Form and Fable in American Fiction

Form and Fable in American Fiction PDF Author: Daniel Hoffman
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813915258
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Combining the disciplines of folklore and literary criticism in his perceptive readings of works by Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, and Mark Twain, Daniel Hoffman demonstrates how these authors transformed materials from both high and popular culture, from their European past and their American present, in works that helped to form our national consciousness. In his new preface, Hoffman describes the evolution of his critical method and suggests the book's value for contemporary readers.

Form and Fable in American Fiction

Form and Fable in American Fiction PDF Author: Daniel Hoffman
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813915258
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Combining the disciplines of folklore and literary criticism in his perceptive readings of works by Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, and Mark Twain, Daniel Hoffman demonstrates how these authors transformed materials from both high and popular culture, from their European past and their American present, in works that helped to form our national consciousness. In his new preface, Hoffman describes the evolution of his critical method and suggests the book's value for contemporary readers.

The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction

The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction PDF Author: Catherine Morley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135899584
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
This volume explores the confluences between two types of literature in contemporary America: the novel and the epic. It analyses the tradition of the epic as it has evolved from antiquity, through Joyce to its American manifestations and describes how this tradition has impacted upon contemporary American writing.

The Animal Fable in Science Fiction and Fantasy

The Animal Fable in Science Fiction and Fantasy PDF Author: Bruce Shaw
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786455985
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Though animal stories and fables stretch back into the antiquity of ancient India, Persia, Greece and Rome, the reasons for writing them and their resonance for readers (and listeners) remain consistent to the present. This work argues that they were essential sources of amusement and instruction--and were also often profoundly unsettling. Such authors in the realm of the animal fable as Tolkien, Freud, Voltaire, Bakhtin, Cordwainer Smith, Karel Capek, Vladimir Propp, and many more are discussed.

The Art of Authorial Presence

The Art of Authorial Presence PDF Author: Gary Richard Thompson
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822313212
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
The critical literary world has spent a wealth of thought and words on the question of Hawthorne himself: Where does he stand in his works? In history? In literary tradition? In this major new study, G. R. Thompson recasts the "Hawthorne question" to show how authorial presence in the writer's works is as much a matter of art as the writing itself. The Hawthorne who emerges from this masterful analysis is not, as has been supposed, identical to the provincial narrator of his early tales; instead he is revealed to be the skillful manipulator of that narrative voice, an author at an ironic distance from the tales he tells. By focusing on the provincial tales as they were originally conceived--as a narrative cycle--Thompson is able to recover intertextual references that reveal Hawthorne's preoccupation with framing strategies and variations on authorial presence. The author shows how Hawthorne deliberately constructs sentimental narratives, only to deconstruct them. Thompson's analysis provides a new aesthetic context for understanding the whole shape of Hawthorne's career as well as the narrative, ethical, and historical issues within individual works. Revisionary in its view of one of America's greatest authors, The Art of Authorial Presence also offers invaluable insight into the problems of narratology and historiography, ethics and psychology, romanticism and idealism, and the cultural myths of America.

A Tissue of Lies

A Tissue of Lies PDF Author: Jennifer Lynn Randisi
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 9780819124524
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
A study linking the novels of Eudora Welty to a tradition of Southern romance writers. Beginning with the Civil War diarists, the author isolates and defines the components of the Southern romance, tracing Welty's adaptation of each component within the novels themselves and revealing a twofold importance: it connects the literature of the Civil War diarists to the work of Eudora Welty in a meaningful way while illuminating her work in the light of a Southern Romance tradition.

The Dream of the Great American Novel

The Dream of the Great American Novel PDF Author: Lawrence Buell
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674727487
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 501

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Book Description
“Magisterial . . . make[s] you suddenly see new things in familiar books . . . brilliant analyses of a dozen or so front-runners in the Great American Novel sweepstakes.” —Michael Dirda, Virginia Quarterly Review The idea of “the great American novel” continues to thrive almost as vigorously as in its nineteenth-century heyday, defying more than 150 years of attempts to dismiss it as amateurish or obsolete. In this landmark book, the first in many years to take in the whole sweep of national fiction, Lawrence Buell reanimates this supposedly antiquated idea, demonstrating that its history is a key to the dynamics of national literature and national identity itself. The dream of the G.A.N., as Henry James nicknamed it, crystallized soon after the Civil War. In fresh, in-depth readings of selected contenders from the 1850s onward in conversation with hundreds of other novels, Buell delineates four “scripts” for G.A.N. candidates and their themes, illustrated by such titles as The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, Invisible Man, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Beloved, Moby-Dick, and Gravity’s Rainbow—works dwelling on topics from self-invention to the promise and pitfalls of democracy. The canvas of the great American novel is in constant motion, reflecting revolutions in fictional fashion, the changing face of authorship, and the inseparability of high culture from popular. As Buell reveals, the elusive G.A.N. showcases the myth of the United States as a nation perpetually under construction. “Engaging and provocative . . . ultimately affirms the importance of literature to a nation’s sense of itself.” —Sarah Graham, Times Literary Supplement “Rich in critical insight . . . Buell wonders if the GAN isn’t stirring again in surprising new developments in science fiction. An impressively ambitious literary survey.” —Booklist (starred review)

Bibliographical Guide to the Study of the Literature of the U.S.A.

Bibliographical Guide to the Study of the Literature of the U.S.A. PDF Author: Clarence Gohdes
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822305927
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
This fifth revised edition features approximately 1,900 items, most of which are annotated. It addresses several interdisciplinary studies that have become prominent in the last decade, especially on popular culture, racial and other minorities, Native Americans and Chicanos, and literary regionalism. It allots more space to computer aids, science fiction, children's literature, literature of the sea, film and literature, and linguistic studies of American English and includes a new section on psychology. The appendix lists the biography of each of 135 deceased American authors. ISBN 0-8223-0592-5 : $22.50 (For use only in the library).

Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature

Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature PDF Author: Mary Ellen Snodgrass
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438109113
Category : Gothic revival (Literature)
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
Presents an alphabetical reference guide detailing the lives and works of authors associated with Gothic literature.

The Publishers Weekly

The Publishers Weekly PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 1270

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Book Description


Democratic Humanism and American Literature

Democratic Humanism and American Literature PDF Author: Harold Kaplan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351522817
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 501

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Book Description
Democratic Humanism and American Literature illustrates the interplay between democratic assumptions and literary performance in the America's classic nineteenth-century writers--Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Cooper, Poe, Whitman, Twain, and James. Harold Kaplan suggests that these major figures' works are linked by the myths of genesis of a new political culture. Challenged by the democratic ideal, and committed to it, they wrote prophetic books in the American liberal tradition and endowed its ethical intelligence. The task of stating a new and undefined freedom was always implicit and often in the foreground of the writing of these nineteenth-century giants. As the author describes the situation, "the free man had to decide in what sense he was bound by nature or could master it; in what sense he was committed to his society and could reconcile his freedom with it." These classic writers devoted their work to examining this dialectic of values; Kaplan sees their complex and polarized democratic consciousness as seminal in the imaginative tradition they generated. What is unique in that tradition of values is the rivalry of criticism with affirmations of faith. "The highly original ethical trait involved here is based on the capacity of a political society to use its negations against itself and survive." The author suggests that in our own time moral judgments are more likely to be the province of activist politics than literature. His new introduction relates the theme of the book to cultural and political developments in the American experience of modernity and adds a discussion of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams to the figures treated in the original edition. Since tendencies to develop ideological and idiosyncratic responses to extrinsic events have grown stronger over time, it is more important than ever for scholars and students alike to recover a "moral imagination"--the force that gave rise to the great literary works of the nineteenth century. To describe that force is Harold Kaplan's goal in Democratic Humanism and American Literature.