Literary Criticism : American

An overview of the greatest achievements of American fiction writing of the nineteenth century. more...

Price: $68.00

An overview of the life, work, contexts and reception of the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God. more...

Price: $16.00

Helen Scott approaches contemporary Caribbean women's writing in the context of global and local economic forces. Considering each text within its national historical and cultural origins while acknowledging regional and international patterns, Scott examines the dynamics of imperialism and illuminates the specific aesthetic qualities that reach beyond the confines of geography and history in the work of such writers as Oonya Kempadoo, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, Pauline Melville, and Janice Shinebourne. more...

Price: $89.95

Considers Gilman's place in American literary and social history by examining her relationships to other prominent intellectuals of her era. By placing Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the company of her contemporaries, this collection seeks to correct misunderstandings of the feminist writer and lecturer as an isolated radical. Gilman believed and preached that no life is ever led in isolation; indeed, the cornerstone of her philosophy was the idea that "humanity is a relation." Gilman's highly public and combative stances as a critic and social activist brought her into contact and conflict with many of the major thinkers and writers of the period, including Mary Austin, Margaret Sanger, Ambrose Bierce, Grace Ellery Channing, Lester Ward, Inez Haynes Gillmore, William Randolph Hearst, Karen Horney, William Dean Howells, Catharine Beecher, George Bernard Shaw, and Owen Wister. Gilman wrote on subjects as wide ranging as birth control, eugenics, race, women's rights and suffrage, psychology, Marxism, and literary aesthetics. Her many contributions to social, intellectual, and literary life at the turn of the 20th century raised the bar for future discourse, but at great personal and professional cost. Cynthia J. Davis is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and author of Bodily and Narrative Forms: The Influence of Medicine on American Literature, 1845 1915. Denise D. Knight is Professor of English at the State University of New York, Cortland, and author of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Study of the Short Fiction. more...

Price: $19.96

An important examination of Charles Chesnutt as a practitioner of realism. With the release of previously unpublished novels and a recent proliferation of critical studies on his life and work, Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932) has emerged as a major American writer of his time—the age of Howells, Twain, and Wharton. In Chesnutt and Realism, Ryan Simmons breaks new ground by theorizing how understandings of literary realism have shaped, and can continue to shape, the reception of Chesnutt’s work. Although Chesnutt is typically acknowledged as the most prominent African American writer of the realist period, little attention has been paid to the central question of this study: what does it mean to call Chesnutt a realist? A writer whose career was circumscribed by the dismal racial politics of his era, Chesnutt refused to conform to literary conventions for depicting race. Nor did he use his imaginative skills to evade the realities he and other African Americans faced. Rather, he experimented with ways of portraying reality that could elicit an appropriate, proportionate response to it, as Simmons demonstrates in extended readings of each of Chestnutt’s novels, including important unpublished works that have been overlooked by previous critics. Chesnutt and Realism also addresses a curiously neglected subject in American literary studies—the relationship between American literary realism and race. By taking Chesnutt seriously as a contributor to realism, this book articulates the strategies by which one African American intellectual helped to define the discourses that influenced his fate. Ryan Simmons is Assistant Professor of English at Utah Valley State College more...

Price: $31.96