Has anyone ever worked harder and longer at being immature than Philip Roth? The novelist himself pointed out the paradox, saying that after establishing a reputation for maturity with two earnest novels, he "worked hard and long and diligently" to be frivolous - an effort that resulted in the notoriously immature Portnoy's Complaint (1969). Three ...
Afrocentrism and its history have long been disputed and controversial. In this important book, Wilson Moses presents a critical and nuanced view of the issues. Tracing the origins of Afrocentrism since the eighteenth century, he examines the combination of various popular mythologies, some of them mystical and sentimental, others perfectly ...
Ralph Ellison's classic 1952 novel Invisible Man is one of the most important and controversial novels in the American canon and remains widely read and studied. This Companion provides an introduction to this influential and significant novelist and critic and to his masterpiece. It features essays by leading scholars, a chronology and a guide to ...
Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities examines the crossing of literary and social forces - be they linguistic, political, poetic - that forms the context for being Chicano. It reveals how a poetry of the cross can influence identity, in readings ranging from the poetry of gender and race by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz to that of the ...
In his old age T. S. Eliot said on a number of occasions that the American experience of his childhood and youth had had the deepest influence on his poetry. This is the first book to explore in detail how Eliot's writings at once preserved and reacted against his complex American heritage: his intellectually and socially prominent family, their ...
In a highly original study, David Wyatt takes a broad, yet personal, look at the cultural legacy of the sixties through ten creative figures who came of age during the Vietnam War. Wyatt argues that it is each artist's 'personal engagement' with his own era that binds together the achievements of storytellers such as filmmaker George Lucas, ...
Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit makes the case for Wharton as a novelist of morals rather than of manners; a novelist who sought answers to profound spiritual and metaphysical questions. Focusing on Wharton's treatment of Anglicanism, Calvinism, Transcendentalism, and Catholicism, Carol Singley analyzes the short stories and seven ...
In this broad ranging and powerful study, Gregg Crane examines the interaction between civic identity, race and justice in American law and literature. Crane recounts the efforts of literary and legal figures to bring the nation's law into line with the moral consensus that slavery and racial oppression were evil. By documenting an actual ...
Covenant and Republic investigates the cultural politics of historical memory in the early American republic, specifically the historical literature of Puritanism. By situating historical writing about Puritanism in the context of the cultural forces of Republicanism and liberalism, this study reconsiders the emergence of the historical romance ...
In Cross Examinations of Law and Literature Brook Thomas uses legal thought and legal practice as a lens through which to read some of the important fictions of antebellum America. The lens reflects both ways, and we learn as much about the literature in the context of contemporary legal concerns as we do about the legal ideologies that the ...
The Divided Mind examines the debate between innovation and tradition in American culture of the early years of the twentieth century. Peter Conn discusses literature, painting, music, architecture and politics, using illustrations of the artwork, buildings and popular graphics of the period. The major figures studied include: Henry James, David ...
This book traces the tradition of American historical fiction from its origins in the early nineteenth century to the eve of World War II. It examines the historical novel's connections with Enlightenment and Romantic theories of history; with the rise of literary regionalism; with the ambitions of Romantic writers to revive the epic and romance; ...
Blanche H. Gelfant's book Cross-Cultural Reckonings both demonstrates and questions the applicability of postmodern cultural and literary theories to realistic texts - to fiction and autobiographies valued for their truth. Drawing together an unusual combination of Russian, American and Canadian writers, the various essays of this book provide ...
This book is a study of the development of New England literature and literary institutions from the American Revolutionary era to the late nineteenth century. Professor Buell explores the foundations, growth and literary results of the professionalization of the writing vocation. He pays particular attention to the major writers - Emerson, ...
This book focuses on the works of America's premier colonial poet, Edward Taylor (1642-1729). This study analyses typology in Taylor's Christographia and Treatise Concerning the Lord's Supper and examining Taylor's adaptations of figural analogies to suit his personal spiritual needs, Professor Rowe advances a theory which unites Taylor's ...
In this provocative and original study, Robert E. Abrams argues that in mid-nineteenth-century American writing, new concepts of space and landscape emerge. Abrams explores the underlying frailty of a sense of place in American literature of this period. Sense of place, Abrams proposes, is culturally constructed. It is perceived through the lens ...
Mark Twain was an author both drawn to and suspicious of authority, and his novels reflect this tension. Marked by disruptions, repetitions, and contradictions, they exemplify the ideological stand off between the American ideal of individual freedom and the reality of social control. This book provides a fresh look at Twain's major novels such as ...
This study proposes interpretive strategies for nineteenth-century American women's novels. Harris contends that women in the nineteenth century read subversively, 'processing texts according to gender based imperatives'. Beginning with Susannah Rowson's best-selling seduction novel Charlotte Temple (1791), and ending with Willa Cather's O ...
In this important revisionist study, Posnock integrates literary and psychological criticism with social and cultural theory to make a major advance in our understanding of the life and thought of two great American figures, Henry and William James. Challenging canonical images of both brothers, Posnock is the first to place them in a rich web of ...
Joel Porte offers a timely reassessment of nineteenth century literature, focusing on the general question of the American Romantic ego and its varying modalities of self-creation, self-display, self-projection, and self-concealment. The book begins by exploring the status of the 'text' in nineteenth-century American writing, the relationship of ...
The coining of the term "intellectuals" in 1898 coincided with W.E.B. Du Bois's effort to disseminate values and ideals unbounded by the colour line. Du Bois's ideal of a "higher and broader and more varied human culture" is at the heart of a cosmopolitan tradition that this text identifies as a missing chapter in American literary and cultural ...
Poe is frequently portrayed as an isolated idiosyncratic genius who was unwilling or unable to adapt himself to the cultural conditions of his time. Eliza Richards revises this portrayal through an exploration of his collaborations and rivalries with his female contemporaries. Richards demonstrates that he staged his performance of tortured ...
Stephen Fredman asserts in his work that American poetry is groundless - that each generation of American poets faces the problem of identity anew and has to discover fresh meaning for itself. His argument focuses on four pairs of poets - Eliot/Williams, Thoreau/Olson, Emerson/Duncan and Whitman/Creeley - and points out that although the later ...
In the 1930s, the Work Progress Administration funded a massive Federal Theatre Project in America's major urban centres, presenting hundreds of productions, some of the most popular and memorable of which were produced in the highly controversial and avant garde 'Negro Units'. This experiment in government-supported culture brought to the ...
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