You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In this study of collaborative writing in western American literature, Linda K. Karell asks broad and fruitful questions about how writing in general is produced. By examining "collaboration" both as a process and as a product, she challenges the definition of an author as an individual genius who creates original works of art in isolation. From a collaborative view, what was a fairly direct cause and effect scenario (individual author + inspiration = original literary masterpiece) becomes something much less clear. An individual is always located within a shifting context of texts from which he or she draws to produce?often with substantial and varied support from other writers, editors, sp...
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2013. This inter- and multi-disciplinary volume examines how culture impacts care for the dying, the overall experience of dying, and ways the dead are remembered. Over the past three decades, scholarship in thanatology has increased dramatically. This text localizes a broad array of perspectives that research, analyze, and interpret the many interrelations and interactions that exist between death and culture. Culture not only presents and portrays ideas about ‘a good death’ and norms that seek to achieve it, but culture also operates as both a vehicle and medium through which meaning about death is communicated and understood. Sadly, too, culture sometimes facilitates death through violence.
This collection of original and classic essays examines the contributions that female authors have made to the short story. The introductory chapter discusses why genre critics have ignored works by women and why feminist scholars have ignored the short story genre. Subsequent chapters discuss early stories by such authors as Lydia Maria Child and Rose Terry Cooke. Others are devoted to the influences (race, class, sexual orientation, education) that have shaped women's short fiction through the years. Women's special stylistic, formal and thematic concerns are also discussed in this study. The final essay addresses the ways our contemporary creative-writing classes are stifling the voices of emerging young female authors. The collection includes an extensive five-part bibliography.
When St. Louis homemaker Pearl Curran began writing fiction and poetry at a Ouija board in 1913, she attributed the work to the “discarnate entity” Patience Worth, a seventeenth-century Puritan. Though now virtually forgotten, her writing garnered both critical praise and public popularity at the time. The Patience of Pearl uncovers more of Curran’s (and thus Patience Worth’s) biography than has been known before; Daniel B. Shea provides close readings of the Patience-dictated writings and explores the historical and local context, applying current cognitive and neuro-psychology research. Though Pearl Curran had only a ninth-grade education, Patience Worth was able to dictate a bibli...
The autobiography has not always been acknowledged as true literature. Since 1970, however, American memoirs have revealed themselves as a respectable literary genre, distinct with an inimitable literary voice and a unique capacity to intersect narration and reflection. This study focuses critical attention on ten memoirs from the northern U.S. Rockies, including Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. By comparing memoirs representing states that share similar demographic, ecological, and socio-economic characteristics, this historic and literary analysis reveals both commonalities and divergences among American Western memoirs. Each chapter compares two books of similar thematic concerns, ranging from regional values and rural evolution to dynamic landscapes and the experiences of American Indians.
The dawn of the twentieth century saw the birth of the New Woman, a cultural and literary ideal that replaced Victorian expectations of domesticity with visions of social, political, and economic autonomy. Although such writers as Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin treated these ideals in well-known literature of that era, marginalized women also explored changing gender roles in works that deserve more attention today. This book is the first study to focus solely on multiethnic women writers' responses to the ideal of the New Woman in America, opening up a world of literary texts that provide new insight into the phenomenon. Charlotte Rich reveals how these authors uniquely articulated the contr...
An anthology of literary essays focusing on the ways in which sexual, emotional, physical, racial, and other forms of violence have affected women artists' imaginations.
These issues of city-building and institutional change involved more than the familiar push and pull of interest groups or battles between bosses, reformers, immigrants, and natives. Revell explores the ways in which technical values - a distinctive civic culture of expertise - helped to reshape ideas of community, generate new centers of public authority, and change the physical landscape of New York City."--Jacket.