An American cakewalk : ten syncopators of the modern world / / Zeese Papanikolas

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910797369203321
• Autore: Papanikolas Zeese
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Stanford, California : , : Stanford University Press, , 2015; ©2015
• ISBN: 0-8047-9539-8
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (255 p.)
• Disciplina: 973.5
• Soggetti: Authors, American; Artists - United States; Intellectuals - United States; United States Intellectual life 19th century; United States Intellectual life 20th century; United States Biography
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Front matter -- Contents -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. Ghost Dance -- Chapter 2. Valentines -- Chapter 3. Cakewalk -- Chapter 4. Monsters -- Chapter 5. The Soul Shepherd -- Chapter 6. The Return of the Novelist -- Chapter 7. An Innocent at Cedro -- Chapter 8. The Rise of Abraham Cahan -- Chapter 9. Beyond Syncopation -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Source Acknowledgments -- Notes for Further Reading -- Name Index
• Sommario/riassunto: The profound economic and social changes in the post-Civil War United States created new challenges to a nation founded on Enlightenment and transcendental values, religious certainties, and rural traditions. Newly-freed African Americans, emboldened women, intellectuals and artists, and a polyglot tide of immigrants found themselves in a restless new world of railroads, factories, and skyscrapers where old assumptions were being challenged and new values had yet to be created. In An American Cakewalk: Ten Syncopators of the Modern World, Zeese Papanikolas tells the lively and entertaining story of a diverse group of figures in the arts and sciences who inhabited this ; new America. Just as ragtime composers subverted musical expectations by combining European march timing with African syncopation, so this book's protagonists—who range from Emily Dickinson to Thorstein Veblen and from Henry and William James to Charles Mingus—interrogated the modern American world through their own "syncopations" of cultural givens. The old antebellum slave dance, the cakewalk, with its parody of the manners and pretensions of the white folks in the Big House, provides a template of how the tricksters, shamans, poets, philosophers, ragtime pianists, and jazz musicians who inhabit this book used the arts of parody, satire, and disguise to subvert American cultural norms and to create new works of astonishing beauty and intellectual vigor.