The Ethnographic Voice, Cultural Anthropology, and the American Novel, 1945-2000
The Ethnographic Voice, Cultural Anthropology, and the American Novel, 1945-2000
Buying pre-order items
Ebooks and Audiobook
You will receive an email with a download link for the ebook or audiobook on the publication date.
Payment
You will not be charged for pre-ordered books until they are available to be shipped. Pre-ordered ebooks will not be charged for until they are available for download.
Amending or cancelling your order
For orders that have not been shipped you can usually make changes to pre-orders up to 72 hours before the publishing date.
Payment for this pre-order will be taken when the item becomes available
Description
Francis C. Altomare argues that significant twentieth-century novelists- Ursula K. LeGuin, Kurt Vonnegut, Saul Bellow, William S. Burroughs, Chad Oliver, and Joan Didion-mark a seminal moment in the interdisciplinary tradition of anthropology and literature as authors who studied and practiced cultural anthropology before their transitions toward literary fiction.
Focusing on the dynamic period between World War II and the turn of last century, this book explores the interdisciplinary dialogue between cultural anthropology and literary studies through analyses of novels composed by authors with significant exposure to professional anthropology during its midcentury period. Not only do these authors stylistically adopt what Altomare coins as the “ethnographic voice,” they also adopt similar frames of observation taken by real-world ethnographers, present readers with ethnographers as protagonists, and integrate anthropological theory into their texts to produce ethnografictions occupying a space between the anthropological and the literary. These convergences place these authors at a nexus between modernist/postmodernist literature and the evolving field of cultural anthropology, complicating and enriching our understanding of fictionality, realism, and narrative truth while shedding light on the inextricable development of these fields in midcentury America as sites of cultural critique, aesthetic value, and sources of human meaning.
Accessibility Information
Additional accessibility information
- EPUB 3.0
- Conforms with the requirements of EPUB Accessibility Spec v1.1
- WCAG level AA
- WCAG v2.2 compliant
- accessibility@bloomsbury.com
Hazards
The publication contains no hazards
Support for non-visual reading
- No accessibility features offered by the reading system, device or reading software are disabled or otherwise unusable with the product
- Has alternative text descriptions for images
Visual adjustments
Appearance of the text and page layout can be modified according to the capabilities of the reading system (font family and size, spaces, as well as color of background and text)
Navigation
- Page list to go to pages from the print source version
- Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation
- All or substantially all textual matter is arranged in a single logical reading order
- Content is enhanced with ARIA roles to optimize organization and facilitate navigation
- Purposes of all links are made clear
Rich content
Language tagging provided
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Literary Anthropology, Fictional Truth, and Cold War Postmodernism
1. Truth is a Matter of the Imagination: Ethnographic Praxis and Cultural Ecology in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness
2. Science That Is Mostly Poetry: Anthropological Imagination in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle
3. Of Ethnographers and Rain Kings: The Anthropological Imagination in the Fiction of Saul Bellow
4. Ethnographer of Interzones: The Ethnographic Imagination in Three Novels by William S. Burroughs
5. “I will be her witness”: The Ethnographic Imagination in Joan Didion's A Book of Common Prayer
Concluding Remarks
Product details
| Published | Jan 21 2027 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 288 |
| ISBN | 9798216276159 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Related Titles
