Dreaming Suburbia

Author : Amy Maria Kenyon
Publisher : Wayne State University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780814332283
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dreaming Suburbia written by Amy Maria Kenyon and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dreaming Suburbia is a cultural and historical interpretation of the political economy of postwar American suburbanization.

Author : Amy Maria Kenyon
Publisher : Wayne State University Press
ISBN 13 : 0814339131
Total Pages : 220 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dreaming Suburbia written by Amy Maria Kenyon and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2004-09-17 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dreaming Suburbia is a cultural and historical interpretation of the political economy of postwar American suburbanization. Questions of race, class, and gender are explored through novels, film, television and social criticism where suburbia features as a central theme. Although suburbanization had important implications for cities and for the geo-politics of race, critical considerations of race and urban culture often receive insufficient attention in cultural studies of suburbia. This book puts these questions back in the frame by focusing on Detroit, Dearborn and Ford history, and the local suburbs of Inkster and Garden City. Covering such topics as the political and cultural economy of suburban sprawl, the interdependence of city and suburb, and local acts of violence and crises during the 1967 riots, the text examines the making of a physical place, its cultural effects and social exclusions. The perspectives of cultural history, American studies, social science, and urban studies give Dreaming Suburbia an interdisciplinary appeal.

Author : Melanie Smicek
Publisher : Anchor Academic Publishing (aap_verlag)
ISBN 13 : 3954893215
Total Pages : 73 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Dreams, Suburban Nightmares: Suburbia as a Narrative Space between Utopia and Dystopia in Contemporary American Cinema written by Melanie Smicek and published by Anchor Academic Publishing (aap_verlag). This book was released on 2014-10 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The suburban landscape is inseparable from American culture. Suburbia does not only relate to the geographical concept, but also describes a cultural space incorporating people’s hopes for a safe and prosperous life. Suburbia marks a dynamic ideological space constantly influenced and recreated by both the events of everyday life and artistic discourse. Fictional texts do not merely represent suburbia, but also have a decisive role in the shaping of suburban spaces. The widely held idealized image of suburbia evolved in the 1950s. Today, reality deviates from the concept of suburbs projected back then, due to e.g. high divorce rates and an increase of crime. Nevertheless, the nostalgic view of the suburbs as the “Promised Land" has survived. Postwar critics object to this perception, considering the suburbs rather as depressing landscapes of mass-consumption, conformity and alienation. This book exemplifies the dualistic representation of suburbs in contemporary American cinema by analyzing Pleasantville, The Truman Show and American Beauty. It examines how utopian concepts of suburbia are created culturally and psychologically in the films, and how the underlying anxieties of the suburban experience, visualized by the dystopian narratives, challenge this ideal.

Author : R. F. Delderfield
Publisher : Open Road Media
ISBN 13 : 1480490423
Total Pages : 463 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Dreaming Suburb written by R. F. Delderfield and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-07-22 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the wars, the lives of four neighboring English families intersect in this “highly recommended” saga by a New York Times–bestselling author (Sunday Express). In the spring of 1919, his wife’s death brings Sergeant Jim Carver home from the front. He returns to be a single parent to his seven children in a place he has never lived: Number Twenty, Manor Park Avenue, in a South London suburb. The Carvers’ neighbor Eunice Fraser, at Number Twenty-Two, has also known tragedy. Her soldier husband was killed, leaving her and her eight-year-old son, Esme, to fend for themselves. At Number Four, Edith Clegg takes in lodgers and looks after her sister, Becky, whose mind has been shattered by a past trauma. No one knows much about the Friths, at Number Seventeen, who moved to the Avenue before the war. The first book in the two-part historical series the Avenue, which also includes The Avenue Goes to War, The Dreaming Suburb takes readers into the everyday lives of these English families between World War I and World War II, as their hopes, dreams, and struggles are played out against a radically changing world.

Author : Roger Webster
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 1800735146
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Expanding Suburbia written by Roger Webster and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2001-02-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the last few decades suburbia has grown enormously and become a phenomenon attracting the attention of scholars as well as practitioners by whom it is seen as an increasingly significant and complex area of modern life. The essays in this volume consider a range of representations of suburban life from the late nineteenth century to the present day, including fiction, film, and popular music, drawn from America and Australia as well as Britain. They explore and challenge traditional views of suburbia so that, rather than a location of conformity and stereotypicality, it can be viewed as a site of social conflict, division, and ambiguity as well as a source of significant creativity across a range of cultural texts. The volume takes a thematic approach, considering the rise of suburbia, imagined and real suburbias, alternative suburbias: all of the essays have a strong historical dimension and the overall approach is characterized by interdisciplinarity.

Author : Rupa Huq
Publisher : A&C Black
ISBN 13 : 1780932243
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Making Sense of Suburbia Through Popular Culture written by Rupa Huq and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-08-15 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how notions of suburbia have developed in our collective imagination, examining novels, cinema, popular music and television in the US and UK.

Author : Melanie Smicek
Publisher : GRIN Verlag
ISBN 13 : 3656671389
Total Pages : 74 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Suburbia as a Narrative Space between Utopia and Dystopia in Contemporary American Cinema written by Melanie Smicek and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2014-06-13 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examination Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Other, grade: 1,0, University of Cologne, language: English, abstract: [Suburbia] has become the quintessential physical achievement of the United States; it is perhaps more representative of its culture than big cars, tall buildings, or professional football. Suburbia symbolizes the fullest, most unadulterated embodiment of contemporary culture. As Kenneth Jackson notes in his price-winning chronicle Crabgrass Frontier, the suburban landscape has become inseparable from American culture within the last two centuries. Nowadays living in the suburbs is the norm for most Americans, as since the 1990s, more than two third of the population lives in suburban districts. The term suburbia does not only relate to the geographical concept that differentiates these dwellings from urban or rural areas, but also describes a cultural, ideological space incorporating Americans’ hopes for an economically safe and prosperous family life. Closely tied to the history and culture of the USA, suburbia marks a dynamic ideological space that is constantly influenced and recreated by both the events of everyday life and artistic discourse. Thus, the depiction of suburban life functions as a central narrative element in numerous works of American literature, art and film. In this context, fictional texts do not merely represent suburbia, but also have a decisive role in the shaping of suburban spaces. The treatment of suburbia as a cultural space in American movies is of special interest, as their commercial success and popularity make films important cultural texts. As Spigel notes, “television and new media redirect our experience of private and public spheres” and therefore highly influence our perceptions of the spaces we inhabit. Regarding suburban landscapes, this aspect is particularly interesting because the inexorable rise of the television practically coincided with the postwar suburbanization of the US and had a significant effect on life in general and on the suburban ideal in particular. As a consequence, the TV-set was inseparable from the model of the suburban single-home in the 1950s. Thus, already in the fifties, when the idealized image of suburbia evolved, television had a decisive impact on the creation of suburbia as a cultural space. In this context, it must be questioned whether the depictions of suburbia are simulations of the real spaces, or if it is in fact the other way around, so that suburbia as a cultural concept is a mere simulation of the fictional spaces depicted on screen and thus a copy without an original.

Author : Andres Duany
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 9780865476066
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Suburban Nation written by Andres Duany and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2000 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk are at the forefront of the New Urbanism movement, and in "Suburban Nation" they assess sprawl's costs to society, be they ecological, economic, aesthetic, or social. 115 illustrations.

Author : Melanie Smicek
Publisher : diplom.de
ISBN 13 : 3954898217
Total Pages : 69 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Dreams, Suburban Nightmares: Suburbia as a Narrative Space between Utopia and Dystopia in Contemporary American Cinema written by Melanie Smicek and published by diplom.de. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 69 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The suburban landscape is inseparable from American culture. Suburbia does not only relate to the geographical concept, but also describes a cultural space incorporating people’s hopes for a safe and prosperous life. Suburbia marks a dynamic ideological space constantly influenced and recreated by both the events of everyday life and artistic discourse. Fictional texts do not merely represent suburbia, but also have a decisive role in the shaping of suburban spaces. The widely held idealized image of suburbia evolved in the 1950s. Today, reality deviates from the concept of suburbs projected back then, due to e.g. high divorce rates and an increase of crime. Nevertheless, the nostalgic view of the suburbs as the “Promised Land" has survived. Postwar critics object to this perception, considering the suburbs rather as depressing landscapes of mass-consumption, conformity and alienation. This book exemplifies the dualistic representation of suburbs in contemporary American cinema by analyzing Pleasantville, The Truman Show and American Beauty. It examines how utopian concepts of suburbia are created culturally and psychologically in the films, and how the underlying anxieties of the suburban experience, visualized by the dystopian narratives, challenge this ideal.

Author : Roger Silverstone
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135094551
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Visions of Suburbia written by Roger Silverstone and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suburbia. Tupperware, television, bungalows and respectable front lawns. Always instantly recognisable though never entirely familiar. The tight semi-detached estates of thirties Britain and the infenced and functional tract housing of middle America. The elegant villas of Victorian London and the clapboard and brick of fifties Sydney. Architecture and landscapes may vary from one suburban scene to another, but the suburb is the embodiment of the same desire; to create for middle class middle cultures, middle spaces in middle America, Britain and Australia. Visions of Suburbia considers this emergent architectural space, this set of values and this way of life. The contributors address suburbia and the suburban from the point of view of its production, its consumption and its representation. Placing suburbia centre stage, each essay examines what it is that makes suburbia so distinctive and what it is that has made suburbia so central to contemporary culture. _