New Essays on Native Son provides original insights into this major American novel by Richard Wright. After an introductory essay by the editor on the conception, composition, and reception of the novel, four leading Afro-Americanists examine various aspects of this classic fictional account of violent life and death in a racist society. John M. Reilly shows how carefully Wright utilises narrative techniques to subvert conventional American racial discourse and to establish the authority and authenticity of the protagonist's voice. Trudier Harris explores some of the social ironies involved...

The Last of the Mohicans is the most widely-read and internationally acclaimed of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking tales, and has traditionally been regarded as an exciting and well-made adventure story. In recent years, however, critics have found in this classic tale of colonial warfare deeper levels of meaning. In the introduction to this volume, H. Daniel Peck studies these developments by tracking critical responses to the novel from the time of its publication in 1826 to the present day. The essays that follow present contemporary reassessments of The Last of the Mohicans from a...

First published in 1951, Catcher in the Rye continues to be one of the most popular novels ever written as well as one of the most frequently banned books in the United States. In his introduction to this volume, Jack Salzman discusses the history of the novel's composition and publication, the mixed reception it received from critics and scholars, the arguments surrounding the attempts at censorship, and its position in a postmodernist literary world. The five essays that follow focus on various aspects of the novel: its ideology within the context of the Cold War, its portrait of a...

The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) established William Dean Howells's reputation in the annals of American literature. This collection of essays argues the renewed importance of Howells's novel for an understanding of literature as social force as well as a literary form. In his introduction Donald Pease recounts the fall and rise of the novel's value in literary history, outlines the various critical responses to Silas Lapham, and then restores Silas Lapham to its social context. The essays that follow expand on this theme, challenging the accepted views of literary critics by explicating...

The introduction by Donald Pizer describes in detail the biographical and historical background of the novel and its critical reputation. The four original essays in the volume not only touch on long-established approaches to Sister Carrie but also reflect a number of the concerns of recent scholarly and critical movements. Each of the essays is a self-standing examination of a major area of interest in the novel, including such topics as the impact of Dreiser's own life on the creation of Carrie and Hurstwood, the relationship of Carrie and the theater, and Dreiser's naturalism and his...

Sixty years after its first publication, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio continues to stand as a "classic" of modernist American fiction. In original new essays by David H. Stouck, Marcia Jacobson, Clare E. Colquitt, and Thomas Yingling, Winesburg is reconsidered in the contexts of the expressionist movement, the American boy-book tradition, the work of Sarah Orne Jewett, and the rise of industrial capitalism. An introduction by John W. Crowley reviews the career of Sherwood Anderson and his assimilation into the literary canon.

When first published in 1929, Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms was decried as a vulgar novel, and was actually banned in Boston. In his extensive introduction, Scott Donaldson explains this initial reception, and then traces the change in perception toward the novel. The essays in this collection show that Farewell was a revolutionary novel that has only now begun to be understood - sixty years after publication. Sandra Spanier demonstrates how World War I determined the behaviour patterns of Catherine Barkley; James Phelan examines the first person narration; Ben Stoltzfus studies the...

"The American Novel" series provides students of American literature with introductory critical guides to the great works of American fiction. Each volume begins with a substantial introduction by a distinguished authority on the text, giving details of the novel's composition, publication history, and contemporary reception, as well as a survey of the major critical trends and readings from first publication to the present. This overview is followed by a group of new essays, each specially commissioned from a leading scholar in the field, which together constitute a forum of interpretive...

The Crying of Lot 49 is widely recognized as a significant contemporary work that frames the desire for meaning and the quest for knowledge within the social and political contexts of the '50s and '60s in America. In the introduction to this collection of original essays on Thomas Pynchon's important novel, Patrick O'Donnell discusses the background and critical reception of the novel. Further essays by five experts on contemporary literature examine the novel's "semiotic regime" or the way in which it organizes signs; the comparison of postmodernist Pynchon and the influential South American...

The American Novel series provides students of American literature with introductory critical guides to the great works of American fiction. Each volume begins with a substantial introduction by a distinguished authority on the text, giving details of the novel's composition, publication history, and contemporary reception, as well as a survey of major critical trends and readings from first publication to the present. This overview is followed by a group of new essays, each specially commissioned from a leading scholar in the field, which together constitute a forum of interpretative methods...