A collection of essays examining the short stories and life of the 19th century American writer Edgar Allan Poe. Presenting some of the best of a broad range of critical perspectives from the psychoanalytical to the postcolonial, it offers an introduction to Poe's tales and the critical conversation surrounding them.

This volume of the Critical Insights series opens with a reflection of Poe's aesthetics, and offers a consideration of Poe's distinctive contribution to American poetry. Other essays contextualize Poe's invocation of the exotic in poems such as "Tamerlane," "Al Aaraaf" "Ulalume," and "The Raven" against nineteenth-century travel narratives, analyze Poe's poetics of memory and grief and discuss Poe's influence on other major poets such as Baudelaire, Frances Osgood, and Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Steven Frye offers a comprehensive treatment of Cormac McCarthy's fiction to date, dealing with the author's aesthetic and thematic concerns, his philosophical and religious influences, and his participation in Western literary traditions. Frye provides extensive readings of each novel, charting the trajectory of McCarthy's development as a writer who invigorates literary culture both past and present through a blend of participation, influence, and aesthetic transformation. He explores the early works of the Tennessee period in the context of the romance genre, the southern gothic, and the...

This Companion provides a comprehensive introduction to the literature of the American West, one of the most vibrant and diverse literary traditions.

This Companion provides a comprehensive introduction to the literature of the American West, one of the most vibrant and diverse literary traditions.

Best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove and his Academy Award-winning screenplay for Brokeback Mountain, Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-nine novels, three memoirs, two collections of essays, and more than thirty screenplays. In Understanding Larry McMurtry, Steven Frye considers a broad range of McMurtry's most important novels and offers detailed textual analyses of works such as Horseman, Pass By, The Last Picture Show, Moving On, and Lonesome Dove to reveal the manner in which McMurtry engages the human condition.
Characters are at the heart of McMurtry's...