The Art of Brevity

The Art of Brevity PDF Author: Per Winther
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570035579
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
The Art of Brevity gathers fresh ideas about the theory and writing of short fiction from around the globe to produce an international, inclusive exploration of the steadily growing field of short story studies. Though Anglo-American scholars have served as the primary developers of contemporary short story theory since the field's inception in the 1960s, this volume adds the contributions of scholars living in other parts of the world. Such Anglo-American pioneers as Mary Rohrberger, Charles May, Susan Lohafer, and John Gerlach join with short fiction scholars at universities in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Canada to build academic bridges and expand the field, geographically as well as conceptually. Contributors to the volume weave together themes of time, space, compression, mystery, reader response, and narrative closure. They discuss writers as varied as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Sarah Orne Jewett, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Mavis Gallant, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Robert Olen Butler. the nineteenth-century queer short story, and contemporary Danish short shorts.

The Art of Brevity

The Art of Brevity PDF Author: Per Winther
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570035579
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Art of Brevity gathers fresh ideas about the theory and writing of short fiction from around the globe to produce an international, inclusive exploration of the steadily growing field of short story studies. Though Anglo-American scholars have served as the primary developers of contemporary short story theory since the field's inception in the 1960s, this volume adds the contributions of scholars living in other parts of the world. Such Anglo-American pioneers as Mary Rohrberger, Charles May, Susan Lohafer, and John Gerlach join with short fiction scholars at universities in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Canada to build academic bridges and expand the field, geographically as well as conceptually. Contributors to the volume weave together themes of time, space, compression, mystery, reader response, and narrative closure. They discuss writers as varied as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Sarah Orne Jewett, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Mavis Gallant, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Robert Olen Butler. the nineteenth-century queer short story, and contemporary Danish short shorts.

Solitude and Society in the Works of Herman Melville and Edith Wharton

Solitude and Society in the Works of Herman Melville and Edith Wharton PDF Author: Linda C. Cahir
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313029970
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
The interplay between solitude and society was a particularly persistent theme in nineteenth-century American literature, though writers approached this theme in different ways. Poe explored the metaphysical significance of isolation and held solitude in high esteem; Hawthorne viewed the theme in moral terms and examined the obligation of each individual to the larger community; and Emerson maintained that the contradictory states of self-reliance and solidarity are fundamental to human happiness. Herman Melville emerged with an ontological response to this issue. Questioning the nature of being, he argued that humans are essentially isolated creatures. While he grants that we are free to choose how we conduct our lives, whether in solitude or in society, we cannot escape the essential condition of our alienation. Thus in Moby-Dick, he coins the term Isolato to signify the inherent separateness of all individuals. Writing some fifty years later, Edith Wharton reached the same conclusion. This book argues that Wharton's views on solitude and society were strongly parallel to those of Melville. Scholars have generally held that Wharton was primarily influenced by the great English, French, and Russian writers of the nineteenth century; and that with the exception of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry James, she neglected the influence of American literature almost entirely. This study demonstrates that Wharton read a significant portion of Melville's writings, that she reflected on the nature and achievement of his works, and that her consideration of his importance emerged during very significant moments in her life, when she was forced to grapple with her own place as an individual in relation to a larger community. Though Melville and Wharton initially seem disparate, this book shows that they had much in common. By studying the two authors side by side, this volume reveals that they shared a similar way of seeing the world, particularly with respect to their considerations of solitude and society. Through their solitary characters, Melville and Wharton question the relationship of self and society and thus engage a universal problem of special interest to the nineteenth century.

Conspiracy and Romance

Conspiracy and Romance PDF Author: Robert S. Levine
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521366540
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Robert Levine examines the American romance in a new historical context. His book offers a fresh reading of the genre, establishing its importance to American culture between the founding of the Republic and the Civil War. With convincing historical and literary detail, Levine shows that anxieties about foreign elements--French revolutionaries, secret societies, Catholic immigrants, African slaves--are central to the fictional worlds of Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne and Melville. Ormond, The Bravo, The Blithedale Romance, and Benito Cereno are persuasively explicated by Levine to demonstrate that the romance dramatized the same conflicts and ideals that gave rise to the American Republic. Americans conceived "America" as a historical romance, and their romances dramatize the historical conditions of the culture. The fear that reputed conspiracies would subvert the order and integrity of the new nation were recurrent and widespread; Levine illuminates the influence of such fears on the works of major romance writers during this period.

The New Romanticism

The New Romanticism PDF Author: Eberhard Alsen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317776003
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
The New Romanticism is an overview of the romantic trend taken up by American novelists in the twentieth-century. Includes three classic essays by Saul bellow, Thomas Pyncheon, and Toni Morrison.

Herman Melville

Herman Melville PDF Author: Corey Evan Thompson
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476642710
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
This reference work covers both Herman Melville's life and writings. It includes a biography and detailed information on his works, on the important themes contained therein, and on the significant people and places in his life. The appendices include suggestions for further reading of both literary and cultural criticism, an essay on Melville's lasting cultural influence, and information on both the fictional ships in his works and the real-life ones on which he sailed.

The Characteristic Theology of Herman Melville

The Characteristic Theology of Herman Melville PDF Author: Bradley A. Johnson
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1630876208
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
What becomes of theology when we think of it aesthetically? What becomes of aesthetics when we think of it theologically? These are the guiding questions that inform both the method and the conclusions of this volume's exploration into the literary world of Herman Melville's "characteristic theology." Far from a specialist work that simply seeks to flesh out the religious disposition and myriad influences of one particular literary giant, Johnson's focus in this volume is instead the identification of a philosophically robust aesthetic conception of theology at its most politically and contemporarily relevant. By way of the Masquerade it sets in motion and in which it fully participates, from its beginning to its very end, this book uses Melville's fiction as vehicle for a radical aesthetic engagement with the theological bases of subjectivity and sovereignty. Through this exploration Johnson conceives the creatively duplicitous character of a materialistic theology whose aim is nothing less than the fashioning of a new heaven and a new earth.

The Romance of Desire

The Romance of Desire PDF Author: Susan L. Field
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838637388
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
At times, Emerson experiences the other as an adversary and at other times as a lover.The author suggests ways in which contemporary readers are also Emerson's other, entangled as we are in a complex romance with a writer who conveyed his longing more than message.

A Companion to Herman Melville

A Companion to Herman Melville PDF Author: Wyn Kelley
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119045274
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 631

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Book Description
In a series of 35 original essays, this companion demonstrates the relevance of Melville’s works in the twenty-first century. Presents 35 original essays by scholars from around the world, representing a range of different approaches to Melville Considers Melville in a global context, and looks at the impact of global economies and technologies on the way people read Melville Takes account of the latest and most sophisticated scholarship, including postcolonial and feminist perspectives Locates Melville in his cultural milieu, revising our views of his politics on race, gender and democracy Reveals Melville as a more contemporary writer than his critics have sometimes assumed

Herman Melville

Herman Melville PDF Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438113056
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Presents a collection of criticism devoted to the work of American author Herman Melville.

Nineteenth-century American Romance

Nineteenth-century American Romance PDF Author: E. Miller Budick
Publisher: Macmillan Reference USA
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Nineteenth-century American romance, as a genre, is defined by the writings of a particular group of authors - James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry James - all of whom are associated with one another in time and place. In this volume, Emily Miller Budick examines the genre both as a style and within a historical context. She interprets American romance as an evolving literary aesthetic and cultural philosophy - as an effort by a group of writers to produce what Noah Webster called an "American tongue", a language imbued with the values of democracy and pluralism.