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Drawing on the theories of philosophers of ethics including Hannah Arendt and Alasdair MacIntyre, Damaged Lives: Southern and Caribbean Narrative from Faulkner to Naipaul studies how moral skepticism harms ordinary human beings. In response to an indecisive and uncommitted culture, many writers from the American South and the Caribbean have sought unambiguous sources of order and belief. Damaged Lives shows how a yearning for conviction pervades the writing of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Agee, Flannery O'Connor, Mary Hood, and V. S. Naipaul. This book will be useful in courses on modern American and Caribbean literature as well as in courses on ethics, American studies, and cultural studies.
Novelist, poet, screenwriter, journalist, film critic, and cult hero, James Agee was a man of many talents. This collection examines Agee's achievements from the perspective of family members, friends, and contemporaries to create a multifaceted portrait of a dynamic and influential man. Included are recollections and commentary from Agee's widow, his lifelong friend and teacher Father Flye, his editor David McDowell, and other notables, including John Huston, Andrew Lytle, and Walker Evans, with whom Agee collaborated on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. For this edition, the editors have added new insights from such luminaries as Robert Fitzgerald, Dwight Macdonald, and Frederick Manfred, along with Agee critics Scott Bates, Edward Carlos, James Lee, Edwin M. Sterling, and William Stott. In addition, editor Jeffrey J. Folks has contributed a new preface outlining the state of Agee criticism in the years since the first edition was published in 1974. With liveliness and candor, Remembering James Agee evokes the life and personality of a writer and critic who holds a unique place in American letters.
A scholar of southern and African American fiction, Folks finds that southern writers of the past century and a half have responded to the particular forces of disorder at large during their time in one of three characteristic modes: resistance, transcendence, or acceptance. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.
In 1917, fifty-two years after its founding, the University of Kentucky faced stagnation, financial troubles, and disturbing reports of nepotism, resulting in a leadership crisis. A special committee investigated the institution and issued a report calling for a massive transformation of the university, including the hiring of a new president who could execute the report's suggested initiatives. The Board of Trustees hired Frank L. McVey. McVey labored tirelessly for more than two decades to establish Kentucky as one of the nation's most respected institutions of higher learning, which brought him recognition as one of the leading progressive educators in the South. In Frank L. McVey and the...
Southern Writers and the Machine Faulkner to Percy traces the artistic treatment of mechanization among two generations of Southern writers. The book studies the artistic and philosophical responses to the increasing mechanization of the South in the work of Faulkner, Tate, O'Connor, Styron, Gaines, and Percy. It argues that these writers were working within a self-conscious aesthetic tradition which evolved out of the southern writer's unique position in relation to a past traditional order and a rapidly emerging future industrial society. The book breaks new ground by analyzing in close detail the relationship between the historical fact of mechanization and the artistic strategies employed in response to it.
Conservative strands in American literature are often overlooked in university courses. This book focuses on the works of conservative American writers and of others who have written of America from a conservative perspective. Beginning with the work of Edgar Allan Poe, the book explores the traditionalist temper in books by Vachel Lindsay, James Agee, Flannery O'Connor, V.S. Naipaul, and Kent Haruf. Drawing on the theories of Lewis P. Simpson, Leszek Kolakowski, Roger Scruton, and Gertrude Himmelfarb, among others, this text offers a fresh examination of a significant aspect of American literature.
Folks (literature, Doshisha U., Japan) explores the relationship between literature and contemporary ethical problems, focusing on southern US and African American writers, his special interest. Deploying theoretical approaches from ethnicity studies, regional criticism, and postcolonial theory, he inserts a reading of ethics in the critical study of fictional and nonfictional narratives. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
Cormac McCarthy, the author of such works as Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, and The Road, is one of America's greatest living writers--an uncompromising examiner of the depths of human depravity, the nature of evil, and the bonds that endure. This companion is intended for both the scholar and lay reader seeking a comprehensive understanding of McCarthy's body of work. Alphabetically ordered entries offer analysis of novels, characters, motifs, allusions, plays, and themes, as well as commentary on events, people and places related to McCarthy scholarship. Most entries include a selected bibliography for further reading. A biographical introduction provides information on the life of this reclusive author, and discussion topics are provided as an aid for instructors.
Since the end of World War II, the South has experienced a greater awareness of growth and of its accompanying tensions than other regions of the United States. The rapid change that climaxed with the war in Vietnam, the Cold War, civil rights demonstrations, and Watergate has forced the traditional South to come to terms with social upheaval. As the essays collected in Southern Writers at Century's End point out, southern writing: since 1975 reflects the confusion and violence that have characterized late-twentieth-century public culture. These essays consider the work of twenty-one of the foremost southern writers whose most important fiction has appeared in the last quarter of this centur...