Contraband Guides

Contraband Guides

EnglishEbook
Kaplan, Paul H. D.
Penn State University Press
EAN: 9780271088204
Temporarily unavailable title
Currently not available to download
CZK 1,529
Common price CZK 1,699
Discount 10%

Detailed information

In his best-selling travel memoir, The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain punningly refers to the black man who introduces him to Venetian Renaissance painting as a ';contraband guide,' a term coined to describe fugitive slaves who assisted Union armies during the Civil War. By means of this and similar case studies, Paul H. D. Kaplan documents the ways in which American cultural encounters with Europe and its venerable artistic traditions influenced nineteenth-century concepts of race in the United States.Americans of the Civil War era were struck by the presence of people of color in European art and society, and American artists and authors, both black and white, adapted and transformed European visual material to respond to the particular struggles over the identity of African Americans. Taking up the work of both well- and lesser-known artists and writerssuch as the travel writings of Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, the paintings of German American Emanuel Leutze, the epistolary exchange between John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton, newspaper essays written by Frederick Douglass and William J. Wilson, and the sculpture of freed slave Eugene WarburgKaplan lays bare how racial attitudes expressed in mid-nineteenth-century American art were deeply inflected by European traditions.By highlighting the contributions people of black African descent made to the fine arts in the United States during this period, along with the ways in which they were represented, Contraband Guides provides a fresh perspective on the theme of race in Civil Warera American art. It will appeal to art historians, to specialists in African American studies and American studies, and to general readers interested in American art and African American history.
EAN 9780271088204
ISBN 0271088206
Binding Ebook
Publisher Penn State University Press
Publication date April 23, 2020
Pages 312
Language English
Country Uruguay
Authors Kaplan, Paul H. D.