Originally published in 1981. This index to characters and names in the published and unpublished fiction of William Faulkner is in two parts. The first, divided into novels, short stories, and unpublished fiction, lists the characters within each individual work. The second is an index of all named characters. Within each division of the first part of the index, works are listed alphabetically. The characters and names in each work are divided into fictional, unnamed, historical, Biblical and literary/mythic. The Master Index of named characters is a conflation of all the fictional...

Originally published in 1967. In this critical survey of the fiction of James Fenimore Cooper, George Dekker devotes a good deal of attention to Cooper's politics. He also explores the assimilation and development of the historical novel as first perfected by Sir Walter Scott. Cooper's major formal innovations in the field of historical fiction were, like Scott's, something more than mere experiments: they were made because American social and political developments differed radically from those of Scott's Europe and so demanded a different formal expression.

Originally published in 1963. The 'Americanness' of the American novel is as readily apparent as it is elusive of definition. It is the purpose of this study not to discover the reluctant formula, the comprehensive statement of national identity, but to examine the evidences of this identity in the work of some individual American writers. This study explores the works of many prominent American authors including Edgar Allan Poe, Nathanial Hawthorne, and Mark Twain.

Originally published in 1993. The purpose of this volume is to lay out documents which give an estimate of Mark Twain as a humourist in both historical scope and in the analysis of modern scholars. The emphasis in this collection is on how Twain developed from a contemporary humourist among many others of his generation into a major comic writer and American spokesman and, in several more recent essays by younger Twain scholars, the outcomes of that development late in his career. The essays determine how the humor takes on meaning and importance and how the humor works in a number of ways...