Spoon River AmericaPub Date : 2021-04-15DOI: 10.5622/illinois/9780252043833.003.0009
Jason J. Stacy
{"title":"Conclusion","authors":"Jason J. Stacy","doi":"10.5622/illinois/9780252043833.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252043833.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"The conclusion of Spoon River America argues that postmodern portrayals of small towns in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries broadly fell into two categories: the exotic and the surreal. The book concludes with brief analyses of popular media portrayals of small towns in films like Heathers (1988), Fargo (1996), Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017); television series like Twin Peaks (1990), Stranger Things (2016-2019), and Ozark (2017); and the radio program A Prairie Home Companion (1974-2016), all of which display variations of Masters’s character tropes. The book ends with a consideration of why Spoon River Anthology’s popularity continues despite changes in perceptions of the small town as representative of the nation.","PeriodicalId":334963,"journal":{"name":"Spoon River America","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115934827","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Spoon River AmericaPub Date : 2021-04-15DOI: 10.5622/illinois/9780252043833.003.0005
Jason J. Stacy
{"title":"Rampant Yokelisms","authors":"Jason J. Stacy","doi":"10.5622/illinois/9780252043833.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252043833.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 4 analyzes three types of citizen found in Spoon River Anthology: populist, elite, and exile. Each type eventually became familiar tropes in the mythological small town of the twentieth century. Masters reserved the perspective of the last type, the exile, for the reader of Spoon River Anthology, and characterized himself as the exile Webster Ford, a pseudonym he often used. Spoon River’s exiles invited readers to view the town from both nostalgic and ambivalent perspectives, thereby helping shape popular conceptions of small towns in twentieth-century popular culture in these terms.","PeriodicalId":334963,"journal":{"name":"Spoon River America","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133170030","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Premodern Midwest","authors":"Jason J. Stacy","doi":"10.5406/j.ctv1nh3mmb.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/j.ctv1nh3mmb.6","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 2 focuses on Illinois, Masters’s home state and the location of the fictional Spoon River. Geographic, economic, and political factors in the early nineteenth century, as well as the growth of Chicago, the Civil War, and the rise of Populism, shaped the state and the region. Likewise, a pioneering mythology molded Midwesterners’ earliest conceptions of themselves, as well as authors like E. W. Howe, who presented grim portrayals of Midwestern life. In adulthood, Masters recalled two towns form his youth, Petersburg, which he remembered nostalgically for its easy-going “Virginian” ways, and Lewistown, which he claimed reflected America’s hypocritical “Calvinism.” These conflicting memories shaped Spoon River Anthology.","PeriodicalId":334963,"journal":{"name":"Spoon River America","volume":"139 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122280087","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Spoon River AmericaPub Date : 2021-04-15DOI: 10.5622/illinois/9780252043833.003.0008
Jason J. Stacy
{"title":"Main Street, U.S.A.","authors":"Jason J. Stacy","doi":"10.5622/illinois/9780252043833.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252043833.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 7 traces portrayals of small towns after 1945 in terms both nostalgic and ambivalent. While films like The Best Years of Their Lives (1946), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), All That Heaven Allows (1955), and Rebel without a Cause (1955) pitted placid surfaces against turbulent depths, nostalgia for small towns also congealed into the simulacra of Disneyland’s Main Street, USA, and open-air shopping malls, which in turn fueled high-brow critiques that echoed Van Doren’s “revolt.” Throughout, Masters’s tropes of populist, elite, and exile appeared in both ambivalent and nostalgic portrayals. By the end of the century, though the small town became untenable as a representative of the nation, Masters’s verse found a second life on Broadway and in secondary schools.","PeriodicalId":334963,"journal":{"name":"Spoon River America","volume":"62 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133877769","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Spoon River AmericaPub Date : 2021-04-15DOI: 10.5622/illinois/9780252043833.003.0002
Jason J. Stacy
{"title":"Origin Stories","authors":"Jason J. Stacy","doi":"10.5622/illinois/9780252043833.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252043833.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 1 explores the nineteenth-century myth of the New England village. Fueled by middle-class ambivalence toward the growth of American cities and changes in the economy during the generation before the Civil War, popular newspapers like the New York Herald; authors and poets like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman; historians like Joel Parker; landscape architects like A. J. Downing; and popular preachers like Henry Ward Beecher constructed a nostalgic vision of rural life where the New England countryside served as a repository of eternal American values. In the aftermath of the Civil War, this myth became especially prevalent as the founding of New England displaced the Virginia Colony as the mythological site of the nation’s birth.","PeriodicalId":334963,"journal":{"name":"Spoon River America","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121218651","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Spoon River AmericaPub Date : 2021-04-15DOI: 10.5622/illinois/9780252043833.003.0007
Jason J. Stacy
{"title":"The Village Revolt","authors":"Jason J. Stacy","doi":"10.5622/illinois/9780252043833.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252043833.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 6 traces Carl Van Doren’s claim in 1921 that Spoon River Anthology founded a literary “Revolt from the Village.” Van Doren argued that Midwestern authors inspired by Masters, such as Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis, formed a literary movement that exposed the hypocritical underside of the United States through a critique of small-town America. The dissemination of this argument can be traced to intellectuals like H. L. Mencken and Thorstein Veblen, who popularized Freudian theory as a way to critique bourgeois mores and American capitalism. However, other popular authors, like William Allen White, celebrated Midwestern towns as ideal communities as a counter to these critiques. Thus, in the 1920s, a short-lived culture war arose around rival interpretations of Masters’s portrayal of American small towns.","PeriodicalId":334963,"journal":{"name":"Spoon River America","volume":"114 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123305536","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Spoon River AmericaPub Date : 2021-04-15DOI: 10.5622/illinois/9780252043833.003.0004
Jason J. Stacy
{"title":"Frontiers","authors":"Jason J. Stacy","doi":"10.5622/illinois/9780252043833.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252043833.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 3 considers the significance of the 1893 World’s Fair on contemporary notions of the Midwest as representative of the nation’s future. We follow Masters to Chicago, where he worked as a lawyer with Clarence Darrow, campaigned for the perennial presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, and failed to find an audience for his reform-focused literature. After struggling to find a venue for his writing, Masters tried to appeal to nascent modernist sensibilities exemplified by Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine. In Spoon River Anthology, first published in Reedy’s Mirror in 1914, Masters synthesized his memories of Petersburg and Lewistown in poetry that emulated the modernist style of younger poets like Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle and he found acceptance among readers of early modernist verse.","PeriodicalId":334963,"journal":{"name":"Spoon River America","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132116292","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Index","authors":"","doi":"10.5406/j.ctv1nh3mmb.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/j.ctv1nh3mmb.15","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":334963,"journal":{"name":"Spoon River America","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115061754","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Acknowledgments","authors":"","doi":"10.5406/j.ctv1nh3mmb.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/j.ctv1nh3mmb.3","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":334963,"journal":{"name":"Spoon River America","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121548170","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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