theologians, and politicians who rewrote the narrative of American exceptionalism through a celebration of variety.

Exploring cultural and institutional spheres ranging from intra-urban walking tours in popular magazines to the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago, she shows how the rhetoric of variety became naturalized and nationalized as quintessentially American and inherently democratic. By focusing on the uses of the term in the work of William James, Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B. Du Bois, Hamlin Garland, and Wong Chin Foo, among many others, Bramen reveals how the perceived innocence and goodness of variety were used to construct contradictory and mutually exclusive visions of modern Americanism.

Bramen's innovation is to look at the debates of a century ago that established diversity as the distinctive feature of U.S. culture."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 337-360) and index.