@article{1478254,
      recid = {1478254},
      author = {Bramen, Carrie Tirado, },
      title = {The Uses of Variety : Modern Americanism and the Quest for  National Distinctiveness /},
      pages = {1 online resource (394 p.)},
      abstract = {The turn of the last century, amid the excesses of the  Gilded Age, variety became a key notion for Americans'a  sign of national progress and development, reassurance that  the modern nation would not fall into monotonous dullness  or disorderly chaos. Carrie Tirado Bramen pursues this idea  through the works of a wide range of regional and  cosmopolitan writers, journalists, theologians, and  politicians who rewrote the narrative of American  exceptionalism through a celebration of variety. Exploring  cultural and institutional spheres ranging from intra-urban  walking tours in popular magazines to the 1893 World's  Parliament of Religions in Chicago, she shows how the  rhetoric of variety became naturalized and nationalized as  quintessentially American and inherently democratic. By  focusing on the uses of the term in the work of William  James, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, Hamlin Garland,  and Wong Chin Foo, among many others, Bramen reveals how  the perceived innocence and goodness of variety were used  to construct contradictory and mutually exclusive visions  of modern Americanism. Bramen's innovation is to look at  the debates of a century ago that established diversity as  the distinctive feature of U.S. culture. In the  late-nineteenth-century conception, which emphasized the  openness of variety while at the same time acknowledging  its limits, she finds a useful corrective to the  contemporary tendency to celebrate the United States as a  postmodern melange or a carnivalesque utopia of hybridity  and difference.Table of Contents: Introduction:  Americanizing Variety I. The Ideological Formation of  Pluralism 1. William James and the Modern Federal Republic  2. Identity Culture and Cosmopolitanism II. The Aesthetics  of Diversity 3. The Uneven Development of American  Regionalism 4. The Urban Picturesque and Americanization  III. Heterogeneous Unions 5. Biracial Fictions and the  Mendelist Allegory 6. East Meets West at the World's  Parliament of Religions Afterword: In Defense of Partiality  Notes Works Cited Acknowledgments IndexReviews of this  book: [Bramen] brings dogged research and steady focus to  [a] central ambiguity in the American ethos.Her study  delivers several powerful messages even plain-talking  people can understand. For one, Bramen shows that issues of  ethnic diversity and variety, far from being epiphenomena  of the last few decades, course through our history and  spotlight the ambiguities in what it means to be an  American.The Uses of Variety boasts gems.of past cultural  history that remind us these are perennial  issues.[Bramen's] penetrating expedition through the  nuances of America's breast-beating about 'diversity within  unity' concentrates the mind. Out of many examples comes an  important book: a flinty challenge to intellectual  complacency about ourselves.--Carlin Romano, Philadelphia  InquirerThe Uses of Variety is a significant addition to  and revision of a century of American pragmatist thinking  about difference. Bramen brings new conceptual tools to  bear on the history of multicultural thought and literature  and thereby avoids the common pitfalls to produce an  important survey and synthesis.--Tom Lutz, author of  American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History and editor  of These 'Colored' United States: African American Essays  from the 1920sCarrie Bramen offers a compelling,  intellectually rigorous history of the protean idea of  pluralism, a concept that has been embraced heartily by  both liberals and conservatives as essential in defining  American identity. Situating pluralism in philosophical,  psychological, aesthetic, and political contexts, Bramen  brings a fresh perspective to illuminating the meaning of  the term for late Victorian America and, significantly, its  legacy for us today.--Linda Simon, author of Genuine  Reality: A Life},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1478254},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674028715},
}