Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> American - Regional

In a series of critical and biographical essays, "Too Smart to Be Sentimental" offers a feminist literary history of twentieth-century Irish America. This collection introduces the reader to the works of twelve contemporary Irish American women writers, some of whom are well known, such as Joyce Carol Oates, Alice McDermott, and Tess Gallagher, and some of whom are equally deserving of recognition.Each chapter focuses on a particular writer, describes and discusses that writer's most important works, contextualizes the discussion with relevant biographical material, and highlights why the...

A renowned literary coterie in eighteenth-century Philadelphia Elizabeth Fergusson, Hannah Griffitts, Deborah Logan, Annis Stockton, and Susanna Wright wrote and exchanged thousands of poems and maintained elaborate handwritten commonplace books of memorabilia. Through their creativity and celebrated hospitality, they initiated a salon culture in their great country houses in the Delaware Valley. In this stunningly original and heavily illustrated book, Susan M. Stabile shows that these female writers sought to memorialize their lives and aesthetic experience a purpose that stands in...

Authors discussed include: Wendell Berry, Erskine Caldwell, Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Shelby Foote, Zora Neal Hurston, Bobbie Ann Mason, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor, William Styron, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Thomas Wolfe, Richard Wright, and many more.

By World War II, the Southern Renaissance had established itself as one of the most significant literary events of the century, and today much of the best American fiction is southern fiction. Though the flowering of realistic and local-color writing...

Since the end of World War II, the South has experienced a greater awareness of growth and of its accompanying tensions than other regions of the United States. The rapid change that climaxed with the war in Vietnam, the Cold War, civil rights demonstrations, and Watergate has forced the traditional South to come to terms with social upheaval. As the essays collected in Southern Writers at Century's End point out, southern writing: since 1975 reflects the confusion and violence that have characterized late-twentieth-century public culture.

These essays consider the work of...

A leading figure in modern southern literature, described by Newsweek as "one of the best American storytellers," Peter Taylor secured a national following through his long relationship with the New Yorker and his widely read volumes from the 1980s, The Old Forest and Other Stories and A Summons to Memphis. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author's portrayals of the battles of strong-willed fathers and mothers with their equally strong-willed sons are at the center of his achievement in fiction.

David Robinson presents Taylor as a writer deeply concerned with...

Twentieth-century authors and filmmakers have created a pantheon of mavericks -- some macho, others angst-ridden -- who often cross a metaphorical boundary among the literal ones of Anglo, Native American, and Hispanic cultures. Douglas Canfield examines the concept of borders, defining them as the space between states and cultures and ideologies, and focuses on these border crossings as a key feature of novels and films about the region.

Canfield begins in the Old Southwest of Faulkner's Mississippi, addressing the problem of slavery; travels west to North Texas and the infamous...

This richly detailed outline of William Faulkner's life is written by an eminent French scholar who brings new insights to the Nobel Laureate's career and writings.

This book is intended to be a quick reference guide to Faulkner's works as they relate to his life. Principally an outline of a literary career, it will serve as a useful aid for students beginning a study of Faulkner's novels. It gives emphasis year-by-year to the main events in his life and to his professional activity. For the major works Gresset gives an account of the inception, composition, revisions, and publication....

Although he belonged to an American generation of writers deeply influenced by the high modernist revolt -against nature- and against the self-imposed limits of realism to a palpable world, William Faulkner reveals throughout his work an abiding sensitivity to the natural world. He writes of the big woods, of animals, and of the human body as a ground of being that art and culture can neither transcend nor completely control.
The eleven essays that make up this volume, including a paper written by the acclaimed novelist William Kennedy, explore the place of -the unbuilt world- in...

O'Connor's stories and novels are usually considered mere dramatizations of her stated orthodox religious commitments. According to the predominant view, the typical O'Connor work consists of a set of corrupt characters and an authoritative narrator who analyzes their theological errors. When redemption occurs, according to this view, it results from forces outside the character and...

Called the greatest Civil War historian, Shelby Foote began his career as a novelist whose powerful works of fiction rose out of his closeness to life and culture in his native region, the Mississippi Delta country. Later in his career he transformed modern historical prose by his keen sense of the novel. His artistic distance from the elements of regionalism that lie at the heart both of his novels and of his history writing gives his prose great narrative force.

This perceptive study fills the genuine need for a sound critical appreciation of Foote the novelist. After he appeared as a...

This study of Faulkner's paradoxical attitude toward women, particularly mothers, will stimulate debate and concern, for his novels are shown here to have presented them as both a source and a threat to being and to language.

-My reading of Faulkner, - the author says, -attempts more than an identification of female stereotypes and an examination of...

This study argues that Faulkner's writings about racial matters interrogated rather than validated his racial beliefs and that, in the process of questioning his own ideology, his fictional forms extended his reach as an artist.

After winning the Nobel Prize in 1950, Faulkner wrote what critics term -his later novels.- These have been almost uniformly dismissed, with the prevailing view being that as he became a more public figure, his fiction became a platform rather than a canvas.

Within this context Faulkner on the Color Line redeems the novels in the final phase of his...

In Faulkner's Imperialism, Taylor Hagood explores two staples of Faulkner's world: myth and place. Using an interdisciplinary approach to examine the economic, sociological, and political factors in Faulkner's writing, he applies postcolonial theory, cultural materialism, and the work of the New Southernists to analyze the ways myth and place come together to encode narratives of imperialism -- and anti-imperialism -- in the worlds in which Faulkner lived and the one that he created. The resulting discussion highlights the deeply embedded imperial impulses underpinning not just...

Readers know that humor abounds in the writings of William Faulkner, but the thousands of articles and hundreds of books about his fiction contain little commentary on Faulknerian humor. To give attention to this subject crying out for schlarly treatment, numerous aspects of Faulknerian humor were explored at the Eleventh Annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference held in 1984 at the University of Mississippi.

Thirteen papers presented at that conference are collected in this volume. Deploring the scholar's tendency to emphasize only Faulkner's serious themes and to neglect the...