Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000 Books

Book SynopsisFor decades, generations of readers have shared their favorite passages of favorite Louis L'Amour novels and short stories: parents with their children, neighbors with their friends, executives with their staff and clergy with their congregations. They pass around dog-eared copies of the books, underlined and yellowing, recalling words that echoes in their readers' hearts and minds long after the last page was turned. Now, many of these selections have been collected in a remarkable volume representing some of the richest ore of the L'Amour lode: voices that heralded the settling of the frontier, of the man and women whose spirit and soul shaped our nation. In these words, Louis L'Amour describes the American experience, bringing our heritage to life, in ways no other author has.No L'Amour reader has a more unique perspective on his work than Angelique, his only daughter. In an extraordinary feat for every Louis L'Amour fan, and in loving appreciation of her father, she has com

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Book SynopsisShortly before his death in June 1988, Louis L’Amour completed writing his most unique adventure story: a personal reflection on his lifelong love affair with learning. Now Bantam Books proudly presents this special Centennial Edition of Education of a Wandering Man, in which L’Amour vividly recalls many of the books he read, the places he visited, and the people he met that catalyzed his evolution as a writer. In this, his most personal book ever, L’Amour writes of growing up in Jamestown, North Dakota, of the parents who instilled in him a love of the printed and spoken word, and of his decision to leave school at fifteen to make the world his classroom. While his contemporaries attended high school, L’Amour skinned cattle in Texas, worked as a circus roustabout and a mine caretaker, won small-town prizefighting exhibitions, hoboed across Texas on the Southern Pacific, and shipped out to the West Indies, England, and Singapore as a merchant seaman. Wherever he wandered, his pockets were always bulging with books. Like the beloved Louis L’Amour novels and short stories that preceded it, Education of a Wandering Man has its share of frontier drama—such as the author’s desperate two-day trek across the blazing Mojave Desert—and robust characters, ranging from Shanghai waterfront toughs to itinerant desert prospectors. All this ultimately informed and inspired the books that have made L’Amour one of the most widely read authors of our time. Ever both teacher and storyteller, Louis L’Amour makes his education our education, in a book filled with glorious asides on everything from hobo culture to the fate of Butch Cassidy. Here is a testament—part memoir, part reflection—in which the author bequeaths to us a most wonderful legacy of the “education of a wandering man”: a life lived to the fullest through the never-ending quest for knowledge.

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Book SynopsisNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A deeply affecting coming-of-age memoir about family, love, loss, basketball—and life itself—by the beloved author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini   During one unforgettable season as a Citadel cadet, Pat Conroy becomes part of a basketball team that is ultimately destined to fail. And yet for a military kid who grew up on the move, the Bulldogs provide a sanctuary from the cold, abrasive father who dominates his life—and a crucible for becoming his own man.   With all the drama and incandescence of his bestselling fiction, Conroy re-creates his pivotal senior year as captain of the Citadel Bulldogs. He chronicles the highs and lows of that fateful 1966–67 season, his tough disciplinarian coach, the joys of winning, and the hard-won lessons of losing. Most of all, he recounts how a group of boys came together as a team, playing a sport that would become a m

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Book SynopsisThis astute guide to the literary achievements of American novelists in the twentieth century places their work in its historical context and offers detailed analyses of landmark novels based on a clearly laid out set of tools for analyzing narrative form. Includes a valuable overview of twentieth- and early twenty-first century American literary history Provides analyses of numerous core texts including The Great Gatsby, Invisible Man, The Sound and the Fury, The Crying of Lot 49 and Freedom Relates these individual novels to the broader artistic movements of modernism and postmodernism Explains and applies key principles of rhetorical reading Includes numerous cross-novel comparisons and contrasts Trade Review“It is an excellent book.” (Primary Health Care,1 March 2015) “Reading the American Novelis also a rich experience, both in terms of the novels discussed and in terms of their literary-critical examination.” (Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas,13 January 2014) Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction: Reading the American Novel, 1920–2010 1 1 Principles of Rhetorical Reading 23 2 The Age of Innocence (1920): Bildung and the Ethics of Desire 39 3 The Great Gatsby (1925): Character Narration, Temporal Order, and Tragedy 61 4 A Farewell to Arms (1929): Bildung, Tragedy, and the Rhetoric of Voice 85 5 The Sound and the Fury (1929): Portrait Narrative as Tragedy 105 6 Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937): Bildung and the Rhetoric and Politics of Voice 127 7 Invisible Man (1952): Bildung, Politics, and Rhetorical Design 149 8 Lolita (1955): The Ethics of the Telling and the Ethics of the Told 171 9 The Crying of Lot 49 (1966): Mimetic Protagonist, Thematic–Synthetic Storyworld 193 10 Beloved (1987): Sethe’s Choice and Morrison’s Ethical Challenge 213 11 Freedom (2010): Realism after Postmodernism 237 Index 261

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Book SynopsisNicholas Jenkins explores war, love, and politics in the early works of W. H. Auden, one of the twentieth century’s most controversial and moving poets. Auden’s poems embraced both haunted meditations on World War I and lyrical visions of English national identity until, in the mid-1930s, he lost faith in the artistic potential of such myths.Trade ReviewThe Island is a Copernican Revolution in Auden studies, a revelatory and often exciting book that presents a new and convincing account of Auden’s early years. It explores, for the first time, the deep connections between the inner workings of his poems and the worlds of politics and economics. By bringing to light Auden’s ambition to be a national poet, Jenkins transforms our understanding of not only Auden himself but all of modernist literature. -- Edward Mendelson, author of Early Auden and Later AudenNicholas Jenkins is one of our most perceptive and resourceful critics. In this wonderful study of the early Auden, he brings to bear history, biography, and an acute sense of the artistic moment to fashion for us a young genius who is conservative, bucolic, gay, a patriotic adherent of post-imperial Little England. Most people work backwards from a writer’s ultimate reputation, but Jenkins gives us a new, unexpected image of a poet developing in the aftermath of World War I and the collapse of modernism. -- Edmund White, author of The Humble Lover

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Book SynopsisFirst published in 1910, Howards End is the novel that earned E. M. Forster recognition as a major writer. Soon to be a limited series on Starz.At its heart lie two families—the wealthy and business-minded Wilcoxes and the cultured and idealistic Schlegels. When the beautiful and independent Helen Schlegel begins an impetuous affair with the ardent Paul Wilcox, a series of events is sparked—some very funny, some very tragic—that results in a dispute over who will inherit Howards End, the Wilcoxes'' charming country home. As much about the clash between individual wills as the clash between the sexes and the classes, Howards End is a novel whose central tenet, Only connect, remains a powerful prescription for modern life.Introduction by Alfred Kazan(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)

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Book SynopsisWidely considered the best novel from one of the best writers of the twentieth century, this astonishing work (The New York Review of Books) continues where The Rainbow left off, revealing a powerful portrayal of two couples dynamically engaged in a struggle with themselves, with each other, and with life’s intractable limitations.          The sisters Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, whom we first met in Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow, here become involved with two close friends: Rupert, an intellectual school inspector; and Gerald, the wealthy heir to a mine owner. The turbulent relationships that result—chronicled with an emotional and sexual frankness that provoked controversy on the book’s publication in 1920—take the characters from an English landscape of coal mines and sooty factories to the snowy heights of the Alps, where tragedy strikes. Women in Love <

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Book SynopsisOne of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 YearsThe urbane authority that Vladimir Nabokov brought to every word he ever wrote, and the ironic amusement he cultivated in response to being uprooted and politically exiled twice in his life, never found fuller expression than in Pale Fire published in 1962 after the critical and popular success of Lolita had made him an international literary figure.An ingeniously constructed parody of detective fiction and learned commentary, Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures, at the center of which is a 999-line poem written by the literary genius John Shade just before his death. Surrounding the poem is a foreword and commentary by the demented scholar Charles Kinbote, who interweaves adoring literary analysis with the fantastical tale of an assassin from the land of Zembla in pursuit of a deposed king. Brilliantly constructed and wildly inventive, this darkly witty novel of suspense, literary one-upmanship, and political intrigue achieves that rarest of things in literature–perfect tragicomic balance. With an introduction by Richard Rorty.

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Book SynopsisWilla Cather’s story of the missionary priest Father Jean Marie Latour and his work of faith in the wilderness of the Southwest is told with a spare but sensuous directness and profound artistry—with an Introduction by A. S. Byatt.When Latour arrives in 1851 in the territory of New Mexico, newly acquired by the United States, what he finds is a vast desert region of red hills and tortured arroyos that is American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. Over the next four decades, Latour works gently and tirelessly to spread his faith and to build a soaring cathedral out of the local golden rock—while contending with unforgiving terrain, derelict and sometimes rebellious priests, and his own loneliness.Death Comes for the Archbishop shares a limitless, craggy beauty with the New Mexico landscape of desert, mountain, and canyon in which its central action takes place, and its evocations of that landscape and those who

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Book SynopsisThe Periodic Table is largely a memoir of the years before and after Primo Levi’s transportation from his native Italy to Auschwitz as an anti-Facist partisan and a Jew. It recounts, in clear, precise, unfailingly beautiful prose, the story of the Piedmontese Jewish community from which Levi came, of his years as a student and young chemist at the inception of the Second World War, and of his investigations into the nature of the material world. As such, it provides crucial links and backgrounds, both personal and intellectual, in the tremendous project of remembrance that is Levi’s gift to posterity. But far from being a prologue to his experience of the Holocaust, Levi’s masterpiece represents his most impassioned response to the events that engulfed him. The Periodic Table celebrates the pleasures of love and friendship and the search for meaning, and stands as a monument to those things in us that

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Book SynopsisSelected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time • Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American ReadInvisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952. A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of the Brotherhood, and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be. The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot''s Th

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Book SynopsisBetween 1927 and his death in 1973, W. H. Auden endowed poetry in the English language with a new face.  Or rather, with several faces, since his work ranged from the political to the religious, from the urbane to the pastoral, from the mandarin to the invigoratingly plain-spoken.This collection presents all the poems Auden wished to preserve, in the texts that received his final approval. It includes the full contents of his previous collected editions along with all the later volumes of his shorter poems. Together, these works display the astonishing range of Auden's voice and the breadth of his concerns, his deep knowledge of the traditions he inherited, and his ability to recast those traditions in modern times.

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Book SynopsisHere are Lorraine Hansberry's last three plays--Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd, and What Use Are Flowers?--representing the capstone of her achievement. Includes a new preface by Jewell Gresham Nemiroff and a revised introduction by Margaret B. Wilkerson.

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