In Anzia Yezierska’s 1923 novel Salome of the Tenements, Russian Jewish immigrant Sonya Vrunsky marries the upper-class American man of her dreams only to discover that she cannot fit into his sterile world of money and manners. “I could never choke myself into the form of your society friends,” she declares. “No more can I make myself over on another person’s pattern. I’m different. I got to be what’s inside of me” (Yezierska [1995], Univ. of Illinois Press, 131). The question of making oneself over “on another person’s pattern” stands at the center of both Tova Cooper’s The Autobiography of Citizenship: Assimilation and Resistance in U.S. Education and Lauren S. Cardon’s Fashion and Fiction: Self-Transformation in Twentieth-Century American Literature. Both Cooper and Cardon examine pressures on individuals in the early decades of the twentieth century to fashion themselves along dominant cultural patterns, and they consider the range of...
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December 1, 2017
Book Review|
December 01 2017
The Autobiography of Citizenship: Assimilation and Resistance in U.S. Education
Fashion and Fiction: Self-Transformation in Twentieth-Century American Literature
The Autobiography of Citizenship: Assimilation and Resistance in U.S. Education
. By Cooper, Tova. New Brunswick, NJ
: Rutgers Univ. Press
. 2015
. xii, 264 pp. Cloth
, $90.00; paper, $31.95; e-book, $31.95.Fashion and Fiction: Self-Transformation in Twentieth-Century American Literature
. By Cardon, Lauren S.. Charlottesville
: Univ. of Virginia Press
. 2016
. xi, 213 pp. Cloth
, $75.00; paper, $29.50; e-book, $29.50.
Aviva F. Taubenfeld
Aviva F. Taubenfeld
Aviva F. Taubenfeld is the author of Rough Writing: Ethnic Authorship in Theodore Roosevelt’s America (New York Univ. Press, 2008). She is associate professor of literature at Purchase College, SUNY, where she teaches and writes on immigration, ethnicity, and childhood in US literature and culture.
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American Literature (2017) 89 (4): 889–891.
Citation
Aviva F. Taubenfeld; The Autobiography of Citizenship: Assimilation and Resistance in U.S. Education
Fashion and Fiction: Self-Transformation in Twentieth-Century American Literature. American Literature 1 December 2017; 89 (4): 889–891. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-4257928
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