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The American short story has always been characterized by exciting aesthetic innovations and an immense range of topics. This handbook offers students and researchers a comprehensive introduction to the multifaceted genre with a special focus on recent developments due to the rise of new media. Part I provides systematic overviews of significant contexts ranging from historical-political backgrounds, short story theories developed by writers, print and digital culture, to current theoretical approaches and canon formation. Part II consists of 35 paired readings of representative short stories by eminent authors, charting major steps in the evolution of the American short story from its beginnings as an art form in the early nineteenth century up to the digital age. The handbook examines historically, methodologically, and theoretically the coming together of the enduring narrative practice of compression and concision in American literature. It offers fresh and original readings relevant to studying the American short story and shows how the genre performs American culture.
The 50-year period from 1880 to 1929 is the richest era for theater in American history, certainly in the great number of plays produced and artists who contributed significantly, but also in the centrality of theater in the lives of Americans. As the impact of European modernism began to gradually seep into American theater during the 1880s and quite importantly in the 1890s, more traditional forms of theater gave way to futurism, symbolism, surrealism, and expressionism. American playwrights like Eugene O'Neill, George Kelly, Elmer Rice, Philip Barry, and George S. Kaufman ushered in the Golden Age of American drama. The A to Z of American Theater: Modernism focuses on legitimate drama, both as influenced by European modernism and as impacted by the popular entertainment that also enlivened the era. This is accomplished through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced entries on plays; music; playwrights; great performers like Maude Adams, Otis Skinner, Julia Marlowe, and E.H. Sothern; producers like David Belasco, Daniel Frohman, and Florenz Ziegfeld; critics; architects; designers; and costumes.
In this study of Ciardi's life, Edward Cifelli has captured all the deep concern, passion, and thoughtfulness that marked Ciardi's long career in American letters. With care and penetrating detail, Cifelli evokes Ciardi's early childhood in Boston, his Italian heritage, his service as a gunner on a B-29 during World War II, and his years teaching at Harvard and Rutgers. Illuminated here are Ciardi's widely read contributions as an editor of Saturday Review and World magazines, as well as his tireless effort to bring an awareness and love of language and poetry to America through radio, television, the lecture circuit, and his twenty-six years on the staff of the famous Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a gathering he directed for seventeen years.
[Steinbecks Typewriter: Essays on His Art] collects several of DeMotts finest essays on Steinbeck... [that are] so carefully revised as to warn other critics seeking their own collected essay volume of the difference between a genuinely lapidary compilation and a kitchen midden. Illustrated with some rare photos, this collection is especially notable... John Ditsky, Choice ...Steinbecks Typewriter... stands as the most in-depth treatment of Steinbecks aesthetics, particularly in its exploration of the authors interior spaces and creative habits, elements of Steinbecks artistry which have not only been underestimated but woefully ignored. Stephen George, Steinbeck Review
Reader's Guide Literature in English provides expert guidance to, and critical analysis of, the vast number of books available within the subject of English literature, from Anglo-Saxon times to the current American, British and Commonwealth scene. It is designed to help students, teachers and librarians choose the most appropriate books for research and study.
This book features biographies of 32 of the most notable figures in Latin American history. To the 23 individuals from the first edition, consisting mostly of revolutionary, political, and military figures of the past, are added nine new biographies of contemporary Latin American presidents, providing an updated view of the region's leadership. Several patterns run through the individual biographies. The concept of native identity is an important aspect in the stories of Malinche, Juarez, Sandino, and Zapata--profoundly affecting the politics of modern Brazil, Mexico, and Nicaragua. One also sees a continuing compulsion to rebel against overwhelming odds in the cases of Manuela Saenz, Che Guevara and Daniel Ortega.
At a time when the Humanities are under threat, this book offers a defense of poetry within the context of growing interest in mindfulness in business, health care, and education. The book argues that the benefits and insights mindfulness provides are also cultivated by the study of poetry. These benefits include a focus on the present, the ability to see through scripts and habits, a rethinking of subjectivity, and the development of ecological or systems thinking. Bryan Walpert employs close readings of traditional and experimental poetry and draws on scientific studies of the effects of mindfulness or reading literature on the brain. It argues the skills that poetry, like mindfulness, cultivates are useful beyond the page or classroom and ultimately are necessary to engage with such global issues as the environmental crisis.
This volume examines the development of film and the film industry during the 1970s and the political and economic background that influenced it.