Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000 Books

Book SynopsisThis book offers an interpretation of the evolution of a growing genre in literary, film, and television.As a follow-up to their 1997 collection ""Political Science Fiction"" Hassler and Wilcox have assembled twenty-four noted international scholars representing diverse fields of inquiry to assess the influential voices and trends from the past decade in ""New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction"". The terrors and technologies that permeate our daily lives have changed radically in the past decade, further highlighting the underlying speculations on our contested future that remain the core of this genre. In surveying the vast expanse of politically charged science fiction of recent years, the editors posit that the defining dilemma for these tales rests in whether identity and meaning germinate from progressive linear changes or progress or from a continuous return to primitive realities of war, death, and the competition for survival.The discussion of political implications ranges among writers from H. G. Wells, Robert A. Heinlein, Ursula Le Guin, and Isaac Asimov to more radical recent voices such as Iain M. Banks, William Gibson, Joanna Russ, Philip K. Dick, and China Mieville. While emphasizing the literature, the collection also addresses political science fiction found on film and television from the original ""Star Trek"" through the newest incarnation of ""Battlestar Galactica"".Trade ReviewFascinating; a clear insight into current and highly informed thinking on matters as diverse as the political implications of Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek as a kind of Philosophy 101, and sexuality in Brazilian science fiction. That it works as a startling and highly germane overview of recent trends in American thinking about the U.S.'s own role in the world is an unexpected but highly welcome bonus. - Iain M. Banks

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Book SynopsisThis is a comprehensive guide to the writing career of the author of ""Angels in America"".""Understanding Tony Kushner"" surveys the acclaimed writings of the author of the Pulitzer Prize - winning drama ""Angels in America"" and coauthor of the Academy Award-nominated screenplay for the film ""Munich"". Viewing Kushner as a sociopolitical dramatist in the tradition of Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, James Fisher guides readers through Kushner's influences and creations to map the importance of the writer's body of work in expanding the postmodern literary and cultural landscapes. After grounding his discussions in Kushner's early plays, ""A Bright Room Called Day"" and ""Hydriotaphia"", or ""The Death of Dr. Brown"", Fisher engages with the two plays of ""Angels in America"" to identify the major themes to be revisited in subsequent works. Fisher reads the depiction of the clash of values in the mid-1980s in Angels as Kushner's placement of humanity's fate at the nexus of divergent views on morality, politics, religion, history, gender, and sexuality, views that complicate individual and national identity and beg the overarching question, is change to be embraced or challenged? Fisher concludes with an exploration of how Kushner moves his themes from stage to screen in Munich and the forthcoming film Lincoln, both directed by Steven Spielberg.

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Book SynopsisThis is a critical survey of the complete body of work by the author of ""Catch-22"". In this revised edition, Sanford Pinsker explores the idiosyncratic vision that permeates Heller's writings, as he maps the dark terrain Heller carved out, novel by novel, with considerable verbal dazzle and the uncompromising outrage of the classical satirist. This updated edition includes new chapters on Closing Time, the sequel to ""Catch-22""; ""Now and Then"", Heller's memoir of growing up in Brooklyn; Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, his posthumously published novel; and ""Catch as Catch Can"", a collection of assorted short stories and sketches.Trade ReviewNicely balancing description with discovery, Pinsker's lively and wide-ranging study not only examines the themes and rhetorical strategies through which Heller projects his satiric vision but also locates them within the cultural context that both shapes our literature and determines, in part, what it is capable of. - Modern Fiction Studies

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Book SynopsisThis is a 2001 Choice Outstanding Academic Title. It is a compelling study of O'Connor's fiction as illuminated by the teaching of the desert monastics. 'Lord, I'm glad I'm a hermit novelist', Flannery O'Connor wrote to a friend in 1957. Sequestered by ill health, O'Connor spent the final thirteen years of her life on her isolated family farm in rural Georgia. During this productive time she developed a fascination with fourth-century Christians who retreated to the desert for spiritual replenishment and whose isolation, suffering, and faith mirrored her own. In ""Flannery O'Connor"", Hermit Novelist, Richard Giannone explores O'Connor's identification with these early Christian monastics and the ways in which she infused her fiction with their teachings. Surveying the influences of the desert fathers on O'Connor's protagonists, Giannone shows how her characters are moved toward a radical simplicity of ascetic discipline as a means of confronting both internal and worldly evils while being drawn closer to God. Artfully bridging literary analysis, O'Connor's biography, and monastic writings, Giannone's study explores O'Connor's advocacy of self-denial and self-scrutiny as vital spiritual weapons that might be brought to bear against the antagonistic forces she found rampant in modern American life.

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Book SynopsisA dominant figure of postwar British literature, Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) wrote more than twenty-five novels, a collection of poems, and a half-dozen philosophical studies..In Understanding Iris Murdoch, Cheryl Bove divides Murdoch's work into two broad categories--the ironic tragedy and the bittersweet comedy--to examine the reasons why her work continues to attract such a large following. A writer of consistently readable novels who fashions gripping narratives and vivid characters, Murdoch presents readers with moral problems upon which she allows her audience to pass judgment. Bove summarizes Murdoch's work not as an effort to advance a cause, expand a philosophy, or portray a society, but to present human relationships and solve fictional problems of plot and theme.

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Book SynopsisThis first book-length study of Pound criticism investigates not just what critics have had to say about Pound but also why they have asked the questions they have asked. Forty-five years after his death, and more than seventy years after his indictment for treason, Ezra Pound remains a deeply controversial figure. Today it is hard to imagine a poet sparking national debate, but Pound did just that. His receipt in 1949 of the first-ever Bollingen Award for Poetry started a hue and cry that spread to every US periodical that made even a pretense of following "cultural" issues: even Time weighed in. It took two years for things to simmer down, and when they finally did, literary study looked profoundly different. Everyone engaged in the study of poetry today, professors and students alike, works in an environment shaped by that national crisis of conscience. The present book considers this untold story, and investigates not just what critics have had to say about Pound but also why they have asked the questions they have asked. It is routine for reception histories to distinguish between professional studies and more popular responses; this book encourages us to consider why we make that distinction and what the costs of doing so might be. Unprofessional responses to Pound have often been ideologically and politically embarrassing for Pound scholars, who have in response policed the distinction between professional and popular readings with extraordinary vigilance. As a result, the history of Pound's reception unfolds as a kind of drama-perhaps the last ongoing theater for McCarthyite cultural-political anxieties.Trade ReviewAs seasoned scholars with a mature capacity for untangling skeins of fact and weaving narrative, considering the big picture steadily and whole, Coyle and Preda have developed a magnificent achievement making sense of (and offering a very legible map of) this Poundian world and its major driving vortices. Above all, beyond the controversies and gossip, the cliques, the frequent masculinism, the eccentricity and sometime crankishness, they rightly feature the work of scholarship-the courageous and generous achievement of generations of Pound scholars who always moved to a different rhythm, stubborn against the grain of mainstream academia. * MODERNITY *While this study is valuable for retracing the history of modernism's acceptance in the academy, its exhaustive and far-reaching scope also allows one to move freely in the midst of the wider intellectual context surrounding and permeating both Pound Studies and the manifold, controversial aspects of literary criticism both in and out of the academic milieu. * Make It New *Table of ContentsPreface From Wabash to Washington, 1907-1947 A Prize Fight and Institutionalization, 1948-1951 Kenner, Watts, and Professional Attention, 1951-1961 Sailing after Knowledge, 1962-1971 The Pound Era and Its Monumental Companion, 1971-1985 Ezra Pound Studies and the Postmodern Turn, 1980-1990 Reading Ezra Pound in the New Millennium, 1990-2016 The Many Lives of Ezra Pound: Biographies and Memoirs, 1960-2015 Periodicals on Ezra Pound, 1954-2017 Conclusion Chronology of the Bollingen Controversy Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisEmploying close reading of a kind usually associated with the study of lyric poetry, this book offers a general framework for reading African-American (and American) literature. This book springs from two premises. The first is that, with a nod toward Marianne Moore, America is - has always been - an imaginary place with real people living in it. The second is that slavery and its legacies explain how and why this is the case. The second premise assumes that slavery - and, after that fell, white supremacy generally - have been necessary adjuncts to American capitalism. Mark Richardson registers these two premises at the level of style and rhetoric - in the texture as much as in the "arguments" of the books he engages. His book is written to appeal to a general reader. It begins with Frederick Douglass, continues with W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Chesnutt, and Richard Wright, and treats works by writers not often discussed in books concerning race in American literature - for example, Stephen Crane and Jack Kerouac. It brings to bear on such books as Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom, Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, and Crane's The Red Badge of Courage a degree and quality of attention one usually associates with the study of lyric poetry. The book offers a general framework within which to read African-American (and American) literature. Mark Richardson is Professor of English at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan. He is co-editor of The Letters of Robert Frost (Harvard University Press) and author of The Ordeal of Robert Frost (University of Illinois Press, 1997).Trade ReviewThe book is both timely and timeless. Scholars of any of these individual authors can benefit from the rigorous historical and contextual research Richardson has done on the authors. Scholars more concentrated on literary analysis equally profit from his close analysis of the styles and metaphors of each author. The value of weaving these authors together is that it allows the reader to understand the crucial nature of the colour line to American culture. * Modern Language Review *It is an ambitious project that Richardson charts for his book: to historicize the white supremacist rhetoric of a slave economy and the literary resistance to that rhetoric; to offer thorough stylistic readings of autobiographies, speeches, stories, and novels (and poetry too), some of them rarely associated with race relations; to review the oeuvre and life of a complex author like Wright, not to mention his proofs; to weave contemporary political and cultural developments into the texts under investigation. Richardson carries it off with skill, in taut and candid prose, as only a seasoned scholar could. * Soundings *The Wings of Atalanta is a much-needed study that underscores the significance of how a 'particular form of white supremacy' took shape in America. In this rigorously researched and beautifully written book, Mark Richardson interrogates the works of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Stephen Crane, Charles Chesnutt, Richard Wright, and Jack Kerouac to demonstrate how these authors used or resisted white supremacy, indirectly or overtly, in their work. Asking today's reader to take a look back at what Whitman called our 'traveled roads,' Richardson seeks to better understand how we arrived where we are today and possibly expose a pathway to change our future. In the process he has created a deeply rewarding study for all who choose to enter.'This splendid collection of essays by Mark Richardson examines the literary, historical, and political implications of seeing America as an imaginary place inhabited by real people. Forging his argument out of lucid and, at times, provocative readings of Douglass, Du Bois, Wright, Kerouac, and others, Richardson prodigiously sweeps backward and forward across American history as he calls for the emergence of a new America to supersede the old imaginary place, a new national space redeemed by living up to the fullest of its democratic possibilities. His message is as timely as it is essential. * . *Table of ContentsIntroduction Frederick Douglass and the Philosophy of Slavery W. E. B. Du Bois and the Redemption of the Body The Mephistophelean Skepticism of Stephen Crane Charles Chesnutt: Nowhere to Turn Richard Wright: Exile as Native Son Peasant Dreams: Reading On the Road Conclusion Notes Bibliography

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Book SynopsisThis first book-length study of fictional suicides in East German literature provides insight into the complex and dynamic rhetoric of the GDR and the literariness of its literature. The many fictional suicides in the literature of the German Democratic Republic have been greatly misunderstood. The common assumption is that authoritarian oppression in East Germany led to an anomalous abundance of real suicides, so that fictional suicides in GDR literature constitute a simple, realistic reflection of East German society. Robert Blankenship challenges this assumption by providing both a history of suicide in GDR literature and close readings of individual texts, revealing that suicides in GDR literature, rather than simply reflecting historical suicides, contain rich literary attributes such as intertextuality, haunting, epistolarity, and unorthodox narrative strategies. Such literariness offered subversive potential beyond suggesting that real people killed themselves in a communist country. This first book-length study of fictional suicides in East German literature provides insight into the complex and dynamic rhetoric of the GDR. Blankenship's underlying claim is that GDR literature ought to be read as literature, with literary methodology, not despite the country's politically and rhetorically charged nature,but precisely because of it. Suicide in East German Literature will be of interest to scholars of GDR literature, humanities-oriented scholars of suicide, and those who are interested in the complex relationship between literature and history. Robert Blankenship is Assistant Professor of German at California State University, Long Beach.Trade Review[An] intriguing and thought-provoking study . . . -- Stephen Brockmann * MONATSHEFTE *From the starting-point of Honecker's Taboo speech in December 1971, Blankenship demonstrates how Plenzdorf, Heiduczek, Wolf, Müller, Muthesius, and Hein use the subversive potential of intertextual references to portrayals of suicide by authors who belong, according to culture-political doctrine, to the 'classical heritage' (Goethe, Thomas Mann, Shakespeare) or are excluded from it (Günderrode, Kleist). . . . Indicates the potential that the topic 'suicide' still holds in GDR literature. -- Paul Onasch * GERMANISTIK *Blankenship's exclusive focus on the literariness of GDR fiction and his dedication to appreciating this literature for its aesthetic value not only offer new insights into the texts he examines, but foster a better understanding of GDR literary history more generally. * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *Blankenship's thesis that fictional suicides enable the transmission of a cultural counter-memory in East German literature is suggestive and produces some provocative insights . . . . * GERMAN QUARTERLY *The outcomes of Blankenship's sequence of analyses are, for the most part, very impressive. * JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES *[A] valuable book. Blankenship is extremely knowledgeable, both on modern and older literature, as well as in the area of literary theory. His major aim to point to the literary qualities of GDR literature, or at least of selected works, is laudable as a counter to the tendency to dismiss every aspect of that now vanished country. * JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN STUDIES] *[I]ntellectually stimulating . . . . This study serves as a welcome complement to the understanding of fictional suicides as a realistic response to the dilemmas of everyday life under a Communist dictatorship. * SLAVONIC AND EASTERN EUROPEAN REVIEW *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Rhetoric of Suicide in East Germany Suicide as an Anti-Fascist Literary Trope: 1945-71 Suicide and the Fluidity of Literary Heritage: Ulrich Plenzdorf's Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. Remembering to Death: Werner Heiduczek's Tod am Meer Suicide and the Reevaluation of Classicism: Christa Wolf's Kein Ort. Nirgends Suicidal Voices: Heiner Müller's Hamletmaschine and Sibylle Muthesius's Flucht in die Wolken Specters of Suicide: Christoph Hein's Horns Ende Conclusion: The Reality of Fictional Suicides Epilogue: The Literariness of East German Literature Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThe first English translation of the essays, lectures, and other critical writings of the celebrated Austrian poet, novelist, and public intellectual, one of the most influential postwar writers in German. The Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is one of the most important postwar writers in German. Her work is enmeshed with the intellectual and cultural developments of the period: she was influenced by European modernism in the early 1950s, experienced the sweeping changes of the 60s, and worked until her death in 1973 on her celebrated and sprawling "Todesarten" (Ways of Death) project, on the decades following National Socialism. Her poetry and prose confront what she called "the sickness of our time": the subtle connection between patriarchal society, catastrophic history in the form of National Socialism, and the subjugation of the Other. Even during her lifetime, Bachmann achieved a prominent position in postwar German-language literature. Interest in her literary output increased sharply in the early 1980s with the publication of the first edition of her works, and has been growing steadily ever since. Bachmann's impact on German literature is comparable to that of Virginia Woolf on English literature. Just as an appreciation of Woolf's poetic oeuvre, and that of other women writers, is impossible without reference to "A Room of One's Own," the critical writings of Bachmann enhance our awareness of not only her own works, but also those of many other writers, philosophers, and artists. As the only translation of Bachmann's essays, lectures, speeches, and theoretical texts into English, The Critical Writings will be a valuable tool for students of Comparative Literature and German literature and cultural studies.Trade ReviewThough best known today for her poems and novels, Bachmann was a serious student of philosophy, an incisive essayist, and an influential commentator on Europe's postwar intellectual and artistic scene. [This] new volume of her critical writings . . . makes this other dimension of her work available to readers in English for the first time. . . . [T]hough Bachmann felt language to be an obstacle to the full expression of being, only when immersed in it does she feel herself. Achberger and Solibakke help us to see behind this self-imposed curtain. . . . The Critical Writings remind us that Bachmann's utopian pursuit, though cut short, aimed for so much more - and that amid the collapse of proofs in our own day, the salvo of the future remains ours to write. -- Peter Filkins * The Boston Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Notes on Translation Introduction 1: Autobiographical Writings and Intimate Reflections Biographical Note Group 47 Attempt at an Autobiography On Giuseppe Ungaretti Admittedly Witold Gombrowicz 2: Philosophy Commentary The Vienna Circle: Logical Positivism-Philosophy as Science Ludwig Wittgenstein-A Chapter of the Most Recent History of Philosophy Logic as Mysticism The Sayable and the Unsayable 3: Modern Literature Commentary Franz Kafka: Amerika Into the Millennium The Man Without Qualities The World of Marcel Proust: Views of a Pandemonium Playing Watten and Other Writings (On Thomas Bernhard) An Attempt Bertolt Brecht: Preface to an Anthology of His Poetry The Bell Jar / The Quintessential Horror (On Sylvia Plath) 4: Visual Rhetoric and Poetics Commentary What I Saw and Heard in Rome The Love of God and Affliction: The Path of Simone Weil On the Trail of Language To What End Poems? On the Genesis of the Title "In Apulia" The Poem Addressing the Reader 5: Music Commentary Wondrous Music Music and Poetry Genesis of a Libretto Otello Hommage à Maria Callas Notes on the Libretto 6: The Frankfurt Lectures and Other Speeches Commentary Truth is Within Human Reach (Acceptance Speech for the Radio Play Prize of the German Union of the War Blind) The First Frankfurt Lecture: Problems of Contemporary LiteratureI. Questions and Pseudo-Questions The Second Frankfurt Lecture: On Poems The Third Frankfurt Lecture: Concerning the I The Fourth Frankfurt Lecture: Names The Fifth Frankfurt Lecture: Literature as Utopia On Receiving the Anton Wildgans Prize Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisNew essays exploring the resurgence of the theme of romantic relationships and love in German literature since around the turn of the millennium. While sociologists have long agreed that the problems of modern and contemporary subjectivity crystallize in the issue of romantic relationships and love (e.g., Luhmann, Illouz, Beck, etc.), the theme of love, so crucial to the foundational text of modern German literature, Goethe's Werther, all but disappeared from German prose literature in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet over the past fifteen years German-language literature has witnessed an explosion of novels with "Liebe" in their titles as well as novels that centrally focus on intersubjective erotic and emotional relationships. A number of major contemporary writers (Treichel, Walser, Kermani, Ortheil, Maron, Zaimoglu, Genazino) have written Liebesromane or novels in which significant sociohistorical questions are refracted through the love relationships of their protagonists. German film likewise has increasingly thematized love relationships under postromantic conditions, e.g. in the films of the Berlin school. Simultaneously, the development of both feminist and LGBTQ politics over the past decades has exploded the heteronormative discourses ofdesire in a way that has both expanded and enriched the lovers' discourse, while recent developments of urban (hetero)sexuality have expanded the previously available models of expressing erotic relationships in ways that are reminiscent of the utopian ending of Goethe's first version of Stella. The present collection offers a wide-ranging set of essays on these developments. Contributors: Esther K. Bauer, Sven Glawion, Silke Horstkotte,Sarra Kassem, Maria Roca Lizarazu, Helmut Schmitz, Angelika Vybiral. Helmut Schmitz is Reader in German at the University of Warwick. Peter Davies is Professor and Head of German at the University of Edinburgh.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Love, Literature, (Post-)Modernity: On the Re-Emergence of Love in Contemporary German Literature - Helmut Schmitz Not so Happily Ever After: Romantic Love in Novels by Alain Claude Sulze - Esther K. Bauer Love as Literature: Hanns-Josef Ortheil's Die große Liebe - Helmut Schmitz Healthy Socialists and Kinky Heroes: Carnivalesque Deconstruction of Heteronormativity in Thomas Brussig's Helden wie wir - Sven Glawion Disembodied Love and Desire: Virtual Love in Daniel Glattauer's Gut gegen Nordwind - Angelika Vybiral Thomas Mann in Furs: Remediations of Sadomasochism in Maxim Biller's Im Kopf von Bruno Schulz and Harlem Holocaust - Maria Roca Lizarazu Precarious Subjects, Vulnerable Love: Thomas Melle's 3000 Euro, Feridun Zaimoglu's Isabel and Julia Wolf's Alles ist jetzt - Silke Horstkotte Love as Anathema: Social Constraints and the Demise of Desire in Fatih Akin's Gegen die Wand - Sarra Kassem

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Book SynopsisFrom the moment Katherine Anne Porter arrived on the American literary scene in 1922, the public was intrigued with her life. Yet she herself revealed only scant facts of her background and often gave conflicting accounts. She maintained, though, that a germ of her own experience lay at the core of everything she wrote. In Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist, Darlene Harbour Unrue finds that Porter's deceptions were a screen for deep personal turmoil. With unprecedented access to archival and personal papers, Unrue brings much new information to light. Porter's maternal grandmother was institutionalized; Porter had more marriages than she acknowledged; she lost babies to miscarriage, abortion, and stillbirth, and she grieved over her failed motherhood. Ever present were her fears of exile and insanity. Despite these constant fears, Porter (1890-1980) lived an extraordinary life that vaulted her from poverty and obscurity to wealth and the fame of being a best-selling author. She experienced or observed many of the major events of the twentieth century. So often on the move, she lived in Greenwich Village during its heyday as a hotbed of radical politics and experimental art, in Mexico during the cultural revolution of the 1920s, in Europe during the rise of Nazism, and in America during the Cold War. Thirteen years old when she first rode in an automobile and saw an airplane, she was invited in her last decade to observe and write about the launching of the final Apollo space ship. Asked to summarize her own life, Porter was fond of quoting Madame Du Barry: ""My life has been incredible. I don't believe a word of it!"" Darlene Harbour Unrue is a professor of English at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. She has written several books on Katherine Anne Porter, including Understanding Katherine Anne Porter and Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction.

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Book SynopsisAs Texas entered the twentieth century, it was opening a new chapter in its cultural and social life, one that would see active efforts to promote not only appreciation of regional literature but also its creation. Author Betty Holland Wiesepape examines the contributions of literary societies and writers' clubs to the cultural and literary development that took place in Texas between the close of the frontier and the beginning of World War II. She offers an overview of literary club activity as well as case studies of four individual writers' clubs that functioned during the 1920s and 1930s. The first study of its kind, Lone Star Chapters contradicts the common perception that early Texas was a cultural wasteland and illuminates how educated citizens met together in locally organized clubs to read, write, and criticize members' original compositions. The stories of the Manuscript Club of Wichita Falls, the Border Poets of Kingsville, the Panhandle Penwomen of Amarillo, and the Makers of Dallas are based on archival research, interviews, and an examination of the literature produced by prominent club members. Each of the stories is set within its own historical and geographical context, and together they illuminate the important role of such clubs in the development of regional arts.

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Book SynopsisLooks back through the twentieth century in order to confront issues of self and community in veterans' literature, exploring how war and the military have shaped the identities of Ernest Hemingway, James Salter, and Tim O'Brien, three of the twentieth century's most respected authors.Trade ReviewFrom time out of mind, war and art have reflected one another, and it is this intersection of war and art that Alex Vernon raptly illuminates. In Soldiers Once and Still, he has penned a probing and savvy book about three of our most haunting soldier-writers. - Donald Anderson, editor, War, Literature and the Arts

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Book SynopsisImagine being a young poet, nurturing your craft without the benefit of established mentors. Imagine having never been in a class taught by a woman poet or not having a bookshelf filled with books written by living women poets. Luckily, young women poets today don't have to. Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker's ""Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections"" collects both personal essays and representative poems by women born after 1960 whose careers were influenced - directly or indirectly - by the women who preceded them.The poets in this collection describe a new kind of influence, one less hierarchical, less patriarchal, and less anxious than forms of mentorship in the past. Vivid and intelligent, these twenty-four essays explore the complicated nature of the mentoring relationship, with all its joys and difficulties, and show how this new sense of writing out of female experience and within a community of writers has fundamentally changed women's poetry.It includes: Jenny Factor on Marilyn Hacker; Beth Ann Fennelly on Denise Duhamel; Miranda Field on Fanny Howe; Katie Ford on Jorie Graham; Joy Katz on Sharon Olds; Valerie Martinez on Joy Harjo; Erika Meitner on Rita Dove; Aimee Nezhukumatathil on Naomi Shihab Nye; Eleni Sikelianos on Alice Notley; Tracy K. Smith on Lucie Brock-Broido; Crystal Williams on Lucille Clifton; and Rebecca Wolff on Molly Peacock.

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Book SynopsisIn this bold book, Samuel Cohen asserts the literary and historical importance of the period between the fall of the Berlin wall and that of the Twin Towers in New York. With refreshing clarity, he examines six 1990s novels and two post-9/11 novels that explore the impact of the end of the Cold War: Pynchon's ""Mason & Dixon"", Roth's ""American Pastoral"", Morrison's ""Paradise"", O'Brien's ""In the Lake of the Woods"", Didion's ""The Last Thing He Wanted"", Eugenides' ""Middlesex"", Lethem's ""Fortress of Solitude"", and DeLillo's ""Underworld"". Cohen emphasizes how these works reconnect the past to a present that is ironically keen on denying that connection. Exploring the ways ideas about paradise and pastoral, difference and exclusion, innocence and righteousness, triumph and trauma deform the stories Americans tell themselves about their nation's past, ""After the End of History"" challenges us to reconsider these works in a new light, offering fresh, insightful readings of what are destined to be classic works of literature. At the same time, Cohen enters into the theoretical discussion about postmodern historical understanding. Throwing his hat in the ring with force and style, he confronts not only Francis Fukuyama's triumphalist response to the fall of the Soviet Union but also the other literary and political 'end of history' claims put forth by such theorists as Fredric Jameson and Walter Benn Michaels. In a straightforward, affecting style, ""After the End of History"" offers us a new vision for the capabilities and confines of contemporary fiction.

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Book SynopsisKnown for his maxim "make it new," Ezra Pound played a principal role in shaping the modernist movement as a poet, translator, and literary critic. Yet readers grapple with his poetry's complex structures and layered allusions and his known fascism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny. This volume offers strategies for guiding students toward the rewards of Pound's works while embracing the challenges they pose.The first section, "Materials," catalogs the print and digital editions of Pound's works, evaluates numerous secondary sources, and provides a history of Pound's critical contexts. The essays in the second section, "Approaches," address Pound's aesthetics, persona, beliefs about economics, fascination with Asian culture, classical source materials, contributions to literary movements, and poetic techniques.Trade ReviewIn this book the challenges of teaching Pound are brilliantly reframed as pedagogical opportunities." - Michael Kindellan, University of Sheffield

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Book SynopsisAs authors and publishers, individuals and collectives, women significantly shaped the modernist movement. While figures such as Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein have received acclaim, authors from marginalized communities and those who wrote for mass, middlebrow audiences also created experimental and groundbreaking work. The essays in this volume explore formal aspects and thematic concerns of modernism while also challenging rigid notions of what constitutes literary value as well as the idea of a canon with fixed boundaries.The essays contextualize modernist women's writing in the material and political concerns of the early twentieth century and in life on the home front during wartime. They consider the original print contexts of the works and propose fresh digital approaches for courses ranging from high school through graduate school. Suggested assignments provide opportunities for students to write creatively and critically, recover forgotten literary works, and engage with their communities.Trade ReviewThe creativity shown here is staggering at times. I am already planning to use some of these innovative approaches to teaching modernism in my own classroom." - Lara Vetter, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

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Book SynopsisMexicana and Chicana authors from the late 1970s to the turn of the century helped overturn the patriarchal literary culture and mores of their time. This landmark volume acquaints readers with the provocative, at times defiant, yet subtle discourses of this important generation of writers and explains the influences and historical contexts that shaped their work.Until now, little criticism has been published about these important works. Addressing this oversight, Teaching Late-Twentieth-Century Mexicana and Chicana Writers starts with essays on Mexicana and Chicana authors. It then features essays on specific teaching strategies suitable for literature surveys and courses in cultural studies, Latino studies, interdisciplinary and comparative studies, humanities, and general education that aim to explore the intersectionalities represented in these works. Experienced teachers offer guidance on using these works to introduce students to border studies, transnational studies, sexuality studies, disability studies, contemporary Mexican history and Latino history in the United States, the history of social movements, and race and gender.Trade ReviewA treasure trove of approaches to teaching Mexicana and Chicana writers. . . . This collection of essays adds pedagogical strategies to any professor's tool kit." —Norma E. Cantú, Trinity University"This is an exciting, useful, and much-needed volume on contemporary Mexicana and Chicana authors." —Gloria E. Chacón, University of California, San Diego

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Book SynopsisEssays featuring twentieth-century Korean thought on literature and culture.Faced with dramatic social and political changes, Korean writers of the twentieth century—writing in the context of Japanese imperialism, World War II, the Korean War, and the Cold War era—explored many pressing questions about modern life: What is the relationship between literature and society? How can intellectual concepts be used politically, for good or ill? What are the differences between Eastern and Western cultures? The essays in this collection, originally published between 1933 and 1957, explore these and other questions through varying lenses, including liberal humanism, socialism, fascism, and an early form of North Korea's Juche thought. Featuring works by Paik Ch'ŏl, Sŏ Insik, Ŏm Hosŏk, and Ch'oe Chaesŏ, the volume highlights the diversity of twentieth-century Korean thought, its developments during periods of upheaval, and its engagement with ideas of modernity that were being shared around the world.This volume contains discussion of writers such as Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, Maxim Gorky, G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, James Joyce, Karl Marx, Walter Pater, Plato, Marcel Proust, Yi Kwangsu, and Yi Sang; movements, schools of thought, and literary styles such as English Romanticism, European modernism, German idealism, the Kyoto school of philosophy, Marxism, naturalism, the New Tendency Group, nihilism, socialist realism, and tendentious literature; traditions such as Hinduism, Mahayana Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen Buddhism; and the sociopolitical and economic formation known as East Asian Community.

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Book SynopsisNight, a memoir by concentration camp survivor and Nobel Peace Prize - winner Elie Wiesel, is a key work of Holocaust literature. It bears witness to the horrors endured by a teenage boy whose freedom and family are forcibly wrested from him. This new study guide to Wiesel's moving story also features an annotated bibliography, a listing of other works by the author, and an introduction by literary scholar Harold Bloom.

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Book SynopsisIn this classic coming-of-age novel set in post-World War II America, Esther Greenwood emerges as a double for author Sylvia Plath. A summer internship at a fashion magazine in New York City reveals only the lack of beauty in the young woman's inner life, as Esther succumbs to a pervasive depression that she likens to being trapped beneath the title object, a bell jar, struggling for her next breath. Noted literary scholar Harold Bloom introduces this new title in the ""Bloom's Guides"" series, which also features an annotated bibliography and a listing of other works by the author.

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Book SynopsisProduced after the death of Eugene O'Neill, ""Long Day's Journey into Night"" is generally considered the author's masterpiece and a seminal drama of the 20th century. The play explores the often-painful ways in which family members love and recognize one another. This new edition in the ""Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations"" series offers a selection of full-length critical essays that explore the restrictive, but essential, familial bonds that mark and define the characters' lives. Complete with an introductory essay by literary scholar Harold Bloom, this study guide also features a chronology, a bibliography, an index, and notes about the contributors.

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Book SynopsisFrom the modernist explorations of the first half of the 20th century to the diverse styles and practitioners of the 21st century, contemporary American poetry has forged a vital and enduring tradition. This volume explores the genre's recent history and development, as succeeding generations of poets have taken up the American idiom and molded it into their own unique modes of expression. This new edition explores contemporary poetry through a selection of critical essays and also features an introductory essay by esteemed professor Harold Bloom.

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Book SynopsisAs a chronicler of the African American experience in fiction and as an incisive cultural commentator in her essays and lectures, Toni Morrison (b. 1931) is regarded as one of the nation's most distinguished novelists and intellectuals. Her novels are richly layered narratives that explore the meanings of tragedy and myth in individual lives. Morrison's perspectives on American life and culture, rendered with a deep understanding of the consequences of history and the power of art, are always compelling. Toni Morrison: Conversations includes interviews with the Nobel Laureate that bring into the foreground Morrison's comments on American literature and society, the academy, and her own work. She discusses growing up in Lorain, Ohio, her role as editor at Random House, the continuing evolution of her style, her teaching philosophy, and her most recent novels Jazz, Paradise, and Love. This volume includes interviews and profiles from the 1970s and 1980s that were not collected in Conversations with Toni Morrison (1993) and a rich collection of new interviews published together for the first time, including conversations with Paula Giddings, Salman Rushdie, Charlie Rose, and Elissa Schappell. Carolyn C. Denard is the author of scholarly essays on Toni Morrison and the forthcoming Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison. She is Associate Dean of the College at Brown University and founder of the Toni Morrison Society.

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Book SynopsisSoon after Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) published his first novel, Lucky Jim, in 1954, he became an object of literary and journalistic scrutiny. This attention would continue until his last days, four decades and forty books later. Conversations with Kingsley Amis includes both the first and last interviews Amis gave. Celebrated by reviewers and critics for his wit and irreverence, Amis rose to the occasion whenever interviewed. His clever and common-sense views covered everything from the state of the novel and current intellectual trends to the circumstances of his domestic life. Not many writers can hold the interest of inquisitors from both Penthouse and the Economist as Amis does. Not many writers, for that matter, articulate views worth recording on sexual relations, about which Amis is something of a failed expert, and on the modern university, about which he could claim a greater authority. English periodicals of all varieties sought out Amis for his opinions on culture, both high and low. Along the way, Amis also entertained literary interrogators from the Paris Review and other journals, including talks with a number of distinguished men of letters such as Clive James, Michael Barber, and John Mortimer.Trade Review"If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing" - Kingsley Amis"

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Book SynopsisIf Russell Banks (b. 1940) says he doesn't ""think about [his] reader at all when [he's] writing,"" he clearly enjoys talking with his actual readers, whether they be students, writers or academics, delighting in the diversity of his audience and in the ""greater democratization of commentary"" provided by alternative media.These conversations span a period of over thirty years, from 1976 with the publication of his first novel, Family Life, and his first collection of short stories, to 2008 with The Reserve. Most date from the late 1990s on, when the publication of Pulitzer-finalist Cloudsplitter in conjunction with the back-to-back release of film adaptations of his novels The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction suddenly put Banks in the spotlight as ""Hollywood's Hottest New Property.""Banks has always believed that the writer plays ""the role of the storyteller,"" fulfilling very basic and universal human needs: ""to talk about the human condition, to tell us something about ourselves."" Yet, for him, writing is not a one-way process. It is an exchange where the key is to tune in and listen--to the voices of the characters engaging the writer's imagination and to the voices of the readers sharing their own experiences of his books and of the world.

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Book SynopsisErnest Hemingway famously called Spain "the country that I loved more than any other except my own," and his forty-year love affair with it provided an inspiration and setting for major works from each decade of his career: The Sun Also Rises, Death in the Afternoon, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Dangerous Summer, and The Garden of Eden; his only full-length play, The Fifth Column; the Civil War documentary The Spanish Earth; and some of his finest short fiction, including "Hills Like White Elephants" and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."In Hemingway's Spain, Carl P. Eby and Mark Cirino collect thirteen penetrating and innovative essays by scholars of different nationalities, generations, and perspectives who explore Hemingway's writing about Spain and his relationship to Spanish culture and ask us in a myriad of ways to rethink how Hemingway imagined Spain—whether through a modernist mythologization of the Spanish soil, his fascination with the bullfight, his interrogation of the relationship between travel and tourism, his involvement with Spanish politics, his dialog with Spanish writers, or his appreciation of the subtleties of Spanish values. In addition to fresh critical responses to some of Hemingway's most famous novels and stories, a particular strength of Hemingway's Spain is its consideration of neglected works, such as Hemingway's Spanish Civil War stories and The Dangerous Summer. The collection is noteworthy for its attention to how Hemingway's post–World War II fiction revisits and reimagines his earlier Spanish works, and it brings new light both to Hemingway's Spanish Civil War politics and his reception in Spain during the Franco years. Hemingway's lifelong engagement with Spain is central to under­standing and appreciating his work, and Hemingway's Spain is an indispensable exploration of Hemingway's home away from home.

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Book SynopsisWhile visiting with Mr. Tumnus in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lucy Pevensie notices a bookshelf filled with such titles as Nymphs and Their Ways and Is Man a Myth? Beginning with these imaginary texts, Charlie W. Starr offers a comprehensive study of C. S. Lewis’s theory of myth, including his views on Greek and Norse mythology, the origins of myth, and the implications of myth on thought, art, gender, theology, and literary and linguistic theory. For Lewis, myth represents an ancient mode of thought focused in the imagination—a mode that became the key that ultimately brought Lewis to his belief in Jesus Christ as the myth become fact.Beginning with a foreword by Lewis scholar Devin Brown, The Faun’s Bookshelf goes on to discuss the many books Lewis imagined throughout his writings—books whose titles he made up but never wrote. It also presents the sylvan myths central to the first two book titles in Mr. Tumnus’s library, including explorations of the relationshipbetween myth and reality, the spiritual significance of natural conservation, and the spiritual and incarnational qualities of gender.Starr then turns to the definition of myth, the literaryqualities of myth, the mythic nature inherent in divine glory, humanity’s destiny to embrace (or reject) that glory, and a deeper exploration of the epistemological ramifications of myth in relation to meaning, imagination, reason, and truth.Trade Review"This book will be most interesting for those that enjoy Lewis already. It is well-written in accessible prose, so that it should not be consigned to the stacks of academic libraries." — Ethics and Culture

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Book SynopsisThe first full biography of Warren Lewis, brother and secretary of C. S. LewisDetailing the life of Warren Hamilton Lewis, author Don W. King gives us new insights into the life and mind of Warren's famous brother, C. S. Lewis, and also demonstrates how Warren's experiences provide an illuminating window into the events, personalities, and culture of 20th-century England. Inkling, Historian, Soldier, and Brother will appeal to those interested in C. S. Lewis and British social and cultural history.As a career soldier, Warren served in France during the nightmare of World War I and was later posted to Sierra Leone and Shanghai. On his retirement from the army, he became an active member of the household at the Kilns, the residence outside Oxford that he co-owned with his brother and Mrs. Janie Moore, and he played an important role in the relationship between his brother and Joy Davidman, the woman who became C. S. Lewis's wife. A talented writer and accomplished amateur historian, Warren also researched and wrote seven books on 17th-century French history.Inkling, Historian, Soldier, and Brother examines Warren Lewis's role as an original member of the Oxford Inklings—that now famous group of novelists, thinkers, clergy, poets, essayists, medical men, scholars, and friends who met regularly to drink beer; discuss books, ideas, history, and writers; and share pieces of their own writing for feedback from the group. Drawing from Warren Lewis's unpublished diaries, his letters, the memoir he wrote about his family, and other primary materials, this biography is an engaging story of a fascinating life, period of history, and of the warm and loving relationship between Warren and his brother, which lasted throughout their lives.Trade ReviewIndependent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY) 2023 Bronze Medal Winner in World History "A consistently interesting and well-paced life story of Warren Lewis. …. To bring Warren out of the shadows, Don King's biography draws upon a wide range of sources, especially published and unpublished passages from his diary." —CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C.S. Lewis Society "Don W. King offers a consistently fact-filled and engaging account of Warren Lewis's life and times, providing as well an illuminating social history of 20th-century Britain. This work allows readers to view C. S. Lewis's life from a new perspective. Warren's story deserves to be told, and Don King is just the right person to tell that story." —David C. Downing, codirector, Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College "King gives us a richly detailed life of Warnie Lewis to make the case that he is interesting not only because of his famous brother but in his own right. We see Warnie with C. S. Lewis growing up, living at the Kilns, and as Inklings, but we also clearly see the complexities of Warnie himself, proud soldier and self-taught historian who yet was psychologically dependent on his brother and tragically diminished by alcoholism." —John Rosegrant, author of Tolkien, Enchantment, and Loss: Steps on the Developmental Journey "King offers a treasure trove of new information and at the same time succeeds admirably in engaging both the expert and someone new to Lewis studies. This book is a must have for any serious Lewis collection—as much for its insights and commentary as for the information it provides." —Devin Brown, professor of English, Asbury University, and author of A Life Observed: A Spiritual Biography of C. S. Lewis

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Book SynopsisA line-by-line analysis of one of Hemingway's greatest novels Published in 1940, Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls is widely considered a masterpiece of war literature. A bestseller upon its release, the novel has long been both admired and ridiculed for its depiction of Robert Jordan's military heroism and wartime romance. Yet its validation of seemingly conflicting narratives and its rendering of the intricate world its characters inhabit, as well as its dense historical, literary, and biographical allusions, have made it a work that remains a focus of interest and study. Alex Vernon, in this contribution to the Reading Hemingway series, mines the historical record to unprecedented depths, examining Hemingway's drafts and correspondence, synthesizing the body of literary criticism about the novel, and engaging in close textual analysis. As a result, new and important insights into the complex situation of the Spanish Civil War—integral to the novel—emerge, enriching our understanding of the novel. Through Vernon's comprehensive work, contemporary readers and scholars are reminded that For Whom the Bell Tolls is still vital, significant, and relevant.Trade Review"Meticulously researched and assembled by a widely respected authority on For Whom the Bell Tolls, this compendium is an extremely useful guide to the many references, allusions, and Spanish phrases in the novel."—Milton Cohen, author of The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s "The farther the world of the Spanish Civil War recedes into the past, the more anyone who wants to fully understand Hemingway's ambitious novel can use a guidebook like this one. With his lifetime of engagement with Hemingway, Alex Vernon is exactly the right person to write it, and he has done a splendid and thorough job."—Adam Hochschild, author of Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 "Anyone interested in understanding Hemingway's achievement in this important and controversial novel will find Alex Vernon's Reading Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls indispensable. —Laurence W. Mazzeno, author of The Critics and Hemingway, 1924-2014: Shaping an American Literary Icon "Alex Vernon has written the indispensable companion to For Whom the Bell Tolls. Beautifully researched, this volume elucidates the historical forces, figures, places, and events essential to a deep understanding of this masterpiece set against the complexities of the Spanish Civil War. With vital insights into the novel's composition, its manuscript, its major themes, and Hemingway's craft, this book will be deeply appreciated by students and scholars alike." —Carl Eby, author of Hemingway's Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood and coeditor of Hemingway's Spain: Imagining the Spanish World

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Book SynopsisPoetics and Praxis ‘After’ Objectivism examines late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century poetics and praxis within and against the dynamic, disparate legacy of Objectivism and the Objectivists. This is the first volume in the field to investigate the continuing relevance of the Objectivist ethos to poetic praxis in our time. The book argues for a reconfiguration of Objectivism, adding contingency to its historical values of sincerity and objectification, within the context of the movement’s development and disjunctions from 1931 to the present. Essays and conversations from emerging and established poets and scholars engage a network of communities in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., shaped by contemporaneous oppositions as well as genealogical (albeit discontinuous) historicisms. This book articulates Objectivism as an inclusively local, international, and interdisciplinary ethos, and reclaims Objectivist poetics and praxis as modalities for contemporary writers concerned with radical integrations of aesthetics, lyric subjectivities, contingent disruption, historical materialism, and social activism. The chapter authors and roundtable contributors reexamine foundational notions about Objectivism—who the Objectivists were and are, what Objectivism has been, now is, and what it might become—delivering critiques of aesthetics and politics; of race, class, and gender; and of the literary and cultural history of the movement’s development and disjunctions from 1931 to the present.

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Book SynopsisExperimental poetry responded to historical change in the decades after World War II, with an attitude of such casual and reckless originality that its insights have often been overlooked. However, as Benjamin Lee argues, to ignore the scenes of self and the historical occasions captured by experimental poets during the 1950s and 1960s is to overlook a rich and instructive resource for our own complicated transition into the twenty-first century.Frank O'Hara and fellow experimental poets like Amiri Baraka, Diane di Prima, and Allen Ginsberg offer us a set of perceptive responses to Cold War culture, lyric meditations on consequential changes in U.S. social life and politics, including the decline of the Old Left, the rise of white-collar workers, and the emergence of vernacular practices like hipsterism and camp. At the same time, they offer us opportunities to anatomize our own desire for historical significance and belonging, a desire we may well see reflected and reconfigured in the work of these poets.

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Book SynopsisCaterina Bernardini gauges the effects that Walt Whitman's poetry had in Italy from 1870 to 1945: the reactions it provoked, the aesthetic and political agendas it came to sponsor, and the creative responses it facilitated. Particular attention is given to women writers and noncanonical writers often excluded from previous discussions in this area of study. Bernardini also investigates the contexts and causes of Whitman's success abroad through the lives, backgrounds, beliefs, and imaginations of the people who encountered his work. Studying Whitman's reception from a transnational perspective shows how many countries were simultaneously carving out a new modernity in literature and culture. In this sense, Bernardini not only shows the interconnectedness of various international agents in understanding and contributing to the spread of Whitman's work, but, more largely, illustrates a constellation of similar pre-modernist and modernist sensibilities. This stands in contrast to the notion of sudden innovation: modernity was not easy to achieve, and it did not imply a complete refusal of tradition. Instead, a continuous and fruitful negotiation between tradition and innovation, not a sudden break with the literary past, is at the very heart of the Italian and transnational reception of Whitman. The book is grounded in archival studies and the examination of primary documents of noteworthy discovery.Trade ReviewWe have always known that Italian writers took an intense interest in Walt Whitman, but Caterina Bernardini's exciting study now fully opens us up to the astonishing degree to which Italy is Whitmanland. Whitman's reception in Italy, up to the breakdown of fascism in 1945, is not only a revealing story in itself but it also offers a history of transatlantic modernism in the context of the political and cultural distortions of the twentieth century. Bernardini's book is a case study demonstrating Whitman's place in Goethe's ever-relevant formula of Weltliteratur." - Walter Grünzweig, author, Constructing the German Walt Whitman"A spirited look at the intercultural conversations sparked by Whitman in Italy. Familiar names like Gabriele D'Annunzio and Cesare Pavese are joined by socialist Ada Negri and feminist Sibilla Aleramo, giving us a vibrant new map of Italian writings. Translation and reinvention transform the very meaning of 'literature' itself." - Wai Chee Dimock, author, Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival

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Book SynopsisWho writes novels about war? For nearly a century after World War I, the answer was simple: soldiers who had been there. The assumption that a person must have experienced war in the flesh in order to write about it in fiction was taken for granted by writers, reviewers, critics, and even scholars. Contemporary American fiction tells a different story. Less than half of the authors of contemporary war novels are veterans. And that’s hardly the only change. Today’s war novelists focus on the psychological and moral challenges of soldiers coming home rather than the physical danger of combat overseas. They also imagine the consequences of the wars from non-American perspectives in a way that defies the genre’s conventions. To understand why these changes have occurred, David Eisler argues that we must go back nearly fifty years, to the political decision to abolish the draft. The ramifications rippled into the field of cultural production, transforming the foundational characteristics— authorship, content, and form—of the American war fiction genre.Trade Review“A very smart, very relevant work. Any scholar of American war fiction would find this study extremely useful.”—Eric Bennett, author, A Big Enough Lie“Writing Wars is a brilliant excavation of the stories Americans have been telling ourselves about war for the past century. Eisler has written a sharp, engaging, and troubling cultural history.”—Phil Klay, National Book Award winner, author, Redeployment “This brilliant, deeply interdisciplinary study is Eisler's first book, but with it he joins the ranks of Jay Winter, Samuel Hynes, and Paul Fussell. A stunning achievement.”—Choice

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Book SynopsisUnderstanding Paul Auster is a comprehensive companion to the work of a writer who effectively balances a particular combination of Jewish American identity and European sensibility across an impressive breadth of novels, screenplays, essays, and poetry. James Peacock views Auster as chiefly concerned with the individual's problematic relationship with language, a theme present from the enigmatic poetry of Auster's early career to the more inclusive and optimistic imaginings of the films Smoke and Blue in the Face and the novels Timbuktu, The Brooklyn Follies, and Man in the Dark.Peacock's study maps the evolution of Auster's fiction and its forms, goals, and influences. Peacock argues that the key event for any Auster character is the realization that language should not be restricted to documenting reality but should instead be embraced for its metaphorical qualities and constantly shifting nature. Peacock finds in Auster a view of language as inherently ethical and communal because, to use language creatively, one must be immersed in the plurality of experience and listen to the voices of others. In celebrated works such as The Invention of Solitude and The New York Trilogy, these voices include Auster's literary antecedents. Increasingly in his recent work, however, they include those of ordinary people. Peacock suggests that in the aftermath of 9/11, much of Auster's fiction places even greater importance on sympathetic relations with ordinary individuals and advocates through artistic endeavors the merits of connecting with others.

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Book SynopsisHenry Veggian introduces readers to one of the most influential American writers of the last half- century. Winner of the National Book Award, American Book Award, and the first Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, Don DeLillo is the author of short stories, screenplays, and fifteen novels, including his breakthrough work White Noise (1985) and Pulitzer Prize finalists Mao II (1992) and Underworld (1998).Veggian traces the evolution of DeLillo's work through the three phases of his career as a fiction writer, from the experimental early novels, through the critically acclaimed works of the mid-1980s and 1990s, into the smaller but newly innovative novels of the last decade. He guides readers to DeLillo's principal concerns - the tension between biography and anonymity, the blurred boundary between fiction and historical narrative, and the importance of literary authorship in opposition to various structures of power - and traces the evolution of his changing narrative techniques.Beginning with a brief biography, an introduction to reading strategies, and a survey of the major concepts and questions concerning DeLillo's work, Veggian proceeds chronologically through his major novels. His discussion summarizes complicated plots, reflects critical responses to the author's work, and explains the literary tools used to fashion his characters, narrators, and events. In the concluding chapter Veggian engages notable examples of DeLillo's other modes, particularly the short stories that reveal important insights into his "modular" working method as well as the evolution of his novels.

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Book SynopsisGerald Alva Miller Jr.'s Understanding William Gibson is a thoughtful examination of the life and work of William Gibson, author of eleven novels and twenty short stories. Gibson is the recipient of many notable awards for science fiction writing including the Nebula, Hugo, and Philip K. Dick awards. Gibson's iconic novel, Neuromancer, popularized the concept of cyberspace. With his early stories and his first trilogy of novels,Gibson became the father figure for a new genre of science fiction called ""cyberpunk"" that brought a gritty realism to its cerebral plots involving hackers and artificial intelligences.This study situates Gibson as a major figure in both science fiction history and contemporary American fiction, and it traces how his aesthetic affected both areas of literature. Miller follows a brief biographical sketch and a survey of the works that influenced him with an examination that divides Gibson's body of work into early stories, his three major novel trilogies, and his standalone works. Miller does not confine his study to major works but instead also delves into Gibson's obscure stories, published and unpublished screenplays, major essays, and collaborations with other authors.Miller's exploration starts by connecting Gibson to the major countercultural movements that influenced him (the Beat Generation, the hippies, and the punk rock movement) while also placing him within the history of science fiction and examining how his early works reacted against contemporaneous trends in the genre. These early works also exhibit the development of his unique aesthetic that would influence science fiction and literature more generally. Next a lengthy chapter explicates his groundbreaking Sprawl Trilogy, which began with Neuromancer. Miller then traces Gibson's aesthetic transformations across his two subsequent novel trilogies that increasingly eschew distant futures either to focus on our contemporary historical moment as a kind of science fiction itself or to imagine technological singularities that might lie just around the corner. These chapters detail how Gibson's aesthetic has morphed along with social, cultural, and technological changes in the real world. The study also looks at such standalone works as his collaborative steampunk novel, his attempts at screenwriting, his major essays, and even his experimental hypertext poetry. The study concludes with a discussion of Gibson's lasting influence and a brief examination of his most recent novel, The Peripheral, which signals yet another radical change in Gibson's aesthetic.

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Book SynopsisIn Understanding Jonathan Coe, the first full-length study of the British novelist, Merritt Moseley surveys a writer whose experimental technique has become increasingly well received and critically admired. Coe is the recipient of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix Medicis, the Priz du Meilleur Livre Entranger, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prizes for Fiction, and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction. His oeuvre includes eleven novels and three biographies--two of famous Hollywood actors Humphrey Bogart and Jimmy Stewart and one of English modernist novelist B. S. Johnson.Following an introductory overview of Coe's life and career, Moseley examines Coe's complex engagement with popular culture, his experimental technique, his political satire, and his broad-canvased depictions of British society. Though his first three books, An Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love, and The Dwarves of Death, received little notice upon publication, Moseley shows their strengths as literary works and as precursors. In 1994 Coe gained visibility with What a Carve Up!, which has remained his most admired and discussed novel. He has since published a postmodern take on sleep disorders and university students, The House of Sleep; a two-volume roman-fleuve consisting of The Rotters' Club and The Closed Circle; a touching account of a lonely woman's life, The Rain before It Falls; a satiric vision of a misguided life, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim; and a domestic comedy thriller set at the 1958 world's fair in Brussels, Expo '58. Moseley explicates these works and discusses the recurring features of Coe's fiction: political consciousness, a deep artistic concern with the form of fiction, and comedy.

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Book SynopsisWhat Marcel Proust wanted from life most of all was unconditional requited love, and the way he went after it—smothering the objects of his affection with gifts—cost him a fortune. To pay for such extravagance, he engaged in daring speculations on the stock exchange. The task of his cousin and financial adviser, Lionel Hauser, was to make sure these speculations would not go sour. In Proust and His Banker, Gian Balsamo reveals that Proust was quite aware of the advantageous trade-off between financial indulgence and artistic inspiration; his liberal squandering of money provided the grist for fictional characters and incidents of surprising effectiveness, both in the artistic sphere and later on in the commercial one. But Hauser was not aware of this odd aspect of Proust’s creativity, nor could he have been since the positive returns from the writer’s masterpieces were late in coming. Focusing on more than 350 letters between Proust and Hauser and drawing on records of the Rothschild Archive and financial data assembled from the twenty-one-volume Kolb edition of Proust’s letters, Balsamo reconstructs Proust’s finances and provides a fascinating window into the writer’s creative and speculative process. Balsamo carefully follows Proust’s financial activities, including investments ranging from Royal Dutch Securities to American railroads to Eastern European copper mines, his exchanges with various banks and brokerage firms, his impetuous gifts, and the changing size and composition of his portfolio. Successes and failures alike provided material for Proust’s fiction, whether from the purchase of an airplane for the object of his affections or the investigation of a deceased love’s intimate background. Proust was, Balsamo concludes, a master at turning financial indulgence into narrative craftsmanship, economic costs into artistic opportunities.Over the course of their fifteen-year collaboration, the banker saw Proust squander three-fifths of his wealth on reckless ventures and on magnificent presents for the men and women who struck his fancy. To Hauser the writer was a virtuoso in resource mismanagement. Nonetheless, Balsamo shows, we owe it to the altruism of this generous relative, who never thought twice about sacrificing his own time and resources to Proust, that In Search of Lost Time was ever completed.

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Book SynopsisRandall Kenan is an American author best known for his novel A Visitation of Spirits and his collection of stories Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was a nominee for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, and named a New York Times Notable Book. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, asa well as the Whiting Writers Award, Sherwood Anderson Award, John Dos Passos Award, Rome Prize, and North Carolina Award for Literature. Understanding Randall Kenan is the first book-length critical study of Kenan, offering a brief biography and an exploration of his considerable oeuvre - memoir, short stories, novels, journalism, folklore, and essays. Kenan's writing can be complex and sometimes highly stylized while covering a broad range of topics, though he often explores African Americans' complicated relationships, specifically as they struggle to make connections along other axes of class, gender, and sexual identity. Crank explores these themes and how they influence Kenan's work through a personal interview with the author.

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Book SynopsisA comprehensive assessment of Holocaust literature, from World War II to the present day

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