{"title":"Joan Shelley Rubin","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"making-of-middlebrow-culture-book-joan-shelley-rubin-9780807843543","title":"The Making of Middlebrow Culture","description":"The proliferation of book clubs, reading groups, outline volumes, and new forms of book reviewing in the first half of the twentieth century influenced the tastes and pastimes of millions of Americans. Joan Rubin here provides the first comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon, the rise of American middlebrow culture, and the values encompassed by it.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49524433158417,"sku":"GOR012182329","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50763128570129,"sku":"CIN0807843547VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52409732006161,"sku":"NLS9780807843543","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53155344417041,"sku":"CIN0807843547G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53588761870609,"sku":"NIN9780807843543","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0807843547.jpg?v=1763220986"},{"product_id":"songs-of-ourselves-book-joan-shelley-rubin-9780674035126","title":"Songs of Ourselves","description":"Rubin shows how the sites and practices of reciting poetry influenced American readers' lives and helped them to find meaning in a poet's words. By blurring boundaries between high and popular poetry, and between modern and traditional, Rubin reveals a fuller, more democratic way of studying our poetic language and ourselves.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51005424763153,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51005428498705,"sku":"NIN9780674035126","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0674035127.jpg?v=1751137194"},{"product_id":"songs-of-ourselves-book-joan-shelley-rubin-9780674024366","title":"Songs of Ourselves","description":"In the years between 1880 and 1950, Americans recited poetry at family gatherings, school assemblies, church services, camp outings, and civic affairs. As they did so, they invested poems - and the figure of the poet - with the beliefs, values, and emotions that they experienced in those settings. Reciting a poem together with others joined the individual to the community in a special and memorable way. In a strikingly original and rich portrait of the uses of verse in America, Joan Shelley Rubin shows how the sites and practices of reciting poetry influenced readers' lives and helped them to find meaning in a poet's words. Emphasising the cultural circumstances that influenced the production and reception of poets and poetry in this country, Rubin recovers the experiences of ordinary people reading poems in public places. We see the recent immigrant seeking acceptance, the schoolchild eager to be integrated into the class, the mourner sharing grief at a funeral, the grandparent trying to bridge the generation gap - all instances of readers remaking texts to meet social and personal needs. Preserving the moral, romantic, and sentimental legacies of the 19th Century, the act of reading poems offered cultural continuity, spiritual comfort, and pleasure. \"Songs of Ourselves\" is a unique history of literary texts as lived experience. By blurring the boundaries between \"high\" and \"popular\" poetry as well as between modern and traditional, it creates a fuller, more democratic way of studying our poetic language and ourselves.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51331238068497,"sku":"CIN0674024362G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0674024362.jpg?v=1751295143"},{"product_id":"making-of-middlebrow-culture-book-joan-shelley-rubin-9780807820100","title":"The Making of Middlebrow Culture","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe proliferation of book clubs, reading groups, outline volumes, and new forms of book reviewing in the first half of the twentieth century influenced the tastes and pastimes of millions of Americans. Joan Rubin here provides the first comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon, the rise of American middlebrow culture, and the values encompassed by it.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Rubin centers her discussion on five important expressions of the middlebrow: the founding of the Book-of-the-Month Club; the beginnings of great books programs; the creation of the \u003ci\u003eNew York Herald Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e's book-review section; the popularity of such works as Will Durant's \u003ci\u003eThe Story of Philosophy\u003c\/i\u003e; and the emergence of literary radio programs. She also investigates the lives and expectations of the individuals who shaped these middlebrow institutions -- such figures as Stuart Pratt Sherman, Irita Van Doren, Henry Seidel Canby, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, John Erskine, William Lyon Phelps, Alexander Woollcott, and Clifton Fadiman.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Moreover, as she pursues the significance of these cultural intermediaries who connected elites and the masses by interpreting ideas to the public, Rubin forces a reconsideration of the boundary between high culture and popular sensibility.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51552338280721,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51552338936081,"sku":"CIN0807820105VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0807843547_4544530f-942b-4fdf-8da2-793b7a05bb4e.jpg?v=1764162474"},{"product_id":"constance-rourke-and-american-culture-book-joan-shelley-rubin-9780807857526","title":"Constance Rourke and American Culture","description":"The career of Constance Rourke (1885-1941) is one of the richest examples of the American writer's search for a \"\"usable past.\"\" In this first full-length study of Rourke, Joan Shelley Rubin establishes the context for Rourke's defense of American culture -- the controversies that engaged her, the books that influenced her thinking, the premises that lay beneath her vocabulary.   With the aid of Rourke's unpublished papers, the author explores her responses to issues that were compelling for her generation of intellectuals: the critique of America as materialistic and provincial; the demand for native traditions in the arts; the modern understanding of the nature of culture and myth; and the question of a critic's role in a democracy.  Rourke's writings demonstrate that America did not suffer, as Van Wyck Brooks and others had maintained, from a damaging split between \"\"high-brow\"\" and \"\"low-brow\"\" but was rather a rich, unified culture in which the arts could thrive. Her classic American Humor (1931) and her biographies of Lotta Crabtree, Davy Crockett, Audubon, and Charles Sheeler celebrate the American as mythmaker. To foster what she called the \"\"possession\"\" of the national heritage, she used an evocative prose style accessible to a wide audience and depicted the frontier in more abstract terms than did other contempoaray scholars. Her commitment to social reform, acquired in her youth and strengthened at Vassar in the Progressive era, informed her sense of the function of criticism and guided her political activites in the 1930s.  Drawing together Rourke's varied discussions of popular heroes, comic lore, literature, and art, Rubin illuminates the delicate balances and sometimes contradictory arguments underlying Rourke's description of America's cultural patterns. She also analyzes the way Rourke's encounters with the ideas of Van Wyck Brooks, Ruth Benedict, Jane Harrison, Bernard DeVoto, and Lewis Mumford shaped her view of America's achievements and possibilities.   Rourke emerges not simply as a follower of Brooks or as a colleague of De Voto, nor even as an antiquarian or folklorist. Rather, she assumes her own unique and proper place -- as a pioneer who, more than anyone else of her day, boldly and eloquently showed Americans that they had the resources necessary for the future of both art and society. By placing Constance Rourke within the framework of a debate about the nature of American culture, the author makes a notable contribution to American intellectual history.  A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52539044528401,"sku":"NLS9780807857526","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780807857526.jpg?v=1763483518"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-joan-shelley-rubin.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}