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Southern Odyssey contains the best of Sherwood Anderson's writings about the region where he spent the last sixteen years of his life. In more than forty selections of journalism and fiction, Anderson explores the people and problems of the South. The pieces collected here present Anderson's perceptive vision of the South, combining his love for the region with the fresh observations of an outsider. His work reflects a range of issues that engaged all southerners at a crucial time in their history--the Great Depression, the influence of the New Deal, the painful transition from agriculture to mechanization, the struggle of labor to unionize, and the elemental divisions of race--always with an eye toward the human side of things. Anderson's impressions and convictions concerning his southern experience encompassed more than its troubles, however. He also wrote of the splendor of a Shenandoah spring and the strength of character of the native people. Southern Odyssey is more than a personal record--it is a gallery of southern portraits, drawn in the style that distinguishes Anderson's prose at its best.
Sherwood Anderson, remembered chiefly as a writer of short stories about life in the Midwest at the turn of the century, was acknowledged as an innovator of the short story form. This book looks at Anderson's early fiction from contemporary interpretative methodologies, particularly from poststructuralist approaches.
First published in 2002. This book explores the philosophical, social, and aesthetic implications of twentieth-century America's obsession with eliminating waste. Through interdisciplinary engagement with fiction and popular culture, William Little traces the way this obsession finds expression in powerful social forces (e.g., the drive to consume conspicuously; the Progressive-era campaign to manage scientifically; the current demand to "reduce, reuse, recycle"), and shows how such forces are governed by an idealism that links proper treatment of waste with the promise of salvation.
This book discusses the American short story composite, or short story cycle, a neglected form of writing consisting of autonomous stories interlocking into a whole. The critical work done on this genre has so far focused on the closural strategies of the composites, on how unity is accomplished in these texts. This study takes into consideration, to a greater degree than earlier criticism, the short story composite as an open work, emphasizing the tension between the independent stories and the unified work, between the discontinuity and fragmentation, on the one hand, and the totalizing strategies, on the other. The discussion of the genre is illustrated with references to numerous American short story composites.
An American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter and film director, Norman Mailer won the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. Along with Joan Didion, Truman Capote, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer was a practitioner of New Journalism, a genre which encompassed the essay and other nonfiction writing.
This study examines masculinity and individualism in four American novels of the 1920s and 1930s usually regarded as belonging to the genre of hard-boiled fiction. The novels under study are Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? by Horace McCoy, and To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway. In this first full-length study of gender in hard-boiled fiction the genre is discussed as a representation of the ideologies of masculinity and individualism. Hard-boiled fiction is located in its historical and cultural context and it is argued that the genre, with its explicit emphasis on masculinity and masculine virtues, attempts to reaffirm a masculine order. The study argues that this emphasis is a counter-reaction to more general changes in the gender relations of the period. Indeed, hard-boiled fiction is argued to be an attempt to reconstruct a masculine identity based on anti-modern values generally accepted in the cultural context of the genre.
This book approaches contemporary fiction as a medium for policy advocacy, one whose narrative devices both link it to, and distinguish it from, other forms of public discourse. Using the framework of political agenda setting, David A. Rochefort analyzes the rhetorical function of problem definition played by literary works when they document and characterize social issues while sounding the call for systemic reform. Focusing on a group of noteworthy realist novels by American authors over the past twenty years, this study maintains that fictional narrative is a potentially influential instrument of "empathic policy argument." The book closes by examining the agenda-setting dynamics through which a social problem novel can contribute to the process of policy change.
"Hapke's book, remarkable in scope and inclusiveness, offers those concerned with American working people a mine of information about and analysis of the 'rich lived history of American laborers' as that has been represented in fictions of every kind. She provides an invaluable foundation for understanding the dirtiest of America's dirty big secrets: the pervasivness of class differences, class discrimination, indeed of class conflict in this, the wealthiest nation in history. Hers is an indispensable guided tour through more than a century and a half of literary representations of 'hands' at their looms, pikets on the line, agitators on their soapboxes, ordinary working women, men, and chil...