The Crimson Letter

Released on by Douglass Shand-Tucci
preview-18

  • The Crimson Letter Book Detail

  • Author : Douglass Shand-Tucci
  • Release Date : 2004-06-01
  • Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
  • Genre : History
  • Pages : 757
  • ISBN 13 : 142993400X
  • File Size : 5,5 MB
DOWNLOAD BOOK

The Crimson Letter by Douglass Shand-Tucci PDF Summary

Book Description: In a book deeply impressive in its reach while also deeply embedded in its storied setting, bestselling historian Douglass Shand-Tucci explores the nature and expression of sexual identity at America's oldest university during the years of its greatest influence. The Crimson Letter follows the gay experience at Harvard in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing upon students, faculty, alumni, and hangers-on who struggled to find their place within the confines of Harvard Yard and in the society outside. Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde were the two dominant archetypes for gay undergraduates of the later nineteenth century. One was the robust praise-singer of American democracy, embraced at the start of his career by Ralph Waldo Emerson; the other was the Oxbridge aesthete whose visit to Harvard in 1882 became part of the university's legend and lore, and whose eventual martyrdom was a cautionary tale. Shand-Tucci explores the dramatic and creative oppositions and tensions between the Whitmanic and the Wildean, the warrior poet and the salon dazzler, and demonstrates how they framed the gay experience at Harvard and in the country as a whole. The core of this book, however, is a portrait of a great university and its community struggling with the full implications of free inquiry. Harvard took very seriously its mission to shape the minds and bodies of its charges, who came from and were expected to perpetuate the nation's elite, yet struggled with the open expression of their sexual identities, which it alternately accepted and anathematized. Harvard believed it could live up to the Oxbridge model, offering a sanctuary worthy of the classical Greek ideals of male association, yet somehow remain true to its legacy of respectable austerity and Puritan self-denial. The Crimson Letter therefore tells stories of great unhappiness and manacled minds, as well as stories of triumphant activism and fulfilled promise. Shand-Tucci brilliantly exposes the secrecy and codes that attended the gay experience, showing how their effects could simultaneously thwart and spark creativity. He explores in particular the question of gay sensibility and its effect upon everything from symphonic music to football, set design to statecraft, poetic theory to skyscrapers. The Crimson Letter combines the learned and the lurid, tragedy and farce, scandal and vindication, and figures of world renown as well as those whose influence extended little farther than Harvard Square. Here is an engrossing account of a university transforming and transformed by those passing through its gates, and of their enduring impact upon American culture.

Disclaimer: www.yourbookbest.com does not own The Crimson Letter books pdf, neither created or scanned. We just provide the link that is already available on the internet, public domain and in Google Drive. If any way it violates the law or has any issues, then kindly mail us via contact us page to request the removal of the link.

The Crimson Letter

The Crimson Letter

File Size : 63,63 MB
Total View : 6432 Views
DOWNLOAD

In a book deeply impressive in its reach while also deeply embedded in its storied setting, bestselling historian Douglass Shand-Tucci explores the nature and e

The Art of Scandal

The Art of Scandal

File Size : 25,25 MB
Total View : 5001 Views
DOWNLOAD

Extensively researched and richly detailed, this biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner is the first to vividly portray the extraordinary life and times of one o

American Architecture and Urbanism

American Architecture and Urbanism

File Size : 93,93 MB
Total View : 4522 Views
DOWNLOAD

A classic book authored by the foremost architectural historian in America, this fully illustrated history of American architecture and city planning is based o