Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> American - Regional

William Faulkner wrote during a tumultuous period in southern racial consciousness, between the years of the enactment of Jim Crow and the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the South. Throughout the writer's career, racial paradigms were in flux, and these shifting notions are reflected in Faulkner's prose. Faulkner's fiction contains frequent questions about the ways in which white Americans view themselves with regard to race along with challenges to the racial codes and standards of the region, and complex portrayals of the interactions between blacks and whites. Throughout his...

Updike is Adam Begley's masterful, much-anticipated biography of one of the most celebrated figures in American literature: Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike--a candid, intimate, and richly detailed look at his life and work.

In this magisterial biography, Adam Begley offers an illuminating portrait of John Updike, the acclaimed novelist, poet, short-story writer, and critic who saw himself as a literary spy in small-town and suburban America, who dedicated himself to the task of transcribing "middleness with all its grits, bumps and...

It's a revered classic and a rite of passage in the reading lives of millions. But how well do we really know The Great Gatsby? As "Fresh Air" book critic Maureen Corrigan points out, many of us first read Fitzgerald's masterpiece when we were too young to comprehend its power.

Offering a fresh perspective on Gatsby, SO WE READ ON takes readers into archives, high school classrooms, and onto the Long Island...

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Flannery O'Connor once noted, "The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down." Her railroading metaphor wittily captures much of the respect and unease Faulkner's example brought the worldwide community of authors.

Few other writers have exerted as profound an influence on literature as Faulkner. Prominent literary scholar M. Thomas Inge documents the scope of his influence in the twentieth century through the words of...

Unscripted America is a study of how colonists in North America struggled to understand, translate, and interpret Native American languages, and the significance of these languages for theological and cosmological...

In 1924 DuBose Heyward (1885-1940) was a businessman absorbed in his Charleston heritage. One year later he was the world-famous author of Porgy, the first major southern novel to portray blacks without condescension. Just a decade later George Gershwin had transformed Heyward's book into an opera that would become one of the most enduring masterworks of American music.

As a young man Heyward was immersed in the Gullah culture of his city. Especially through his mother, a performer and interpreter of Gullah life in folktale and song, he discovered the gateway into the fascinating...

When the United States entered World War I, parts of the country had developed industries, urban cultures, and democratic political systems, but the South lagged behind, remaining an impoverished, agriculture region. Despite New South boosterism, the culture of the early twentieth-century South was comparatively artistically arid. Yet, southern writers dominated the literary marketplace by the 1920s and 1930s.

World War I brought southerners into contact with modernity before the South fully modernized. This shortfall created an inherent

tension between the region's existing...