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...

Billy Budd is Herman Melville's most popular work after Moby-Dick. Melville wrote the novella during the five years before his death, and it was published posthumously in 1924. The essays collected here provide a multifaceted introduction to this major American work.

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...

These new critical essays on Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's explosive first novel, not only question our understanding of the "Southern Gothic," but launch a new inquiry into the nature and history of O'Connor's critical reputation. Perceived as a "classic" American writer despite the double setbacks of being a woman and a twentieth-century author, O'Connor continues to speak with striking clarity and disturbing vision to successive generations.

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.

These new critical essays on Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's explosive first novel, not only question our understanding of the "Southern Gothic," but launch a new inquiry into the nature and history of O'Connor's critical reputation. Perceived as a "classic" American writer despite the double setbacks of being a woman and a twentieth-century author, O'Connor continues to speak with striking clarity and disturbing vision to successive generations.

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.

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.