Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> American - General

Calling on the image of the Midwest s vanished inland sea, Susan Neville has written a compelling collection of essays that ponder writing and the "landlocked imagination." The essays range from interviews with Indiana writers Kurt Vonnegut, Scott Sanders, Marguerite Young, and others, to discussions on techniques grounded in a Midwestern sensibility. As director of Butler University s Visiting Writers Series, Neville has had the rare opportunity to converse with such literary giants as Salman Rushdie, Ray Bradbury, and Toni Morrison, and some of those exchanges have been incorporated into...

The period from the late 1920s to the early 1940s was in Faulkner's career one of prodigious fertility, and the creative outburst on which it opens from The Sound and the Fury (1929) through As I Lay Dying (1930) and Sanctuary (1931) to Light in August (1932) touches indeed on the miraculous. It is the four children of this miracle that Andre Bleikasten re-examines and re-evaluates in his substantial new book on Faulkner. But rather than approach Faulkner's fiction from a priori theoretical assumptions and process it through some prefabricated grid, he has concentrated on the text...

Since its publication in 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper" has always been recognized as a powerful statement about the victimization of a woman whose neurasthenic condition is completely misdiagnosed, mistreated, and misunderstood, leaving her to face insanity alone, as a prisoner in her own bedroom. Never before, however, has the story itself been portrayed as victimized.

In this first critical edition of Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper," accompanied by contemporary reviews and previously unpublished letters, Julie Bates Dock examines the various myth-frames...

The original edition of this widely praised critical study was described as "quite the best book on Hemingway," and its importance was substantially enhanced when Philip Young added an absorbing account of his difficult exchange with Hemingway during the book's preparation and a summary of Hemingway's final years. Now available in a paperback edition through Lightning Print, this book explores the relationship between Hemingway the man and Hemingway the author, offering perspectives that remain fresh and insightful.

The Crossroads of American History and Literature collects two decades' worth of the best-known essays of Philip F. Gura. Beginning with a definitive overview of studies of colonial literature, Gura ranges through such subjects in colonial American history as the intellectual life of the Connecticut River Valley, Cotton Mather's understanding of political leadership, and the religious upheavals of the Great Awakening. In the nineteenth century, he visits such varied topics as the history of print culture in rural communities, the philological interests of the Transcendentalist...

In American Trajectories Warner Berthoff argues that even in the broadest cultural and historical perspective, imaginative literature (like all the arts) is a matter of individual signatures and differences. He also puts forth that there are recognizable patterns and continuities marking off what is distinctively American, what both reflects and speaks for a shared national experience. Discussions of Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain, Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, Kate Chopin, Theodore Dreiser, and Edmund Wilson focus on the provenance and central character of writing by...

Sacred Estrangement analyzes certain works by important American writers and thinkers in the context of the "rhetoric of conversion." Such analysis is especially valuable because it provides a reliable index of the relationship between the self and larger communities. Traditionally, "conversion" has served a socializing function, signifying that one has come into alignment with certain linguistic, behavioral, and cultural expectations. The socialization process is particularly apparent in the Christian conversion narratives of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries: by...

Maupassant and the American Short Story isolates and develops more fully than any previous study the impact of Maupassant's work on the writing of Ambrose Bierce, O. Henry, Kate Chopin, and Henry James. It introduces a new perspective to assess their canons, reviving the importance of many often-ignored stories and, in the cases of Maupassant and O. Henry, reasserting the necessity of studying such writers to understand the history of the genre.

An important moment in the history of the short story occurred with the American misreading of Maupassant's use of story structure....

Maria Marotti applies a unique mixture of strains of contemporary literary theory to the body of posthumously published works so far published in the Mark Twain Papers series, examining these late, frequently incomplete or abandoned, and usually experimental, works in theoretical light.

Marotti's approach is a text-centered one, semiotic and structuralist in inspiration, and she brings a fresh Continental perspective to bear on an author usually treated biographically, thematically, psychologically. Her concern is with generic definition, and this guides her shaping of the book into...

The first decade of the twentieth century saw Henry James at work selecting and revising his novels and tales for a collection of his work known as the New York Edition. James not only made extensive revisions of his early works; he added eighteen prefaces that provide what many readers believe to be the best commentary on his fiction. John Pearson argues here for a reading of the prefaces within the context of the New York Edition as James's attempt to construct an ideal reader, one attentive to his art and authorial performance.

Throughout his discussion of the...

The Private Melville demonstrates how great a role his profound sense of privacy played in Melville's life and work. Secrets he was careful never to reveal are unmasked by Philip Young. Privacy, as it appears to Melville here, is of three types. First are family matters the public had no business knowing about, such as the life story of a secret half-sister; next the story of the life of a cousin, model for the heroine of his incestuous novel, Pierre; and then the history of the woman's forebears.

The second type concerns four Berkshire Tales that depend heavily on...

From the early 1960s to the late 1980s, John A. Hostetler was the world's premier scholar of Amish life. Hailed by his peers for his illuminating and sensitive portrayals of this often misunderstood religious sect, Hostetler successfully spanned the divide between popular and academic culture, thereby shaping perceptions of the Amish throughout American society. He was also outspoken in his views of the modern world and of the Amish world--views that continue to stir debate today.

Born into an Old Order Amish family in 1918, Hostetler came of age in an era when the Amish were largely...

This edited volume is a wide ranging collection of essays on Ernest Hemingway and his work by some of the world's leading scholars and critics in the field of Hemingway studies. The collection offers the latest views--and some of the most challenging--of many of the best scholars in the field. The conclusions drawn are as various as the sixteen contributors; many of which challenge generally accepted views in the field. This study will be of interest and use to Hemingway buffs, to scholars of modern American literature, and to academic libraries.

Puerto Rican writers living in the United States and writing in English find themselves astride two cultures, two languages, and two ways of looking at life. They also find two sets of prejudice: racial, cultural, and linguistic bias in the United States; and rejection from Puerto Rican society. In this vibrant collection of interviews, Hernandez presents portraits of 14 of the most prominent Puerto Rican writers living in the United States and offers the first chance for them to speak directly about their lives and their literary tradition. Taken as a whole, the diverse experiences of...

African American fugitive slave narratives are receiving growing amounts of attention for their literary and historical value. This book examines the techniques the slave narrative writers used to authorize and rhetorically create themselves in their writings. By examining such issues as voice and identity formation, the volume demonstrates how identity may be seen as a cultural fabrication. Former slave narrators used a series of masking and doubling techniques to address their experiences as African Americans. This book crosses the boundaries between literary criticism and historical...

While most people know that Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous book "Uncle Tom's Cabin" spurred on abolotionist sentiments in the North, not many are aware of the vast abolitionist literature of children's books, poems, short stories, and essays. Many of these volumes were not written by seasoned authors, but by women whose primary roles were as mothers who functioned as domestic abolitionists, and have been lost to the ages. Here, De Rosa recovers a collection of these writings, illustrating the domestic abolitionists' efforts

While most people know that Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous book...