Literary Criticism : American

Tracing the evolution of Susan Glaspell's writing, Veronica Makowsky provides fascinating glimpses of the life of a woman who broke the barriers against female journalists, advocated socialism, struggled with the precepts of Greenwich Village free love, was one of the founders of the Provincetown Players, participated in the sessions of the feminist Heterodoxy Club, placed women's concerns on the stage as a playwright and actress, and wrote about a turbulent century of American women with courage, optimism, sensitivity, and love. This is the first full-length book about Glaspell's works, including the fiction and lifewriting that bracketed her relatively brief career as the playwright best-known for the one-act drama Trifles. Also the author of many other plays, including the Pulitzer prize-winning Alison's House, a number of collected and uncollected short stories, nine novels, and a biography of her husband the iconoclastic George Cram Cook, Glaspell was an artist of formidable, but ill-acknowledged talent. Makowsky places Glaspell's work in its biographical and cultural context, with particular attention to Glaspell's depiction of women's roles over a century of American history. In addition, she examines closely Glaspell's use of the maternal metaphor and her depiction of women in the role of mothers. This absorbing and revelatory study rescues one of America's literary "foremothers" from relative obscurity, challenging canonical ideas about the circumstances that lead to literary "greatness."  more...

Price: $72.00

A comprehensive introduction to the genre from Edgar Allen Poe to Raymond Carver. more...

Price: $21.00

Fitz Hugh Ludlow was a recent graduate of Union College in Schenectady, New York, when he vividly recorded his hasheesh-induced visions, experiences, adventures, and insights. During the mid-nineteenth century, the drug was a legal remedy for lockjaw, and Ludlow had a friend from whom he received a ready supply. He consumed such large quantities at each sitting that his hallucinations have been likened to those experienced by opium addicts. Throughout the book, Ludlow colorfully describes his psychedelic journey that led to extended reflections on religion, philosophy, medicine, and culture. First published in 1857, The Hasheesh Eater was the first full-length American example of drug literature. Yet despite the scandal that surrounded it, the book quickly became a huge success. Since then, it has become a cult classic, first among Beat writers in the 1950s and 1960s, and later with San Francisco Bay area hippies in the 1970s. In this edition, editor Stephen Rachman positions Ludlow’s enduring work as not just a chronicle of drug use but also as a window into the budding American bohemian literary scene. A lucid introduction explores the breadth of Ludlow’s classical learning as well as his involvement with the nineteenth-century subculture that included fellow revelers such as Walt Whitman and the pianist Louis Gottschalk. With helpful annotations guiding readers through the text’s richly allusive qualities and abundance of references, this edition is ideal for general readers as well as for classroom use. more...

Price: $17.00

Using Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, Neil Campbell shows how the West (or west-ness) continually breaks away from a mainstream notion of American “rootedness” and renews and transforms itself in various cultural forms. A region long traversed by various transient peoples (from tribes and conquerors to immigrants, traders, and trappers), the West reflects a mythic quest for settlement, permanence, and synthesis—even notions of a national or global identity—at odds with its rootless history, culture, and nature. Crossing the concept of “roots” with “routes,” this book shows how notions of the West—in representations ranging from literature and film to photography, music, and architectural theory—give expression to ideas about identity, nationhood, and belonging in a world increasingly defined by movement across time and borders. The Rhizomatic West offers a new vision of the American West as a hybrid, performative space, a staging place for myriad intersecting and constantly changing identities. more...

Price: $50.00

Though he died some forty years ago, James Thurber remains a vastly popular author, whose irreverent, insightful, and consistently witty books--for both adults and children, and typically illustrated with his droll cartoons--remain largely in print. Simon & Schuster had a strong and lasting relationship with Thurber, so it is appropriate that we be the publisher of this new collection of his letters. (An earlier collection, published in 1981 by Little, Brown, and edited by Thurber's widow, is long out of print.) For the first time, James Thurber's daughter will allow the publication of many of the extremely personal letters he wrote to both her and her late mother, and, in addition, Harrison Kinney who will edit this collection, has located many others that have never before been published. In the book, letters in most instances will be presented chronologically by date, and in an effort to make the text more accessible,an effort has been made to avoid footnotes where possible, using instead short explanatory notes preceding the letters wherever appropriate. Thurber's original drawings will be used when relevant to a particular letter, and in addition there will be an 8-page photo insert showing many of the principles. more...

Price: $24.99