The introduction and four scholarly essays in this volume constitute an overview of Hemingway's career as a short story writer and offer an overview of practical problems involved in reading this work. The early short story Up in Michigan is explained in relation to the short story cycle In Our Time. Problems of narration are analysed in Now I Lay Me, an integral part of the famous Nick Adams stories. A detailed look at ecological and Native American backgrounds is presented in Fathers and Sons, in the collection Winner Take Nothing; and Snows of Kilimanjaro is examined from a postcolonial perspective. Also included is a selected bibliography designed to direct readers to the most valuable resources for the study of Hemingway's short fiction.
This 1999 book provides a multifaceted introduction to Nobel Prize-winner Saul Bellow's most widely read, respected, and taught work of fiction, Seize the Day. This tragi-comic story of one day in the life of an average man on the brink of failure and despair is a prime example of the Jewish novels of the 1950s. The essays in this volume examine the thematic, stylistic, and critical elements of Bellow's masterpiece and offer different approaches to how the novel may or may not be thought of as 'ethnic'.
Sixty years after its first publication, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio continues to stand as a 'classic' of modernist American fiction. In original new essays by David H. Stouck, Marcia Jacobson, Clare E. Colquitt, and Thomas Yingling, Winesburg is reconsidered in the contexts of the expressionist movement, the American boy-book tradition, the work of Sarah Orne Jewett, and the rise of industrial capitalism. An introduction by John W. Crowley reviews the career of Sherwood Anderson and his assimilation into the literary canon.
Sister Carrie (1900), Theodore Dreiser's first novel, is one of the seminal works in American literature because of Dreiser's ground-breaking dramatization of the tragic life led by men and women in the modern American city. The introduction by Donald Pizer describes in detail the biographical and historical background of the novel and its critical reputation. The four original essays in this 1991 volume not only touch on long-established approaches to Sister Carrie but also reflect a number of the concerns of scholarly and critical movements. Each of the essays is a self-standing examination of a major area of interest in the novel, including such topics as the impact of Dreiser's own life on the creation of Carrie and Hurstwood, the relationship of Carrie and the theater, and Dreiser's naturalism and his narrative technique.
When first published in 1929, Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms was decried as a vulgar novel, and was actually banned in Boston. In his extensive introduction, Scott Donaldson explains this initial reception, and then traces the change in perception toward the novel. The essays in this collection show that Farewell was a revolutionary novel that has only now begun to be understood - sixty years after publication. Sandra Spanier demonstrates how World War I determined the behaviour patterns of Catherine Barkley; James Phelan examines the first person narration; Ben Stoltzfus studies the novel from psychoanalytical (Lacanian) angles, and Paul Smith traces Hemingway's repeated attempts to write about the war.
Light in August (1932) is one of William Faulkner's most important, most challenging, and most widely studied novels, demanding to be approached from many angles and with a variety of critical and scholarly skills. Here five distinguished critics offer just such a range of approaches, discussing the novel in terms of its composition and its place in Faulkner's oeuvre; its structure and narrative techniques; its relation to the religious, racial, and sexual assumptions of the society it depicts; its presentation of women and handling of gender-related issues; and the social and moral implications of the 'hero' status accorded to a figure like Joe Christmas. Each contributor has had a double ambition: to write clearly and directly, thus making the volume accessible to the widest possible audience, and to write freshly and originally, so as to enhance - even for those thoroughly familiar with the existing criticism - understanding and appreciation of Light in August itself and of
The introduction to this volume outlines the critical history of the novel from the moralising reactions of Hawthorne's contemporaries, through the assessments of writers such as Henry James and D. H. Lawrence, to the more recent approaches of the New Criticism, formalism, psychoanalytical criticism, structuralism and feminism. Each of the interpretative essays that follow places The Scarlet Letter in a specific historical and cultural context. The first shows that an awareness of the convention of romance is essential to an understanding of the novel. A second investigates the tension between Hawthorne's Puritan setting and his Romantic language, suggesting a complex relationship among author, narrator, characters, and story. A third considers the novel's pervasive metaphor of sexuality. The final essay locates the work in the genre of 'the novel of adultery'.
The American Novel series provides students of American literature with introductory critical guides to the great works of American fiction by giving details of the novel's composition, publication history and contemporary reception. The group of essays, each specially commissioned from a leading scholar in the field, examines the interpretative methods and prominent ideas on the text. There are also helpful guides to further reading. Specifically designed for undergraduates, the series will be a powerful resource for anyone engaged in the critical analysis of major American novels. This collection of essays on Moby-Dick reconnects Melville's great work with concerns that are central to readers in critical studies. Richard Brodhead introduces the volume with a discussion of the book's unique place in the canon of American literature. He then recounts the novel's history from its mixed reception in the mid-nineteenth century to its prevalent status as a classic. The five essays that
Increased interest in the role of women and minorities in establishing the canon of American literature has led to renewed interest in Uncle Tom's Cabin. The essays in this volume set out to provide contemporary readers with a critical and historical interpretation of the novel that reflects the best of recent scholarship. In his introduction Eric J. Sundquist attempts to show that Uncle Tom's Cabin boldly takes issue with both proslavery arguments and prevailing prejudices among abolitionists, employing the forms of popular melodrama and heated rhetoric to carry its complex argument. The individual essays examine the influence of Stowe's novel on the characterization of women in the American novel and on later women writers, the role of women in the antislavery movement, the literary exchanges between Stowe and her contemporaries; Uncle Tom's Cabin and the tradition of the Gothic novel, and the characterizations of blacks in this novel and in later works.
When The Awakening was first published in 1899 it was an extraordinarily controversial book. One of the first American novels to concern itself with themes of adultery and divorce, it was widely attacked as 'vulgar' and 'unhealthy'. In her introduction to this collection, Wendy Martin discusses the historical background of the novel and analyses the heroine's evolution from a role of traditional femininity to one of autonomous individualism. The essays that follow explore other central themes of the novel, as well as locating Chopin in the tradition of American women novelists and discussing her status as a pre-modernist writer.
The American (1877) was written the very year Henry James committed himself to making his way as an author outside America. It thus formed part of the brief that James had to draw up both for and against his countrymen. This 1987 collection of essays casts light on this and other major aspects of the novel: the French literary influences on James as he gravitated between the genres of the romantic and the realistic novel; the many-layered French political scene that he incorporated into the novel; the complex gender roles of his characters; and the pervasive effect of capitalism upon them.
The Portrait of a Lady is arguably Henry James's most appealing and accessible novel. The introduction to this volume of specially written essays, first published in 1990, situates the novel in its cultural and historical context: its treatment of a modern woman 'affronting' her destiny, its relation to the contemporary controversy over 'morality' in fiction, its use of an Italian setting, and its late nineteenth century elegiac mood. It also discusses James's revisions of the novel and his late Preface. The essays that follow deal with the place of Portrait in the tradition of modern narrative, its relation to popular women's fiction on the question of marriage, the influence of James's 'family romance' and his brother William, and the character of Isabel Archer seen from a psychoanalytic point of view.
Billy Budd is Herman Melville's most read work after Moby-Dick. Melville wrote the novella during the 5 years before his death, and it was published posthumously in 1924. The essays collected here provide a multifaceted introduction to the work. Areas investigated include nineteenth-century political and social dynamics and the literary response they provoked, as well as the relevance of mythology and the histories of classical world and Judaeo-Christian civilization to Melville's book. Also examined are Melville's later writing, including the late poetry, the text's development, and its ambiguities. This collection will prove an invaluable resource for students of this major American writer.
Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw may be Henry James's most widely read tales. Certainly, these swiftly moving accounts of failed connections are among the best examples of his shorter fiction. One represents the international theme that made him famous; the other exemplifies the multiple meanings that make him modern. The introduction to this 1993 volume locates his fiction in the context of the family that conditioned his concern with the sexual politics of intimate experience. In the four essays that follow, Kenneth Graham offers a close reading of Daisy with an emphasis on Daisy; Robert Weisbuch examines Winterbourne as a specimen of James's formidable bachelor type; Millicent Bell places the ghost story governess in the traditions of English fiction and society; David McWhirter then provides a critique of female authority. Deftly summarising earlier criticism, these essays demonstrate the continuing appeal of Henry James in our time.
This is a collection of new essays on one of the most important works of New England local colour fiction, The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett. It builds on feminist literary scholarship that affirms the importance and value of Jewett's work, but goes beyond previously published studies by offering an analysis of how race, nationalism, and the literary marketplace shape her narrative. The volume constitutes a major rethinking of Jewett's contribution to American literature, and will be of broad interest to the fields of American literary studies, feminist cultural criticism, and American studies.
This volume in The American Novel series addresses the established reputation of The Education of Henry Adams as a classic work of American autobiography and canonical work of American literature. Examining The Education in terms of early twentieth-century American attitudes to education, gender, US foreign policy, and historiography, these essays add considerably to our understanding of the Education as an expression of its time. The approaches of the four contributors - John Carlos Rowe, Brook Thomas, Martha Banta, and Howard Horwitz - complement each other, even though the specific topic explored by each scholar is distinctly different from the others. The result is a remarkably coherent volume that explains in original ways the continuing importance of The Education of Henry Adams as literature and history.
Still John Updike's most popular and critically acclaimed novel, Rabbit Run introduced the character of Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, one of those middle-class Americans who, in Updike's words, aren't 'especially beautiful or bright or urban' but about whom there is a lot worth saying. The fallible hero struggles with his own sexuality, his religious feelings, the difficulties of being a son and father, and with the changes in American society that seem to suffocate him. Updike's writing is charged with narrative energy and pictorial accuracy that illuminate the present moment; it evokes the tension between the drab compromises we are forced to make with age and the religious mystery that sustains us. Written by a distinguished group of international scholars, these essays examine both the technical mastery and thematic range that make Updike's work one of the most significant achievements in modern American fiction and one that continues to provoke fresh critical insight.
My Antonia is undoubtedly Willa Cather's most famous novel. It is also her most autobiographical novel and her most aesthetically complex; it can be enjoyed both for its simple, pure prose and for its literary depth. The essays in this volume place the novel in the context of American literary history, African-American music, and Southern writing, and offer illuminating ways of reading Cather's best-known work.
While William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury met with only limited success when published in 1929, it since has become one of the most popular of Faulkner's novels, serving as a litmus paper upon which critical approaches have tested themselves. In the introduction to this volume Noel Polk traces the critical responses to the novel from the time of its publication to the present day. The essays that follow present contemporary reassessments of The Sound and the Fury from a variety of critical perspectives. Dawn Trouard offers us the women of The Sound and the Fury, reading against the grain of the predominant critical tradition that sees the women through the lens of masculine cultural biases. Donald M. Kartiganer comes to terms with the ways in which the novel simultaneously attracts readers and resists readings. Richard Godden discusses the relationship between incest and miscegenation. Noel Polk examines closely the way Faulkner experiments with language.
This 1995 volume of critical essays on Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's explosive first novel, not only questions our understanding of the 'Southern Gothic,' but launches an inquiry into the nature and history of O'Connor's critical reputation. Perceived as a 'classic' American writer despite the double setbacks of being a woman and a twentieth-century author, O'Connor continues to speak with striking clarity and disturbing vision to successive generations. Michael Kreyling's introduction explores the nature and history of O'Connor's literary reputation using quotations from her letters, works, and from critical reviews and articles covering the history of her presence in the canon. Robert Brinkmeyer Jr, who has written on O'Connor from a more or less traditional theological view in the past, writes a re-evaluative essay from that point of view. Patricia Yaeger's feminist/psychoanalytical essay explores the construction of the narrative voice in Wise Blood. James Mellard links O'Connor
