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The world of Saul Bellow is peopled largely by men, often intellectuals, who manifest Bellow's unique conception of American masculinity. In this timely analysis of the Bellow oeuvre from a feminist perspective, Gloria Cronin offers a stunning and insightful critique of the Nobel Prizewinning novelist. Drawing on her comprehensive knowledge of Western thought and Western philosophical tradition, Cronin also incorporates the brilliant insights of French feminist theory on Western male philosophers into her critique. Cronin's mastery of these intellectual traditions informs her fruitful examination of Bellow's explicit dialogue, rich consideration of his "misogyny," and the many masculinities ...
"A writer who simply panders to the public is seldom taken for an artist. An artist who cannot publish is seldom granted a career. This dilemma, the subject of Muse in the Machine, has been home to many authors of serious fiction since the eighteenth century. But it is especially pointed for American writers, since the United States never fostered a sustainable elite culture readership. Its writers have always been reliant on mass publicity's machinery to survive; and when they depict that machinery, they also depict that reliance and the desire to transcend its banal formulas. This book looks at artist tales from Henry James to don DeLillo's Mao II, but also engages more indirect expression...
For nearly a century of being underestimated as a literary genre, the short story is currently experiencing a revival. The editors of this collection of articles have brought together the contributions of nine outstanding scholars in the field of the short story to reveal some of the many directions in which the genre is expanding. This book is a reasoned and well-documented anthology which casts light on new aspects of the short story. It participates in the current trend of short story criticism, characterized by the gathering in one single volume of a diversity of approaches with the main aim of promoting discussion on this thriving area of literary studies. The editors of this volume believe that a fruitful tension may rise by putting side by side insights into a not so well known tradition, on the one hand, and fresh considerations on unexpected developments of the short story, on the other. All in all, the short story emerges as a dynamic and flexible form that reacts and adapts itself better than any other literary genre to the challenges of the sceptical times we live in.
Why do writers so often write about writers? This book offers the first comprehensive account of the phenomenon of the fictional novelist as a character in literature, arguing that our notions of literary genius – and what it means to be an author – are implicitly shaped by and explicitly challenged in novels about novelists, a genre that has been critically underexamined. Employing both close and distant reading techniques to analyse a large corpus of author-stories, The Novelist in the Novel explores the forms and functions of author-stories and the characters within them, offering a new theory that frames these works as textual sites at which questions of literary value and the cultur...
In this groundbreaking work, Linda A. Westervelt defines an important yet previously unidentified and therefore unnamed type of novel, the altersroman, or age novel. Fictions focusing on a protagonist's confrontation with mortality toward the end of middle age are likely to become ever more prominent in a Western world in which the average age of the population increases and more people reach late middle age and old age. Working from a diverse sample of modern literature, Westervelt analyzes the variety of responses to the life evaluation. Some characters achieve a level of affirmation that allows renewal, redirection, or simply peace, while others confront feelings of disgust or despair tha...
Examines the life and writings of Henry James including detailed synopses of his works, explanations of literary terms, biographies of friends and family, and social and historical influences.