In this classic study of the relationship between technology and culture, Miles Orvell demonstrates that the roots of contemporary popular culture reach back to the Victorian era, when mechanical replications of familiar objects reigned supreme and realism dominated artistic representation. Reacting against this genteel culture of imitation, a number of artists and intellectuals at the turn of the century were inspired by the machine to create more authentic works of art that were themselves \"real things.\" The resulting tension between a culture of imitation and a culture of authenticity, argues Orvell, has become a defining category in our culture. The twenty-fifth anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author, looking back on the late twentieth century and assessing tensions between imitation and authenticity in the context of our digital age. Considering material culture, photography, and literature, the book touches on influential figures such as writers Walt Whitman, Henry James, John Dos Passos, and James Agee; photographers Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans, and Margaret Bourke-White; and architect-designers Gustav Stickley and Frank Lloyd Wright.

The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940.

In this article, I introduce the critical study of the skin in three parts. I start with a reflection on what makes the skin such a suggestive and, arguably, special phenomenon. I then provide a brief overview of the key works, recurring themes and ongoing debates that characterize the skin studies subfield. And finally, I end with a presentation of the articles that make up Body and Society’s special issue on the skin, taking care to highlight how they both contribute to the subfield as it currently stands while orienting it towards new questions, concerns and challenges.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1357034X18763065

Skin Studies: Past, Present and Future

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Wondrous Detritus: Thingness and Alternative Spirituality in American Modernist Fiction.

The New Orleans hot jazz vocal trio the Boswell Sisters was one of the leading ensembles of the 1930s. Enormously popular with audiences, the Boswells were also recognized by colleagues and peers to be among the finest singers, instrumentalists, and arrangers of their day. Many jazz historians remember them as the first successful white singers who truly “sounded black,” yet they rarely interrogate what “sounding black” meant for the Boswells, not only in technical or musical terms but also as an expression of the cultural attitudes and ideologies that shape stylistic judgments. The Boswells' audience understood vocal blackness as a cultural trope, though that understanding was simultaneously filtered through minstrelsy's legacy and challenged by the new entertainment media. Moreover, the sisters' southern femininity had the capacity to further contexualize and “color” both their musical output and its reception. This essay examines what it meant for a white voice to sound black in the United States during the early 1930s, and charts how the Boswells permeated the cultural, racial, and gender boundaries implicit in both blackness and southernness as they developed their collective musical voice.

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White face, black voice: race, gender, and region in the music of the Boswell sisters

Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism

This essay argues that The Great Gatsby may be fruitfully read against African American models of identity formation of the late teens and Twenties. Like Gatsby, passing and Americanization fiction render racial and national identity theatrical. Gatsby's parties, given minimal attention in Fitzgerald scholarship, miniaturize the process of identity formation that characterizes the novel as a whole. Theatrical modes of identity formation are not limited to the novel's parvenus, however: showing how even the novel's elite are fully implicated in the culture of imitation, Fitzgerald refutes the possibility of any identity as "the real thing."

http://nebula.wsimg.com/6ed8cf949533a847105283573b1ed3c2?AccessKeyId=B422ABD2803330C973BE&disposition=0&alloworigin=1

White Skin, White Mask: Passing, Posing, and Performing in The Great Gatsby

This essay examines the racialized and gendered construction of Jewishness in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth Through an analysis of the depiction of Simon Rosedale, the Jewish parvenu who unsuccessfully woos Lily Bart, I contend that Wharton's perception of Jewish difference is more complex than it initially appears, making reductive conclusions regarding her antisemitism impossible However, uncovering Wharton's ambivalence makes her repudiation of Jewish difference all the more striking; although Wharton grudgingly acknowledged that upwardly mobile immigrant Jews like Rosedale had become part of her world, she would never fully accept that they were there to stay

Meredith Goldsmith

Papers

White Skin, White Mask: Passing, Posing, and Performing in The Great Gatsby

The Year of the Rose: Jewish Masculinity in The House of Mirth