Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction

Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction PDF Author: Darlene Harbour Unrue
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820333549
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
My stories are fragments of a larger plan, Katherine Anne Porter once wrote. And on another occasion she praised a critic who perceived that all her work, from the very beginning, was part of an "unbroken progression, all related." In Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction, Darlene Unrue examines the encompassing themes that underlie Porter's shorter fiction and that combined to create the haunting events of her complex metaphorical novel, Ship of Fools. Porter believed that men and women are compelled toward discovering the truth about their existence, but that the nature of our world makes those truths difficult to discern. In her writing, Unrue finds, Porter explored not only this basic human need to confront the truth, but also the bewilderment and suffering that are so often the results of failing to fulfill that need. Often in Porter's fiction the movement toward truth is obstructed by the hollow beliefs and illusions that abound in the world--by the seductions of ideology and dogmatic religion, by romantic love or the vision of a golden past. Clinging to such illusions, using them to lend a false coherence to their lives, Porter's characters are led away from the hard realization that truth requires accepting the existence of the unknowable at the center of life, and that what is knowable lies within themselves. Drawing on essays, reviews, letters, and notes, as well as on the intricate fabric of the fiction, this study traces Porter's pursuit of the truth through the creation of a body of fiction in which, from fragments of life, she could assemble an honest vision of the world.

Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction

Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction PDF Author: Darlene Harbour Unrue
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820333549
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
My stories are fragments of a larger plan, Katherine Anne Porter once wrote. And on another occasion she praised a critic who perceived that all her work, from the very beginning, was part of an "unbroken progression, all related." In Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction, Darlene Unrue examines the encompassing themes that underlie Porter's shorter fiction and that combined to create the haunting events of her complex metaphorical novel, Ship of Fools. Porter believed that men and women are compelled toward discovering the truth about their existence, but that the nature of our world makes those truths difficult to discern. In her writing, Unrue finds, Porter explored not only this basic human need to confront the truth, but also the bewilderment and suffering that are so often the results of failing to fulfill that need. Often in Porter's fiction the movement toward truth is obstructed by the hollow beliefs and illusions that abound in the world--by the seductions of ideology and dogmatic religion, by romantic love or the vision of a golden past. Clinging to such illusions, using them to lend a false coherence to their lives, Porter's characters are led away from the hard realization that truth requires accepting the existence of the unknowable at the center of life, and that what is knowable lies within themselves. Drawing on essays, reviews, letters, and notes, as well as on the intricate fabric of the fiction, this study traces Porter's pursuit of the truth through the creation of a body of fiction in which, from fragments of life, she could assemble an honest vision of the world.

Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction

Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction PDF Author: Darlene Harbour Unrue
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description


The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction, 3 Volume Set

The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction, 3 Volume Set PDF Author: Brian W. Shaffer
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405192445
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1581

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Book Description
This Encyclopedia offers an indispensable reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English-language. With nearly 500 contributors and over one million words, it is the most comprehensive and authoritative reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English language. Contains over 500 entries of 1000-3000 words written in lucid, jargon-free prose, by an international cast of leading scholars Arranged in three volumes covering British and Irish Fiction, American Fiction, and World Fiction, with each volume edited by a leading scholar in the field Entries cover major writers (such as Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, A.S. Byatt, Samual Beckett, D.H. Lawrence, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Alice Munro, Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, and Ngûgî Wa Thiong’o) and their key works Examines the genres and sub-genres of fiction in English across the twentieth century (including crime fiction, Sci-Fi, chick lit, the noir novel, and the avant-garde novel) as well as the major movements, debates, and rubrics within the field, such as censorship, globalization, modernist fiction, fiction and the film industry, and the fiction of migration, diaspora, and exile

An Earthy Entanglement with Spirituality

An Earthy Entanglement with Spirituality PDF Author: Elizabeth Moore Willingham
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1835536549
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
An Earthy Entanglement with Spirituality offers compelling perspectives on the human spirit as represented in literature and art. Authors approach the inquiry using distinct critical approaches to varied primary sources—poetry of various genres and periods, Shakespearean drama, contemporary theater, Renaissance sculpture, and the novel, short story, sketch, and dialogue.

Companion to Literature

Companion to Literature PDF Author: Abby H. P. Werlock
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 143812743X
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 859

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Book Description
Praise for the previous edition:Booklist/RBB "Twenty Best Bets for Student Researchers"RUSA/ALA "Outstanding Reference Source"" ... useful ... Recommended for public libraries and undergraduates."

The Indian in American Southern Literature

The Indian in American Southern Literature PDF Author: Melanie Benson Taylor
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108495311
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Explores the abundance of Native American representations in US Southern literature.

Research Guide to American Literature

Research Guide to American Literature PDF Author: Benjamín Franklin
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438132425
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Presents American literature from the beginnings to the Revolutionary War, including essays, narratives and more.

The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter

The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter PDF Author: Mary Titus
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820341142
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
During a life that spanned ninety years, Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) witnessed dramatic and intensely debated changes in the gender roles of American women. Mary Titus draws upon unpublished Porter papers, as well as newly available editions of her early fiction, poetry, and reviews, to trace Porter’s shifting and complex response to those cultural changes. Titus shows how Porter explored her own ambivalence about gender and creativity, for she experienced firsthand a remarkable range of ideas concerning female sexuality. These included the Victorian attitudes of the grandmother who raised her; the sexual license of revolutionary Mexico, 1920s New York, and 1930s Paris; and the conservative, ordered attitudes of the Agrarians. Throughout Porter’s long career, writes Titus, she “repeatedly probed cultural arguments about female creativity, a woman’s maternal legacy, romantic love, and sexual identity, always with startling acuity, and often with painful ambivalence.” Much of her writing, then, serves as a medium for what Titus terms Porter’s “gender-thinking”--her sustained examination of the interrelated issues of art, gender, and identity. Porter, says Titus, rebelled against her upbringing yet never relinquished the belief that her work as an artist was somehow unnatural, a turn away from the essential identity of woman as “the repository of life,” as childbearer. In her life Porter increasingly played a highly feminized public role as southern lady, but in her writing she continued to engage changing representations of female identity and sexuality. This is an important new study of the tensions and ambivalence inscribed in Porter’s fiction, as well as the vocational anxiety and gender performance of her actual life.

South by Southwest

South by Southwest PDF Author: Janis P. Stout
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817317821
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
An interdisciplinary study of Katherine Anne Porter’s troubled relationship to her Texas origins and southern roots, South by Southwest offers a fresh look at this ever-relevant author. Today, more than thirty years after her death, Katherine Anne Porter remains a fascinating figure. Critics and biographers have portrayed her as a strikingly glamorous woman whose photographs appeared in society magazines. They have emphasized, of course, her writing— particularly the novel Ship of Fools, which was made into an award-winning film, and her collection Pale Horse, Pale Rider, which cemented her role as a significant and original literary modernist. They have highlighted her dramatic, sad, and fragmented personal life. Few, however, have addressed her uneasy relationship to her childhood in rural Texas. Janis P. Stout argues that throughout Porter’s life she remained preoccupied with the twin conundrums of how she felt about being a woman and how she felt about her Texas origins. Her construction of herself as a beautiful but unhappy southerner sprung from a plantation aristocracy of reduced fortunes meant she construed Texas as the Old South. The Texas Porter knew and re-created in her fiction had been settled by southerners like her grandparents, who brought slaves with them. As she wrote of this Texas, she also enhanced and mythologized it, exaggerating its beauty, fertility, and gracious ways as much as the disaffection that drove her to leave. Her feelings toward Texas ran to both extremes, and she was never able to reconcile them. Stout examines the author and her works within the historical and cultural context from which she emerged. In particular, Stout emphasizes four main themes in the history of Texas that she believes are of the greatest importance in understanding Porter: its geography and border location (expressed in Porter’s lifelong fascination with marginality, indeterminacy, and escape); its violence (the brutality of her first marriage as well as the lawlessness that pervaded her hometown); its racism (lynchings were prevalent throughout her upbringing); and its marginalization of women (Stout draws a connection between Porter’s references to the burning sun and oppressive heat of Texas and her life with her first husband).

The Family Saga in the South: Generations and Destinies

The Family Saga in the South: Generations and Destinies PDF Author: Robert O. Stephens
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807141335
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description