Nobel Writers on Writing

Nobel Writers on Writing PDF Author: Ottar G. Draugsvold
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 9780786406296
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
When in 1901 Alfred Nobel bequeathed to the world the funds to support the Nobel Prize, one of his few directives for the category of literature was that the artists selected be of "idealistic tendency." Since its inception, the prize has given a very public voice to some of the world's greatest writers, and their responses to the honor-their acceptance speeches-have themselves often been epochal within each author's body of literature. From the famed call to "arms" by William Faulkner to the multicultural song of Derek Walcott, from 1903's Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson to 1999's Günter Grass, this collection traces the ideals of the artists and the selection committee itself throughout the entirety of the 20th century. "Interestingly," writes Draugsvold, "none [of the writers] discuss the more technical aspects of their craft." Equally striking is the strength of the common thread of idealism found in these addresses-a firm belief in humankind and the power of art, in its role in "the service of truth and the service of liberty" as Albert Camus said in 1957. "I decline to accept the end of man" wrote the Old Man, William Faulkner. The speeches presented here were chosen not by subjective but rather by substantive criteria, with biographical presentations and brief statements of gratitude omitted. Included are an introduction to each of the 28 writers chosen, an excerpted copy of the speech or lecture and a bibliography of works in English. The work concludes with a complete list of prize winners in literature and a bibliography of sources cited in the writer's introductions.

Nobel Writers on Writing

Nobel Writers on Writing PDF Author: Ottar G. Draugsvold
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 9780786406296
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
When in 1901 Alfred Nobel bequeathed to the world the funds to support the Nobel Prize, one of his few directives for the category of literature was that the artists selected be of "idealistic tendency." Since its inception, the prize has given a very public voice to some of the world's greatest writers, and their responses to the honor-their acceptance speeches-have themselves often been epochal within each author's body of literature. From the famed call to "arms" by William Faulkner to the multicultural song of Derek Walcott, from 1903's Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson to 1999's Günter Grass, this collection traces the ideals of the artists and the selection committee itself throughout the entirety of the 20th century. "Interestingly," writes Draugsvold, "none [of the writers] discuss the more technical aspects of their craft." Equally striking is the strength of the common thread of idealism found in these addresses-a firm belief in humankind and the power of art, in its role in "the service of truth and the service of liberty" as Albert Camus said in 1957. "I decline to accept the end of man" wrote the Old Man, William Faulkner. The speeches presented here were chosen not by subjective but rather by substantive criteria, with biographical presentations and brief statements of gratitude omitted. Included are an introduction to each of the 28 writers chosen, an excerpted copy of the speech or lecture and a bibliography of works in English. The work concludes with a complete list of prize winners in literature and a bibliography of sources cited in the writer's introductions.

Pearl S. Buck’s Novels of China and America

Pearl S. Buck’s Novels of China and America PDF Author: Rob Hardy
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811635560
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
This book, the first single-authored book-length study of Buck’s fiction for over twenty years, shows how Buck’s thought developed through the medium of her fiction - from her early turbulent years in China to her last lonely days in the United States, with chapters examining her loss of faith in Christianity, her reflections on Chinese life during and after the breakdown of Old China, her voluminous reading, her confrontation with the horrors of American racism and sexism after her return to the United States, and her final metaphorical search for home as she approached death. The book argues that Buck, the first American woman to win both the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes for literature, was a heroic forerunner of those who, while occupying a place in the world, never feel fully at home there; in Buck’s case because her Chinese identity throughout her life struggled with her American. For this reason Pearl S. Buck’s fiction deserves to be considered alongside that of writers such as Anchee Min, Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan. The book’s central claim is that Buck is a major novelist, capable of speaking to the distress of our times, richly deserving the honor she has received in China, and deserving greater recognition in the United States.

Middlebrow Mission: Pearl S. Buck's American China

Middlebrow Mission: Pearl S. Buck's American China PDF Author: Vanessa Künnemann
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839431085
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Nobel Prize winner Pearl S. Buck's engagement with (neo-)missionary cultures in the United States and China was unique. Against the backdrop of her missionary upbringing, Buck developed a fictional project which both revised and reaffirmed American foreign missionary activity in the Pacific Rim during the 20th century. Vanessa Künnemann accurately traces this project from America's number one expert on China - as Buck came to be known - from a variety of disciplinary angles, placing her work squarely in Middlebrow Studies and New American Studies.

The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature

The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature PDF Author: Jay Parini
Publisher:
ISBN: 0195156536
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 2273

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Book Description
This set treats the whole of American literature, from the European discovery of America to the present, with entries in alphabetical order. Each of the 350 substantive essays is a major interpretive contribution. Well-known critics and scholars provide clear and vividly written essays thatreflect the latest scholarship on a given topic, as well as original thinking on the part of the critic. The Encyclopedia is available in print and as an e-reference text from Oxford's Digital Reference Shelf.At the core of the encyclopedia lie 250 essays on poets, playwrights, essayists, and novelists. The most prominent figures (such as Whitman, Melville, Faulkner, Frost, Morrison, and so forth) are treated at considerable length (10,000 words) by top-flight critics. Less well known figures arediscussed in essays ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words. Each essay examines the life of the author in the context of his or her times, looking in detail at key works and describing the arc of the writer's career. These essays include an assessment of the writer's current reputation with abibliography of major works by the writer as well as a list of major critical and biographical works about the writer under discussion.A second key element of the project is the critical assessments of major American masterworks, such as Moby-Dick, Song of Myself, Walden, The Great Gatsby, The Waste Land, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Death of a Salesmanr, or Beloved. Each of these essays offers a close reading of the given work,placing that work in its historical context and offering a range of possibilities with regard to critical approach. These fifty essays (ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words) are simply and clearly enough written that an intelligent high school student should easily understand them, but sophisticatedenough that a college student or general reader in a public library will find the essays both informative and stimulating.The final major element of this encyclopedia consists of fifty-odd essays on literary movements, periods, or themes, pulling together a broad range of information and making interesting connections. These essays treat many of the same authors already discussed, but in a different context; they alsogather into the fold authors who do not have an entire essay on their work (so that Zane Grey, for example, is discussed in an essay on Western literature but does not have an essay to himself). In this way, the project is truly "encyclopedic," in the conventional sense. These essays aim forcomprehensiveness without losing anything of the narrative force that makes them good reading in their own right.In a very real fashion, the literature of the American people reflects their deepest desires, aspirations, fears, and fantasies. The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature gathers a wide range of information that illumines the field itself and clarifies many of its particulars.

Burying The Bones

Burying The Bones PDF Author: Hilary Spurling
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1847651933
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Pearl Buck was raised in China by her American parents, Presbyterian missionaries from Virginia. Blonde and blue-eyed she looked startlingly foreign, but felt as at home as her Chinese companions. She ran free on the grave-littered grasslands behind her house, often stumbling across the tiny bones of baby girls who had been suffocated at birth. Buck's father was a terrifying figure, with a maniacal zeal for religious conversion - a passion rarely shared by the local communities he targeted. He drained the family's budget for his Chinese translation of the New Testament, while his aggrieved, long-suffering wife did her utmost to create a homely environment for her children, several of whom died tragically young. Pearl Buck would eventually rise to eminence in America as a bestselling author (her most renowned work, The Good Earth, re-entered the bestseller charts in 2004 when it was selected for Oprah's Book Club) but in this startlingly original biography, Spurling recounts with elegance and great insight her unspeakable upbringing in a China that was virtually unknown to the West.

Fiction Catalog

Fiction Catalog PDF Author: H.W. Wilson Company
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Best books
Languages : en
Pages : 664

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Book Description
Includes an abridged edition of 1908 catalog issued under title: English prose fiction ... list of about 800 title.

Twayne's United States Authors Series

Twayne's United States Authors Series PDF Author: Paul A. Doyle
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description


Pearl Buck in China

Pearl Buck in China PDF Author: Hilary Spurling
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 143918044X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
One of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary Americans, Pearl Buck was the first person to make China accessible to the West. She recreated the lives of ordinary Chinese people in The Good Earth, an overnight worldwide bestseller in 1932, later a blockbuster movie. Buck went on to become the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Long before anyone else, she foresaw China’s future as a superpower, and she recognized the crucial importance for both countries of China’s building a relationship with the United States. As a teenager she had witnessed the first stirrings of Chinese revolution, and as a young woman she narrowly escaped being killed in the deadly struggle between Chinese Nationalists and the newly formed Communist Party. Pearl grew up in an imperial China unchanged for thousands of years. She was the child of American missionaries, but she spoke Chinese before she learned English, and her friends were the children of Chinese farmers. She took it for granted that she was Chinese herself until she was eight years old, when the terrorist uprising known as the Boxer Rebellion forced her family to flee for their lives. It was the first of many desperate flights. Flood, famine, drought, bandits, and war formed the background of Pearl’s life in China. "Asia was the real, the actual world," she said, "and my own country became the dreamworld." Pearl wrote about the realities of the only world she knew in The Good Earth. It was one of the last things she did before being finally forced out of China to settle for the first time in the United States. She was unknown and penniless with a failed marriage behind her, a disabled child to support, no prospects, and no way of telling that The Good Earth would sell tens of millions of copies. It transfixed a whole generation of readers just as Jung Chang’s Wild Swans would do more than half a century later. No Westerner had ever written anything like this before, and no Chinese had either. Buck was the forerunner of a wave of Chinese Americans from Maxine Hong Kingston to Amy Tan. Until their books began coming out in the last few decades, her novels were unique in that they spoke for ordinary Asian people— "translating my parents to me," said Hong Kingston, "and giving me our ancestry and our habitation." As a phenomenally successful writer and civil-rights campaigner, Buck did more than anyone else in her lifetime to change Western perceptions of China. In a world with its eyes trained on China today, she has much to tell us about what lies behind its astonishing reawakening.

Adult Catalog: Authors

Adult Catalog: Authors PDF Author: Los Angeles County Public Library
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Library catalogs
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description


The Reader's Adviser and Bookman's Manual

The Reader's Adviser and Bookman's Manual PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Best books
Languages : en
Pages : 1144

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Book Description