Fashion and Fiction

Fashion and Fiction: Self-Transformation in Twentieth-Century American Literature
English | 2016 | ISBN: 0813938619 | 240 Pages | EPUB (True) | 3 MB
During the twentieth century, the rise of the concept of Americanization-shedding ethnic origins and signs of "otherness" to embrace a constructed American identity-was accompanied by a rhetoric of personal transformation that would ultimately characterize the American Dream. The theme of self-transformation has remained a central cultural narrative in American literary, political, and sociological texts ranging from Jamestown narratives to immigrant memoirs, from slave narratives to Gone with the Wind, and from the rags-to-riches stories of Horatio Alger to the writings of Barack Obama. Such rhetoric feeds American myths of progress, upward mobility, and personal reinvention.