The Contemporary American Comic Epic

The Contemporary American Comic Epic PDF Author: Elaine B. Safer
Publisher: Detroit : Wayne State University Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Elaine Safer's critically acclaimed work analyzes how 20th century epic writers make ironic use of traditional themes and patterns to develop a new genre, the American comic epic novel. Illustrating practical criticism at its best, the book closely scrutinizes six modern comic novels from John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis , and Ken Kesey. Safer supports her study with a firm grasp of the English epic of John Milton, the American epics of Cotton Mather and Walt Whitman, and the comic tradition of Rabelais, Cervantes, and Fielding. Her examination allows the modern American absurdist novel to be seen within a tradition and yet as distinctively modern. In addition, the book provides a clear and wide-ranging theoretical framework for the absurd and for black humor, terms too loosely defined in the past.

The Contemporary American Comic Epic

The Contemporary American Comic Epic PDF Author: Elaine B. Safer
Publisher: Detroit : Wayne State University Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
Elaine Safer's critically acclaimed work analyzes how 20th century epic writers make ironic use of traditional themes and patterns to develop a new genre, the American comic epic novel. Illustrating practical criticism at its best, the book closely scrutinizes six modern comic novels from John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis , and Ken Kesey. Safer supports her study with a firm grasp of the English epic of John Milton, the American epics of Cotton Mather and Walt Whitman, and the comic tradition of Rabelais, Cervantes, and Fielding. Her examination allows the modern American absurdist novel to be seen within a tradition and yet as distinctively modern. In addition, the book provides a clear and wide-ranging theoretical framework for the absurd and for black humor, terms too loosely defined in the past.

The Last American

The Last American PDF Author: John Wagner
Publisher: 2000 AD
ISBN: 9781781085448
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
WRITERS ALAN GRANT & JOHN WAGNER ARTIST MIKE MCMAHON I pledged allegiance to the flag of the United Sates of America, and to the republic for which it stood, look where it got me. Over twenty years have passed since a global war plunged the world into nuclear armageddon. Placed in suspended animation by his superiors, U.S. Army Captain, Ulysses Pilgrim, is woken by three military robot aides. Now Pilgrim has one last mission: wade through a post-holocaust U.S.A. and search for survivors. Written by John Wagner and Alan Grant and featuring the unique art of Mick McMahon, The Last American is a brilliant, yet terrifying look at the reality and futility of nuclear war.

Masters of American Comics

Masters of American Comics PDF Author: John Carlin
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030011317X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
Presents the work of America's most popular and influential comic artists, and includes critical essays accompanying each artist's drawings.

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.

American Studies

American Studies PDF Author: Jack Salzman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521365598
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1124

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Book Description
This volume supplements the acclaimed three volume set published in 1986 and consists of an annotated listing of American Studies monographs published between 1984 and 1988. There are more than 6,000 descriptive entries in a wide range of categories: anthropology and folklore, art and architecture, history, literature, music, political science, popular culture, psychology, religion, science and technology, and sociology.

Rewriting Early America

Rewriting Early America PDF Author: Christopher K. Coffman
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611462568
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
Recent poems and fictions set in the early Americas are typically read as affirmations of cultural norms, as evidence of the impossibility of genuine engagement with the historical past, or as contentious repudiations of received histories. Inspired particularly by Mihai Spariosu’s arguments regarding literary playfulness as an opening to peace, Rewriting Early America: The Prenational Past in Postmodern Literature adopts a different perspective, with the goal of demonstrating that many recent literary texts undertake more constructive and hopeful projects with regard to the American past than critics usually recognize. While honoring writers' pervasive critiques of hegemony, this volume trades a preoccupation with antagonism for an interest in restoration and recuperation. It describes how texts by John Barth, John Berryman, Susan Howe, Toni Morrison, Paul Muldoon, Thomas Pynchon, and William T. Vollmann harness the ambiguities of the colonial past to find sociocultural possibilities that operate beyond the workings of power and outside the politics of difference. Throughout, this book remains devoted to uncovering the moments at which contemporary writers proffer visions of American communities defined not by marginalization and oppression, but by responsive understanding and inclusion.

The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction

The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction PDF Author: Tom Perrin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137523956
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
During the Cold War, many popular American novels were labelled "middlebrow," leading to a general belief that these texts held less intellectual merit. Perrin debunks these unfair assumptions through works by James Michener, Harper Lee, and Leon Uris, arguing that such writers made a major contribution to the tradition of American literature.

Swallowing a World

Swallowing a World PDF Author: Benjamin Bergholtz
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496241126
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Swallowing a World offers a new theorization of the maximalist novel. Though it’s typically cast as a (white, male) genre of U.S. fiction, maximalism, Benjamin Bergholtz argues, is an aesthetic response to globalization and a global phenomenon in its own right. Bergholtz considers a selection of massive and meandering novels that crisscross from London and Lusaka to Kingston, Kabul, and Kashmir and that represent, formally reproduce, and ultimately invite reflection on the effects of globalization. Each chapter takes up a maximalist novel that simultaneously maps and formally mimics a cornerstone of globalization, such as the postcolonial culture industry (Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children), the rebirth of fundamentalism (Zadie Smith’s White Teeth), the transnational commodification of violence (Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings), the obstruction of knowledge by narrative (Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know), and globalization’s gendered, asymmetrical growth (Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift). By reframing analysis of maximalism around globalization, Swallowing a World not only reimagines one of the most perplexing genres of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries but also sheds light on some of the most perplexing political problems of our precarious present.

The Cruft of Fiction

The Cruft of Fiction PDF Author: David Letzler
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496201647
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
A 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title What is the strange appeal of big books? The mega-novel, a genre of erudite tomes with encyclopedic scope, has attracted wildly varied responses, from fanatical devotion to trenchant criticism. Looking at intimidating mega-novel masterpieces from The Making of Americans to 2666, David Letzler explores reader responses to all the seemingly random, irrelevant, pointless, and derailing elements that comprise these mega-novels, elements that he labels "cruft" after the computer science term for junk code. In The Cruft of Fiction, Letzler suggests that these books are useful tools to help us understand the relationship between reading and attention. While mega-novel text is often intricately meaningful or experimental, sometimes it is just excessive and pointless. On the other hand, mega-novels also contain text that, though appearing to be cruft, turns out to be quite important. Letzler posits that this cruft requires readers to develop a sophisticated method of attentional modulation, allowing one to subtly distinguish between text requiring focused attention and text that must be skimmed or even skipped to avoid processing failures. The Cruft of Fiction shows how the attentional maturation prompted by reading mega-novels can help manage the information overload that increasingly characterizes contemporary life.

William Gaddis

William Gaddis PDF Author: Aaron Tillman
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438113587
Category : Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Presents a collection of critical essays on the works of William Gaddis.