Melvin Lasky's Books

The Diary of Lt. Melvin J. Lasky

Into Germany at the End of World War II

By: Charlotte A. Lerg

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The Diary of Lt. Melvin J. Lasky

Into Germany at the End of World War II

By: Charlotte A. Lerg

The Diary of Lt. Melvin J. Lasky' offers not only a panoramic view of a country poised between devastation and an uncertain future but a gripping self-portrait of a man poised between unresolved youthful bewilderment and a mature clarity of conviction." • Wall Street Journal In 1945 Melvin J. Lasky, serving in one of the first American divisions that entered Germany after the country’s surrender, began documenting the everyday life of a defeated nation. Travelling widely across both Germany and post-war Europe, Lasky’s diary provides a captivating eye-witness account colored by ongoing socio-political debates and his personal background studying Trotskyism. The Diary of Lt. Melvin J. Lasky reproduces the diary’s vivid language as Lasky describes the ideological tensions between the East and West, as well as including critical essays on subjects ranging from Lasky’s life as a transatlantic intellectual, the role of war historians, and the diary as a literary genre.

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341

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Berghahn Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1800736967

ISBN 13

9781800736962

Voices in a Revolution

The Collapse of East German Communism

By: Melvin J. Lasky

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Voices in a Revolution

The Collapse of East German Communism

By: Melvin J. Lasky

Afeatured article in Die Zeit, the leading German weekly, begins with "Melvin, du hast gewonnen"--Mel, you have won! In his extraordinary account of the final days of the German Democratic Republic (DDR) we see the reckoning of a regime, and also the vindication of a life-long devotee of European democracy. It is unlikely that any comparable memoir will be written, since Lasky's career spanned the entire history of wartime and postwar Germany, especially in divided and Wall-torn Berlin.Voices in a Revolution, now in paperback, offers an in-depth portrayal of the Communist police state before the breakdown, followed by a blow-by-blow account of the drama of breakdown and regime transformation. Characters in the everyday cultural world of Germany come alive as harbingers and heralds of the end of the old and the necessity of the new.Lasky understands the role of accident as well as of necessity. The West Germans had all but abandoned the slogan of One People, One Nation when they were faced with the immense task of supervising just such a reintegration. The work ends with the awakening conscience at the very point that the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. This is a memorable work--one likely to sear the conscience of lovers of freedom and analysts of tyranny alike.

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138

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1351299824

ISBN 13

9781351299824

On Understanding Emotion

By: Melvin J. Lasky

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On Understanding Emotion

By: Melvin J. Lasky

Emotions--fleeting, insubstantial, changeable, and ambiguous--seem to defy study and analysis. Nothing is more complex, mysterious, and subject to conflicting theories and interpretations than human emotion. Yet the central importance of emotion in human affairs is undeniable. Emotions affect all levels of life--personal, organizational, political, cultural, economic, and religious. Emotions give meaning to life. Emotional disturbances can destroy that meaning. How should emotions be studied? How can an understanding of the inner feelings of individuals illuminate important social interactions and human developments? In his book, Norman Denzin presents a systematic, in-depth analysis of emotion that combines new theoretical advances with practical applications. Based on an intensive, critical examination of classical and modern theoretical research--and on revealing personal interviews in which ordinary people express their emotional lives--he builds a new framework for understanding ordinary emotions and emotional disturbances. Denzin analyzes how people experience joy and pain, love and hate, anger and despair, friendship and alienation--and examines the personal, psychological, social, and cultural aspects of human emotion to provide new perspectives for understanding human experience and social interactions. He offers new insights on the role of emotions in family violence and recommends ways of helping people escape from recurring patterns of violence. And in criticizing current conceptions of emotionally disturbed people, he reveals the nature of their inner lives and the ways they perceive and relate to others. In sum, this book presents new insights on human relationships and human experience. It is now available in paperback for the first time, with a new introduction by the author.

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415

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1351501755

ISBN 13

9781351501750

Profanity, Obscenity and the Media

By: Melvin J. Lasky

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Profanity, Obscenity and the Media

By: Melvin J. Lasky

This is the second volume of Melvin J. Lasky’s The Language of Journalism series, praised as a “brilliant” and “original” study in communications and contemporary language, and as “a joy to read.” When it was first published, it broke ground in focusing on the comparative styles and prejudices of mainstream American and British newspapers, and in its trenchant analysis of their systematic debasement of language in the face of obligatory platitudes and compulsory euphemisms. Lasky documents the growing crisis affecting honest, thoughtful, and independent journalism in the Western world. He extends the scope of his first volume in the trilogy and deepens the interpretation. He also adds a personal touch of wit and anecdote, as one might expect from an experienced international journalist and historian. Lasky’s examination of the use of formerly forbidden language is a triumph of sinuous semantics. In his incisive analysis, we see the tortuous struggle of a once Puritanized literary culture writhing to break free of censorship and self-censorship. This volume on the phenomenon of profanity adds another dimension to Lasky’s thesis on mass culture’s trivialization of real social and political phenomena. It also underscores our society’s embrace of banality, in standardizing politically correct jargon and slang. Readers of the first volume will find here a new range of references to illuminate the detail of what our newspapers have been publishing.

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362

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Transaction Publishers

Published Date

ISBN 10

1412832012

ISBN 13

9781412832014

Media Warfare

The Americanization of Language

By: Melvin J. Lasky

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Media Warfare

The Americanization of Language

By: Melvin J. Lasky

Media Warfare is the concluding volume of Melvin Lasky's monumental The Language of Journalism, a series that has been praised as a ""brilliant"" and ""original"" study in communications and contemporary language. Firmly rooted in the critical tradition of H. L. Mencken, George Orwell, and Karl Kraus, Lasky's incisive analysis of journalistic usage and misusage gauges both the cultural and political health of contemporary society as well the declining standards of contemporary journalism.As in the first two volumes, Lasky's scope is cross-cultural with special emphasis on the sometimes conflicting, sometimes mutually influential styles of American and British journalistic practice. His approach to changes in media content and style is closely keyed to changes in society at large. Media Warfare pays particular attention to the gradual easing and near disappearance of censorship rules in the 1960s and after and the attendant effects on electronic and print media. In lively and irreverent prose, Lasky anatomizes the dilemmas posed by the entrance of formerly ""unmentionable"" subjects into daily journalistic discourse, whether for reasons of profit or accurate reporting. He details the pervasive and often indirect influence of the worlds of fashion and advertising on journalism with their imperatives of sensationalism and novelty and, by contrast, how the freeing of language and subject matter in literature--the novels of Joyce and Lawrence, the poetry of Philip Larkin--have affected permissible expression for good or ill. Lasky also relates this interaction of high and low style to the spread of American urban slang, often with Yiddish roots and sometimes the occasion of anti-Semitic reaction, into the common parlance of British no less than American journalists.Media Warfare concludes with prescriptive thoughts on how journalism might still be revitalized in a ""post-profane"" culture. Witty, timely, and deeply learned, the three volumes of The Language of Journalism are a c

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388

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

135150634X

ISBN 13

9781351506342

On the Barricades, and Off

By: Melvin J. Lasky

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On the Barricades, and Off

By: Melvin J. Lasky

The importance of Melvin J. Lasky and of the journals he has edited "(Encounter "in London, "Der Monat "in Berlin) has been beautifully captured by a young European intellectual, Dr. Michael Naumann: "Lasky's work, quite apart from its value as a meditation, is a testimony of personal courage. This is the work of an outsider, of a thinker in crazed times, who ranks with the few who can apply that 16th-century observation of Richard Hooker to themselves with every justification: 'Posterity may know we have not loosely through silence permitted things to pass away as in a dream.'..." "On The Barricades, And Off, "is an extraordinary collection of writings by Lasky dealing with Revolutionaries and Ideologies, with the German Problem and the Russian Question, with Travelling and Climates of Opinion. But there is nothing eclectic or random about this effort. Indeed the essays are stitched together by an impassioned dedication to the open society and, no less, a universal, even-handed critique of all closed societies. Born in New York City, Melvin J. Lasky has been co-editor of "Encounter "in London (called "the most brilliant European periodical") since he succeeded Irving Kristol in 1958. He was educated at the City College of New York, at the University of Michigan, and Columbia University. He was the literary editor of the New Leader before serving in World War II as a combat historian in France and -Germany. After the war he was a foreign correspondent for the "New York Times, The Reporter, Partisan Review, "and other publications. His work as an editor and writer reflects that unusual group of cosmopolitan scholars and men of letters who emerged from the ashes of conflict to help recreate the intellectual climate for democracy in Europe, indirectly reestablishing transatlantic critical standards in America.

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500

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Transaction Publishers

ISBN 10

1412830133

ISBN 13

9781412830133

Utopia and Revolution

On the Origins of a Metaphor

By: Melvin Lasky

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Utopia and Revolution

On the Origins of a Metaphor

By: Melvin Lasky

The most comprehensive study of ideology and utopia since Karl Mannheim's work of the 1930s, Utopia and Revolution can be understood as turning classical political theory on its head or, perhaps, inside out. Instead of the usual summary of how English radical theologies contributed to the revolutionary process, Lasky shows how such political theology of the mid-seventeenth century became the backbone of the natural history of revolutionary disasters. In a remarkable feat of scholarship in intellectual history, Lasky charts the course of this historic entanglement over some five turbulent centuries of Western history. In so doing, he traces the ideological extension of the human personality through the writings of political theorists, philosophers, poets, and historians.

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1253

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Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1351300342

ISBN 13

9781351300346

Media Warfare

The Americanization of Language

By: Melvin J. Lasky

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Media Warfare

The Americanization of Language

By: Melvin J. Lasky

Media Warfare is the concluding volume of Melvin Lasky's monumental The Language of Journalism, a series that has been praised as a "brilliant" and "original" study in communications and contemporary language. Firmly rooted in the critical tradition of H. L. Mencken, George Orwell, and Karl Kraus, Lasky's incisive analysis of journalistic usage and misusage gauges both the cultural and political health of contemporary society as well the declining standards of contemporary journalism. As in the first two volumes, Lasky's scope is cross-cultural with special emphasis on the sometimes conflicting, sometimes mutually influential styles of American and British journalistic practice. His approach to changes in media content and style is closely keyed to changes in society at large. Media Warfare pays particular attention to the gradual easing and near disappearance of censorship rules in the 1960s and after and the attendant effects on electronic and print media. In lively and irreverent prose, Lasky anatomizes the dilemmas posed by the entrance of formerly "unmentionable" subjects into daily journalistic discourse, whether for reasons of profit or accurate reporting. He details the pervasive and often indirect influence of the worlds of fashion and advertising on journalism with their imperatives of sensationalism and novelty and, by contrast, how the freeing of language and subject matter in literature--the novels of Joyce and Lawrence, the poetry of Philip Larkin--have affected permissible expression for good or ill. Lasky also relates this interaction of high and low style to the spread of American urban slang, often with Yiddish roots and sometimes the occasion of anti-Semitic reaction, into the common parlance of British no less than American journalists. Media Warfare concludes with prescriptive thoughts on how journalism might still be revitalized in a "post-profane" culture. Witty, timely, and deeply learned, the three volumes of The Language of Journalism are a crowning achievement to a distinguished career.

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373

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Transaction Publishers

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ISBN 10

1412812259

ISBN 13

9781412812252

The Language of Journalism: Media Warfare

By: Melvin J. Lasky

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The Language of Journalism: Media Warfare

By: Melvin J. Lasky

The concluding volume of Lasky's monumental "The Languages of Journalism," a series that has been praised as a "brilliant" and "original" study in communications and contemporary language. Other volumes in the series include "Profanity, Obscenity and the Media" and "Newspaper Culture.

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388

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Transaction Publishers

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ISBN 10

076580302X

ISBN 13

9780765803023

The Language of Journalism

Newspaper culture. Volume one

By: Melvin J. Lasky

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The Language of Journalism

Newspaper culture. Volume one

By: Melvin J. Lasky

Hugely enjoyable--and valuable. I dropped everything else to read it. A treasure..."--Charles Wheeler, senior foreign correspondent, the BBC The newspaper is to the twentieth century what the novel was for the nineteenth century: the expression of popular sentiment. In the first of a three-volume study of journalism and what it has meant as a source of knowledge and as a mechanism for orchestrating mass ideology, Melvin J. Lasky provides a major overview. His research runs the gamut of material found in newspapers, from the trivial to the profound, from pseudo-science to habits of solid investigation. The volume is divided into four parts. The first attacks deficiencies in grammar and syntax with examples from newspapers and magazines drawn from the German as well as English-language press. The second examines the key issues of journalism: accuracy and authenticity. Lasky provides an especially acute account of differences between active literacy and passive viewing, or the relationship of word and picture in defining authenticity. The third part emphasizes the problem of bias in everything from racial reporting to cultural correctness. This is the first systematic attempt to study racial nomenclature, identity-labeling, and literary discrimination. Lasky follows closely the model set by George Orwell a half century earlier. The final section of the work covers the competition between popular media and the redefinition of pornography and its language. The volume closes with an examination of how the popular culture both influenced and was influential upon literary titans like Hemingway, Lawrence, and Tynan. Melvin J. Lasky was the editor of Encounter in England from 1958 until its close in 1990. It was viewed as the most brilliant European periodical of its time. Lasky served as foreign correspondent for the New York Times and The Reporter, and has written for many of the intellectual journals from Partisan Review to Commentary. He is the author of The Hungarian Revolution, Africa for Beginners, Utopia and Revolution, On the Barricades, and Off, and Voices in a Revolution.

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506

Publisher

Transaction Publishers

ISBN 10

1412837553

ISBN 13

9781412837552

The Evolution of Childhood

Relationships, Emotion, Mind

By: Melvin Konner

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The Evolution of Childhood

Relationships, Emotion, Mind

By: Melvin Konner

This book is an intellectual tour de force: a comprehensive Darwinian interpretation of human development. Looking at the entire range of human evolutionary history, Melvin Konner tells the compelling and complex story of how cross-cultural and universal characteristics of our growth from infancy to adolescence became rooted in genetically inherited characteristics of the human brain. All study of our evolution starts with one simple truth: human beings take an extraordinarily long time to grow up. What does this extended period of dependency have to do with human brain growth and social interactions? And why is play a sign of cognitive complexity, and a spur for cultural evolution? As Konner explores these questions, and topics ranging from bipedal walking to incest taboos, he firmly lays the foundations of psychology in biology. As his book eloquently explains, human learning and the greatest human intellectual accomplishments are rooted in our inherited capacity for attachments to each other. In our love of those we learn from, we find our way as individuals and as a species. Never before has this intersection of the biology and psychology of childhood been so brilliantly described. "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution," wrote Dobzhansky. In this remarkable book, Melvin Konner shows that nothing in childhood makes sense except in the light of evolution.

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Page Count

961

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674062019

ISBN 13

9780674062016

Media Warfare

The Americanization of Language

By: Melvin J. Lasky

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Media Warfare

The Americanization of Language

By: Melvin J. Lasky

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365

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Transaction Pub

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ISBN 10

141280728X

ISBN 13

9781412807289

The Presidency of Richard Nixon

By: Melvin Small

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The Presidency of Richard Nixon

By: Melvin Small

Small (history, Wayne State U.) uses a topical approach in his examination of Richard Nixon's controversial presidency. He examines both the military and diplomatic aspects of ending the Vietnam War while integrating Nixon's efforts to eliminate the antiwar movement. He also includes chapters on Nixon's domestic policies, his war with the media, Watergate, and a closing chapter on Nixon's post- presidential years. Small takes a fairly balanced approach to Nixon's presidency and incorporates reflections on Nixon's broader influence on American politics and culture. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

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Page Count

428

Published Date

ISBN 10

0700612556

ISBN 13

9780700612550

The Language of Journalism

By: Melvin J Lasky

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The Language of Journalism

By: Melvin J Lasky

This is the second volume of Melvin J. Lasky's The Language of Journalism series, praised as a "brilliant" and "original" study in communications and contemporary language, and as "a joy to read." When it was first published, it broke ground in focusing on the comparative styles and prejudices of mainstream American and British newspapers, and in its trenchant analysis of their systematic debasement of language in the face of obligatory platitudes and compulsory euphemisms.Lasky documents the growing crisis affecting honest, thoughtful, and independent journalism in the Western world. He extends the scope of his first volume in the trilogy and deepens the interpretation. He also adds a personal touch of wit and anecdote, as one might expect from an experienced international journalist and historian. Lasky's examination of the use of formerly forbidden language is a triumph of sinuous semantics. In his incisive analysis, we see the tortuous struggle of a once Puritanized literary culture writhing to break free of censorship and self-censorship.This volume on the phenomenon of profanity adds another dimension to Lasky's thesis on mass culture's trivialization of real social and political phenomena. It also underscores our society's embrace of banality, in standardizing politically correct jargon and slang. Readers of the first volume will find here a new range of references to illuminate the detail of what our newspapers have been publishing."--Provided by publisher.

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Page Count

339

Published Date

ISBN 10

1138516171

ISBN 13

9781138516175

Voices in a Revolution

The Collapse of East German Communism

By: Melvin J. Lasky

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Voices in a Revolution

The Collapse of East German Communism

By: Melvin J. Lasky

A featured article in Die Zeit, the leading German weekly, begins with "Melvin, du hast gewonnen"--Mel, You have won! In his extraordinary account of the final days of the German Democratic Republic (DDR) we see the reckoning of a regime, and also the vindication of a life-long devotee of European democracy, the editor of Encounter, Melvin J. Lasky. It is unlikely that any comparable memoir will be available, since Lasky's career spans the entire history of wartime and postwar Germany, especially in divided and Wall-torn Berlin. Written with an intimacy about the German nation, a feeling for the language and culture of the people, and a sense of the ideological taproots of the Communist regime that ruled East Germany until the end, Lasky's book gives a sense of "a world-shaking Revolution" that is equaled only by John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World. Indeed, it must be added that Lasky has what Reed lacked: a deep intellectual understanding of political systems and social movements. The work offers an in-depth portrayal of the Communist police state before the breakdown; followed by a blow-by-blow account of the drama of breakdown and regime transformation as such. Characters in the everyday cultural world of Germany come alive as harbingers and heralds of the end of the old and the necessity of the new. The role of the intelligentsia is underscored with stunning detail. Lasky understands the role of accident as well as of necessity. The West Germans had all but abandoned the slogan of One People, One Nation when they were faced with the immense task of supervising just such a reintegration. The work ends with the awakening conscience at the very point that the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. This is a memorable work--one likely to sear the conscience of lovers of freedom and analysts of tyranny alike.

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Page Count

116

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Transaction Pub

Published Date

ISBN 10

1412805503

ISBN 13

9781412805506

On the Barricades, and Off

By: Melvin J. Lasky

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On the Barricades, and Off

By: Melvin J. Lasky

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500

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Transaction Publishers

ISBN 10

1412830133

ISBN 13

9781412830133

Profanity, Obscenity and the Media

By: Melvin J. Lasky

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Profanity, Obscenity and the Media

By: Melvin J. Lasky

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362

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ISBN 10

1412832012

ISBN 13

9781412832014

The Language of Journalism

Volume 1, Newspaper Culture

By: Melvin J. Lasky

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The Language of Journalism

Volume 1, Newspaper Culture

By: Melvin J. Lasky

The newspaper is to the twentieth century what the novel was for the nineteenth century: the expression of popular sentiment. In the first of a three-volume study of journalism and what it has meant as a source of knowledge and as a mechanism for orchestrating mass ideology, Melvin J. Lasky provides a major overview. His research runs the gamut of material found in newspapers, from the trivial to the profound, from pseudo-science to habits of solid investigation. The volume is divided into four parts. The first attacks deficiencies in grammar and syntax with examples from newspapers and magazines drawn from the German as well as English-language press. The second examines the key issues of journalism: accuracy and authenticity. Lasky provides an especially acute account of differences between active literacy and passive viewing, or the relationship of word and picture in defining authenticity. The third part emphasizes the problem of bias in everything from racial reporting to cultural correctness. This is the first systematic attempt to study racial nomenclature, identity-labeling, and literary discrimination. Lasky follows closely the model set by George Orwell a half century earlier. The final section of the work covers the competition between popular media and the redefinition of pornography and its language. The volume closes with an examination of how the popular culture both influenced and was influential upon literary titans like Hemingway, Lawrence, and Tynan.

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Page Count

805

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1351327186

ISBN 13

9781351327183

Utopia and Revolution

On the Origins of a Metaphor

By: Melvin Lasky

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Utopia and Revolution

On the Origins of a Metaphor

By: Melvin Lasky

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1253

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Routledge

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ISBN 10

1351300342

ISBN 13

9781351300346

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