In a series of essays written especially for this volume, five distinguished critics offer a range of approaches, discussing the novel in terms of its composition and position in Faulkner's career, its structure and narrative techniques, and its relation to the religious, racial, and sexual assumptions of the society it represents.

New Essays on Walden reviews Thoreau's classic from four important contemporary perspectives. Lawrence Buell explains how decisions by Thoreau's publisher combined with promotion of Thoreau by early Thoreauvians, literary critics and reviewers turned Walden into a classic. Nature writer and ecologist Anne LaBastille writes of her own responses to Walden. H. Daniel Peck examines how the pastoralism of Walden serves to contain not only the forces of industrialism and commerce in American society but also psychic forces in Thoreau's inner life. Finally Michael Fischer reevaluates Walden in the...

The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett is one of the most important works of New England local color fiction. This collection of essays builds on feminist literary scholarship that affirms the value of Jewett's work, but goes beyond previously published studies by offering an analysis of how race, nationalism, and the literary marketplace shape her narrative. The volume constitutes a major rethinking of Jewett's contribution to American literature, and will be of interest to the fields of American literary studies, feminist cultural criticism, and American studies.

Still John Updike's most popular and critically acclaimed novel, Rabbit Run introduced the character of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, one of those middle-class Americans who, in Updike's words, aren't especially beautiful or bright or urban but about whom there is a lot worth saying. The fallible hero struggles with his own sexuality, his religious feelings, the difficulties of being a son and father, and with the changes in American society that seem to suffocate him. Updike's writing is charged with narrative energy and pictorial accuracy that illuminate the present moment; it evokes the tension...

This volume addresses the established reputation of the Education of Henry Adams as a classic work of American autobiography and a canonical work of American literature. Examining the Education in terms of early twentieth-century American attitudes toward education, gender, U.S. foreign policy, and historiography, these essays add considerably to our understanding of the Education as an expression of its time. This is a remarkably coherent volume that explains in original ways the continuing importance of the Education of Henry Adams as literature and history.

Henry Roth's Call it Sleep, praised when it first appeared in the 1930s, neglected for decades, and reissued to wide acclaim in the 1960s, has been finally hailed as the finest Jewish-American novel of the first half of the century and one of the richest modernist novels to appear in America. The introduction and essays locate the novel in its cultural context and in terms of contemporary debates about ethnic literature, minority writing, modernism and canonization. Thus the volume sets out to consider Roth's hybrid status--as an American writer, a Jewish writer, and a European modernist.

William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury met with only limited success when published in 1929, probably due to its fragmented, non-chronological structure. Since, however, it has become one of the most popular of Faulkner's novels, serving as a litmus paper upon which critical approaches have tested themselves. In the introduction to this volume Noel Polk traces the critical responses to the novel from the time of its publication to the present day. The essays that follow present contemporary reassessments of The Sound and the Fury from a variety of critical perspectives. Dawn Trouard offers...

The essays collected here, written by leading critics of Toni Morrison's work, exemplify the fresh theoretical and cultural perspectives that have been brought to bear on African-American texts in general and on Song of Solomon in particular. They reveal the complexities of a deceptively straightforward novel and spark renewed interest in this pivotal text by one of the most gifted authors this nation has produced.

The House of Mirth captured the attention of a large portion of the reading public when it was published in a serial version for most of 1905 and then as a book in October of that year. Edith Wharton's story of Lily Bart topped the American bestseller list for four months and sealed the author's reputation as one of the major English-language fiction writers of her generation. Each of the four articles collected in this New Essays volume makes distinctive new claims for the historical, critical, and theoretical significance of Wharton's seminal work.

This book provides a multifaceted introduction to Nobel Prize-winner Saul Bellow's most widely read, respected, and taught work of fiction, Seize the Day. This tragi-comic story of one day in the life of an average man on the brink of failure and despair is a prime example of the Jewish novels of the 1950s. The essays in this volume examine the thematic, stylistic, and critical elements of Bellow's masterpiece and offer different approaches to how the novel may or may not be thought of as "ethnic."