Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> American - General

Exceptionalism, the notion that Americans have a distinct and special destiny different from that of other nations, permeates every period of American history. It is the single most powerful force in forming the American identity.

In American Exceptionalism Deborah L. Madsen traces this powerful theory from its origins in Puritan and Revolutionary-era writing to its latest manifestations in the Vietnam conflict and in current films and fiction.

The growth of the idea is complex. In the 1600s the Massachusetts Bay colonists believed that God had intervened to create in America a...

By taking the literary traveler on seven preplanned tours--through the Delta, along Highway 61, to the heart of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha country, to sites near Interstate 55 and the Natchez Trace, to the piney woods of East and South Mississippi, and along the sun-struck Gulf Coast--this book captures the phenomenal abundance and diversity of Mississippi literature.

More than a guidebook, this book includes capsule biographies and well over a hundred photographs of writers, their residences, and their literary environments. It also provides maps and gives explicit directions to...

By taking the literary traveler on seven preplanned tours--through the Delta, along Highway 61, to the heart of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha country, to sites near Interstate 55 and the Natchez Trace, to the piney woods of East and South Mississippi, and along the sun-struck Gulf Coast--this book captures the phenomenal abundance and diversity of Mississippi literature.

More than a guidebook, this book includes capsule biographies and well over a hundred photographs of writers, their residences, and their literary environments. It also provides maps and gives explicit directions to...

In Conversations with Mary Gordon, Mary Gordon reveals her intellectual vigor, her freewheeling humor, and her strongly held opinions on issues ranging from sex to contemporary literature and gender theory. With candor, she details her departure from and eventual return to her Irish-Catholic heritage.

Since the resounding success of her first novel, Final Payments (1978), Gordon has been one of America's most popular and controversial writers. She has published five novels, three novellas, two collections of essays, a short story collection, a memoir, a biography of Joan...

Celebrated author Ellen Gilchrist has played many roles-writer and speaker, wife and lover, mother and grandmother. But she never tackled the role of teacher.

Offered the opportunity to teach creative writing at the University of Arkansas, she took up the challenge and ventured into unknown territory. In the process of teaching more than two hundred students since her first class in 2000, she has found inspiration in their lives and ambitions and in the challenge of conveying to them the lessons she has learned from living and writing.

The Writing Life brings together fifty...

In 1952, Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) published his novel Invisible Man, which transformed the dynamics of American literature. The novel won the National Book Award, extended the themes of his early short stories, and dramatized in fictional form the cultural theories expressed in his later essay collections Shadow & Act and Going to the Territory.

In Shadowing Ralph Ellison, John Wright traces Ellison's intellectual and aesthetic development and the evolution of his cultural philosophy throughout his long career. The book explores Ellison's published fiction,...

In 1968, Thomas McGuane (b. 1939) dazzled the literary world with his highly acclaimed debut novel, The Sporting Club. His second work, The Bushwacked Piano, a comic novel, won the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1974, his third novel, Ninety-two in the Shade, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Critics marveled at McGuane's abilities and drew comparisons between him and America's greatest writers.

McGuane has been dubbed -a writer's writer.- He has been praised for his technical luminosity, his savagely comic...

On tissue-thin paper in a tiny, often undecipherable hand, Alice Toklas described her daily life in Paris in absorbing detail, like a latter-day Madame de Sevigne. Here are shrewd, witty observations on some of the most interesting artists, musicians, and writers of the twentieth century: Thornton Wilder, Carl Van Vechten, Edith Sitwell, Anita Loos, Cecil Beaton, Janet Flanner, Bennett Cerf, among others. There are stories about Picasso, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Juan Gris, Cocteau, and Sartre--all revealing a sharp eye that was as much a part of Alice as her devotion to Gertrude and her...