Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> American - General

Though one of the most significant American writers of the 20th century, Saul Bellow has continually elicited conflicting responses from critics. Some critics have seen him as America's greatest contemporary writer, while others have discounted him as discouragingly redundant. Not even his novel Herzog, generally considered his worthiest achievement, has gone unchallenged. The expansion of critical theory in the last decade has added to the controversy over Bellow's works.

The reviews and essays gathered in this volume illustrate the many disparate critical responses and...

This collection of recent essays on Hemingway and For Whom the Bell Tolls demonstrates the centrality of this Spanish Civil war novel in the author's life and canon and reestablishes the book's status as an American masterpiece. It provides a long overdue reassessment of the novel, which was an overwhelming critical and popular success in 1940.

Following Rena Sanderson's introduction, the volume begins with a reconsideration of Hemingway's career by novelist Kurt Vonnegut. Ten literary essays by both well-known specialists and new voices follow. Employing a diversity of...

This comprehensive and sophisticated feminist analysis contradicts the negative evaluations of earlier feminist critics to define Oates' feminist accomplishments. Wesley presents Oates' fiction as a dynamic structure that grew out of her obsessive concern with the American family and shows her literary patterns of resistance to the gender ideology that shapes it. She illustrates how Oates' disturbing portrayals of troubled families can and do address complex issues of power in contemporary society--economic dislocation, gender inequity, and violence--as they are experienced in intimate...

Joan Didion is a major contemporary American novelist and journalist whose works have popular appeal and are widely studied from a variety of literary perspectives as well as for philosophical, psychological, and political insights into the times and topics with which they deal. This volume collects an extensive range of critical commentary, both reviews and scholarly examinations, including newly commissioned essays, covering the entire canon: four works of fiction and five of nonfiction published between 1963 and 1992. Individually, the selections explore diverse critical approaches to...

Eudora Welty holds a prominent position among Southern writers, receiving critical attention in publications that scan a wide range of interests. Journals that specialize in American literature, journals that publish general essays, and journals that focus on Southern literature frequently include articles about her works. Her writings have been included in anthologies and have been adapted for the stage and television. This book traces the evolving critical response to her fiction.

In a lucid introductory essay, Champion presents an overview and summarizes the body of criticism on...

From the time he left his job as a publicist for General Electric in 1950 to pursue a career as a writer, Kurt Vonnegut has made an indelible mark on American literature. During the first decade of his career, his work appeared chiefly in paperback. With the hardcover publication of Cat's Cradle in 1963, his writings received increasing attention, with criticism of Vonnegut's work flourishing during the decades that followed. This volume traces the critical response to his work.

Included in this book are reviews and critical essays on Vonnegut's writings from the roots...

D.H. Lawrence remains one of the most popular and studied authors of the 20th century. This book is a comprehensive but easy to use reference guide to Lawrence's life, works, and critical reception. The volume has been systematically structured to convey a coherent overall sense of Lawrence's achievement and critical reputation, but it is also designed to enable the reader who may be interested in only one aspect of Lawrence's career, perhaps even in only one of his novels or stories, to find relevant information quickly and easily without having to read other parts of the text.

The...

The selections of criticism in this anthology reveal the social, cultural, and economic contexts of the writings of Tillie Olsen. The essays link Olsen with socialism, feminism, and the American literary tradition, and show the potential for activism cultivated in her early years. They reflect her concern with women and children, and explore her belief in the power of the written and spoken word. The volume also serves as a companion to other full-length studies of Olsen.

Tillie Olsen grew up in a Socialist, secular Jewish immigrant working-class home in the American midwest,...

The extraordinary flowering of Southern literary talent in the early twentieth century, the Southern Literary Renascence, has continued virtually unabated, showing increasing vitality in recent decades. These newer fiction writers, poets, dramatists, and journalists reflect in their work the changing social conditions of the South while also presenting traditional Southern values and qualities. Their astonishing output constitutes a phenomenon worthy of being called a Second Southern Literary Renascence. Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain, editors of the acclaimed Fifty Southern Writers...

From the early 20th century to the present, Southern literary talent has flourished. The newer poets, dramatists, essayists, and novelists of this region often use their writings to explore the changing social values of the South, while also drawing upon traditional Southern values and culture. This reference work is a guide to the writings of 50 contemporary Southern poets, dramatists, essayists, and novelists.

Many of the authors profiled in this volume have established themselves as writers of lasting significance. However, the book also profiles the careers and work of authors who...

In correspondence, Willa Cather confessed to planting some of her allusions deep. This reader's companion contains thousands of lively and informative entries on persons, places, and events, fictional and real, and on quotations, works of art, and other items to reveal meanings or provide background for understanding Cather's fictional world. At the same time, it offers insights into her real world and time, her interests, and her astonishingly broad frame of reference. A lifetime project of encyclopedist John March, the once unwieldy manuscript and notes have been verified, clarified,...

The middle decades of the nineteenth century, sometimes known as the American Renaissance, yielded some of the most enduring literary works and influential philosophical ideas in American history. The Transcendentalist movement was central to defining this period, and nineteenth-century thinkers responded to it in different ways. While Emerson and Thoreau fostered it, Hawthorne and Poe criticized it; while Melville, though never part of New England Transcendentalism, was ambivalent. The movement was not entirely original, and American Transcendentalists borrowed much from the European and...

Richard Wright is widely recognized as one of the most important African-American writers and as a significant 20th-century author. With the publication of Native Son in 1940, Wright established his enduring reputation as a man of letters. With the immense critical success of Native Son, Wright went on to author Black Boy, The Outsider, and Eight Men. His writings reflect his experiences growing up in the poverty and racial strife of the South, and his thoughts on major social issues.

This volume traces the critical reception of Wright's...

This volume contains the key pieces of criticism on London's major works arranged chronologically to reconstruct the literary debate on London's work from earliest reviews to recent analyses. The essays contained here show how the perception of London's ideas and concerns have evolved throughout the 20th century to reflect the changes in American ethos itself.

Jack London continues to be one of America's most popular writers. While most critics have ignored him or underestimated his contribution to American letters for that reason, this anthology shows that some of the best...

As author of "Red Harvest," "The Maltese Falcon," "The Thin Man," and other works, "Dashiell Hammett" is one of the most popular American writers of detective fiction. The critical response to his work has been diverse. Edmund Wilson saw little merit in his novels, while Raymond Chandler pointed to Hammett's originality and artistry. While some critics have considered it foolish to search for deeper meanings in his novels, many others have praised his writings as profound social and literary documents.

Spanning more than 60 years of critical response, this collection includes...

Throughout her novels, Toni Morrison explores the complex interaction of race, class, culture, and gender. This study takes into account both Western and Black traditions to show how Morrison not only denounces the constricting patterns of the dominant culture, but also, through the reversal or subversion of Western stereotypes, harnesses the rich potential for the significance they contain.

While most recent studies of Morrison examine individual works separately, this book concentrates on particular dimensions of Morrison's fiction and explores the continuities and developments from...

Herman Melville is one of the most challenging authors of American literature. Known primarily as the author of Moby-Dick, he wrote several other novels, short stories, and poems. With the rise of interest in Melville in the 20th century, critical and biographical studies of Melville continue to be published at an ever-increasing rate. This encyclopedia is a comprehensive guide to Melville's rich and complex literary career.

The volume includes several hundred alphabetically arranged entries for all of Melville's works and characters, and for his family members, friends, and...

The metaphor of life as prison obsessed Edith Wharton, and, consequently, the theme of imprisonment appears in most of her 86 short stories. In the last several decades, critical studies of Wharton's fiction have focused on this theme of imprisonment, but invariably it is related to biographical considerations. This study, however, is not concerned with such insights and influences; rather, it concentrates on Wharton's skill as a craftsman in consciously and carefully fitting her narrative techniques to the imprisonment theme. Representative tales from Wharton's early period (1891-1904),...

In Marge Piercy's work, the repair of the world involves an affirmation of a healing and nurturing principle, sometimes depicted as matriarchal, but generally not gender-bound. In this book, the first comprehensive, critical survey of all of Piercy's fiction to date (including her newest novel, The Longings of Women), the author places Piercy in American literary history and in American neofeminist thought. She also highlights Piercy's analysis of power patterns in intimate relationships and in society, and constructions of sexuality and gender as they relate to issues of class and...