Title: The uses of variety
First published: 2000
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.
Subjects: History and criticism, American fiction, Multiculturalism in literature, Pluralism (Social sciences) in literature, National characteristics, American, in literature, Ethnic relations in literature, Literature and society, Difference (Psychology) in literature, Intellectual life, Minorities in literature, Minority authors, History, Cultural pluralism in literature, American fiction, history and criticism, Difference (psychology)
Places: United States
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: PS374.D45 B73 2000