Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> American - Regional

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...

Essays by Susan V. Donaldson, Lael Gold, Adam Gussow, Martin Kreiswirth, Jay Parini, Noel Polk, Judith L. Sensibar, Jon Smith, and Priscilla Wald

William Faulkner once said that the writer -collects his material all his life from everything he reads, from everything he listens to, everything he sees, and he stores that away in sort of a filing cabinet . . . in my case it's not anything near as neat as a filing case; it's more like a junk box.- Faulkner tended to be quite casual about his influences. For example, he referred to the South as -not very important to me. I just happen to...

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...

The memory of the American Civil War took many forms over the decades after the conflict ended: personal, social, religious, and political. It was also remembered and commemorated by poets and fiction writers who understood that the war had bequeathed both historical and symbolic meanings to American culture. Although the defeated Confederacy became best known for producing a literature of nostalgia and an ideological defensiveness intended to protect the South's own version of history, authors loyal to the Union also confronted the question of what the memory of the war signified, and how...

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...

Coal miners evoke admiration and sympathy from the public, and writers -- some seeking a muse, others a cause -- traditionally champion them. David C. Duke explores more than one hundred years of this tradition in literature, poetry, drama, and film. Duke argues that as most writers spoke about rather than to the mining community, miners became stock characters in an industrial morality play, robbed of individuality or humanity. He discusses activist-writers such as John Reed, Theodore Dreiser, and Denise Giardina, who assisted striking workers, and looks at the writing of miners...

In this stirring book Richard Nelson offers a new interpretation of the transformation of Anglo-American intellectual and aesthetic culture since 1890. He shows that southern intellectuals--aesthetic theorists, literary critics, historians, and political thinkers--confronted head on the tensions Machiavelli observed between power and value, creativity and tradition, and romanticism and realism while seeking a cultural ideal that balances politics and aesthetics.

The Antebellum South, the most militant hotbed of republicanism in the antebellum period, remained at the center of the...

Perspectives on Barry Hannah is a collection of essays devoted to the work of the award-winning fiction writer Barry Hannah. The anthology features a broad range of critical approaches and covers the span of Hannah's career from Geronimo Rex (1972) to Yonder Stands Your Orphan (2001). The book also includes a previously unpublished interview with Hannah.

The ten essays cover all of Hannah's thirteen published books. The contributors give fresh perspectives on Hannah's classic works (Airships and Ray), provide illuminating readings of important fiction...