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The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter During a life that spanned ninety years, Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) witnessed dramatic and intensely debated changes in the gender roles of American women. Mary Titus draws upon unpublished Porter papers, as well as newly available editions of her early fiction, poetry, and reviews, to trace Porter's shifting and complex response to those cultural changes. Titus shows how Porter explored her own ambivalence about gender and creativity, for she experienced firsthand a remarkable range of ideas concerning female sexuality. These included the Victorian attitudes of the grandmother who raised her; the sexual license of revolutionary Mexico, 1920s New York, and 1930s Paris; and the conservative, ordered attitudes of the Agrarians. Throughout Porter's long career, writes Titus, she "repeatedly probed cultural arguments about female creativity, a woman's maternal legacy, romantic love, and sexual identity, always with startling acuity, and often with painful ambivalence." Much of her writing, then, serves as a medium for what Titus terms Porter's "gender-thinking"--her sustained examination of the interrelated issues of art, gender, and identity. Porter, says Titus, rebelled against her upbringing yet never relinquished the belief that her work as an artist was somehow unnatural, a turn away from the essential identity of woman as "the repository of life," as childbearer. In her life Porter increasingly played a highly feminized public role as southern lady, but in her writing she continued to engage changing representations of female identity and sexuality. This is an important new study of the tensions and ambivalence inscribed in Porter's fiction, as well as the vocational anxiety and gender performance of her actual life.
The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America This final volume of Vernon Louis Parrington's Pultzer Prize-winning study deals with the decay of romantic optimism. It shows that the cause of decay is attributed to three sources: stratifying of economics under the pressure of centralization; the rise of mechanistic science; and the emergence of a spirit of skepticism which, with teachings of the sciences and lessons of intellectuals, has resulted in the questioning of democratic ideals. Parrington presents the movement of liberalism from 1913 to 1917, and the reaction to it following World War I. He notes that liberals announced that democratic hopes had not been fulfilled; the Constitution was not a democratic instrument nor was it intended to be; and while Americans had professed to create a democracy, they had in fact created a plutocracy. Industrialization of America under the leadership of the middle class and the rise of critical attitudes towards the ideals and handiwork of that class are examined in great detail. Parrington's interpretation of the literature during this time focuses on four divisions of development: the conquest of America by the middle class; the challenge of that overlordship by democratic agrarianism; the intellectual revolution brought about by science and the appropriation of science by the middle class; and the rise of detached criticism by younger intellectuals. A new introduction by Bruce Brown highlights Parrington's life and explains the importance of this volume. n great detail. Parrington's interpretation of the literature during this time focuses on four divisions of development: the conquest of America by the middle class; the challenge of that overlordship by democratic agrarianism; the intellectual revolution brought about by science and the appropriation of science by the middle class; and the rise of detached criticism by younger intellectuals. A new introduction by Bruce Brown highlights Parrington's life and explains the importance of this volume.
The Cambridge Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald Although F. Scott Fitzgerald remains one of the most recognizable literary figures of the twentieth century, his legendary life - including his tempestuous romance with his wife and muse Zelda - continues to overshadow his art. However glamorous his image as the poet laureate of the 1920s, he was first and foremost a great writer with a gift for fluid, elegant prose. This introduction reminds readers why Fitzgerald deserves his preeminent place in literary history. It discusses not only his best-known works, The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934), but the full scope of his output, including his other novels and his short stories. This book introduces new readers and students of Fitzgerald to his trademark themes, his memorable characters, his significant plots, the literary modes and genres from which he borrowed, and his inimitable style.
Critical Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald Known for his masterwork, ""The Great Gatsby"" and its criticism of American society during the 1920s, F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed the distinction of writing what many consider to be the ""great American novel."" ""Critical Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald"" studies the legacy of this writer, highlighting significant themes and historical references of his various works. This revised, reorganized, and fully updated revision of ""F. Scott Fitzgerald A to Z"" contains extensive updates, including new critical commentary on all Fitzgerald's major novels and short stories. This accessible volume is illustrated with first edition dust jackets, portraits of Fitzgerald throughout his life, and pictures of friends, relatives, and contemporaries. Coverage includes: a biography detailing Fitzgerald's life; detailed synopses of all Fitzgerald's major and many minor works; descriptions of major characters; discussions of important people in Fitzgerald's life, including family and friends; and helpful bibliographies and a chronology of Fitzgerald's life.
Critical Companion to Robert Frost Known for his favorite themes of New England and nature, Robert Frost may well be the most famous American poet of the 20th century. His classic works include the poems ""The Road Not Taken,"" ""Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,"" ""The Death of the Hired Man,"" and many more. ""Critical Companion to Robert Frost"" is an encyclopedic guide to the life and works of this great American poet. This accessible volume combines extensive critical analysis with in-depth information on Frost's life, providing a one-stop resource for students. Coverage includes: a concise but thorough biography of Frost; entries on every one of Frost's published poems, plays, and important works of prose; criticism and interpretations of Frost's work; entries on related people, places, themes, and topics; and appendixes, including bibliographies of primary and secondary sources and a chronology.
Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot Best known for his works The Waste Land, Four Quartets, and The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, T S Eliot is one of the most popular 20th-century poets studied in high school and college English classes. This work explores the life and works of this amazing Nobel Prize-winning writer, with analyses of Eliot's writing.
Critical Insights: Cather, Willa This volume explores why and how she is one of America's most treasured and most expansive writers. Original essays discuss Cather's cultural position and her use of radical new literary techniques. Other essays analyze the role of the protagonist in Cather's O Pioneers!, as well as a comparison of One of Ours to F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in light of the themes of the waste land and the Holy Grail.
Critical Insights: Eliot, T. S. This collection of essays on the work of T. S. Eliot contains a variety of materials for approaching the writings of one of the twentieth century's most influential writers: overviews of his career and his importance in the opening section; followed by a group of original essays focusing on relevant contexts and critical reception and illustrating interpretive choices; and the longest section, devoted to previously published essays by established scholars on Eliot's critical writing, his drama, and the whole range of his poetry from early to late in his career. A section of Resources rounds out the collection, including a chronology of Eliot's life, a list of his works, and a bibliography.
Critical Insights: Fitzgerald, F. Scott This volume in the Critical Insights series collects a variety of old and new essays on Fitzgerald and continues the work of rehabilitating his reputation and reexamining his work. Noble's introduction serves as a meditation on Fitzgerald's enduring relevance, pointing out how the major themes persisting across his work-wealth, success, love, youth, and tragedy-are also enduring themes within the American consciousness, and Elizabeth Gumport, writing for The Paris Review, offers a reflection on Fitzgerald's magical prose and his characters' magical thinking.
Critical Insights: Frost, Robert Following a brief biography of Robert Frost by James Norman O'Neill and a succinct critical comment by Elizabeth Gumport of The Paris Review, this volume, containing both newly commissioned pieces and reprinted essays and book chapters, brings together an unusually wide range of approaches to Frost's poetry. Though Frost has been famous and widely celebrated in the United States for nearly a century, his reputation has shifted dramatically since his first volumes appeared just before World War I. Acclaimed as a modernist by Ezra Pound when his first two books appeared in England, where he was then living, Frost became popular as a warm, accessible poet from the 1920s through the 1950s as four of his collections received the Pulitzer Prize. He was admired as homey and straightforward when modernist writing was often obscure; as a nature poet, an authentically American writer, when many modernists were cosmopolitan expatriates; and as an optimistic New England sage when his leading contemporaries produced dark
Critical Insights: Harlem Renaissance The Harlem Renaissance represented an explosion of African American literature, drama, music, and visual art in 1920s America, with such notable figures as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and many more leading the charge. This compilation of essays takes a closer look at this pivotal point in African American history, as well as its origins, identity, portrayal of women, and rediscovered authors.
Critical Insights: Hemingway, Ernest Ernest Hemingway's public persona and reputation, literary style, affinity with modern painting, and conception of character are among the subjects of these commentaries on the author's life and work. Following my general introduction, R. Baird Shuman introduces us to Hemingway's life. In her contribution for The Paris Review, Petrina Crockford speaks of his 'adventurous life as brash and uncompromising as that of his greatest characters.'
Critical Insights: Hughes, Langston Essays in this volume about African American writer Langston Hughes include a biographical sketch and four essays that survey the critical reception of his work and explore the cultural and historical contexts and key themes in Hughes's works. Other essays explore topics like Hughes' relations to the Harlem Renaissance, his portrayal of women and families, and his depictions of racial violence.
Critical Insights: Steinbeck, John Easily one of America's most important novelists, John Steinbeck has been a favorite among readers of all kinds for decades. A versatile, restless writer who constantly experimented with new forms and genres, he seems to offer something for everyone-whether rapturous descriptions of the California landscape, fierce denunciations of social injustices, simple morality tales, or just picaresque adventure stories.
Critical Insights: The Grapes of Wrath Edited and with an introduction by Keith Newlin, Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, this volume in the Critical Insights series brings together a variety of new, classic, and contemporary essays on this major American novel.
Critical Insights: William Faulkner Edited by Kathryn Stelmach Artuso, Assistant Professor of English at Westmont College, this volume in the Critical Insights series presents a variety of new essays on the canonized American novelist. For readers who are studying Faulkner for the first time, a biographical sketch relates the details of his life and four essays survey the critical reception of his work, explore its cultural and historical contexts, situate Faulkner among his contemporaries, and review key themes in his work. Readers seeking a deeper understanding of the writer can then move on to other original essays that explore a bevy of topics, such as the influence of James Joyce on Faulkner and his work, the author’s tradition of literary pessimism, and the celebrated author’s relationship to film and television. Among the contributors are Doreen Fowler, D. Matthew Ramsey, Jacques Pothier, and Bryan Giemza.
Ernest Hemingway in Context Explores a broad range of subjects relating to Hemingway’s life and career, including key literary, intellectual, social and historical contexts.
F. Scott Fitzgerald : New Perspectives Years after his death, F. Scott Fitzgerald continues to captivate both the popular and the critical imagination. This collection of essays presents fresh insights into his writing, discussing neglected texts and approaching familiar works from new perspectives. Seventeen scholarly articles deal not only with Fitzgerald's novels but with his stories and essays as well, considering such topics as the Roman Catholic background of The Beautiful and Damned and the influence of Mark Twain on Fitzgerald's work and self-conception. The volume also features four personal essays by Fitzgerald's friends Budd Schulberg, Frances Kroll Ring, publisher Charles Scribner III, and writer George Garrett that shed new light on his personal and professional lives. Together these contributions demonstrate the continued vitality of Fitzgerald's work and establish new directions for ongoing discussions of his life and writing.
Fifty Years of Hemingway Criticism A master of short story, novel, and nonfiction prose, Ernest Hemingway has been the subject of countless books, articles, and biographies. The Nobel-prize winning author and his work continue to interest academics, whose studies of his personal life are frequently intertwined with examinations of his writing. In Fifty Years of Hemingway Criticism, noted scholar Peter L. Hays has assembled a career-spanning collection of essays that explore the many facets of Hemingway--his life, his contemporaries, and his creative output. Although Hays has published on other writers, Hemingway has been his main research interest, and this selection constitutes five decades of criticism. Arranged by subject matter, these essays focus on the novels The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea, as well as the short stories "The Undefeated," "The Killers," "Soldier's Home," and "A Clean Well-Lighted Place." Other chapters explore Hemingway's relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald; teaching Hemingway in the classroom; and comparing Hemingway's work to writers such as Eugene O'Neill, Ford Madox Ford, and William Faulkner. When first published, some of these essays offered original views and insights that have since become standard interpretations, making them invaluable to readers. Easily accessible by both general readers and academic scholars, Fifty Years of Hemingway Criticism is an essential collection on one of America's greatest writers.
From Texas to the World and Back : Essays on the Journeys of Katherine Anne Porter Katherine Anne Porter's uneasy relationship with her home state has become increasingly important to discussions of her life and work. Born in the now-gone community of Indian Creek and raised in Kyle, Porter is tied to Texas by three major events that occurred during her career. In 1939 she expected to receive the Texas Institute of Letters Award for "Best Texas Book" only to be insulted when the award went to folklorist J. Frank Dobie. In the 1950s she accepted an invitation to lecture at the University of Texas at Austin. During her visit to present that lecture, Porter began to believe that UT would build a library and name it after her, Texas' most famous literary daughter. But somehow she and UT President Harry Ransom miscommunicated, and Porter left her materials to the McKeldin Library at the University of Maryland. Finally, in 1976 she returned to Texas to receive recognition from Howard Payne University in Brownwood. On that trip she visited her mother's grave in the little cemetery at Indian Creek and decided that her remains on her death belonged beside her mother. So Porter finally returned to the state she had fled early in her life. The essays in this collection are based primarily upon a symposium held in May 1998 at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos. The collection includes essays by both scholars of Porter's work and of Texas literature. Some concern specific aspects of her life, such as her love for her birthday or her marital record. Others focus on the main elements of her relationship with Texas, while still others deal with specific works, often relating them to her Texas heritage. This important addition to Porter studies provides new insight into the ways in which Porter's Texas heritage shaped her life and her fiction.
Research Guide to American Literature: American Modernism 1914-1945 Covers American literature during the time of war and Depression in the first half of the 20th century.
Roads Not Taken : Rereading Robert Frost In Roads Not Taken, Earl J. Wilcox and Jonathan N. Barron bring a new freshness and depth to the study of one of America's greatest poets. While some critics discounted Frost as a poet without technical skill, rhetorical complexity, or intellectual depth, over the past decade scholars have begun to view Robert Frost's work from many new perspectives. Critical hermeneutics, culture studies, feminism, postmodernism, and textual editing all have had their impact on readings of the poet's life and work. This collection of essays is the first to account for the variety of these new perceptions. Appealing to a wide literary community, and in keeping with Frost's own poetic goals, these twelve essays fall into four distinct categories: gender, biography and cultural studies, the intertext, and poetics and theory. All the contributors, many of whom have written books on Frost, are widely recognized scholars. Their diverse viewpoints and collective expertise make this volume of essays the most significant contribution to Frost criticism to be published in over twenty years.
The Shadowed Country : Claude Mckay and the Romance of the Victorians One of the most important voices of the Harlem Renaissance, Claude McKay is largely recognized for his work during the 1920s, which includes a major collection of poems, Harlem Shadows, as well as a critically acclaimed novel, Home to Harlem. But McKay was never completely comfortable with his literary reputation during this period. Throughout his world travels, he saw himself as an English lyricist. In this compelling examination of the life and works of this complex poet, novelist, journalist, and short story writer, Josh Gosciak sheds light on McKay's literary contributions beyond his interactions with Harlem Renaissance artists and writers. Working within English literary traditions, McKay crafted a verse out of hybridity and diaspora. Gosciak shows how he reinvigorated a modern pastoral through his encounters with some of the major aesthetic and political movements of the late Victorian and early modern periods. Exploring new archival material as well as many of McKay's lesser known poetic works, TheShadowed Country provides a unique interpretation of the writings of this major author.
The Sound and the Fury The collection features an array of readings that range from philosophical approaches to the perspectives offered by the emerging and contested field of fat studies. The essays investigate such topics as the environment, war, and industrialism in The Sound and the Fury while offering fascinating explorations of time, the instability of meaning, and secrets of miscegenation.
Student Companion to Ernest Hemingway The fully-lived, yet tragically ended life of Ernest Hemingway has attracted nearly as much attention as his extensive canon of writings. This critical study introduces students to both the man and his fiction, exploring how Hemingway confronted in his own life the same moral issues that would later create thematic conflicts for the characters in his novels. In addition to the biographical chapter which focuses on the pivotal events in Hemingway's personal life, a literary heritage chapter overviews his professional developments, relating his distinctive style to his early years as a journalist. With clear concise analysis, students are guided through all of Hemingway's major works including The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and The Old Man and the Sea (1952). Full chapters are also devoted to examining his collections of short fiction, the African Stories, and the posthumous works. Each chapter carefully examines the major literary components of Hemingway's fiction with plot synopsis, analysis of character development, themes, settings, historical context, and stylistic features. Alternate critical readings are also given for each of the full length works. An extensive bibliography citing all of Hemingway's writings as well as biographical sources, general criticism, and contemporary reviews will help students understand the scope of Hemingway's contributions to American Literature.
Student Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald The dazzling, romantic fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald manages to captivate each new generation of readers. This critical introduction, written specifically for students, offers insightful yet accessible literary criticism for five novels: ^UThis Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, and ^UThe Last Tycoon. A full chapter is devoted to examining each of these works, with an indepth discussion of character development, thematic concerns and plot structure. The introduction to each novel traces its genesis and the critical reception it received at the time it was written. The historical context sections examine the ways visionary works like ^UThe Great Gatsby offer both a chronicle and a critique of the attitudes, dreams, and illusions of American society during the period between the First and Second World Wars. Students will also get a vivid sense of how life and art converged in the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the man who christened the Jazz Age. This introductory study features a biographical chapter that relates Fitzgerald's life to his work and a chapter that places his fiction within its historical and literary contexts. Five chapters analyze not only the basic literary components of plot, character, and theme, but also provide an alternate critical interpretation of each novel that enriches reader's understanding of the work's complexity and vision. A complete bibliography of Fitzgerald's works and a selected bibliography of critical and biographical sources complete this volume.
Student Companion to Zora Neale Hurston Zora Neale Hurston is considered one of the most controversial yet prominent figures associated with the Harlem Renaissance. This introductory study examines Hurston's contributions to that literary movement, as well as her role as mediator between the black and white worlds in which she lived. Readers will appeciate the clear presentation of the biographical facts of her life, as well as an overview of the issues and varying perceptions surrounding her literary achievements. A full chapter is devoted to analysing each of Hurston's major works of fiction: Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), Seraph on the Suwanee (1948) as well as her short fiction and her fictionalized autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). For each of the works, plot, character development, themes, setting and symbols are identified and discussed in clear accessible language. An alternate critical perspective enhances the understanding of each of Hurston's full length works. Contemporary reviews are cited in a bibliography which also helps students find further biographical and critical information on Zora Neale Hurston.
Virginia Woolf and 20th Century Women Writers This volume examines a diverse set of texts published by notable women in the mid-20th century. From Maya Angelou and Margaret Atwood to Willa Cather and Kate Chopin, essays survey the critical conversation regarding these works, explore their historical, societal and cultural contexts, and offer close and comparative readings of key texts in the genre through a variety of critical approaches.
Willa Cather and Aestheticism In this collection of essays, contributors investigate the various connections between Willa Cather's fiction and her aesthetic beliefs and practices. Including multiple perspectives and critical approaches--derived from the Aesthetic Movement, the visual arts, modernism, and the relationship between art and religion--this collection will increase our understanding of Cather's aesthetic and lead to a better comprehension of her work and her life.
Willa Cather and Others After many years as one of the premier scholars of English Renaissance literature, Jonathan Goldberg turns his attention to the work of American novelist Willa Cather. With a focus on Cather's artistic principle of "the thing not named," Willa Cather and Others illuminates the contradictions and complexities inherent in notions of identity and shows how her fiction transforms the very categories--regarding gender, sexuality, race, and class--around which most recent Cather scholarship has focused. The "others" referred to in the title are women, for the most part Cather's contemporaries, whose artistic projects allow for points of comparison with Cather. They include the Wagnerian diva Olive Fremstad, renowned for her category-defying voice; Blair Niles, an ethnographer and novelist of jazz-age Harlem and the prisons of New Guinea; Laura Gilpin, photographer of the American Southwest; and Pat Barker, whose Regeneration trilogy places World War I writers--and questions of sexuality and gender--at its center. In the process of studying these women and their work, Goldberg forms innovative new insights into a wide range of Cather's celebrated works, from O Pioneers! and My Ántonia to her later books The Song of the Lark, One of Ours, The Professor's House, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Sapphira and the Slave Girl. By applying his unique talent to the study of Cather's literary genius, Jonathan Goldberg makes a significant and new contribution to the study of American literature and queer studies.
William Faulkner : Lives and Legacies In this newest volume in Oxford's Lives and Legacies series, Carolyn Porter, a leading authority on William Faulkner, offers an insightful account of Faulkner's life and work, with special focus on the breathtaking twelve-year period when he wrote some of the finest novels in Americanliterature. Porter ranges from Faulkner's childhood in Mississippi to his abortive career as a poet, his sojourn in New Orleans (where he met a sympathetic Sherwood Anderson and wrote his first novel Soldier's Pay), his short but strategically important stay in Paris, his "rescue" by Malcolm Crowley inthe late 1940s, and his winning of the Nobel Prize. But the heart of the book illuminates the formal leap in Faulkner's creative vision beginning with The Sound and the Fury in 1929, which sold poorly but signaled the arrival of a major new literary talent. Indeed, from 1929 through 1942, he wouldproduce, against formidable odds--physical, spiritual, and financial--some of the greatest fictional works of the twentieth century, including As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses. Porter shows how, during this remarkably sustained burst of creativity,Faulkner pursued an often feverish process of increasingly ambitious narrative experimentation, coupled with an equally ambitious thematic expansion, as he moved from a close-up study of the white nuclear family, both lower and upper class, to an epic vision of southern, American, and ultimatelyWestern culture. Porter illuminates the importance of Faulkner's legacy not only for American literature, but also for world literature, and reveals how Faulkner lives on so powerfully, both in the works of his literary heirs and in the lives of readers today.

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Amy Lowell, American Modern For decades, the work of one of America's most influential poets, 1925 Pulitzer Prize-winner Amy Lowell (1874-1925), has been largely overlooked. This vigorous, courageous poet gave voice to an erotic, thoroughly American sensibility. Cigar-smoker, Boston Brahmin, lesbian, impresario, entrepreneur, and prolific poet, Lowell heralded the rush of an American poetic flowering. A best-selling poet as well as a wildly popular lecturer (autograph-seeking fans were sometimes so boisterous that she required a police escort), she was a respected authority on modern poetry, forging the path that led to the works of Allen Ginsberg, May Sarton, Sylvia Plath, and beyond. Yet, since her death, her work has suffered critical neglect. This volume presents an essential revaluation of Lowell, and builds a solid critical basis for evaluating her poetry, criticism, politics, and influence. Essays explore the varied contributions of Lowell as a woman poet, a modernist, and a significant force of the literary debates of early twentieth-century poetics. In addition to placing Lowell in her proper historical context, contributors demonstrate her centrality to current critical and theoretical discussions: feminist, gay and lesbian, and postcolonial, in as well as in disability, American, and cultural studies. The book includes a transatlantic group of literary critics and scholars. Amy Lowell, American Modern offers the most sustained examination of Lowell to date. It returns her to conversation and to literary history where she belongs.  
Bloom's How to Write About F. Scott Fitzgerald Known for his masterwork ""The Great Gatsby"", a searing criticism of American society during the 1920s, F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed the distinction of creating what many readers and scholars consider to be the ""great American novel."" ""Bloom's How to Write about F. Scott Fitzgerald"" offers valuable paper-topic suggestions, clearly outlined strategies on how to write a strong essay, and an insightful introduction by Harold Bloom on writing about Fitzgerald. This new volume is designed to help students develop their analytical writing skills and critical comprehension of this modern master and his major works.
The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane The Broken Tower reads with all the drama of a psychological novel and the inexorable force of a Greek tragedy. Hart Crane made a meteoric rise in the late 1920s and then as suddenly burnt out, killing himself at the age of 32, and thus turned his life and poetry into the stuff of myth. A mid-Westerner, Crane came to New York to play a central part in the contemporary avant-garde literary world and also became part of the New York gay scene.
The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O'Neill This is a volume of specially commissioned essays containing studies of Eugene O'Neill's life, his intellectual and creative forebears, and his relation to the theatrical world of his creative period, 1916-42. Also included are descriptions of the O'Neill canon and its production history on stage and screen, and a series of essays on 'special topics' related to the playwright, such as his treatment of women in the plays, his portrayals of Irish and African Americans, and his attempts to deal in dramatic terms with his parental family culminating in his greatest play, Long Day's Journey Into Night. One of the essays speaks for those who are critical of O'Neill's work, and the volume concludes with an essay on O'Neill criticism containing a select bibliography of full-length studies of the playwright's work.
The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway This Companion serves both as an introduction for the interested reader and as a source of the best recent scholarship on the author and his works. In addition to analysing his major texts, the contributors provide insights into Hemingway's relationship with gender history, journalism, fame and the political climate of the 1930s. The essays are framed by an introductory chapter on Hemingway and the costs of fame and an invaluable conclusion providing an overview of Hemingway scholarship from its beginnings to the present. Students will find the selected bibliography a useful guide to future research. Contributors include both distinguished established figures and brilliant newcomers, all chosen with regard to the clarity and readability of their prose.
The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost This collection of specially-commissioned essays by experts in the field explores key dimensions of Robert Frost's poetry and life. Frost remains one of the most memorable and beguiling of modern poets. Writing in the tradition of Virgil, Milton, and Wordsworth, he transformed pastoral and georgic poetry both in subject matter and form. Mastering the rhythms of ordinary speech, Frost made country life the point from which to view the world and the complexities of human psychology. The essays in this volume enable readers to explore Frost's art and thought, from the controversies of his biography to his subtle reinvention of poetic and metric traditions and the conflicts in his thought about politics, gender, science and religion. This volume will bring fresh perspectives to the lyric, narrative and dramatic poetry of an American master, and its chronology and guide to further reading will prove valuable to scholars and students alike.
The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather offers thirteen original essays by leading scholars of a major American modernist novelist. Willa Cather's luminous prose is 'easy' to read yet surprisingly difficult to understand. The essays collected here are theoretically informed but accessibly written and cover the full range of Cather's career, including most of her twelve novels and several of her short stories. The essays situate Cather's work in a broad range of critical, cultural, and literary contexts, and the introduction explores current trends in Cather scholarship as well as the author's place in contemporary culture. With a detailed chronology and a guide to further reading, the volume offers students and teachers a fresh and thorough sense of the author of My ntonia, The Professor's House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop.
The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner This collection of essays explores Faulkner's widespread cultural import. Drawing on a wide range of cultural theory and written in accessible English, ten major Faulkner scholars examine the enduring whole of Faulkner's oeuvre. Bringing into focus the broader cultural context which lent its resonance to his work, the collection will be particularly useful for the student seeking critical introduction to Faulkner, while also serving the dedicated scholar interested in recent trends in Faulkner criticism. Together these essays map Faulkner's contemporary meaning by exploring his relation to modernism and postmodernism, to twentieth-century mass culture, to European and Latin American fiction, to issues of gender difference, and, above all, to the conflicted scene of United States race relations. Neither assuming in advance his literary 'greatness' nor insisting that his canonical status be revoked, they instead pose the question: what is at stake today in reading Faulkner?
Carson McCullers: A Life The first major biography in more than twenty years of one of America's greatest writers, based on newly available letters and journals V. S. Pritchett called her "a genius." Gore Vidal described her as a "beloved novelist of singular brilliance . . . Of all the Southern writers, she is the most apt to endure . . ." And Tennessee Williams said, "The only real writer the South ever turned out, was Carson." She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia. Her dream was to become a concert pianist, though she'd been writing since she was sixteen and the influence of music was evident throughout her work. As a child, she said she'd been "born a man." At twenty, she married Reeves McCullers, a fellow southerner, ex-soldier, and aspiring writer ("He was the best-looking man I had ever seen"). They had a fraught, tumultuous marriage lasting twelve years and ending with his suicide in 1953. Reeves was devoted to her and to her writing, and he envied her talent; she yearned for attention, mostly from women who admired her but rebuffed her sexually. Her first novel--The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter--was published in 1940, when she was twenty-three, and overnight, Carson McCullers became the most widely talked about writer of the time. While McCullers's literary stature continues to endure, her private life has remained enigmatic and largely unexamined. Now, with unprecedented access to the cache of materials that has surfaced in the past decade, Mary Dearborn gives us the first full picture of this brilliant, complex artist who was decades ahead of her time, a writer who understood--and captured--the heart and longing of the outcast.
Critical Companion to Robert Frost: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work Known for his favorite themes of New England and nature, Robert Frost may well be the most famous American poet of the 20th century. His classic works include the poems ""The Road Not Taken,"" ""Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,"" ""The Death of the Hired Man,"" and many more. ""Critical Companion to Robert Frost"" is an encyclopedic guide to the life and works of this great American poet. This accessible volume combines extensive critical analysis with in-depth information on Frost's life, providing a one-stop resource for students. Coverage includes: a concise but thorough biography of Frost; entries on every one of Frost's published poems, plays, and important works of prose; criticism and interpretations of Frost's work; entries on related people, places, themes, and topics; and appendixes, including bibliographies of primary and secondary sources and a chronology.
Critical Essays on Katherine Anne Porter The full range of literary traditions comes to life in the Twayne Critical Essays Series. Volume editors have carefully selected critical essays that represent the full spectrum of controversies, trends and methodologies relating to each author's work. Essays include writings from the author's native country and abroad, with interpretations from the time they were writing, through the present day.Each volume includes: -- An introduction providing the reader with a lucid overview of criticism from its beginnings -- illuminating controversies, evaluating approaches and sorting out the schools of thought-- The most influential reviews and the best reprinted scholarly essays-- A section devoted exclusively to reviews and reactions by the subject's contemporaries-- Original essays, new translations and revisions commissioned especially for the series-- Previously unpublished materials such as interviews, lost letters and manuscript fragments-- A bibliography of the subject's writings and interviews-- A name and subject index
Ernest Hemingway A to Z : The Essential Reference to the Life and Work A guide to the author's life offers synopses of his writings, explores the major and minor characters of his work, and discusses the important people in his life.
Eugene O'Neill's America: Desire Under Democracy In the face of seemingly relentless American optimism, Eugene O’Neill's plays reveal an America many would like to ignore, a place of seething resentments, aching desires, and family tragedy, where failure and disappointment are the norm and the American dream a chimera.
Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts A major new biography of the Nobel Prize-winning playwright whose brilliantly original plays revolutionized American theater   Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize This extraordinary new biography fully captures the intimacies of Eugene O'Neill's tumultuous life and the profound impact of his work on American drama.
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby By assembling a wide-ranging collection of extracts from essays, reviews and articles, the study guides in this series provide students with ready access to the most important secondary writings of one or more texts by a given writer.
Fitzgerald, Hemingway and the Twenties "Both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway came into their own in the 1920s and did some of their best writing during that decade. In a series of interrelated essays, Ronald Berman considers an array of novels and short stories by both authors within the context of the decade's popular culture, philosophy, and intellectual history. As Berman shows, the thought of Fitzgerald and Hemingway went considerably past the limits of such labels as the Jazz Age or the Lost Generation."
Literary Sisters : Dorothy West and Her Circle : A Biography of the Harlem Renaissance Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West led a charmed life in many respects. Born into a distinguished Boston family, she appeared in Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, then lived in the Soviet Union with a group that included Langston Hughes, to whom she proposed marriage. She later became friends with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who encouraged her to finish her second novel, The Wedding, which became the octogenarian author's first bestseller. Literary Sisters reveals a different side of West's personal and professional lives--her struggles for recognition outside of the traditional literary establishment, and her collaborations with talented African American women writers, artists, and performers who faced these same problems. West and her "literary sisters"--women like Zora Neale Hurston and West's cousin, poet Helene Johnson--created an emotional support network that also aided in promoting, publishing, and performing their respective works. Integrating rare photos, letters, and archival materials from West's life, Literary Sisters is not only a groundbreaking biography of an increasingly important author but also a vivid portrait of a pivotal moment for African American women in the arts.
One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner Jay Parini, the author of highly praised biographies of Robert Frost and John Steinbeck, has now written an engaging biography of one of the most significant American writers of the twentieth century. One Matchless Time is a sympathetic, sweeping evocation of William Faulkner's life and work. From his birth in 1897 in Mississippi to his death sixty-five years later, Faulkner spent almost his entire life on this one small patch of land, the "significant soil" from which all his fiction grew. Jay Parini paints an intimate picture of Faulkner's Mississippi world and shows how the artist transformed this raw material into Yoknapatawpha County, a place of pure imagination. Between 1928 and 1942, during what Faulkner called his "one matchless time," a period of wild inspiration when characters and stories came to him mysteriously and in abundance, he published more than half a dozen masterpieces, including the novels The Sound and the Fury; As I Lay Dying; Sanctuary; Light in August; Absalom, Absalom!; The Wild Palms; Go Down, Moses; and The Hamlet. This is an astonishing achievement without equal in American literature. Parini, who has taught Faulkner's work to students for nearly thirty years, vividly brings to life this writer's complex fictional world in the context of his life, using the one to illuminate the other. He uses letters and memoirs unavailable to earlier biographers as well as interviews he had with Faulkner's daughter and several of his lovers. His William Faulkner is an immensely gifted, obsessive artist plagued by alcoholism and a bad marriage, but someone who rose above his limitations to become a figure of major importance on the stage of world literature. One Matchless Time is a magnificent biography, profound, thought-provoking, meticulously researched, elegantly composed, and a tribute to the genius of its subject.
Robert Frost: A Life This fascinating reassessment of America's most popular and famous poet reveals a more complex and enigmatic man than many readers might expect. Jay Parini spent over twenty years interviewing friends of Frost and working in the poet's archives at Dartmouth, Amherst, and elsewhere to produce this definitive and insightful portrait of both the public and private man. While he depicts the various stages of Frost's colorful life, Parini also sensitively explores the poet's psyche, showing how he dealt with adversity, family tragedy, and depression. By taking the reader into the poetry itself, which he reads closely and brilliantly, Parini offers an insightful road map to Frost's remarkable world.
Thomas Wolfe Symbolic patterns in You can't go home again / Clyde C. Clements, Jr. -- The hills beyond / Leslie Field -- The escapes of time and memory / Morris Beja -- Wolfe's fiction / Richard S. Kennedy -- The web and the rock / Leo Gurko -- The web of the south / C. Hugh Holman -- Structure, theme, and metaphor in Look homeward, angel / John Hagan -- Of time and the river / John Hagan.
Thomas Wolfe: When Do the Atrocities Begin? In 1937, after years of living alone in New York City, a manic-depressive Thomas Wolfe returned to his family and his native Asheville, North Carolina, a city he had both ridiculed and brought notoriety to through his novel, Look Homeward, Angel, eight years earlier. Concerned about lingering resentment from the community over the literary work and his tenuous relationship with his family members, Wolfe returned to his hometown with caution, but also with the need to both rejuvenate and compile material for his next novel. It is this visit that sparks Wolfe's trademark conclusion, You can't go home again. During 1937 and 1938, Thomas Wolfe experienced extreme highs and lows as he labored furiously to produce his next work. Joanne Marshall Mauldin provides an in-depth look at those final two years in the life of the brilliant, yet troubled writer in Thomas Wolfe: When Do the Atrocities Begin? By adding new information and insight, Mauldin challenges much of the existing biographical material on the writer and offers a fresh view on the final years of his life. Through the utilization of primary and secondary sources including letters, interviews, recordings, and newspaper clippings, Mauldin offers a candid account of the life of Thomas Wolfe from the time of his visit to North Carolina in 1937 until his untimely death in 1938. Mauldin chronicles details of Wolfe's shocking change in publishers and his complex relationships with his editors, family, friends, and his mistress. This examination goes beyond Wolfe's life and extends into the period after his death, revealing details about the reaction of family and friends to the passing of this literary legend, as well as the cavalier publishing practices of his posthumous editors. Mauldin's narrative is unique from other biographical accounts of Thomas Wolfe in that it focuses solely on the final years in the life of the author. Her unbiased approach enables the reader to draw his or her own conclusions about Wolfe and his actions and state of mind during these last two years of his life."
Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice This is the first in-depth biography of Willa Cather in thirty years, and the first ever that fully integrates her life and work. The author of such classics as Death Comes to the Archbishop and O Pioneers! was a complex, passionate and gifted woman trying to forge a new kind of identity for herself as a woman and artist before there were adequate models for this kind of self.
William Faulkner : The Making of a Modernist Amid all that has been published about William Faulkner, one subject--the nature of his thought--remains largely unexplored. But, as Daniel Singal's new intellectual biography reveals, we can learn much about Faulkner's art by relating it to the cultural and intellectual discourse of his era, and much about that era by coming to terms with his art. Through detailed analyses of individual texts, from the earliest poetry through Go Down, Moses, Singal traces Faulkner's attempt to liberate himself from the repressive Victorian culture in which he was raised by embracing the Modernist culture of the artistic avant-garde. To accommodate the conflicting demands of these two cultures, Singal shows, Faulkner created a complex and fluid structure of selfhood based on a set of dual identities--one, that of a Modernist author writing on the most daring and subversive issues of his day, and the other, that of a southern country gentleman loyal to the conservative mores of his community. Indeed, it is in the clash between these two selves, Singal argues, that one finds the key to making sense of Faulkner.
William Faulkner and Southern History One of America's great novelists, William Faulkner was a writer deeply rooted in the American South. In works such as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner drew powerfully on Southern themes, attitudes, and atmosphere to create his own worldand place--the mythical Yoknapatawpha County--peopled with quintessential Southerners such as the Compsons, Sartorises, Snopes, and McCaslins.