Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> American - General

The unlikely heroines analyzed in this book are fictional women, who, like their male counterparts of the era, demonstrated an urge to break with tradition, a rejection of conventional values, and a desire for adventure. The six authors who created them--Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Kate Chopin--at one time or another all received critical acclaim. However, their gender has prevented them, and their works, from being viewed as an integral part of the important literature of the time. The six novels discussed...

For the American living 200 years ago, life was very different from today. One of the best ways to learn what life was like in early America is to examine the many almanacs published during that time. These books include a broad range of information that was of central importance to daily life in late 18th-century America, such as cures for common diseases, recipes for food, instructions for preparing many of the items that modern Americans would expect to buy at a store, agricultural advice, tables for computing interest and currency depreciation, church and court schedules, and lists of...

The Catholic literary revival in America refers both to the impact of the modern resurgence in European Catholic thought and letters upon the American Church between 1920 and 1960, and to efforts by American Catholic educational and literary leaders to induce a similar flowering of Catholic life and culture in their own country. Arnold Sparr examines those areas of Catholic thought and culture that most concerned educated American Catholics, critics, and cultural leaders between 1920 and 1960: the renaissance in Catholic literary, theological, philosophical, and social thought; its...

Despite extraordinary attention within the past five years by novelists, playwrights, and critics, the subject of mothers and daughters, and motherhood and daughterhood, has remained complicated and compelling. Mother Puzzles is a unique collection that examines how women who write have dealt with those relationships. Pearlman notes in her introduction that missing mothers--mothers who are physically present but emotionally absent--are often found in works by women. The question this collection addresses is why the mother, as currently portrayed in American literature by women, has...

A wide range of writers are brought together for the first time in this discussion of an on-going, largely unrecognized American prose tradition: literary journalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such writing was not new journalism and therefore simply a type of journalism; nor was it factual fiction, merely a type of realistic fiction. Rather, it can be examined as a distinct literary form, a type of cultural expression that can be defined and characterized.

Thirty-five lively and literate essays by contributing scholars analyze major writers of this literary genre or...

This literary critical book deals exclusively with contemporary fiction by women that focuses on aging of women. It discusses the emergence of a new fictional genre, the novel of ripening or Reifungsroman. This emerging genre about the aging heroine reconceptualizes middle and old age for women, taking it from a formerly stereotypical state of passivity and deterioration (by the hearthside) into one of adventure, growth, self-discovery, self-affirmation, and integration (on the open road). The book contains an extensive bibliography of twentieth-century popular periodical articles on aging...

Wayne Fraser's examination of the works of eighteen women writers in English Canada's history demonstrates how Canadian women's literature provides rich insight into the social and political development of the country. Fraser approaches the subject as a literary critic, arguing that these narratives were constructed within a certain social and political framework that resulted in a body of literature whose themes focus on the relationship of the individual to the larger community, an essentially feminine orientation.

The study, arranged chronologically from colonial times through the...

While neither Kate Chopin nor Edith Wharton can be called feminist writers, each did produce female moral art, writings that focus relentlessly on the dialectics of social relations and the position of women therein. Mary Papke analyzes their disintegrative visions through detailed readings of virtually all of their novels and several of their shorter works. Unlike comparable writers of their time, theirs was a nonpolemical but nonetheless political art in which disruption of the rules of masculine/feminine discourse and the hegemonic world view are deeply but obviously embedded within...

One of America's most distinguished independent artists/intellectuals, Richard Kostelanetz, has written a prescient volume that uses, as a starting point, the philosopher Robin Collingwood's notion that the historian and the novelist have much in common, for both attempt to define the largest lines of historical development. Aside from the introduction and conclusion, which were specifically written for this publication, these insightful chapters on four outstanding African-American novelists were composed and appeared in journals in the late 1960s. Kostelanetz saw the writing on the wall...

Schor traces the development of Ralph Ellison's fiction from the earliest experiments to the major accomplishment of his novel "Invisible Man," the mature prose of the "Hickman" stories and other published portions of his novel-in-progress. The study considers the two-fold obligation Ellison felt in committing himself to literature: to contribute at once to the growth of literature and also to the shaping of the culture as he would like it to be. His stories, read sequentially, reflect his struggle to encompass this aim in his writing. In describing that fragment of American experience he...

The Scarlet Letter is virtually unique among works of American fiction because it has not lapsed from print in over 140 years. The history of its reception, which is fully articulated in the volume introduction, may be read as a case study in canon formation. The collection of documents in the volume outline the highs and lows of Nathaniel Hawthorne's literary reputation and the elevation of his first and best-known romance to the rank of masterpiece and classic. Also included is a selective bibliography of modern scholarship.

Among the early documents reprinted are...

Best known as the author of imaginative short fiction, such as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Cask of Amontillado, and as the author of hauntingly sonorous poems such as The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe was a leading practitioner of the American Gothic and helped popularize the short story as a genre. This reference work assembles in dictionary format a complete and current body of information on Poe's life and work. More than 1900 entries cover all phases of Poe's art and literary criticism, his family relationships, his numerous travels and residences, and the abundance of critical...

William Styron has enjoyed a resurgence of popularity with the publication of "Darkness Visible" (1990), his account of his struggle with near-suicidal depression. His works are known for discussing psychological conflicts within families, religious doubt, existentialism, racial tension, and the role of history in fiction. Often compared with William Faulkner, Styron has emerged as one of the most important figures in contemporary American literature and is best known for his continuation of the Southern gothic tradition.

Through original essays, reprints of previously published...

In his youth a prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Arna Wendell Bontemps matured into a renaissance man in the broadest sense, a person fully engaged in the life of the intellect. He contributed vastly to the culture of his era through his own writings--fiction, plays, poetry, children's books, scholarship, and criticism--and advanced it through teaching, librarianship, and as a sponsor and patron of other artists. This detailed and fond biography provides a thorough analysis of Bontemps's private and public lives. Author Kirkland Jones is effective at portraying...

Publication of this sourcebook on important gay American fiction writers grants legitimacy and recognition to this rapidly emerging area of literary studies. Though wary of canon-formation in this groundbreaking work, editor Nelson has selected fifty-seven writers whose works have received serious critical acclaim and/or have won large audiences or, in a few cases, are worthy of greater attention. Included are representative writers of detective fiction and science fiction, but not authors of erotic fiction or pulp novels. Also excluded are a few novelists whose expressed wishes for...

Bosha collects major, representative criticism of John Cheever's fiction, and his posthumously published Letters and Journals, from the earliest reviews of 1943, through to the present. The volume provides a clear and comprehensive assessment of Cheever's critical reputation both during his lifetime, as each of his books was published and reviewed, and retrospectively, by academics and literary historians who have sought to place Cheever's work in a larger literary context. In addition to several new essays written specifically for this volume, this book publishes, for the first time, a...

Acknowledged as an original and important voice in American letters, Ann Beattie published her first short story at age twenty-five in 1972. Four years later, she issued her first short-story collection and first novel concurrently. This volume brings together book reviews, criticism, interviews, biographical materials, and bibliography spanning the entire corpus of Beattie's fiction to date---five short-story collections and four novels published through 1991. The editor's introduction analyzes the various critical stances, both positive and negative, informed also by her own 1992...