Author: Mary King O'Donnell
Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
ISBN: 9780896724495
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 452
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Book Description
Quincie, the motherless thirteen-year-old daughter of an itinerant muleskinner, is the captivating protagonist of this Depression-era novel set in the Texas oil patch. Her story's value resides not only in the viewpoint of a young girl who comes of age in the shadow of the derricks but also in the currency of her creator's sensitivity to the natural world and environmental issues. Originally a 1941 Houghton-Mifflin Literary Fellowship Book, Quincie Bolliver is an extraordinary study in character, place, and the community of women weak and strong. From the moment the wise, lonesome Quincie and her stubborn, charming father, Curtin, arrive in Good Union, Texas, where the boom has passed and Judith Paradise's boarding house stands as a tattered monument to bygone prosperity, King engages the reader in the passions and struggles of the small town's inhabitants. As beautiful and natural as its commanding realism, Quincie Bolliver is not only a remarkable first novel, but one that should stand for all time. Her grief was wide, touching the still trees, the wet coats of the grazing cattle, the lonely posts of the power line, the soft feathers of the heron. Her pity was for all things: for the leaf set spinning by the rain, for the drops of rain that fell and were lost, for the darkening sky itself, and for the tender earth that must lie forever open to the sky, racked to preserve the running heel-and toe-print of all who chose to pass.
Author: Bryan Giemza
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807150924
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 491
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Book Description
In this comprehensive study, Bryan Giemza retrieves a missing chapter of Irish Catholic heritage by canvassing the literature of American Irish writers from the U.S. South. Beginning with the first Irish American novel, published in Winchester, Virginia, in 1817, Giemza investigates nineteenth-century writers contending with the turbulence of their time -- writers influenced by both American and Irish revolutions, dramatists and propagandists of the Civil War, and memoirists of the Lost Cause. Some familiar names arise in an Irish context, including Joel Chandler Harris and Kate (O'Flaherty) Chopin. Giemza then turns to the works of twentieth-century writers, such as Margaret Mitchell, John Kennedy Toole, and Pat Conroy. For each author, Giemza traces the impact of Catholicism on their ethnic identity and their work. Giemza draws on many never-before-seen documents, including the correspondence of Cormac McCarthy, interviews with members of the Irish community in Flannery O'Connor's native Savannah, Georgia, and Giemza's own correspondence with writers such as Valerie Sayers and Anne Rice. This lively history prompts a new understanding of how the Catholic Irish in the South helped invent a regional myth, an enduring literature, and a national image.
Author: James A. Kaser
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810892049
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 426
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Book Description
The importance of New Orleans in American culture has made the city's place in the American imagination a crucial topic for literary scholars and cultural historians. While databases of bibliographical information on New Orleans-centered fiction are available, they are of little use to scholars researching works written before the 1980s. In The New Orleans of Fiction: A Research Guide, James A. Kaser provides detailed synopses for more than 500 works of fiction significantly set in New Orleans and published between 1836 and 1980. The synopses include plot summaries, names of major characters, and an indication of physical settings. An appendix provides bibliographical information for works dating from 1981 well into the 21st century, while a biographical section provides basic information about the authors, some of whom are obscure and would be difficult to find in other sources. Written to assist researchers in locating works of fiction for analysis, the plot summaries highlight ways in which the works touch on major aspects of social history and cultural studies (i.e., class, ethnicity, gender, immigrant experience, and race). The book is also a useful reader advisory tool for librarians and readers who want to identify materials for leisure reading, particularly since genre, juvenile, and young adult fiction—as well as literary fiction—are included.
Author: Library of Congress. Copyright Office
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Copyright
Languages : en
Pages : 1098
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Book Description
Author: Gordon Hutner
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807887757
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 465
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Book Description
Despite the vigorous study of modern American fiction, today's readers are only familiar with a partial shelf of a vast library. Gordon Hutner describes the distorted, canonized history of the twentieth-century American novel as a record of modern classics insufficiently appreciated in their day but recuperated by scholars in order to shape the grand tradition of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. In presenting literary history this way, Hutner argues, scholars have forgotten a rich treasury of realist novels that recount the story of the American middle-class's confrontation with modernity. Reading these novels now offers an extraordinary opportunity to witness debates about what kind of nation America would become and what place its newly dominant middle class would have--and, Hutner suggests, should also lead us to wonder how our own contemporary novels will be remembered.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Agriculture
Languages : en
Pages : 92
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Book Description
Author: Al Jennings
Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
ISBN: 9780896724808
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
Al Jennings, if we are to believe him, was for several years a close friend of O. Henry (William Sydney Porter), perhaps America's favorite short-story writer. They met, Jennings claims, as outlaws on the run in Honduras, served time together in the Columbus, Ohio, Penitentiary at the turn of the century, and later met up in New York. Jennings, erstwhile lawyer, bank robber, and Hollywood consultant, was the subject of the 1951 movie Al Jennings of Oklahoma, starring Dan Duryea. Although a suspect narrator at best, Jennings is a masterful storyteller in this 1921 classic. Jennings describes the horrors of prison life so compellingly that the book might have served as a call for prison reform. Yet he also tells how he, O. Henry, and their friends managed to cope. They secured jobs in the prison post office and pharmacy and managed to find a secret room near the kitchen where on Sunday evenings they retired for a fine meal--complete with wine secured from corrupt prison contractors--and good talk. As Jennings recaps their long, philosophical discussions, readers may wish to have joined them in the fancy New York restaurants they were later able to frequent. Anyone reading Through the Shadows with O. Henry will agree that both of the author and his subject were characters worthy of any O. Henry tale.--Mike Cox
Author: Sylvia Ann Grider
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9780890967652
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 484
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Book Description
A critical survey of over 150 years of Texas women writers, including fiction and nonfiction authors, poets, and dramatists.
Author: Jane Gilmore Rushing
Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
ISBN: 9780896725034
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
Reared in isolation by her father on the Western prairie, Mary Dove has been taught to fear only one thing. One sparkling October day it happens. The inevitable stranger rides in off the plains, and Mary Dove does what she had always promised her father she would--she shoots. Yet compassion overcomes Mary's fear. In remorse, she tends to the wounded stranger, and what follows is their tentative discovery of each other and a love story that weaves universal and timeless themes. The mother who died before Mary Dove could know her was African-American. And so completely has Mary Dove's father sheltered her that she cannot begin to comprehend what society would so cruelly teach her. Archetypal in their blamelessness and in how deeply they must suffer for their love, Mary Dove and her cowboy, "Red" Christopher Columbus Jones, are so thoroughly West Texan that they prove Rushing's mastery of character and place. "Get away," she said "Now I ain't gonna hurt you," he said, "and I don't want to know nothing about you that you don't want to tell." He came a step closer. "Stop right now," she said, "or I'll shoot." "You wouldn't," he said. He was so nearly right. She believed what he said--or nearly. But she had been afraid so long. And wasn't it a law of God to do what your father said? She trembled, looking into his smiling blue eyes. It would have been easier if he had been preparing to pounce, like the panther, or striking, like the snake. The rifle barrel dropped, a little. "I knew you wouldn't," he said, taking another step towards her. "I have to," she said, and with a terrible struggle to hold the gun steady, she fired.
Author: Al Dewlen
Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
ISBN: 9780896724792
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 426
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Book Description
Against the flamboyant background of the "Golden Spread," the oil-rich Panhandle of the late 1950s, Al Dewlen has poised a full-scale and truly original novel of one Texas family--the Mungers of Amarillo. The six Munger siblings are the heirs of hard-drinking, hardscrabble farmer Cecil Munger, who in one generation brought his family from Dust Bowl poverty to unfathomable wealth. Wayward humor, warmth and passion, vigorous and imaginative revelation silhouette their individual rebelliousness against the debilitating restrictions of the family empire.
