Acknowledged as an original and important voice in American letters, Ann Beattie published her first short story at age twenty-five in 1972. Four years later, she issued her first short-story collection and first novel concurrently. This volume brings together book reviews, criticism, interviews, biographical materials, and bibliography spanning the entire corpus of Beattie's fiction to date---five short-story collections and four novels published through 1991. The editor's introduction analyzes the various critical stances, both positive and negative, informed also by her own 1992...

Joan Didion is a major contemporary American novelist and journalist whose works have popular appeal and are widely studied from a variety of literary perspectives as well as for philosophical, psychological, and political insights into the times and topics with which they deal. This volume collects an extensive range of critical commentary, both reviews and scholarly examinations, including newly commissioned essays, covering the entire canon: four works of fiction and five of nonfiction published between 1963 and 1992. Individually, the selections explore diverse critical approaches to...

Eudora Welty holds a prominent position among Southern writers, receiving critical attention in publications that scan a wide range of interests. Journals that specialize in American literature, journals that publish general essays, and journals that focus on Southern literature frequently include articles about her works. Her writings have been included in anthologies and have been adapted for the stage and television. This book traces the evolving critical response to her fiction.

In a lucid introductory essay, Champion presents an overview and summarizes the body of criticism on...

Presenting roughly sixty year's worth of Miller scholarship, Centola and Cirulli offer a wide range of interpretations and critical responses to the playwright's work. Incorporating insights from several disciplines including, but not limited to, philosophy, psychology, and sociology, this work also contains discussions of his work in light of new understandings discovered through considerations of cultural contexts, performance issues, feminist concerns, as well as deconstructionist and postmodernist redefinitions of the textuality of Miller's writing.

Presenting roughly sixty year's...

As the author of such classic American short stories as A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Everything That Rises Must Converge, and Revelation, Flannery O'Connor has always been recognized as a distinctive voice in American literature. A devoutly Catholic, Southern author with serious literary ambitions, she dealt with topics such as the operation of grace in ordinary life, and the nature of evil, sin, and redemption. Fifty years after the publication of her first novel, Wise Blood, her fiction is acclaimed for its high literary value and with the publication of her Collected Works,...