Down With the Old Canoe by Steven Biel
An immensely readable, provocative, and entertaining exploration of the Titanic as cultural icon. "I suggest, henceforth, when a woman talks women's rights, she be answered with the word Titanic, nothing morejust Titanic," wrote a St. Louis man to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He was not alone in mining the ship for a metaphor. Everyone found ammunition in the Titanicsuffragists and their opponents; radicals, reformers, and capitalists; critics of technology and modern life; racists and xenophobes and champions of racial and ethnic equality; editorial writers and folk singers, preachers and poets. Protestant sermons used the Titanic to condemn the budding consumer society ("We know the end of . . . the undisturbed sensualists. As they sail the sea of life we know absolutely that their ship will meet disaster."). African American toasts and working-class ballads made the ship emblematic of the foolishness of white people and the greed of the rich. A 1950s revival framed the disaster as an "older kind of disaster in which people had time to die." An ever-increasing number of Titanic buffs find heroism and order in the tale. Still in the headlines ("Titanic Baby Found Alive!" the Weekly World News declares) and a figure of everyday speech ("rearranging deck chairs . . ."), the Titanic disaster echoes within a richly diverse, paradoxical, and fascinating America.
Steven Biel is the executive director of the Mahindra Humanities Center and a senior lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780393039658 |
| ISBN 10 | 039303965X |
| Title | Down With the Old Canoe |
| Author | Steven Biel |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | WW Norton & Co |
| Year published | 1997-04-02 |
| Number of pages | 320 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |