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Author: Edgar A. Dryden
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781421429984
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
Author: Edgar Dryden
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421431130
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
Originally published in 1988. Edgar Dryden challenges recent criticism that has tended to discredit—or at least devalue—the importance of "romance" as a thematic and generic category of American fiction. In The Form of American Romance, he examines its evolution and meaning through readings of five exemplary texts: Hawthorne's Marble Faun, Melville's Pierre, James's Portrait of a Lady, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, and Barth's Letters. Each of these novels treats the problems of reading and writing in a self-referential way that reflects on the questions they dramatize, and Dryden has chosen each with the others in mind. Taken together, they chart a line of development with representative examples of what literary history calls romanticism, realism, modernism, and postmodernism, and thus they suggest a certain story about the continuity of the American novel.
Author: Edgar A. Dryden
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781421429984
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
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.
Author: Janice A. Radway
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807898856
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
Originally published in 1984, Reading the Romance challenges popular (and often demeaning) myths about why romantic fiction, one of publishing's most lucrative categories, captivates millions of women readers. Among those who have disparaged romance reading are feminists, literary critics, and theorists of mass culture. They claim that romances enforce the woman reader's dependence on men and acceptance of the repressive ideology purveyed by popular culture. Radway questions such claims, arguing that critical attention "must shift from the text itself, taken in isolation, to the complex social event of reading." She examines that event, from the complicated business of publishing and distribution to the individual reader's engagement with the text. Radway's provocative approach combines reader-response criticism with anthropology and feminist psychology. Asking readers themselves to explore their reading motives, habits, and rewards, she conducted interviews in a midwestern town with forty-two romance readers whom she met through Dorothy Evans, a chain bookstore employee who has earned a reputation as an expert on romantic fiction. Evans defends her customers' choice of entertainment; reading romances, she tells Radway, is no more harmful than watching sports on television. "We read books so we won't cry" is the poignant explanation one woman offers for her reading habit. Indeed, Radway found that while the women she studied devote themselves to nurturing their families, these wives and mothers receive insufficient devotion or nurturance in return. In romances the women find not only escape from the demanding and often tiresome routines of their lives but also a hero who supplies the tenderness and admiring attention that they have learned not to expect. The heroines admired by Radway's group defy the expected stereotypes; they are strong, independent, and intelligent. That such characters often find themselves to be victims of male aggression and almost always resign themselves to accepting conventional roles in life has less to do, Radway argues, with the women readers' fantasies and choices than with their need to deal with a fear of masculine dominance. These romance readers resent not only the limited choices in their own lives but the patronizing atitude that men especially express toward their reading tastes. In fact, women read romances both to protest and to escape temporarily the narrowly defined role prescribed for them by a patriarchal culture. Paradoxically, the books that they read make conventional roles for women seem desirable. It is this complex relationship between culture, text, and woman reader that Radway urges feminists to address. Romance readers, she argues, should be encouraged to deliver their protests in the arena of actual social relations rather than to act them out in the solitude of the imagination. In a new introduction, Janice Radway places the book within the context of current scholarship and offers both an explanation and critique of the study's limitations.
Author: Robert Charles Post
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Author: Kay Mussell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
In this work, Kay Mussell and Johanna Tu n collect essays by contemporary North American romance authors who have come to prominence, directly or indirectly, as a result of the huge change in the field of romance writing which started in the early 1980s. New publishing houses began to compete with Harlequin, and the North American romance novel came into its own as a genre. In their essays on their own work, each of the writers in this volume describes her own "take" on the romance novel today and how she has adapted the form to accommodate her own voice and concerns. Collectively, these writers have used the romance genre to address a broad range of social issues and problems. Presenting these essays together provides a window into the creativity and originality of some of the best writers in the field.
Author: Theodore Anthony Leeson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 656
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Book Description
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.
Author: Kimberly Freeman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135885370
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
A popular subject in sociology and cultural studies, divorce has until recently been overlooked by literary critics. Spanning nearly a century during which the divorce rate skyrocketed, Love American Style traces the treatment of divorce in the American novel. This book draws upon popular, sociological, political and architectural history to illustrate how divorce reflects conflicting ideologies and notions of American identity. Focusing primarily on work by William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, Mary McCarthy and John Updike, Kimberly Freeman delineates a system of tropes particular to divorce in American novels, such as the association of divorce with the West and modernity, the dismantling of the home, and the disruption of the boundary between the public and the private. These tropes suggest a literary tradition of love, marriage and divorce that is central to twentieth century American fiction. Offering an explanation for both the treatment of divorce in the American novel as well as its predominance in American culture, this book should appeal to scholars of American literature and popular culture, or anyone interested in how divorce has become so 'American'.
Author: Xiaojing Zhou
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295802308
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
This critical anthology draws on current theoretical movements to examine the breadth of Asian American literature from the earliest to the most recent writers. Covering fiction, essays, poetry, short stories, ethnography, and autobiography, Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature advances the development of a theoretically informed, historically and culturally specific methodology for studying this increasingly complex field. The essays in this anthology probe into hotly debated issues as well as understudied topics, including the relations between Asian American and other minority American writings.