Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> American - General

Many hikers on the Appalachian Trail take books as companions, in spite of the extra weight in their packs, but Ian Marshall carries the habit to new literary, ecological, and spiritual heights. In the more than twenty years he's been hiking the trail, Marshall, known on the AT as Evergreen, has practiced what he likes to call -an ecology of reading, - exploring America's past, its landscape and national experience, through literature inspired by places in the Appalachian chain: -a literary heritage, - he writes, -of interest to scholars and hikers alike, both seekers of a...

The Hidden Force is a 1900 novel by the Dutch writer, L. Couperus. In the novel, the protagonist, Van Oudijck, a Dutch resident, faces his own demise as a result of his inability to see past his Western rationalism. The East Indian people and countryside have no effect on him, and the ambiance of Java, coupled with the adverse behavior of their Javanese subjects, prove more powerful than the might and power of the colonials.

Myth and misconception have obstructed a clear understanding of the poetry and person of Marianne Moore. In this groundbreaking study, Taffy Martin delves beneath the layers of myth and recaptures the excitement that Moore's contemporaries, particularly William Carlos Williams, felt when they encountered her poetry. She reveals that, far from being a stanch upholder of Modernist order and stasis, Moore continually undermines the stability of her own medium, language. Unlike the writings of other Modernist poets, such as T. S. Eliot, who tried to create islands of order in the seas of...

The forty years of American Indian literature taken up by James H. Cox--the decades between 1920 and 1960--have been called politically and intellectually moribund. On the contrary, Cox identifies a group of American Indian writers who share an interest in the revolutionary potential of the indigenous peoples of Mexico--and whose work demonstrates a surprisingly assertive literary politics in the era.

By contextualizing this group of American Indian authors in the work of their contemporaries, Cox reveals how the literary history of this period is far more rich and nuanced than is...

Adapting Detective Fiction is a study of specific instances of adaptation, with close readings of both the originating sources and adapted texts. But it is also more than this. It is a study of the politics of representation in the last decades of the twentieth century, and the role television detective fiction plays in this. It is about the mutually-informing interrelation of cultural texts and political rhetoric, about the connection between the popular-cultural depiction of crime and criminality and how we come to understand human behaviour and culpability; most of all, it is a detailed...

Poetry, for Jed Rasula, bears traces of our entanglement with our surroundings, and these traces define a collective voice in modern poetry independent of the more specific influences and backgrounds of the poets themselves. In This Compost Rasula surveys both the convictions asserted by American poets and the poetics they develop in their craft, all with an eye toward an emerging ecological worldview.

Rasula begins by examining poets associated with Black Mountain College in the 1950s--Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan--and their successors. But This...

For fans of Downton Abbey, a real-life American version of the Crawley family--Fortune's Children is an enthralling true story that recreates the drama, splendor, and wealth of the legendary Vanderbilts.

Vanderbilt: The very name is synonymous with the Gilded Age. The family patriarch, "the Commodore," built a fortune that made him the world's richest man by 1877. Yet, less than fifty years after his death, no Vanderbilt was counted among the world's richest people. Written by descendant Arthur T. Vanderbilt II, Fortune's Children traces the dramatic and...

"The event which compels me into this book was my meeting with the celebrated mystic, teacher and philosopher, George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, whom I encountered as if by chance and came to love as if by design."

Kathryn Hulme's life was radically changed and enriched by the influence of Gurdjieff. Undiscovered Country is a tribute to him and his teachings, a vivid personal memoir of her experience as his student, and of the burning spiritual intensity that dominated her life as a result of his influence.

"Undiscovered Country is in the tradition of Kathryn Hulme's best work;...