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

Published Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2015] ©2015

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Description 1 online resource : illustrations Contents Ghost dance -- Valentines -- Cakewalk -- Monsters -- The soul shepherd -- The return of the novelist -- An innocent at Cedro -- The rise of Abraham Cahan -- Beyond syncopation Summary 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 Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Print version record Subject Authors, American -- Biography Artists -- United States -- Biography Intellectuals -- United States -- Biography BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY -- Historical. HISTORY -- United States -- State & Local -- General. Artists Authors, American Intellectual life Intellectuals SUBJECT United States -- Intellectual life -- 19th century United States -- Intellectual life -- 20th century. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85140367 United States -- Biography. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85139912 Subject United States Genre/Form Biographies Biographies. Biographies. Form Electronic book ISBN 9780804795395 0804795398

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