Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> American - General

This book was written to venture beyond interpretations of Cormac McCarthy's characters as simple, antinomian, and non-psychological; and of his landscapes as unrelated to the violent arcs of often orphaned and always emotionally isolated and socially detached characters. As McCarthy usually eschews direct indications of psychology, his landscapes allow us to infer much about their motivations. The relationship of ambivalent nostalgia for domesticity to McCarthy's descriptions of space remains relatively unexamined at book length, and through less theoretical application than close...

American literary realism burgeoned during a period of tremendous technological innovation. Because the realists evinced not only a fascination with this new technology but also an ethos that seems to align itself with science, many have paired the two fields rather unproblematically. But this book demonstrates that many realist writers, from Mark Twain to Stephen Crane, Charles W. Chesnutt to Edith Wharton, felt a great deal of anxiety about the advent of new technologies - precisely at the crucial intersection of ethics and language. For these writers, the communication revolution was a...

Returning to a foundational moment in the history of the American family, Negotiating Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century American Literature explores how various authors of the period represented the maternal role-an office that came to a new, social prominence at the end of the eighteenth century. By examining maternal figures in the works of diverse authors such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Sarah Piatt, this book exposes the contentious but fruitful negotiations that took place in the heart of the American sentimental...

This study examines the ways that F. Scott Fitzgerald portrayed organized spectator sports as working to help structure ideologies of class, community, and nationhood. Situating the study in the landscape of late nineteenth/early twentieth-century American sport culture, Chapter One shows how narratives of attending ballgames, reading or listening to sports media, and being a 'fan, ' cultivate communities of spectatorship.

Adopting this same framework, the next three chapters explore how Fitzgerald's literary representations of sport culture express the complexities of...

This overview of McCarthy's published work to date, including: the short stories he published as a student, his novels, stage play and TV film script, locates him as a icocolastic writer, engaged in deconstructing America's vision of itself as a nation with an exceptionalist role in the world.

Introductory chapters outline his personal background and the influences on his early years in Tennessee whilst each of his works is dealt with in a separate chapter listed in chronological order of publication.

"This is a marvelous book by one of our greatest poets. Reading John Ashbery's Selected Prose is like listening to a brilliant talker who not only keeps us entertained and laughing, but who also has wise things to say about all sorts of interesting subjects."
---Charles Simic

"At last Many of the fugitive...