Walker Percy's Voices

Walker Percy's Voices PDF Author: Michael Kobre
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820321400
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Walker Percy's novels are fraught with characters struggling toward a destiny and purpose in life who must sort through conflicting inner voices and the voices of family, friends, therapists, and mentors until they finally find their own paths. Through trial, error, and retrial, Percy's characters continuously reinvent themselves, struggling until they reach solutions, satisfaction, and maturity. In this multifaceted work, Michael Kobre analyzes Walker Percy's major fiction works--The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins, Lancelot, The Second Coming, and The Thanatos Syndrome--in terms of the Russian philosopher and literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin's critical theory. Kobre begins with an introduction to Percy's view of language and consciousness and a clear, accessible explanation of Bakhtin's ideas. His subsequent discussion of the novels connects each work in turn with Percy's advancing career and explores the deepening conflict in Percy's fiction between his desire to express his own religious and moral beliefs and his commitment to the essential freedom of his art--the play of many voices in his narratives.

Walker Percy's Voices

Walker Percy's Voices PDF Author: Michael Kobre
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820321400
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book Here

Book Description
Walker Percy's novels are fraught with characters struggling toward a destiny and purpose in life who must sort through conflicting inner voices and the voices of family, friends, therapists, and mentors until they finally find their own paths. Through trial, error, and retrial, Percy's characters continuously reinvent themselves, struggling until they reach solutions, satisfaction, and maturity. In this multifaceted work, Michael Kobre analyzes Walker Percy's major fiction works--The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins, Lancelot, The Second Coming, and The Thanatos Syndrome--in terms of the Russian philosopher and literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin's critical theory. Kobre begins with an introduction to Percy's view of language and consciousness and a clear, accessible explanation of Bakhtin's ideas. His subsequent discussion of the novels connects each work in turn with Percy's advancing career and explores the deepening conflict in Percy's fiction between his desire to express his own religious and moral beliefs and his commitment to the essential freedom of his art--the play of many voices in his narratives.

Seasons of Misery

Seasons of Misery PDF Author: Kathleen Donegan
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812245407
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Seasons of Misery offers a boldly original account of early English settlement in American by placing catastrophe and crisis at the center of the story. Donegan argues that the constant state of suffering and uncertainty decisively formed the colonial identity and produced the first distinctly colonial literature.

The Genesis of the United States

The Genesis of the United States PDF Author: Alexander Brown
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 698

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Book Description


Argall

Argall PDF Author: William T. Vollmann
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440684170
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 769

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Book Description
From the National Book Award-winning author of Europe Central – a hugely original fictional history of Pocahontas, John Smith, and the Jamestown colony in Virginia In Argall, the third novel in his Seven Dreams series, William T. Vollmann alternates between extravagant Elizabethan language and gritty realism in an attempt to dig beneath the legend surrounding Pocahontas, John Smith, and the founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia-as well as the betrayals, disappointments, and atrocities behind it. With the same panoramic vision, mythic sensibility, and stylistic daring that he brought to the previous novels in the Seven Dreams series--hailed upon its inception as "the most important literary project of the '90s" (The Washington Post)--Vollmann continues his hugely original fictional history of the clash of Native Americans and Europeans in the New World. In reconstructing America's past as tragedy, nightmare, and bloody spectacle, Vollmann does nothing less than reinvent the American novel.

Walker Percy's The Moviegoer at Fifty

Walker Percy's The Moviegoer at Fifty PDF Author: Jennifer Levasseur
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807162752
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
More than fifty years after its publication, Walker Percy's National Book Award Winner, The Moviegoer, still confronts, comforts, and enlightens generations of readers. This collection of twelve new essays, edited and introduced by Jennifer Levasseur and Mary A. McCay, emphasize the evolving significance of this seminal, New Orleans novel. Authors' consider the text with diverse perspectives, drawing from philosophy, theology, disability theory, contemporary music and literature, social media, and film studies. Jay Tolson opens the volume with reflections on rereading the novel on a Kindle decades after writing his important biography of Percy. H. Collin Messer, Montserrat Gins, Jessica Hooten Wilson, and Brian Jobe follow with illuminating essays analyzing Percy's influences, from St. Augustine and Cervantes to Heidegger and Dostoevsky. Jonathan Potter and Read Mercer Schuchardt, Mary A. McCay, Matthew Luter, and Dorian Speed delve into the novel's significance to cinema, including an exhaustive guide to its film references, a meditation on Binx Bolling as a director of his existence, and the semiotics of celebrity. Brent Walter Cline and Robert Bolton, Michael Kobre, and L. Lamar Nisly present a roadmap for Bolling's inward journey, exploring a variety of elements from the role of the broken body to the spiritual connection to Bruce Springsteen lyrics. Walker Percy's The Moviegoer at Fifty is the first critical work devoted solely to the author's debut novel. Coinciding with the centenary of Percy's birth, this collection invites both new and veteran readers to enjoy The Moviegoer with fresh perspectives that underscore its lasting relevance.

The Female American; or, The Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield

The Female American; or, The Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield PDF Author: Unca Eliza Winkfield
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 1770481281
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
When it first appeared in 1767, The Female American was called a "sort of second Robinson Crusoe; full of wonders." Indeed, The Female American is an adventure novel about an English protagonist shipwrecked on a deserted isle, where survival requires both individual ingenuity and careful negotiations with visiting local Indians. But what most distinguishes Winkfield's novel is her protagonist, a woman who is of mixed race. Though the era's popular novels typically featured women in the confining contexts of the home and the bourgeois marriage market, Winkfield's novel portrays an autonomous and mobile heroine living alone in the wilds of the New World, independently interacting with both Native Americans and visiting Europeans. Moreover, The Female American is one of the earliest novelistic efforts to articulate an American identity, and more specifically to investigate what that identity might promise for women. Along with discussion of authorship issues, the Broadview edition contains excerpts from English and American source texts. This is the only edition available.

The Female American - Second Edition

The Female American - Second Edition PDF Author: Unca Eliza Winkfield
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 1554810965
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
When it first appeared in 1767, this novel was called a “sort of second Robinson Crusoe; full of wonders.” Indeed, The Female American is an adventure novel about an English protagonist shipwrecked on a deserted isle, where survival requires both individual ingenuity and careful negotiations with visiting local Indians. But what most distinguishes Winkfield’s novel is her protagonist, a woman who is of mixed race. Though the era’s popular novels typically featured women in the confining contexts of the home and the bourgeois marriage market, Winkfield’s novel portrays an autonomous and mobile heroine living alone in the wilds of the New World, independently interacting with both Native Americans and visiting Europeans. The Female American is also one of the earliest novelistic efforts to articulate an American identity. This second edition has been updated throughout and includes a greatly expanded selection of historical materials on castaway narratives and on the cultural context of colonial America.

Justice in Colonial Virginia

Justice in Colonial Virginia PDF Author: Oliver Perry Chitwood
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Courts
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description


Savagism and Civility

Savagism and Civility PDF Author: Bernard Sheehan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521229272
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
When the English settlers arrived in Virginia in 1607 they carried with them a fully developed mythology about native Indian cultures. This mythology was built around the body of English writing about America that began to appear in the 1550s, prior to any significant contact between the English and the native groups, and was founded upon the assumption of the savagism of the Indian and the civility of European culture. Professor Sheehan argues that English commitment to this myth was at the root of the violence that broke out almost immediately between the settlers and the Indians. On the one hand, the Indians were seen as noble savages, free from and innocent of the deficiencies of European society. But as ignoble savages they were seen as immature, even bestial, lacking the civilising and ordering social structure that characterised European culture. Whichever perspective was adopted, this mythology was a product of the white man's world, developed without accurate information about Indian culture. This mythology justified both the exploitation that came to characterise settler-native relations and the inevitability of the violence that culminated in the massacre of 1622.

Spirits of the Air

Spirits of the Air PDF Author: Shepard Krech
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820328154
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Before the massive environmental change wrought by the European colonization of the South, hundreds of species of birds filled the region's flyways in immeasurable numbers. Before disease, war, and displacement altered the South's earliest human landscape, Native Americans hunted and ate birds and made tools and weapons from their beaks, bones, and talons. More significant to Shepard Krech III, Indians adorned themselves with feathers, invoked avian powers in ceremonies and dances, and incorporated bird imagery on pottery, carvings, and jewelry. Krech, a renowned authority on Native American interactions with nature, reveals as never before the omnipresence of birds in Native American life. From the time of the earliest known renderings of winged creatures in stone and earthworks through the nineteenth century, when Native southerners took part in decimating bird species with highly valued, fashionable plumage, Spirits of the Air examines the complex and changeable influences of birds on the Native American worldview. We learn of birds for which places and people were named; birds common in iconography and oral traditions; birds important in ritual and healing; and birds feared for their links to witches and other malevolent forces. Still other birds had no meaning for Native Americans. Krech shows us these invisible animals too, enriching our understanding of both the Indian-bird dynamic and the incredible diversity of winged life once found in the South. A crowning work drawing on Krech's distinguished career in anthropology and natural history, Spirits of the Air recovers vanished worlds and shows us our own anew.