Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> American - General

Annika Bautz is Associate Professor in English at Plymouth University, UK.

Kathryn N. Gray is Reader in Early American Literature at Plymouth University, UK.

A new account of Herman Melville and the writing of Moby-Dick, written by a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Biography and based on fresh archival research, which reveals that the anarchic spirit animating Melville's canonical work was inspired by his great love affair with a shockingly unconventional married woman.

Herman Melville's epic novel, Moby-Dick, was a spectacular failure when it was published in 1851, effectively ending its author's rise to literary fame. Because he was neglected by academics for so long, and because he made little effort to preserve his...

Writing is how I attempt to repair myself, stitching back former selves, sentences. When I am brave enough I am never brave enough I unravel the tapestry of my life, my childhood. -- from Book of Mutter

Composed over thirteen years, Kate Zambreno's Book of Mutter is a tender and disquieting meditation on the ability of writing, photography, and memory to embrace shadows while in the throes -- and dead calm -- of grief. Book of Mutter is both primal and sculpted, shaped by the author's searching, indexical impulse to inventory family apocrypha in the wake...

In this book, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet C. K. Williams sets aside the mass of biography and literary criticism that has accumulated around Walt Whitman and attempts to go back to Leaves of Grass as he first encountered it--to explore why Whitman's epic "continues to inspire and sometimes daunt" him. The result is a personal reassessment and appreciation of one master poet by another, as well as an unconventional and brilliant introduction to Whitman. Beautifully written and rich with insight, this is a book that refreshes our ability to see Whitman in all his power.

You'll meet the world's brightest, you'll hang with the best
And now that you've met them, you'll work with the rest

If you're looking for an inspirational book for young people starting life's great adventure, you probably want to read Dr. Seuss's Oh, the Places You'll Go But before your first day of actual work, you need to meet Dr. Suits for a dose of reality. You won't learn this stuff in high school, college, or gift books by world-famous authors. But fear not

With his...

But there was much more to Thoreau than his brief experiment in living at Walden Pond. A member of the vibrant intellectual circle centered on his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was also an...

H. L. Mencken's reputation as a journalist and cultural critic of the twentieth century has endured well into the twenty-first. His early contributions as a writer, however, are not very well known. He began his journalistic career as early as 1899 and in 1910 cofounded the Baltimore Evening Sun. The next year he initiated a column -- The Free Lance -- that ran six days a week for four and a half years, until the Sun discontinued it, partially in response to Mencken's controversial defense of Germany during World War One.

In this early forum for his renowned wit,...

Originally selected by Faulkner scholars Blotner and Litz for their series on the author, this pathbreaking monograph contains a comprehensive and provocative discussion of Faulkner's historical vision. Drawing on the rich literature of historiography (including the writings of R. G. Collingwood and Herbert Butterfield), and on a wide-ranging body of scholarship on the historical novel (including discussions of Scott, Thackeray, and Conrad), Rollyson shrewdly probes Faulkner's dynamic and changing uses of the past. Also taking advantage of his own work as a biographer, Rollyson has...

Picturing Emerson reproduces and explores the background of all known images of Ralph Waldo Emerson created from life, including drawings, paintings, silhouettes, sculptures, and photographs. The book provides dates for these images; information about their makers and Emerson's sittings; as well as commentary by family members and contemporaries. The resulting work makes it possible for the first time to trace Emerson's visage over seven decades.

Dating and correctly identifying images of Emerson has long challenged scholars, collectors, and the general public. By examining...

"There was a book. Oh man was there a book. It is still to this day a book I mention it to any book lover if asked for a recommendation. The best books stick with you, often reminding you of the power, and potential, of storytelling, and House of Leaves is one of those books."--Michael Seidlinger, in this Bookmarked volume on Mark Z. Danielweski's classic of experimental contemporary literature, House of Leaves.

Michael J. Seidlinger is the author of several novels, including Falter Kingdom, The Strangest, The Fun We've Had, and...

William Gilmore Simms was the best known and certainly the most accomplished writer of the mid-nineteenth-century South. His literary ascent began early, with his first book being published when he was nineteen years old and his reputation as a literary genius secured before he turned thirty. Over a career that spanned nearly forty-five years, he established himself as the American South s premier man of letters an accomplished poet, novelist, short fiction writer, essayist, historian, dramatist, cultural journalist, biographer, and editor. In Reading William Gilmore Simms, Todd...