Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> American - Regional

Kentucky and Kentuckians are full of stories, which may be why so many present-day writers have Kentucky roots. Whether they left and returned, like Wendell Berry and Bobbie Ann Mason, or adopted Kentucky as home, like James Still and Jim Wayne Miller, or grew up and left for good, like Michael Dorris and Barbara Kingsolver, they have one connection: Kentucky has influenced their writing and their lives. L. Elisabeth Beattie explores this influence in twenty intimate interviews.

Conversations with Kentucky Writers was more than three years in the making, as Beattie traveled...

This is the first complete modern edition of The Female Marine, a fictional cross-dressing trilogy originally published between 1815 and 1818. Enormously popular among New England readers, the tale in various versions appeared in no fewer than nineteen editions over that brief four-year span. This new edition appends three other contemporary accounts of cross-dressing and urban vice which, together with The Female Marine, provide a unique portrayal of prostitution and interracial city life in early-nineteenth-century America.

The alternately racy and moralistic narrative recounts the...

"Tropicalia" is a collection of poems by Emma Trelles, winner of the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize. The book is a melodic union between the green insistence of the subtropics and the city ensconced within. Trelles's language is detailed and startling, her poems infused with color and light, and the secret beauty of back alleys and parking lots is seamed to sorrow, hope, and land. Rock bands play among odes to Lorca and Chagall, and the hard news of protest and war lives among the simple pleasures of words and sky.

""Tropicalia" borrows its title from the Brazilian art movement of the same...

No writer in America has a better feel for the country's rythms, richness, and rewards than bestselling author and syndicated columnist Bob Greene. With the color and depth of a novel, this treasury of best-loved columns captures America's small triumphs and all-too-human tragedies as Greene travels across the country to tell the stories that don't make the headlines. A small-town cop saves a child's life by double-checking, on a hunch, a closed case of suspected abuse. Frank Sinatra, on his last concert tour, shares off-the-cuff wisdom about fame, craft, and shifting fortunes. An...

-This well could be the most important book yet published on Eudora Welty, - says noted Welty scholar Noel Polk. -It offers a revolutionary and convincing reading of Welty's The Golden Apples (1949), but its implications for the study of Welty as a writer go far and beyond its interpretation of this single text.-

Until the recent explosion of feminist critical interest in her work, Welty criticism was dominated by the narrow and singular perspective of her as a -white southern lady- writing first-rate -regional fiction.- Today her work is being closely re-examined for its...

Since Aristotle's Poetics, the episode has been a vexed category of literary analysis, troubling any easy view of the subsumption of unwieldy narrative parts into well-plotted wholes. Garrett puts forward a new, dialectical theory of episodic form to recast this peculiar object of literary history, looking to the episode as a narrative unit smaller...

Between 1972 and 2001, Barry Hannah (1942-2010) published eight novels and four collections of short stories. A master of short fiction, Hannah is considered by many to be one of the most important writers of modern American literature. His writing is often praised more for its unflinching use of language, rich metaphors, and tragically damaged characters than for plot. -I am doomed to be a more lengthy fragmentist, - he once claimed. -In my thoughts, I don't ever come on to plot in a straightforward way.-

Conversations with Barry Hannah collects interviews published between 1980...

Between 1972 and 2001, Barry Hannah (1942-2010) published eight novels and four collections of short stories. A master of short fiction, Hannah is considered by many to be one of the most important writers of modern American literature. His writing is often praised more for its unflinching use of language, rich metaphors, and tragically damaged characters than for plot. -I am doomed to be a more lengthy fragmentist, - he once claimed. -In my thoughts, I don't ever come on to plot in a straightforward way.-

Conversations with Barry Hannah collects interviews published between 1980...

Rachel Bryant in The Homing Place calls for a process of listening to the stories that Indigenous peoples have been telling about this continent since before the arrival of European settlers centuries ago. In doing so, Bryant performs this process herself, creating a model for listening and incorporating Indigenous stories, and deferring to Indigenous knowledge structures to demonstrate how those structures can transform settler understandings of history and place.

The study addresses two closely related questions: (1) How and why did settlers and their descendants assume a...

The recent spatial turn in social theory and cultural studies opens up exciting new possibilities for the study of William Faulkner's literature. The fictional domains of Yoknapatawpha County and Jefferson, Mississippi, are not simply imagined communities but imaginative geographies of remarkable complexity and detail, as evidenced by the maps Faulkner created of his "apocryphal" county. Exploring the diverse functions of space in Faulkner's artistic vision, the eleven essays in Faulkner's Geographies delve deep into Yoknapatawpha but also reach beyond it, to uncover unsuspected...